A white man with a shotgun charged out of a farmhouse a couple of hundred yards away. He didn’t want to yield his porkers without a fight. The machine gunners sprayed a burst in his general direction. He ran away even faster than he’d come out.
“We don’t take shit from nobody!” Spartacus roared as Moss put the pickup in gear again. Riding around with a machine gun in the back of your truck worked wonders for your confidence.
Those side roads brought the pickup almost back to where its rampages had begun. The machine gun and the top part of the mount came off neat as you please. One of the gunners carried the weapon. The other shouldered the long pipe. More guerrillas emerged from the undergrowth to take charge of the dead pigs.
Roast pork and a ten-mile stretch of road shot to hell and gone made for a celebration that evening. So did a couple of jugs of raw corn whiskey. The stuff tasted like paint thinner and burned its way down like a lighted kerosene lamp. After a few swallows, Moss started forgetting things. A few more, he knew, and he’d have trouble remembering his name.
But he needed to remember something. “You’ve got to tell people,” he said to Spartacus, the homemade hooch adding urgency to his voice.
“Tell which people?” the guerrilla leader asked. “Tell ’em what?” He was drinking harder than Moss.
“Got to tell the other colored fighters.” Moss was proud of himself. He did remember! “Got to tell them what these pickup trucks can do.”
“Don’t you worry none about dat,” Spartacus said. “Be all over Georgia day after tomorrow. Be all the way to Louisiana this time nex’ week. Yes, suh. You best believe it will. We done hit the ofays hard. Folks is gonna hear about it. You best believe folks is gonna hear about it.”
Moss turned to Nick Cantarella. “You’re a hero.”
“My ass,” Cantarella said. “I didn’t even get to drive the truck.” But he hadn’t drunk himself fighting mad, for he went on, “What I really like about this is that their own damn propaganda upped and bit ’em. I never woulda thought of mounting a machine gun on a pickup and raising hell. But since those stupid pricks went and told me how-”
“Here’s to propaganda,” Moss said. They both drank.
Colonel Terry DeFrancis was one of the youngest officers of his rank Major General Abner Dowling had ever seen. Remembering how long he’d taken to get to bird colonel himself, Dowling eyed the boy wonder with suspicion.
“My orders from the War Department are to subordinate myself to you and to smash C.S. air power in west Texas,” DeFrancis said. “I think my wing has brought enough fighters and bombers out here to do the job, too.”
“I wouldn’t begin to argue with you there, Colonel,” Dowling said. In one fell swoop, the air power at his command had tripled. “But why does Philadelphia care now when it didn’t before?”
“Sir, I can answer that in three little words,” DeFrancis told him.
“If you’re going to say, I love you, Colonel, I’ll throw you out on your ear,” Dowling warned, straight-faced.
Terry DeFrancis stared at him, then laughed like a loon. “You’re not what I expected, sir, not even slightly,” he said. “No, what I was going to say is, I don’t know. Have Featherston’s boys been pulling off air raids that hurt?”
“If they have, nobody told me about it,” Dowling answered. “They haven’t had enough airplanes out here to hurt us very badly. We haven’t had enough to do much to them, either. Sounds like things are going to change, though.”
“That’s what I’m here for,” Colonel DeFrancis agreed. “That’s what my boys are here for. We’re going to make them sorry if we can.”
“Good,” Dowling said. It was good in all kinds of ways. If the War Department had aircraft to spare for an out-of-the-way outfit like his Eleventh Army, it was bound to have even more farther east, where the real decision would lie. And…“Tell me something, Coloneclass="underline" when they sent you out here, did they say anything about Camp Determination?”
“No, sir,” the younger man answered. “Is that ours or theirs? Sounds like something the Freedom Party would name.”
“There’s a reason for that-it is something the Freedom Party named. Here. Take a look at these.” Dowling’s desk had a locked drawer. He unlocked it and took out the aerial reconnaissance photos of the camp near Snyder…and of the mass graves not far away.
DeFrancis studied them with meticulous care. He was frowning as he looked up at Dowling. “Interpreting stuff like this isn’t always easy, especially when you’re seeing it for the first time. What exactly am I looking at here?” Dowling told him exactly what he was looking at there. DeFrancis’ jaw dropped. “You’re making that up…uh, sir.”
“Colonel, I wish to Christ I were,” Dowling answered, and the disgust and horror in his voice had to carry conviction. “It’s the truth, though. If anything, it’s an understatement. They really are killing off their Negroes, and they really are doing it by carload lots. Literally by carload lots-that’s a railroad spur between the two halves of the camp.”
“Yes, sir. I saw that it was.” Colonel DeFrancis stared down at the pictures again. When he looked up this time, he wasn’t just frowning. He was slightly green, or more than slightly. “You know, I thought all those stories were bullshit. Propaganda. Stuff we pumped out to keep the civilians all hot and bothered about the war effort. Back in the last war, the British said the Germans boiled babies’ bodies to make soap. That kind of thing.”
“I felt the same way till I got out here,” Dowling said grimly. “Who wouldn’t? If you’re halfway decent yourself, you figure the guy on the other side is, too. Well, the guy on the other side here is Jake Featherston, and Jake Featherston really is just as big a son of a bitch as everybody always thought he was.”
DeFrancis eyed the photographs once more. Dowling understood that. They had an evil fascination to them. In their own way, they were just as much filthy pictures as the ones you could buy in any town where soldiers or sailors got leave. “What can we do about this, sir?” DeFrancis asked. “We can’t just let it go on. I mean, I haven’t got any great use for niggers, but…”
“Yeah. But.” Dowling reached into another desk drawer. He pulled out a half-pint of whiskey and slid it across the desk to the younger man. “Here. Wash the taste out of your mouth.”
“Thank you, sir.” DeFrancis took a healthy swig, then set the flat bottle down. “What can we do? We’ve got to do something.”
“I think so, too, though you’d be amazed at how many people on our side of the border don’t give a rat’s ass,” Dowling said. “I’ve had the time to think about it now. Way it looks to me is, we can’t just bomb hell out of the camp. If we do that, we go into the nigger-killing business ourselves. Like you said, I don’t have much use for them, but I don’t want to do that.”
“I agree,” DeFrancis said. “Like I told you, sir, my first priority is blasting enemy airstrips and aircraft, but now I see what I do next.”
Dowling scratched his head. The War Department suddenly seemed to have a wild hair about C.S. airstrips here in the West. Had the latest raids on Los Angeles and Las Vegas and Denver rattled people back East so much? If they had, why? Dowling shrugged. That wasn’t his worry-and, as often as not, the ways of the gods back in Philadelphia were unfathomable to mere mortals in the field.
“I haven’t operated out here before,” Colonel DeFrancis said. “What’s the fuel situation like?”
“We don’t have a problem there,” Dowling said. “The refineries in Southern California are working with local crude, so they’re at full capacity. We get what we need. A lot of the airplane plants are out there, too, so you should be able to get your hands on spare parts.”