“Assuming they don’t decide to send all of them-and all the avgas-to Ohio and Virginia,” DeFrancis said.
“Yes, assuming,” Dowling agreed. “We can’t do much about that, so there isn’t much point to worrying about it, is there?”
“No, sir.” The young officer eyed him. “I think we’re going to get on pretty well, sir.” He might have been announcing a miracle.
“Well, here’s hoping,” Dowling said. “I put up with General Custer for a lot of years. My thought is, if I managed that, most people ought to be able to stand me for a while.”
“Er-yes, sir.” Colonel DeFrancis gave him an odd look now. To DeFrancis, as to most people, George Armstrong Custer was a hero up on a marble column. He wasn’t a whiskey-drinking, cigar-smoking, skirt-chasing (whenever his wife wasn’t too close), evil-tempered, mule-stubborn old man. Reminding people that a hero had feet of clay (and sometimes a head of iron) seldom won you friends.
No matter what DeFrancis thought about General Custer, he knew what to do with airplanes. He built his strips close to the front, relying on the Eleventh Army not to lose ground and leave them vulnerable to artillery fire. Dowling thought he could oblige the flier there. But he was gloomily certain the Confederates would find out where the new fields were as soon as the bulldozers and steamrollers started leveling ground. No matter whether you called this part of the world west Texas or part of a revived U.S. state of Houston, the people here remained passionately pro-Confederate. And the land was so wide and troops scattered so thinly, those people had no trouble slipping across the front to tell the enemy what they knew.
Or rather, what they thought they knew. Terry DeFrancis proved devious to a downright byzantine degree. Earth-moving equipment laid out and flattened several dummy fields along with the ones his airplanes would actually use. Confederate bombers called on more of the dummies than the real airstrips, wasting their high-explosive sweetness on the desert ground.
And then DeFrancis’ medium and heavy bombers roared off to respond. Dowling drove back to one of the strips-irreverently named Fry Featherston Field-to watch them go. They and their escort fighters kicked up ungodly clouds of dust. Coughing, Dowling said, “We’ve got our own smoke screen.”
“Yes, sir,” DeFrancis shouted over the engines’ thunder. “We could use one, too. I’m not used to operating in broad daylight. It’s a different war out here. New rules.”
“No, Colonel.” Dowling shook his head. “Only one rule, the same one you find anywhere. We’ve got to beat those bastards.”
DeFrancis pondered that, but not for long. “We’ll do it, sir. We’ll beat ’em like a drum.”
He kept fighters in the air when the bombers came back for fuel and ordnance. A few bombers-and a few fighters-didn’t come back. The Confederates had fighters of their own, and antiaircraft around their airfields. You couldn’t fight a war without taking losses. Colonel DeFrancis looked grim. The men who went down weren’t just fliers to him. They were friends, almost family.
Wireless technicians monitored signals from the U.S. airplanes, and also from the Confederates. They marked maps and brought them to DeFrancis and Dowling. “Looks like we’re doing pretty good, sir,” one of them said.
“We’re plastering the fields we know about, all right,” DeFrancis said.
“How many fields have they got that we don’t know about?” Dowling asked.
“That’s always the question,” DeFrancis said. “We’ll find out how hard they hit back, and from where. Then we’ll go blast hell out of those places, too. Sooner or later, they won’t be able to stand the gaff any more.”
He sounded confident. Dowling looked inside himself-and found he was confident, too. Enemy bombers returned, but at night: the Confederates had paid too high a price to go on with day bombing. That was a sign they were hurting, or Dowling hoped it was. Night bombing spared their airplanes, but wasn’t very accurate.
The Confederates managed to sneak auto bombs onto a couple of fields. They blew up one bomber in its revetment and cratered another runway. The runway was easy enough to repair; the bomber was a write-off. Terry DeFrancis cashiered the officers in charge of security at those strips.
When Dowling heard about the auto bombs, he telephoned and asked what the wing commander had done about them. When he found out, he grunted in sour satisfaction. “If you didn’t give ’em the boot, I would have,” he said.
“Figured as much, sir,” DeFrancis said. “But I can shoot my own dog, by God. And I shot both those sons of bitches. They had no business falling asleep at the switch. This isn’t Nebraska, for God’s sake. Enemy action shouldn’t catch them playing with themselves.”
“In two words, Colonel, you’re right.” Dowling hung up feeling better about the world than he had in quite a while. DeFrancis was an officer after his own heart.
On the ground, the Eleventh Army wasn’t making much progress. Dowling used what he had as aggressively as he could. He’d already made the Confederates send that elite unit to stall his advance. The Party Guards did it, too. He was disappointed about that, but not crushed. Whatever the Freedom Party Guards did here, they weren’t doing in Ohio or Kentucky or Virginia, places that really mattered.
He wondered if the Confederates would send more bombers west to contest the skies with Terry DeFrancis’ airplanes. They didn’t. Their counterattacks dwindled. Before long, they were reduced to harassment raids from biplanes that sounded like flying sewing machines-Boll Weevils, the Confederates called them. They came straight out of the Great War: their pilots heaved five- and ten-pound bombs from the cockpit by hand.
That sounded laughable, till the first time one of those little bombs blew up an officers’ club. The Boll Weevils flew at what would have been treetop height if there were any trees close by. Y-ranging had a devil of a time spotting them, and nothing else could, not till they got right on top of whatever they intended to hit.
They would never win the war for the CSA. Even so, they kept Dowling and DeFrancis back on their heels. U.S. air power had won part of the fight here in west Texas, but not all of it. Abner Dowling fumed in Lubbock. Nothing ever went quite the way you wished it would.
VIII
George Enos had never crossed the country on a train before. That he could now said the war had come a long way in the past few months. The Townsend sat in drydock in San Diego, getting a refit and repairs. They’d given him enough liberty to go to Boston, stay a few days, and then hop another train heading back to the West Coast.
The one he was on now would have gone faster if it could have made anything better than a crawl at night. But blackouts were strictly enforced. The cars had black curtains. Along with conductors, they had hard-faced blackout monitors who carried.45s and made sure nobody showed a light at night.
Those monitors had good reason to look tough. The farther east the train traveled, the more often George saw wrecks shoved off to one side of the railroad. The government no doubt figured they were part of the cost of making war. The government had a point. George doubted the people in those ravaged trains would have appreciated it.
He came through Ohio during the day, so he could see what the war had done. He stared in astonishment. It looked more like the mountains of the moon than any human landscape. How many years would this part of the country take to recover from the devastation? Would it ever? How could it?
He didn’t go through Pittsburgh. From everything he’d heard, that was even worse. That he could get through at all was plenty. This time last year, things were even worse, he thought. He shook his head. It seemed impossible.
Even Boston had taken bomb damage. He’d heard that, too. Seeing it as the train slowed and then stopped was something else again. Those bastards hit my home town. The fury that stirred up amazed him.