“Where the fuck is Elkton?” one of them asked.
“Follow me. I’ll get you there.” By his accent, the man who spoke was from around these parts. You’d have to be, to know where Elkton was.
“Take your trucks to gate number nine,” Dover said. “Go in through there and make the first left you can.” He’d laid out the depot himself. He knew where everything was. If Major Bramlette needed cold-weather socks or prophylactics, he would have known where they were off the top of his head, too.
Confederate soldiers loaded the rockets and their stovepipe launchers onto the trucks. In the last war, Negroes would have done it. Not here, not now. The soldiers didn’t even grumble about nigger work. They just fetched and carried without a second thought. If blacks were working now, most of the soldiers working the depot could have been at the front with automatic rifles in their hands. That seemed obvious to Jerry Dover. The trouble he would land in if he said so out loud seemed even more obvious, so he kept his mouth shut.
Inside of half an hour, the trucks were on the way. Dover went back to his office and telephoned Major Bramlette. “Barring air strikes, they should get there in an hour or so. It’s what, about forty miles from here to where you’re at?” he said.
“Something like that, anyways,” Bramlette answered. “Thank you kindly, Colonel. You’ve done what you could. Now we just have to see if we can hold on that long.” As if to punctuate the comment, explosions came over the telephone line. All of a sudden, he didn’t have a connection. He swore, hoping the trouble was in the line and not because of a direct hit on Bramlette’s headquarters.
He didn’t find out till the trucks got back a little before sunset. “We delivered the rockets, sir,” said the head driver, a master sergeant named Stonewall Sloane. (Dover had seen his papers-that was his real name. Why his parents couldn’t have picked a different Confederate hero to name him after…Jerry Dover shrugged. How many babies born between 1934 and now were called Featherston? Too many-he was sure of that.)
“All right-you delivered them,” Dover said. Sloane nodded. He neither looked nor sounded happy. Dover asked the question he had to ask: “What went wrong?”
“Damnyankees had already shoved our guys out of Elkton by the time we got there, sir.” Stonewall Sloane paused to light a cigar. Dover had a cigarette going-but then, he usually did. The sergeant went on, “I hope the rockets can help us blow some of the Yankees to hell and gone. If they can’t…” He sent up gloomy smoke signals.
“Shit,” Dover said. “Whereabouts exactly did you make your delivery? Was it south of Elkton or east of it?”
“East, sir,” Sloane answered: a world of bad news in two words.
“Shit,” Dover said again. “They’re heading this way, then.”
“Don’t know if they want to take Bowling Green or get in behind it and cut it off,” Sergeant Sloane said. “They’ve been doing a lot of that crap lately. We did it in Ohio, so I reckon the United States learned their lessons from us.”
“Did they have to learn them so goddamn well?” Dover stubbed out his cigarette and lit another one. Stonewall Sloane managed a thin smile. After a deep, savage drag, Dover asked, “You think we’ll have to get out of town? The more time we have, the more stuff we’ll be able to save.”
“Sir, I honest to God don’t know,” Sloane replied. “If you told me a month ago the Yankees could come this far this fast, I would’ve told you you were out of your goddamn tree. Uh-meaning no disrespect.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Dover said dryly.
Stonewall Sloane sent him an appraising glance. The cigar twitched. “You’re all right, aren’t you?”
“Well, I try.”
“Yeah.” Sloane scratched his head. “Where was I? Oh, yeah. They’ve already done more than I reckoned they could, so who knows what the fuck they’re liable to do next? Do you want to take chances?”
Before Dover could answer, air-raid sirens wailed. “We’re going to take chances whether we want to or not,” he said, and grabbed his helmet and ran for the closest trench. Sergeant Sloane was right behind him.
Antiaircraft guns around the depot thundered. Dover was glad he had steel between his skull and the chunks of shrapnel that would start falling out of the sky any second now. You were just as dead if your own side killed you as you were any other way.
Fighter-bombers streaked by low overhead, the U.S. eagle in front of crossed swords plainly visible. One trailed fire and smoke. It slammed into the ground and blew up. “That’ll learn ’em!” Sloane yelled.
But other explosions came from the depot not far away. Some were single, others multiple: bombs touching off more explosions on the ground. What Jerry Dover had to say scuttled several commandments. He’d arranged ordnance in small lots with thick earthen dikes between them. That minimized the damage, but didn’t, couldn’t, stop it.
The surviving U.S. airplanes came back for another pass at the depot and the trucks, this time with their cannons and machine guns. Dover said something even worse. He yanked his.45 out of its holster and fired several shots at the U.S. warplanes. That did no good, of course. He’d known it wouldn’t. “Goddamn useless thing,” he growled in disgust.
“Antiaircraft guns aren’t doing a hell of a lot better,” Stonewall Sloane said.
“Fuck them, too,” Dover said. The veteran noncom blinked, then laughed. Dover wasn’t laughing. He was furious. “We ought to have something that really will shoot airplanes down, dammit. All these things do is make noise.” The guns, at the moment, were making a godawful racket.
“Rockets, maybe?” Sergeant Sloane didn’t sound as if he took that seriously, even if he was the one proposing it.
But Dover said, “Why the hell not? They’ve got ’em for barrels. Why not airplanes? They’re a lot easier to wreck.”
“Harder to hit, though,” Sloane said.
“That’s for the guys with the high foreheads and the thick glasses,” Dover said. “I bet we’ve got people working on it. I bet the damnyankees do, too. If they figure it out first, that’s bad news.” He scrambled out of the trench and trotted toward the depot to do what he could to control the damage-and to see how much damage there was to control. Right now, he couldn’t find much good news for the CSA.
Cassius skirted Milledgeville, Georgia, the way he skirted every town he approached. Milledgeville was a fair-sized place, with maybe 5,000 people in it. It was laid out with the idea that it would become the state capital-and it did, till brawling, bumptious Atlanta displaced it after the War of Secession. A sign on the outskirts bragged that Milledgeville was where Georgia legislators voted to leave the Union. Cassius didn’t think that was anything to be proud of.
What would life be like in the United States? It probably wouldn’t be good; he didn’t suppose life for Negroes was good anywhere. But it couldn’t be like this. He was skinny and dirty. He smelled bad-the only chances he got to wash were in streams he walked past. He was hungry most of the time.
And, at that, he didn’t have it so bad. He wasn’t in a camp. He didn’t know what his family was going through, not exactly. Nobody knew exactly except the people who got carted away. The only thing people on the outside knew was that the ones who got carted away didn’t come back.
Most Negroes in the cities had been rounded up and taken away. It was harder out in the countryside. They were more scattered, harder to get into one place with barbed wire all around it. Guerrillas scared some whites out in the country to death. Others, though, weren’t so bad. Quite a few let you do odd jobs in exchange for food and a place to sleep and maybe a dollar or two.
Some of the farms had women running them, all the menfolk gone to war. Cassius learned it was harder to get a handout or even a hearing at those places than at the ones with white men on them. Women on their own commonly carried shotguns or rifles, and didn’t want to listen to a hard-luck story. “Get lost before I call the sheriff,” they would say-either that or, “Get lost before I shoot.”