Not all the Confederates had surrendered or died. A nest of them were holed up in a farmhouse and barn. Though cut off and surrounded by U.S. soldiers, they wouldn’t quit. An officer in green-gray approached the barn with a white flag to see if he could talk them into coming out. They fired a burst over his head. They weren’t trying to hit him, but they were letting him know they didn’t intend to give up. He drew back in a hurry.
“Is that a bunch of Freedom Party Guards?” Dowling shouted to a sergeant serving a mortar.
“Those camouflage cocksuckers?” The noncom paused to drop a bomb down the tube. After a surprisingly small bang, it arced through the air to come down between the house and the barn. “Yes, sir, that’s them. They fight hard.”
“If we get rid of them, then, the Confederates will be in more trouble,” Dowling said.
As if the holed-up elite troops had heard him, they aimed one of their machine guns his way. He hadn’t been under gunfire for a while: not since he and Daniel MacArthur were trying to hold this part of Texas in the USA before Al Smith’s plebiscite. “Get down, sir!” Major Toricelli yelled when bullets kicked up puffs of dust not far from the command car.
“Get down, hell!” Dowling swung the pintle-mounted machine gun toward the barn and let it rip. He had a.50-caliber weapon to play with, not the rifle-caliber gun that was shooting at him. His fired bullets almost as big as his thumb. The barn had to be more than a mile away-not much more than a dot on the horizon. Even so, he had confidence he was doing the enemy some harm.
And the jackhammer roar of the gun was as much fun as a roller-coaster ride. The stink of cordite and the clatter of brass as empty cartridges flew from the breech and fell to the floor of the command car only added to the kick. He went through a belt as happily as a twelve-year-old plinking at tin cans with a.22.
If he could have made the Confederates surrender all by himself, that would have been great. No such luck. A couple of truck-drawn 105s pulled up and flattened both buildings in which the Freedom Party Guards were holed up. The shells set the barn and the farmhouse on fire. Even so, when U.S. infantrymen cautiously advanced, the surviving Confederates opened up on them with automatic weapons.
All in all, the Freedom Party Guards fought a first-rate delaying action. They did what they set out to do: they tied up enough U.S. soldiers to let their buddies withdraw in better order than they could have otherwise.
But Abner Dowling, with the bit between his teeth, was determined not to let that matter much. He had more men than the Confederates, and more artillery, and more barrels, and many more airplanes. As long as I don’t do anything stupid, he told himself, I can drive them a long way. Could he drive them all the way back to Camp Determination? He aimed to find out.
Flora Blackford had needed a while to get used to picking up the Philadelphia Inquirer and reading good news day after day. It seemed strange, unnatural, almost un-American. But instead of stories of disaster in Ohio and retreat in Pennsylvania, the paper was full of the U.S. drive through Kentucky and Tennessee, and of other progress elsewhere. By everything she could tell, U.S. bombers were hitting Richmond harder than the Confederates were hitting Philadelphia these days. New U.S. airstrips farther south meant Birmingham and Atlanta were starting to catch it, too.
Even the news west of the Mississippi seemed good, though it often got shoved back to page four or page six. Out in Texas, Abner Dowling was quoted as saying, “With more men, I could move even faster.”
Flora wanted General Dowling’s army to move faster. If U.S. soldiers could walk into Camp Determination, or could even take closeups of the vast boneyard where Jake Featherston’s men disposed of dead Negroes, the world would have to sit up and take notice…wouldn’t it?
She wished she hadn’t had that last little afterthought. When the Tsar turned the Cossacks loose on the Jews in another pogrom, did the world sit up and take notice? When the Turks enjoyed their ancient sport of slaughtering Armenians, did the world try to stop them? When the Germans treated the blacks in the Congo even worse than the Belgians had, did anybody get up on his hind legs and complain?
No, and no, and no. So why would the world flabble unduly-or at all-about what the Confederates were doing to their own people?
“To hell with the world, then,” Flora said, there in the more-or-less privacy of her office. “I care, whether it does or not.”
Her secretary stuck her head into the office. “Did you call me, Congresswoman?”
“No, Bertha. It’s all right,” Flora said. The other woman retreated. Flora shook her head. It wasn’t all right, or even close to all right. And if the world didn’t care, wasn’t that a sign something was wrong with the poor old globe?
She looked at the newspaper again. Why should Dowling complain that he didn’t have enough men? He was doing something vitally important. Shouldn’t he get all the soldiers he wanted, and more besides?
Her first impulse was to summon the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War and hold the General Staff’s toes to the fire. In 1941, she would have done it. She still might do it, but she’d learned other tricks since then. She called the Assistant Secretary of War instead.
“Hello, Flora!” Franklin Roosevelt boomed when she got through to him. “Let me guess-you’re going to want me to send about six divisions to west Texas, and to have them all there yesterday.”
“Well-yes.” Flora didn’t like being so predictable. “And now you’re going to tell me why you claim you can’t do it.”
“Simplest reason in the world: we need ’em more farther east,” Roosevelt said. “If they go to Kentucky and Tennessee, they gut the Confederacy. Gut it, I say. If I send them out to Abner Dowling, they step on its toes. That will hurt, no doubt about it. But it won’t kill, and we want the CSA dead.”
“Sending troops to Texas will stop Jake Featherston from murdering Negroes,” Flora said.
“Sending troops to Texas will stop Jake Featherston from murdering Negroes…at Camp Determination,” Roosevelt said. “It won’t do a damn thing-excuse me, but it won’t-to stop him from murdering them in Louisiana or Mississippi or east Texas. The only thing that will keep him from murdering them there is knocking the Confederate States flat. Taking land away from the enemy, taking away his factories and his railroads and his highways-that will stop him.”
He made more sense than she wished he did. “Is there any way we can compromise?” Flora asked. “I can see why you don’t want to send a lot of men and a lot of equipment to Texas. I don’t like it, but I can see it. Can you send some, though? The Confederates are bound to be having a hard time out there, too. Even a small reinforcement could tip the balance our way.”
“You’re very persuasive. You ought to be in Congress.” Roosevelt laughed merrily. “Tell you what I’ll do. Let me talk to the gentlemen with the stars on their shoulder straps. What they say we can afford, we’ll send. If they say we can’t afford anything-”
“They can come before the Joint Committee and explain why not.” Flora reminded him she had the stick as well as the carrot.
He only laughed again. “You’re very persuasive,” he said. “I suspect you may squeeze a few soldiers out of them after all.”
Flora suspected she might squeeze out some soldiers, too. Generals were often happier facing amputation without anesthesia than they were about coming before the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. Amputation only cost you your leg, not your career, and the pain didn’t last nearly so long.