“Yes, sir,” Nathan Bedford Forrest III said stolidly.
Jake swore under his breath. He’d never thought it would come to this when he ordered his armies into motion against the USA. The Yankees were the ones who were supposed to be fighting for their lives, not his side.
He swore again, on a different note, a moment later. He’d already survived two assassination tries. If the war kept going down the toilet, he knew damn well he’d have to worry about another one. Even a Vice President as pliable as Don Partridge might start getting ideas. So might Clarence Potter-as if he didn’t have them already. But he might decide to do something about them, the cold-blooded son of a bitch. Nathan Bedford Forrest III might get some of his own, too.
“Is security tight?” Jake asked.
“Tight as we know how to make it,” Forest answered.
“It better be. It better be tight as a fifty-dollar whore’s twat,” Jake said, and the chief of the General Staff let out a startled laugh. Featherston went on, “If the damnyankees figure out what we’re up to before we get rolling, they can give us all kinds of grief, right?”
“You’d better believe it, sir. If they’ve got a gopher planted somewhere between here and General Patton’s headquarters, that’s a problem,” Forrest replied. “And if he can pass on whatever he knows, I mean.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Jake said impatiently. “What are the odds?”
“Mr. President, I just don’t know.” Nathan Bedford Forrest III spread his hands. “We still have gophers in the USA and with U.S. forces. The Yankees are bound to be doing the same thing to us. Too goddamn hard for one side to root out all the spies from the other. We just sound too much alike. Whether they’ve got somebody in the right place, whether the son of a bitch can pass on what he picks up, if he picks up anything…We’ll have to find out. I hope to God we don’t find out the hard way, but I can’t be sure.”
Most men in Forrest’s place would have told Jake Featherston what they thought he wanted to hear: that everything was fine, that of course the United States had no chance of finding out what was going on. Reluctantly, Featherston respected the younger man’s honesty. If you promised the moon and couldn’t deliver, wasn’t that worse than not promising in the first place?
“All right. We’ll see what happens.” Jake tried telling himself what he wanted to hear: “Maybe the Yankees won’t believe we’d try coming through the mountains even if some stinking spy tells them we will.”
“Maybe.” But General Forrest sounded dubious. “Remember, sir, that’s General Morrell in charge of their spearhead. He won’t be easy to fool. He’s the kind who’d take armor through the mountains himself, so he’s too likely to think we’d try it, too.”
“I suppose.” Featherston forced himself to nod. “No, you’re bound to be right, dammit. I sure wish we’d punched his ticket for good. Some lousy busybody of a sergeant threw him on his back and toted him out of the line of fire, I hear.”
Nathan Bedford Forrest III didn’t say anything. The expression on his face was hard for Jake to fathom-and then, all of a sudden, it wasn’t. Sure as hell, Forrest was thinking, Takes one to know one. And sure as hell, he was right. Jake damn well had been a lousy busybody of a sergeant. Clarence Potter remembered that, even if Forrest couldn’t.
“Anything else?” Jake asked.
“No, Mr. President. That’s what’s going on now.”
“We’ll go from there, then. Tell Patton to give ’em hell. Tell him I said so.”
“I will, sir-when I’m sure the damnyankees can’t hear me do it.” Forrest got to his feet, saluted, and left the office.
Once Jake was sure the general was on his way back to the War Department, he stuck his head out and asked, “Who’s next, Lulu?”
“The Attorney General is waiting to see you, Mr. President.”
“Well, you know you can send him in,” Featherston said.
Ferdinand Koenig lumbered into the office a moment later. Unlike Forrest, he was older than Jake, and also much heavier than the President, who retained a whipcord leanness. “Good morning,” Koenig rumbled.
“I hope so,” Jake said. “You couldn’t prove it by me, though.” He pointed at the map. The U.S. thrust aimed straight at Chattanooga. It was getting too close, too.
“I expect you’ll do something about that before too long.” Ferd Koenig didn’t know the details. He didn’t need or want to know them, either.
“I expect I will, too.” Jake said no more than he had to. The less you told people, the less they could blab. Ferd wasn’t the kind of guy who ran his mouth; Featherston wouldn’t have put up with him for a second if he were. But even an inadvertent slip might hurt badly here, so why take chances? The President said, “What’s on your mind today?”
“About what you’d expect: the mess in Texas.”
Jake Featherston grunted. It was a mess, no two ways about it. “When we built Camp Determination way the hell out there at the ass end of nowhere, we never reckoned the damnyankees would give us so much trouble about it.”
“That’s the truth,” Koenig said unhappily.
“Only goes to show the bastards really are a bunch of nigger-lovers,” Jake said. “How far from the camp are they?” He already knew, but didn’t feel like admitting it.
“About forty miles now. They’re throwing everything they’ve got out there into the attack,” the Attorney General said. “They’ve got more out there than we do, too. We need reinforcements, Mr. President. We need ’em bad.”
“I can’t give you more Army men, dammit.” Jake pointed again to the map showing the ominous Yankee bulge. “Everything we can grab, we’re using against that.” He sighed. Talking about Texas meant talking about Kentucky and Tennessee after all. He might have known it would. Things fit together; however much you wished you could, you couldn’t look at any one part of the war in isolation.
“Can I have more Freedom Party Guards, then?” Koenig asked. “I’ve got to do something, Jake, or the damnyankees’ll take the camp away from us. We can’t afford to let that happen-you know we can’t. It screws up the whole population-reduction program, and it hands the USA a propaganda victory like you wouldn’t believe.”
He wasn’t wrong. Sometimes, though, propaganda defeats had to take a back seat when you were nose-to-nose with real military defeat. Jake didn’t want anything to get in the way of cleansing the Confederacy of Negroes, but he didn’t want to lose the war, either. He felt more harried than he’d ever dreamt he could. Never a man who compromised easily, he knew he had to now.
“Yeah, you can raise some more Guards units,” he said. “We aren’t short of weapons and we aren’t short of uniforms, by God. But I’ll tell you something else, too-we better set up a new camp some place where the damnyankees sure as hell can’t get at it. When it’s ready to roll, just move the guard staff and start shipping in niggers.”
“What about the ones who’re already in Camp Determination?” Koenig asked.
“Well, what about ’em?” Jake said. Ferd was a sharp guy, but sometimes even sharp guys missed seeing the obvious.
“Oh.” The Attorney General turned a dull red. To hide his embarrassment, he made a small production of lighting up a Habana. After a couple of puffs, he went on, “Yeah, that’ll take care of itself, won’t it? Jeff Pinkard won’t be happy about moving, though. Camp Determination’s his baby.”
“Tough titty,” Featherston said. “Where it’s at, his baby’s getting to be more trouble than it’s worth. If there’s no camp in west Texas, the United States don’t have any reason for pushing farther in. Except for Determination, what’s there?”