“You’re right about that,” Morrell said. “They’ll know they can’t hide a concentration very long. It’ll have to be soon. If you find out exactly when soon is, let me know as fast as you can. We’ll counterpunch if we have to, but getting in the first lick is even better.”
“Yes, sir.” Their voices didn’t sound alike; Williamson’s was an octave deeper. They tore off almost identical salutes, returned to their command cars, and roared off to wherever they worked their code-breaking magic. Morrell didn’t know where that was; what he didn’t know, he couldn’t spill if captured.
As things worked out, the Confederates announced their own attack. They chose early afternoon to open their bombardment, hoping to catch U.S. soldiers off guard. By the rumble from U.S. batteries, they didn’t.
U.S. airplanes roared into the sky. Morrell couldn’t see where they were taking off from; the fields lay farther behind the lines. But he knew they were up there, which was what counted. The Confederates wouldn’t catch them on the ground, the way they’d caught so many fighters and bombers in Ohio. U.S. Y-ranging gear was pointed east, ready to warn the pilots to get airborne before enemy air attackers arrived. And these days, unlike the way things were in 1941, everybody took Y-ranging-and the Confederates-very seriously indeed.
Those fighters and bombers with the eagle in front of crossed swords didn’t get airborne just to escape C.S. attacks, either. They were loaded for bear. The Confederates had to deploy through several gaps in the mountains before they could debouche. The harder they got bombed and strafed while still in column, the slower and clumsier their deployment would be. The less they can bring to the dance, Morrell thought, remembering how he met Agnes not long after the Great War.
She and their daughter, Mildred, were all right. He’d had a letter not long before. The war hadn’t really touched Fort Leavenworth. Out beyond the Mississippi, fighting came in harsh spatters: one that seemed unending over the oil fields in Sequoyah, which each side torched whenever the other seemed about to retake them, and another in west Texas that had heated up lately. Looked at logically, there was no reason on God’s green earth to fight over west Texas. Dark mutters said logic had little to do with it, that the Confederates were up to something really horrible out there, something that needed suppressing regardless of logic.
Having fought without much luck to hold the state of Houston in the USA before Al Smith’s plebiscite, Morrell was ready to believe the worst of west Texas. He was also ready to believe the worst of Jake Featherston and all his Freedom Party pals. The only question in his mind was how bad the worst was out there.
He didn’t even have time to worry about that, except when he got out of the command barrel to stand behind a tree or smoke a cigarette. He spent almost all of the next forty-eight hours in the turret, as a less mobile commander might have spent them in a map room in a headquarters somewhere far behind the line. He was wryly amused to find it worked out about the same either way. Now much of the front-most of the places where the Confederates were trying to break through-lay behind him.
A map room proved better than the turret for at least one reason: it had the space to put up the maps. He was constantly unfolding and refolding them and using cellophane tape to stick them here and there for a little while. Frenchy Bergeron finally lost patience with him. “What happens if the Confederates attack us here, sir?” the gunner asked pointedly. “How am I supposed to fight those fuckers off if I can’t even load my piece?”
“If the fate of this army depends on this barrel and some other one can’t do the job, we’re in a hell of a lot more trouble than I think we are,” Morrell said mildly.
“Well, all right, sir,” Bergeron said. “I can see that. But my own neck might depend on shooting that gun, even if the army doesn’t.”
“I think we’re good even so,” Morrell told him. “With everything the Confederates are throwing at our left, I don’t see how they can have much to use against our front here.”
The gunner grunted. Like almost everyone else in the two opposing armies, Bergeron fancied himself a strategist. He came closer to being right than a lot of other people, some of whom held significantly higher rank than his. And he listened to what Morrell didn’t say as well as to what he did. “They’re hitting us from the one side, sir? Not from both sides at once?”
“That’s right.” Morrell nodded. “They don’t have the men for that. And even if they did, they could never get them into place west of us. The mountains help screen their positions in the east, and the travel’s easier to get there, too. What they’re doing is about as good a counterattack as they can hope to put together.”
“But not good enough, right?” Frenchy Bergeron said confidently.
Morrell yawned. He’d been in the saddle for a devil of a long time. “Don’t quite know yet,” he said. “I hope not, but I can’t be sure yet.”
“What happens if they do break through?” the gunner asked.
“Well, I can give you the simple answer or the technical one,” Morrell said. “Which would you rather?”
“Give me the technical one, sir.” Sure enough, Bergeron figured he knew enough to make sense of it.
He was right, too. “The technical answer is, if that happens, we’re screwed,” Morrell replied.
Bergeron started to laugh, then broke off when he saw Morrell wasn’t even smiling. “You’re not kidding, are you, sir?” he said.
“Not me,” Morrell said. “Not even a little bit. So the thing we want to make sure of is, we want to make sure they don’t break through.”
Brigadier General Clarence Potter thought of himself as a cosmopolitan man. He’d gone to college at Yale, up in the USA. He’d traveled up and down the east coast of the CSA, and west as far as New Orleans. He thought he knew his own country well.
But he’d never been to Knoxville, Tennessee, before. He’d never been anywhere like Knoxville before. The Confederacy’s interior had been a closed book to him. The longer he stayed in and around the town, the more he wanted to get back to Richmond and the War Department. Knoxville made daily U.S. air raids seem good by comparison.
He’d spent most of his time in Charleston and Richmond. Those were sophisticated places. Back before the Freedom Party seized power, they’d had substantial opposition groups. Chances were they still did, though the opposition had to stay underground these days if it wanted to go on existing.
Knoxville…By all appearances, Knoxville had never heard of, never dreamt of, opposing Jake Featherston. People here were shabby and tired-looking, the way they were in Richmond. The men came in three categories: the very, very young; the ancient; and the mutilated. An awful lot of women wore widow’s weeds. But people in Knoxville greeted one another with, “Freedom!” Potter hadn’t heard them say it without sounding as if they meant it. Jake Featherston’s portraits and posters were everywhere. Even with U.S. soldiers in Tennessee on the other side of the mountains, the locals remained convinced the Confederate States would win the war.
Without sharing their confidence, Potter envied it. He wouldn’t have come to Knoxville himself if the CSA weren’t in trouble. If pulling someone out of Intelligence and expecting him to command a brigade wasn’t a mark of desperation, what was it?
He needed a while to realize that question might not be rhetorical. Jake Featherston could have had reasons of his own in assenting to Potter’s transfer. The first that sprang to mind was the one most likely true: the President of the CSA might not shed a tear if his obstreperous officer stopped a bullet.