The Grapple sa-2

by Harry Turtledove

  He couldn’t explain it. Even trying was a losing fight. He just sighed and said, “I got my job.”

  “Don’t seem like reason enough.” Had Bathsheba got mad and screamed at him, he could have lost his temper and stormed off. But she didn’t. And that meant he couldn’t. He had to listen to her instead. He had three stripes on his sleeve and a submachine gun in his hands. She had nothing, and chances were neither she nor her pretty daughter had long to live.

  So why did he feel he was the one at a disadvantage? Why did he feel she could call the shots? Why did he wish he were still down on the farm outside of Baroyeca? He didn’t know why. He didn’t like wondering, not even a little bit.

  Jake Featherston was not a happy man. Being unhappy was nothing new for him. He ran on discontent, his own and others’, the way a motorcar ran on gasoline. He recalled only two times in his life when he was happy, and neither lasted long: when he took the oath of office as President of the CSA, and when his armies drove all before them pushing north from the Ohio to Lake Erie and cutting the United States in half.

  Being President was still pretty good, but it was also a lot more work than he ever thought it would be. Hard work corroded happiness. And Al Smith, damn him, was supposed to lie down with his belly in the air after the Confederates went and licked him. When he didn’t, he dragged Jake and the Confederacy into a long war, the last thing anybody on this side of the border wanted.

  Now the CSA would have to take a Yankee punch, too. Jake muttered under his breath. Like any barroom brawler, he wanted to get in the first punch and clean up afterwards, especially when the other guy was bigger. He tried it, and he didn’t knock out the USA. He didn’t have enough to hit again. Standing on the defensive went against every ounce of instinct in him. Instinct or not, sometimes you had no choice.

  His secretary looked into his office. “The Attorney General is here to see you, sir.”

  “Thank you kindly, Lulu. Bring him in,” Jake said.

  Ferd Koenig seemed bigger and bulkier than ever. “Hello, Jake,” he said-he was one of the handful of men these days who could call the President by his first name.

  “Hello, Ferd,” Jake answered. “Have a seat. Pour yourself some coffee if you want to.” A pot sat on a hot plate in the corner. Jake smacked a desk drawer. “Or I’ve got a fifth in here if you’d rather have that.”

  “Coffee’ll do.” Koenig fixed himself a cup, then sat down. After a sip, he said, “Want to thank you for letting that Freedom Party Guard unit go into action in west Texas. They’ve done a pretty good job.”

  “Better than I expected, to tell you the truth,” Featherston said. “You want to pick up recruiting for your combat wing, I won’t tell you no.”

  “Thanks, Mr. President. With your kind permission, I will do that,” Koenig said. “We need a fire brigade when things get hot.”

  “That’s a fact. Other fact is, some of the generals are getting jumpy. I can feel it,” Jake said. “A counterweight to the Army could come in goddamn handy one of these days. You never can tell.”

  “Lord, isn’t that the truth?” Koenig set the coffee cup on the desk. “Pour me a shot in there after all, would you?”

  “Help yourself.” Jake got out the bottle and slid it across the desk. “Shame to do that to good sippin’ whiskey, but suit yourself.”

  “I want the jolt, but I run on coffee these days.” Koenig added a hefty slug of bourbon, then tasted. He nodded. “Yeah, that’ll do the trick.” He eyed Jake. “You really mean that about the Guards units?”

  “Hell, yes.” Jake poured himself a shot, too, only without the coffee. He raised the glass. “Mud in your eye.” After a respectful drink-he couldn’t just knock it back, not after he called it sipping whiskey-he went on, “If Party guards aren’t loyal, nobody will be. You raise those units, and by God I’ll see they’re equipped with the best we’ve got.”

  “Army won’t like it,” the Attorney General predicted.

  “Fuck the Army,” Featherston said. “That’s the whole point. So what else have we got going on?”

  “Did you forget?” Ferd Koenig asked. “Day after tomorrow, we clean out Richmond. Isn’t it about time the Confederate States had a nigger-free capital?”

  “Oh, I remember, all right. You don’t need to worry about that,” Jake said. “All the cops and stalwarts and guards are geared up for it.” He chuckled. “With the niggers gone, we won’t need so many of those people around here. We can put some of ’em in the Army-and in your Party Guards outfits-and some in the factories, and we’ll be better off both ways.”

  “If we didn’t have all those Mexicans coming in, we’d never be able to make enough to stay in the war,” Koenig said.

  “Yeah, well, that’s the carrot we give Francisco Jose,” Jake answered. “He gives us soldiers to fight the niggers in the countryside, we keep the frontier open for his workers. That’s his safety valve, like. They get jobs here instead of going hungry down in Mexico and stirring up trouble against him. He gives us a hard time, we close the border…and start shipping the rebels old bolt-action Tredegars we don’t need any more. His old man made it through a civil war-we can see how he likes another one.” His laugh held all the cynicism in the world.

  “Sounds like you’ve got that under control, all right.” Koenig’s role was domestic. He didn’t presume to mess around with foreign affairs. He had his place, he knew it, he was good at it, and he kept to it, all of which made him uniquely valuable to Jake Featherston. He added, “The sooner we clean out all the niggers, the sooner we can throw everything we’ve got at the USA.”

  “That’s the idea, all right,” Jake agreed. Koenig didn’t know anything about the uranium bomb. Featherston didn’t tell him anything, either. That secret couldn’t be too tightly held. He did say, “Starting day after tomorrow, Richmond’ll be a better place. You go in right at sunup like usual?”

  “That’s what I’ve got in mind. We’ll have all day to move ’em out then. Yankee bombers aren’t likely to complicate things by daylight, either,” Koenig answered, and Jake nodded. As far as he was concerned, the difference between day and night was largely arbitrary. He’d always been a night owl, and spending so much time underground only encouraged him to catnap around the clock.

  He was asleep at sunrise the day the cleanout started, but he got a wakeup call: literally, for the telephone by his cot jangled. That telephone didn’t ring unless something big was going on. He grabbed it in the middle of the second ring. “Featherston,” he said hoarsely, and then, “What the fuck have the damnyankees done to us now?”

  “Not the damnyankees, Mr. President.” Ferd Koenig’s voice was on the other end of the line. “It’s the goddamn niggers. We’ve got…” He paused, maybe looking for a way to sugarcoat what came next, but he almost always did speak his mind, and this morning proved no exception: “We’ve got an uprising on our hands.”

  Jake sat bolt upright. “What’s going on? Fill me in fast.”

  “Damn smokes must’ve known we were coming for ’em,” the Attorney General answered. “We’ve already had, I dunno, six or eight people bombs go off. They’ve got rifles and grenades and Featherston Fizzes and a couple of machine guns, anyway. They mined the streets into the colored quarter, the sneaky bastards, and they blew two armored cars to hell and gone. It’s a fight, sir, nothing else but.”

  “Son of a bitch. Son of a motherfucking bitch,” Jake Featherston said. “All right, if they want a fight, they can damn well have one. Let me get hold of the War Department. If we have to, we’ll blow up the whole nigger part of town”-basically, southeast Richmond-“and all the coons inside it. That’ll do, by God.” He sounded as if he looked forward to it. The reason for that was simple: he did.

  “All right, Mr. President. I wanted to let you know,” Koenig said.

  “Well, now I know. Get off the line, and I’ll get you what you need to finish the job.” Jake waited till the Attorney General hung up, then called Nathan Bedford Fo
rrest III. He wasn’t surprised to find the chief of the General Staff at his desk. “Forrest, the niggers are raising a ruckus. What can we pull from north of here to squash those stinking, backstabbing shitheels flat?”

  “Well, sir, there is a problem with that,” Forrest said slowly. “If we pull too much or make it too obvious what we’re doing, the damnyankees are liable to try and break through up there. They’re liable to make it, too-we’re already stretched pretty damn thin north of the city.”

  “They won’t do it.” Jake sounded very sure. He wondered why. Then he found an answer: “They’re building up out West, not right here. You know that as well as I do.” He even thought he was telling the truth. And he added, “Besides, we can’t let the niggers get away with this kind of crap, or we’ll have trouble from here to fucking Guaymas. I want men. I want armor. I want artillery. And I want Asskickers. By the time they all get done, won’t be a nigger left on his feet in there.”

  He waited. If Nathan Bedford Forrest III did any more bitching, the C.S. General Staff would have a new chief in nothing flat. Forrest must have sensed as much, too, for he said, “All right, Mr. President. They’ll get here as fast as they can.”

  “Faster than that,” Featherston said, but it was only reflex complaint; Forrest had satisfied him. He slammed down the telephone, quickly dressed, and did something he didn’t do every day: he went up above ground.

  Shockoe Hill gave him a good vantage point. When he looked southeast, he swore at the black smoke rising over the colored part of Richmond. He heard the rattle of small-arms fire and the occasional explosion, too. “Christ!” he said. The police and stalwarts and Party Guards always came loaded for bear, just in case. Well, they found a bear and then some this time.

  Nathan Bedford Forrest III proved good as his word. About half an hour later, the first Mule dive bombers screamed down out of the sky above the colored quarter. Whatever the blacks had in the way of small arms, they didn’t have any antiaircraft guns. The flat, harsh crump! of bursting bombs echoed across Richmond.

  But the Confederate Asskickers weren’t the only airplanes in the sky. U.S. fighters, flying at not much above rooftop level, darted over southeastern Richmond to strafe the people cleaning out the Negroes. Then they zoomed away to the north again.

  Jake Featherston did some more swearing at that, swearing sulfurous enough to make his guards and the crews of the antiaircraft guns on the cratered Gray House grounds stare at him in startled admiration. He didn’t know whether the damnyankees had urged Richmond’s Negroes to rise. He didn’t know, and he hardly cared. He did know they had good spies inside the city, to hear about it and take advantage of it so fast.

  He called for his driver and pointed toward the trouble. “Take me down there, quick as you can.”

  “Uh, yes, Mr. President.” The driver saluted. But then he went on, “Sir, what good will you be able to do there? You don’t want to give the coons a shot at you.”

  “Don’t tell me what I want to do,” Jake snapped. “Just get moving, goddammit.”

  The driver did. People were in the habit of doing what Jake Featherston said. A good thing, too, he thought. A damn good thing. Twenty minutes later, he was at what was for all practical purposes the fighting front. He found Ferd Koenig looking ridiculous with a helmet on his jowly head. A moment later, when a bullet cracked past, Featherston wished for a helmet of his own-not that any helmet ever made would stop a direct hit.

  “It’s a war, Mr. President,” Koenig said unhappily.

  “I see that.” Featherston wasn’t unhappy. He was furious. If the Negroes thought they could get away with this, they needed to think again. “Send in everybody we’ve got,” he told Koenig. “This has to be stamped out right now.”

  “Shouldn’t we wait till the soldiers get here?” the Attorney General asked, licking his lips. “Been kind of hot for the manpower we have.”

  “Send them in,” Featherston repeated. “When we have the soldiers later, we’ll use ’em. But if we can end it in a hurry, we’ll do that. We’ve already got the Asskickers in action. What more do you want, egg in your beer?”

  So the attack went in. And the Negro fighters, waiting in prepared positions, shredded it. Wounded whites staggered back out of the fighting. So did overage cops who looked as if they were on the point of having heart attacks. They killed some Negroes and brought out some others, but they didn’t break the line. Jake Featherston swore yet again. Now he’d have to do it the hard way.

  From the bridge, Sam Carsten looked at the Josephus Daniels with a kind of fond dismay. They’d done strange things to his ship. Her paint was the wrong shade of gray. Sheet metal changed the outline of the bridge and the gun turrets. Her sailors wore whites of the wrong cut. His own uniform was dark gray, not blue, and so were the rest of the officers’.

  By the name painted on both sides of her bow, the Josephus Daniels was the CSS Hot Springs, a Confederate destroyer escort operating in the North Atlantic. The main danger coming south from Boston was that she would run into a U.S. patrol aircraft or submersible and get sunk by her own side. The Confederate naval ensign, a square version of the C.S. battle flag, completed the disguise.

  “If they capture us, they’ll shoot us for spies.” Lieutenant Pat Cooley didn’t sound worried. He was almost childishly excited at playing dress-up. The possibility of getting shot hardly seemed real to him.

  It didn’t seem real to Sam, either, but for a different reason. “Not a whole lot of POWs off Navy ships,” he said. “If something goes wrong, they’ll just damn well sink us.” That wasn’t romantic. It had no cloak-and-dagger flavor to it. He didn’t care. It was real.

  By now, barring bad luck, they were too far south for U.S. airplanes to harry them. Subs were always a risk, but Sam didn’t know what to do about it except monitor the hydrophones as closely as he could. The crew was doing that.

  He had the best set of C.S. Navy recognition signals his U.S. Navy superiors could give him. He also had an ace in the hole, a deserter from the CSA named Antonio Jones. Normally, Sam would have been leery about a Confederate traitor. Anybody like that was too likely to be playing a double game. But he-and, again, his superiors-had a good reason for thinking Jones reliable.

  The man was black as the ace of spades.

  He came from Cuba, the only state in the CSA where Negroes had surnames. He pronounced his “Hone-ace”: he spoke English with an accent half Confederate drawl, half syrupy Cubano Spanish. He hated the homeland he’d left behind, and he burned to go back there. And so here he was, with a disguised destroyer escort for transport…among other things.

  “Not the first time I’ve been in the gun-running business,” Carsten remarked.

  “No?” the exec said, as he was supposed to.

  “Nope. I took rifles into Ireland in the last go-round, just to help keep England busy,” Sam said. “The Irish paid us off in whiskey. Don’t expect that’ll happen in Cuba.”

  “No, suh,” Antonio Jones said. He wore a mess steward’s uniform. High cheekbones and a strong nose argued for a little Indian blood in him. “But maybe you get some rum.”

  “Oh, I won’t,” Sam said. “That’ll be for the fellows who do the real work. Long as they don’t get drunk and disorderly, I’ll look the other way.”

  Pat Cooley raised an eyebrow, but lowered it again in a hurry. A lot of skippers would do the same thing, not just a man who was a mustang. The exec contented himself with saying, “Let’s hope they have the chance to drink it.”

  “Not all these little tricks are easy,” Sam said. “We just have to do what we can and hope for the best, same as always.”

  They were off the coast of South Carolina when a seaplane of unfamiliar design buzzed out to look them over. The mock Confederate sailors ran to their guns. With luck, that wouldn’t alarm the fliers in the seaplane, which also sported the Confederate battle flag on wings, fuselage, and tail.

  After a couple of passes, the seaplane waggled its wings at
the pseudo-Hot Springs and flew away. “Let’s just hope it didn’t fly low enough to read our name,” Pat Cooley said.

  “I don’t think it did.” Sam hoped he wasn’t whistling in the dark. The people the seaplane wirelessed probably wouldn’t be surprised to find a C.S. destroyer escort in these waters. They probably would be surprised to find the Hot Springs around here. They also probably wouldn’t be very happy. The Josephus Daniels wasn’t fast enough to run away from everything they’d throw at her. She wasn’t armed well enough to fight it off, either. All she could do was go down swinging.

  “Y’all are bueno?” Antonio Jones asked.

  “Well, I’ll tell you-if we’re not, we’ll know pretty damn quick.” Sam went from the bridge to the wireless shack. “Any Confederate traffic for us or about us?” he asked the men with earphones.

  “Nothing for us, sir,” one of the yeomen answered. “If there’s anything about us, it’s not in clear.”

  “If it’s in code, chances are we’re shafted,” Sam said. “All right-thanks.” He returned to his station, at least somewhat reassured.

  Another seaplane examined them when they neared the southern tip of Florida. They must have passed that inspection, too. If they hadn’t, cruisers and land-based dive bombers would have called on them. As far as Sam knew-as far as anybody in the U.S. Navy knew-the Confederates had no airplane carriers. It made sense that they wouldn’t; they didn’t need that kind of navy. Land-based air and coast-defense ships could keep the United States from mounting major operations against them, and submarines let them strike at the USA from far away.

  “You know what our best chance is?” Sam said as the Josephus Daniels neared the northeastern coast of Cuba.

  “Sure,” his exec answered. “Our best chance is that the Confederates won’t figure we’re crazy enough to try anything like this in the first place.”

  “Just what I was thinking-maybe we ought to get married,” Sam said.