“Thank you, sir,” Moss said cautiously, and sat with just as much care. The condemned man got a hearty meal went through his mind.
General Yount must have realized what he was thinking. “I didn’t call you in here to ream you out, Colonel,” he said. “I want to ask you a question.”
“Sir?” The less Moss said, the less he might have to regret later on.
But Yount came straight to the point: “You’ve flown a lot of different airplanes, haven’t you?”
“Well, yes, sir. I started with a pusher job in 1914, and I’m still doing it, so I must have, eh?”
“That’s right.” Yount smiled and nodded. “How would you like to add a turbo job to the list?”
A crazy grin spread across Moss’ face. “Sir, I’d kill for a chance like that. Only reason I haven’t is, I didn’t know who needed bumping off.”
Turbos were going to turn propeller-driven airplanes obsolete as soon as the boys with the slide rules and the thick glasses worked the gremlins out of them. They were already sixty or eighty miles an hour faster than the hottest prop-driven fighters. The drawbacks were unreliable engines and landing gear, among other things. Turbos were widowmakers on a scale that hadn’t been seen since the early days of the Great War. Moss was one of thousands of pilots who didn’t give a damn. He wanted that chance so bad he could taste it.
Major General Yount’s smile got wider. He knew Moss was kidding…up to a point. “You’ve got it, Colonel. You can call it a reward for a hard time, if you like. There’s one thing I do have to warn you about, though.”
“What? That it’s dangerous? I already know, sir. I’m ready to take the chance.”
“No, no.” The training commandant shook his head. “I assumed you knew that. But you also have to know that for the time being we aren’t using turbo fighters anywhere except above U.S.-occupied territory. If you get shot down or forced to crash-land because of engine trouble, we don’t want this machinery falling into enemy hands. You must agree to that before you begin flight training here.”
“Oh.” Moss didn’t try to hide his disappointment. “I wanted to go hunting.”
“I understand that. You wouldn’t be a good fighter pilot if you didn’t. But I hope you follow the reasoning behind the order.”
“Yes, sir,” Moss said reluctantly. Even more reluctantly, he added, “All right, sir. I agree to the condition.”
“Good. In that case, report to Building Twelve at 0730 tomorrow morning. You’ll learn about the care and feeding of your new beast.”
Several turbo fighters sat on the runway outside of Building Twelve. Moss got there early so he could walk around them before he went in. They looked weird as hell. The fuselage was almost shark-shaped. The wings swept back from root to tip. He’d never seen or imagined anything like that before. The turbos had no tailwheel. They sat on a nosewheel instead, so the fuselage rested parallel to the ground instead of sloping down from nose to tail. The engines sat in metal pods under the wings. Yeah, the new fighter was one peculiar bird. But the longer Moss stared, the more he nodded to himself. It might look different, but it also looked deadly.
He wasn’t the only pilot giving the new airplanes a once-over. “Fly one yet?” he asked a much-decorated major.
“Yeah,” the younger man answered.
“What’s it like?”
“Like your first girl after you’ve been jacking off too goddamn long.”
Moss laughed. That wasn’t what he’d expected, but he liked the way it sounded. He went into the building to hear about the care and feeding of the Boeing-71, as the new turbo was officially known. The major doing the lecturing had some fresh and nasty burn scars on his left arm, and walked with a limp. Moss wondered if he’d got hurt in a turbo, but didn’t ask. He didn’t really want to know. Nobody else seemed curious, either.
He learned about the instruments, about the guns (four 30mm cannon in the nose—one hell of a punch), about the strange and temperamental landing gear, about what to do if an engine quit or caught fire, about what to do if both engines went out (not the most encouraging bit of instruction he’d ever had), about tactics against the Confederates’ hottest prop-driven Hound Dogs, about everything he needed to know before he plopped his butt down in the cramped-looking cockpit.
He had to make himself listen. He knew he was hearing all kinds of stuff that would help keep him alive. He was a pro; he understood that. Even so, all he wanted to do was get in there and find out what the bird could do.
After what seemed forever and was only a week, he got his chance in a two-seat trainer. U.S. armies had driven the Confederates out of Petersburg. Birmingham and Huntsville were under artillery assault. Moss wondered if there’d be any enemy airplanes left for him to face when he finally went on duty in the new turbo—people were calling them Screaming Eagles, and the brass didn’t seem to mind too much.
The noise inside the cockpit was different. He felt it all through his body instead of just hearing it. He gave the turbo some throttle. It raced down the runway—it needed half again as much tarmac as a prop job. As he came up to takeoff speed, the instructor said, “Ease the stick back. Not too much, now. You do everything by little bits with this baby.”
“Right,” Moss said, and then he was airborne. He gunned the turbo a little. When he felt what happened, he whispered, “Ohh.” Sure as hell, the murmur wasn’t much different from the one he’d made as he first slid into Beth Sullivan when he was seventeen. He’d forgotten you could mix so much delight and awe and astonishment.
The instructor chuckled. How many other pilots had made that same sound in his earphones? “It’s something, isn’t it?” he said.
“Wow,” Moss answered, which wasn’t a hell of a lot more articulate. After a moment, he tried again: “It’s like angels are pushing.”
“It is, isn’t it?” Now the instructor sounded thoughtful; he hadn’t heard that before, anyway. He paused for a moment, then said, “Remember, they can turn into devils in nothing flat if you screw up—or even if you don’t. Sometimes only God knows why the engines flame out or throw a rotor or just up and quit. And if you don’t want to be asking Him face-to-face, you’ve got to get out of the bird in a hurry.”
“I understand,” Moss said. The single-seat Screaming Eagle had one of the nicest cockpit canopies he’d ever seen, a sleekly streamlined armor-glass bubble. The trainer’s canopy was longer and more bulbous, to accommodate the longer cockpit with two men. Could you yank it back quick enough to bail out? He hoped so.
At the instructor’s command, he swung the turbo into a turn. You couldn’t come close to turning as tight as you could in a prop job. But you wouldn’t want to dogfight in a Screaming Eagle anyway, not when you could outdive, outclimb, and just plain outrun anything else in the air.
Landing with a nosewheel as the first flight ended felt strange, but he did it. He couldn’t stop smiling when he got out of the fighter. If this wasn’t love, what was it?
IX
Georgia. Now Alabama. Cincinnatus Driver didn’t care where they sent him. That he could drive through states which didn’t come close to bordering the USA shouted louder than any words that the Confederacy was cracking up.
Enemy wireless programs still denied the obvious. They promised vengeance on the United States and swore C.S. victory lay right around the corner. “Those bastards are so full of bullshit, no fuckin’ wonder their eyes are brown,” Hal Williamson said. He paused to drag on a cigarette. The smoke, like the battery-powered wireless set, was loot from a captured Confederate supply dump. The enemy had destroyed what he could, but he’d had to retreat too fast to get rid of everything.
“We will take our revenge on the damnyankees!” the announcer brayed. “Our rockets will drop from the skies and punish them as they only dream of punishing us! We will wipe their corrupt and filthy cities off the map one after another!”
Cincinnatus lit up a Raleigh of his own. “Turn him off,” he said. “Screechin’ like that�
�ll ruin my digestion.”
“I hear you,” Williamson said, and turned the power knob till it clicked. The ranting Confederate broadcaster—he must have studied at the Jake Featherston school of drama—fell silent. Williamson made as if to throw a rock at the set. “Goddamn lying cocksucker.”
“Yeah,” Cincinnatus said, and hoped he was right. U.S. newscasters went on and on about the German bomb that leveled Petrograd. If the Germans could do something like that, could the Confederates match them? You didn’t want to think so, but was it impossible?
Hal’s thoughts ran along a different train track: “Besides, where’ll the dickheads get their rockets once we’re done with Huntsville?”
“Yeah!” This time, Cincinnatus sounded much happier. Everybody knew the enemy rockets came from there. If the Confederates couldn’t throw their superbomb at the USA, what good would it do them?
And, even before Huntsville got overrun, it was catching holy hell. Battery upon battery of 105s pounded away at the town. Their muzzle flashes brightened the horizon from the north all the way around to the southeast. The deeper crump! of bursting bombs said U.S. airplanes came over Huntsville, too. How anybody could go on working while high explosives were knocking his city flat was beyond Cincinnatus. The Confederates seemed intent on trying, though.
Before the drivers settled down for the night, they cut cards to see who would stand sentry when. Cincinnatus got a three-hour shift right at the start. That was good news and bad mixed together. He would have to stay awake longer when he was hungrier for sleep than for a good steak. But when he did climb into the cabin of his truck and roll up in blankets, he wouldn’t have his sleep interrupted…unless Confederate raiders hit.
And they might. He knew that too well, which was why he carried his submachine gun with the safety off. C.S. regulars were thin on the ground. Raiders, damn them, popped out of nowhere. Some were bypassed soldiers, others civilians with a chip on their shoulder. If they could throw a few grenades or stitch a burst of automatic-weapons fire through a truck park, the damage they did more than paid for itself even if they got scragged.
A lot of the time, they didn’t. They disappeared into the darkness and were never seen again. “Bastards,” Cincinnatus muttered. His leg hurt. So did his shoulder. They did a lot of the time, even though he took enough aspirins to give himself a perpetual sour stomach. Run out in front of a motorcar and you weren’t the same again afterwards.
He prowled around the parked trucks, doing his best to move quietly. Not far away, he heard a sound like crazy screeching. He froze for a second before realizing it was a raccoon. Those unearthly noises could get you going.
His wristwatch had numbers and hands that glowed in the dark. When his stretch on patrol ended, he shook his replacement awake and curled up on the seat of his truck. Whatever happened from then till sunup happened without him.
Somebody had liberated a ham. Toasted over a fire, a thick slab of it was delicious, and beat the hell out of the canned scrambled eggs Cincinnatus also ate. The coffee tasted as if it was at least half chicory. He’d had blends like that when he lived in Covington. He was used to it; he even kind of liked it. Some of the white drivers grumbled.
Hal Williamson put things in perspective: “Shit, guys, it’s better than no coffee at all.” Nobody found any easy way to argue with that.
The drivers headed for the closest dump to load up with whatever the troops might need today (or whatever the quartermaster had, which wasn’t always the same thing). Before they got there, a bird colonel in a command car waved them down. “You men have empty trucks, right?”
“Yeah? So?” the lead driver asked. Being technically a civilian, he could get away with things that would have put a soldier in the stockade. Cincinnatus was only two trucks behind, and could hear everything that went on between the driver and the officer.
That worthy didn’t even blink at the near-insubordination. “So you’re going to come with me instead of going wherever the hell you were going.”
“We can’t do that!” the lead driver exclaimed. “They’ll have our heads.”
“No, they won’t,” the colonel said. “Whatever you were doing, what I’ve got for you is more important. Unless you’re on your way to pick up a bunch of those kraut superbombs, this trumps everything. And I will have your guts for garters if you fuck with me, buddy—I promise you that.”
The lead driver considered, but not for long. “Colonel, you talked me into it,” he said. Cincinnatus would have said the same thing; he didn’t think the colonel was bluffing.
All the man said after that was, “Follow me.” He got into the command car, nudged the driver, and took off. The truck convoy rumbled after him.
They headed straight for Huntsville—straight for the front, in other words. Cincinnatus began to wonder if the colonel wasn’t one of those Confederate impostors who showed up every now and then. Even more than raiders, they caused trouble all out of proportion to their numbers. If this son of a bitch was leading a whole column of trucks into an ambush…
Cincinnatus glanced over to the submachine gun beside him. He had as many bullets as he could for the Confederates, and one more for himself afterwards. They wouldn’t take him alive no matter what.
The command car pulled up in front of a nondescript factory building—or it would have been, except for the barbed-wire perimeter surrounding it. Soldiers stood at the doorway, soldiers in green-gray uniforms. Cincinnatus breathed a sigh of relief.
“Let them come out!” the colonel shouted. The soldiers waved and nodded. They threw the doors wide.
“Do Jesus!” Cincinnatus gasped. His next thought after an ambush had been that the USA might have overrun another camp where the Confederates got rid of their Negroes. He turned out to be wrong, but what he saw was just about as bad. He hadn’t imagined anything could be.
The men who came shambling out were white. They wore striped uniforms, the way convicts had back when Cincinnatus was a kid. The trousers and shirts looked as if they were made for some much larger species. And so they had been—Cincinnatus didn’t think any of these skeletons on legs weighed more than 120 pounds. Most of them weren’t anywhere close to that. A powerful animal stench came from them.
“Do Jesus!” Cincinnatus said again. He was out of the truck and limping toward them before he thought about what he was doing. He had several ration cans in pouches on his belt. “Here!” he called, and tossed them to the closest captives.
He wasn’t the only driver doing the same thing. Anyone who had enough himself—even someone who was only hungry—would have wanted to feed these bright-eyed walking skeletons.
But the food almost touched off a riot. The drivers didn’t have enough with them to give everybody some. The starving men who didn’t get any tried to steal from the ones who did. Finally, the U.S. guards had to break things up with rifle butts. “Hate to do it,” one of them said. “It’s like hitting your puppy ’cause he wants a bone. These guys can’t help it—they’re that hungry. But what can you do? Otherwise, we’ll have an even bigger goddamn mess on our hands.”
“You’ll all get some soon!” the colonel shouted. “Honest to God, you will! That’s what the trucks are here for—to take you to where there’s food.”
That turned the trick. The boneracks in stripes swarmed onto the trucks, which could hold many more of them than of human beings of ordinary dimensions. “Who are you poor bastards?” Cincinnatus asked.
“We’re politicals,” a scrawny man said, not without pride. “I’m a Whig. I was mayor of Fayetteville, Arkansas.” He looked more like a disaster than a one-time public official. A weak breeze—never mind a strong one—would have knocked him over in a heap. “I didn’t like the Freedom Party. Still don’t, by God. And this is what it bought me.”
“What were you doin’ in there?” Cincinnatus asked. But the mayor of Fayetteville didn’t hang around to chat. That might have cost him a place in a truck, and he wasn’t about to take a chance.
One of the guards answered for him: “They were putting rockets together, that’s what—the big mothers that go miles and miles. Featherston’s fuckers figured they might as well work ’em to death as just shoot ’em.”
“Oh,” Cincinnatus said in a hollow voice. When the guard said work ’em to death, he wasn’t kidding. Some of the men still coming out of the factory would plainly die before they got fed. The dreadful odor that accompanied them from the building said more than a few men were already dead in there.
And yet…What happened to these political prisoners was horrible, no doubt about it. But they still got to try to stay alive. Some of them might have staved off death since before the war began.
The Confederacy’s Negroes never got even that much of a chance. They went into camps—and they didn’t come out. The politicals who hated the Freedom Party still labored for the Confederate States. Negroes would have done the same…had anyone asked them to.
Nobody seemed to have. The Freedom Party and a lot of white Confederates wanted their Negroes dead—and they got what they wanted. As horrible as this was, it could have been worse. That was, perhaps, the scariest thought of all.
As Cincinnatus got back into the cab of his deuce-and-a-half, he also wondered whether that bird colonel would have made such a fuss if the rocket factory were full of Negro laborers. He shrugged; he couldn’t be sure one way or the other. But if he had his doubts—well, who could blame him, considering all the things he’d seen, all the things he’d escaped?
None of which made the plight of the starving, stinking politicals who jammed the back of the truck anything less than dreadful. Yes, if they were black they would have been dead already. But they couldn’t last long as things were. Cincinnatus put the truck in gear and drove them off toward whatever help the U.S. Army could give.
In at the Death Page 31
