Return engagement sa-1

by Harry Turtledove

  Boardman stopped. He pulled out a pack of cigarettes, lit one, and offered them to Moss. The pilot shook his head. Boardman shrugged, dragged till the coal glowed red, and blew out a cloud of smoke. Only then did he answer, "Mm, I expect things could look a little better."

  "What are we going to do?" Moss said. "We can't let Featherston take a bite out of us. He'll just want another one as soon as he can get it."

  "Why are you asking me? I'm not the President. I didn't even vote for him." The doctor blew out more smoke. As always, what he exhaled smelled milder than the harsh stuff spiraling up off the cigarette.

  Moss' Canadian law practice meant he hadn't voted for close to twenty years. He said, "It's either talk about it or start screaming, you know what I mean? It's not just could look better. Things don't look good. For God's sake, tell me I'm wrong. Make me believe it." Dr. Boardman walked along in silence. After a few steps, Moss realized that was all the answer he'd get. "Give me a smoke after all, would you?" he said, and Boardman did.

  V

  Jake Featherston had fought through the Great War in the First Richmond Howitzers. Even then, the name had been a misnomer; the artillery outfit had had quick-firing three-inch field guns-copies of the French 75-instead of the howitzers its gunners had served during the War of Secession and the Second Mexican War.

  Nowadays, the First Richmond Howitzers used four-inch guns. They could fire a shell twice as heavy almost half again as far as the last war's models. But the principles hadn't changed one goddamn bit.

  If the crew that was shelling damnyankee positions north of Fredericksburg, Virginia, was nervous about performing under the knowing eye of the President of the CSA, it didn't show. Bare to the waist and gleaming with sweat in the July sunshine, they loaded, aimed, and fired again and again. The gun pit in which they served their piece was bigger and deeper than the ones Jake remembered, but the gun was bigger, too. It needed more digging in.

  A sergeant named Malcolm Clay commanded not only the gun but the battery of which it was a part. He was about thirty-five, blond with strawberry stubble on his cheeks and chin, and did a perfectly capable job. All the same, watching him, Jake smiled behind his hand.

  He turned to Saul Goldman and asked quietly, "Did you put them up to this, or were they smart enough to come up with it on their own?"

  Goldman looked silly in a helmet, the way a coal miner would have looked silly in a top hat: it wasn't his style at all. The director of communications conscientiously wore it just the same. Peering out from under the steel brim, he said, "I don't know what you're talking about, Mr. President."

  "Hell you don't," Jake said genially. "I was a sergeant in charge of a battery, too. They let me run it on account of I could and I was good, but the bastards never would promote me." He raised his voice: "Clay! Come on over here!"

  "Yes, sir?" Red dust kicked up from the noncom's boots as he obeyed. He smelled hot and sweaty, too, but it wasn't a nasty stink. He was working and sweating too hard for that.

  "How'd you get command of this here battery?" Featherston asked.

  "Sir, Captain Mouton got wounded four or five days ago, and I'm in charge till they drop another officer into his slot."

  "No, goddammit." Jake shook his head. "It's your battery now, Lieutenant Clay. You can do the job, so you deserve the rank."

  "Thank you very much, sir!" Sergeant-no, Lieutenant-Clay's eyes were a bloodshot blue. They shone now. His grin showed a missing front tooth.

  "You're welcome," Featherston answered. "In this here war, people who deserve to be promoted are going to get promoted. Nobody's gonna get screwed over like I got screwed over twenty-five years ago."

  "You won't be sorry, sir!" Clay exclaimed. "We'll give those damnyankees what-for-you wait and see. Freedom!" He shouted the Party greeting.

  "Freedom!" Jake said. "On this front, what I want is for you to keep the Yankees from giving us what-for. That's what we need here: to stop those sons of bitches in their tracks. Can you do that?"

  "Hell, yes," Clay said, and then, "Uh, yes, sir."

  Jake Featherston laughed. "I understood you the first time. I used to do your job, remember?"

  Newsreel cameras ground away. They would capture Jake daring to visit the front, brave Confederate soldiers blasting the hell out of the damnyankees, and as much other good news as they could find. Before long, the result would be in theaters all across the CSA, running in front of thrillers from before the war and, soon, melodramas that would help people see things the way the Freedom Party wanted them to.

  U.S. artillery wasn't idle around here. Every so often, a few shells would come down on the Confederate positions behind the town of Fredericksburg. No doubt they did some harm, in the sense that they did wound or kill a few men in butternut. But Featherston, having fought here in the last war, knew Fredericksburg was a damn tough nut to crack. From where he was when the order came to cease firing, he could have slaughtered all the U.S. soldiers in the world if they'd kept coming at him, and they wouldn't have been able to do much to hurt him.

  Things weren't quite the same this time around, of course. Bombers and barrels had both been babies in the Great War. They'd grown up now. If the USA got barrels across the Rappahannock, they might tear the defenses to pieces. They might-but it wouldn't be easy even so.

  Saul Goldman plucked at his sleeve. "We've done everything we came here to do, Mr. President," he said, half good flunky, half mother herding would-be rebellious child on its way before it could get into trouble.

  "All right, Saul," Featherston said indulgently. He could play the role of good little boy, too. He could play any role he wanted. If more than twenty years on the stump had taught him anything, it was how to do that.

  He went back to Army of Northern Virginia headquarters, a few miles farther behind Fredericksburg-out of artillery range. There, Nathan Bedford Forrest III was hashing things out with Lieutenant General Hank Coomer, currently in charge of the army that had once belonged to Robert E. Lee. The two officers stood in front of a map table so big, they needed pointers to show what they wanted to do; their arms weren't long enough to reach.

  "Dammit, they can't bring that off, Nate," Coomer was saying when Featherston walked into the middle of the argument. Like Forrest, he was a new man. He was just a few years past forty, and had been a lieutenant in the Great War. He came from no fancy-pants family; his father had pressed pants in Atlanta. He'd belonged to the Freedom Party since 1922.

  Nathan Bedford Forrest III did some pointing of his own. "They can't bring it off now," he said. "But they're building up for it. Do you think some spoiling attacks on the flanks will disrupt them, make them spread out? Because we sure as hell don't want them pushing down toward Richmond with everything they've got."

  Coomer scowled. When he did, a scar over his right eye pulled his eyebrow out of shape. The ribbon for the Purple Heart was among the fruit salad above the left breast pocket of his tunic. He said, "Even if they do get over the Rappahannock, we can stop 'em."

  "Don't even let 'em try, not if you can help it," Jake said. "We've got to hang in here till what we're doin' farther west takes hold. They can hurt us bad right now if they get the chance. Later on, it'll be a hell of a lot harder for 'em. I don't believe they've quite figured that out yet."

  "Some of them have," Forrest said. "That Morrell is squealing like a shoat caught in a fence. He knows what's going on."

  "He's the bastard who took Nashville away from us last time," Coomer said. "He knows his business, all right."

  "Damnyankees paying any attention to him?" Featherston asked.

  "Not yet. Not by what they're putting into the Midwest," Forrest answered.

  "Good. Outfuckingstanding, as a matter of fact," Jake said. "If we get where we're going, they are screwed."

  "That's true, Mr. President," his chief of staff said. "But it's like any coin: it's got another side to it. What the damnyankees aren't sending to the Schwerpunkt, they are sending here."

&nb
sp; "Damn right they are," Coomer agreed. "They want to make Virginia the Schwerpunkt, same as they did in the War of Secession. They reckon they can smash on through to Richmond and give us one in the nuts."

  "I understand that. Your job is to make sure they don't do it," Jake said. "This isn't the best country for barrels-too many river barriers, not enough space between the mountains and the ocean-so we've got to keep blocking their punch till ours lands on their chin. If we can't do that, we've got a lot more trouble than we figured on."

  He eyed Hank Coomer. If you can't do that, you've got a lot more trouble than you ever figured on, he thought. He'd pumped Coomer up. He'd deflate him and pick somebody else just as fast if the fellow in charge of the Army of Northern Virginia let him down.

  But Coomer said, "I understand what we need, sir." By the look in his eye, he probably understood what Featherston was thinking along with what he was saying. "All the bombing we're doing helps keep the Yankees from concentrating. And the sabotage problem on the roads and railways back of their lines is pretty bad."

  "Damn well better be," Featherston said. He and Hank Coomer and Nathan Bedford Forrest III all had the identical gleam in their eye. At the end of the Great War, the United States had annexed as much of northern Virginia as they'd occupied, and they'd tacked it on to West Virginia. They could do that. They'd won the war, and the Confederate government was in no condition to tell them no. They could do it, but they couldn't make the people they'd done it to like it.

  The annexed part of Virginia had given the USA trouble ever since they took it. Even the Whigs had had sense enough to encourage that. But the damnyankees wouldn't cough it up, because it protected Washington as long as they had it, and Washington had been threatened in the War of Secession, shelled in the Second Mexican War, and occupied during the Great War.

  So what had been northern Virginia remained part of West Virginia. And it remained a place where roads were mined, where machine guns shot up trucks and troop trains and then disappeared, where switches got left half open, and where stretches of rail vanished into thin air so locomotives derailed. It also remained a place where the Yankees hanged anybody whose looks they didn't like, which only made survivors love them better still.

  "We've got to hold 'em," Jake repeated. "If we can keep their attack here from coming off at all, that's best. If we can't, though, we've got to blunt it, contain it. We've got to, God damn it, on account of we can't afford to pull anything away from our own main attack."

  "That's always been our problem," Forrest said. "The United States are bigger than we are. They've got more people than we do, and more factories, too. They can afford to make some mistakes. We can't. We've got to do it right the first time."

  "We've done it before," Jake said. "We did it in the War of Secession and in the Second Mexican War. It was only in the Great War that the Whigs screwed the pooch."

  They'd done the most obvious thing they could: they'd driven straight for Philadelphia. He'd known better than that this time, anyway. So far, everything was going fine. In the War of Secession, the damnyankees had tried to come down the Mississippi and cut the CSA in half. It hadn't worked. But turnabout was fair play. How would the USA do if it got split in two? Jake smiled hungrily. If things went well for just a little longer, he'd find out.

  Gasoline rationing had come to Canada as soon as fighting broke out between the Confederate States and the United States. Mary Pomeroy resented that. The USA had made sure her country wasn't in the fight this time. Why did the Yanks have to steal gas from people who weren't at war? She knew the answer perfectly well: so they could use it against the Confederates. Knowing the answer didn't make her like it.

  Not long after the war began, the wireless announced that gasoline rationing had also been imposed in the USA. That didn't make Mary any happier. The Yanks deserved it. Her own people didn't.

  Rationing didn't keep her and Mort and Alec from going for a picnic one warm, bright Sunday afternoon. Such days didn't come to Rosenfeld all that often. Wasting this one would have felt sinful.

  Mary did the cooking. They could have taken food from the Pomeroy diner, but it wouldn't have seemed like a real picnic to her then. She fried chicken and made potato salad and cole slaw and deviled eggs and baked two cherry pies. She filled an enormous pitcher with iced tea. And, though she didn't brew the beer herself, she didn't forget it, either.

  By the time the picnic basket was full of food-and ice from the diner, to keep the cold things fresh-it weighed about a ton and a half. She happily let Mort show how strong he was by carrying it down the stairs to the Oldsmobile. "What did you put in here, an anvil?" he asked halfway down.

  "That's right," she answered. "I roasted it special-it's one of Ma's old recipes." Alec giggled at that.

  Mort just shook his head. "Ask a silly question, get a silly answer." But when he put the picnic basket in the back seat of the motorcar, it made the springs visibly settle. Mary's husband shook his head again. "Maybe there really is a roasted anvil in there."

  "Is there, Mommy?" Alec asked eagerly. "Can I have a piece?"

  "It'll make all your teeth fall out," Mary said. Her son didn't seem to mind. He hadn't lost any teeth yet, but he had heard of the tooth fairy. He liked the idea of getting money whenever a tooth came out.

  The road they took ran west, parallel to one of the railroad tracks that came into Rosenfeld. Getting out of town wasn't hard; inside of ten minutes, they'd put all memory of the place behind them. To Mary, being out in the middle of that vast, gently rolling farm country seemed the most natural thing in the world. Her husband and her son had grown up in town. They weren't used to a horizon that stretched out forever.

  After a while, Mort pulled off onto the shoulder and stopped the auto. "As good a place as any," he said. "If I don't fall over lugging the picnic basket away from the road…"

  "It's not as heavy as all that," Mary said indignantly. She grabbed blankets with one hand and Alec with the other.

  Mort mimed staggering under the weight of the basket. Mary mimed tripping him so he really would fall. They both laughed. She spread out the blankets on the grass. Mort set down the basket with a theatrical groan of relief. Even after he set it down, he kept listing to the right, as if the weight had permanently bent him. Alec thought that was funny, too.

  Mort's condition improved remarkably once Mary opened a Moosehead for him. He gulped about half the bottle and then sat down. "Is that a hawk up there in the sky?" he asked, pointing towards a wheeling shape high overhead.

  "No, that's a turkey vulture," Mary answered at once. "See how the wings go slanting up a bit from the body? Hawks mostly carry theirs flat."

  "A vulture, is it?" Mort said. "It must know how worn out I am from hauling that basket."

  "Well, you can make it lighter so you won't have to carry so much back to town," Mary said.

  "I aim to do that very thing," he answered. "Let me have some of the fried chicken, if you'd be so kind."

  Before long, he'd turned a lot of chicken into bones. He liked light meat, Mary liked dark, and Alec was partial to giblets. They damaged the cole slaw and the potato salad, too, and the two grownups got rid of several bottles of beer. The bones, inevitably, drew ants. That vulture, or another one, soared past again. "We're not going to leave it much to eat," Mary said.

  "Good," Mort said. "I'd rather gobble up all this good stuff myself than leave it for an ugly old bird with a bald pink head."

  Every so often, a motorcar would rattle past. A couple of drivers honked their horns at the picnickers. When they did, Mary would wave and Mort solemnly lift the straw hat from his head. Alec paid no attention to salutations from the passersby. He was busy picking wildflowers and hunting bugs.

  They'd been there a little more than an hour, and had reached the filling-in-the-corners stage of things, when an eastbound train roared past. That made Alec sit up and take notice, even if he'd ignored the passing autos. The great wheel-churning, smoke-belching locomotiv
e was too grand and noisy to ignore. The engineer blew a long, mournful blast on his whistle, too. And once the steam engine had gone by, there were still all the boxcars and flatcars and tank cars to admire, and at last the caboose-this one painted yellow instead of the more usual red.

  "Wow!" Alec's eyes shone. "I want to make one of those go when I get big."

  "Maybe you will," Mort said. "It's a good job."

  For all the sense he made to his son, he might as well have started speaking Eskimo. Alec couldn't imagine that being an engineer was work, and often hard work to boot. He would have paid, and paid anything he happened to have, for the privilege of riding in that thundering monster.

  "Want another piece of pie, anyone?" Mary asked.

  "Twist my arm," Mort said lazily. "Not too big a piece, or I'm liable to explode."

  "Kaboom!" Alec yelled. "Can I have another piece, too, Mommy?" If he hadn't been eating cherry pie, the sticky red all around his mouth would have meant he'd got a split lip.

  Mary was cutting him the new piece when a truck pulled off the road behind their Oldsmobile. It had a blue-gray body and a green-gray canvas top over the bed. Half a dozen soldiers who wore blue-gray uniforms and carried bayoneted rifles jumped out and advanced on the Pomeroys.

  Their leader was a sergeant with a salt-and-pepper mustache. "What you do here?" he asked in bad English.

  "We're having a picnic." Mort waved to the basket. "Want some fried chicken?"

  The sergeant spoke to his men in French. They plundered the picnic hamper as if they'd heard food might be outlawed tomorrow. All the leftovers and all the beer-and even the iced tea-vanished inside of fifteen minutes. Mary knew she'd made more food than her family needed. She hadn't made enough for a squad of hungry Quebecois infantry.

  "You too close to train tracks," the sergeant said, gnawing the last meat off a drumstick. "You no come here no more. It could be I have to run you in. But you not doing nothing bad, you just have food. You go home, you don't get in no trouble. You be happy, we be happy. C'est bon?"

  "Oui, monsieur. Merci." Mort had picked up a little French at the diner.