Settling Accounts Return Engagement: Book One of the Settling Accounts Trilogy

by Harry Turtledove

  Slowly, Potter nodded to himself. That must have been a nervy piece of work. The Royal Navy must have believed that Bermuda was worth a carrier. It hadn’t had to pay the price, but it might have.

  Eyeing a map, the Intelligence officer decided the British were dead right. The game had been worth the candle. With Bermuda lost, U.S. ships would have to run the gauntlet down the Confederate coast to resupply the Bahamas. He didn’t think the United States could or would do it. Taking them away from the USA would probably fall to the Confederacy rather than Britain, but it would eliminate a threat to the state of Cuba and make it much harder for U.S. ships to move south and threaten the supply line between Argentina and the United Kingdom. Cutting that supply line was what had finally made Britain throw in the sponge in the Great War.

  And if we take the Bahamas, what will we do with all the Negroes there? he wondered. That was an interesting question, but not one he intended to ask Jake Featherston. If he was lucky, Featherston would tell him it was none of his goddamn business. If he was unlucky, something worse than that would happen.

  He didn’t waste a lot of time worrying about it. As Confederates went, he was fairly liberal. But Confederates—white Confederates—did not go far in that direction. What happened to Negroes—in the Confederate States or out of them—wasn’t high on his list of worries. Blacks inside the CSA deserved whatever happened to them, as far as he was concerned.

  There, Anne Colleton would have completely agreed with him. He shook his head. He made a fist. Instead of slamming it down on the desk, he let it fall gently. He still couldn’t believe she was dead. She’d been one of those fiercely vital people you thought of as going on forever. But life didn’t work like that, and war had an obscene power all its own. What it wanted, it took, and an individual’s vitality mattered not at all to it.

  His fist fell again, harder this time. He was damned if he knew whether to call what he and Anne had had between them love. There probably wasn’t a better name for it, even if the two of them had disagreed so strongly about so many things that they’d broken up for years, and neither one of them ever really thought about settling down with the other. Anne had never been the sort to settle down with a man.

  “And neither have I, with a woman,” Potter said softly. He tried to imagine himself married to Anne Colleton. Even if what they’d known had been love, the picture refused to form. Domestic bliss hadn’t been in the cards for either one of them.

  Potter laughed at himself. Even if he’d had a wife who specialized in domestic bliss—assuming such a paragon could exist in the real world—he wouldn’t have had time to enjoy it. When he wasn’t here at his desk, he was unconscious on a cot not far away. The coffee he poured down till his stomach sizzled made sure he was unconscious as little as possible.

  He lit a cigarette. Tobacco didn’t help keep him awake. It did, or could every now and then, help him focus his thoughts. Since the war started, getting instructions to the spies the CSA had in the USA and getting reports back from them had grown a lot harder than it was during peacetime.

  Where was that roster? He pawed through papers till he found it. One of the Confederates who spoke with a good U.S. accent worked at a Columbus wireless station. Potter scribbled a note: “Satchmo’s Blues” at 1630 on the afternoon of the 11th, station CSNT.

  The note would go to Saul Goldman. Goldman would make sure the right song went out at the right time from the Nashville wireless station. The Confederate in Columbus listened to CSNT every afternoon at half past four. If he heard “Satchmo’s Blues,” he made his coded report when he went on the air in the wee small hours. Someone on the Confederate side of the line would hear and decipher it. Potter didn’t know all the details, any more than Goldman knew exactly who would be listening for that tune. Someone was listening. Someone would hear. That was all that mattered.

  Sooner or later, some bright young damnyankee would be listening, too, and would put two and two together and come up with four. At that point, the Confederate in Columbus would start suffering from a sharply lower life expectancy, even if he didn’t know it yet.

  Or maybe, if the men from the USA were sneaky enough, they wouldn’t shoot the Confederate spy. Maybe they would turn him instead, and make him send their false information into the CSA instead of the truth.

  How would the people who listened and deciphered know the agent had been turned? How would they keep the Confederates from acting on damnyankee lies? Mirrors reflecting into other mirrors reflecting into other mirrors yet . . . Intelligence was that kind of game, a chess match with both players moving at the same time and both of them blindfolded more often than not.

  Somewhere not far from Columbus, some other Confederate spy would be waiting for a different signal. He would have a different way to respond. If what he said didn’t match what the fellow at the wireless station reported, a red flag would—with luck—go up.

  Potter snorted. Without luck, nobody would notice the discrepancy till too late. In that case, some Confederate soldiers would catch hell. It wasn’t as if soldiers didn’t catch hell all the time.

  Air-raid sirens began to warble. That was what the instruction posters said, anyhow. When the siren begins to warble, that is your signal to take cover. It didn’t sound like a warble to Potter. It sounded like the noise a mechanical dog would make if a giant stepped on its tail. howlhowlhowlhowlhowlhowl endlessly, maddeningly repeated . . .

  The damnyankees had nerve, coming over Richmond in broad daylight—either nerve or several screws loose. Potter locked up his important papers in a desk drawer, then headed for the stairway to the shelters in the War Department subbasement—not far from where he’d formerly worked, in fact. He’d just reached the stairwell when the antiaircraft guns started banging away. “I hope we shoot down all of those bastards,” a young lieutenant said.

  “That would be nice,” Potter agreed. “Don’t hold your breath till it happens, though.” The lieutenant gave him an odd look. It was one he’d seen a great many times before. “Don’t worry, sonny,” he said. “I’m as Confederate as you are, no matter what I sound like.”

  “All right, sir,” the lieutenant said. “I don’t reckon they’d make you a general if you weren’t.” His voice was polite. His face declared he didn’t altogether believe what he was saying. Potter had seen that before, too.

  Bombs were already screaming down when Potter got into the shelter. It was hot and crowded and not very comfortable. The ground shook when bombs started bursting. The lights overhead flickered. The shelter would be a hell of a lot less pleasant if they went out. Crammed into the sweaty dark with Lord only knew how many other people . . . He shuddered.

  More bombs rained down. A woman—a secretary? a cleaning lady?—screamed. Everybody in the shelter seemed to take a deep breath at the same time, almost enough to suck all the air out of the room. One scream had probably come close to touching off a swarm of others.

  Crump! The lights flickered again. This time, they did go out, for about five seconds—long enough for that woman, or maybe a different one, to let out another scream. A couple of men made noises well on the way toward being screams, too. Then the lights came on again. Several people laughed. The mirth had the high, shrill sound of hysteria.

  Behind Potter, somebody started saying, “Jesus loves me. Jesus loves me. Jesus loves me,” again and again, as relentless as the air-raid siren. Potter almost shouted at him to make him shut up—almost but not quite. Telling the man that maybe Jesus loved him but no one else did might make the Intelligence officer feel better, but would only wound the poor fellow who was trying to stay brave.

  The next explosions were farther away than the blast that had briefly knocked out the lights. Potter let out a sigh of relief. It wasn’t the only one.

  “How long have we been down here?” a man asked.

  Potter looked at his watch. “Twenty-one—no, twenty-two—minutes now.”

  Several people loudly called him a liar. “It’s got to b
e hours,” a man said.

  “Feels like years,” someone else added. Potter couldn’t very well quarrel with that, because it felt like years to him, too. But it hadn’t been, and he was too habitually precise to mix up feelings and facts.

  After what seemed like an eternity but was in truth another fifty-one minutes, the all-clear sounded. “Now,” somebody said brightly, “let’s see if anything’s left upstairs.”

  Had the War Department taken a direct hit, they would have known about it. Even so, the crack spawned plenty of nervous laughter. People began filing out of the shelter. This was only the third or fourth time the USA had bombed Richmond. Everybody felt heroic at enduring the punishment. And someone said, “Philadelphia’s bound to be catching it worse.”

  Half a dozen people on the stairs nodded. Potter started to himself. He wondered why. Yes, there was a certain consolation in the idea that the enemy was hurting more than your country. But if he blew you up, or your family, or your home, or even your office, what your side did to him wouldn’t seem to matter so much . . . would it? Vengeance couldn’t make personal anguish go away . . . could it?

  That near miss hadn’t blown up Potter’s office. But it had blown the glass out of the windows, except for a few jagged, knife-edged shards. The soles of his shoes crunched on glittered pieces of glass in the carpet. More sparkled on his desk. He couldn’t sit down on his swivel chair without doing a good, thorough job of cleaning it. Otherwise, he’d get his bottom punctured. He shrugged. A miss was about as good as a mile. An hour or two of cleanup, maybe not even that, and he’d be back on the job.

  Lieutenant-Colonel Tom Colleton peered north toward Grove City, Ohio. It wasn’t much of a city, despite the name; it couldn’t have held more than fifteen hundred people—two thousand at the outside. What made it important was that it was the last town of any size at all southwest of Columbus. Once the Confederate Army drove the damnyankees out of Grove City, they wouldn’t have any place to make a stand this side of the capital of Ohio.

  Trouble was, they knew it. They didn’t want to retreat those last eight miles. If the Confederates got into Grove City, they could bring up artillery here and add to the pounding Columbus and its defenses were taking. U.S. forces were doing their best to make sure that didn’t happen.

  Grove City lay in the middle of a fertile farming belt. Now, though, shells and bombs were tearing those fields, not tractors and plows. Barrel tracks carved the most noticeable furrows in the soil. The smell of freshly turned earth was sweet in Colleton’s nostrils; he crouched in a foxhole he’d just dug for himself, though the craters pocking the ground would have served almost as well.

  More shells churned up the dirt. The U.S. soldiers had an artillery position just behind Grove City, and they were shooting as hard and as fast as they could. Somewhere not far away, a Confederate soldier started screaming for his mother. His voice was high and shrill. Tom Colleton bit his lip. He’d heard screams like that in the last war as well as this one. They meant a man was badly hurt. Sure enough, these quickly faded.

  Tom cursed. He was in his late forties, but his blond, boyish good looks and the smile he usually wore let him lie ten years off his age. Not right now, not after he’d just listened to a soldier from his regiment die.

  And when bombs or shells murdered his men, he couldn’t help wondering whether his sister had made those same noises just before she died. If Anne hadn’t been in Charleston the day that goddamn carrier chose to raid the city . . . If she hadn’t, the world would have been a different place. But it was what it was, and that was all it ever could be.

  “Wireless!” Tom shouted. “God damn it to hell, where are you?”

  “Here, sir.” The soldier with the wireless set crawled across the riven ground toward the regimental commander. The heavy pack on his back made him a human dromedary. “What do you need, sir?”

  “Get hold of division headquarters and tell ’em we’d better have something to knock down those Yankee guns,” Colleton answered. “As best I can make out, they’re in map square B-18.”

  “B-18. Yes, sir,” the wireless operator repeated. He shouted into the microphone. At last, he nodded to Tom. “They’ve got the message, sir. Permission to get my ass back under cover?”

  “You don’t need to ask me that, Duffy,” Tom said. The wireless man crawled away and dove into a shell hole. Soldiers said two shells never came down in the same place. They’d said that in the Great War, too, and often died proving it wasn’t always true.

  Within a few minutes, Confederate shells began falling on map square B-18. The bombardment coming down on the Confederate soldiers south of Grove City slowed but didn’t stop. Tom Colleton shouted for Duffy again. The wireless man scrambled out of the shell hole and came over to him, his belly never getting any higher off the ground than a snake’s. Duffy changed frequencies, bawled into the mike once more, and gave Tom a thumbs-up before wriggling back to what he hoped was safety.

  Dive bombers screamed out of the sky a quarter of an hour later. Screamed was the operative word; the Mules (soldiers often called them Asskickers) had wind-powered sirens built into their nonretractable landing gear, to make them as demoralizing as possible. They swooped down on the U.S. artillery so fast and at so steep an angle, Tom thought they would surely keep going and crash, turning themselves into bombs, too.

  He’d watched Mules in action before. They always made him worry that way. He’d seen a couple of them shot down—if Yankee fighters got anywhere near them, they were dead meat. But they didn’t fly themselves into the ground, no matter how much it looked as if they would. One after another, they released the bombs they carried under their bellies, pulled out of their dives, and, engines roaring, raced away at not much above treetop height.

  Mules aimed their bombs by aiming themselves at their target. They were far more accurate than high-altitude bombers—they were, in effect, long-range heavy artillery. Counterbattery fire hadn’t put the U.S. guns out of action. A dozen 500-pound bombs silenced them.

  “Let’s go, boys!” Colleton yelled, emerging from his foxhole and dashing forward. His men came with him. If he’d called for them to go forward and hung back himself, they wouldn’t have moved nearly so fast. He’d discovered that in the Great War. He was one of the lucky ones. He’d had only minor wounds, hardly even enough to rate a Purple Heart. An awful lot of brave Confederate officers—and damnyankees, too—had died leading from the front.

  Even without their artillery, the U.S. soldiers in Grove City didn’t intend to leave. Tracer rounds from several machine guns sketched orange lines of flame across the fields. Men went down, some taking cover, others because they’d been hit. The volume of fire here was less than it had been on the Roanoke front; this was a war of movement, and neither side got the chance to set up defenses in depth the way both had a generation earlier. But even a few machine guns could take the starch out of an attacking infantry regiment in a hurry.

  “Goddammit, where the hell are the barrels?” somebody shouted.

  Whoever that fellow was, noncom or more likely private, he thought like a general. Barrels—a few stubborn Confederates called them tanks, the way the British did—were the answer to machine-gun fire. And here they came, five—no, six—of them, as if the bellyaching soldier really had summoned them. The U.S. machine guns started blazing away at them. You needed a bigger door knocker than a machine-gun round to open them up, though. The bullets sparked off their butternut-painted armor.

  The barrels also carried machine guns. They started shooting up the U.S. position at the southern edge of Grove City. And the barrels’ cannon spoke, one by one. One by one, the Yankees’ machine guns stopped shooting back. Rifle fire still crackled, but rifle fire couldn’t wreck advancing foot soldiers the way machine guns could.

  “Let’s go!” Tom Colleton yelled again. He panted as he dashed forward. He’d been a kid during the Great War. He wasn’t a kid any more. He flinched when a bullet whined past him. Back then, he’d
been sure he would live forever. Now, when he had a wife and kids to live for, he knew all too well that he might not. He didn’t hang back, but part of him sure as hell wanted to.

  Young soldiers on both sides still thought they were immortal. A man in U.S. green-gray sprang up onto a Confederate barrel. He yanked a hatch open and dropped in two grenades. The barrel became a fireball. The U.S. soldier managed to leap clear before it blew, but Confederate gunfire cut him down.

  Five trained men and a barrel, Tom thought glumly. The damnyankee had thrown his life away, but he’d made the Confederates pay high.

  Another barrel hit a buried mine. Flames spurted up from it, too, but most of the crew got out before the ammunition inside started cooking off. The remaining barrels and the Confederate infantry pushed on into Grove City. Tom waited for barrels painted green-gray to rumble down from the north and stall the Confederate advance. He waited, but it didn’t happen. The USA didn’t seem to have any barrels around to use.

  They’re bigger than we are, Colleton thought as he peered around the corner of a house whose white clapboard sides were newly ventilated with bullet holes. They’re bigger than we are, but we’re a lot readier than they are. If we’d waited much longer, we’d be in trouble.

  But the Confederate States hadn’t waited, and their armies were going forward. In the last war, they’d thrust toward Philadelphia, but they’d fallen short and been beaten back one painful mile at a time. Other than that, they’d fought on the defensive all through the war. Tom had been part of it from first day till last, and he’d never once set foot on U.S. soil.

  Here he was in Ohio now. Jake Featherston had always said he would do better than the Whigs had when it came to running a war against the United States. Tom had had his doubts. He’d never sold his soul to the Freedom Party, the way he often thought his sister had. You couldn’t argue with results, though. A couple of weeks of fighting had taken the Confederacy halfway from the banks of the Ohio River to the shores of Lake Erie. If another two or three weeks could take the CSA the rest of the way . . .