Flora sighed. “I’m afraid it seems that way to me, too. I was hoping you might tell me something different.”
“I’d be happy to, if you want me to lie,” Roosevelt said. “I thought you would rather have a straight answer.”
“And I would,” Flora said. “I tell you frankly, I would also like to have the executive branch say some of the things I’m saying. If it did, the Negroes in the Confederate States might have some real reason to hope.”
“I have two things to say about that,” Roosevelt replied. “The first is that if you want to persuade the executive branch to say anything in particular, you need to persuade the President, not the Assistant Secretary of War.”
“President Smith has a view of this matter somewhat different from mine,” Flora said unhappily.
Roosevelt shrugged those broad shoulders. “That’s between you and him, then, not between you and me. The other thing I would tell you, though, is that you should watch what the administration does, not just what it says. I am sure the President has his reasons for not wanting to make the sort of statement you wish he would. You may not agree with them, but he has them. No matter what he says, we are doing what we can to arm Negroes in the Confederate States. If they can fight back, they’re less likely to be slaughtered, don’t you think?”
Carefully, Flora said, “I wish we were doing it for reasons of justice and not just for political and military considerations.”
When Teddy Roosevelt’s cousin shook his head, he showed a lot of his more famous namesake’s bulldog determination. “There, meaning no offense, I have to say I disagree with you. Whenever someone talks about doing something for reasons of justice, you should put your hand in your pocket, because you’re about to get it picked. That’s not always true—your own career proves as much—but it’s the way to bet.”
“Thank you for making the exception,” Flora murmured, wondering if he really meant it.
“Any time,” he said cheerfully. He was too smart to make any protestations that he had. She wouldn’t have believed those. Instead, he went on, “Political and military reasons are the ones you should rely on, if you care to know what I think. They have self-interest behind them, and that makes them likely to last. Principles are pretty, but they go stale a lot faster.”
Again, Flora wondered whether that was wisdom or some of the most appalling cynicism she’d ever heard. Again, she had a devil of a time coming up with an answer.
The more Clarence Potter learned about the intelligence assets the Confederates had in place in the USA, the more he respected his predecessors. Some of the people who contrived to send word south of the border had been quietly working in the U.S. War Department and Navy Department and Department of State since before the Great War broke out. Most of the time, they were what they pretended to be all the time: clerks and bookkeepers who did their jobs and didn’t worry about anything else. They did their jobs, all right, but every now and then they did worry about something else.
Seeing what they did also made Potter worry about something else. He dared not assume U.S. spymasters were any less clever than those on his own side. That made him wonder who in the C.S. War Department had ways to get word of this, that, or the other thing to the damnyankees. Who was in the C.S. State Department but not fully of it?
Trying to find out wasn’t his province. He had plenty to keep his own plate full—not least those reports that came out of Philadelphia and Washington. They helped confirm what he’d suspected for some time: that the United States were getting ready to try an offensive of their own, and that Virginia, the obvious target, was the one they had in mind.
But he did do what anyone who’d spent a while in government service would have done: he wrote a memorandum. He sent it to his opposite number in Counterintelligence, and sent a copy to Nathan Bedford Forrest III as chief of the Confederate General Staff. He thought about sending a copy to Jake Featherston, too, but decided against it—that would be going over too many people’s heads.
Instead of having the President descend on him like a ton of bricks, then, he had the head of the General Staff pay him the same kind of call. Potter jumped to his feet and saluted when Forrest barged into his office unannounced. Nathan Bedford Forrest III was not a man to cross, any more than his great-grandfather was said to have been.
“At ease,” Forrest said, and then, “By God, General, once I started looking at your note, I started doubting whether anybody here would ever be at ease again.”
“One of the things we’ve found out over and over again, sir, is that anything we can do to the Yankees, they can damn well do to us,” Potter said. “We didn’t believe it in the Great War, and look at the price we paid for that.” Part of the price the Confederate States had paid was Jake Featherston. Potter still thought so, but not even he was bold enough to say so out loud.
“I don’t think I much care for the sound of that,” Forrest observed. “Do you think they could pull off an armored attack like the one that took us up to Lake Erie?”
“Give that Colonel Morrell of theirs enough barrels, for instance, and I expect he could,” Potter answered. “One of the things that goes some little way towards easing my mind about what’s building up to the north of us here is that Morrell’s nowhere near it.”
Forrest chewed on the inside of his lower lip as he thought that over. At last, he nodded. “A point. But that’s not what I came here to talk to you about. Do you truly believe we’ve got us some damnyankee gophers digging out what we’re up to here in the War Department?”
“Gophers.” Potter tasted the word. He nodded, too—he liked it. He could all but see spies gnawing underground, chomping away at the tender roots of Confederate plans. “Unfortunately, sir, I do. Why wouldn’t the United States want to do something like that? No reason I can see. And they’ll have people who can sound as if they belong here, same as we have people who can put on their accent.”
“You’re one of those,” Forrest said. “Every now and then, I get calls about you from nervous lieutenants. They think you’re a spy.”
“And so I am—but not for the United States.” Potter allowed himself a dry chuckle. “Besides, I only sound like a Yankee to somebody who’s never really heard one. I do sound a little like one, but only a little. Comes of going to college up there. That turned out to be educational in all kinds of ways.”
“I’ll bet it did,” Forrest said.
“Sir, you have no idea how much in earnest those people were,” Potter said. “This was before the Great War, you understand. We’d licked them twice, humiliated them twice. They were bound and determined to get their own back. That holiday of theirs, Remembrance Day . . . They wanted the last war more than we did, and they got it.”
“Well, now that shoe is on the other foot,” Forrest said. He was right. The Confederates had been whipped up into a frenzy of vengeance, while U.S. citizens hadn’t cared to think about a new fight. The chief of the General Staff brought things back to what he wanted to know: “If we’ve got gophers, how do we find ’em? How do we go about getting ’em out of their holes?”
“I can tell you the ideal solution,” Potter said. Forrest raised an eyebrow. His eyes and eyebrows were much like his famous ancestor’s, more so than the lower part of his face. Clarence Potter went on, “The ideal solution would be for our gophers in Washington and Philadelphia to dig up a list of U.S. gophers here. That could solve our problem.”
“Could, hell!” Forrest said. “That would do it.”
“Well, sir, not necessarily,” Potter said. “If the Yankees knew we were looking for that kind of list, they could arrange for us to find it—and to shoot ourselves in the foot with it.”
Nathan Bedford Forrest III raised both eyebrows this time. “You have a damn twisty mind, General.”
“Thank you, sir,” Potter answered. “Considering the business I’m in, I take that for a compliment.”
“Good. That’s how I meant it.” Forrest pulled a pack of Raleighs
out of his pocket. He stuck one in his mouth and held out the pack. Potter took one, too. Forrest had a cigarette lighter that could have done duty for a flamethrower. He almost singed Potter’s nose giving him a light. After they’d both smoked for a little while, the head of the General Staff said, “Something I want you to do for me.”
“Of course, sir.” Potter gave the only kind of answer you were supposed to give to a superior officer.
“If you get word that that Morrell is moving from Ohio to the East, I want you to let me know the instant you do. The instant, you hear me? I don’t care if I’m on the crapper with my pants down around my ankles. You barge in there yelling,, ‘Holy Jesus, General, the damnyankees have transferred Morrell!’ “
Potter laughed. Nathan Bedford Forrest III wagged a finger at him. He wasn’t kidding. “If I have to do that, I’ll do it,” Potter promised.
“You’d better.” Forrest got to his feet. “And if you have any good ideas about how to make a gopher trap, I wouldn’t mind hearing those.”
“That’s really more Counterintelligence’s cup of tea, sir. I just wanted to alert you to the possibility,” Potter said. “I don’t want to step on General Cummins’ toes any more than I have already.”
“Oh, I’ll put him on it, too. Don’t you worry about that,” Forrest said. “You’ve already done some thinking about this, though. Kindly do some more.” Trailing smoke, he hurried out the door.
“Gopher traps,” Potter muttered. He did some more muttering, too, while he finished the cigarette and stubbed it out. It wasn’t as if he weren’t already riding herd on 127 other things, all of which were in his bailiwick. And it wasn’t as if General Cummins weren’t a perfectly competent officer. Potter wanted to put the whole business on the back burner.
He wanted to, but he found he couldn’t. He kept worrying at it in odd moments. It might have been a bit of gristle stuck between his teeth. It kept drawing his attention no matter how much he wished it wouldn’t.
“Gopher traps.” He kept saying it, too. If only Forrest hadn’t come up with such a good phrase. It commanded attention whether Potter felt like giving it or not.
For the next few days, as he watched the growing U.S. storm in the north, he tried hard not to think about catching any possible spies in the War Department. He was, in fact, clacking away at a report summarizing news from spies in Kansas and Nebraska when he suddenly stopped and stared out the window, his eyes far away behind his spectacles.
His gaze returned to the report. It was as dull as it deserved to be. Not a hell of a lot was going on in Kansas and Nebraska. Not a hell of a lot had ever gone on in that part of the USA. In spite of that, he started to smile. In fact, he started to laugh, and the report had not a single funny word in it.
He walked over to Lieutenant General Forrest’s office. The chief of the General Staff wasn’t in the men’s room. That being so, Potter had no trouble getting in to see him. The power of these wreathed stars, he thought. He’d never expected to become a general officer. He’d ten times never expected to become a general officer with Jake Featherston as President of the CSA. But here he was.
Nathan Bedford Forrest III looked up from whatever paperwork jungle he’d been hacking his way through. “Morrell?” he asked. “If he’s up there, the other shoe’ll drop on us any day now.”
“No, sir. Haven’t heard a thing about him.” Potter shook his head. “I may have found a gopher trap, though.”
“Well, that’s interesting, too.” Forrest waved him to a chair. “Why don’t you sit down and tell me all about it?”
“Let me show you this first.” Potter set the report on Kansas and Nebraska on Forrest’s desk. “Glance over it, sir, if you’d be so kind.” After Forrest did, he nodded. Potter explained. He finished, “You see how I could do that, don’t you, sir?”
“I believe I do.” Forrest looked the report over one more time. “It would mean a good deal of extra typing for you—because if you take this on, you’re not going to trust it to a secretary.”
“Oh, good heavens, no, sir. Of course not.” Potter was shocked. “The thought never once crossed my mind.”
“Good. I believe you—you sound like a schoolteacher talking about the bawdyhouse next door to her apartment building.” The chief of the General Staff chuckled. Potter was less amused, but let it pass. Chuckling still, Forrest went on, “I should have remembered you run spies. You think about these things more than an ordinary officer is liable to.”
“Well, I should hope so!” Clarence Potter exclaimed. “Ordinary officers . . .” He shook his head. “I read a memoir once, by one of Robert E. Lee’s couriers. In the Pennsylvania campaign, he almost lost a set of Lee’s special orders—the damned fool had wrapped them around three cigars. If McClellan had found out how badly Lee had divided the Army of Northern Virginia, who knows how much mischief he could have done? An enlisted man saw the orders fall and gave them back. If he hadn’t, that courier’s name would be mud all over the CSA.”
“You do have to pay attention to little things,” Forrest agreed. He tapped the report with his fingernail. “Go ahead with what you’ve got in mind. I’ll be interested to see what you turn up.”
“Yes, sir.” Potter’s smile was all sharp teeth. “What—and who.”
XIV
Colonel Irving Morrell hadn’t read the Iliad since he got out of the Military Academy, almost thirty years ago now. Chunks of it still stuck in his mind, though. He didn’t remember the anger of Achilles so much as the Greek hero sulking in his tent after he’d quarreled with Agamemnon.
All things considered, Morrell would rather have sulked in Achilles’ tent than in Caldwell, Ohio, where he found himself ensconced for the moment. Caldwell was a town of fifteen hundred or two thousand people, a few miles west of Woodsfield. It was the county seat for Noble County, as a sign in front of the county courthouse declared. That made him feel sorry for the rest of the county.
Caldwell was a coal town. People had been mining coal there for more than sixty years, and it showed. The air was hazy with coal dust. When Morrell needed to hawk and spit, he spat black. There were no red brick buildings in Caldwell. There were no white frame houses, either. The brick buildings were murky brown, the frame houses gray. The people seemed as subdued as their landscape. A lot of them seemed covered in a thin film of coal dust, too.
All things considered, Caldwell would have made Irving Morrell gloomy even if he’d gone into the place cheery as a lark. Since he’d gone in sullen, he would have been satisfied to come away without hanging himself. Even that much sometimes seemed optimistic. Caldwell was where what would have been his grand attack against the base of the Confederate salient in Ohio had ingloriously petered out. Sabotage and Confederate Asskickers had brought his armor to a standstill.
That wasn’t the worst of it, either. He’d thought it would be, but he’d been wrong. As he watched some of his precious barrels chained onto flatcars bound for the East Coast, his fury and frustration grew too large to hold in. He turned to Sergeant Michael Pound, who was always good for sympathy over imbecilities emanating from the War Department. “I’m being robbed, Sergeant,” he said. “Robbed, I tell you, as sure as if they’d held a gun to my head and lifted my wallet.”
“Yes, sir,” Pound said. “If they’re going to take your barrels, the least they could do would be to take you, too. Seems only fair.”
“They don’t want me anywhere near Philadelphia,” Morrell said. “They want me to keep fighting here in Ohio. They’ve said so.”
“They just don’t want to give you anything to fight with,” Sergeant Pound said. “They’ll probably set you to making bricks without straw next.”
“You mean they haven’t?” Morrell said. “By God, I was doing that for years at Fort Leavenworth. We had the prototype for a modern barrel twenty years ago—had it and stuck it in a back room and forgot about it. Christ, Sergeant, you went back to the artillery when they closed down the Barrel Works.”
&
nbsp; “I’m glad you don’t hold it against me, sir,” Pound said.
“A man has to eat. There’s nothing in the Bible or the Constitution against that,” Morrell said. “If there were no barrels to work on—and there damn well weren’t—you needed to be doing something.”
“That was how I looked at it, too.” Pound suddenly snapped his fingers. “I’ll bet I know one of the reasons why they’re taking your barrels away from you.”
“More than I do,” Morrell said sourly. “Tell me.”
“They’re the biggest bunch we can get our hands on this side of the Confederate salient,” Pound said. “Everything west of here has to go the long way around, up through Canada—either that or on Great Lakes freighters that the enemy can bomb.”
Morrell eyed him. “Normally, Sergeant, when I say somebody thinks like a General Staff officer, I don’t mean it as a compliment. This time, I do. That makes much more sense than anything I’ve been able to think of.” He paused. “How would you like me to recommend you for a commission? You have the brains to do well by it. You have more in the way of brains than four out of five officers I know, maybe more.”
“Thank you very much, sir.” Michael Pound smiled a crooked smile. “If it’s all the same to you, though, I’ll pass. I’ve seen what officers do. There’s a lot more nonsense in it than there is when you’ve just got stripes on your sleeve. Gunner suits me fine. It’s simple. It’s clean. I know exactly what I have to do and how to do it—and I’m pretty damn good at it, too. My notion is, the Army needs a good gunner more than it needs an ordinary lieutenant, which is what I’d be.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that.” Morrell’s smile lifted only one corner of his mouth. “Whatever else you were, you’d be an extraordinary lieutenant. You talk back to me as a sergeant. If you got a gold bar on your shoulder, you’d probably talk back to the chief of the General Staff.”
“Seeing how the war is going, wouldn’t you say somebody ought to?” Pound sketched a salute and ambled off. He was blocky as a barrel himself—and solid as a barrel, too. And, when he went up against something he didn’t like, he could also be as deadly as a barrel.
Settling Accounts Return Engagement: Book One of the Settling Accounts Trilogy Page 48
