"Hello, Pinkard," said the voice on the other end of the line. "This is Ferd Koenig, in Richmond."
"What can I do for you, sir?" Jeff asked the Attorney General, adding, "Glad to hear you still are in Richmond." From some of the things the papers were saying, the capital was in trouble. Since the papers always told less than what was really going on, he'd worried.
"We're still here. We aren't going anywhere, either," Koenig said. As if to contradict him, something in the background blew up with a roar loud enough to be easily audible even over the telephone. He went on, "We'll lick the damnyankees yet. You see if we don't."
"Yes, sir," Jeff said, though he'd already seen all the war he wanted and more besides in Snyder. Coming east to Humble was a wonderful escape. U.S. warplanes hardly ever appeared over the city of Houston (far, far away from the damnyankee abortion of a state that carried the same name) and had never been seen over this peaceful town twenty miles north of it.
"Wait till we get all our secret weapons into the fight," Koenig said. "We're already throwing those rockets at the USA, and we've finally got new barrels that'll make their best ones say uncle. Bigger and better things in the works, too."
"Sure hope so." From everything Pinkard could see, the Confederate States needed bigger and better things if they stood a chance of winning.
"Believe it. The President's promised we'll have 'em, and he keeps his word." Ferdinand Koenig sounded absolutely convinced, despite yet another big boom in the distance. He went on, "But there's something I need from you."
Of course there is. You wouldn't have called me if there wasn't, Jeff thought. Aloud, all he said was, "Tell me what."
"I want you to go through your guards. Anybody who's fit enough to fight, put him on a train for Little Rock. We'll take it from there," the Attorney General said.
"Everybody who's fit enough to fight?" Pinkard asked in dismay.
"That's what I said."
"Sir, you know a lot of my guys are from the Confederate Veterans' Brigades," Jeff said. Those were men the C.S. Army had already judged not fit to fight, mostly because of wounds from the Great War.
"Yes, I understand that. Sort through them, too. Some of 'em'll probably do-we aren't as fussy as we used to be," Koenig said. "But you've got plenty of Congressmen's nephews and Party officials' brothers-in-law. Come on, Pinkard-we both know how that shit works. But we can't afford it any more."
"Shall I get on the train myself, then?" Jeff asked. "Reckon I still know which end of a rifle's which."
"Don't be dumb," Koenig told him. "We've got to keep the camp running. That's damn important, too. Way things are, though, we need every warm body we can get our hands on at the front."
"Well, I'll do what I can, sir," Jeff said.
"I reckoned you would," the Attorney General replied. "Freedom!" The line went dead.
"Freedom," Jeff echoed as he hung up, too. Once the handpiece was back in the cradle, he added one more word: "Shit."
He wondered how few guards he could get away with sending. The men on the women's side, sure. They wouldn't be a problem. He could always replace them with dykes. Plenty of tough broads ready to send Negro women to the bathhouses. Plenty of tough broads eager to do it. And if some of them ate pussy in the meantime…well, hell, as long as the colored gals got what was coming to them sooner or later, Jeff supposed he could look the other way in the meantime. Yeah, lezzies were disgusting, but there was a war on, and you had to take the bad with the good.
Losing guards from the men's side would hurt more. He couldn't bring female guards over here. Some of them, the butch ones, would have liked it. But it would stir up trouble among the coons if he tried it, and it would stir up more trouble among his men. So he'd have to do some pruning, and then live with personnel being gone.
Congressmen's nephews. Party bigwigs' brothers-in-law. Sure, he had some guys like that. He didn't want to get rid of all of them. They were the young, the healthy, the quick here. You couldn't run a camp with a bunch of old farts who couldn't get out of their own way…could you? He hoped he wouldn't have to find out, and feared he would.
He got on the intercom, and then on the PA system, to summon Vern Green to his office. The guard chief got there about fifteen minutes later. "What's up, sir?" Pinkard told him what was up. He looked disgusted when he heard. "Well, for God's sake! They reckon our boys gonna win the damn war all by their lonesome?"
"Beats me," Jeff answered. "But when the Attorney General tells you you got to do this and that, you can't very well say no."
Green looked more disgusted yet, but he nodded. "I'll ask around," he said. "Maybe we can fix it." He had his own back channels to Richmond. Someone in the capital would be keeping an eye on Jeff for the government or the Party or both. Usually, that made the guard chief the camp commandant's rival. They both wanted to pull in the same direction today, though.
"Yeah, you do that," Jeff said. "But don't hold your breath. War news is bad enough, they'll be grabbing anybody they can get their hands on."
"Uh-huh," Green said. They both had to be careful when they talked about how things were going. Either could report the other for defeatism. But they couldn't afford to pretend they were blind, either. If the news were better, Richmond wouldn't be prying men loose wherever it could. The guard chief went on, "You got a roster handy?"
"Sure do." Jeff spread papers out on his desk. "I've made some marks already."
Green looked at them. He nodded. "What you've got makes sense. We can always come up with guards in skirts for the women's side."
"Just what I was thinkin'," Pinkard agreed. "The ones over here, though…That's gonna be a bastard. Bastard and a half, even."
"Yeah." The guard chief nodded again. "Some of these guys'll bawl like castrated colts when you tell 'em they got to go and fight the damnyankees. Some of their fathers'll bawl even louder."
"Tell me about it," Jeff said with a wry grin. "But I know what to do about that, damned if I don't. I'll just say, 'You want to squawk, don't you come squawkin' to me. Go squawk to Ferd Koenig, on account of he gave the orders. Me, I'm only doin' like he said.'"
Vern Green smiled a slow, conspiratorial smile. "Ain't gonna be a whole lot o' folks with the brass to try that."
"Hell, I wouldn't," Jeff said. "I know when I'm fightin' out of my weight. Anybody who wants to take a swing at it, well, good luck." He peered through his reading glasses at the roster. "Let's see how we can finish this off and still have enough left to do our jobs here."
Neither of them ended up happy about what they came up with. But they both agreed Camp Humble could go on reducing population without the guards they'd ship to Little Rock. Then they wrangled about who would announce the transfers. Jeff wanted the guard chief to do it. Green insisted the words had to come out of the commandant's mouth. In they end, they split the difference. Pinkard would announce the Attorney General's order, while Green read the names of the men who would go to Little Rock.
Even assembling the guards was tricky. Like any soldiers or bureaucrats, the men knew a break in routine was suspicious. To them, change was anything but good. And they started yelling their heads off when Jeff announced that Ferd Koenig required some of them to go to the front.
"Shut up!" Pinkard yelled, and his bellow was enough to rock them back on their heels and make sure they damn well did shut up, at least for a little while. Into that sudden, startled silence, he went on, "Y'all reckon I want to do this? You're out of your goddamn minds if you do. You reckon I've got any choice? You're just as crazy if you think so, and a lot stupider'n I figured you were."
"We won't go!" somebody yelled, and other guards took up the cry.
"Oh, yes, you will," Jeff said grimly. "I don't believe you catch on. You ain't just fuckin' with me, people. Y'all are fuckin' with Ferd Koenig and Jake Featherston and the Freedom Party and the Confederate government. You'll end up in the stockade, and then they'll ship your sorry asses to the front any which way. And if you don't end up
in a penal battalion for raising a ruckus, then I don't know shit about how things work. And I damn well do."
A shudder ran through the guards. They didn't want to go to the front as soldiers. That was nasty and dangerous. But if you went to the front in a penal battalion, you were nothing but dead meat that hadn't got cooked yet. And they threw you straight into the fire.
"You still talkin' about not goin'?" Jeff asked. Nobody said anything this time. He nodded in something approaching satisfaction. "That's more like it. Maybe y'all ain't as dumb as you look after all. Hell, you go and mutiny, maybe they don't send you to the front at all. Maybe they just line you up and shoot you." He waited for another shudder, and got it. Then he went on, "Vern here'll read out the names of the men who're going to Little Rock. You hear your name, be ready to ship out tomorrow at 0600. You ain't ready, you got more trouble'n you know what to do with, I promise. Vern?"
One by one, the guard commander read the list of names. Some men who got called jerked as if shot. For a few, or more than a few, that was bound to be anticipation. Others cursed Green or the Freedom Party. And still others reacted with complete disbelief. "You can't do this to me!" one of them cried. "Do you know whose cousin I am?"
"You ain't Ferd Koenig's cousin, and you ain't Jake Featherston's cousin, either," Jefferson Pinkard said in a voice like iron. "And as long as you ain't, it don't matter for shit whose cousin you are. You got it?"
"You can't talk to me that way!" exclaimed the guard with the prominent-but not prominent enough-cousin.
"No? Seems like I just did," Jeff answered. "You can get on the train tomorrow morning, or you can go to the stockade now and get on another train after that. You just bet your ass you won't be happy if you do, though."
The cousin said not another word. Green went back to reading names. He got more howls of protest. Some guards did some virtuoso cussing. But nobody else said he wouldn't go. Nobody else said he had a relative important enough to keep him from going, either. As far as Jeff was concerned, that was progress.
He waited with the shivering guards the next morning. All but two of them were there. Those two had skipped camp. They'd be the military police's worry from now on. He figured the MPs would track them down and make them sorry. The train pulled in right on time, snorting up in the beginnings of morning twilight-sunup was still a ways away.
Doors opened. Glumly, the guards climbed up and into the passenger cars. When they'd all boarded, the train chugged off. Its light was dim. Even here, lights could draw U.S. airplanes. You didn't want to take chances you didn't have to.
After the train pulled away, Jeff went to the kitchen for fried eggs, biscuits and gravy, and coffee. He'd done his duty. He wasn't happy about it, but he'd done it. Pretty soon, Camp Humble would start doing its duty again, too. Even with a reduced guard contingent, the camp would keep on working toward making the Confederate States Negro-free.
That was damned important work. Jeff was proud to have a part in it. He just wished the damnyankees and the war wouldn't keep interfering.
VI
Lieutenant-Colonel Jerry Dover didn't have Atlanta to kick around any more. The senior supply officers there couldn't make his life miserable any more. They'd either fled or died or were languishing in U.S. POW camps. The Stars and Stripes flew over the capital of Georgia. And so…
And so…Alabama. Dover had never figured he would have to try to fight the damnyankees from Alabama. Now he could scream at Huntsville for not getting him what he needed.
It was less fun than screaming at Atlanta had been. The chief quartermaster officer in Huntsville was a brigadier general named Cicero Sawyer. He sent Dover anything he had. When he didn't send it, he didn't have it. Dover could complain about that, but Sawyer complained about it, too.
"Anything that comes from Virginia and the Carolinas, forget it," he told Dover on a crackling telephone line. "They can't get it here."
"Why not?" Dover demanded. "We've still got Augusta. We've still got Savannah. We've still got shipping. Damnyankees can't sink every freighter in the goddamn country."
"Reckon the big reason is all the shit that's going on up in Virginia right now," Sawyer said. "They want to hang on to every damn thing they can so they can go and shoot it at the Yankees there."
"Yeah, well, if they forget this is part of the country, too, pretty soon it won't be any more," Dover said. "Let's see how they like that."
"I know," Sawyer said wearily. "I've got two worries myself. I got to keep the soldiers supplied-that means you. And I've got to keep the rocket works going. We're hurting the USA with those things, damned if we're not."
"That's nice," Dover said. "In the meantime, I need boots and I need raincoats and I need ammo for automatic rifles and submachine guns. When the hell you gonna get that stuff for me?"
"Well, I can send you the ammunition," Brigadier General Sawyer answered. "That comes out of Birmingham, so it's no problem. The other stuff…Mm, maybe I can get some of it from New Orleans. Maybe."
"If you don't, I'm gonna have men coming down with pneumonia," Dover said. "Boots wear out, dammit, and they start to rot when it's wet like it is now. The guys who have shelter halves are wearing them for rain hoods, but they aren't as good as the real thing."
Sawyer sighed. "I'll try, Dover. That's all I can tell you. You aren't the only dumpmaster yelling his head off at me, remember."
"Why am I not surprised?" Dover hung up with the last word.
Dumpmaster was a word that fit him much too well right now. His supply depot was small and shabby. The nearest town, Edwardsville, was even smaller and shabbier. Close to a hundred years earlier, Edwardsville had been a boom town, for there was gold nearby. Then the mother lode in California shot the little Alabama gold rush right behind the ear. Some of the fancy houses built in Edwardsville's first-and last-flush of prosperity still stood, closed and gray and grim.
"Well?" Pete asked when Dover hung up.
"He promised us the ammo," Dover told the veteran quartermaster sergeant. "As far as the rest of it goes, we're screwed."
"Not us. We got the shit for ourselves," Pete said. Supply officers and noncoms lived well. That was a perquisite of the job. Pete went on, "It's the poor bastards a few miles east of here who get the wrong end of the stick."
Jerry Dover nodded unhappily. In the last war, the average Confederate soldier had been about as well supplied as his Yankee counterpart. Through the first couple of years of this fight, the same held true. But the Confederate States were starting to come apart at the seams, and the men were paying for it.
"Ammo's great," Pete went on. "What if everybody's too damn hungry and sick to use it, though?"
"I already told you," Dover answered. "In that case, we're screwed." He looked around to make sure nobody but Pete could hear before adding, "And we're liable to be."
Off to the northwest lay Huntsville, where the rockets came from. Off to the west lay Birmingham, where anything made of iron or steel came from. Off to the east lay damnyankees who knew that much too well. When they got ready to push west, could they go right on through the Confederates standing in their way?
Although Dover hoped not, he wouldn't have bet against it.
"How many niggers in these parts?" Pete asked, not quite out of a clear blue sky.
"Well, I don't exactly know," Dover answered. "I don't think I've seen any, but there could be some skulking around, like."
"Could be, yeah. I bet there are," Pete said. "I bet they get one look at what all we got here, then they light out to tell the Yankees."
"I bet you're right. We saw it often enough farther east," Dover said. "Maybe we ought to do some hunting in the woods around here." He remembered too well the black raiders who'd plundered his dump in Georgia.
"Maybe we should." Pete grinned. "I ain't been coon hunting since I was a kid."
"Heh." Dover made himself grin back. He'd heard jokes like that too many times to think they were very funny, but he didn't want to hurt P
ete's feelings.
The hunt was no joke. Jerry Dover feared it was also no success. He couldn't get any front-line troops to join in, which meant he had to do it with his own men, men from the Quartermaster Corps. They could fight if they had to; they were soldiers. They'd had to a couple of times, when U.S. forces broke the lines in front of them. They hadn't disgraced themselves.
But there was a big difference between a stand-up fight and hunting down Negroes who didn't want to get caught or even get seen. Regular troops probably would have had a hard time doing that. It was more than the men from the supply dump could manage. They might have made the blacks shift around. They caught no one and killed no one. The day's only casualty was a corporal who sprained his ankle.
That evening, Birmingham caught hell. The bombers came right over the supply dump, flying from east to west. When the alarms went off, Dover scrambled into a slit trench and waited for hellfire and damnation to land on his head. As the Hebrews in Egypt must have done, he breathed a silent sigh of relief when the multi-engined Angels of Death passed over him, bound for other targets.
He felt guilty about that, and angry at himself, but he couldn't help it. Yes, the Confederacy was still going to get hurt. Yes, other men-and women, and children-were still going to get blown to bits. But his own personal, precious, irreplaceable ass was safe, at least till the sun came up.
He grimaced when he realized just how many U.S. airplanes were heading west. The damnyankees had loaded up their fist with a rock this time. Alabama boasted only two targets worth that much concentrated hate. The bombers' course told him they weren't bound for Huntsville. "Sorry, Birmingham," he muttered.
Birmingham, without a doubt, would be, and shortly was, even sorrier. He cowered in a trench more than seventy miles east of the city. Even from there, he could hear the bombs going off: a low, deep roar, absorbed almost as much through the palms of the hands and the soles of the feet as through the ears.
"Where the hell's our fighters?" Pete howled, as if Dover had a couple of dozen stashed away in the depot.
In At the Death sa-4 Page 19
