In At the Death sa-4

by Harry Turtledove

  Two stout coal-burning stoves sat there to heat the hall in winter. A wireless set was playing an insipid Yankee tune when Dover walked in. The Confederates punished POWs for clandestine wirelesses. U.S. authorities equipped the halls with them. That was daunting, too.

  A colonel in his late thirties ambled up to Dover. "Howdy. I'm Kirby Smith Telford," he said, Texas in his voice and in his name. "I'm the senior officer hereabouts. They caught me outside of Chattanooga late in '43."

  Jerry Dover introduced himself. "They shot up my command car and got me in front of Huntsville," he said. "I was up near Chattanooga, too. Had to clear out my supply dump quick as I could when the damnyankees' paratroops came down."

  "Yeah, that screwed everything up, all right." Telford watched him with a blue-eyed directness that looked friendly but, Dover realized, wasn't. "You sound like you've been around. I reckon somebody in here'll be able to vouch for you."

  "Vouch for me?" Dover echoed. "I'm a POW, for crying out loud. What the hell else am I gonna be?"

  He didn't think the colonel would have an answer for him, but Kirby Smith Telford did: "Maybe a Yankee plant. They try it every now and then, see what they can find out about us. Pretty soon you'll find out who you can talk in front of and who you've got to watch yourself with. I don't mean any offense, Colonel-don't get me wrong-but right now I don't know you from Adam, so I'll be careful what I say around you."

  "However you please. I don't mean any offense, either, but right now I don't know how much difference it's gonna make," Dover said.

  Telford's face clouded. "That's defeatist talk," he said stiffly.

  "I've got news for you, Colonel. The damnyankees didn't capture me outside of Huntsville because we're winning."

  The senior officer turned away from him without another word. Dover contemplated winning friends. He'd just lost one. Even if somebody did vouch for him now, Telford wouldn't want much to do with him. Well, too goddamn bad, Dover thought. If he doesn't like the truth, he can read a novel.

  He found cot 17. It was a better bed than the one he'd had in his own tent. It had a footlocker underneath. Dover didn't have much to stick in there, not after the soldiers who caught him relieved him of his chattels personal. They hadn't shot him, and they could have. Next to that, robbery was a detail.

  He stretched out on the cot. He'd been sitting up ever since he got on the train somewhere near the Alabama-Georgia border. Two minutes later, he was snoring.

  What might have been the voice of God-if God talked like a Yankee-blasted him awake: "Supper call! Supper call!" The camp had a PA system! He was sure the Confederates had never thought of that.

  Supper wasn't fancy, but it wasn't bad: fried chicken, green beans (overcooked, of course-the ex-restaurateur did notice that), and French fries. You could take seconds. The apple pie for dessert was actually pretty good. Dover turned to the captain sitting next to him and said, "Hell of a note when the enemy feeds us better than our own side did."

  "Yeah." The younger officer-except for some other obvious retreads, all the men in here were younger than Dover-looked surprised. "Hadn't thought about it like that, but you're right."

  If I am, what does it mean? Dover didn't like any of the answers that occurred to him. The most obvious one was the one that was probably true. The United States were enough richer than the Confederacy that they didn't have to worry about pennies and dimes. They could afford to do little things like build sturdy POW camps and give enemy soldiers decent rations. The CSA couldn't. The Confederates had enough trouble taking care of their own men.

  Nothing to do after supper but troop back to the barracks hall. A couple of card games got started. Two officers bent over a chess set. By the way they shot pieces back and forth as the game opened, they'd already played each other a great many times.

  Dover played a fair game of checkers, but chess had never interested him. He figured he'd play poker or bridge one of these days, but he didn't feel like it now. He went up to Kirby Smith Telford, who was reading a news magazine and shaking his head every now and then. "Can I get some paper and a pencil?" Dover asked. "I'd like to let my family know I'm in one piece."

  "They'll have a Red Cross wire by now," Telford said, which was likely true, but he handed Dover a sheet of cheap stationery imprinted CAMP LIBERTY! an envelope, and a pencil. "Don't seal it when you're done," he warned. "Censors look over everything you write."

  "I reckoned they would," Dover said. After more than ten years of Freedom Party rule in the CSA, he took censorship for granted. No reason the damnyankees wouldn't have it, too. "Thanks," he added, and went back to his own cot.

  As he went, he felt Colonel Telford's eyes boring into his back. Did the other officer think he hadn't been respectful enough? Did they worry about that crap here? If they did, why, for God's sake? What difference did it make now? As for Dover, he'd cussed out generals. He was damned if he'd get all hot and bothered about somebody whose three stars didn't even have a wreath around them.

  He wished he could have grabbed some table space. Writing at the cot was awkward, but he managed. Dear Sally, he wrote, I bet you will have heard by now that I'm a POW. I'm up here in the USA, in Indiana. I'm not hurt. They're treating me all right. I love you and the kids. I'll see you when the war is over, I guess. XOXOXOX-Jerry.

  He looked at the letter. After a shrug, he nodded. It said everything he needed to say. He couldn't see anything the censor would flabble about. He folded the paper, put it in the envelope, and wrote his home address on the outside. No matter what Telford had said, he started to lick the glue on the flap, but caught himself in time. I'm a creature of habit, all right, he thought.

  Somebody turned on the wireless. Women sang about war bonds in yapping Yankee accents. They wouldn't have made Dover want to buy. When the advertisement ended, an announcer said, "And now the news."

  None of the news was good, not if you were a Confederate POW. Dover assumed U.S. broadcasts bent things the same way his side did. But you could bend them only so far before you started looking ridiculous. When the newsman said Birmingham was surrounded, it probably was. When he said U.S. soldiers had freed more starving political prisoners from rocket factories on the outskirts of Huntsville, they probably had. Using politicals for work like that sounded like something the Freedom Party would do. So did starving them.

  And when the fellow said the Tsar was asking the Kaiser for an armistice, how could you doubt him? After Petrograd went up in smoke, Russia had hung on longer than Jerry Dover thought it could. But all good things came to an end. England and France would be in even more trouble now that Germany didn't have to fight on two fronts.

  Two Confederate cities had already gone up in smoke. So had a big part of Philadelphia. The war on this side of the Atlantic sounded like a game of last man standing. Who could make superbombs faster? Who could get them where they needed to go? How long could the poor bastards on the other side stand getting pulverized?

  Odds were the United States could make bombs faster. They made everything else faster. Odds were the USA could deliver the goods, too. How long could even Jake Featherston stay stubborn when death rained down on his country from the skies?

  Camp Liberty! Dover winced. Odds were he'd get his liberty back when his country finished losing the war.

  XI

  J onathan Moss savored the feeling of being at a forward air base again. He was a little southwest of Atlanta-not too far from where he'd pounded the ground with Gracchus' guerrillas. Comparing what he could do now with what he'd done then was funny, in a macabre way. The new turbo fighter could take him as far in an hour as he could march in a month.

  Every time he flew off towards Alabama, he hoped to pay the Confederates back for all the time away from his specialty they'd cost him. The pilot who'd shot him down might have killed him instead. So might the soldiers who'd taken him prisoner. He didn't dwell on that. Resenting them for turning him into a guerrilla helped keep and hone his fighting edge.

&
nbsp; His biggest trouble these days was finding someone to fight. The Confederates didn't-couldn't-put up many fighters any more. He had a pretty good notion of what his Screaming Eagle could do, but he wanted to put it through its paces against the best opposition the enemy could throw at it.

  If the turbo wasn't going after the latest souped-up Hound Dogs or Razorbacks or Mules, it didn't have much point. It carried enough firepower to make a fair ground-attack aircraft, but only a fair one: it went so fast and covered so much ground, it couldn't linger and really work over a target. It had bomb racks, but using it as a fighter-bomber struck Moss as the equivalent of using a thoroughbred to pull a brewery wagon. Sure, you could do it, but other critters were better suited to the job.

  And so he wished the United States had come up with it a year and a half earlier. It would have swept Confederate aircraft from the skies. As things worked out, enemy airplanes were few and far between anyhow, but getting them that way had taken a lot longer and cost a lot more.

  His pulse quickened when he spotted a pair of Hound Dogs well below him. The newest Confederate aircraft got a performance boost by squirting wood alcohol into the fuel mix. They were a match for any U.S. piston-engined fighter. They weren't a match for a turbo-not even close.

  He gave the fighter more throttle and pushed the stick forward. As he dove, he wondered what kind of pilots sat in those cockpits. These days, the Confederates had two types left: kids just out of flight school who might be good once they got some experience but didn't have it yet, and veterans who'd lived through everything the USA could throw at them and who'd be dangerous flying a two-decker left over from the last war.

  The way these guys stuck together, leader and wingman, told him right away that they'd been through the mill. So did the speed with which they spotted him. And so did the tight turns into which they threw their aircraft. The one thing a turbo couldn't do was dogfight a Hound Dog. You'd get in trouble if you tried. They'd turn inside you and get on your tail in nothing flat.

  Even if they did, they wouldn't stay there long. In a turbo, you could run away from anything in the world except another turbo.

  Moss climbed again for a new pass. The Hound Dogs dove for the deck. He followed them down, smiling when his airspeed indicator climbed over 500. No piston job could touch that, not even diving for all it was worth.

  They knew he was after them, all right. They stuck together all the same. Yes, they'd been flying together awhile, or more than awhile. He had to guess which way they'd break when he got close. He chose right, and that was right. They started to turn so they could shoot back at him, but his thumb had already come down on the firing button atop the stick.

  When the cannon boomed, pieces flew from the C.S. wingman's Hound Dog. The pilot struggled for control and lost. The fighter spun toward the ground. The pilot wouldn't have an easy time bailing out.

  Meanwhile, though, the leader was shooting at Moss. Well, he was trying to: your sights wouldn't let you lead a turbo airplane. It just flew too fast. The leader's tracers went behind the turbo as it zipped past him.

  Swinging through as tight a turn as he could make, Moss came back at the C.S. fighter. The Hound Dog didn't want any more of him. Its pilot wanted nothing more than to escape. And he did, too, getting down to treetop height and dodging and jinking in a way Moss couldn't hope to match.

  "All right, buddy-I'll see you some other time." Inside his cockpit, Moss sketched a salute. That was a good flyer over there on the other side. Yeah, he was a Confederate son of a bitch, but he made one hell of a pilot.

  Time to break off, then. When Moss pulled back on the stick, the turbo seemed to climb hand over hand. No prop job could come close to matching that performance. You had to trade speed for height, but the turbo had so much speed that it sacrificed much less than a Hound Dog or similar U.S. fighter. If Moss could have seen this in 1914…

  He'd flown a two-decker pusher when the Great War broke out. That was the only way anyone had figured out to get a machine gun firing straight ahead. No interrupter gear to fire through the spinning prop, not yet. Moss laughed. That technology was turning obsolete right before his eyes.

  He hadn't had a wireless in his pusher, either. He hadn't had an enclosed cockpit, let alone oxygen. He hadn't worn a parachute. If he went down, he was a dead duck. And, with an airplane made of wood and canvas and glue and wire, with an engine almost aggressively unreliable, plenty of those early airplanes did go down, even with no enemies within miles.

  He laughed once more. Now he sat behind sheet metal and bulletproof glass in an armored seat. He could fly more than twice as high as that pusher could have gone. But he still flew, or flew again, with aggressively unreliable engines. Maybe he could bail out now if they went south on him. On the other hand, maybe he couldn't.

  Finding the airstrip from which he'd taken off was another adventure. Just any old field wouldn't do. The turbo had a high takeoff and landing speed. It needed a lot of runway. One that was fine for prop jobs likely wouldn't let him land.

  Instead of the base, he spotted another airplane: a Confederate Grasshopper buzzing along over U.S. territory to see what it could see. Grasshoppers were marvelous little machines. They could hover in a strong headwind and land or take off in next to nothing. For artillery spotting or taking out casualties or sneaking in spies or saboteurs, they couldn't be beat. Moss knew that several captured specimens were wearing the U.S. eagle over crossed swords instead of the Confederate battle flag.

  The guy in this one saw him coming before he got close enough to fire. It scooted out of the way with a turn no honest fighter could match. Try to shoot down a Grasshopper whose pilot knew you were there and you'd end up talking to yourself. It was like trying to kill a butterfly with an axe.

  More for the hell of it than any other reason, Moss made another pass. With effortless ease, the Grasshopper evaded him again. He didn't even bother opening fire. And the observer in the back of the light airplane's cockpit squeezed off a burst at him with his pintle-mounted machine gun. None of the tracers came close, but the defiant nose-thumbing-it couldn't be anything else-tickled Moss' funny bone. He would have had a better chance against the Grasshopper in his 1914 Curtiss pusher than he did in a Screaming Eagle.

  He made it back to the airfield and eased the turbo down to the ground. You had to land gently. The nosewheel was less sturdy than it should have been; sometimes it would break off if you came down on it too hard. The first couple of pilots who'd discovered that would never learn anything else now.

  "How'd it go?" a groundcrew man asked as Moss climbed down from the cockpit.

  "Nailed a Hound Dog," he answered. The groundcrew techs cheered. Somebody pounded him on the back. He went on, "His buddy dove for the deck and got away-bastard was good. And I made a couple of runs at a Grasshopper, but ffft!" He squeezed his thumb and forefinger together, miming a watermelon seed squirting out between them.

  "Take an even strain, Colonel," a groundcrew man said. "Those suckers'll drive you bugshit." The others also made sympathetic noises.

  "How'd she perform?" another tech asked.

  "Everything went fine this time around." Moss banged a fist off the side of his head in lieu of knocking wood. "Engines sounded good, gauges looked good all the way through, guns behaved themselves, nosewheel wasn't naughty." He turned to eye it. There it was, all right, looking as innocent as if its kind never, ever misbehaved. No matter how innocent it looked, he knew better.

  Leaving the Screaming Eagle to the men who fed and watered it, he walked over to the headquarters tent to report more formally. His flight suit kept him warm up over thirty thousand feet. Here in the muggy warmth of Georgia spring, he felt as if it were steaming him.

  Colonel Roy Wyden ran the turbo squadron. He was a boy wonder, just past thirty, with the ribbons for a Distinguished Service Cross and a Bronze Star among the fruit salad on his chest. When Moss told him he'd knocked down a C.S. fighter, Wyden reached into his desk drawer and pulled ou
t a bottle and two glasses. He poured a couple of knocks of good Tennessee sipping whiskey-spoil of war-and said, "Way to go."

  "Thank you, sir." Moss tasted the drink and added, "Thank you, sir." Wyden grinned at him-and seemed even younger. Moss went on, "I went after a Grasshopper, too, but he got away a lot easier than the Hound Dog's buddy."

  "Those goddamn things. There ought to be a bounty on 'em," Wyden said. "A Screaming Eagle isn't exactly the weapon of choice against them, either."

  "Tell me about it!" Moss exclaimed. "He fired at me. I never laid a glove on him. He's back there somewhere laughing his ass off."

  "They'll drive you to drink, all right." As if to prove it, Wyden sipped from his own whiskey. He glanced over to Moss. "Does that Hound Dog make you an ace in both wars?"

  "No, sir. I made it the first time, but I've only got three this round," Moss said. "I spent too damn long on the shelf in Andersonville and then running around with the black guerrillas."

  "You ought to get some credit for that. It's not like you didn't hurt the Confederates while you were doing it."

  "The war on the ground's an ugly business." Some of the memories that surfaced in Moss' mind made him finish his drink in a hurry. "Our war with the CSA is ugly. The one the Negroes are fighting…No quarter on either side there. And what Featherston's fuckers would have done to me for fighting on the Negroes' side-"

  "Better not to think about that," Wyden broke in.

  "Yeah. I know. Just staying alive took luck. If the Confederates hadn't had all of their regulars fighting the USA, they would've hunted us down pretty damn quick. Jake should've started in on his blacks sooner, or else left them alone till after the war. Trying to get rid of them at the same time as he was fighting us only screwed him up."