Drive to the East sa-2

by Harry Turtledove

  “Too many,” Forrest said morosely. “They hit us where we were weakest and punched on through.”

  “Goddamn Mexicans. I ought to have Francisco Jose’s guts for garters. If he had any guts, by God, I would, too.” Jake was not only furious, he wanted to blame someone-anyone-else for what was going on in Pennsylvania and Ohio. That way, the blame wouldn’t come down on his own head.

  The chief of the General Staff didn’t seem interested in casting blame: a blessing and an annoyance at the same time. “Sir, we just didn’t have enough of our own people to go around. That’s the trouble with fighting a country bigger than we are,” he said. “That’s why we’ve got to get as many of our men in and around Pittsburgh out as we can. If we lose them all-”

  “They’ll take plenty of damnyankees with ’em,” Jake broke in.

  “Yes, sir.” Forrest sounded patient. He also sounded worried. “But if we trade men one for one with the USA, we lose, on account of they’ve got more men than we do. Pretty soon we just run dry, and they keep going. That’s the point of everything we’ve done up till now: to make them pay more than we do. If that whole big army’s stuck inside of Pittsburgh, it can’t play that game anymore.”

  Jake Featherston grunted. However little he wanted to see that, Forrest’s picture left him little choice. But trying to break out of Pittsburgh would be a disastrous admission of defeat. “What can we get together in Ohio?” he asked. “What can we use to break through the ring and get those people out?”

  Forrest frowned. “It won’t be easy, Mr. President. We put the best of what we had into the attacking force. That’s what you’re supposed to do, sir: make the Schwerpunkt as strong as you can.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Don’t you go spouting German at me,” Jake said. “Goddamn Kaiser’s got troubles of his own. You’d better believe he does. If we can break in far enough for the men in Pittsburgh to break out and link up, that’ll be all right.” He shook his head. “It won’t be all right, but we can take it. There’s politics in this damn war, too, don’t forget.”

  “All right, sir. If that’s all I can get from you, that’s all I can get,” Nathan Bedford Forrest III said. “I’ll… see what we can put together. And the air resupply will do the best job it can. If you’ll excuse me…” He saluted and hurried away.

  “Fuck,” Featherston muttered. He scowled at the map on the wall of his underground and armored office. He would have been tougher on Forrest if he hadn’t seen at once that the head of the General Staff wasn’t alibiing-he was telling the truth. Where the devil could they scrape up enough men to relieve Pittsburgh? Wherever it was, they had to do it pretty damn quick.

  He turned his head to the bigger map on the far wall, the one that showed the whole frontier from Sonora to Virginia. He could yank some soldiers from…

  “Fuck,” he said again, louder this time. The damnyankees were mounting an attack on Lubbock. He didn’t think it would get there, but the town had to be held. They were kicking up their heels in Sequoyah. A column from Missouri was pushing down into Arkansas. It wasn’t a real big column, but it was big enough to keep him from taking men out of the state. General MacArthur was getting uppity just a little north of Richmond, too. The Confederates had already pulled men from the Army of Northern Virginia to load up farther west. They couldn’t very well pull more.

  Featherston repeated the obscenity yet again. Early in the war, somebody’d said that whoever could keep two big campaigns going at once would probably win. Both sides seemed to have taken that as gospel. Now, suddenly and painfully, Jake saw it wasn’t necessarily so.

  The damnyankees had done one big thing. They were also doing a bunch of little things. By itself, not one of those little things mattered. Added together, though, they kept the Confederates from properly countering the big thrust. It was like being gnawed by rats instead of eaten by a bear. It was ignominious. It was humiliating.

  You ended up just as dead either way. That was the point, and he’d taken too damn long to see it. Something, somewhere, would have to give. That was all there was to it. While Jake eyed the map with the big picture, he also scowled at the red pins stuck into the interior of the CSA: from South Carolina all the way west to Louisiana, and some in the mountains of Cuba, too. They marked spots where Negro guerrillas were kicking up their heels.

  He swore so foully, he took a hasty look toward the door to make sure Nathan Bedford Forrest III had closed it behind him. He didn’t want Lulu hearing and wagging a finger at him. That was pretty funny when you got right down to it: the most powerful man the Confederate States had ever known, afraid of his own secretary. But Featherston wasn’t laughing at all.

  If the blacks in the country had just stayed quiet, he would have had several more divisions to throw at the damnyankees. He wouldn’t be jumping up and down now about where to find men to try to bail out the force trapped in Pittsburgh.

  “Those bastards’ll pay,” he growled. “Oh, Lord, how they’ll pay.” He got on the telephone and called Ferdinand Koenig. Ferd had a new secretary, one with a hell of a sultry voice. Jake wondered if the rest of her lived up to it. If it did, Koenig might be finding after-hours work for her, too.

  “Office of the Attorney General,” she purred, as if she’d just got out of bed.

  Featherston didn’t have time for that, though. “This is the President,” he said. “Get Ferd on the line right this second, you hear?”

  “Y-Yes, sir.” Most of that sexy lilt disappeared-most, but not all.

  “Ferd Koenig.” The Attorney General’s deep, gruff voice sounded the way it always did. Jake tried to imagine Koenig talking in soft, throaty tones. He couldn’t do it.

  “Listen, we have got to get rid of more niggers faster,” he said without preamble. “The damn guerrillas are a running sore. We’ve got to get rid of it, or it’s going to screw us for the rest of the war.”

  “Camps are running pretty close to capacity,” Koenig said dubiously.

  “Bump it up,” Jake said. “Build more bathhouses. Build more trucks. Hell, build more camps. Whatever it takes, but bump it up. And fast.”

  “All right, sir. I’ll handle that,” Koenig said, and he was a man who did what he said he would do. He was an old Party buddy, one of the last ones Jake had, but he was also damn good at his work. He went on, “The more we step it up against the coons, the more they’re liable to try and fight back, you know. That’ll cost us men who could be at the front.”

  He was thinking along with Jake, but Jake was a little bit ahead of him. Jake hoped he was, anyhow. “You handle your end of it, Ferd,” he said. “I’ll take care of the other-or if I don’t, somebody’s gonna be mighty goddamn sorry, and it won’t be me or you.”

  “I’ll do everything I can. The camps will do everything they can,” Koenig promised.

  “Good. That’s what I need to hear. Freedom!” Featherston hung up. His next call was to the Secretary of State. He talked with Herbert Walker much less often than with Ferdinand Koenig. The Secretary of State was a real diplomat, and always looked uncomfortable wearing a Freedom Party uniform instead of striped pants and cutaway coat.

  Walker knew better than to keep Jake waiting, though. “Yes, Mr. President? What can I do for you today, sir?”

  Again, Featherston came straight to the point: “I need another five divisions of Mexicans from Francisco Jose, and I need ’em yesterday.”

  “Mr. President!” The Secretary of State sounded horrified. “After what’s happened to the men he sent you before, you’ll be lucky to get the time of day out of him, let alone anything more.”

  “Tell him I won’t use them against the damnyankees. Promise him on a stack of Bibles-it’s the truth,” Jake said. “Tell him I want ’em for… for internal security. That’s what it is, all right. I’m gonna sic ’em on the damn uppity niggers, free up our own men to fight against the USA. That’s what I should’ve done with the last batch of Mexicans, only I didn’t think of it then. Sometimes you’re smarter the
second time around.”

  “Well, I’ll try, sir,” Walker said. “On that basis, I will try. Even so, I don’t know what the answer will be.”

  “We’ve got Mexicans coming up here to get work now, lots of ’em,” Jake said. “Tell Francisco Jose that if he doesn’t want to give us a hand, we won’t just seal the border-we’ll ship the ones who are already here back to Mexico.”

  “The way things are, that’s liable to hurt us worse than the Mexicans,” Walker said.

  Jake understood what he meant: the Mexicans were doing the scutwork Negroes had done in the CSA for generations. They were also filling more and more factory slots white men would have taken if they weren’t off fighting a war. Even so, he said, “Tell him anyway, by God. If we don’t have Mexicans giving us some help with the work, it’s a pain in the ass. If Francisco Jose’s got a pile of Mexicans who can’t get any work sitting around, it’s a civil war waiting to happen. You reckon he doesn’t know it? He’s dumb, but he’s not that dumb.”

  “All right, sir. I’ll tell him. Internal security. It’s a good phrase,” the Secretary of State said.

  “He damn well better say yes,” Jake said. A small gasp came from the other end of the line. Hastily, he added, “It’ll be his hard luck if he doesn’t, not yours. I didn’t mean that.”

  “Thank you, Mr. President. I’m glad you didn’t. And now I’d better get on with it.” When Jake didn’t say no, Walker hung up. Jake chuckled harshly. He could still make people afraid of him, an essential part of the business of ruling.

  But the chuckle cut off as he looked from one situation map to the other. How was he supposed to make the damnyankees afraid of him? He’d hurt them badly. He’d stopped their first big counterattack. Now, though, they were running with the ball, and he was going to have a devil of a time tackling them.

  Abner Dowling had spent too long either retreating before the Confederates or banging his head into a stone wall. Now, for the first time since gaining a command of his own, he was going forward-and he was enjoying it, too. So what if the force he had consisted mostly of what nobody else in the USA wanted? The force trying to stop him consisted mostly of what nobody else in the CSA wanted. By the way it had performed so far, it was even more raggedy than his own.

  His new headquarters lay in the grand metropolis-say, a thousand people-of Sudan, Texas. He’d been disappointed when one of the locals told him it was named for the kind of grass that fed the local cattle, not for the place in Africa. He supposed the grass was named for the place in Africa, but it didn’t seem the same.

  Sudan grass didn’t cover everything. Not far away, a brownish-yellow ridge line ran east and west. It was called, bluntly, the Sand Hills. People from the north side of the hills were supposed to vote differently from those to the south, and each group was supposed to have its own little social sets. Dowling lost not a moment’s sleep about that. People on both sides of the Sand Hills were Confederates, which was everything he needed to know about them.

  His line stood about four miles farther down C.S. Highway 84, halfway between Sudan and Amherst, a town of about the same size. Another eight or ten miles down the road was Littlefield, which was the next size up. Lubbock lay thirty-five miles southeast of Littlefield, and Lubbock, with more than 20,000 people, was a real city. If he could take it, people as far away as Richmond would jump and shout and swear.

  And if he couldn’t… “News from Pennsylvania and Ohio’s better than what we’ve heard before,” he said to Major Toricelli.

  “Yes, sir,” his adjutant agreed. “Now we get to see how tough the enemy is when things don’t go his way.”

  Dowling coughed. He wished the younger man hadn’t put it that way. He’d seen the Confederates in adversity during the last war, and they’d fought like sons of bitches. They were sons of bitches, as far as he was concerned, but that didn’t mean they weren’t brave and tough and stubborn.

  “We’re playing some little part in what’s going on there, too,” he said. “I like that.”

  “Yes, sir. Me, too,” Angelo Toricelli said. “Wherever they get reinforcements from, they won’t get ’em from here. We’re keeping ’em too busy for that.”

  “We may even grab Lubbock,” Dowling said. “I didn’t think we could when we got started, but you know what?”

  “The Confederates around here are even more screwed up than we are?” Toricelli suggested.

  “That’s just exactly what I was going to say.” Dowling raised an eyebrow. “By now, you’ve signed my name with ‘by direction’ after it so many times, you really are starting to think like me. No offense, of course.”

  “Did I say anything like that, sir?” Toricelli looked and sounded so innocent, Dowling wouldn’t have been surprised to see a halo suddenly start glowing above his head. The general commanding Eleventh Army chuckled under his breath. If his adjutant had started thinking like him, he could also start thinking like his adjutant. He’d been an adjutant for years, while Toricelli would have to wait for the next war against the Confederates for his turn as a CO.

  The next war against the Confederates… The noises Dowling made under his breath when that thought crossed his mind weren’t nearly so amused. When the Great War ended, he’d hoped the USA would never have to worry about the CSA again. He’d been too optimistic once. He would be a fool to make the same mistake twice. Nothing kept a man from making a fool of himself now and again. Dowling did try not to make a fool of himself that way too often.

  Half a dozen artillery rounds came down a few hundred yards short of Sudan. “They’re probably after you, sir,” Major Toricelli said.

  “They’re a pack of idiots if they are,” Dowling replied. “This attack doesn’t need Julius Caesar or Napoleon at the top. As long as I keep the boys in butternut too busy to head east, I’m a hero.”

  “A regular Robert E. Lee,” Toricelli said with malice aforethought. Dowling scowled, his severity more or less real. If his Confederate opposite number talked about officers to emulate, Lee’s name would likely be the first one in his mouth. Why not? Lee trounced every U.S. general he faced in the War of Secession.

  When the War of Secession was new, just as Virginia was going from the USA to the CSA, Abe Lincoln offered Lee command of U.S. forces. Had Lee said yes, the USA might well be one country now. Lincoln might not share with James G. Blaine the dubious distinction of being the only Republican Presidents. They also shared the even more dubious distinction of starting wars-and losing them.

  Dowling tried to remember. Wasn’t it during Blaine’s term that Lincoln had pulled out of the Republican Party and gone over to the Socialists? He thought so. The Republicans had never been the same since. Now Dowling, a thoroughgoing Democrat, had to hope the Socialists hadn’t started a war they were going to lose. He had to do whatever he could to help make sure they didn’t lose it, too.

  More shells crashed down southeast of Sudan. These were closer. Dowling and Major Toricelli both raised eyebrows. Toricelli said, “Sir, I move we adjourn to the storm cellar. You may not think you’re important, but it looks like they do.”

  “Damn nuisance,” Dowling grumbled, but he didn’t say no. An unlit kerosene lantern hung on the wall by the trap door to the cellar. Tornadoes tore across the West Texas prairie every now and again. Most houses in these parts-and on the U.S. side of the line in New Mexico, too-had shelters that could save lives… if you were lucky enough or quick enough to get into them fast enough.

  Toricelli ceremoniously lifted the trap door. “After you, sir.” A couple of the wooden stairs creaked under Dowling’s weight, but they held. Toricelli followed him down and closed the door behind them. “I’ve got a match, sir,” he said, and lit one.

  Dowling hadn’t checked to see if the lamp held fuel. “Just my luck if it’s dry,” he said. But it wasn’t. Buttery light pushed back shadows. It wasn’t very bright, but it would do. Four milking stools comprised the cellar’s furniture. He set the lamp on one and perched himself on anothe
r. It also creaked.

  “We’ve done what we can do, sir,” Major Toricelli said. One more set of booms came in, some of them very loud and close. “I’m glad we did, too,” he added.

  “Well, now that you mention it, so am I,” Dowling allowed. His adjutant smiled. Dowling didn’t think of himself as particularly brave. General Custer, now, had been as brave a man as any ever born, even up into his seventies and eighties. Dowling admired that without being convinced it made Custer a better commander. It might have made him a worse one: since he didn’t worry about his own safety, he also didn’t worry much about his men’s. Daniel MacArthur also had as much courage as any four ordinary people needed, which didn’t make him any less a vain blowhard or any more a commanding general in command of himself. If you weren’t a hopeless coward-more to the point, if the soldiers you led didn’t know you were a hopeless coward-you could function as a commanding officer.

  More shells crashed down in Sudan. “I hope the sentries outside the house are all right,” Toricelli said. “They’ve got foxholes, but even so…”

  “Yes, even so,” Dowling said. “We ought to be going after the Confederates’ guns. They must have pushed them well forward to land shells this far back of the line. Our own artillery should be able to pound on them.”

  “Here’s hoping,” his adjutant said. “Do you want me to go up and get on the telephone with our batteries?”

  “No, no, no.” Dowling shook his head. “If the people in charge of them can’t figure that out for themselves, they don’t deserve to have their jobs.”

  “That’s always a possibility, too.” Toricelli had seen enough incompetents in shoulder straps to know what a real possibility it was.

  So had Abner Dowling. “If they just sit around and waste the chance, that will tell us what we need to know about them,” he said. “And if they do just sit around, we’ll have some new officers in those slots by this time tomorrow, by God.”

  “What do we do with the clodhoppers, then?” Toricelli asked. “Not always simple or neat to court-martial a man for moving slower than he should.”