Lulu stuck her head into his underground office. She was paler than she should have been. She didn’t get up into the sun and fresh air as often as she should these days. Jake suspected he was paler than he should have been, too. He didn’t like being stuck down here, but he didn’t like getting blown up, either.
“General Forrest is here to see you, Mr. President,” she said.
“Well, send him on in,” Jake replied. “Did he tell you what it was all about?” Forrest had asked for this meeting; Jake hadn’t summoned him. The chief of the General Staff had been coy about saying just what was on his mind, too.
But Featherston’s secretary shook her head. “No, sir.”
“All right. Never mind. I’ll find out,” Jake said.
Nathan Bedford Forrest III strode into the office and saluted. “Mr. President,” he said, and then, “Freedom!” and then, “May I shut the door?”
“Go ahead,” Featherston answered. Forrest had a pistol in his holster. He was one of the handful of men allowed to bear arms in Jake’s presence. Jake didn’t think Forrest had come here to plug him. If Forrest had, he wouldn’t waste time with the door. He’d just go ahead and do it. Jake waved him to a chair and asked, “What’s up?”
“Mr. President, it seems to me we’ve done a pretty good job of making Pittsburgh useless to the damnyankees,” Forrest said. “We’ve smashed it up so the steel production there’s gone straight to hell. Most of what the mills do make, the USA can’t get out of the city. Do we really need to hold the ground?”
“Damn straight we do,” Jake said without even a heartbeat’s hesitation. “We need to show those bastards we can beat ’em anywhere we please. And besides, the second we ease up, that town’ll come back to life like a monster in a horror flick. You know it as well as I do, too.”
Forrest looked unhappy. “Sir, what I know is, the damnyankees are chewing up men and barrels and airplanes we can’t afford to lose. They’ve got more people than we do, dammit, and that’s what they’re using. Between us, we and the Yankees’ve knocked Pittsburgh cockeyed. They squat in the ruins and potshoot us.”
“We’ll lick ’em,” Jake declared. “That’s why every infantryman’s got an automatic weapon. Put enough lead in the air and the other guys fall over dead.”
“Sir, it’s not that simple,” Nathan Bedford Forrest III said. “Fighting like that, there are no good targets. They make us come to them, and then they make us pay for coming. We’ve got crack regiments knocked down to the size of a couple of companies. Units just aren’t the same when you have to rebuild ’em after losses like that. It’s the same way with barrels. They pick a spot, they wait, and then they shoot first. Their new models aren’t as good as ours, but getting the first shot off counts for a hell of a lot, especially at short range. We’re losing barrels as fast as we can build ’em. And we’re losing veteran crews, too. That just isn’t good terrain for armor to attack in.”
“Whatever we’re losing, they’re losing worse,” Jake said.
Forrest nodded, which didn’t mean he agreed. “Yes, sir. They are,” he said. “But they can afford it better. This is how we got in trouble in the last war.”
He hadn’t been old enough to fight in the last war. Jake had been in it from first day to last. That a pup should have the nerve to tell him what had happened and what hadn’t… “We are going to take Pittsburgh,” Featherston said in a voice like iron. “We are. We’ll take it, and we’ll hold it, and if the damnyankees want it back they’ll have to kiss our ass. That’s the way it’s gonna be, General. Have you got it?”
“Yes, sir.” Nathan Bedford Forrest III got to his feet. He stood at stiff attention. He saluted with machinelike precision. He did a smart about-turn and marched out of the President’s office. He didn’t slam the door. He closed it silently, which was even more sarcastic.
“I haven’t convinced that man,” Jake muttered. But Forrest would follow orders when he got them. That was what soldiers were for. And Pittsburgh would fall. And when it did, the United States would have to make peace. They couldn’t very well fight a war if they didn’t have anything to fight with, could they?
Sometimes the fellows in the fancy uniforms started flabbling over nothing. Forrest hadn’t been one to do that, but he was doing it now. Jake had no doubts. He hardly ever had doubts. That was why he’d got where he was, why the Freedom Party had got where it was. People with doubts stopped before they ought to. If you just kept going, you’d get there. And he was going to get Pittsburgh.
Lulu came in. “Mr. President, Mr. Goldman is here to see you. He says it’s urgent.”
“Well, then, I’d better find out what he wants, eh?” Jake wondered what had gone wrong. Something must have, or Saul wouldn’t come to his office uninvited.
The director of communications gave him the news in three bald words: “Another people bombing.”
“Son of a bitch!” Jake said. “Where? How bad?”
“Jackson, Mississippi, sir,” Goldman answered. “A waiter at a restaurant there last night. It was crowded-some kind of ladies’ club function. Eleven known dead, at least forty hurt.”
“Plus the nigger, of course,” Featherston said.
“Yes, sir. Plus him. Two other waiters were also injured.” Goldman paused. “How do you want to treat this, Mr. President? I hate to say it, but keeping quiet about what the Mormons are doing in the USA hasn’t worked.”
Jake knew why he hated to say it: saying it meant saying Jake Featherston was wrong. But Goldman had said it, and Jake couldn’t very well claim not talking about people bombs had kept them from scarring the CSA. He made a discontented noise down deep in his throat. He wanted to say exactly that. But he had to deal with the truth, no matter how little he liked it.
He thought for a few seconds, then nodded to himself. “All right. Here’s how we’ll play it. You can splash this one all over the papers, Saul. A ladies’ club, you say? Make it an atrocity story to end all atrocity stories, then. Nigger murders Confederate white women! That’ll make people’s blood boil. And you can let folks know all the coons’ll pay for what that one bastard went and did.”
Goldman didn’t always show everything he thought. By the way he brightened now, that was what he’d wanted to hear, and he’d wanted very much to hear it. “Yes, sir, Mr. President!” he said, enthusiasm bubbling in his voice. “That sounds like just the right line to take. I’ll handle everything. Don’t you worry about it.”
“I don’t,” Jake said simply. “If I worried about the way you did your job, Saul, somebody else would be doing it, and you can take that to the bank.”
“Uh, yes, sir,” Goldman said. Jake didn’t want him scared, so he made himself smile. That did the trick. Goldman got to his feet and said, “I’ll get right on it. If you’ll excuse me…?”
“Go on, go on,” Featherston said indulgently. The director of communications hurried away. Jake got on the telephone. “Ferd?… You heard about the shit that happened in Jackson?… Yeah, Saul told me just now. Eleven dead plus the nigger! Jesus Christ!.. How fast can you get the Party mobilized to help the cops and soldiers?… That quick? Good!.. By this time Thursday, then, I don’t want one nigger left in Jackson-not one, you hear me? And when they get where they’re going, I don’t want ’em hanging around, either… You see to it, that’s all. ’Bye.” He hung up-he slammed down the telephone, as a matter of fact.
He wasted a few seconds swearing at the Mormons. Those damned fanatics had come up with a weapon other fanatics could use. Mississippi and Alabama had been in revolt since he took office, and they hadn’t been what anybody would call calm even before that. Too damn many coons, that was all there was to it. Well, he aimed to thin ’em out. And what he aimed at, he got.
He wondered whom Lulu would announce when she came in again. Instead of announcing anybody, she asked, “When was the last time you ate something, Mr. President?”
“Why-” Before Jake could finish talking, his stomach let out a rumble you could hear across the room. “Been a while, I guess,” he said sheepishly.