“This one’s a long way from lost. We may get Pittsburgh yet.” Part of Potter wanted to leap at any chance to cast down Jake Featherston. That made him even more careful about what he said than he would have been otherwise. He didn’t think Forrest was trying to entrap him-the other officer sounded too upset for that-but he wasn’t a hundred percent sure. When three men plot, one is a fool and two are government spies. What about two men?
I’m already a spy, Potter thought. He laughed inside, though he held his face straight. But he was a spy for the Confederate States. He wasn’t a spy for Jake Featherston and the Freedom Party, and he was damned if he’d turn into one. And if he did ever turn into such a debased creature, he doubtless would be damned.
“So we may.” Forrest spoke cautiously, too. “But how likely do you think that is, what with the way things look now?”
“I don’t know,” Potter said: the exact and literal truth. He thought about Henderson FitzBelmont over at Washington University. He thought about 235 and 238, and the trouble FitzBelmont and his fellow physicists were having in separating the one from the other. He had no idea whether Forrest knew about FitzBelmont’s project. He couldn’t ask, either, for fear the chief of the General Staff didn’t.
If the physicists could build their bomb, the CSA would win the war. Drop one of those on Pittsburgh, and it wouldn’t cause problems anymore. Drop one on Philadelphia, one on New York City, one on Boston, one on Pontiac… That would knock the United States flat and kick them in the teeth while they were down.
Then Potter thought about the U.S. project in Washington State. He thought about bombs blowing Richmond and Atlanta and Louisville and Birmingham and New Orleans and Dallas off the map. It was a race, a race into the unknown. Whoever first played Prometheus and stole fire from the gods would drop that fire on his enemies’ heads.
He tried to imagine fighting a war where both sides had bombs like that. His mind recoiled like a horse shying at a snake. That wouldn’t be submachine guns at two paces. It would be flamethrowers at two paces.
And what sort of weapons would you use in the war after that one? To his surprise, the answer formed almost as soon as the question did.
You would fight that next war with rocks.
“We’re on the tiger’s back right now, and we’ve got hold of his ears,” he said, not knowing and not much caring whether he was talking about Featherston or about the war. “If you tell me that’s not where we want to be, I won’t argue with you. But if you say we’d do better letting go and jumping off, I have to say I think you’re out of your mind-sir. Do you want Don Partridge trying to run things?” He supposed he’d been talking about Jake after all.
Nathan Bedford Forrest III hissed like a wounded snake himself. “Damn you, Potter, you don’t fight fair.”
“I didn’t know that was part of the requirement,” Potter said. “I thought the only thing you had to do was win.”
“That’s it,” Forrest agreed. “And that’s what I wanted to ask you. Do you think we can win the war with Jake Featherston in charge of things?”
“Do you think we can win without him?” Potter asked in return. “Do you think we can even get out of the war without him?” He didn’t ask about getting out of the war with Featherston still in the Gray House. That wouldn’t happen. Period. Exclamation point, even.
Forrest sat on the bench with a faraway look in his eyes. Potter suspected his own face bore a similar expression. How would the Confederate States do if they had to fight on without that pillar of fire at their heart? No, he didn’t love Featherston-far from it. He did, reluctantly, respect him.
Slowly, the chief of the General Staff got to his feet. “Maybe we’ll talk about this another time,” he said. “I hope we don’t, but maybe we will.” He tipped his hat and walked away.
A starling perched in a shattered tree not far from where Potter sat. It chirped metallically. The shimmering summer gloss was off its feathers; it wore a duller autumn plumage. Potter swore under his breath. The gloss was off the war, too. He thought of one question he hadn’t asked himself before. Could the CSA win even with Jake Featherston at the helm?
Potter had thought so when the barrels charged from the Ohio up to Lake Erie. He hadn’t believed he was guilty of the old Confederate error of underestimating how tough the damnyankees were. He hadn’t believed it, but evidently he was, because the United States refused to fold up. Would even the fall of Pittsburgh knock them out of the fight? Again, he just didn’t know.
And did Nathan Bedford Forrest III know what he was talking about? Was the President of the Confederate States of America nuttier than a five-dollar fruitcake? Potter shook his head. That was the wrong question. If Featherston was nuttier than a five-dollar fruitcake, what about it? Being out of your tree didn’t necessarily disqualify you from holding office. Some people said only a crazy man would want to be President of the CSA. Potter wasn’t one of them, but he could see their point.
Was Featherston crazy enough to be unfit to lead during wartime? That was what it came down to. Potter would have loved to believe it. He wouldn’t have been sorry for an excuse to throw Jake Featherston out on his ear-no, to kill him, because he wouldn’t go without a fight, and he’d fight hard. He always did. Forrest said he’d seemed crazy when he refused to pull back from Pittsburgh.
Maybe the chief of the General Staff was right. But Potter wasn’t ready to upset the Confederate applecart on a maybe. Featherston was at least as likely to be crazy like a fox. He’d proved that time and again. Taking Pittsburgh might prove it once more.
“Better to wait,” Potter murmured. Acting was irrevocable, and he didn’t think the time ripe. If going into Pittsburgh proved a fiasco… Well, so what? Did that mean Featherston had gone around the bend, or just that he’d made a mistake?
Did it matter? If Pittsburgh proved a fiasco, the Confederate States were in trouble either way. Somebody would have to take the blame. Who else but Jake Featherston then?
Nodding to himself, Potter got to his feet with one more thing to worry about. If Pittsburgh proved a fiasco, who took the blame might not matter, either.
To say Jefferson Pinkard was not a happy man failed to use the full power of language. Somebody in Richmond got a brainstorm. Who got to make that brainstorm real? Pinkard did. Some damnfool Negro in Jackson blew himself up, and a bunch of white women with him? Yeah, all right, he was a dirty, stinking son of a bitch. But get rid of all the Negroes in Jackson on account of him? At once? That was lunacy. That was also what Jeff had orders to do.
When the telegram came in, he telephoned Ferdinand Koenig and asked, “How many niggers are we talking about here?”
“Hell, I don’t know off the top of my head,” the Attorney General answered, which did not fill Jeff with confidence. Koenig said, “I’ll get back to you this afternoon. You want to know what you’re getting into, do you?”
“You might say so,” Pinkard said tightly. “Yeah, you just might.”
Ferdinand Koenig was as good as his word. Just after Jeff’s lunch, he got another telegram. TWENTY-FIVE OR THIRTY THOUSAND. F.K., it said. What Pinkard said when he saw that had an f and a k in it, too, with a couple of other letters in between. He said several other things right afterwards, most of them even hotter than what he’d started with.
Once his spleen was well and truly vented-once it had blown off about three counties’ worth of steam-he called Vern Green into his office and gave the guard chief the news. “Well, Jesus Christ!” Green said. “We got to get rid o’ these niggers? We don’t just try and stuff ’em on in here?”