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.”