"Only Featherston left," said the man in the next bed.
"What do we do when we catch him?" somebody asked.
"String him up!" The answer came from Pound and several other wounded soldiers at the same time. It also came from the nurse. She suggested stringing the President of the CSA up by some highly sensitive parts of his anatomy. Coming from most women, that would have shocked Pound. He'd seen that nurses had mouths at least as raunchy as those of soldiers. It made sense: nurses saw plenty of horrors, too.
"My God," someone else said. "The war really is just about over."
Nobody made any snide comments about that. Maybe the other men in the ward had as much trouble taking it in as Michael Pound did. The war had consumed his whole being for the past three years-and before that, when he'd been down in Houston before it returned to the CSA, he might as well have been at war.
He wondered what he'd do when peace finally broke out. Would the Army want to keep a first lieutenant with gray hair? The service needed some grizzled noncoms; they tempered junior officers' puppyish enthusiasm. But he'd never be anything more than a junior officer himself, and he was much too goddamn old for the role.
If they turned him loose, if they patted him on the back and said, Well done-now we'll go use up somebody else, what the hell would he do then? He had no idea. The thought was frightening enough. The Army had been his life since he was eighteen years old.
They couldn't just throw him out…could they?
"Shit," another burned man said. "This fuckin' war's never gonna be over-excuse my French, miss."
"I've heard the words before," the nurse said dryly.
The soldiers laughed. The one who'd been talking went on, "It won't be. Honest to God, it won't. Maybe the Confederate government finally surrenders, yeah, but we'll stay on occupation duty down here forever. Lousy bushwhackers and diehards won't start singing 'The Star-Spangled Banner' tomorrow, and you can take that to the bank. We have grandchildren, they'll be down here shooting at waddayacallems-rebels."
Three or four guys groaned, probably because they thought the burned man was likely to be right. Michael Pound felt like cheering, for exactly the same reason. He didn't-everybody else would have thought he was nuts. But he felt like it. If the war, or something a lot like the war, went on and on, the Army wouldn't have any excuse to throw him out on his ear.
Well, it wouldn't have any excuse except maybe that he'd made himself too obnoxious for the brass to stand. Not without pride, he figured he was capable of that.
"Once we get done licking the Confederates, do we go after the Japs next?" asked the guy in the next bed.
If the General Staff of the burn ward of the military hospital outside Chattanooga had their way, the answer to that one was no. Pound wouldn't have minded seeing the Sandwich Islands, but not as a way station to a battle somewhere even farther off in the Pacific. The Japs had their sphere, and the United States had theirs, and as long as neither side poached on the other that was fine with him.
He did say, "I bet they're working overtime in Tokyo, trying to figure out how to build a superbomb."
"Wouldn't you be?" said the soldier next to him.
"You bet I would," Pound answered. "As long as we've got it and they don't, it's a club we can use to beat them over the head. I bet the Tsar's telling all his scientists they're heading for Siberia if they don't make one PDQ, too. If the Germans have one and the Russians don't, they're in big trouble."
He wondered whether Austria-Hungary would try to make one. Berlin was the senior partner there, and had been since the early days of the Great War. Germany had saved Austria-Hungary's bacon against the Russians then, and again this time around. But Vienna had some clever scientists, too. You never could tell, Pound decided with profound unoriginality.
"Before long, everybody and his mother-in-law's going to have those…miserable things." A soldier had mercy on the nurse's none-too-delicate ears. "How do we keep from blowing each other to kingdom come?"
That was a good question. It was probably the question on the minds of the striped-pants set these days. If the diplomats came up with a halfway decent answer, they would earn their salaries and then some.
Michael Pound thought about the CSA's rockets. If you could load superbombs onto bigger, better ones, you could blow up anybody you didn't like, even if he didn't live next door. Wouldn't that be fun?
Could you make a rocket shoot down another rocket? Airplanes shot down airplanes…some of the time, anyhow. Why shouldn't rockets shoot down rockets…some of the time, anyhow? Would that be enough? Pound had no idea, which left him in the same leaky boat as everybody else in the world.
XIII
J ake Featherston felt trapped. The skies over North Carolina had been lousy with damnyankee fighter-bombers coming down from the north. Now that he'd crossed into South Carolina, the skies were lousy with damnyankee fighter-bombers coming up from the south. He and the handful of loyalists who clung to him through thick and thin moved by night and lay up by day, like any hunted animals.
Only chunks of the Confederate States still answered to the Confederate government: pieces of Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina; the part of Cuba that wasn't in revolt; most of Florida; most of Sonora and Chihuahua (which, cut off by the goddamn treasonous Republic of Texas, might as well have been on the far side of the moon); and a core of Mississippi, Louisiana, and most of Arkansas. If the war would go on, if the war could go on, it would have to go on there.
One thing wrong: Jake hadn't the faintest idea how to reach his alleged redoubt. "What are we going to do?" he demanded of Clarence Potter. "Jesus H. Christ, what can we do? They're squeezing us tighter every day, the bastards."
"O God! I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams," Potter answered.
"What the hell is that?" Jake said.
"Shakespeare. Hamlet."
"Hot damn! I don't need to go back to school now, thank you kindly." Featherston glared at the longtime foe who'd done him so much good. "What are you doing here, anyway? Why don't you give yourself up to the USA? You can tell 'em you've hated my guts since dirt."
"If things were different, I might," Potter said calmly. "But I'm the guy who blew up Philadelphia, remember. And I did it wearing a Yankee uniform, too."
"I'm not likely to forget." Jake's laugh was a hoarse, harsh bark. "You got out again, too, in spite of everything. I bet those sons of bitches are shitting rivets on account of it."
"Bad security," Potter said. "If we had another superbomb, we could get it up there."
That made Featherston cuss. They would have another bomb in a few months-if the United States didn't overrun Lexington first, which seemed unlikely. Henderson FitzBelmont had moved heaven and earth to make one superbomb. Now, when the CSA needed lots of them, he got constipated. You couldn't count on anybody-except yourself. Always yourself.
"But now the United States want to kill me worse than you ever did," Potter went on. "And they've got an excuse, because I wore their uniform. So in case they find out who I am, I expect I'm dead. Which means I'm all yours, Mr. President."
"All mine, huh? Then why the devil ain't you a redheaded gal with legs up to here?"
"You can't have everything, sir. You've still got Ferd Koenig along for the ride, and you've still got Lulu."
She sat in a different motorcar, parked under some trees not far away. Jake looked over in that direction to make sure she couldn't overhear before he said, "She's a wonderful woman in all kinds of ways, but not that one. I do believe I'd sooner hump me a sheep."