"Well, she doesn't do anything for me, either, but she worships the ground you walk on," Potter said. "God knows why."
"Fuck you, too," Featherston said without rancor. "She's a good gal. I don't want to make her unhappy or anything, so she better not hear that from you."
"She won't. I don't play those kinds of games," Potter said, and Jake decided to believe him. The Intelligence officer wasn't usually nasty in any petty way. After a moment, Potter went on, "You know, you're right-you are nice to Lulu. You go out of your way to be nice to Lulu. How come you don't do that with anybody else?"
There was a question Jake had never asked himself. Now he did, but he only shrugged. "Damned if I know, Potter. It's just how things worked out, that's all. I like Lulu. Rest of the world's full of assholes."
"I wish I could tell you you were wrong," Potter said. Airplanes droned by overhead-Yankee airplanes. They were going to hit something farther north. Columbia was already in U.S. hands, so they could drop their load on North Carolina and then land in Virginia. With a sigh, Potter asked, "How are we going to make it out West? Do you think we can get an Alligator to land anywhere near here? Do you think it could fly across Georgia and Alabama without getting shot down?"
"Wouldn't bet on it," Jake answered mournfully. "What I was thinking was, if we put on civvies and make like we're a bunch of guys who gave up, we can say we're going home and sneak across what the damnyankees are holding, and they won't be any wiser. How do you like it?"
Potter pursed his lips. "If we can't get an Alligator, maybe. If we can, I believe I'd sooner fly at night and take the chance of getting blown out of the sky."
Jake scowled at him. Potter looked back unperturbed, as if to say, Well, you asked me. He was one of the few men who never sugarcoated their opinions around the President of the CSA. Reluctantly, Featherston respected him for that. And he was too likely to be right, damn him. "I'll see what we can come up with," the President said.
When his shrunken entourage drove into Spartanburg, South Carolina, he found the colonel in charge of the town's defenses lost in gloom. "Damnyankees are on the way, and to hell with me if I know how to stop 'em," the officer said.
"Do your best," Jake answered. "Now let me get on the horn to Charlotte." That was the closest place where he thought he was likely to find a transport. And he did. And, after some choice bad language, he persuaded the authorities there to fly it down to Spartanburg.
"If it gets shot down-" some officious fool in Charlotte said.
"If it doesn't get here, you'll get shot down." Jake wasn't sure he could bring off the threat. But the jerk up in Charlotte couldn't be sure he couldn't.
The Alligator landed late in the afternoon. Ground crew personnel swarmed out with camouflage nets to make it as invisible as they could. "Do we really want to do this?" Ferd Koenig asked.
"If you don't, then stay here," Featherston answered. "Say hello to the U.S. soldiers when they catch you." The Attorney General bit his lip. He got on the airplane with everybody else.
"Don't know exactly how we'll land if we have to do it in the dark," the pilot said.
"You'll work something out," Jake told him.
"Well, I sure as hell hope so." But the pilot didn't sound too worried. "One thing-if I think this is crazy, chances are the damnyankees will, too. Maybe we'll surprise 'em so much, we'll get through 'em just like shit through a goose."
"Now you're talking. You take off in the wee small hours," Jake said. "Fly low-stay under the Y-ranging if you can. Goddammit, we aren't licked yet. If we can just make the enemy see that occupying our country is more expensive than it's worth, we'll get their soldiers out of here and we'll get a peace we can live with. May take a while, but we'll do it."
He believed every word of it. He'd been fighting his whole life. He didn't know anything else. If he had to lead guerrillas out of the hills for the next twenty years, he was ready to do it. After so many fights, what was one more? Nothing to faze him-that was for sure.
After they got airborne, the pilot asked, "Want me to put on my wing lights?"
"Yeah, do it," Jake answered. "If the Yankees see 'em, they'll reckon we're one of theirs. I hope like hell they will, anyway."
"Me, too," the pilot said with feeling, but he flicked the switch. The red and green lights went on.
The Alligator droned south and west-more nearly south than west at first, because neither the pilot nor Jake wanted to come too close to Atlanta. If U.S. forces would be especially alert anywhere, they both figured that was the place.
Looking out of one of the transport's small side windows, Jake had no trouble figuring out when they passed from C.S.-to U.S.-held territory. The blackout in the occupied lands was a lot less stringent. The Yankees didn't expect Confederate bombers overhead, damn them. And the worst part was, the Yankees had every right not to expect them. The Confederacy didn't have many bombers left, and mostly used the ones it did have in close support of its surviving armies.
Turbulence made the Alligator bounce. Somebody gulped, loudly. "Use the airsick bag!" three people shouted at the same time. The gulper did. It helped-some.
And then turbulence wasn't the only thing bouncing the Alligator. Shells started bursting all around the airplane. Suddenly, the road through the air might have been full of potholes-big, deep ones. A major general who wasn't wearing a seat belt went sprawling.
"Get us the fuck out of here!" Jake yelled. If Lulu sniffed or squawked, he didn't hear her.
Engines roaring, the transport dove for the deck. The antiaircraft guns pursued. Shrapnel clattered into the wings and tore through the fuselage. Somebody in there shrieked, which meant jagged metal tore through a person, too.
"We're losing fuel!" the pilot shouted. "Lots of it!"
"Can we go on?" Jake had to bellow at the top of his lungs to make himself heard.
"Not a chance in church," the pilot answered. "We'd never get there."
"Can you land the son of a bitch?"
"If I can't, we're all dead," the man answered. Jake remembered that he hadn't been thrilled about landing at night even in Confederate-held territory. How much less enthusiastic would he be about a nighttime emergency landing on enemy soil? I told him to put on the wing lights, Jake thought. Did it matter? Too goddamn late to worry about it now.
He hated having his fate in somebody else's hands. If he was going out, he saw himself trading bullets with the damnyankees and nailing plenty of them before they finally got him. This way…Dammit, I'm a hero. The script isn't supposed to work like this.
"Brace yourselves!" the pilot shouted. "Belts on, everybody! I'm putting it down. I think that's a field up ahead there-hope like hell it is, anyway. Anybody gets out, let Beckie know I love her."
One of the engines died just before the Alligator met the ground-that was one hell of a leak, all right. The transport was built to take it and built to land on rough airstrips-but coming down in a tobacco field with no landing lights was more than anybody could reasonably expect.
But it got down. It landed hard, hard enough to make Jake bite the devil out of his tongue. One tire blew. The Alligator slewed sideways. A wingtip dug into the ground. The transport tried to flip over. The wing broke off instead. The fire started then.
"Out!" the pilot screamed. "Out now!" The airplane hadn't stopped moving, but nobody argued with him. Jake was the second man out the door. He had to jump down to the ground, and turned an ankle when he hit. Swearing savagely, he limped away.
"Fuck!" he said in amazement. "I'm alive!"
C larence Potter wondered how many nasty ways he could almost die. This blaze was a lot smaller than the radioactive fire he'd touched off in Philadelphia, but it was plenty big enough to give a man an awful fore-taste of hell before it finally killed him. To the poor chump roasting, how could any fire be bigger than that?