"Would I? Would we?" Morrell pursed his lips. "Probably. It's too good a move-and too obvious-to ignore."
"No further questions," Altrock said. One had done him enough damage.
"Anything on redirect?" the chief judge asked Potter's lawyer, who shook his head. The judge nodded to Morrell. "You are dismissed, General. We appreciate your testimony."
Clarence Potter spoke for the first time: "If I may say so, I appreciate it very much." His own accent might have inspired him to dress up Yankee-sounding Confederates in U.S. uniforms.
"I don't love you, General, but if they hang you it should be for something you did and we didn't." Morrell got to his feet. He nodded to the judges and left the courtroom.
John Abell wasn't waiting there any more. Morrell hadn't expected him to hang around. The driver was. "Where to, sir?" he said. "Wherever you need to go, I'll take you there."
"Back to the train station, quick, before somebody else here decides he needs me," Morrell answered. "By God, I am going to see my wife and daughter."
The driver grinned. "I know how you feel, sir. Let's go."
Two and a half hours later, Morrell was on a train bound for Kansas City. He traveled through the stretches of western Pennsylvania, Ohio, and eastern Indiana that had seen the hardest fighting inside the USA. Looking out the window at the devastation was like falling back in time. Down in the occupied Confederacy, hardly anyone looked out of train windows. What people saw there was too likely to hurt. The United States was luckier, but this one stretch of terrain had suffered as much as any farther south.
Morrell breathed easier when he neared Indianapolis. C.S. bombers had hit the city, but nowhere near as hard as they'd pummeled Washington and Baltimore and Philadelphia. And the only soldiers in butternut who'd made it to Indianapolis went into the POW camps outside of town. Some of them still languished there. Most had gone home by now. Some of the ones who had would make U.S. authorities sorry they'd ever turned them loose. Morrell was as sure of that as he was of the scars on his thigh and shoulder, but what the hell could you do?
St. Louis had taken a beating, and Missouri went up in flames whenever war broke out. Even three generations after the War of Secession, it had some stubborn Confederate sympathizers. Lines were fluid in the West, too; C.S. raiders had little trouble sneaking up from Arkansas and raising hell.
Kansas City and Leavenworth, as well as the fort nearby, had also suffered. But, as the war went on, the Confederates found troubles of their own closer to home. Morrell knew Agnes and Mildred had come through without a scratch. To him, selfishly, that was all that mattered.
They were waiting for him when he got off the train. Agnes was about his age, but her black hair showed not a streak of gray. Maybe that was a miracle; more likely it was dye. Morrell didn't care either way. His wife looked damn good to him, and she had ever since they met at a dance right here in town.
He was amazed at how shapely Mildred had got. She was nineteen now, but the years had gone by in a blur for him. He eyed Agnes in mock severity. "You've been feeding her again," he said sternly. "Didn't I warn you about that? See what happens?"
"I'm sorry, Irv." Agnes sounded as contrite as he was angry-which is to say, not very.
"Daddy!" Mildred was just plain indignant.
He gave her a kiss. "It's good to see you, sweetheart. You've grown up as pretty as your mother." That he meant. Mildred was certainly better off with Agnes' looks than with his own long-faced, long-jawed countenance. He wasn't an ugly man, but a woman with features as harsh as his wouldn't have been lucky.
"How long can you stay?" Agnes asked.
"They promised me a couple of weeks, but you know what Army promises are worth," Morrell answered. The rueful twist to his wife's mouth said she knew much too well. He went on, "We'll just have to make the most of the time, however long it turns out to be."
"Of course we will." Agnes looked at Mildred. "That's good advice any old time." She had her own bitter experience; she'd lost her first husband in the early days of the Great War.
Mildred wasn't impressed. With a toss of the head, she said, "I thought I graduated from high school."
Morrell started to give her a swat on the behind for sass, but checked himself. She was too big these days for a man to spank. He contented himself with asking, "Have you been giving your mother lip all the time I've been gone?"
"Every single minute," Mildred answered proudly. That took the wind out of his sails.
"Let's go home," Agnes said. "We have a lot of catching up to do." She winked at Morrell. He grinned. He looked forward to trying to catch up, anyhow.
All over the country-and all over the wreck of the CSA, too-survivors were trying to catch up with their families and trying to make them grow. Some reunions would be smooth, some anything but. Morrell put one arm around his wife, the other around his daughter. They walked off the platform that way. So far, so good, he thought.
XVIII
Clarence Potter took his place in the Yankee courtroom. The Yankee kangaroo courtroom, he feared it was. The judges had let his lawyer question witnesses and even bring in Irving Morrell, but how much difference would any of that make? He'd superbombed the town where they were trying him. Evidence? Who gave a damn about evidence? If they felt like convicting him, they bloody well would.
He nodded to Major Stachiewicz, who'd defended him. "You did what you could. I appreciate it."
"I didn't do it for you, exactly. I did it for duty," the damnyankee said.
"I understand that. I don't want to marry you, either. But you made an honest effort, and I want you to know I know it," Potter said.
"All rise!" said the warrant officer who doubled as bailiff and recording secretary.
Everyone in the courtroom got to his feet as the judges came in. As soon as the judges sat down, Brigadier General Stephens said, "Be seated." Potter sat. He didn't want to let the enemy know he was nervous. In the rows of seats in the spectators' gallery behind him, reporters poised pens above notebooks.
Verdict day today.
The chief judge fixed him with an unfriendly stare. "The defendant will please rise."
"Yes, Your honor." Potter stood at attention.
"Without a doubt, General Potter, you caused greater loss of life than any man before you in the history of the North American continent," General Stephens said. That was cleverly phrased. It ignored the hell the USA's German allies unleashed on Petrograd earlier, and it also ignored the hell the United States visited on Newport News and Charleston. All the same, it remained technically true.
"Also without a doubt," Stephens continued, "you were able to do what you did thanks to a ruse of war, one frowned on by the Geneva Convention. Carrying on the fight in the uniform of the foe skates close to the edge of the laws of war."
He looked as if his stomach pained him. "However…" He paused to pour himself a glass of water and sip from it, as if to wash the taste of the word from his mouth. Then he had to say it again: "However…" Another long pause. "It has also been demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt that U.S. forces utilized the identical ruse of war. Executing a man on the other side for something we also did ourselves strikes the court as unjust, however much we might wish it did not. This being so, we find you not guilty of violating the laws of war in bringing your superbomb to Philadelphia."
Hubbub in the courtroom as reporters exclaimed. Some rushed out to file their stories. No one paid any attention to the chief judge's gavel. Through the chaos, Potter said, "May I tell you something, sir?"
"Go ahead." No, Brigadier General Stephens was not a happy man. And, over at the prosecutor's table, Lieutenant Colonel Altrock looked as if he'd just found half a worm in his apple.