“Yes, sir, it is. The United States think so, too,” FitzBelmont said, which made Jake wince. The physicist went on, “If the Yankees hit us once in Lexington, aren’t they likely to do it again? We may take more damage the next time around.”
“I’ve already pulled four antiaircraft batteries away from Richmond and sent ’em west,” Jake said. “I’ve pulled two wings of night fighters, too. We’ll get hit harder here, but we can live with that. We can’t live without you. I didn’t want to do anything special about Lexington before. If we had all kinds of defenses around a no-account little college town, the United States’d be bound to wonder why. Well, now the damnyankees know why, so we’ll do everything we can to hold ’em back.”
“Thank you, Mr. President.” FitzBelmont hesitated, then asked his question: “What do you think the odds are?”
“Not as good as I wish they were.” Featherston wanted to lie, but feared the USA would show he was lying in short order. “We can make hitting Lexington expensive for them. I know that for a fact. I can’t promise we’ll keep everything off you. How much time would you lose if you packed up and went somewhere else?”
“A good deal. Several weeks, anyhow-maybe months.” Henderson V. FitzBelmont eyed the map to which Jake had pointed. “Besides, where would we go?”
That was a much better question than the President wished it were. With airstrips in southern Tennessee, the United States could strike most of the Confederate heartland. “Miami? Houston? Habana? Those look like about your three best choices.”
By the expression on FitzBelmont’s face, he liked none of them. Neither did Jake Featherston. But he didn’t like leaving the facility where it was, either. The devil and the deep blue sea, he thought. Yet the devil lurked in the deep blue sea. U.S. submersibles prowled the Confederate coast. If they sank a ship with the uranium project aboard, they sank the CSA, too.
“How much of your work can you move underground?” he asked. “That’ll give the damnyankees a harder time, anyhow.”
“It will also involve delay.” But Professor FitzBelmont looked thoughtful. “With reinforced concrete above it, perhaps…”
“You need concrete? I’ll give you concrete till it’s coming out your ass,” Jake said. “And we’ll give the Yankees something new to think about pretty soon, too.”
“May I ask what?” The professor was starting to get the hang of security.
Normally, Jake wouldn’t have said boo, but he needed something to buck up FitzBelmont’s spirits-and his own. He made the rules. He could break them. “Yeah,” he said. “We’ve got us a project down in Huntsville, too. Pretty soon-any day now, matter of fact-we’ll be able to fire rockets with a ton of TNT in the nose a couple of hundred miles into Yankeeland. Let’s see ’em try and stop those, by God!”
“That would help. I can see as much. How accurate are they?”
“They can hit a city. They can’t hit a city block.” Jake stabbed a finger out at Professor FitzBelmont. “How heavy will your uranium bomb be? Put one of those in a rocket and it’d be the perfect weapon, near enough.”
“Calculations are still theoretical. The best estimate is on the close order of ten tons,” FitzBelmont answered.
“Shit!” Jake said feelingly. “Need bigger rockets or smaller bombs. Which do you reckon I could get first?”
“Since we don’t have any bomb at all yet, getting larger rockets would seem easier,” the professor said.
“Makes sense,” the President of the CSA agreed. “I’ll tell the boys in Huntsville to get on it, and pronto. Damnyankees haven’t sniffed them out yet, so they can work without having the sky fall on ’em.” He muttered under his breath. “Only a matter of time, probably. Spies everywhere. Everywhere, I tell you.” He made himself brighten. It wasn’t easy. “Wouldn’t that be something, though? A rocket big enough to throw a uranium bomb all the way to San Francisco and Seattle?”
“That would be…remarkable,” FitzBelmont said. “Of course, a just peace would be even better.”
“I offered the United States a just peace two years ago,” Featherston said angrily. His definition of just boiled down to just what I want. “They wouldn’t take it, the bastards. I figured we’d better grind it out of ’em, then, on account of they sure aimed to grind it out of us.”
Henderson V. FitzBelmont started to say something. It probably would have been something like, Look how things are now. Would they be worse if you’d made a softer proposal? Had he said any such thing, Jake would have blown up in his face. The physicist wasn’t so good with people, but he saw that, all right.
“We are going to win this sucker. Win it, you hear?” Jake growled. “We are going to lick the Yankees right out of their boots. Lick ’em, by God. Lick ’em so they stay licked, so we never have to worry about ’em again. It will happen, and you’ll help make it happen. That’s how it’s gonna be. Got it?”
FitzBelmont said the only thing anybody with an ounce of sense would have said: “Yes, Mr. President.”
Maybe he meant it. Maybe he didn’t. But he said it, and he would produce for Jake Featherston and for the Confederate States of America. He would produce, and the Confederate states would win. Jake looked at the unfortunate situation map, then deliberately turned away from the unfortunate situation it portrayed. No matter what was going on in northern Georgia, the Confederate States would win.
The house Jefferson Pinkard rented in Humble, Texas, was one of the finest two or three in town. Edith and Willie and Frank liked it fine. Of course, they would have liked a tent in the woods outside of Humble almost as well. Anything that got them away from the Yankee air raids on Snyder would have looked like paradise on earth to them. Getting away from Snyder looked pretty damn good to Jeff, too.
And Camp Humble looked even better. Ferd Koenig had wanted to call it something fancy: Camp Devastation, or maybe Camp Destruction. Jeff talked him out of it. “Look,” he said in a long, angry telephone call, “any nigger who hears he’s goin’ to Camp Destruction, he’ll know he’s got nothin’ to lose. He’ll be more dangerous than a goddamn rattlesnake. There’s such a thing as asking for trouble, and giving a camp a name like that-well, it’s the picture in the book.”
He got his way. The Attorney General grumbled and harumphed, but the Attorney General was way the hell off in Richmond. He wouldn’t have to live with the consequences of a name like that. No-he’d just blame Jeff for the riots and dead guards that sprang from it.
Camp Humble, now…What could sound more harmless? And what could be more deadly? This camp was done right. Everything Jeff had learned the hard way at Camp Determination went into Camp Humble from the start. The bathhouses had a bigger capacity than his old ones. He had more trucks to help them along. And he had a big, fancy crematorium set up right at the edge of the camp. No more mass graves, no, sir. When Camp Humble reduced its Negro population, it would reduce the coons right down to nothing.
Leaves no evidence behind, he thought. He couldn’t do anything about the mass graves outside of Snyder. Now that Camp Determination was empty and blown to hell and gone, he doubted that the Confederates would bother trying to hold on to Snyder and the territory nearby. They needed soldiers even more farther east. Those graves handed the United States a propaganda victory on a silver platter.
Well, too bad. They could yell all they wanted. It wouldn’t make a dime’s worth of difference in who won the war.
He sighed. Back when he ran up Camp Determination, he’d figured it was in a damn good spot. So had everybody set above him in the CSA. That only went to show people weren’t always as smart as they thought they were. Yes, Snyder, Texas, was out at the ass end of the Confederacy. The damnyankees could reach it anyhow. The older, smaller camps farther east were still going great guns.