“Always a relief,” Roosevelt agreed. “The last thing anybody wants or needs is a secret unadmirer.”
“Er-yes.” Flora tasted the phrase. “But it’s a shame Featherston’s unadmirers here didn’t stay secret enough.”
“Well, so it is,” the Assistant Secretary of War said. “The Confederates didn’t break off the flight because they’re reading our codes. I think they put a decoy on it because one of their security people got jumpy. The good ones do, from everything I’ve heard, and Lord knows Featherston needs good ones.”
“Plenty of people on both sides of the border who want to kill him, all right,” Flora said. “Did you notice inflation is coming back to the Confederate States?”
“No.” Roosevelt was suddenly and sharply interested. After the Great War, the Confederate dollar collapsed; when things were at their worst, enjoying a beer took billions. “What do you mean? It would be wonderful if their economy went down the drain again.”
But Flora didn’t mean that, however much she wished she did. “Not what I was thinking,” she said sadly. “When the war was new, though, Featherston promised to drop three tons of bombs on our heads for every ton we landed on the CSA. Now he’s up to ten tons.”
“Oh.” Franklin Roosevelt laughed. “I’d call that deflation myself-as his spirits go down, his threats go up. He was lying then, and he’s still lying now. The Confederates weren’t that far ahead at the start of things, and they’re behind us now. We’re landing more on them than they are on us-quite a bit more, as a matter of fact.”
“Good,” Flora said, wondering how he knew. If she asked him, he’d probably tell her it was a very precise statistic he’d just made up. Odds were neither side knew exactly how much it was getting and receiving. She asked a different question instead: “How are things out West?”
“They’re doing quite well.” Roosevelt sounded enthusiastic, as he often did. “It really does look like General Dowling will take Lubbock away from the Confederates. If he does, we may proclaim the state of Houston again. That will give the people in west Texas something to flabble about-something to fight among themselves about.”
“No one-except maybe them-would be sorry about that,” Flora said. “It would also give him a base to go after Camp Determination.” The camps where the Confederates systematically got rid of their Negroes sickened her as nothing else ever did.
“Well, maybe.” Franklin Roosevelt didn’t sound so enthusiastic about that. He spelled out his reasons: “It’s farther from Lubbock to the camp than it is from the border to Lubbock, quite a bit farther. Those are the wide open spaces out there. And detaching men from more urgent things farther east may not be easy, either.”
Flora could have argued that nothing was more urgent than saving the lives of untold thousands of innocent human beings. She could have, but she knew the Assistant Secretary of War wouldn’t pay any attention if she did. He would say that wouldn’t win the war, and winning the war was the most urgent item on the agenda. She would have a devil of a time showing he was wrong, too. So, again, she took a different tack: “How are things farther west than that?”
Had Roosevelt started giving her chapter and verse about the skirmishes on the border between New Mexico and Sonora-and there’d never been more than skirmishes on that border, even though the war was heading towards its second birthday-she would have got angry. But he didn’t. “That seems to be going as well as expected, too,” he said.
“I’m glad to hear it.” Flora didn’t expect to hear anything more, not over the telephone. The project centered on Hanford, Washington, sounded like something from the pages of a pulp magazine with bugeyed monsters and scantily clad girls on the cover. In fact, though, someone had told her that those magazines had a lot of subscribers in Hanford-they were much more popular with scientists and engineers than with the general public. She hoped the Confederacy’s spymasters didn’t know that.
“I do think we’re making progress. I really do,” Roosevelt said.
“Here’s hoping.” Flora didn’t think she’d ever heard of uranium till after the war began. Now she knew there was more than one kind. If the 235 could be separated from the 238, or if the 238 could somehow make some new element altogether-it all sounded more like medieval alchemy than science-the bombs that resulted might blow whole cities off the map. With luck, those would be Confederate cities. Without luck…“Any word on how they’re doing with this on the other side of the line?”
“Well, they do seem to be trying.” The Assistant Secretary of War sounded less jaunty than was his wont.
Fear clogged Flora’s throat. If the cities blown off the map belonged to the USA, Jake Featherston would win his war in spite of the disasters the Confederates had suffered in Pennsylvania and Ohio. “What can we do about that?” she asked. “Can we do anything?”
“We won’t let them get away with it if we can possibly stop them, I promise you that,” Roosevelt said.
“Good,” Flora said, before she asked herself how good it really was. What had Roosevelt promised? To stop the CSA from building a uranium bomb? No. He’d promised to try to stop the Confederates from building one. Of course the United States would do that. Flora found one more question: “What can they do to stop us?”
“They haven’t tried anything yet,” Roosevelt said-another answer that wasn’t an answer. He went on, “They may have done some reconnaissance-we’re not sure about that. If they did, they won’t be able to do it again. We’ve tightened up since the last time we think they came around.”
“Why weren’t things tight right from the beginning?” Flora admired her own restraint. She didn’t raise her voice at all, no matter how much she felt like yelling her head off.
“Because we were asleep at the switch.” Roosevelt could be disarmingly frank. “We aren’t any more. We won’t be, either. That’s about the best I can tell you, Flora.”
“All right,” she said, and hoped it was. “I’m sure we’ll do everything we can.” She said her good-byes then. She hoped the USA bombed the Confederates’ uranium-producing plants to hell and gone. She hoped the CSA didn’t do the same to the one the United States had. Was such hope enough? The only answer that occurred to her was painfully cliched, which made it no less true. She’d have to wait and see.
III
Mail call!” That shout always made the guards at Camp Determination hurry up to see what they had. Troop Leader Hipolito Rodriguez wasn’t as good at hurrying as some of his younger, sprier comrades. He was still on the sunny side of fifty, but moved like an older man. He’d almost got electrocuted a year and a half earlier, and he’d never been the same since. He belonged to the Confederate Veterans’ Brigades: men who couldn’t hope to fight at the front, but who could still serve the CSA behind the lines.
All the men at Camp Determination, whether from the Veterans’ Brigades or not, were Freedom Party guards, with the funny ranks that accompanied Party positions. Rodriguez had three stripes on the left sleeve of his gray uniform. He thought of himself as a sergeant. He did a sergeant’s job and got a sergeant’s pay. If they wanted to call him something silly, who was he to tell them they couldn’t?
Because he had three stripes on his sleeve, Rodriguez didn’t need to hurry as much as ordinary guards did. They got out of the way for him. They never would have if he hadn’t been promoted. To most Confederates, greasers from Chihuahua and Sonora were only a short step up from niggers. Rank carried more weight than race, though.
And a short step could be the longest step in the world. Hipolito Rodriguez-Hip to men who grew up speaking English-wasn’t the only guard with Mexican blood. On the other side of the barbed wire were untold thousands of mallates. And the camp outside of Snyder, Texas, existed for one reason and one reason only: to kill them off as fast as possible.