Moss saw no point in making things worse than they were already. "Reporting as ordered," he said when he walked into Trotter's office. That let the commandant know he was willing to take his orders, even if he didn't call him sir or salute first.
Trotter nodded. He didn't salute, either. "Have a seat, Major," he said, acknowledging Moss' rank that way so he also didn't have to say sir. He waved the older man into the chair in front of his desk. It creaked when Moss sat down in it. It always did.
"What's up?" Moss asked.
Trotter lit a cigarette before he answered. He shoved the pack of Raleighs across the desk so Moss could have one, too. As Moss lit up, the commandant pushed a sheet of paper across the desk after the Raleighs. "Your orders have come through."
Was that relief in his voice? Moss wouldn't have been surprised. Base commandants didn't like ambiguity, and with reason: it weakened their authority. If Trotter got Moss out of his hair, he could go back to being senior officer here in every sense of the term.
The cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth, Moss reached for the paper. It bore the embossed eagle in front of crossed swords that had symbolized the USA since the revival after the Second Mexican War. He read through the orders, then looked up at Captain Trotter. "You have an atlas of the United States here, sir? Where the hell is Mount Vernon, Illinois?"
"I thought you were from Illinois," Trotter answered, pulling a book off a shelf behind his chair.
"I'm from Chicago," Moss replied with dignity. "Downstate is all the back of beyond, as far as I'm concerned." He might have been talking about darkest Africa.
Captain Trotter opened the atlas, then pointed. "Here it is." He turned the book around so Moss could see, too. "Right in the middle of the pointy end that goes down to where the Ohio and the Mississippi meet."
"Uh-huh," Moss said. "Hell of a nice place to fly missions into Kentucky from, looks like to me."
"Or to defend if the Confederates start flying missions out of Kentucky," Trotter agreed.
"I don't want to defend. To hell with defending," Moss said savagely. "If those bastards think they can start a new war, I want to go out and tear 'em a new asshole so they'll goddamn well think twice."
That made Captain Trotter grin. "No wonder you're still a good pilot. You've got the killer instinct, all right."
Moss knew he should have smiled, too. Try as he would, he couldn't. Yes, he had a killer instinct. He'd been thinking about that while he was up in the fighter. But he hadn't thought about it in terms of the Confederates then. He'd thought about Canadians, people he'd been dealing with-hell, people he'd liked, people he'd loved-for more than twenty years.
Trotter might have picked that out of his head. "Maybe getting away from these parts will do you good," he said.
"Will it? I have my doubts," Moss answered. "It won't bring Laura and Dorothy back to life. It won't make me stop wanting to blow Canada to hell and gone."
The commandant shifted uneasily in his swivel chair. He didn't seem to know what to make of that. Moss could hardly blame him. He hadn't known what an explosive mixture grief and rage and hate could be till it overwhelmed him. For a moment, he wondered if the damned Canuck who'd sent Laura the bomb had had that same hot, furious blend blazing in him. Only for a moment. Then Moss shoved the thought aside. To hell with what the damned Canuck had been thinking. If I knew who it was… Regretfully, Moss shoved that thought aside, too. He didn't know. From what U.S. investigators said, it wasn't likely he ever would.
"Well," Trotter said, "any which way, you will be going back to the States. Your orders say, 'as quickly as practicable.' How soon can you be on a train?"
If Moss hadn't had tragedy strike him, he knew he wouldn't have got that much consideration. The other officer would have said, Be on the train at seven tomorrow morning, and off he would have gone. Here, though, even if he didn't think getting away would do much for him, he was far from sorry to put Canada behind him. "I don't have much left to do here," he said. "I've been settling affairs ever since… since it happened. After my apartment got blown to hell, it's not like I've got much left to throw in a suitcase. If it wasn't for your kindness, I wouldn't have a suitcase to throw my stuff in, either."
"I'd say we owe you more than a suitcase, Major Moss," Trotter told him. "I've taken the liberty of checking the train schedules…" He paused to see if that would annoy Moss. It didn't; he knew the commandant was only doing his job. When he nodded, Trotter continued, "Next train from Toronto to Chicago gets into London at 4:34 this afternoon."
"That's what the schedule says, anyway," Moss observed dryly. If the train was within half an hour of that, it would be doing all right.
Trotter nodded. "Yeah, that's what it says. And a train from Chicago to Mount Vernon goes out at half past nine tomorrow night. You'll have to kill some time in Chicago, but if you're from there it shouldn't be too bad."
"Maybe," Moss said. He didn't want to see his family. He'd had enough trouble with them at the funeral. But Captain Trotter didn't need to know about his difficulties there. His family had thought he was crazy to marry Laura Secord, and they'd seemed offended when the union didn't fall apart in short order. But he could find ways to spend time in Chicago without having anything to do with them. He could, and he intended to.
"Good luck," Trotter said.
Moss didn't laugh in his face. For the life of him, he couldn't figure out why. If he'd had anything remotely approaching good luck, his wife and daughter would still be alive, and he wouldn't be wearing U.S. uniform again. But he hadn't, they weren't, and he was. "Thanks, Captain," he said, very much as if he meant it.
When Hipolito Rodriguez walked into Freedom Party headquarters in Baroyeca, the first thing he saw was a new map on the wall. It showed the Confederate States as they were now, with Kentucky and what had been called Houston back in the fold. The lands the United States had seized in the Great War and not yet returned-chunks of Virginia, Arkansas, and Sonora-had a new labeclass="underline" Unredeemed Territory. That same label was applied to Sequoyah, even though the plebiscite there had gone against the CSA.
Part of Rodriguez-the part that had hated los Estados Unidos ever since their soldiers tried to kill him during the Great War-rejoiced to see that label on Sequoyah. A lingering sense of fairness made him wonder about it, though. Pointing to the map, and to Sequoyah in particular, he asked Robert Quinn, "Is that truly the way it should be?"
"Sн, Seсor Rodriguez. Absolutamente," the local Freedom Party leader answered. "The election in Sequoyah was a shame and a sham. Since the war, los Estados Unidos sent so many settlers into that state that the result of the vote could not possibly be just. Since they had no business occupying the land in the first place, they had no business settling it, either."
"Is this what Seсor Featherston says?" Rodriguez asked.
Quinn nodded. "It certainly is. And it is something more than that. It is the truth." A priest celebrating the Mass could have sounded no more sure of himself.
Rodriguez eyed the map again. Slowly, he nodded. But he could not help saying, "If Seсor Featherston tells this to the United States, they will not be happy. They thought the plebiscite settled everything."
"Are you going to lie awake at night flabbling about what the United States think?" Quinn dropped the English slang into the middle of a Spanish sentence, which only strengthened its meaning.