"Poor bastard," Potter muttered. Anyone who ran into the cutting torch of Jake Featherston's fury was going to get charred. He'd seen that for himself, more often than he cared to remember.
And then he put Stanley McGillivray out of his mind. He was familiar with only about a third of the work that this desk did. He had to learn the rest of it… and he had the strong feeling he had to learn it in a tearing hurry. Featherston sure as hell wouldn't wait for him. Featherston had never been in the habit of waiting for anybody.
Potter went through the manila folders on the desk one by one. Some of them held things he'd expected to find. A few held surprises. He'd hoped they would. If he'd been able to figure out everything McGillivray was doing, wouldn't the damnyankees have done the same thing?
Some of the surprises were surprises indeed. The Confederates had been running people in Philadelphia since before the Great War. They'd recruited young men who needed this or that-and some who needed to make sure this or that never became public. Not all those young men had lasted. Some had died in the war. Some hadn't had the careers they'd hoped they would, and so proved useless as sources. But a handful of them, by now, were in position to know some very interesting things, and to pass them on.
The assets farther west were interesting, too. Most of Potter's notions of where they were proved right. Again, he got some surprises about who they were. That didn't matter so much. As long as he could use them…
He also checked the procedures Brigadier General McGillivray had in place for staying in touch with his people in the USA in case normal communications channels broke down-in plain English, in case there was a war. They weren't bad. He hoped he could find a way to make them better. The real problem he saw was how slow they were. He understood why that was so, but he didn't like it. "There's got to be a better way," he muttered, not sure if he was right.
Late that afternoon, the telephone in the new office rang. When he picked it up, Anne Colleton was on the other end of the line. "Congratulations, General Potter," she purred in his ear.
"Jesus Christ!" Potter sat bolt upright in his new swivel chair. It was a different make from the one he'd used before; he wasn't used to it yet. Its squeak sounded funny, too. "How did you know that?"
"I had to talk with the president about something," she answered. "He told me he'd promoted you."
"Oh." Potter's alarm evaporated. If she'd heard it from Jake Featherston, it was hardly a security breach. "All right."
"He told me some of why he promoted you, too," Anne said. "Do you really think the damnyankees are going to raise hell here if we go to war?"
"Well, I can't know, not for sure. But I would, if I were in their shoes. I do know they gave our niggers guns during the last war. If there's another one, they'd be fools not to do it again. They're bastards. They aren't fools. We thought they were in 1914. We've been paying for it ever since."
"Can we track down the people they've got here?" Anne asked.
"Of course we can," Potter answered, thinking, No way in hell. More truthfully, he went on, "The harder we go after them, the more careful they'll have to be, too."
"Uh-huh," Anne said in thoughtful tones.
She was, dammit, plenty smart enough to see the contradictions between the two things he'd said. He changed the subject: "What were you talking about with the president?"
"The timing of a propaganda campaign here in South Carolina," she said. Potter wondered just what that meant. He didn't want to go into details with her. God only knew how secure this line was. But the likeliest explanation he could come up with on his own was, We were talking about when the war will start.
Abner Dowling raised field glasses to his eyes and looked across the Ohio River into Kentucky. The mere act of observing Kentucky from afar made him so angry, he wanted to swell up like a bullfrog. As far as he was concerned, he shouldn't have been looking into a foreign country when he eyed Kentucky. He should have been in the state, getting ready to defend it against the Confederates. If they wanted to take it away from him, they would have been welcome to try. He could have promised them a warm reception.
Now… Now he had to figure out how to defend Ohio instead. The General Staff had generously sent him some plans prepared before the Great War. They would have been just what he needed, except that they ignored airplanes and barrels and barely acknowledged the existence of trucks. Things had changed since 1914. Dowling knew that. He hoped to God the General Staff did, too.
Some of what the old plans suggested was still sound. All the bridges across the Ohio had demolition charges in place. Artillery covered the bridges and other possible crossing points. Antiaircraft guns poked their noses up among the camouflaged cannons. If the Confederates were going to try to bomb his guns to silence, they wouldn't have an easy time of it.
He kept his main force farther back in Ohio than the old plans recommended. Again, the airplane was the main reason why. He also wanted to get some notion of what the Confederates were doing before he committed his men.
Custer would have charged right at them, wherever they first showed themselves, he thought. The way he rolled his eyes showed his opinion of that. Custer would have charged, sure as the devil. Maybe he would have smashed everything in his way. Maybe he would have blundered straight into an ambush. But he could no more keep from charging than a bull could when a matador waved his cape. Sword? What sword? Custer would have thought, bullishly.
For better or worse-for better and worse-Dowling was more cautious. If the Confederate Army crossed into the USA, he wanted to slow it down. The way he looked at things, if the Confederates didn't win quick victories, they'd be in trouble. In a long, drawn-out grapple, the USA had the edge. Dowling didn't think that had changed since the Great War.
He raised the field glasses again. Kentucky seemed to leap toward him. Jake Featherston had lied about keeping soldiers out of the state. He'd lied about not asking for more land. How was anybody in the United States supposed to trust him now? You couldn't. It was as simple as that.
Even Al Smith had seen the light. The president of the USA had said he would fight back if the CSA tried to take land by force. Dowling was all for that. But so much more could have been done. It could have, but it hadn't. Everybody'd known the Confederates were rearming. If the USA had been serious about showing Featherston who was boss, the country could have done it quickly and easily in 1935. Nothing would be quick or easy now.
And the United States weren't so ready as they should have been. Dowling thought about all the time wasted in the 1920s. The Confederates had been on the ropes then, either on the ropes or smiling and saying how friendly they were. Why build better barrels when you'd never have to use them? As happened too often in politics, never turned out not to be so very long after all.
"Sir?" said an aide at Dowling's elbow. "Sir?"
Dowling had been lost in his own gloom. He wondered how long the younger man had been trying to draw his notice. However long it was, he'd finally succeeded. "Yes, Major Chandler? What is it?"
"Sir, Captain Litvinoff from the Special Weapons Section in Philadelphia has come down from Columbus to confer with you," Chandler answered.
"Has he?" Dowling was damned if he wanted to confer with anybody from what was euphemistically called the Special Weapons Section. Regardless of what he wanted, he had little choice. "All right. Let's get it over with." He might have been talking about a trip to the dentist.