supposed to be.'
'Hell, yes, it's a compliment,' Jake Featherston answered. 'It's also a judgment on us. We've been thinking a lot about what we can do to the damnyankees. We ain't worried near enough about what them bastards can do to us.'
When his grammar slipped that far, he was genuinely irate. He'd also told Potter what the call was about. 'You've read the memorandum, then?'
'Damn right I've read it. Those two whistle-ass peckerheads above you kicked it up to me. They were going, 'What do you want to do about this here?' '
Clarence Potter had a hard time swallowing a snort. Featherston might be president of the CSA, but he still talked like a foul-mouthed sergeant, especially when he took aim at officers. Potter asked, 'What do you want to do about it, Mr. President?'
'You asked the questions. I want somebody to get me some answers. I sure as shit don't have enough of 'em right now. How would you like to do it? I'll make you a brigadier general on the spot.'
Only two promotions really mattered: the one up from buck private and the one to general's rank. All the same, Potter said, 'Sir, if I have a choice, I'd rather work on our assets there than their assets here. I want to hit those people when the time comes.'
'Even if it costs you the promotion?' Featherston could only mean, How serious are you?
'Even if it does,' Potter said firmly. 'I didn't expect to come back into the Army anyway. I didn't do it for a wreath around my stars. I did it for the country.' And to keep from giving you an excuse for getting rid of me. He didn't say that. Why remind Featherston?
'All right, then. You've got it-and the promotion,' the president said. 'That's your baby now, General Potter.'
It did feel good. It felt damn good, as a matter of fact. And it felt all the better because Potter hadn't expected he would ever get it. When he said, 'Thank you, Mr. President!' he sounded much more sincere than he'd thought he would while talking to Jake Featherston.
'I reckon you've earned it,' Featherston answered. 'I reckon you'll do a good job with it, too. You wait half an hour, and then you go right on into Brigadier General McGillivray's office and get to work. From here on out, it's yours.'
'Yes, sir,' Potter said, but he was talking to a dead line. He wondered briefly why the president wanted him to wait, but only briefly. He'd known Jake Featherston more than twenty-five years. He could guess what Jake would be doing with that half hour.
And his guess proved good. When he walked into his superior's-no, his former superior's-office, Brigadier General Stanley McGillivray was white and trembling. 'I gather you are to replace me?' he choked out when he saw Potter.
'I gather I am.' Potter had ripped into a good many incompetent officers in his time, but he didn't have the heart to say anything snide to McGillivray. The other Intelligence officer was a broken man if ever he'd seen one. He was so terribly broken, in fact, that Potter, for once, was moved more to sympathy than to sarcasm. 'I hope the president wasn't too hard on you?'
'That, Colonel Potter-excuse me: General Potter-is what they call a forlorn hope,' McGillivray answered bitterly. 'I think you will find everything in order here. I think you will find it in better condition than I have been given credit for. Good day. Good luck.' By the way he stumbled out of the office, he might almost have been a blind man.
'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
