to do with the Army was certain-but probably. He said, 'How about that beer now? It'll taste twice as good with somebody else buying.' The grin Jimmy gave him was half sheepish, half I'll get you next time. Jonathan's grin said only one thing. Oh, no, you won't.
But Moss wasn't grinning when he drove back to Berlin. He understood why Major Finley worried about where his pilots would come from. The USA had been holding Canada down for more than twenty years now. The Canucks showed no sign of wanting to become Americans, none at all, despite a generation's worth of schooling and propaganda. But the United States couldn't just turn them loose and wave good-bye. If they did, the British would be back twenty minutes later. And then… 'Encirclement,' Moss muttered. That had been the U.S. strategic nightmare from the end of the War of Secession to the end of the Great War. With the Confederate States feeling their oats again, encirclement would be a disaster.
The way the world looked wasn't the only reason Moss' grin slipped on the way home. 'Daddy!' Dorothy squealed when he walked in the door, and did her best to tackle him. That best was pretty good; it would have drawn a penalty on any football field from Edmonton down to Hermosillo.
'Hi, sweetie.' Moss squeezed his daughter, too, though not with intent to maim. 'Where's your mom?'
'I'm here,' Laura called from the kitchen. 'Where else would I be?'
After disentangling himself from Dorothy, Moss went into the kitchen and gave his wife a kiss. She kissed him back, but not with any great enthusiasm. 'What smells good?' he asked, pretending he didn't notice.
'Roast pork,' she said, and then, 'Did you have a good time shooting up the countryside?'
Her voice had an edge to it. 'I didn't shoot up the countryside,' Moss answered steadily. 'I would have shot down one American half my age if this were the real thing.'
He'd hoped the prospect of a Yank going down in flames would cheer Laura, but it didn't. She said, 'If anything really happened, the two of you would fly on the same side-and you'd fly against Canada. Are you going to tell me I'm wrong?'
'They wouldn't do that to me,' Moss said. 'I was talking about it with Major Finley.'
'Ha!' she said. 'If fighting started, they'd do whatever they pleased.'
She could have been right. But Jonathan shook his head. 'No, I don't think so. They know what I've been doing since I came to Canada. They want people they can trust to carry out their orders, and I don't think I qualify.'
'Are you sure? Isn't it likely they just want Yanks who know how to fly?'
That paralleled Moss' own worries too closely for comfort. Angry because it did, he snapped, 'You sound like those Canadians who want to murder me because I was born in the United States, no matter what I've tried to do up here.'
Laura turned red. 'There are Canadians who want to murder me, too, because you were born in the United States. Me!' She sounded furious. She was descended from, and named for, the first Laura Secord, who in the War of 1812 had done for the Canadians what Paul Revere had for the Americans in the Revolution: warned of oncoming enemy soldiers and saved the day. Laura was proud of her ancestry, and was as much a Canadian patriot as her ancestor had been.
'Yes, I know that,' Moss said. 'If you think it doesn't worry me, you're crazy.'
Hostages to fortune, he thought unhappily. 'If anything happened to you and Dorothy, I'd-'
'You'd what?' Laura broke in. 'Hop in an aeroplane and machine-gun my people from the sky for revenge? That's not the right answer, you know.'
Maybe it wasn't. It was exactly what Moss had been thinking. He knew he couldn't say that to his wife. He kissed her again instead. She looked as if she would rather have gone on arguing. To his relief, she didn't.
Hipolito Rodriguez hadn't been on a train for a long time: not since he laid down his rifle at the end of the Great War and came home to Baroyeca from west Texas. Then he'd had the taste of defeat in his mouth, sour as vomit after too much beer. Now, as the car rattled and jounced toward Hermosillo along the twisting track, he was having the time of his life.
Why not? Many of his friends from Baroyeca rode with him: among others, Carlos Ruiz and Felipe Rojas and Robert Quinn, who'd brought the Freedom Party to his home town. And better yet, Jorge and Miguel rode with him, too. What could be better than going into action with your own sons at your side? Nothing he could think of.
Everybody in the car seemed to feel the same way. Men chattered and sang snatches of Freedom Party songs and passed bottles of tequila and whiskey back and forth. Nobody got drunk, but a lot of people got happy. Rodriguez knew he was happy.
He kept an eye on his boys. He didn't want them making fools of themselves and embarrassing him in front of his comrades. But they did fine. They mostly stared out the window, watching the landscape change. Even in the Freedom Youth Corps, they hadn't gone so far from home.
As the crow flew, Hermosillo was about 150 miles northwest of Baroyeca. The railroad line from the little mining town to the capital of Sonora was no crow. It went west from Baroyeca to Buenavista, south to Terim, west to Guaymas on the coast, and then, at last, north to Hermosillo. That made the journey take twice as long as it would have by a more direct route, but Rodriguez didn't mind. No, he didn't mind at all.
He nodded to Robert Quinn. 'Gracias, muchas gracias, seсor, for arranging to have the Freedom Party pay for our fares. We never would have been able to come otherwise.'
'El gusto es mio,' Quinn answered with a smile. 'The pleasure is also that of the Partido de Libertad. This is important business we are going to tend to in Hermosillo. We need all the help we can get. We need it, and we are going to have it. No one can stop us. No one at all.'
Hipolito Rodriguez nodded again. 'No. Of course not.' Hadn't he seen Don Gustavo, his one-time patron, turned away from the polling place in Baroyeca? Hadn't he helped turn him away? Yes, indeed, nothing could stop the Freedom Party.
They got into Hermosillo late that afternoon. It was as big a city as Rodriguez had ever seen-big enough to make his sons' eyes bug out of their heads. The train station stood a couple of miles north of downtown. Rodriguez wondered whether they would have to march down to the Plaza Zaragoza, the square where they would go into action, but buses draped with partido de libertad banners waited for them. The men from Baroyeca weren't the only Freedom Party members who'd come to Hermosillo on the train. By the time everybody filed aboard the buses, there weren't many empty seats.
The ridge line of the Cerro de la Campaсa rose higher in the southern sky as the buses rolled down toward the Plaza Zaragoza. Rodriguez noted the hill only peripherally. He was used to mountains. The profusion of houses and shops and restaurants and motorcars was something else again. More than half the signs, he noted, were in English, which had a stronger hold in the city than in the Sonoran countryside.
Hermosillo's two grandest monuments stood on either side of the Plaza Zaragoza. To the west was the Catedral de la Asunciуn, to the east the Palacio de Gobierno. A cathedral had stood next to the plaza since the eighteenth century. When Sonora passed from the Empire of Mexico to the Confederate States in the early 1880s, the original adobe building had been crumbling into ruin. The replacement, not completed till the early years of the twentieth century, dwarfed its predecessor in size and splendor. With its two great bell towers and elaborate ornamentation, it put Rodriguez in mind of a gigantic white wedding cake.
It dwarfed the Palacio de Gobierno on the other side of the square, though that brick-and-adobe structure was impressive in its own right. And, since the Palacio de Gobierno housed the governor and legislature of the state of Sonora, it was of more immediate concern to the Freedom Party than the cathedral. God could take care of Himself. Secular affairs needed a nudge in the right direction.
Freedom Party men already jammed the Plaza Zaragoza. They greeted the latest set of newcomers with calls of, 'Freedom!' and 'ЎLibertad!' and handed out signs, some in Spanish, others in English. Rodriguez looked up at the one he got. In English, it said, repeal the seven words!
Robert Quinn translated for him, knowing he didn't have much written English: 'Abrogan las siete palabras.' The Freedom Party man went on, 'You understand what that means?'
'Oh, sн, sн,' Rodriguez said. 'The Constitution.'
'That's right.' Quinn nodded. 'The way it is now, it says'-he switched from Spanish to English-' 'The Executive power shall be vested in a President of the Confederate States of America. He and the Vice-President shall hold their offices for the term of six years; but the President shall not be reeligible.' '
'But if we take out the last seven words, President Featherston can run again next year,' Rodriguez
