He wasn't kidding. At least a dozen long-range rockets slammed into Philadelphia in the next few minutes. One of them missed Congressional Hall by alarmingly little. Flora felt the jolt in the soles of her feet. The rockets didn't announce themselves. They flew faster than sound, so the boom! when they went off was the first and only sign they were on the way.
After the salvo ended, Roosevelt said, 'He can annoy us doing that, but he can't beat us. And we can beat him on the ground. And we are. And we will.'
'But how much will be left of us by the time we do?' Flora asked.
The Assistant Secretary of War stuck out his chin. 'As long as we have one man standing after he goes down, nothing else matters.'
As long as the one man we have standing is my son, nothing else matters, Flora thought. But Franklin Roosevelt had a son in the Navy. Maybe he was thinking the same thing.
IV
Major Toricelli stuck his head into Abner Dowling's office. 'Sir, you've got a call from Philadelphia.'
'Do I?' Dowling viewed the prospect without delight. 'What do they think I've gone and done now?' Calls from the War Department, in his copious experience, seldom brought good news.
But his adjutant said, 'I don't think it's that kind of call, sir. It's General Abell. Shall I transfer it in here?'
'You'd throw a fit if I said no. So would he,' Dowling said. A moment later, the telephone on his desk rang. He picked it up. 'Abner Dowling here.'
'John Abell, sir,' said the voice on the other end of the line, and Dowling recognized the brainy General Staff officer's cool, cerebral tones. 'I hope you're well?'
'Tolerable, General, tolerable,' Dowling replied. 'Yourself?'
'I'll last out the war,' Abell said, which might have meant anything or nothing. 'I have a question for you: how would you like to come back to the East and command an army in what we hope will be one of the decisive attacks of the war?'
How would you like to go to bed with a beautiful blonde who's passionately in love with you? Yes, there were dumber questions, but not many. 'What's not to like?' Dowling asked.
And John Abell told him what there was not to like: 'Your army-group commander would be General MacArthur.'
'Oh,' Dowling said. MacArthur had commanded a division in George Custer's army in the Great War while Dowling was Custer's adjutant general. When MacArthur led an army in northern Virginia this time around, Dowling had commanded a corps under him for a while. The two men didn't get along well-which was, if anything, an understatement.
'We could use you back in Virginia, sir,' Abell said. 'You have experience with aggressive offensive action, and you have experience fighting Freedom Party Guards. You'd do the country a service if you came back.'
'And what would I do to myself?' Dowling asked. Brigadier General Abell didn't answer; he had to figure that out on his own. 'Who would take over for me here if I left?' he inquired. 'Still lots of work that needs doing.'
'We were looking at giving Colonel DeFrancis a star and putting him in charge of Eleventh Army,' Abell said. 'He should handle it, and his coming from the air-operations side of things would be an advantage on such a broad front. Or do you think I'm wrong?' Is there anything about Terry DeFrancis we don't know? he meant.
'No, I'm sure he'll do a bang-up job.' Dowling had to answer that quickly and firmly, so Abell would have no doubts. 'He's a fine officer, and he knows the situation here, so he won't have to waste any time figuring out what's going on. He's young to make general, but wars do that.'
'So they do,' said Abell, who, like Dowling, had waited a long time for stars. 'I'll see you here in Philadelphia, then, as fast as you can come. Orders will be cut by the time you get to the airstrip outside of Snyder. Take care.' He hung up without waiting for Dowling's good-bye.
'Pack a duffel, Angelo,' Dowling called to his adjutant. 'We're on our way to Philly, and then to Virginia.'
'Who takes over here?' Toricelli asked.
'Terry DeFrancis,' Dowling replied. 'My guess is, his telephone's ringing right about now.'
Sure enough, DeFrancis' auto pulled up in front of Eleventh Army headquarters just as Dowling and Toricelli were ready to leave for the airstrip. 'Congratulations on getting back to the real war, sir!' DeFrancis called as he jumped out.
'Congratulations to you, General,' Dowling said. They shook hands.
'I've got a hot transport waiting for you at the field,' DeFrancis said. 'It'll take you up to Wichita. I don't know what they've got laid on for you after that, but General Abell sure sounded like he wants you in Philadelphia fast as you can get there.'
Dowling and Toricelli threw duffel bags with enough personal belongings to keep them going for a little while into a command car. After one more handshake with DeFrancis, Dowling told the driver, 'Step on it!'
'Yes, sir!' The corporal needed no further encouragement. He drove like a bat out of hell-perhaps like a bat a little too eager to go back there.
The two-engined transport took off with an escort of four fighters. Terry DeFrancis hadn't mentioned that. Dowling was grateful all the same. U.S. air power dominated the skies in west Texas, but the Confederates still got fighters up in the air every now and then. Even a hot transport was no match for a Hound Dog.
Neither the Texas Panhandle nor western Sequoyah had suffered too badly in the war. The fighting in Sequoyah was mostly farther east, where the oil wells were. Where the oil wells had been, rather. The oil fields had changed hands several times during the war. Whenever they did, the side pulling out blew them up to deny them to the enemy. The conquerors would start making repairs and then have to retreat themselves-and carry out their own demolitions. By now, Sequoyah's oil wells were some of the most thoroughly liberated real estate on the face of the globe.
In the last war, Sequoyah had started out as Confederate territory. C.S. cavalry raids terrorized Kansas till the USA slowly and painfully overran that state's southern neighbor. These days, though, Wichita was a backwater. The arrival of a major general, even if he was only passing through on his way somewhere else, made airport personnel flabble.
'Your airplane is ready and waiting, sir!' said the major in command of the field.
'Thanks,' Dowling said. 'Where do I go from here?'
'Uh, St. Louis, sir,' the major said. 'Didn't they tell you?'
'If they had, would I be asking?' Dowling asked reasonably.
He got into St. Louis just as the sun was setting. That was a relief: he wasn't sure they would have turned on landing lights for his airplane. Confederate bombers from Arkansas came up often enough to leave blackout regulations tightly in place.
At the airport there, they offered him the choice of a Pullman berth on a fast train east or a layover and the first flight out in the morning. He chose the layover. A bed that didn't bounce and shake had its attractions.
He spent less time in it than he would have liked. The Confederates came over at eleven and then again at two. Instead of a bed that didn't bounce, Dowling got two doses of a chilly trench. Bombs whistled down and burst too close for comfort. He wondered if he would be able to fly out the next morning.
He did. The raid left the airport with a working runway, and didn't hit the airplane waiting to take him east. On the way, he got a bird's-eye view of what the war had done to the United States.
Only occasional craters showed on the ground till he flew over what had to be eastern Indiana. From there on, it was one disaster after another: deserted, unplowed farmland, with towns and cities smashed into ruins. How long would repairing the devastation take? How much would it cost? What could the country have done if it didn't have to try to put itself together again? He couldn't begin to guess. That was a question for politicians, not soldiers. But a soldier had no trouble seeing the USA-and the CSA, too-would have been better off without a war.
Though Dowling didn't see what had happened to the Confederate States, he knew that had to be worse than what he was looking at. 'If they were smart, they would have left us alone,' he said to Major Toricelli.
'If they were smart, they never would have elected that Featherston bastard,' his adjutant replied. Dowling nodded-there was another obvious truth.
