'We got a ciphered message yesterday that made me think they were going to try it,' the Assistant Secretary of War said. 'They were cagey. I would be, too. Wouldn't be good to say too much if the other side is reading your mail, so to speak. And the Kaiser just talked on Wireless Berlin.' He looked down at a piece of paper on his desk. ''We have harnessed a fundamental force of nature,' he said. 'The power that sets the stars alight now also shines on earth. A last warning to our foes-give up this war or face destruction you cannot hope to escape.''
'My God,' Flora said, and then again, 'My God!' Once you'd said that, what was left? Nothing she could see- not for a moment, anyhow. Then she did find something: 'How close are we?'
'We're getting there,' Roosevelt said, which might mean anything or nothing. The exasperated noise Flora made said it wasn't good enough, whatever it meant. Roosevelt spread his hands, as if to placate her. 'The people out in Washington say we're getting close,' he went on. 'I don't know if that means days, weeks, or months. They swear on a stack of Bibles that it doesn't mean years.'
'It had better not, not after all the time they've already used and all the money we've given them,' Flora said. If not for the money, she never would have known anything about the U.S. project. And she found another question, one she wished she didn't need to ask: 'How close is Jake Featherston?' Even with the Stars and Stripes flying in Richmond for the first time since 1861, she thought of the Confederacy boiled down to the terrifying personality of its leader.
So did Franklin Roosevelt, as his answer showed: 'We still think he's behind us. We're plastering his uranium works every chance we get, and we get more chances all the time, because we're finally beating down the air defenses over Lexington. His people have put a lot of stuff underground, but doing that must have cost them time. If we're not ahead, he's got miracle workers, and I don't think he does.'
'Alevai,' Flora said, and then, 'Do they have any idea how many dead there are in Petrograd?' Part of her wished she hadn't thought of that. Most of the dead wouldn't be soldiers or sailors. Some would be factory workers, and she supposed you could argue that the people who made the guns mattered as much in modern war as the people who fired them. All the generals did argue exactly that, in fact. But so many would be street sweepers and dentists and waitresses and schoolchildren…Thousands? Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? From one bomb? 'My God!' she exclaimed again.
Franklin Roosevelt shrugged the broad shoulders that went so strangely with his withered, useless legs. 'Flora, I just don't know. I don't think anyone knows yet-not the Germans, not the Russians, nobody. Right now… Right now, the whole world just took a left to the chops. It's standing there stunned, trying not to fall over.'
That wasn't the comparison Flora would have used, but it was vivid enough to make her nod. Before she could say anything-if she could find anything to say beyond one more 'My God!' — the captain from the outer office came in and nodded to Roosevelt. 'Sir, the Tsar just issued a statement.'
'What did he say?' Roosevelt and Flora asked at the same time.
The captain glanced down at a piece of paper in his left hand. 'He calls this a vicious, unholy, murderous weapon, and he condemns the massacre of innocents it caused.' That went well with Flora's thoughts.
'Did he say anything about surrender?' Franklin Roosevelt asked.
'No, sir.' The young officer shook his head. 'But he did say God would punish the Kaiser and 'the accursed scientists and people of Germany'-his words-even if the Russian Army couldn't do the job.'
'How can he keep fighting if Germany can drop bombs like that and he can't?' Flora asked, not really aiming the question at either Roosevelt or the captain. Was God listening? If He was, would He have let that bomb go off? 'Moscow, Minsk, Tsaritsyn…' She ran out of Russian cities. She did, yes, but she was sure the Germans wouldn't.
'Russia always takes more losses than her enemies,' the Assistant Secretary of War said. 'That's the only way she stays in wars. But losses on that kind of scale? I don't think so, not for long.'
'If the Tsar tries to go on fighting and the Germans drop one of those on Moscow, say, don't you think all the Reds who've gone underground will rise up again?' the captain asked. 'Wouldn't you?'
'How many Reds are left?' Flora asked. 'Didn't the Tsar's secret police kill off as many as they could after the last civil war?'
'They sure did,' Franklin Roosevelt said, and the captain nodded. Roosevelt went on, 'We know the secret police didn't get everybody, though. And the Reds are masters at going underground and staying there.'
'They have to be, if they want to keep breathing,' the captain added.
'So the short answer is, nobody-nobody on this side of the Atlantic, that's for sure-knows how many Reds there are,' Roosevelt said. 'Something like a uranium bomb will bring them out, though, if anything will.'
'And if it doesn't kill them,' the captain said. 'Chances are, there are a lot of them close to Petrograd and Moscow.'
Flora nodded. Those were the two most important Russian cities, and the Reds were like anybody else-they'd want to stay as close to the center of things as they could. Her thoughts went west. 'England and France have to be shaking in their boots right now,' she said. 'Unless they've got bombs of their own, I mean.'
'If they had them, they would use them,' Roosevelt said. 'The war in the west has turned against them-not as much as the war here has turned against the CSA, but enough. If the Kaiser's barrels really get rolling across Holland and Belgium and northern France, it won't be easy to stop them this side of Paris.'
'Paris,' Flora echoed. The Germans hadn't got there in 1917; the French asked for an armistice before they could. Kaiser Wilhelm granted it, too. Looking back, that was probably a mistake. Like the Confederates, the French weren't really convinced they'd been beaten. 'This time, the Germans ought to parade through the streets, the way they did in 1871.'
'Sounds good to me,' Roosevelt said. 'Keep it under your hat, but I've heard Charlie La Follette's going to go to Richmond.'
'Is it safe?' Flora asked.
'Not even a little bit, but he's going to do it anyhow,' Roosevelt answered. 'Abe Lincoln couldn't, God knows James G. Blaine couldn't, even my Democratic cousin Theodore couldn't, but La Follette can. And there's an election this November.'
'Good point,' Flora agreed. How many votes would each photo of President La Follette in the ravaged and captured capital of the Confederacy be worth? Maybe as many as the uranium bomb had killed, and that was bound to be a lot.
VIII
I n! In! In!' Sergeant Hugo Blackledge bellowed. 'Move your sorry asses before you get 'em shot off!'
Corporal Jorge Rodriguez hurried aboard the little coastal freighter. Fires in Savannah lit up the docks almost bright as day. Every so often, a flash and a boom would mark another ammo dump or cache of shells going up in smoke. The port was falling. Anybody who stayed to try to hold up the damnyankees would end up dead or a POW. Orders were to get out as many soldiers as could escape.
Nervously, Rodriguez looked up into the sky. If any fighters came over right now, they could chew his company to pieces. But they mostly stayed on the runways after dark. With a little luck, this ship-the Dixie Princess, her name was-would be far away from Savannah by the time the sun came up.
'Ever been on a boat before?' Gabe Medwick asked.
'No,' Jorge admitted. 'You?'
'A little rowboat, fishin' for bluegill an' catfish,' his friend said. 'This ain't the same thing, is it? Not hardly.' He answered his own question.
Soldiers from eight or ten regiments-not all of them even from the same division-jammed the Dixie Princess. They eyed one another like dogs uncertain whether to fight. Sailors in gray dungarees elbowed their way through the butternut crush. They knew where they were going and what they were doing, which gave them a big edge on the troops they were carrying.
The rumble of the engines got deeper. Rodriguez felt the deck vibrate under his boots. The freighter pulled away from the pier and down the Savannah River toward the sea.
Only gradually did Jorge realize there were antiaircraft guns on deck. More sailors manned them. Some wore helmets painted gray. Others stayed bareheaded, as if to say a helmet wouldn't make any difference in what they
