He was of about Potter's vintage, a man who'd been through the Great War and didn't flabble about anything. He gave Potter what he needed.
Potter wrote it down to be sure. 'Thanks,' he said. The retread sergeant nodded. The patch over his left eye and the hook sticking out of his left tunic cuff told why he was in a backwater like this. Despite them, he was a better man than most at the front.
The chameleon convoy rolled out of Luray before sunup. Potter wanted to get into U.S.-held territory while it was still dark. That would help keep his vehicles from giving themselves away right where people were most likely to get antsy about them.
Yankee country started just a couple of miles north of Luray. If somebody'd spilled the beans-not impossible with the CSA visibly coming to pieces-a couple of companies of real U.S. soldiers could have swooped down and ended a lovely scheme before it really got rolling.
But no. The sergeant's raid for prisoners hadn't even made the U.S. forces jumpy. Potter and his merry band got several miles into Yankeeland before they came to a checkpoint. The passwords he'd picked up in Luray worked fine. A kid second lieutenant asked, 'What is all this crap, uh, sir?'
'Matйriel captured from Featherston's fuckers,' Potter answered crisply-he knew what the enemy called his side. 'We're taking it north for evaluation.'
'Nobody told me,' the shavetail complained.
'It's a war,' Potter said with more patience than he felt. 'They wouldn't tell you your name if you hadn't had it issued ahead of time.'
'No shit!' the lieutenant said, laughing. 'All right, sir-pass on.'
On they passed. The sun came up. They crossed over the Shenandoah again at Front Royal. Nobody on their side had specially reinforced that bridge. 'Think it'll take the strain, sir?' Wilton asked.
'If they ever sent a barrel over it, it will,' Potter said. 'Barrels are a hell of a lot heavier than this baby.'
They made it. They stopped at a fuel dump and gassed up, then went on. The farther they got from the front line, the less attention U.S. soldiers paid them. They just seemed to be men doing a job. One nine-year-old kid by the side of the road gaped, though. He knew they were driving C.S. vehicles-Potter could tell. He probably knew every machine and weapon on both sides better than the guys who used them did. Plenty of kids like that down in the CSA, too. It was a game to them. It wasn't a game to Clarence Potter.
Harpers Ferry. John Brown had come here, trying to start a slave uprising. Robert E. Lee led the men who captured him. And, three years later, Lee came through again on the campaign that won the Confederate States their independence. Maybe this trip north would help them keep it.
Over the Potomac. Into Maryland. Into the USA proper. Potter had come this way almost exactly thirty years earlier, with the Army of Northern Virginia's thrust toward Philadelphia. They'd fallen short then. Had they taken the de facto capital, they might have had a triumphant six weeks' war. Jake Featherston had hoped for the same thing this time around. What you hoped for and what you got weren't always the same, dammit.
Maryland looked prosperous; Pennsylvania, when they got there, even more so. Oh, Potter spied bomb damage here and there, but only here and there. This land hadn't been fought over the way so much of the CSA had. It had got nibbled, but not chewed up. The United States was too big a place for bombing alone to chew them up. Pittsburgh, now, Pittsburgh probably looked as if it had had a proper war, but Potter and his band of cutthroats headed east, not west.
Drivers in military vehicles coming the other way waved to him and honked their horns as they passed. He always waved back. They figured he was returning from the front with something important. Nobody bothered checking his papers or asking him where he was going or why. The United States were a big place. Once beyond the usual military zone, security for people who looked and sounded like U.S. soldiers eased off. He'd counted on that when he put this scheme together.
Jake Featherston wanted him to go all the way into downtown Philadelphia. He didn't intend to. There of all places, security would tighten up again. He couldn't afford to have anybody ask questions too soon. Some overeager goon with a Tommy gun or a captured automatic Tredegar could mess everything up if he got suspicious at just the wrong time.
No, not downtown. Potter stopped west of it, on the far side of the Schuylkill River. At his order, Wilton pulled into a parking lot. Potter ducked into the back of the truck and set two timers on the side of the crate-he wasn't going to take chances with only one. The driver, meanwhile, raised the hood.
'What's going on?' somebody called.
'Damn thing's broken down,' Wilton answered. 'We've got to round up a mechanic somewhere.'
He and Potter jumped into one of the command cars. 'Back the way we came,' Potter said. 'Fast as you can go.' He eyed the man who'd questioned them. The fellow only shrugged and ambled into a shop. Maybe he'd seen breakdowns before.
'How long, sir?' asked the corporal behind the command car's wheel.
'Not long enough,' Potter said. 'Step on it.'
Fifteen minutes later, the world blew up behind them.
I rving Morrell wasn't looking west when the bomb went off. He was standing at a counter, trying to decide between a chocolate bar and a roll of mints. All of a sudden, the light swelled insanely, printing his shadow on the wall in back of the sidewalk stand. The fat little old woman behind the counter screeched and covered her eyes with her hands.
'Good God!' Morrell said, even before the roar of the explosion reached him. His first thought was that an ammo dump somewhere had blown sky high. He didn't think of a bomb. The explosion seemed much too big for that.
He forgot about the candy and ran out into the street. Then he realized just how lucky he'd been, because a lot of windows had turned to knife-edged flying shards of glass. The magazine stand and snack counter where he'd been dithering didn't have a window of any sort, so he'd escaped that, anyhow.
He stopped and stared. He wasn't the only one. Everybody out there was looking west with the same expression of slack-jawed disbelief. No one had ever seen anything like that rising, boiling, roiling cloud before. How high did it climb? Three miles? Four? Five? He had no idea. The colors put him in mind of food-salmon, peach, apricot. The top of the cloud swelled out from the base, as if it were a toadstool the size of a god.
The roar came then, not just in his ears but all through his body. He staggered like a drunken man. But it wasn't his balance going; the ground shook under his feet. A blast of wind from nowhere staggered him. Also out of nowhere, rain started pelting down. The drops were enormous. They left black splashes when they hit the ground. When one hit his hand, he jerked in surprise-the rain was hot.
'Where's it at?' somebody asked.
'Across the river, looks like,' a woman said.
It looked that way to Morrell, too. The rain shower didn't last more than a couple of minutes. It hadn't ended before he started trying to scrub the filthy drops from his skin. He remembered what John Abell had told him a few days before: uranium bombs put out poison. And what else could that horrible thing be? No ammunition dump in the world blew up like that.
How much poison was in the rain? How much was in that monstrous toadstool cloud? Am I a dead man walking? he wondered.
'We gotta go help,' said the man who'd asked where the blast was. He hurried toward the Schuylkill River.
His courage and resolve shamed Morrell. Of course, the stranger-who was plump and fiftyish, with a gray mustache-didn't know what Morrell did. If ignorance was bliss…
After a moment's hesitation, Morrell followed. If he was already poisoned, then he was, that was all. Nothing he could do about it now. Overhead, that cloud grew taller and wider. Winds began to tear at it and tug it out of shape…and blow it toward downtown Philadelphia.
Crowds got worse the farther west Morrell went. Everybody was pointing and staring and gabbling. You fools! Don't you realize you might all be dead? No, Morrell didn't shout it out. But it filled his thoughts.
Damage got worse the farther west he went, too. All the windows that had survived years of Confederate air raids were blown out. Motorcars and trucks had windows shattered, too. Drivers, their faces masks of blood, staggered moaning through the streets. Many of them clutched at their eyes. Morrell knew what that was bound to mean: they had glass in them.
