expect Confederate bombers overhead, damn them. And the worst part was, the Yankees had every right not to expect them. The Confederacy didn't have many bombers left, and mostly used the ones it did have in close support of its surviving armies.
Turbulence made the Alligator bounce. Somebody gulped, loudly. 'Use the airsick bag!' three people shouted at the same time. The gulper did. It helped-some.
And then turbulence wasn't the only thing bouncing the Alligator. Shells started bursting all around the airplane. Suddenly, the road through the air might have been full of potholes-big, deep ones. A major general who wasn't wearing a seat belt went sprawling.
'Get us the fuck out of here!' Jake yelled. If Lulu sniffed or squawked, he didn't hear her.
Engines roaring, the transport dove for the deck. The antiaircraft guns pursued. Shrapnel clattered into the wings and tore through the fuselage. Somebody in there shrieked, which meant jagged metal tore through a person, too.
'We're losing fuel!' the pilot shouted. 'Lots of it!'
'Can we go on?' Jake had to bellow at the top of his lungs to make himself heard.
'Not a chance in church,' the pilot answered. 'We'd never get there.'
'Can you land the son of a bitch?'
'If I can't, we're all dead,' the man answered. Jake remembered that he hadn't been thrilled about landing at night even in Confederate-held territory. How much less enthusiastic would he be about a nighttime emergency landing on enemy soil? I told him to put on the wing lights, Jake thought. Did it matter? Too goddamn late to worry about it now.
He hated having his fate in somebody else's hands. If he was going out, he saw himself trading bullets with the damnyankees and nailing plenty of them before they finally got him. This way…Dammit, I'm a hero. The script isn't supposed to work like this.
'Brace yourselves!' the pilot shouted. 'Belts on, everybody! I'm putting it down. I think that's a field up ahead there-hope like hell it is, anyway. Anybody gets out, let Beckie know I love her.'
One of the engines died just before the Alligator met the ground-that was one hell of a leak, all right. The transport was built to take it and built to land on rough airstrips-but coming down in a tobacco field with no landing lights was more than anybody could reasonably expect.
But it got down. It landed hard, hard enough to make Jake bite the devil out of his tongue. One tire blew. The Alligator slewed sideways. A wingtip dug into the ground. The transport tried to flip over. The wing broke off instead. The fire started then.
'Out!' the pilot screamed. 'Out now!' The airplane hadn't stopped moving, but nobody argued with him. Jake was the second man out the door. He had to jump down to the ground, and turned an ankle when he hit. Swearing savagely, he limped away.
'Fuck!' he said in amazement. 'I'm alive!'
C larence Potter wondered how many nasty ways he could almost die. This blaze was a lot smaller than the radioactive fire he'd touched off in Philadelphia, but it was plenty big enough to give a man an awful fore-taste of hell before it finally killed him. To the poor chump roasting, how could any fire be bigger than that?
He heard Jake Featherston's obscene astonishment from not far away. It summed up how he felt, too. He'd scrambled away from the burning Alligator right after the President of the CSA. Was everybody out? He looked at the pyre that had been a transport. Anybody who wasn't out now never would make it, that was for damn sure.
'Where the hell are we?' Ferdinand Koenig's deep voice came from over to the right.
'Somewhere in Georgia-I can't tell you anything else.' That was the pilot. Nobody would have to deliver his message to Beckie…yet.
But they weren't free and clear, not by a long shot. 'Let's get out of here,' Potter said. 'This field will be swarming with Yankees in nothing flat.'
Some of the Confederate big shots weren't going anywhere. 'I think my leg is busted,' said the general who'd replaced Nathan Bedford Forrest III as chief of the General Staff. Potter couldn't remember his name; as far as Potter was concerned, the officer wasn't worth remembering. 'I'm not going anywhere quick.'
'You can surrender, Willard. Don't reckon they're shooting soldiers-only politicians,' Jake Featherston said. 'Just don't tell 'em I'm around.'
'I wouldn't do that, sir,' Willard said. First name or last? Potter wondered. Hell, it didn't matter to anybody but Willard any more.
'General Potter is right,' Saul Goldman said. Potter blinked. He hadn't even known the Director of Communications got on the Alligator. Goldman was so quiet and self-effacing, he could disappear in plain sight.
Lulu was hurt, too, hurt badly. 'I don't want the Yankees to get me, Mr. President,' she told Jake. 'Will you please shoot me and put me out of my misery?'
'I don't want to do that!' Featherston exclaimed.
'Please,' Lulu said. 'I can't go on. It's the last thing you can do for me, since…Oh, never mind. You didn't care about that, not with me.'
She knew what she was talking about. Jake had put it more pungently the afternoon before, but it amounted to the same thing. The President of the CSA muttered to himself. He started to turn away, then turned back. Potter had rarely seen him indecisive-wrong often, sometimes disastrously so, but hardly ever at a loss. 'Christ,' he said under his breath.
'Hurry,' Lulu said. 'You can't stay here.'
Potter hadn't imagined he would find Lulu agreeing with him, either. 'Christ,' Jake said again, a little louder this time. Then he yanked the.45 out of the holster he always wore. He fired, and whispered, 'Sorry, Lulu,' as he did. 'Come on!' Now he almost shouted. 'Let's get the fuck away from here.'
They stumbled and limped through the field. The only light came from the burning Alligator, and they were trying to put it behind them as fast as they could. 'That must have been hard, sir,' Potter said after a while: cold comfort, he realized as soon as he spoke, if any at all.
'Feels like I just shot my own luck,' Featherston answered, his voice rough with-tears? 'That make any sense at all to you?'
'Sense? No,' Potter answered. As the President glared at him, he added, 'I understand what you mean, though. Let's hope you're wrong, that's all.'
'Yeah. Let's.' Jake's voice stayed harsh. 'You know what? You're liable to be our ace in the hole. We do run into damnyankees, you can talk for us, make 'em think we're on their side.'
'I hope I can, anyhow,' Potter said. He'd done it up in the USA. If he couldn't do it again-they were up the well-known creek, that was all. 'I hope I don't have to. I hope there aren't any Yankees within miles.'
'That'd be nice.' Featherston didn't sound as if he believed it was likely. Since Potter didn't, either, he would have let it rest there. But Featherston went on, 'Best thing we can do is get into some town the Yankees didn't bother garrisoning. We borrow a couple of motorcars from loyal people, we can head west… Wish to hell I knew just where we were at.'
Potter did. They were in trouble, that was where. Jake Featherston yelled for the pilot and asked him. 'Somewhere east of Atlanta-can't tell you closer,' he replied. 'I was going to fly south a little while longer, then swing west. That's about as good as I can do right now. Beg your pardon, sir, but I'm fuckin' surprised I'm in one piece.'
'You did good, son,' Jake said-he was never shy about patting small fry on the back. That was probably one of the things that had helped him rise and kept him on top. 'Yeah, you did good. So where's a town?'
'Let's find a road,' Potter said. 'Sooner or later, a road's got to take us into a town.' He didn't say what kind of town a road would take them into. They just had to trust to luck on that. No sooner had the thought crossed his mind than Featherston's mournful comment followed it.
He found the road by the simple expedient of stepping down into it. He came closer to hurting himself then, than he had in the Alligator's crash-landing. 'Which way?' Ferdinand Koenig asked. North or south, east or west? was supposed to follow that question, but Potter had no idea which direction was which. Evidently, neither did anyone else.
But there was the moon, a thin waning crescent, so that had to be the east. Which meant the North Star
