Drive to the East

Harry Turtledove

Drive to the East

(Settling Accounts-2)

About the Author

HARRY TURTLEDOVE is a Hugo Award-wi

I

Every antiaircraft gun in Richmond seemed to thunder at once. The sky above the capital of the Confederate States filled with black puffs of smoke. Jake Featherston, the President of the CSA, had heard that his aviators called those bursts nigger-baby flak. They did look something like black dolls-and they were as dangerous as blacks in the Confederacy, too.

U.S. airplanes didn’t usually come over Richmond by daylight, any more than Confederate aircraft usually raided Washington or Philadelphia or New York City when the sun was in the sky. Antiaircraft fire and aggressive fighter patrols had quickly made daylight bombing more expensive than it was worth. The night was the time when bombers droned overhead.

Today, the United States was making an exception. That they were, surprised Jake very little. Two nights before, Confederate bombers had killed U.S. President Al Smith. They hadn’t done it on purpose. Trying to hit one particular man or one particular building in a city like Philadelphia, especially at night, was like going after a needle in a haystack with your eyes closed. Try or not, though, they’d flattened Powel House, the President of the USA’s Philadelphia residence, and smashed the bomb shelter beneath it. Vice President La Follette was Vice President no more.

Featherston wasn’t sure he would have deliberately killed Al Smith if he’d had the chance. After all, he’d hornswoggled a plebiscite on Kentucky and the part of west Texas the USA had called Houston and Sequoyah out of Smith, and triumphantly welcomed the first two back into the Confederacy. But he’d expected Smith to go right on yielding to him, and the son of a bitch hadn’t done it. Smith hadn’t taken the peace proposal Featherston offered him after Confederate armor sliced through Ohio to Lake Erie, either. Even though the USA remained cut in two, the country also remained very much in the war. The struggle wasn’t as sharp and short and easy as Jake had hoped.

So maybe Al Smith was better off dead. Maybe. How could you tell? Like any Vice President, Charlie La Follette was the very definition of an unknown quantity.

But it was only natural for the United States to try to take revenge. Kill our President, will you? We’ll kill yours!

U.S. Wright-27 fighters, no doubt diverted from shooting up Confederate positions near the Rappaha

With them, though, came a squadron of dive bombers, airplanes not usually seen in attacks on cities. To Jake’s admittedly biased way of thinking, the CSA had the best dive bomber in the world in the Mule, otherwise known on both sides of the front as the Asskicker. But its U.S. counterparts were also up to the job they had to do.

That job, here, was to pound the crap out of the Confederate Presidential residence up on Shockoe Hill. The building was often called the Gray House, after the U.S. White House. If the flak over Richmond as a whole was heavy, that over the Gray House was heavier still. Half a dozen guns stood on the Gray House grounds alone. If an airplane was hit, it seemed as if a pilot could walk on shell bursts all the way to the ground. He couldn’t, of course, but it seemed that way.

A dive bomber took a direct hit and exploded in midair, adding a huge smear of flame and smoke to the already crowded sky. Another, trailing fire from the engine cowling back toward the cockpit, smashed into the ground a few blocks away from the mansion. A greasy pillar of thick black smoke marked the pilot’s pyre.

Another bomber was hit, and another. The rest bored in on their target. Back before the Great War started in 1914, lots of Confederates believed the Yankees were not only enemies but cowardly enemies. They’d learned better, to their cost. The pilots in these U.S. machines were as brave and as skilled as the men the CSA put in the air.

Yet another dive bomber blew up, this one only a few hundred feet above the Gray House. Flaming wreckage fell all around, and even on, the Presidential residence. The survivors did what they were supposed to do. One after another, they released their bombs, pulled out of their dives, and scurried back towards U.S.-held territory as fast as they could go.

No antiaircraft defenses could block that kind of attack. The Gray House flew to pieces like an anthill kicked by a giant’s boot. Some of the wreckage flew up, not out. The damnyankees must have loaded armor-piercing bombs into some of their bombers. If Jake Featherston took refuge in the shelter under the museum, they aimed to blow him to hell and gone anyway.

But Jake wasn’t in the Gray House or in the shelter under it.

Jake wasn’t within a mile of the Gray House, in fact. As soon as he heard Al Smith was dead, Jake had ordered the Presidential residence evacuated. He’d done it quietly; making a fuss about it would have tipped off the damnyankees that he wasn’t where they wanted him to be. At the moment, he was holed up in a none too fancy hotel about a mile west of Capitol Square. His bodyguards kept screaming at him to get his ass down to the basement, but he wanted to watch the show. It beat the hell out of Fourth of July fireworks.

Saul Goldman didn’t scream. The C.S. Director of Communications was both more restrained and smarter than that. He said, “Mr. President, please take cover. If a bomb falls on you here, the United States win, just the same as if you’d stayed up on Shockoe Hill. The country needs you. Stay safe.”

Jake eyed the pudgy, gray-haired little Jew with something that was for a moment not far from hatred. He ran the Confederate States, ran them more nearly absolutely than any previous North American ruler had run his country-and that included all the goddamn useless Maximilians in the Empire of Mexico. Nobody could tell him what to do, nobody at all. Saul hadn’t tried, unlike the Freedom Party guards who’d bellowed at him. No, Saul had done far worse than that. He’d talked sense.

“All right, dammit,” Featherston said peevishly, and withdrew. He affected not to hear the sighs of relief from everyone around him.

Sitting down in the basement was as bad as he’d known it would be. He despised doing nothing. He despised having to do nothing. He wanted to be up there hitting back at his enemies, or else hitting them first and hitting them so hard, they couldn’t hit back at him. He’d tried to do that to the United States. The first blow hadn’t quite knocked them out. The next one… He vowed the next one would.