Drive to the East

The letter from the recruiting station came eight days later. That was sooner than the sergeant had said. Cinci

“Why couldn’t that blamed man say one way or the other?” he asked when he took it upstairs.

“You find out then, that’s all,” Elizabeth said. She was calmer than he was-and she wasn’t trying to find out what she’d be doing for the rest of the war.

Cinci

The one-handed sergeant got to the station when Cinci

“Good morning, Mr. Driver,” he said. “You didn’t waste any time, did you?”

“No, suh-uh, no, Sergeant,” Cinci

Reaching into the top desk drawer, the recruiting sergeant pulled a sheet of Army stationery. “Here’s what Brigadier General Straubing has to say about you, Mr. Driver.” He set a pair of reading glasses on his nose. “ ‘I remember Cinci

“That’s-mighty fine, Sergeant. Mighty fine,” Cinci

“We’ll let you drive,” the sergeant answered. “You said it yourself-if you go behind the wheel, a younger man gets to pick up a Springfield.”

“Ain’t quite what I said.” Cinci

“Yeah, and they’ve been regretting it ever since,” the sergeant said dryly. He held up his hook. “You can say it wouldn’t be like that here. You can say it, and I wouldn’t give you any grief about it, Mr. Driver, ’cause I think you’re likely right. But I don’t make the rules, and neither do you. The War Department says we’ll play the game like this, so we will. Do you want to do it, or don’t you? If you do, you’ve got about a million forms to fill out. If you don’t, well, thanks for stopping by.”

He had no give in him. He didn’t need to; the government backed him straight down the line. Cinci

The sergeant had to go back to a filing cabinet to get the papers. “You’re a sensible man, Mr. Driver. The difference between bad and worse is a lot bigger than the difference between good and better.”

Cinci

Officially, he wasn’t joining the Army. Officially, he was becoming a civilian employee of the U.S. government. The undersigned agrees, acknowledges, and accepts that his duties may require him to enter areas not definitively known to be safe. He wasn’t sure what definitively meant, but he signed anyway. He knew he wasn’t going to be driving from Idaho to Mi

For purposes of self-protection, employees hired for the aforementioned duty may be permitted to carry firearms, another form told him. He looked at the recruiting sergeant. “The Confederates catch me with a gun, they go

“Don’t worry about it,” the sergeant answered. “If they catch you without a gun, they’ll shoot your ass anyway.” Since Cinci

At last, only one sheet of paper was left: a loyalty oath. Cinci

“Go home,” the sergeant told him, which caught him by surprise. “Bring a suitcase-a small suitcase-with you Monday morning. You report to the State Capitol, room… 378. After that, you do what they tell you.”

“All right. Thank you kindly, Sergeant,” Cinci

“Thank you, Mr. Driver. You said it-you’re doing your bit.” The sergeant looked down at his hook for a moment, then up at Cinci

“I do that, Sergeant,” Cinci

Aclear predawn morning in mid-January. When Irving Morrell looked west, he saw red flares in the sky-Confederate recognition signals. When he looked east, he saw more red flares. The Confederates to the east and west could probably see each other’s flares, too. Only twenty or thirty miles separated them, twenty or thirty miles and the force Morrell commanded.

So far, the C.S. rescue force pushing east hadn’t been able to reach the men trapped in and around Pittsburgh. Morrell didn’t intend that they should, either. He turned to his wireless man. “Send ‘Rosebud’ to Philadelphia, Jenkins,” he said.

“ ‘Rosebud.’ Yes, sir.” The wireless operator didn’t know what the code phrase meant. He sent it anyway. A moment later, he nodded to Morrell. “Received, sir.”

“Good,” Morrell said. “Now we see how they like that.”

“Yes, sir,” Jenkins repeated. “Uh, what’s it all about, sir?”

Morrell didn’t think the wireless man could be a Confederate plant. He didn’t think so, but he didn’t take any chances, either. “It means Featherston’s fuckers are going to have some tough sledding, that’s what,” he said. That seemed safe enough-the younger man still didn’t know where or how.

He could have meant sledding literally. Snow blanketed eastern Ohio and western Pe

Artillery boomed, off to the north. Those were U.S. guns, throwing death at the Confederates pushing in from the west. The men in butternut who hung on around Pittsburgh hadn’t pushed west to try to join them. Maybe they were too short of fuel to move. By now, Featherston’s transport aircraft had taken a devil of a beating. And they were flying in from farther and farther away, too, as U.S. bombers plastered their fields.

Had Morrell been ru

That didn’t break Morrell’s heart. For the first year of the war, everything Jake Featherston tried seemed golden. He’d jumped on the United States with both feet. He’d held the USA down, too, even though he ran a smaller country. That had really alarmed Morrell. Featherston didn’t just intend to lick the United States. He intended to conquer them. Morrell wouldn’t have believed it was possible-till the Confederates cut the USA in half.