Drive to the East

“You’re not ru

“Trouble’s like a dog. You run from it, it’ll chase you and bite you in the ass,” Pinkard said. A startled grunt of laughter escaped Schoonover. Jeff went on, “You go at it, though, sometimes you can make it run instead.”

“Wish we could make the damnyankees run,” the assault band leader said.

“That ain’t the point.” Educated or not, Jeff knew enough to say isn’t. He used ain’t with malice aforethought. “The damnyankees are the Army’s trouble. Them finding out about what all we’re doin’ here-that’s our trouble. That’s what we can take care of on our own.”

“Some of it, anyhow,” Schoonover said. “Those graves won’t disappear all by themselves.”

“Well, you’re right. I already figured that out myself, too,” Jeff said. “But since we can’t do anything about ’em, no point to flabbling about ’em, either. We got to take care of what we can take care of, that’s all.”

Lyle Schoonover got to his feet. He moved well, as long as he didn’t have to get anywhere in a tearing hurry. “Fair enough, sir. That’s a sensible attitude.” His salute didn’t seem too grudging. He left Pinkard’s office. If you didn’t know he’d been maimed in the Great War, his gait wouldn’t give it away.

He hadn’t been gone more than ten minutes before the telephone on Jeff’s desk jangled. Jeff picked it up. “Pinkard here.” He wondered what had gone wrong now. Telephone calls while he was at work were rarely good news.

“Hello, Pinkard. This is Ferd Koenig.”

“What can I do for you, sir?” Jeff tried to stay cool. Calls from the Attorney General were never good news.

“You’ve got the damnyankees a little closer to you than we thought you might,” Koenig said.

“Yes, sir. That’s a fact.” Jeff began to suspect he knew why Koenig was calling. “We’re doing what we can to get ready, just in case.”

“Are you?” the Attorney General said. “Like what?”

With the conversation with the camp engineer fresh in his mind, Pinkard went into detail-maybe more detail than Ferdinand Koenig wanted to hear. He finished, “Nothin’ we can do about the graves, sir. Except for them, though, we can have this place looking like an ordinary concentration camp mighty quick.”

“All right,” Koenig said when he got done. The Attorney General sounded more that a little stu

“You come up with anything else, sir, you just tell me, and I’ll take care of it,” Pinkard promised. He didn’t believe Koenig could. If he’d thought the man back in Richmond would have orders for him, he would have kept his mouth shut.

“I’ll do that.” By the Attorney General’s tone, he didn’t want to talk to anybody from Camp Determination for quite a while. That suited Jeff fine; he didn’t want to talk to Ferd Koenig, either. Koenig added, “I’ll tell the President how thorough you’ve been out there. He’ll be glad to have the good news.”

“Thank you kindly, sir.” Jeff might not be an educated man, but he could read between the lines. He heard what Koenig didn’t say: that Jake Featherston hadn’t had much good news lately. “Things aren’t going so good up in Yankeeland, are they?”

“They could be better.” By the Attorney General’s heavy sigh, they could be a lot better. Koenig went on, “But with any luck at all, the Army will do its job up there by Lubbock, and everything you’re doing will be like putting a storm cellar into a house-it’ll be nice to have, but you won’t really need it.”

“Here’s hoping, sir,” Pinkard said.

“Yeah, here’s hoping. Freedom!” Ferdinand Koenig hung up.

“Freedom!” Jeff echoed, but he was talking to a dead line. He put the handset back in its cradle. How much freedom could the CSA enjoy if the USA came down and took it away? The Negroes in his domain? Their freedom? They never entered his mind.

January in the North Atlantic was about as bad as it got. Waves threw the Josephus Daniels this way and that. The destroyer escort had a course she was supposed to follow. Keeping to it-keeping anywhere close to it-was a long way from easy. Even knowing exactly where the ship lay was a long way from easy.

Sam Carsten had only one thing going for him: he didn’t get seasick no matter what. Pat Cooley was a good sailor, but the exec looked a little green. A lot of the men seemed even less happy with their own insides than they had when they whipped the British auxiliary cruiser a couple of months earlier.

Cleaning crews with mops and buckets kept patrolling the heads and passageways. The faint reek of vomit persisted all the same. Too many sailors were too sick to hold in what they ate. More often than not, they couldn’t use the rail, either. To try would have asked to get washed overboard.

Waves and spray made the Y-ranging gear much less reliable than it would have been in better weather and calmer seas. Thad Walters looked up from his screens and put the best face on things he could: “Well, sir, the damn limeys’ll have just as much fun finding us as the other way round.”

“Oh, boy,” Sam said in hollow tones. “They’ll find Newfoundland. They’ll find the Maritimes. They’ll find trouble for the USA-find it or make it.”

“That’s the name of the game for them, sir,” Lieutenant Cooley said.

“I know. But the name of the game for me is stopping them if I can,” Sam answered.

“Sir, with that gunship to our credit we’re still a long way ahead,” the exec answered.

“No.” Sam shook his head. “That’s ancient history. Anything that happened yesterday is ancient history. What we do today matters. What we’re going to do tomorrow matters. Forget the old stuff. We’ve still got a big job ahead of us.”

The Y-ranging officer and the exec exchanged glances. “Sir, I’m sorry you didn’t go to A

“What I haven’t got is the brains to make an admiral,” Sam said. “You know it, I know it, and the Navy Department sure as hell knows it. I’m damn proud I’ve come as far as I have.”

“You’ve got plenty of brains, sir. You’ve got as many as any officer I’ve served under,” Cooley said. “It’s just too bad you had to start late.”

“Well, thank you very much, Pat. That’s white of you,” Carsten answered. He knew the exec meant it; whatever else the younger man was, he was no brown-noser.

A wave crashed over the Josephus Daniels’ bow. White water cascaded back. No sailors ma

“Boy, this is fun,” Lieutenant, J.G., Walters said, raising his eyes from the electronic display for a moment.

“This time of year, the weather’s a worse enemy than the limeys and the frogs and the damn Confederates all rolled together,” Sam said. “When spring finally comes around, we’ll all get serious about the war again.”

“Sub drivers are always serious,” Cooley said.

“That’s a fact. And they’ve got it easy once they submerge-that’s another fact,” Sam agreed. “But God have mercy, I wouldn’t want to be a submersible skipper here and now, not even a little bit. They have to get into position on the surface, remember. They’re way too slow underwater to do it there. I’ll tell you one thing-I wouldn’t like to be a sub captain trying to stay up with us here.”

“Wouldn’t be a whole lot of fun, would it?” the exec allowed after a moment’s contemplation.

“Not hardly.” Sam thought about the wave his ship had shrugged off. He thought about the captain of a submarine standing on top of the co