Moss made his way up to the bar and ordered a beer. He reminded himself that drink wasn't spelled with a u. As he sipped, he listened to the chatter around him. When he discovered that the three men immediately to his left were reconnaissance pilots, he started picking their brains. If anybody could tell him what the Confederates were up to, they were the men.

But they couldn't tell him much. One said, "Bastards know how to palm their cards as well as we do. If they haven't got more than they're showing, we'll waltz into Richmond. 'Course, I hope to hell they're saying,, 'Sure don't look like them damnyankees got much up there a-tall." " His impression of a Confederate accent was less than successful.

"Here's hoping," Moss agreed. A second beer followed the first. He had a few more over the evening. He didn't get drunk-he was sure of that-but he did get happy. He heard about as many opinions of Daniel MacArthur as there were people offering them.

Not long after he hit the sack, Confederate bombers came overhead. They were doing their best to disrupt what they had to know was coming. Moss ran for a damp trench. He didn't think any of their load hit the airstrip, but it wasn't coming down very far away. He hoped U.S. bombers were paying similar calls on the defenders. Soldiers who went without sleep didn't fight as well as those who got their rest.

Orders for his squadron came in the next morning. He'd wondered if they'd been sent east to escort bombers. They hadn't had any training or practice in that role. But instead the command was ground attack. Moss nodded to himself. They could handle that just fine. And he had a date-three days hence. He talked with men who'd been in Maryland longer about local landmarks and Confederate antiaircraft.

The day of the attack dawned cold and gloomy. Moss yawned as he went to his fighter. He didn't like the low clouds overhead. They would make it harder for him to find his targets. He managed a shrug. His squadron wouldn't be the only one hitting the Confederates. He could probably tag along with someone else.

He ran through his flight checks with impatience, but was no less thorough because he was impatient. Like a modern automobile, the Wright had a self-starter. No groundcrew man needed to spin the prop for him. He poked the button. The engine roared to life; the propeller blurred into a disk.

He raced down the runway and flung himself into the air. One by one, the airplanes in his squadron followed. They rocketed south toward Virginia and the enemy. Moss got the feeling of being part of something much bigger than himself. He'd known it in the Great War, too, but seldom in this fight.

As they got farther south, the clouds began to break up. That was a relief. Maybe the people who'd ordered the attack weren't complete idiots after all. Then again, you never could tell. Moss got a quick glimpse of Washington, D.C., before he zoomed over the Potomac. Plumes of smoke rose here and there from the formal capital-for all practical purposes, the former capital. Confederate bombers must have visited there the night before. Not even Y-ranging had helped fighters do much to track bombers by night.

After the Potomac, the next good-sized river was the Rappahannock. If U.S. soldiers could get over the Rappahannock and the Rapidan, the next stop was Richmond, which lay on the north bank of the James.

Crossing the Rappahannock wouldn't be a whole lot of fun, though. Confederate artillery was zeroed in on the river, and pounded the pontoon bridges U.S. military engineers were running up under the not quite adequate cover of their own artillery. Asskickers were out dive-bombing those bridges, too. Moss watched one crash into the Rappahannock in flames. Somebody had thought to bring plenty of antiaircraft guns forward, then. Good.

And there were plenty of Confederate antiaircraft guns right up at the front, too. Shells began bursting around Moss and his squadron even while they were on the U.S. side of the Rappahannock. He hoped those came from Confederate guns. He didn't like the idea of getting shot down by his own side. Come to that, he didn't like the idea of getting shot down by the enemy, either.

He dove on a battery of Confederate artillery pieces. He could damn well shoot back at the bastards on the other side. He thumbed the firing button. His Wright seemed to stagger a little in the air from the recoil of the guns. Soldiers in butternut scattered as he roared past overhead. Muzzle flashes showed that some of them were taking potshots at him with whatever small arms they carried. He wasn't going to lose any sleep over that-he was gone before they could hope to aim.

He had more targets than he could shake a stick at. The Confederates had known this attack was coming, and they'd spent a lot of time getting ready for it. That worried Moss. When the Confederates struck for Lake Erie, they'd caught the USA by surprise. Maybe they shouldn't have, but so what? Surprise had helped them go as far and as fast as they had.

Surprise wouldn't do the USA a nickel's worth of good here. Could a major armored thrust succeed without it? Moss didn't know. One way or the other, he'd find out. And so would everybody else.

He shot up another artillery position, and a battalion's worth of infantrymen he caught in the open. He'd pitied the poor foot soldiers in the last war. Their lot was, if anything, worse now. The fighters he and the Confederates were flying now were ever so much more deadly as ground-attack machines than their Great War ancestors had been. Barrels were correspondingly more dangerous, too. Even the poison gas was more poisonous than it had been a generation earlier.

When Moss tried to strafe some more infantrymen, his guns emptied in the middle of the burst. Time to head for home, he thought, and hoped no Hound Dog would jump him on the way back to Maryland. All he could do was run away.

From the squadron's wireless traffic, a lot of the other pilots were in the same boat. "Let's go back," Moss said. "They can reload us, and then we'll hit 'em again." Savage sounds of approval dinned in his earphones.

Finding Texas, Maryland, wasn't easy, even though the clouds had thinned out up there, too. He knew how things had looked going from north to south. They didn't look the same coming back from south to north. They never did. Anyone who drove a motorcar knew that. The problem was ten times worse in an airplane.

He finally spotted the town by the nearby ponds that had once been mine shafts. If they were there, then the airstrip was… there. He bumped to a landing. It wasn't pretty, but he'd take it.

Groundcrew men swarmed over the fighters. He got refueled. Armorers took out the empty ammunition belts and loaded in full ones. An officer came out of the headquarters tent with a map. He pointed a few miles west of where Moss and his squadron had been strafing. Moss called his pilots to gather around so they got a look at the map, too. After a little while, everybody nodded. Moss thought he knew how to get there.

As it happened, the squadron never did. They'd come into U.S.-held West Virginia and were heading for Confederate Virginia when they ran into a squadron of Hound Dogs flying north to shoot up the men in green-gray who wanted to invade their country. Fliers from each side spotted the other at about the same time. Both sides started shooting at about the same time, too.

Nobody'd planned the fight. Nobody'd expected it. Nobody backed away from it, either. It was a wild melee. Both Wrights and Hound Dogs were already on the deck; they had no altitude to give up. They just darted and swooped and fired. Gunners down below-Moss was damned if he knew whose gunners-seemed to blaze away impartially at both sides.

Moss thought he hit a Hound Dog, but the Confederate fighter kept flying. A Wright smashed into the ground. A fireball blossomed where it went down. He swore. That was one of his men surely dead; nobody could hope to bail out this low. A Hound Dog limped off toward the south trailing smoke. Moss hoped it crashed, too.