Before long, they left the overenthusiastic gunners behind. From the air, the battlefield looked much more like those from the Great War than the Ohio ones had. Because the front had moved slowly here, things on both sides of it had been pounded and cratered in a way they hadn't farther west. The bombed-out landscape took Jonathan back half a lifetime across the years.

There was the Rappahannock. Hardly the blink of an eye later, there was the Rapidan, and the U.S. toehold on the far bank. The Wilderness had surely looked like what it was even before war came to it. Bombs and artillery and entrenchments did nothing to improve it.

Moss didn't want to shoot up his own side, even if his own side hadn't been shy about shooting at him. Green flares went up from the ground to mark U.S. positions. Anything beyond them was fair game. He swooped low over the battlefield, shooting up trenches and trucks and anything that caught his eye. A column of men in butternut tramping up a road dissolved like maple sugar in water under machine-gun fire.

Whoops of glee filled Moss' earphones. He let out shouts when he was shooting things up, too. It was fine sport-none finer-if you didn't think about the havoc you were wreaking on the ground. Watching trucks go up in flames, watching ant-sized men scatter in all directions, was like being inside an adventure film.

This had a drawback adventure films didn't: people shot back at you here. Confederate antiaircraft gunners and machine gunners and riflemen filled the air with lead. Strafing runs were more dangerous than bomber escort because of all the small-arms fire that couldn't touch you at altitude. Moss never worried about it very much. It was just something that came with the mission.

He was clawing his way up off the deck to go around for another pass when his engine suddenly quit. Smoke and steam gushed from it. Oil streamed back and smeared his windshield. A chunk of metal from the cowling slammed off the bulletproof glass, too.

"Shit," he said, and then something stronger. He gave the altimeter a quick glance-two thousand feet. If he didn't get out now, he never would. He cranked back the canopy, stood up in his seat, and bailed out.

He got away from the stricken fighter without smashing against the tail-always an escaping pilot's first worry. As soon as he was free, he yanked the ripcord. He didn't have a lot of time to waste, not down that low. The parachute opened with a loud whump! Moss' vision went red for a few seconds, then slowly cleared.

Another, smaller, whump! was a bullet going through the silk canopy above his head. He was a target hanging up here in the sky. If the Confederates on the ground wanted to shoot him, they could. They could shoot him by accident, too. Till he got down, he couldn't do anything about anything.

A tall column of black, greasy smoke rising from the ground not too far away had to be the Wright's funeral pyre. He shuddered. If the canopy had jammed, it would have been his funeral pyre, too.

Here came the ground. He steered away from a stand of trees and towards a clearing. Then he wondered if he'd made a mistake, because soldiers in butternut came out of the woods. No help for it now. He bent his knees, bracing for the landing. He twisted an ankle, but that was all.

As he struggled to get out of the parachute harness, the soldiers ran up to him. He looked down the barrels of several automatic rifles and submachine guns. "Surrender!" three men yelled at the same time.

"Well, what the hell else am I going to do?" Moss asked irritably. "There!" He shed the harness. He knew of a man who'd had to cut his way free, and had cut off the tip of his thumb without even noticing till later.

One of the Confederates had a single bar on either side of his collar: a second lieutenant. "Can you walk, Yankee?" he asked.

"Let's see." Gingerly, Moss got to his feet and put weight on that ankle. "Kind of."

"Pull his teeth, somebody," the lieutenant said. A corporal plucked the.45 automatic from Moss' belt. The downed fighter pilot looked at it as if it belonged to somebody else-which it did, now. He'd been about as likely to yank it out and start shooting as to sprout wings and fly away without his airplane. Of course, the Confederates didn't know that. To them, if not to himself, he was still a dangerous character.

They also relieved him of his wristwatch. That was a different story. He let out a squawk: "My wife gave me that watch." It was one of the last things he had by which to remember Laura.

The lieutenant stuck it in his pocket. "And so?" he asked coolly. Moss wondered whether a sob story would do him any good. He didn't wonder for more than about three seconds, though. They didn't have to take prisoners, no matter what the Geneva Convention said. Not every fighting man who fell into enemy hands ended up in a POW camp. If they shot him now, who'd know? Who'd care? Nobody and nobody, respectively. When Moss kept his mouth shut, the lieutenant nodded and said, "I reckoned you were a smart fellow. Now get moving."

He got moving. He couldn't go very fast, but they didn't push him. As long as they were herding him along, they were doing something clearly line-of-duty and just as clearly not very hard. That came close to a soldier's ideal. One of them even cut a branch off a pine and trimmed it with his bayonet to make Moss a walking stick. He took it gratefully. It helped.

They'd spread camouflage netting and branches over their tents. That must have worked; they didn't seem to have been shot up. The lieutenant took Moss into a tent where a man in his thirties with three bars on each side of his collar-a captain-sat behind a folding table doing paperwork. "Captured the damnyankee flier we heard going down," the lieutenant said proudly.

"Good work." By the casual way the captain said it, this sort of thing happened every day, which was bullshit of the purest ray serene. The captain looked at Moss and said, "For you, the war is over."

How many bad films about the Great War had he seen, to come out with a line like that? Moss almost laughed in his face. But it wasn't really a laughing matter, not when he could still suffer an unfortunate accident-and when the captain was right. "Looks that way to me, too," Moss said.

The captain got down to business. "Give me your particulars."

"Jonathan Moss. Major, U.S. Army." He rattled off his pay number. He knew it as well as he knew his name.

"What was your mission?" the Confederate officer asked.

"I've told you everything the laws of war say I have to," Moss answered, and waited to see what happened next. If the captain felt like giving him the third degree… he couldn't do a whole hell of a lot about it.

But the man just said, "Well, we can't keep you here. We don't have the setup to hold prisoners. Jenkins!"

"Yes, sir!" the lieutenant said.

"Take him into Spotsylvania. They'll have a jail there. He won't get out till they can take him down to the Carolinas or Georgia or one of those places where they've got themselves POW camps."

"Yes, sir," the lieutenant repeated. Into Spotsylvania Moss went. Hell of a name for a town, he thought, but that was one more thing he kept quiet about. The auto was of Confederate make, but looked and performed like one built in the USA. Two soldiers with submachine guns sitting behind Moss discouraged any thoughts of adventure.

The jail was a squat red-brick building. The sheriff considerately gave Moss a cell as far away from the drunk tank as he could. It had a cot and a chamber pot and a pitcher and cup and basin. The water was cool, not cold. Moss drank it anyway. The bars all looked very solid. He rattled them. They were. He sighed and lay down on the cot. For you, the war is over. And so it was.

Brigadier General Abner Dowling was not a happy man. For Dowling, that made anything but a man-bites-dog headline. What with long service under George Armstrong Custer, even longer service in hate-filled Utah, and brief service trying to hold back the Confederate thrust into Ohio, he hadn't had a lot to be happy about. When some of your fonder memories were of a Salt Lake City sporting house, you hadn't lived life for the fun of it.