Somewhere not far from Columbus, some other Confederate spy would be waiting for a different signal. He would have a different way to respond. If what he said didn't match what the fellow at the wireless station reported, a red flag would-with luck-go up.

Potter snorted. Without luck, nobody would notice the discrepancy till too late. In that case, some Confederate soldiers would catch hell. It wasn't as if soldiers didn't catch hell all the time.

Air-raid sirens began to warble. That was what the instruction posters said, anyhow. When the siren begins to warble, that is your signal to take cover. It didn't sound like a warble to Potter. It sounded like the noise a mechanical dog would make if a giant stepped on its tail. howlhowlhowlhowlhowlhowl endlessly, maddeningly repeated…

The damnyankees had nerve, coming over Richmond in broad daylight-either nerve or several screws loose. Potter locked up his important papers in a desk drawer, then headed for the stairway to the shelters in the War Department subbasement-not far from where he'd formerly worked, in fact. He'd just reached the stairwell when the antiaircraft guns started banging away. "I hope we shoot down all of those bastards," a young lieutenant said.

"That would be nice," Potter agreed. "Don't hold your breath till it happens, though." The lieutenant gave him an odd look. It was one he'd seen a great many times before. "Don't worry, sonny," he said. "I'm as Confederate as you are, no matter what I sound like."

"All right, sir," the lieutenant said. "I don't reckon they'd make you a general if you weren't." His voice was polite. His face declared he didn't altogether believe what he was saying. Potter had seen that before, too.

Bombs were already screaming down when Potter got into the shelter. It was hot and crowded and not very comfortable. The ground shook when bombs started bursting. The lights overhead flickered. The shelter would be a hell of a lot less pleasant if they went out. Crammed into the sweaty dark with Lord only knew how many other people… He shuddered.

More bombs rained down. A woman-a secretary? a cleaning lady?-screamed. Everybody in the shelter seemed to take a deep breath at the same time, almost enough to suck all the air out of the room. One scream had probably come close to touching off a swarm of others.

Crump! The lights flickered again. This time, they did go out, for about five seconds-long enough for that woman, or maybe a different one, to let out another scream. A couple of men made noises well on the way toward being screams, too. Then the lights came on again. Several people laughed. The mirth had the high, shrill sound of hysteria.

Behind Potter, somebody started saying, "Jesus loves me. Jesus loves me. Jesus loves me," again and again, as relentless as the air-raid siren. Potter almost shouted at him to make him shut up-almost but not quite. Telling the man that maybe Jesus loved him but no one else did might make the Intelligence officer feel better, but would only wound the poor fellow who was trying to stay brave.

The next explosions were farther away than the blast that had briefly knocked out the lights. Potter let out a sigh of relief. It wasn't the only one.

"How long have we been down here?" a man asked.

Potter looked at his watch. "Twenty-one-no, twenty-two-minutes now."

Several people loudly called him a liar. "It's got to be hours," a man said.

"Feels like years," someone else added. Potter couldn't very well quarrel with that, because it felt like years to him, too. But it hadn't been, and he was too habitually precise to mix up feelings and facts.

After what seemed like an eternity but was in truth another fifty-one minutes, the all-clear sounded. "Now," somebody said brightly, "let's see if anything's left upstairs."

Had the War Department taken a direct hit, they would have known about it. Even so, the crack spawned plenty of nervous laughter. People began filing out of the shelter. This was only the third or fourth time the USA had bombed Richmond. Everybody felt heroic at enduring the punishment. And someone said, "Philadelphia's bound to be catching it worse."

Half a dozen people on the stairs nodded. Potter started to himself. He wondered why. Yes, there was a certain consolation in the idea that the enemy was hurting more than your country. But if he blew you up, or your family, or your home, or even your office, what your side did to him wouldn't seem to matter so much… would it? Vengeance couldn't make personal anguish go away… could it?

That near miss hadn't blown up Potter's office. But it had blown the glass out of the windows, except for a few jagged, knife-edged shards. The soles of his shoes crunched on glittered pieces of glass in the carpet. More sparkled on his desk. He couldn't sit down on his swivel chair without doing a good, thorough job of cleaning it. Otherwise, he'd get his bottom punctured. He shrugged. A miss was about as good as a mile. An hour or two of cleanup, maybe not even that, and he'd be back on the job.

Lieutenant-Colonel Tom Colleton peered north toward Grove City, Ohio. It wasn't much of a city, despite the name; it couldn't have held more than fifteen hundred people-two thousand at the outside. What made it important was that it was the last town of any size at all southwest of Columbus. Once the Confederate Army drove the damnyankees out of Grove City, they wouldn't have any place to make a stand this side of the capital of Ohio.

Trouble was, they knew it. They didn't want to retreat those last eight miles. If the Confederates got into Grove City, they could bring up artillery here and add to the pounding Columbus and its defenses were taking. U.S. forces were doing their best to make sure that didn't happen.

Grove City lay in the middle of a fertile farming belt. Now, though, shells and bombs were tearing those fields, not tractors and plows. Barrel tracks carved the most noticeable furrows in the soil. The smell of freshly turned earth was sweet in Colleton's nostrils; he crouched in a foxhole he'd just dug for himself, though the craters pocking the ground would have served almost as well.

More shells churned up the dirt. The U.S. soldiers had an artillery position just behind Grove City, and they were shooting as hard and as fast as they could. Somewhere not far away, a Confederate soldier started screaming for his mother. His voice was high and shrill. Tom Colleton bit his lip. He'd heard screams like that in the last war as well as this one. They meant a man was badly hurt. Sure enough, these quickly faded.

Tom cursed. He was in his late forties, but his blond, boyish good looks and the smile he usually wore let him lie ten years off his age. Not right now, not after he'd just listened to a soldier from his regiment die.

And when bombs or shells murdered his men, he couldn't help wondering whether his sister had made those same noises just before she died. If Anne hadn't been in Charleston the day that goddamn carrier chose to raid the city… If she hadn't, the world would have been a different place. But it was what it was, and that was all it ever could be.

"Wireless!" Tom shouted. "God damn it to hell, where are you?"

"Here, sir." The soldier with the wireless set crawled across the riven ground toward the regimental commander. The heavy pack on his back made him a human dromedary. "What do you need, sir?"

"Get hold of division headquarters and tell 'em we'd better have something to knock down those Yankee guns," Colleton answered. "As best I can make out, they're in map square B-18."

"B-18. Yes, sir," the wireless operator repeated. He shouted into the microphone. At last, he nodded to Tom. "They've got the message, sir. Permission to get my ass back under cover?"

"You don't need to ask me that, Duffy," Tom said. The wireless man crawled away and dove into a shell hole. Soldiers said two shells never came down in the same place. They'd said that in the Great War, too, and often died proving it wasn't always true.