The Mississippi was warm. The mud it carried didn’t keep a couple of fish from finding him and nibbling at him. What he would have done if an alligator or snapping turtle had come up to investigate him was a question he was glad he did not have to answer.

He kicked hard, propelling the raft out toward the middle of the Mississippi. One thing he had not taken into account was his small circle of vision with his eyes only a few inches above the water. If he drifted past the C.S. river monitor without spying it, he would feel worse than just foolish.

There it was! That long, low shape, with almost no freeboard, couldn’t be anything else. Someone had described the original Monitor as a cheese box on a raft, which also fit its descendants, both U.S. and C.S., to a tee-although the Confederates billed theirs as river gunboats, refusing to name their kind after a U.S. warship.

McSweeney hung onto the raft with his fingertips, letting as little of himself show as he could. His scheme would have been impossible had the C.S. vessel’s deck been higher above the waterline. As things were, it was just insanely foolhardy. Gordon McSweeney had been doing insanely foolhardy things since the war began. If God willed that he die doing one of them, die he would, praising His name with his last breath.

He wondered what sort of watch the Confederate sailors kept on deck. He knew they didn’t patrol with electric torches. Had they been foolish enough to do so, U.S. sharpshooters on the western bank of the Mississippi would have made them regret it.

He had to kick hard to keep the raft from gliding past the Confederate monitor and down the river. Grabbing the. 45 and the sack of rubberized canvas he’d carried on the raft, he scrambled up onto the monitor’s deck. His bare feet made not a sound on the riveted iron. Somewhere aft, a sentry was pacing; his shoes clanked on the deck.

And here he came. He moved without any particular urgency, but as much on his appointed rounds as a postman might have done. McSweeney had no trouble keeping the turret between himself and the man who strode on through the darkness, never expecting trouble could come on his watch when the Confederate States so dominated this stretch of the Mississippi River.

Whether he expected it or not, trouble shared the deck with him. McSweeney undid the sack and drew from it two one-pound blocks of TNT, twenty seconds’ worth of fuse for each, and a match safe that had stood up to all the rain and mud nearly three years in the trenches had thrown at it. The matches inside rattled. He glared at them, willing them to be silent, then crimped the fuses to the explosive blocks.

Silent himself, he scuttled round the turret to the openings from which the barrels of the monitors’ big guns projected. Once he got there, he reluctantly set down the. 45 so he could take a match out of the trusty safe and strike it.

The hiss of the match as it caught was tiny. So was the light that came from it. One or the other, though, alerted the sentry. “Who goes there?” he demanded, his voice suddenly sharp and alert.

“Damnation,” McSweeney muttered, and only saved himself from the blasphemy he so despised by hastily adding, “to the enemies of the Lord.” He lit the fuses attached to the explosive blocks, tossed them inside the monitor’s turret, as far to the back as he could, and snatched up the pistol once more.

“Who goes there?” the sentry repeated. Now his shoes rang on the deck as he hurried to investigate.

McSweeney fired three quick rounds at him. One of them must have hit, for the Reb let out a shriek. McSweeney didn’t care, except insofar as the fellow didn’t get a chance to shoot at him. He threw away the pistol and dove into the Mississippi. He’d cut things too fine, both metaphorically and, with the fuses, literally as well.

He swam away from the monitor as fast as he could. He tried to go as deep as he could. His ears ached in protest. He ignored them, knowing better than they what was about to happen.

No matter how muddy the Mississippi was, suddenly the surface of the water, high over his head, lit up bright as day, bright as hellfire. The explosion behind him sent him tumbling through the water, more than half stunned. Why he didn’t open his mouth and breathe in half the river, he never knew. Either the Lord watched over him or he was simply too stubborn to drown.

After a while, his lungs told him he had to breathe or die. By then, the chunks of iron-some of them bigger than he was-had stopped raining down out of the sky. When he broke the surface, he was amazed he’d swum so far from the Confederate monitor-till he remembered the explosion had given him a big push.

He’d hoped his explosives would touch off the magazine inside the turret, and had they! Had they ever! Bombs bursting in air, he thought as one explosion followed another. God had wanted him to live, and so he lived. Surely no one aboard the monitor did, not now. He struck out for the Arkansas bank of the river. His slow backstroke let him rest whenever he needed.

Alarm tingled through him when he finally splashed up onto the bank of the Mississippi. What if the current had swept him beyond the limits of U.S.-held territory and into land the Rebels still controlled? Then he would have to make his way north, that was all. As long as he was on the right side of the river, being captured never entered his mind.

The sentry who challenged him when he came up onto the land was a pure Yankee, from Maine or New Hampshire. He didn’t believe McSweeney’s explanation of who he was or why he was naked. Neither did his superior, nor that fellow’s superior, either.

Calm as could be, McSweeney kept explaining who he was, what he’d done, and how he’d done it. They gave him clothes. Eventually, they got hold of his service record. That made them argue less and gape more. Then they found out he wasn’t with the company where he was supposed to be, which made them begin to wonder if he might not be in front of them after all.

It was mid-morning before they brought Ben Carlton down to identify him. When Carlton did, they stared and stared. “Oak-leaf cluster,” they kept muttering. “Medal of Honor with an oak-leaf cluster. Who would dare write up the citation, though? Who would believe it?”

“Can you please send me back to my unit?” McSweeney asked. “I’ve had a long night, and I’m very tired.” Everyone kept right on staring at him.

Scipio wished he were anywhere but trapped in the swamps by the Congaree River. He’d wished that ever since Anne Colleton sent him here. He’d never wished it so intensely as now.

From out on the perimeter, the fighters of the Congaree Socialist Republic kept up a continuous crackle of fire. The Confederate militiamen were not nearly so good, man for man, as the Reds, but they had more men and, finally, what looked to be a determination to press the fight.

Cassius looked worried. Scipio had never before seen Cassius look worried, not even when the CSA put down the larger version of the Congaree Socialist Republic, the version that had tried to carry the Red revolution to a wide stretch of South Carolina.

“ Damn that Cherry!” he burst out now. “She don’ listen to nobody but her ownself, an’ she weren’t as smart as she reckon she were. An’ now she ain’t here no more, an’ I feels like I’s missin’ my lef’ hand.”

“Maybe you is,” Scipio said, “but maybe you is just as well off without it, too. If she was your left hand, you was always watchin’ it to make sure it don’t stab you in the back.”

“Now I knows that ain’t a lie, but I misses she all de same,” Cassius answered. “What she do, she do for the sake o’the revolution. Anything gits in the way o’the revolution, she sure as hell push it off to de side.” He sighed. “She sure as hell try and push me off to de side, you right about dat. But even so, I misses she. She hate de ’pressors more’n anything in the whole wide world.”