"Pack a duffel, Angelo," Dowling called to his adjutant. "We're on our way to Philly, and then to Virginia."

"Who takes over here?" Toricelli asked.

"Terry DeFrancis," Dowling replied. "My guess is, his telephone's ringing right about now."

Sure enough, DeFrancis' auto pulled up in front of Eleventh Army headquarters just as Dowling and Toricelli were ready to leave for the airstrip. "Congratulations on getting back to the real war, sir!" DeFrancis called as he jumped out.

"Congratulations to you, General," Dowling said. They shook hands.

"I've got a hot transport waiting for you at the field," DeFrancis said. "It'll take you up to Wichita. I don't know what they've got laid on for you after that, but General Abell sure sounded like he wants you in Philadelphia fast as you can get there."

Dowling and Toricelli threw duffel bags with enough personal belongings to keep them going for a little while into a command car. After one more handshake with DeFrancis, Dowling told the driver, "Step on it!"

"Yes, sir!" The corporal needed no further encouragement. He drove like a bat out of hell-perhaps like a bat a little too eager to go back there.

The two-engined transport took off with an escort of four fighters. Terry DeFrancis hadn't mentioned that. Dowling was grateful all the same. U.S. air power dominated the skies in west Texas, but the Confederates still got fighters up in the air every now and then. Even a hot transport was no match for a Hound Dog.

Neither the Texas Panhandle nor western Sequoyah had suffered too badly in the war. The fighting in Sequoyah was mostly farther east, where the oil wells were. Where the oil wells had been, rather. The oil fields had changed hands several times during the war. Whenever they did, the side pulling out blew them up to deny them to the enemy. The conquerors would start making repairs and then have to retreat themselves-and carry out their own demolitions. By now, Sequoyah's oil wells were some of the most thoroughly liberated real estate on the face of the globe.

In the last war, Sequoyah had started out as Confederate territory. C.S. cavalry raids terrorized Kansas till the USA slowly and painfully overran that state's southern neighbor. These days, though, Wichita was a backwater. The arrival of a major general, even if he was only passing through on his way somewhere else, made airport personnel flabble.

"Your airplane is ready and waiting, sir!" said the major in command of the field.

"Thanks," Dowling said. "Where do I go from here?"

"Uh, St. Louis, sir," the major said. "Didn't they tell you?"

"If they had, would I be asking?" Dowling asked reasonably.

He got into St. Louis just as the sun was setting. That was a relief: he wasn't sure they would have turned on landing lights for his airplane. Confederate bombers from Arkansas came up often enough to leave blackout regulations tightly in place.

At the airport there, they offered him the choice of a Pullman berth on a fast train east or a layover and the first flight out in the morning. He chose the layover. A bed that didn't bounce and shake had its attractions.

He spent less time in it than he would have liked. The Confederates came over at eleven and then again at two. Instead of a bed that didn't bounce, Dowling got two doses of a chilly trench. Bombs whistled down and burst too close for comfort. He wondered if he would be able to fly out the next morning.

He did. The raid left the airport with a working runway, and didn't hit the airplane waiting to take him east. On the way, he got a bird's-eye view of what the war had done to the United States.

Only occasional craters showed on the ground till he flew over what had to be eastern Indiana. From there on, it was one disaster after another: deserted, unplowed farmland, with towns and cities smashed into ruins. How long would repairing the devastation take? How much would it cost? What could the country have done if it didn't have to try to put itself together again? He couldn't begin to guess. That was a question for politicians, not soldiers. But a soldier had no trouble seeing the USA-and the CSA, too-would have been better off without a war.

Though Dowling didn't see what had happened to the Confederate States, he knew that had to be worse than what he was looking at. "If they were smart, they would have left us alone," he said to Major Toricelli.

"If they were smart, they never would have elected that Featherston bastard," his adjutant replied. Dowling nodded-there was another obvious truth.

His airplane landed outside of Pittsburgh to refuel. As it spiraled down toward the runway, he got a good look at what the battle had cost the city. His first thought was, Everything. But that wasn't an obvious truth. Smoke rose from tall stacks-and from some truncated ones-from steel mills that were either back in business or had never gone out of business. Nobody had bothered repairing shell-pocked walls or, sometimes, roofs. Those could wait. The steel? That was a different story. Trucks on the roads, trains in the railroad yards, and barges on the rivers took it where it needed to go.

When he got out of the airplane to stretch his legs and spend a penny, his nose wrinkled. He'd expected the air to be full of harsh industrial stinks, and it was. He hadn't expected the stench of death to linger so long after the fighting ended.

"Not as bad as the graves outside of Camp Determination," Toricelli said.

"Well, no. I don't think anything in the whole world is that bad," Dowling replied. "But this is what the Great War battlefields were like. Most of the ones this time around aren't so foul. They move faster and cover more ground, so there aren't so many bodies all in the same place."

"Except here there are," his adjutant said.

Dowling nodded. "Yeah. Except here there are."

Philadelphia was another bomb-pocked nightmare of a city, another place where factories sent up defiant plumes despite the destruction. A green-gray motorcar met Dowling at the airport. "I'll take you to the War Department, sir," said the bright young captain who accompanied the enlisted driver.

"How bad are these long-range rockets we hear about?" Dowling asked as the auto picked its way through streets often cratered and rubble-strewn.

"They sure aren't good, sir," the captain answered. "First thing you know is, they go boom-and if you're there when they do, then you aren't any more."

That was convoluted, but Dowling got the message. Damage grew worse as the auto got closer to the center of town. A lot of the rockets seemed to have fallen there. Dowling saw the finned stern of one sticking up, and curved sheet metal from a couple of more.

The War Department had taken lots of near misses but no direct hits Dowling saw. He had to show his ID before they let him in. Even after he did, they patted him down. No one apologized-it was part of routine. The captain took him down to John Abell's office. "Good to see you, sir," Abell said, his usual bloodless tones sucking the warmth from the words.

"And you," Dowling replied, which wasn't entirely true but came close enough. He pointed to a map of Virginia on Abell's wall. "What are we going to do to them?"

Abell got up and pointed. "This is what we've got in mind."

Dowling whistled. "Well, whoever came up with it sure didn't think small."

"Thank you," Abell said. That made Dowling blink; the General Staff officer was more likely to see what could go wrong than what could go right. This scheme, though, definitely counted on things going right.

"You really think they're on their last legs, don't you?" Dowling said.

"Last leg," John Abell replied. "They're standing on it in Georgia. If we hit them here, too, the bet is that they fall over."

"It could be." Dowling hesitated, then said the other thing he thought needed saying: "Is General MacArthur really the right man to knock them over?"