“Not if they throw their lives away to do it,” Jake said. “We can’t afford gestures like that, not in the spot we’re in. You don’t see me going right up to the front any more, do you? You reckon I don’t want to?”

Patton might have wanted to make a comment or two along those lines. Whatever he wanted, he didn’t do it. Featherston’s record for fighting up near the front all through the Great War spoke for itself. And, when things were going better, he’d already served the guns this time around. You could say a lot of things about him-he knew the things his enemies did say. But the only way you could call him yellow was to lie through your teeth.

Bombs started thudding home a few minutes after Jake and Patton went to the shelter. Dirt pattered down between the planks that shored up the ceiling. Kerosene lamps lit the bombproof. Their flames wavered and jerked when bombs hit close. Once, the junior officer moved one of them back from the edge of the table on which it sat. Jake didn’t get the feeling he was in any great danger, not down here.

“How long you think this’ll go on?” he asked the kid.

“Twenty minutes to a half hour, sir, if it’s the usual kind of raid.”

“They’re trying to wear us down,” Patton said.

They were doing a pretty damn good job of it, too. Jake held that thought to himself. If Patton couldn’t see it for himself, he didn’t need to hear it. “What will the Yankees be doing up top?” Featherston asked the youngster.

“Maybe some raids to grab prisoners and squeeze them.” The officer looked unhappy. “We lost a machine-gun nest like that last week. But they may just sit tight and let the airplanes pound on us.”

“How many do we usually shoot down when they come over like this?”

“A few. Not enough. The antiaircraft guns do what they can, but we really need fighters to make the enemy pay.”

“We need more fighter pilots, too,” Patton said. “Some of the kids who get into Hound Dogs these days…don’t have enough practice before they do. Let’s put it that way. If they live through their first few missions, they learn enough to do all right. But a lot of them don’t, and that costs a man and a machine.”

“I know. Ciphering out what to do about it’s not so easy, though,” Jake said. “If we slow down the training program, the pilots pick up more experience, but we don’t get ’em soon enough to do us much good. If we rush ’em, they’re still green when they come out. Like you say, General, the ones who live do learn.”

“Sometimes they get killed anyway, uh, sir,” the junior officer said. “The damnyankees just have too many airplanes.”

Featherston glared at him. He didn’t like being reminded of that. And, since the front had moved south, Confederate bombers weren’t hitting U.S. factories so hard. The ones out in California and the Pacific Northwest, which the CSA could hardly hit at all, were also making their weight felt. In a war of production, the United States had the edge-and they were using it.

After a little more than half an hour, the bombs stopped falling. “Let’s get up there and see what the hell they did to us this time,” Jake said.

They’d turned the area into one of the less pleasant suburbs of hell, that was what. Craters pocked the red earth. Smoke rose here and there from fires the bombs had set. Several motorcars lay flipped over onto one side or on their roofs. Stretcher bearers and ambulances took casualties back to aid stations. The wounded men groaned or screamed, depending on how badly hurt they were. Nobody shouted, “Freedom!”

Biting his lip, Featherston said, “It’s a bastard, isn’t it?”

“Can’t fight a war without casualties, sir,” Patton said.

“I know that,” Jake said impatiently-he couldn’t let the general think he’d found a weak spot. “But I didn’t reckon they could do so much damage so quick. What if they did push through after an air raid like that? Could we stop ’em?”

He watched Patton pick his response with care. Patton, after all, was the general whose flank attack through the mountains hadn’t driven the USA out of Tennessee and Kentucky, and the general who hadn’t held Chattanooga when it desperately needed holding. “Sir, we’d make it mighty warm for them,” Patton said at last.

That meant he didn’t know. Jake had no trouble reading between the lines. “If they break out again, we’re in a lot of trouble. A lot of trouble, you hear me?”

“We’re doing everything we can with what we’ve got,” Patton said. “That’s the Lord’s truth. If you can pull any more rabbits out of your hat, I’d love to have ’em. Maybe those rockets you talked about will do some good. I hope so. But if there’s anything bigger, I sure want to get my hands on it as quick as I can.”

Jake thought of Professor FitzBelmont and his team at Washington University. He could still win-the CSA could still win-if they got their uranium bomb built faster than the damnyankees did. If the USA beat them to that punch…Well, if that happened, a breakout in Georgia wouldn’t matter any more.

“I may have something for you, General, but I don’t know when yet,” Featherston said. “When you get it, though, it’ll be a humdinger.”

Patton looked northwest. “Sir, it had better be,” he said.

Flora Blackford smiled whenever she got a letter from Joshua. That wasn’t often enough to suit her-two a day wouldn’t have been enough to suit her-but he did write two or three times a week, when he found the chance and wasn’t too tired. Camp Pershing was in upstate New York, between Rochester and Syracuse. To Flora, that was the back of beyond. Joshua liked the weather. How he’d like it when September turned to November and then to January was liable to be another story.

He even liked the food in the mess halls, which was a truly alarming thought. By what Flora gathered from his letters, they fried everything and let him eat as much as he wanted. To an eighteen-year-old, that made a pretty good start on heaven.

He wrote about how they were whipping him into shape, and how he was stronger and faster than he’d ever been. They were turning him into the best kind of killer they knew how to manufacture. Part of Flora hated that-she didn’t want him conscripted at all. But if he had to wear the green-gray uniform, shouldn’t he be a fit, well-trained soldier? Wouldn’t that give him the best chance of coming home in one piece?

She wished she hadn’t thought of it that way. She wished she didn’t have to think of it that way. As a Congresswoman, as a President’s widow, her wishes usually came true. Not the ones that had to do with Joshua, not any more. He had wishes of his own, and the will to thwart her. He had them, and he used them, and she had to pray his enthusiastic patriotism didn’t get him killed.

The next morning, someone blew himself up while Flora was on her way in to the battered hall where Congress met in Philadelphia. The blast was only a couple of blocks away, and made the taxi’s window rattle. “Gottenyu!” she exclaimed. “Was that what I’m afraid it was?”

“I think so, ma’am.” The driver was close to sixty, and one of the hands he put on the wheel was a two-pronged hook. “Those crazy bastards don’t know when to quit.”

“You don’t even know who it was,” Flora said.

“Do I need to?” he returned. “Whoever’d strap on explosives and push the button’s gotta be nuts, right?”

“You’d hope so.” But Flora wasn’t so sure. Apparently rational, cold-blooded groups were starting to use people bombs for a very basic reason: they worked. Nothing else disrupted life the way they did. Every time you got on a bus, you looked at all the other passengers, wondering if you could spot the one about to martyr himself-or herself-for the sake of a Cause. And those other people were looking at you, wondering if you were that one.

A Mormon unhappy with the truce terms? A Confederate agent who’d got close to somebody Jake Featherston wanted dead before pushing the button? Somebody with a personal grievance and access to explosives? A genuine nut? She wouldn’t know till she heard over the wireless or read the answer in the paper.