“That’s the idea, all right,” Jake agreed. Koenig didn’t know anything about the uranium bomb. Featherston didn’t tell him anything, either. That secret couldn’t be too tightly held. He did say, “Starting day after tomorrow, Richmond’ll be a better place. You go in right at sunup like usual?”

“That’s what I’ve got in mind. We’ll have all day to move ’em out then. Yankee bombers aren’t likely to complicate things by daylight, either,” Koenig answered, and Jake nodded. As far as he was concerned, the difference between day and night was largely arbitrary. He’d always been a night owl, and spending so much time underground only encouraged him to catnap around the clock.

He was asleep at sunrise the day the cleanout started, but he got a wakeup call: literally, for the telephone by his cot jangled. That telephone didn’t ring unless something big was going on. He grabbed it in the middle of the second ring. “Featherston,” he said hoarsely, and then, “What the fuck have the damnyankees done to us now?”

“Not the damnyankees, Mr. President.” Ferd Koenig’s voice was on the other end of the line. “It’s the goddamn niggers. We’ve got…” He paused, maybe looking for a way to sugarcoat what came next, but he almost always did speak his mind, and this morning proved no exception: “We’ve got an uprising on our hands.”

Jake sat bolt upright. “What’s going on? Fill me in fast.”

“Damn smokes must’ve known we were coming for ’em,” the Attorney General answered. “We’ve already had, I dunno, six or eight people bombs go off. They’ve got rifles and grenades and Featherston Fizzes and a couple of machine guns, anyway. They mined the streets into the colored quarter, the sneaky bastards, and they blew two armored cars to hell and gone. It’s a fight, sir, nothing else but.”

“Son of a bitch. Son of a motherfucking bitch,” Jake Featherston said. “All right, if they want a fight, they can damn well have one. Let me get hold of the War Department. If we have to, we’ll blow up the whole nigger part of town”-basically, southeast Richmond-“and all the coons inside it. That’ll do, by God.” He sounded as if he looked forward to it. The reason for that was simple: he did.

“All right, Mr. President. I wanted to let you know,” Koenig said.

“Well, now I know. Get off the line, and I’ll get you what you need to finish the job.” Jake waited till the Attorney General hung up, then called Nathan Bedford Forrest III. He wasn’t surprised to find the chief of the General Staff at his desk. “Forrest, the niggers are raising a ruckus. What can we pull from north of here to squash those stinking, backstabbing shitheels flat?”

“Well, sir, there is a problem with that,” Forrest said slowly. “If we pull too much or make it too obvious what we’re doing, the damnyankees are liable to try and break through up there. They’re liable to make it, too-we’re already stretched pretty damn thin north of the city.”

“They won’t do it.” Jake sounded very sure. He wondered why. Then he found an answer: “They’re building up out West, not right here. You know that as well as I do.” He even thought he was telling the truth. And he added, “Besides, we can’t let the niggers get away with this kind of crap, or we’ll have trouble from here to fucking Guaymas. I want men. I want armor. I want artillery. And I want Asskickers. By the time they all get done, won’t be a nigger left on his feet in there.”

He waited. If Nathan Bedford Forrest III did any more bitching, the C.S. General Staff would have a new chief in nothing flat. Forrest must have sensed as much, too, for he said, “All right, Mr. President. They’ll get here as fast as they can.”

“Faster than that,” Featherston said, but it was only reflex complaint; Forrest had satisfied him. He slammed down the telephone, quickly dressed, and did something he didn’t do every day: he went up above ground.

Shockoe Hill gave him a good vantage point. When he looked southeast, he swore at the black smoke rising over the colored part of Richmond. He heard the rattle of small-arms fire and the occasional explosion, too. “Christ!” he said. The police and stalwarts and Party Guards always came loaded for bear, just in case. Well, they found a bear and then some this time.

Nathan Bedford Forrest III proved good as his word. About half an hour later, the first Mule dive bombers screamed down out of the sky above the colored quarter. Whatever the blacks had in the way of small arms, they didn’t have any antiaircraft guns. The flat, harsh crump! of bursting bombs echoed across Richmond.

But the Confederate Asskickers weren’t the only airplanes in the sky. U.S. fighters, flying at not much above rooftop level, darted over southeastern Richmond to strafe the people cleaning out the Negroes. Then they zoomed away to the north again.

Jake Featherston did some more swearing at that, swearing sulfurous enough to make his guards and the crews of the antiaircraft guns on the cratered Gray House grounds stare at him in startled admiration. He didn’t know whether the damnyankees had urged Richmond’s Negroes to rise. He didn’t know, and he hardly cared. He did know they had good spies inside the city, to hear about it and take advantage of it so fast.

He called for his driver and pointed toward the trouble. “Take me down there, quick as you can.”

“Uh, yes, Mr. President.” The driver saluted. But then he went on, “Sir, what good will you be able to do there? You don’t want to give the coons a shot at you.”

“Don’t tell me what I want to do,” Jake snapped. “Just get moving, goddammit.”

The driver did. People were in the habit of doing what Jake Featherston said. A good thing, too, he thought. A damn good thing. Twenty minutes later, he was at what was for all practical purposes the fighting front. He found Ferd Koenig looking ridiculous with a helmet on his jowly head. A moment later, when a bullet cracked past, Featherston wished for a helmet of his own-not that any helmet ever made would stop a direct hit.

“It’s a war, Mr. President,” Koenig said unhappily.

“I see that.” Featherston wasn’t unhappy. He was furious. If the Negroes thought they could get away with this, they needed to think again. “Send in everybody we’ve got,” he told Koenig. “This has to be stamped out right now.”

“Shouldn’t we wait till the soldiers get here?” the Attorney General asked, licking his lips. “Been kind of hot for the manpower we have.”

“Send them in,” Featherston repeated. “When we have the soldiers later, we’ll use ’em. But if we can end it in a hurry, we’ll do that. We’ve already got the Asskickers in action. What more do you want, egg in your beer?”

So the attack went in. And the Negro fighters, waiting in prepared positions, shredded it. Wounded whites staggered back out of the fighting. So did overage cops who looked as if they were on the point of having heart attacks. They killed some Negroes and brought out some others, but they didn’t break the line. Jake Featherston swore yet again. Now he’d have to do it the hard way.

From the bridge, Sam Carsten looked at the Josephus Daniels with a kind of fond dismay. They’d done strange things to his ship. Her paint was the wrong shade of gray. Sheet metal changed the outline of the bridge and the gun turrets. Her sailors wore whites of the wrong cut. His own uniform was dark gray, not blue, and so were the rest of the officers’.

By the name painted on both sides of her bow, the Josephus Daniels was the CSS Hot Springs, a Confederate destroyer escort operating in the North Atlantic. The main danger coming south from Boston was that she would run into a U.S. patrol aircraft or submersible and get sunk by her own side. The Confederate naval ensign, a square version of the C.S. battle flag, completed the disguise.

“If they capture us, they’ll shoot us for spies.” Lieutenant Pat Cooley didn’t sound worried. He was almost childishly excited at playing dress-up. The possibility of getting shot hardly seemed real to him.