He sighed. Sure as hell, the senior female guard officer would come around and complain that her girls didn’t get a chance to help with the unloading. She’d done that at least half a dozen times. She wanted them to get what she thought was their fair share of the loot.

“Too damn bad,” Pinkard muttered. In case something out here went wrong, he didn’t want a bunch of flabbling women trying to fix it, even (or maybe especially) if they carried submachine guns, too. They were all right with barbed wire to back them up. They even had advantages over men. Fewer of them had affairs with Negro women. But when they did, they really fell in love with their colored partners. That happened much less often with the men.

By now, the female guards knew how to get the colored women and children into the asphyxiating trucks and the bathhouse on that side of the camp without panicking them. The ones who couldn’t manage that were gone. Jeff had had to be firm about that; the guards in skirts had powerful backers in Richmond. But nobody was more powerful than Ferd Koenig and Jake Featherston, and he’d got his way.

Camp Determination got another shipment of Negroes the next day, and two more the day after that. It seemed like old times again. Barracks started filling up as prisoners came in faster than the camp could process them. That was how Jeff thought of it, and that was how it went down on every report. It seemed so much more…sanitary than talking about killing.

There was some trouble with the prisoners from the last trainload on the second day. As they lined up to “get deloused and bathed,” a man shouted, “You ain’t gwine give us no baths! You gwine kill us all!”

He wasn’t wrong, either in general or in particular. Two guards emptied their submachine guns at him. By the time they got done, he had more holes than a colander. They hit other prisoners, too-only fool luck kept them from hitting other guards. Nobody could stay smooth and polite after that. The only way the guards got the Negroes into the bathhouse was by threatening to kill them all on the spot if they didn’t get moving.

“An ugly business,” Jeff said when he got to the bottom of it. “I hope that damn troublemaking nigger cooks in hell forever. All his fault.”

“Yes, sir,” agreed the guard officer in charge of those prisoners. “We did everything we could.”

“We got the job done-that’s what counts most,” Pinkard said. “Maybe things’ll slow down again so all the spooks who saw this get processed. Then they won’t have the chance to say anything to anybody else. That’s what really matters.”

“Yes, sir,” the guard said.

“We’ll have endless trouble if we don’t keep it smooth. I mean endless,” Jeff went on. “Most of the guards I’ve got here, they didn’t serve at a place like Camp Dependable. They don’t know what it’s like when you have to reduce populations by hand.” He meant marching Negroes out into the swamp and shooting them. Saying what he said was easier on the spirit. “They don’t know what it’s like to have the niggers knowing their population’s gonna get reduced, neither. It’s like sitting on a bomb with the fuse primed, that’s what. You hear me?”

“Uh, yes, sir,” the guard officer said once more. He was getting more than he bargained for, more than he wanted, but he couldn’t do a thing about it.

And Jefferson Pinkard still wasn’t through. “If any little thing goes wrong then, the fuse catches and the bomb goes up. And then it blows your fuckin’ ass off. You aim to let that happen? We gonna let that happen?”

“No, sir!” Now the guard got to say something else. It was the right answer, too.

“All right, then,” Jeff growled. “Get the hell out of here, and we’ll see if we can pick up the processing. More niggers we do handle before we get the next trainload in, easier things’ll be from then on out.”

Instead of agreeing this time-or even disagreeing-the guard got the hell out of there, as Jeff had said. Pinkard nodded to himself. Telling other people what to do was an awful lot better than getting told. Where he was now, the only people who could tell him what to do were the Attorney General of the CSA and the President. No wonder I don’t like getting calls from Richmond, he thought.

Then he laughed, because somebody else could tell him what to do: his wife. He laughed again. That was true of any ordinary family man, and what else was he? “Got a new young one on the way,” he said wonderingly. He hadn’t expected that, but he liked it pretty well, even if Edith did have morning sickness all day long. He looked out over the camp and nodded. “I’m doing this for him, by God.”

Major Angelo Toricelli stuck his head into Abner Dowling’s office. “I have the reply from the War Department decoded, sir.”

“Oh, good,” Dowling said, and then, after getting a look at his adjutant’s face, “No, I take it back. It isn’t going to be what I wanted to hear, is it?”

“I’m afraid not, sir.” Toricelli walked in and set a sheet of paper on Dowling’s desk.

“Thanks.” The commander of the U.S. Eleventh Army peered down through his reading glasses. When he looked over the tops of them, Toricelli was in perfect focus, but the typewritten text in front of him blurred into illegibility.

He would just as soon have had it stay unreadable. Philadelphia told him he not only couldn’t have any more barrels-he couldn’t have any new artillery, either. He got the impression he was lucky to be able to keep what he had, and that it had taken special intercession from the Pope, or possibly from the Secretary of War, to keep him supplied with ammunition.

“So much for that,” he muttered.

“Sir?” Toricelli said.

“Philadelphia got all hot and bothered about Camp Determination-for about a month,” Dowling said. “Now they’ve got bigger fish to fry. Morrell’s drive into Tennessee is going well. I’m not complaining, mind you-don’t get me wrong. We need to give Featherston a couple of good ones right in the teeth. Lord knows he’s given us too many. But that means they’re forgetting everybody west of Morrell again.”

“Colonel DeFrancis-” his adjutant began.

Dowling shook his head. “His aircraft have been hitting other targets lately, too. I don’t blame him-we do need to knock out the enemy’s factories. But nobody seems to be paying attention to the poor damned niggers.”

“I’m afraid you’re right,” Major Toricelli said. “Signs are that the Confederates are shipping more blacks to the camp and taking more bodies away from it. We’ve got aerial recon photos showing they’ve dug a new trench in that field where they get rid of the bodies.”

“Bastards,” Dowling said. The word didn’t seem nearly strong enough. He doubted whether the language had words strong enough to say everything he thought about the Confederates who ran Camp Determination, the ones who fed Negroes into it, and the ones who, by backing the Freedom Party, proclaimed that it ought to exist.

Major Toricelli shrugged. “What can we do, sir?” By his tone of voice, he didn’t think the Eleventh Army could do anything.

Under normal circumstances, Dowling would have agreed with him. But circumstances here in west Texas weren’t normal. He couldn’t win the war here, no matter what he did. He couldn’t lose it no matter what he did, either. When he got plucked from Virginia and sent to the wilds of Clovis, New Mexico, they told him he’d be doing his job as long as he didn’t let the Confederates take Santa Fe and Albuquerque. Well, the Confederates damn well wouldn’t. They had to be flabbling about what was going on in Kentucky and Tennessee even more than the United States were. Their defensive force wouldn’t get many new men. He was still surprised it had got that unit of Freedom Party Guards.

“I want you to draft some new orders, Major,” Dowling said. Toricelli raised a questioning eyebrow. Dowling explained: “I want you to order this army to concentrate in and around Lubbock and to prepare for an advance as soon as possible. And get hold of Terry DeFrancis and tell him to get his fanny over here as fast as he can, because we’ll need all the air support we can get.”