That’s what I am, all right. With two shots of morphine in him, the idea didn’t bother Armstrong a bit. “Bring him in!” somebody yelled from the other side of the canvas. In Armstrong went. He smelled ether and other chemicals he couldn’t name-and blood, enough blood for a butcher’s shop. “Where are you hit, soldier?” a bespectacled man asked from behind a surgical mask.

“Leg,” Armstrong answered.

The corpsmen slid him off the stretcher and onto the operating table. The doctor peeled off the bandage he’d put on and studied the wound. “You’re lucky,” he said after perhaps half a minute.

“My ass.” Even doped to the gills, Armstrong knew bullshit when he heard it. “If I was lucky, the fucker would’ve missed me.”

“He’s got you there, Doc,” one of the medics said, laughing.

“Oh, shut up, Rocky,” the surgeon replied without rancor. He turned back to Armstrong. “I’m going to give you a shot of novocaine to numb you up. Then I’ll clean that out. It should heal fine. You may not be as lucky as you like, but you’ll do all right.”

He wasn’t especially gentle, and he didn’t wait for the novocaine to take full effect before he started working with a probe and forceps and a scalpel. Armstrong yipped a couple of times. Then he did more than yip. “Christ on a crutch, Doc, take it easy!” he said.

“Sorry about that.” The surgeon didn’t sound very sorry. He didn’t take it easy, but went on, “No offense, but I want to get you taken care of in a hurry so I can deal with a bad wound if one comes in.”

“Thanks a lot,” Armstrong said. “Easy for you to talk like that-it ain’t your goddamn leg.”

“Well, no,” the medico said. “But it’s not an amputation, either, or a sucking chest, or a belly wound, or a bullet in the head. You’ll be back on duty in six weeks or so. In the meantime, you get to take it easy while you heal. Could be worse.” As he spoke, he did some more snipping. Armstrong yelped again.

After what seemed like forever and was probably about ten minutes, the surgeon gave him a shot. “What’s that?” Armstrong asked suspiciously.

“Tetanus-lockjaw,” the man answered. He eyed Armstrong over his mask. “Locking your jaws might be an improvement, all things considered.”

“Funny, Doc. Har-de-har-har. I’m laughing my ass off, you know what I mean?”

“Get him out of here,” the surgeon told the corpsmen. “Some other poor bastard’ll come along pretty damn quick.”

They carried Armstrong over to a tent next to the aid station and put him on a cot. “Ambulance’ll be along in a while,” one of them said.

“Happy day,” he answered. They were shaking their heads when they left the tent. He couldn’t have cared less.

The tent held a dozen cots. Counting his, five of them were occupied. None of the other wounded men was in any shape to talk. One of them had bloody bandages around his head. One had lost an arm. Two had torso wounds. Three, including the man who’d been shot in the head, were deeply unconscious. The other one moaned from time to time, but didn’t come out with any real words.

Looking at them, listening to them, Armstrong reluctantly decided the smartass surgeon had a point. If he had to get wounded, he could have done a lot worse than catching a hometowner. Despite the morphine and novocaine, his leg barked again. He muttered under his breath. Then he brightened-a little, anyhow. His old man had always thought he wasn’t quite good enough, that he never did enough. If his father tried saying that now, Armstrong promised himself he’d knock his goddamn block off.

Lulu looked into Jake Featherston’s office. “General Forrest is here to see you, Mr. President,” she said.

“Send him in, then,” Jake growled. His secretary nodded and ducked out to bring back the chief of the Confederate General Staff.

Nathan Bedford Forrest III looked pale and pasty: the look of a man who spent most of his time underground and didn’t see the sun very often. Featherston looked the same way, but he hardly noticed it-he saw himself all the time. Forrest nodded to him. “Mr. President,” he said.

“Hello, General.” Jake leaned forward across the desk. “Are we ready to hit back at those damnyankee sons of bitches?”

“General Patton thinks so, sir, and he’s the man on the spot,” Forrest answered.

“He’s the man on the spot, all right,” Jake Featherston said. His eyes went to the map on the wall of his office. The Confederates had been gathering men and materiel east of the Appalachians for weeks, aiming to strike at the U.S. flank. If everything went the way it was supposed to, they could cut off the Yankees in Tennessee and bundle the ones in Kentucky back to the Ohio. That would put the war on even terms again. But if things didn’t go the way he wanted them to…“We can’t afford to fuck this up.”

“Yes, sir,” Nathan Bedford Forrest III said stolidly.

Jake swore under his breath. He’d never thought it would come to this when he ordered his armies into motion against the USA. The Yankees were the ones who were supposed to be fighting for their lives, not his side.

He swore again, on a different note, a moment later. He’d already survived two assassination tries. If the war kept going down the toilet, he knew damn well he’d have to worry about another one. Even a Vice President as pliable as Don Partridge might start getting ideas. So might Clarence Potter-as if he didn’t have them already. But he might decide to do something about them, the cold-blooded son of a bitch. Nathan Bedford Forrest III might get some of his own, too.

“Is security tight?” Jake asked.

“Tight as we know how to make it,” Forest answered.

“It better be. It better be tight as a fifty-dollar whore’s twat,” Jake said, and the chief of the General Staff let out a startled laugh. Featherston went on, “If the damnyankees figure out what we’re up to before we get rolling, they can give us all kinds of grief, right?”

“You’d better believe it, sir. If they’ve got a gopher planted somewhere between here and General Patton’s headquarters, that’s a problem,” Forrest replied. “And if he can pass on whatever he knows, I mean.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Jake said impatiently. “What are the odds?”

“Mr. President, I just don’t know.” Nathan Bedford Forrest III spread his hands. “We still have gophers in the USA and with U.S. forces. The Yankees are bound to be doing the same thing to us. Too goddamn hard for one side to root out all the spies from the other. We just sound too much alike. Whether they’ve got somebody in the right place, whether the son of a bitch can pass on what he picks up, if he picks up anything…We’ll have to find out. I hope to God we don’t find out the hard way, but I can’t be sure.”

Most men in Forrest’s place would have told Jake Featherston what they thought he wanted to hear: that everything was fine, that of course the United States had no chance of finding out what was going on. Reluctantly, Featherston respected the younger man’s honesty. If you promised the moon and couldn’t deliver, wasn’t that worse than not promising in the first place?

“All right. We’ll see what happens.” Jake tried telling himself what he wanted to hear: “Maybe the Yankees won’t believe we’d try coming through the mountains even if some stinking spy tells them we will.”

“Maybe.” But General Forrest sounded dubious. “Remember, sir, that’s General Morrell in charge of their spearhead. He won’t be easy to fool. He’s the kind who’d take armor through the mountains himself, so he’s too likely to think we’d try it, too.”

“I suppose.” Featherston forced himself to nod. “No, you’re bound to be right, dammit. I sure wish we’d punched his ticket for good. Some lousy busybody of a sergeant threw him on his back and toted him out of the line of fire, I hear.”

Nathan Bedford Forrest III didn’t say anything. The expression on his face was hard for Jake to fathom-and then, all of a sudden, it wasn’t. Sure as hell, Forrest was thinking, Takes one to know one. And sure as hell, he was right. Jake damn well had been a lousy busybody of a sergeant. Clarence Potter remembered that, even if Forrest couldn’t.