“Hello, Captain Shaynbloom,” Morrell said. “What have you got for me today?”

Sol Shaynbloom was thin and pale, with a bent blade of a nose and thick glasses. He looked too much like someone who would go into cryptography to seem quite real, but he was. He handed Morrell a manila folder. “Latest decrypts, sir,” he said, “and some aerial photos to back them up.”

“Let’s see what we’ve got.” Morrell studied the decoded messages and the pictures. “Well, well,” he said at last. “They are getting frisky over there, aren’t they?”

“Yes, sir,” Captain Shaynbloom said. “More of a buildup on our flank than in front of us, as a matter of fact.”

Morrell had a map case on his hip. He pulled out a map and unfolded it. “So-here and here and here, eh?” He pointed. “That’s probably what I’d do in their shoes, too. They’ll try to cut us off and roll us back to the Ohio.”

“Can they?” the codebreaker asked.

“I hope not,” Morrell said mildly. But that wasn’t what the other man wanted to hear. Smiling a little, Morrell went on, “I think we’re ready for them. If we are, your section will have an awful lot to do with it.”

Shaynbloom smiled. “That’s what we’re here for, sir.” Then his smile disappeared. “If we do smash them as they try to break through, I hope they don’t realize how well we’re able to read their codes.”

“No, that wouldn’t be good,” Morrell agreed. “But sometimes the cards aren’t worth anything unless you put them on the table. This feels like one of those times to me.”

“All right, sir. I guess you’re right,” Captain Shaynbloom said.

I’d better be, Morrell thought. Being right in spots like this is what they pay me for. He wasn’t in it for the money, but the extra salary he earned with stars on his shoulder straps acknowledged the extra responsibility he held. And if he was wrong a couple of times, they wouldn’t take the rank or the pay away from him. They would just put him in charge of the beach in Kansas or the mountains in Nebraska and try to forget they’d ever had anything to do with him.

Another command car pulled up alongside the first. “What’s this?” Morrell said. “I thought they only gave one to a customer.” He made it sound like a joke, but his hand dropped to the butt of the.45 on his belt even so. The Confederates had already tried to assassinate him once. They might well be up for another go at him.

But he recognized the officer who got out. First Lieutenant Malcolm Williamson bore almost a family resemblance to Sol Shaynbloom. Both were skinny and pale and fair, and both looked more like graduate students than soldiers. Williamson also wore an unadorned uniform. Saluting both Shaynbloom and Morrell, he handed the latter an envelope. “We just got this, sir.”

“Let’s have a look.” As Morrell opened the envelope, he asked, “Do you know what’s in it? Can I talk about it in front of you?”

“Yes, sir, and in front of the captain,” Williamson answered. “It’s not that kind of thing-you’ll see in a second.”

“Fair enough.” Nodding, Morrell unfolded the paper in the envelope and read the message someone-maybe Williamson-had scrawled on it. “Well, well,” he said. “So General Patton will be in charge of the Confederate thrust. I’m honored…I suppose.”

“I wondered if he would be,” Shaynbloom said. “He’s sort of fallen off the map the past few weeks.”

“He’s back on it now,” Morrell said. “It’s a compliment to me, I guess, but I could do without it.” He’d heard from someone or other that Patton developed his slashing style by studying his own campaigns during the Great War. Maybe that was true, maybe it wasn’t. If it was, it made for another compliment Morrell didn’t really want. Patton was too good at what he did.

“We’ll lick him, sir.” As a lieutenant, Williamson wasn’t prone to the doubts that could cloud a general’s mind. “Who gives a damn how tough he is? We’ve got the horses to ride roughshod over him.” He didn’t even mix his metaphors, a common failing for everyone from the President on down.

“Do we know their precise start time?” Morrell asked. “If we do, we can disrupt them with spoiling bombardments ahead of time. The more we can do to throw their plan and their timing out of whack, the better off we’ll be.”

Williamson and Shaynbloom looked at each other. They even wore the same U.S.-issue steel-framed spectacles, though Shaynbloom’s lenses were noticeably stronger. As one man, they shook their heads. “Haven’t got it yet, sir,” they chorused, Shaynbloom adding, “But it can’t be long.”

“You’re right about that,” Morrell said. “They’ll know they can’t hide a concentration very long. It’ll have to be soon. If you find out exactly when soon is, let me know as fast as you can. We’ll counterpunch if we have to, but getting in the first lick is even better.”

“Yes, sir.” Their voices didn’t sound alike; Williamson’s was an octave deeper. They tore off almost identical salutes, returned to their command cars, and roared off to wherever they worked their code-breaking magic. Morrell didn’t know where that was; what he didn’t know, he couldn’t spill if captured.

As things worked out, the Confederates announced their own attack. They chose early afternoon to open their bombardment, hoping to catch U.S. soldiers off guard. By the rumble from U.S. batteries, they didn’t.

U.S. airplanes roared into the sky. Morrell couldn’t see where they were taking off from; the fields lay farther behind the lines. But he knew they were up there, which was what counted. The Confederates wouldn’t catch them on the ground, the way they’d caught so many fighters and bombers in Ohio. U.S. Y-ranging gear was pointed east, ready to warn the pilots to get airborne before enemy air attackers arrived. And these days, unlike the way things were in 1941, everybody took Y-ranging-and the Confederates-very seriously indeed.

Those fighters and bombers with the eagle in front of crossed swords didn’t get airborne just to escape C.S. attacks, either. They were loaded for bear. The Confederates had to deploy through several gaps in the mountains before they could debouche. The harder they got bombed and strafed while still in column, the slower and clumsier their deployment would be. The less they can bring to the dance, Morrell thought, remembering how he met Agnes not long after the Great War.

She and their daughter, Mildred, were all right. He’d had a letter not long before. The war hadn’t really touched Fort Leavenworth. Out beyond the Mississippi, fighting came in harsh spatters: one that seemed unending over the oil fields in Sequoyah, which each side torched whenever the other seemed about to retake them, and another in west Texas that had heated up lately. Looked at logically, there was no reason on God’s green earth to fight over west Texas. Dark mutters said logic had little to do with it, that the Confederates were up to something really horrible out there, something that needed suppressing regardless of logic.

Having fought without much luck to hold the state of Houston in the USA before Al Smith’s plebiscite, Morrell was ready to believe the worst of west Texas. He was also ready to believe the worst of Jake Featherston and all his Freedom Party pals. The only question in his mind was how bad the worst was out there.

He didn’t even have time to worry about that, except when he got out of the command barrel to stand behind a tree or smoke a cigarette. He spent almost all of the next forty-eight hours in the turret, as a less mobile commander might have spent them in a map room in a headquarters somewhere far behind the line. He was wryly amused to find it worked out about the same either way. Now much of the front-most of the places where the Confederates were trying to break through-lay behind him.

A map room proved better than the turret for at least one reason: it had the space to put up the maps. He was constantly unfolding and refolding them and using cellophane tape to stick them here and there for a little while. Frenchy Bergeron finally lost patience with him. “What happens if the Confederates attack us here, sir?” the gunner asked pointedly. “How am I supposed to fight those fuckers off if I can’t even load my piece?”