“Sir?” The blank look was back on the kid’s baby face.

Morrell clapped him on the shoulder. “Never mind. Point me at a typewriter. We do have messengers we can rely on, right?” If the lieutenant told him no, he was up the well-known creek without even a canoe, much less a paddle.

But the young officer nodded. “Oh, yes, sir. They’re very reliable, and they make sure to destroy what they’re carrying if they run into trouble.”

“That’s what I wanted to hear,” Morrell said. “Now where’s that typewriter?”

For the next couple of hours, he pounded away at it. He was no secretary; he typed with his two forefingers. He wasn’t fast, but he got the job done. A look at the messengers reassured him more than the lieutenant’s praise did. They were a raffish lot, men who could be counted on to get where they were going. And if they liberated booze or smokes or a steak along the way… well, so much the better.

He gave them oral orders. Then he handed them the dispatches he’d written. Off they went, in command cars, on horseback, on bicycles, on shank’s mare. Before long, one-word responses started coming in by telephone and telegraph. Received, Morrell heard, again and again and again. He marked the map, again and again and again.

When he was satisfied, he got on the telephone. He called officer after officer, delivered his orders, and hung up. Maybe this would work and maybe it wouldn’t. It seemed worth a try, though.

One thing: U.S. reconnaissance was good. Most people who lived in Ohio, especially in this northern part of it, wanted nothing to do with the Confederates. They slipped through enemy lines, risking their necks to report on what Jake Featherston’s men were up to. When Morrell heard the Confederates were assembling armor in Homeworth, a few miles west of Salem, he smiled to himself.

Their attack on Salem went in two days later. They came loaded for bear, convinced they had a big force of barrels in front of them. Morrell showed a few and shelled the Confederates heavily to slow them down. That only made them push harder. They’d just about reached Salem’s outskirts… when the real U.S. barrel force, which had concentrated some miles to the north, roared down and struck them in the flank.

The Confederates still might have made a fight of it. They had at least as many machines as the USA did, and theirs hit harder. But they were rattled, as anybody hit from a direction he didn’t expect would have been. They fell back in some disorder, and left a lot of barrels burning in front of Salem.

“That was amazing, sir!” Now the young lieutenant looked at Morrell with something not far from hero worship.

“That’s what we’re supposed to do, dammit,” Morrell said, wondering how-and if-he could bring off the same sort of thing again.

Abner Dowling was the man who’d spotted the Confederates thinning their lines in Virginia so they could send more men into Ohio. He hadn’t had the chance to attack them after he caught them doing that. Oh, no. His reward was thinning his own lines so the USA could try to smash through the Confederates’ position at Fredericksburg, which hadn’t worked at all. Now he was thinning them still further to send reinforcements to the West.

He took a half pint of whiskey out of his desk drawer and stared at it. Like most half pints, it was curved to fit the hand. He wasn’t a man who drank to excess. He remembered General Custer. With whiskey as with women, Custer could resist everything except temptation. And Custer with a snootful was even more a bull in a china shop than he had been any other time.

No, Dowling wasn’t like that-which didn’t mean he was teetotal, either. Every once in a while, a nip was welcome. Sometimes you needed not to think about things for a little while, and whiskey was the best thought preventer this side of a blackjack. He undid the metal screw top, raised the bottle to his lips, and took a healthy slug.

His adjutant chose that moment to walk in the door.

Captain Angelo Toricelli had been with him since his unhappy stay as commandant in Salt Lake City-another one of the garden spots of the universe. Unlike some adjutants, Toricelli understood that he wasn’t about to end up on Skid Row just because he drank now and again. It was embarrassing all the same.

Trying to cover that embarrassment, Dowling held out the bottle and asked, “Want some for yourself?”

“No, thank you, sir,” Captain Toricelli answered-not primly, but not in a way that suggested he’d change his mind, either. “We have a message from General MacArthur inquiring how the pullback is going in this corps.”

“Tell General MacArthur to-” Dowling broke off. If he went on in that vein, Toricelli would think it was the whiskey talking. That was nonsense. Dowling needed no booze to despise Daniel MacArthur. Still… “Tell General MacArthur to rest assured that we are complying with his orders and the War Department’s.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. That’s well phrased.” Toricelli’s dark eyes glinted. He knew what Dowling had been on the point of saying. But Dowling hadn’t said it. Neither he nor the half pint could get the blame. Toricelli saluted and left the room.

Dowling eyed the little bottle. It was almost as if the narrow escape gave him the license for another drink. He shook his head and put the bottle back in the desk drawer. It would be there when he really needed it. If he drank when he didn’t really need it… That was how trouble started.

Off in the distance, somebody’s artillery opened up. He thought those were U.S. guns. With fewer foot soldiers on the ground, artillery had to take up some of the slack. Of course, some of his artillery was getting pulled west to try to stop the Confederates, too.

After fifteen or twenty minutes, the guns fell silent. Dowling hoped that meant they’d smashed whatever they were aiming at. If not, some wireless man would rush in with news of a new disaster. And Dowling would have to try to put the pieces back together-and take the blame if Humpty Dumpty remained bits of eggshell.

His eyes went to the large-scale map of Virginia on the wall. He didn’t like the way his right flank was vulnerable. He never had. General Patton, the Confederates’ answer to Irving Morrell, had roared out of the mountains trying to roll him up. Patton hadn’t managed it. Dowling took a certain amount of pride in the way he’d defended against the CSA’s armored wizard, but they didn’t pin medals on your chest for losing only a few square miles. Often that deserved a medal, but it never got one.

If Patton or some other Confederate hotshot tried charging out of the mountains again, could Dowling’s corps hold the enemy again? He muttered unhappily. If the Confederates hit him as hard as they had the last time, he probably couldn’t. But he brightened a little a moment later. He might not have the wherewithal to defend that he’d had before, but he was pretty damn sure the boys in butternut couldn’t mount the same kind of attack as they had then. They seemed to be putting everything they had into the push through Ohio and into Pennsylvania.

He looked at the map again, then slowly nodded to himself. Ever since the war started, people had been saying that whoever could mount two big drives at once would likely win. So far, neither side had come close. Logic said the United States had the better chance. They had more men and more resources. They also had more problems. The Confederates had a smoldering Negro uprising to worry about; their response seemed to be massacre. The United States had to flabble about the Mormons, and now the Canadians, the Japanese in the Pacific, and the really mad naval struggle in the North Atlantic. With all the sideshows, they couldn’t concentrate on the main event.

Captain Toricelli came in again. “Yes? What is it?” Dowling asked with a sinking feeling. His adjutant could bear bad tidings at least as well as a wireless operator.