Harry Turtledove: The Victorious opposition

He waited to see if Potter would get angry or get sniffy. The other man didn't. Instead, he nodded. "All right. That makes sense. Does anybody know all your secrets? Besides you, I mean?"

"Hell, no," Jake answered automatically. "There are things I could brag about-but I won't." If he hadn't checked himself, he might have started boasting about what was going on down in Louisiana, for instance. But the whole point of knowing things other people didn't was to be able to use what you knew against them and to keep them from using what they knew against you.

Clarence Potter, he saw, got that. Well, Potter was in Intelligence. If anybody could see the point of secrets, he was the man. And he nodded now. "When I first got to know you, you would have run your mouth," he said. "There's more to you than there used to be. That's why I'm here, I expect."

"Instead of still being a goddamn stubborn Whig and wanting to blow my head off, you mean?" Featherston asked.

Potter nodded. He smiled a crooked smile. "Yeah. Instead of that." The smile got wider. Now he was waiting-waiting to find out if Jake would send him off to a camp for admitting it.

And Jake wanted to. But Potter, damn him, had made himself too useful to be jugged like a hare. And from now on he'd be too busy to worry about blowing the head off of anybody who wasn't wearing a green-gray uniform. Jake jerked a thumb at the door. "All right. Get the hell out of here, and take all your pictures of naked women with you."

"Yes, sir." Chuckling, Potter scooped up the folder of reconnaissance photos and started out. He paused with his hand on the doorknob. "Good luck," he said. "You've done everything you could to get us ready, but we'll still need it."

"I'll put in a fresh requisition with the Quartermaster Corps," Jake said. Potter nodded and left. Jake shook his head in bemusement. He might have made stupid jokes like that with Ferd Koenig and a couple of other old-time Party buddies, but not with anybody else. So why make them with Potter?

But he didn't need long to find the answer. He'd known Potter longer than he'd known Koenig or any of the other Party men. They'd both hung tough when the Army of Northern Virginia was falling to pieces all around them. If the president of the greatest country in North America-no, in the world! — couldn't joke around with the one man who'd known him when he was just a sergeant, with whom could he joke? Nobody. Nobody at all.

If the Confederate States were going to become the greatest country in the world, they had to go through the United States first. Bastards beat us once, when the niggers stabbed us in the back, Jake thought. This time, I'll sit on the niggers but good, right from the start. Let's see those damnyankee fuckers do it again, especially when we're ready-when I'm ready-and they aren't quite. The photos Potter had shown him proved that.

Lulu made most of his telephone calls. He made this one himself, on a special line that didn't pass through her desk. It went straight from his office to the War Department. Men checked twice a day to make sure the damnyankees didn't tap it. It rang only once before the Chief of the General Staff picked it up. "Forrest speaking."

"Featherston," Jake said, and then, "Blackbeard." He hung up.

There. It was done. The die was cast. Whatever was going to happen would happen… starting tomorrow morning, early tomorrow morning.

Summer had just come in. Jake worked through the rest of June 21. He ate supper, and then went right on working through the night. Lulu brought him cup after cup of coffee. After a while, yawning, she went home to bed. He worked on, behind blackout curtains that kept light from leaking out of the Gray House and showing where it was from the air.

June 21 passed into June 22. All that coffee made Jake's heart thud and soured his stomach. He gulped a Bromo-Seltzer and went on. At a quarter past three, the drone of airplane engines and the thunder of distant artillery-not distant enough; damn those Yankee robbers! — made him whoop for sheer glee. He'd waited so long. Now his day was here.