Harry Turtledove - Drive to the East

Potter listened to a sergeant talking. “Where did you learn to sound like a damnyankee?” he asked.

“Sir, I grew up in Pittsburgh,” the noncom answered. “My father was in the tobacco business, and he lived up there. Wasn’t much fun when I came down here, because I already had the accent, and people got on me for it.”

“I believe that,” Potter said. Somebody else would have to check the man’s story. If it was true, it accounted for the accent. If it wasn’t, it was outstanding cover for the Yankees to sneak one of their own into a secret Confederate operation.

But that wasn’t Potter’s worry, or not directly. All he could do was note the possibility. Somebody else would have to deal with it. His job was checking the way the sergeant sounded. And the man sounded pretty good to him. He scribbled notes in a loose-leaf binder, then nodded to the sergeant.

“I think you may well hear back from us,” he said.

“I hope so, sir,” the man said, still sounding much too much like a damnyankee for comfort. “This sounds like a good way to give the United States a good, stiff kick in the nuts.”

Potter hadn’t said much about the operation. The sergeant, however, plainly had the brains to add two and two and get something close to four. “If you do hear from us, you’ll get the details then,” Potter told him.

He also had the brains not to ask too many questions. He said, “I hope I do, sir,” saluted, and left the underground room in the War Department.

Instead of calling in another candidate, Potter telephoned Nathan Bedford Forrest III. The chief of the Confederate General Staff said, “Forrest here. What can I do for you, General?”

“You’ve already done it, sir,” Potter said. “You’ve got me playing God for these fellows you’re recruiting.”

“And so?” Forrest said. “This isn’t the first time you’ve had to select people for a dangerous mission. That’s part of your job.”

“Oh, yes, sir,” Potter agreed. “Usually, though, the men I pick and choose from aren’t so eager as these kids. They’re going to get killed. Some of them will get a blindfold and a cigarette if they’re lucky, or a bullet in the back of the head if they aren’t. But they don’t care. I could give you a division if willingness were all it took.”

“Well, willingness damn well isn’t,” Forrest said. “These man have got to be good. They’ll have to convince Yankees that they’re Yankees. We don’t want just anybody here. We want men who can get well behind enemy lines and raise hell.”

“I understand that. There was a fellow a couple of days ago who’d played a Yankee two or three times in amateur theatricals down in Mississippi.” Potter sighed. “He was every bit as bad as that would make you think, but he didn’t believe it. He got mad as hops when I told him he’d have to fight the war the regular way.”

Forrest laughed, not that it was really funny. “Amateur theatricals, eh? I believe you-you couldn’t make that up. He must have convinced somebody he could sound like he came from the USA, or he never would have got as far as you.”

“I suppose he did.” Potter drummed his fingers on the binder. “Have to see who he did convince, and weed that man out-whoever he is, he’s got a tin ear.” He wrote himself another note.

“You think of everything, don’t you?” Forrest said admiringly.

“Don’t I wish I did? If I’m so smart, how come I’m not rich?” Potter said. Forrest laughed, though again he wasn’t joking. He went on, “I’m just trying to stay one step ahead of the damnyankees.”

“We’ll be farther ahead of them than that if things go the way I hope they do,” Lieutenant General Forrest said.

Potter almost asked what kind of things the chief of the General Staff had in mind. He refrained at the last moment, at least as much because he feared Forrest would tell him as because he feared Forrest wouldn’t. He didn’t have a need to know, no matter how badly he wanted to know. He didn’t want to make Forrest responsible for breaching security. I really have spent too much time in Intelligence, he thought.

Instead of prodding at things that weren’t his proper concern, he asked something that was relevant: “Any sign the United States are training infiltrators who wear butternut?”

He got silence on the line for about half a minute. Then Forrest said, “Thank you for reminding me that anything we can do to the USA, the USA can do to us. No, General, I haven’t had any reports like that. But just because I haven’t had them doesn’t mean the damn-yankees aren’t doing something like that. They could, couldn’t they?”

“Oh, yes-maybe more easily than we could,” Potter answered. Kentuckians loyal to the USA had no trouble sounding as if they came from Confederate Tennessee. Men from the less mountainous parts of West Virginia sounded like their Virginia neighbors. And the United States had their share of people who’d grown up in the Confederate States or gone to school here.

“One more thing we’ll have to watch out for,” Forrest said mournfully. “The President won’t be jumping up and down when he hears about it.”

“No, he won’t,” Potter agreed. “But I’ll tell you one thing: he’ll be a lot angrier if you don’t tell him about it till it ups and bites you, if it does.”

“You’re likely right,” Forrest said.

“Yes, I think so,” Potter said. He’d known Jake Featherston longer than even the President’s oldest Freedom Party buddies. He didn’t know Featherston so deeply, but he’d spent a lot of time brooding over what the head of the Freedom Party was likely to do next, and he’d been right more often than he’d been wrong.

“All right, then. I will pass it along,” Forrest said. “And I’ll try to make sure no more ham actors get as far as you. So long.” He didn’t quite suppress a snort before hanging up.

It was funny. Potter couldn’t deny that, though he’d been annoyed at the inept Mississippian and even more annoyed at the officer who’d passed the man. That officer would soon find himself in a new assignment. Potter didn’t know whether it would be defusing mines with his teeth or just counting thumbtacks in Georgia or Alabama or somewhere else far away from the real war. Wherever it was, the fellow wouldn’t have anything to do with this project.

At the moment, Clarence Potter didn’t want to have anything more to do with this project, either. He suddenly seemed to feel the weight of the whole War Department pressing down on him. If he didn’t get out, he thought he’d suffocate. That set of symptoms had afflicted other men who worked in the subbasement, but never him, not till now.

Rank had its privileges. If he felt like getting out, he could, and he didn’t have to ask anyone’s permission. He blinked a little when he came out into Richmond in broad daylight. He might have been a suddenly unearthed mole. When was the last time he’d been out and about with the sun in the sky? He couldn’t remember, which wasn’t a good sign.

Propaganda posters sprouted everywhere: on walls, on fences, on doors. They cursed the enemy and exhorted people to work hard and keep their mouths shut. One of them, an idealized portrait of Jake Featherston (and Potter, who saw Featherston fairly often, knew how idealized it was), simply said, THE PRESIDENT KNOWS. That gave Potter something to think about; he suspected it would have given anybody something to think about. Another one showed two bestial-looking Negroes with knives sneaking up on a house where a blond woman slept. LOOK OUT! it warned. The Intelligence officer nodded to himself-there was a good piece of propaganda.

The city of Richmond, now that he was actually looking around, seemed to have taken a worse beating already in this war than it had all through the Great War. Clarence Potter didn’t know why that surprised him, but it did. Bombers could rain far more death down onto the ground than they’d been able to a generation earlier. They carried bigger bombs farther, faster, and higher, so they were harder to shoot down. And there were more of them than there had been. It showed.