Harry Turtledove - Drive to the East

Moss didn’t give the guards a hard time. It struck him as cruising for a bruising. He’d seen the guards rough people up. That violated the Geneva Convention, but you couldn’t call them on it. They would say the roughee had it coming, and the camp commandant would back them right down the line.

Here, though, the guards didn’t push things. They grumbled and they fumed and then tramped out of the barracks. “What the hell was that all about?” asked a captain who’d been in Andersonville only a few days.

“Beats me,” somebody else answered-an officer who’d been a prisoner longer than Moss had.

It beat Moss, too. When he got the chance to ask Nick Cantarella, he did. Cantarella started laughing. “I’ll bite. What’s funny?” Moss asked.

“The Confederates know what they’re doing, that’s all,” Cantarella answered. He was still laughing, and didn’t care who heard him. He thought it was funny as hell. “If we’re digging a tunnel, those slats are about the best thing we could use to shore it up.”

“Oh.” A light dawned. “And if they’re not missing, then we’re not digging a tunnel?”

“I didn’t say that.” Cantarella was nothing if not coy. “You said that. With a little luck, the guards think that.”

“Then we are digging a tunnel?” Moss persisted.

“I didn’t say that, either. I didn’t say anything. It’s the waddayacallit-the Fifth Amendment, that’s it.”

Moss hadn’t had much to do with the Fifth Amendment while practicing law in occupied Ontario; it hadn’t crossed the border with the U.S. Army. It wasn’t as strong as it might have been in the USA, either. From the 1880s until the Great War, the United States had geared up for a rematch against the Confederacy. Nothing had got in the way of gearing up-and, thanks to a pliant Supreme Court, that nothing included big chunks of the U.S. Constitution.

When he expressed his detailed opinion of the Fifth Amendment and of the horse it rode in on, he just made Cantarella laugh some more. “Dammit, you know I’m legit now,” Moss groused. “The least you could do is tell me what’s going on.”

“Who says I know?” Cantarella answered. “I just work here.” Had he put a pot full of cold water on Moss’ head, it would have boiled in about thirty seconds. Moss’ face must have told him as much. When he laughed again, it was in some embarrassment. “Don’t ask for what I shouldn’t give you, buddy.”

“Why shouldn’t you?” Moss went on steaming. “Only reason I can see is that you still think I might not be the goods.”

“Then you aren’t looking hard enough.” The New Yorker’s voice took on a hard edge. “I don’t give a shit if you’re as legitimate as Teddy Roosevelt. The more people who know more stuff than they ought to, the better chance Featherston’s fuckers have of tearing it out of them. Have you got that through your goddamn thick head now, or shall I draw you a picture?”

“Oh.” Jonathan Moss’ temperature abruptly lowered. He didn’t like security concerns, but he understood them. “Sorry, Captain. I was out of line there.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Like most people, Cantarella was more inclined to be magnanimous after he’d got his way. “When the time comes-if the time comes-you’ll find out whatever you need to know. Till then, just relax. Let Jake Featherston pay your room and board-and your salary, too.”

“He needs to learn something about the hotel business. You’re not supposed to have to lock up your customers to get ’em to stay,” Moss said. Nick Cantarella thought that was funny as hell. Moss would have, too, if he’d been on the other side of the barbed wire.

For quite a while after rejoining the Confederate Army, Brigadier General Clarence Potter had worked underground, in War Department offices that officially didn’t exist. Intelligence tended to get quartered in places like that. For one thing, it was supposed to be secret. For another, if you didn’t have to look at spies, you could use what they gave you and still pretend to yourself that your hands were clean.

When he got the wreath around his three stars that meant promotion to general’s rank, he also got his unfortunate predecessor’s upstairs office. Being able to look out at Richmond instead of just walls was very nice. That is, it had been very nice till U.S. bombers started coming over Richmond in large numbers.

These days, only the foolhardy and those who had no choice worked above ground in the heart of the city. A lot of War Department operations had moved to the suburbs. Those that couldn’t had gone underground. Potter’s new office was only a few doors down from the one he’d had as a colonel. Returning to the subbasement, he’d displaced a captain, not the colonel who had the old room. As long as the electricity kept working, he could get the job done.

He stared at the papers on his desk through the bottoms of his bifocals. He was an erect, soldierly-looking man, nearer sixty than fifty, with iron-gray hair, a stern expression, and the same style of steel-rimmed glasses he’d worn as a major in Intelligence in the Army of Northern Virginia during the Great War (they hadn’t been bifocals then). The spectacles softened what would otherwise have been some of the coldest gray eyes anyone ever owned.

One of the reasons he glowered at those papers was that they should have got to him weeks before they did. Before the shooting started, he’d run Confederate espionage operations in the USA. Two countries hardly separated by language made spying here easier in many ways than it was in Europe. Some Confederate operatives had been in place in Washington and Philadelphia and elsewhere since before the Great War.

There were two problems with that. Shooting and moving armies and closed ordinary channels of mail and telegraphy made it harder for information to get across the border-which was why these papers were so late. The other problem was, what were the damnyankees doing in the CSA? Ease of spying cut both ways, worse luck.

Formally, counterintelligence was on Brigadier General Cummins’ football field, not his. He wasn’t sorry about that, or most of him wasn’t. Even guzzling coffee as if they’d outlaw it day after tomorrow, he did have to sleep every once in a while. He didn’t see how he could conjure up enough extra hours in the day to do a proper job if more responsibility landed on his head.

Jake Featherston and Nathan Bedford Forrest III, the head of the Confederate General Staff, thought he could handle it if he had to. He had a hard time quarreling with either of them, because they both had more in their laps than he did. But he was a relentless perfectionist in ways they weren’t, and couldn’t let go of things till they were exactly as he wanted them. He had enough insight to understand that that wasn’t always a desirable character trait. Understanding it and being able to do anything about it were two different things.

Someone knocked on the door. Down here, the rule was that you didn’t walk in till you were invited. Potter checked to make sure nothing sensitive was out in the open before he said, “Come in.”

“Thank you.” It was Nathan Bedford Forrest III. Potter started to come to attention; Forrest waved him back into his chair before the motion was well begun, saying, “Don’t bother with that silly nonsense.” The great-grandson of the cavalry raider in the War of Secession had a fleshier face than his famous ancestor, but his eyes, hooded under strong dark brows, proclaimed the relationship.

“Good morning, sir, or afternoon, or whatever time of day it is out there,” Potter said. “What can I do for you?”

Instead of answering right away, Forrest cocked his head to one side, an odd sort of smile on his face. “I purely love to listen to you talk, General-you know that?”