Harry Turtledove - Drive to the East

“I believe it.” Potter also believed that BDU men could probably figure it out for themselves, or at least come close. They all had to be mourning friends and comrades. Two and a half months… That was worse than he would have guessed. “Nos morituri te salutamus,” he murmured.

Nathan Bedford Forrest III nodded. “The only good thing you can say about the business is that, if something goes wrong, it’s all over before the poor bastards know it. The bombs go off faster than the nervous system can react.”

“That does matter,” Potter said. He hadn’t been at the front in the last war, but he’d been close enough to have seen horrors aplenty. Dreadfully wounded men, as far as he was concerned, were worse horrors than the dead. No matter how gruesome a corpse was, it was beyond suffering. For the living, pain went on and on.

The telephone rang. “Forrest here,” Forrest said. Potter left. He didn’t wait for Forrest to wave him out because he lacked clearance to hear whatever the chief of the General Staff was talking about. Disappearing without being asked in such circumstances was part of the etiquette of the security-conscious.

Potter’s own above-ground office, to which he’d defiantly returned, also had plywood in place of glass. Glass, these days, was not only a luxury but a dangerous luxury. In a bomb burst, shards were so many flying knives. They could chop a man into hamburger in the blink of an eye. Potter knew that. He missed being able to see out even so.

One thing-since he couldn’t look out the window, he couldn’t use looking out the window as an excuse for daydreaming. He had to buckle down and tackle the work on his desk. And so, reluctantly, he did.

On top of the pile was an urgent request from the Mormons of Deseret for whatever the Confederacy could send them. Getting supplies to them was harder than it had been when the rebellion first broke out. The U.S. noose was tightening. Potter had known it would. In a way, encouraging and helping the Mormon uprising seemed dreadfully unfair. Those people had not a chance in the world of winning, but they were eager to try, eager to the point of madness. It was enough to make a man with a conscience feel guilty.

Of course, a man with that kind of conscience had no business getting into Intelligence in the first place. Potter knew as much. He also knew his damnyankee counterparts were doing everything they could to arm the Negro terrorists in the CSA. If turnabout wasn’t fair play, what was? The only thing he really felt bad about was that there were so many more Negroes in the Confederate States than Mormons in the United States. Blacks caused more trouble for his side than the religious maniacs did for the enemy.

He wondered whether some Confederate operative had suggested auto bombs to the Mormons or they’d come up with them on their own. Either way, they made a viciously effective weapon for the weak against the strong. Again, Negroes in the CSA had proved that-and continued to prove it whenever they got the chance.

We need to keep this uprising alive as long as we can, he wrote. Where else can we tie down so many U.S. soldiers at so little cost to ourselves?

Even though the question was rhetorical as he wrote it, he knew it did have a possible answer. If Canada flared into rebellion, the Yankees would need endless divisions to hold it down. But, despite assiduous efforts, the Confederates hadn’t made a lot of friends up there. To Canadians, they might as well have been Yankees themselves. That infuriated Clarence Potter-and every other Confederate who’d ever run into the problem-but fury didn’t do much good.

If any outsiders could make the Canadians rise up, the Confederates weren’t the ones. The British were. Potter paused thoughtfully. Winston Churchill was supposed to favor quixotic schemes like that-and keeping the USA busy was as much in Britain’s interest as it was in the CSA’s.

A memorandum from Potter would never reach the British Prime Minister. A memorandum from Jake Featherston, on the other hand… Potter nodded to himself. Churchill might not agree. That was the chance you took. But he wouldn’t be able to ignore the request from an allied head of state. And Featherston would look at a memorandum from Potter. The Intelligence officer paused for a moment to gather his thoughts, then began to write.

Jake Featherston often felt busier than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest. He sometimes thought he wouldn’t have wanted to become President if he’d known ahead of time how much work the job was. That wasn’t true-down deep in his heart, he knew as much-but it gave him something to complain about.

Take paperwork. He’d never known what an obscene word that could be till he came to the Gray House. No matter how much he gave to other people, he still had plenty and then some. Paperwork was the price he paid for being boss.

Every once in a while, he ran into something he really needed to see. When he came to a memorandum from Clarence Potter, he knew he had to read it. For one thing, Potter would give him a hard time if he didn’t. And, for another, even though he trusted the Intelligence officer about as far as he could throw him, Potter had a lefthanded way of looking at the world that was often valuable. By his own lights, Potter was a patriot. Where his lights and Jake’s corresponded, they got on fine.

As Featherston read through this scheme, he found himself nodding. “Yeah,” he said when he was done. “About time we got some help from our so-called allies.” He knew as well as anybody that Britain was heavily bogged down in western Germany, trying to hold on to the gains she and France had made when the war was shiny and new. He recognized the feeling. He had it himself. The problem with grabbing a tiger by the tail was that letting go could hurt even worse than hanging on.

He picked up a pen and started to write. If Churchill wanted to play along, this wouldn’t cost the limeys much-and if it went off well, it could bring the United States untold grief. That wouldn’t break Jake’s heart. Oh, no-far from it.

His big worry was that Churchill was too obsessed with the Kaiser to care what happened on this side of the Atlantic. But the USA was the country that had taken Canada and Newfoundland away from England after the Great War. Winston was almost as good at remembering offenses done him as Jake was himself.

“Lulu!” he called from his office.

“What is it, Mr. President?” his secretary asked.

“I want Major Hamilton right away.”

Major Ira Hamilton hurried into the President’s underground office inside of five minutes. “Reporting as ordered, sir,” he said. He was tall, thin, and bespectacled; he looked much more like a math teacher than a major.

“Good. Good.” Jake thrust the paper at him. “I need you to put this into our fanciest code and send it to London just as fast as you can.” There was a reason Hamilton looked like a math teacher: up till the war started, he’d been a professor of mathematics at Washington University.

“I’ll do it, sir,” he said. “It doesn’t look too long-it should go out this afternoon.”

“That’ll be just fine, Major. Thank you kindly.” Featherston was far more polite with people who were useful to him than with the rest of the world. Hamilton gave him a ragged salute and hurried away. Someone would keep a discreet eye on the unmilitary major to make sure he did what he was supposed to do and nothing else. And someone would watch the man who watched Hamilton, and somebody would…

Things had to work that way. If you didn’t keep an eye on people, they’d make you wish you had. Jake even kept an eye on Don Partridge. He’d chosen his Vice President because Partridge was the mildest, safest, most inoffensive, and most useless man he could find-and he kept an eye on him anyway. You couldn’t be too careful.