Harry Turtledove - Drive to the East

That wasn’t real happy. Several Negroes asked Jeff if they could have bigger rations. He just shook his head and kept walking. They didn’t complain too much. The grits and occasional beans or biscuits they got didn’t quite amount to a starvation diet. The ration was just small enough to remind people it should have been larger.

The workers had no shortage of building supplies. Ferdinand Koenig, the C.S. Attorney General, had promised Pinkard a railroad spur would run to Camp Determination, and he’d kept his word. Everything Jeff needed came right to his front door. As soon as the camp was finished, trainloads of prisoners would come right to his front door, too. It wouldn’t be very long.

More colored prisoners were paving the road that led into Camp Determination and the big parking area at the end of it. Along with the railroad spur, there’d be plenty of truck traffic going in and out of the camp. Jeff smiled to himself. That had been his idea, back at Camp Dependable. But there he hadn’t had the room to do things right. Here, he did. And if anybody came up with something better than trucks, he’d have room for that, too, whatever it turned out to be. Nobody’d improved on trucks yet, but you never could tell what someone might think up.

“You make sure you get that concrete nice and smooth,” Jeff barked to a Negro working on the lot.

“Oh, yes, suh, I do dat. You don’t gots to worry none. Everything be fust-rate. We takes care of it.” As any Negro would when a white boss bore down on him, this one was quick and ready to promise the moon. Whether he’d deliver was liable to be a different question.

Pinkard didn’t care so much about the barracks halls. But the parking lot and the road-they really counted. The trucks were important and expensive. They had to be well taken care of. “I’ll have my eye on you,” Pinkard growled. “You think I’m kidding, you’ll be sorry.”

“Yes, suh.” The Negro didn’t get up from his hands and knees. He probably wanted to show Jeff how diligent he was. “Don’t you fret none.”

As things advanced here, more barbed wire with gates in it would separate the road and the lot from the rest of the camp. He had everything planned. The blueprints for Camp Determination had come out of Richmond, but he had permission from Ferd Koenig to modify them as he thought best. This was going to be his camp, and by God it would work the way he wanted it to.

Guards saluted as he and his silent gun-toting companion left the perimeter. He’d need more manpower when the camp got going, but he didn’t expect that to be a problem. The Confederate Veterans’ Brigades had a guard-training center not far outside of Fort Worth. The way Jeff saw things, the men who came out of it would probably do better than the cops and tough guys who made up most of the guard force now. They’d really know what they were supposed to do.

He had his own office by the growing camp. Telephone and telegraph lines connected it to the outside world. That was more so Richmond could send him instructions than so he could reach other places, but the powers that be back in the capital didn’t mind if he did.

When he walked up to the telegrapher, the young man didn’t quite sit at attention, but he came close. Jeff said, “Billy Ray, I want you to send a wire to Edith Blades in Alexandria, Louisiana. You’ve got the address, right?”

“Yes, sir, Standard Leader!” Billy Ray said. If he didn’t have the address of his boss’s fiancee handy, he’d be in trouble. He grabbed a message pad and poised a pencil over it. “Go ahead, sir.”

“Right.” Jeff paused a moment to work out what he wanted to say before he said it. He always felt like a damn fool when he had to mumble and stumble and backtrack. “Here we go… ‘Dear Edith, All well here. Progress on schedule. Will be back to visit in about two weeks. Expect things to start up in less than two months. Miss you and the boys. See you all soon. Love, Jeff.’ ” He tried to keep things short, even if he wasn’t paying for the wire out of his own pocket.

“Let me read that back for you, sir.” Billy Ray did. He had it right. The boys had surprised him the first time he heard it; he hadn’t known Edith was a widow. Now he took them for granted.

“Send it off,” Jeff told him. The telegraph key started clicking.

Jeff went into his inner office. He’d been careful about more than keeping things short. Suppose the damnyankees got their hands on this wire. He hadn’t given his last name or his rank. He hadn’t said anything specifically about the camp, either. Anybody who didn’t already know what he was talking about wouldn’t be able to make much sense of it. He sounded like a drummer or an efficiency expert, not a camp commandant.

I damn well am an efficiency expert, he thought. A lot of the changes he’d made to the blueprints involved smoothing things out, clearing up bottlenecks, avoiding trouble wherever he could. The parking area was bigger than it had been in the original drawings, and the road leading to and from it better laid out. A lot of trucks would go in and out of Camp Determination. A hell of a lot of Negroes would come in and go out.

He knew where the road out of camp led. At the end of it, there was another barbed-wire enclosure. That one kept people out, not in. Texas had a hell of a lot of prairie. If you put some dozer crews on the job, they could dig a lot of trenches without drawing much notice. Fill those trenches full of bodies, bulldoze the dirt back over them, and dig some new ones…

Jeff nodded to himself. The Negroes who got into trucks would think they were on their way to some other camp. So would the ones who stayed behind. They wouldn’t know the exhaust fumes were routed into the airtight passenger box, not till too late they wouldn’t.

Camp Determination was big. The burial ground was even bigger. The Freedom Party was-was determined, by God! — to solve the Negro problem in the CSA once and for all. It would take a lot of work, but Jeff figured they could do it.

Brigadier General Irving Morrell wished to God he could get out of the hospital. His shattered shoulder was improving, but there was an unfortunate difference between improving and improved. Morrell, a rawboned, weathered man of fifty, had found out all about that when he was wounded in the Great War. An infection after he got shot in the leg had kept him on the shelf for months, and kept the doctors darkly muttering about amputation. In the end, they didn’t have to go in there with a hacksaw, for which he’d never stopped being grateful.

No wound infection this time, or none to speak of. They had drugs now they hadn’t dreamt of a generation earlier. But he still needed to heal, and that took time, however much he wished it didn’t. He could use his right hand again, though he feared the arm would never regain all its strength and dexterity.

“When can I go back to work, Doc?” he asked the Army physician who was tending his wound. He might have been a roofer who’d taken a fall-most wounds in war weren’t that different from industrial accidents. Most-but not his. The sniper who’d wounded him hadn’t been aiming at anybody else. Two more bullets had cracked past him as the gunner on the barrel he commanded hustled him out of harm’s way.

Like any Army doctor, Conrad Rohde held officer’s rank so he could tell enlisted men what to do. He had a major’s gold oak leaves on the green-gray tunic he wore under his white hospital coat. He was big and blond and slow-moving-slow-talking, too. After his usual careful consideration, he answered, “Well, sir, it shouldn’t be too long now.”

“Gee, thanks a lot. Thanks a hell of a lot,” Morrell said. Rohde’d been telling him the same thing for a while now. Before that, he’d said a few weeks… for a few weeks.