Harry Turtledove - Return engagement

"I don't just aim to be ahead of the game. I aim to win it and then kick over the goddamn table." Featherston sounded perfectly serious. He also sounded as angry as usual-not at me, Potter judged, but at the USA.

Really whipping the United States, whipping them to a point where they couldn't hope to fight back, had always been the Confederate dream. Featherston still believed it. Maybe that made him crazy. Potter had long thought so. He wasn't so sure any more.

"Gotta knock 'em flat," Featherston went on. "Gotta knock 'em flat and never let 'em build up again. They tried it with us at the end of the Great War, but they couldn't make it stick. When we do it, we'll fuckin' do it right."

Potter remembered U.S. inspectors in Charleston harbor making sure the Confederate States adhered to the armistice they'd signed. But Jake Featherston was right; the USA hadn't kept that up for long. The United States had wanted to forget about the war, to enjoy what they'd won. They were able to afford it-they had won. For the Confederates, everything since then had been about getting even. With Featherston, everything still was.

If he made the damnyankees say uncle, he wouldn't forget about holding them down. He wanted nothing more than to stand on them with a boot on their neck. For as long as he lived, the United States would go through hell on earth. And if anything could make Jake Featherston a happy man-which was by no means obvious-that would be it.

What would happen after Jake finally went? Potter wondered if the President of the CSA had ever wondered about that. The Intelligence officer doubted it. Everything was personal with Jake Featherston. If it didn't have him in it, he didn't give a damn. Whatever happened after he was gone would just have to take care of itself.

"How would you like to run the operation that makes sure the damnyankees keep on being good little boys and girls?" Featherston asked.

Not only was everything personal with him, he knew who had an axe to grind, and which axe it was. He assumed everybody took things as personally as he did. He knows just what to offer me, by God, Potter thought. He said, "If we get there, I'll do that job for you, Mr. President."

"Oh, we'll get there. Don't you worry about that. Don't worry about it even for a minute." As usual, Jake sounded messianically certain. By being so sure himself, he made other people sure, too. And when they were sure, they could do things they never would have imagined possible before.

The Confederate States had done some things Clarence Potter wouldn't have imagined possible. Could they do more? Could they flatten the United States? A smaller country flatten a bigger one and hold it down? Before this war started, Potter never would have believed it. Now-and especially after he listened to Jake Featherston for a while-he really thought he did.

Hipolito Rodriguez hadn't needed long to decide that Assault Troop Leader Billy Joe Hamilton put him in mind of his Great War drill sergeant. "I want y'all to listen up. Listen up real good, you hear?" he'd say several times a day, sticking out his chin to seem even meaner than he did already. "y'all better listen up good, on account of I ain't got the time to say this shit over and over."

He gave his warning over and over. He didn't seem to realize that. Rodriguez didn't challenge him on it. Neither did any of the other men in his training group. Challenge an instructor and you lost even if you won.

"Anybody here ever hear people talk about a population reduction?" Hamilton asked one day.

A few men from the Confederate Veterans' Brigade raised their hands. The ones Rodriguez knew came from big cities-Richmond, Atlanta, New Orleans.

"Means, 'I'll fix you,' somethin' like that, right?" Hamilton said. "Folks say,, 'I'll reduce your population, you son of a bitch,' right? Doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense, but who said the way people talk's gotta make sense, right? Right?"

"Right!" the men chorused. If loud agreement was what the Freedom Party guard wanted, they'd give it to him.

"That's a bunch of bullshit," he said now. "When we talk about reducing population, we goddamn well mean it. Too many niggers in this country, right? Gotta do somethin' about that, right? Right?"

"Right!" The chorus sounded odd this time. Some of the men bayed out the word in voices full of savage enthusiasm, while others sounded oddly doubtful. Rodriguez's tones were somewhere in the middle. He had no use for mallates, but he'd never been filled with blood lust, either.

The Party guard studied his students. "Some of you sorry sons of bitches are gonna puke like you wouldn't believe when we get rolling on this here job. Some of y'all won't be able to cut it. We'll have to ship your asses home-either that or put you in an easier line of work."

"How come?" somebody in back of Rodriguez called.

"How come?" Billy Joe Hamilton echoed. "You'll find out how come. Bet your balls you will. I got one other thing to tell you, too-no matter how tough y'all reckon you got it, you don't know squat about what tough is. Fellas who were doin' this before we got the system down, they're the ones who can talk about tough. What they saw is tougher'n any battlefield."

"Bullshit." This time, it was a man off to Rodriguez's left. Rodriguez was thinking the same thing himself. Nothing was worse than a battlefield. Nothing could be. He was convinced of that. The Devil hadn't known how to run hell before he took a long look at a Great War battlefield.

"I heard that," Hamilton said. "You go ahead. You think that way. y'all'll find out what it's like now. But that ain't a patch on what camp guards were doin'. No, sir, not even a patch."

Rodriguez remained dubious. Everybody who was an old-timer at this, that, or the other thing always went on and on about how tough things had been before all these new fellows came in. Talk was cheap. Talk was also commonly nonsense.

Camp guards learned by doing. They ran their own camp, out there past Decatur, Texas. They were Great War veterans, every man jack of them. They knew all they needed to know about barbed wire and machine guns. Most of them had taken prisoners, too. Some of them had been prisoners, which also taught a lot about what they needed to know.

Submachine guns were new to Rodriguez, but easy to learn. For guard duty, they were better than the bolt-action Tredegar he'd carried during the last war. No one bullet had the stopping power of a Tredegar round, but you could do a lot of shooting mighty fast with a submachine gun. If you got in trouble in the camp, that mattered more.

"Never trust the niggers here. Never believe the niggers here," Assault Troop Leader Hamilton told his pupils. "You do, you'll end up with your throat cut. They didn't get in here on account of they was nice people. They got here on account of they was trouble."

That Rodriguez believed. The blacks in the camp looked like men who would raise hell if they ever got the chance. They looked like captured enemy soldiers, as a matter of fact. In essence, they were. Rodriguez figured he would have been safer guarding Yankee prisoners. They would have been less desperate than the Negroes here.

A truck with an iron box of a cargo compartment pulled up to the camp. At the morning roll call, the experienced guards picked twenty Negroes from the lineup. "You men are going to be transferred to another camp," one of them told the blacks.

There were the usual grumbles. "I jus' got here two weeks ago," a prisoner complained. "How come you shippin' me somewheres else?"

"To confuse you. Working pretty good, isn't it?" the guard answered. The prisoner scratched his head. He didn't know how to take that, and so he warily accepted it.

Rodriguez was one of the guards outside the barbed-wire perimeter who made sure the Negroes didn't try to run off on their way to the truck. The black men gave no trouble. Most of them seemed glad to get away from where they were. One of the experienced guards closed the doors behind the prisoners and dogged them shut. The bar that did the trick seemed exceptionally sturdy.