Scott Mariani - The Rebel’s Revenge

A bitter outcome which, at this point in time, it seemed nothing could prevent. Since the crushing defeat at Chattanooga late the previous year and the subsequent appointment of Ulysses S. Grant as General-in-Chief of the Union forces, the turning point seemed to have come. Rout after rout; the tattered and depleted army of the South was in danger of being completely overrun.

‘Gentlemen, we stand to lose this damn war,’ the general said in between puffs of his cigar. ‘And lose it we will, unless saved by a miracle.’

‘Desperate times call for desperate measures,’ said the second officer, who was knocking back the wine as fast as it could be served. He was a younger man, a senior colonel known for his fiery temperament both on and off the battlefield. The last cavalry charge he had personally led had resulted in him having his right arm blown off by a cannonball. It had been found two hundred yards away, his dead hand still clutching his sabre. He now wore the empty sleeve of his grey tunic pinned across his chest, after the fashion of Lord Nelson.

‘Indeed they do,’ the general agreed. ‘And if that yellowbelly Jeff Davis and his lapdog Lee don’t have the guts to do what’s necessary to win this war, then by God someone else must step in and do it for them.’

This provoked a certain ripple of consternation around the table, as it was somewhat shocking to refer to the President of the Confederate States of America, not to mention the revered General Robert E. Lee, hero of the South, in such harsh language. But nobody protested. The facts of the matter were plain. The dreadful prospect of a Union victory was looming large on the horizon. Leonidas Garrett, whose business empire stood to be devastated if a victorious Abraham Lincoln acted on his promise to liberate all slaves in North America, dreaded it as much as anyone.

After another toke on his cigar and a quaff of wine, the general leaned towards Garrett and fixed him with his one steely eye. ‘Mr Garrett, how certain are you that this bold scheme of yours can work?’

‘If it can be pulled off, which I believe it can, then my certainty is absolute,’ Garrett replied coolly.

The third senior officer was the only conspirator present at the top-secret gathering who was yet to be fully convinced of Garrett’s plan. ‘Gentlemen, I must confess to having great misgivings about the enormity of what we are contemplating. Satan himself could scarcely have devised such wickedness.’

The general shot him a ferocious glare. ‘At a time like this, if it took Beelzebub himself to lead the South to victory, I would gladly give him the job.’

The objector made no reply. The general stared at him a while longer, then asked, ‘Are you with us or not?’

‘You know I am.’ No sir , no display of deference to a man of far superior rank. Because rank was not an issue at a meeting so clandestine, so illicit, that any and all of them could have been court-martialled and executed by their own side for taking part. What they were envisaging was in flagrant contravention of the rules of war and gentlemanly conduct.

Silence around the table for a few moments. The dissenter said, ‘Still, a damned ugly piece of work.’

‘I’m more interested in knowing if we can make it work,’ said the one-armed colonel.

‘It isn’t a new idea, by any measure,’ Garrett said. ‘Such tactics, though brutal, have been used in warfare throughout history. Trust me, gentlemen. We have the means to make it work, and if successful its effect on the enemy will be catastrophic. It will bring the North to its knees, cripple their infrastructure and force those Yankee scumbellies to surrender within a month. But I must reiterate,’ he added, casting a solemn warning look around the table, ‘that not a single word of this discussion can ever be repeated to anyone outside of this room. Not anyone , is that perfectly clear?’

Throughout the meeting, a young female negro servant dressed in a maid’s outfit had been silently hovering in the background, watching the levels in their wine glasses and meekly stepping up to the table now and then to top them up from a Venetian crystal decanter. Nobody acknowledged her presence in the room, least of all her legal owner, Garrett. As far as he was concerned she might simply have been a well-trained dog, rather than a human being. A dog, moreover, that could be whipped, chained up to starve, or used as target practice without compunction or accountability at any time, just for the hell of it.

Like Garrett, none of the three Southern-born officers gave an instant’s thought to the possibility that this young slave girl could be absorbing every single word of their discussion. And that she could remember it perfectly, so perfectly that it could later be repeated verbatim. Nor did any man present have any notion as to who the negro servant woman really was. Her role in the downfall of their plan was a part yet to be played. Just how devastating a part, none of them could yet know either.

‘So, gentlemen, we’re agreed,’ the general said after they’d spent some more time discussing the particulars of Garrett’s radical scheme. ‘Let’s set this thing in motion and reclaim the South’s fortunes in this war.’ He raised his glass. ‘To victory!’

‘To victory!’ The toast echoed around the table. They clinked glasses and drank.

Her duty done, the slave humbly asked for permission to excuse herself and was dismissed with a cursory wave, whereupon she slipped from the room to attend to the rest of her daily chores. Though if any of them had paid her the least bit of heed, they might have wondered at the enigmatic little smile that curled her lips as she walked away.

Ben Hope had often had the feeling that trouble had a knack of following him around. No matter what, where or how, it dogged his steps and stuck to him like a shadow. If trouble were a person, he’d have felt justified in thinking that individual was stalking him. If he’d been of a superstitious bent he could have thought he was haunted by it, as by a ghost. Whatever the case, it seemed as if at every juncture of his life, wherever he went and however he tried to steer out of its path, there it was waiting for him.

And it was here, pushing midnight on one sultry and thus-far uneventful September evening in the unlikely setting of a tiny backstreet liquor store in Clovis Parish, Louisiana, that he was about to make trouble’s acquaintance yet one more time.

If the most recent round of airport security regulations hadn’t made it more bother than it was worth to carry his old faithful hip flask across the Atlantic among his hand luggage, and if the bar and grill where he’d spent most of that evening had stocked the right kind of whisky to satisfy one of those late-night hankerings for a dram or three of the good stuff that occasionally come over a man, then two things wouldn’t have happened that night. First, there would have been nobody else around to prevent an innocent man from getting badly hurt, most probably shot to death.

Which was a good thing. And second, Ben wouldn’t have been plunged into a whole new kind of mess, even for him.

Which was less of a good thing. But that’s what happens when you have a talent for trouble. He should have been used to it by now.

It was nine minutes to midnight when Ben walked into the liquor store. It was as warm and humid inside as it was outside, with a lazy ceiling fan doing little more than stir the thick air around. An unseen radio was blaring country music, a stomping up-tempo bluegrass instrumental that was alive with fiddles and banjos and loud enough to hear from half a block away.

The sign on the door said they were open till 2 a.m. Ben soon saw he was the only customer in the place, which didn’t surprise him given the lateness of the hour and the emptiness of the street. Maybe they got a rush of business just before closing time.