Five-thirty in the morning. Reveille blared. Armstrong Grimes groaned. He had time for that one involuntary protest before he rolled out of his cot and his feet hit the floor of the barracks hall at Fort Custer outside of Columbus, Ohio. Then he started functioning, at least well enough. He threw on his green-gray uniform, made up the cot, and dashed outside to his place in the roll call—all in the space of five minutes.
What happened to men who were late had long since convinced him being late was a bad idea. Back home, his mother had made the bed for him most of the time. He’d been sloppy at it when he first got here. Now a dime bounced off his blanket, and bounced high. The drill sergeant didn’t have cause to complain about him or even notice him—the two often being synonymous.
He stood there trying not to shiver in the chilly dawn. When the time came, he sang out to announce his presence. Other than that, he kept quiet. Everybody else did the same. For once, the drill sergeants seemed in a merciful mood. They let the assembled soldiers march off to breakfast after only a minimum of growling and cursing.
Everybody marched everywhere at Fort Custer. Armstrong had begun to think Thou shalt march was in the Bible somewhere right below Thou shalt not kill and Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord in vain—two commandments he was learning more about violating every day.
He took a tray and a plate and a mug and silverware, then advanced on the food. A cook’s helper loaded the plate with scrambled eggs and hash browns and greasy, overdone bacon. Another one poured the mug full of coffee almost strong enough to eat through the bottom. Armstrong grabbed a seat at a long, long table. He put enough cream and sugar in the coffee to tame it a little, threw salt on the eggs and potatoes and pepper on the eggs, and then started shoveling in chow.
Nobody talked much at breakfast. Nobody had time. The drill here was simple: feed your face as fast as you could. Armstrong had never much cared for manners. He didn’t have to worry about them here. Compared to the way some of the guys ate, he might have come from the upper crust. Every once in a while, he thought that was pretty funny. More often than not, he didn’t have time to worry about it one way or the other.
As soon as he finished, he shoved his tray and dirty dishes at the poor slobs who’d drawn KP duty. Then he hustled out to the exercise yard. He wasn’t the first one there, but he was a long way from the last. Bad things happened to the guys who brought up the rear.
Of course, bad things happened to everybody right after breakfast. Violent calisthenics and a three-mile run weren’t the way Armstrong would have used to settle his stomach. The drill sergeants didn’t care about his opinion. They had their own goals. His conscription class, like any other, had had some fat guys, some weak guys. He remembered who they’d been. But the fat guys weren’t fat any more, and the weak guys weren’t weak any more. Oh, a few had washed out, simply unable to stand the strain. People said one fellow had died trying, but Armstrong didn’t know if he believed that. Most of the recruits, no matter what kind of shape they’d been in to start with, had toughened up since.
After the run, the conscripts “relaxed” with close-order drill. “Left … ! Left … ! Left, right, left!” the drill sergeant bawled. “To the rear … haarch!” He screamed at somebody who couldn’t keep the rhythm if his life depended on it. Armstrong’s company had a couple of those unfortunates, who drew more than their fair share of abuse. He’d never figured out why the Army still needed close-order drill. Doing it where the enemy could see you was a recipe for getting massacred. But he didn’t have any trouble telling one foot from the other, or turning right and not left when he heard, “To the right flank … haarch!”
Lunch that day was creamed chipped beef on toast, otherwise creamed chipped beast or, more often, shit on a shingle. Armstrong didn’t care what people called it. He didn’t care what he got, either, as long as there was plenty of it. He would have eaten a horse and chased the driver—and, considering how fast he could pound out the three miles, he probably would have caught him.
After lunch came dirty fighting and rifle practice. Like any reasonably tough kid who got out of high school, Armstrong had thought he knew something about dirty fighting. The drill sergeant who’d mercilessly thumped him in the first day’s lesson taught him otherwise. He’d been amazed to discover what all you could do with elbows, knees, feet, and bent fingers. If you happened to have a knife …
“Any civilian who fucks with me better have his funeral paid for,” he said.
The drill sergeant shook his head. “He may have been through the mill, too. Or he may have a gun. You can’t kick a gun in the nuts. Remember that, or you’ll end up dead.”
That struck Armstrong as good advice. A lot of what the drill sergeants said struck him as good advice. Whether he would take it was another question. He was no more interested than any other male his age in getting answers from someone else. He thought he had everything figured out for himself.
After the fighting drill, he and his company marched off to the rifle range. That did help reinforce what the sergeant had said. If you had a Springfield in your hand, you could put a hole in a man—or a man-shaped target—from a hell of a lot farther away than a man could put a boot in your belly. And Armstrong was a good shot.
“A lot of you guys think you’re hot stuff,” another drill sergeant said. This one had a fine collection of Sharpshooter and Expert medals jingling on his chest. “Listen to me, though. There’s one big difference between doing it on the range here and doing it in the field. In the field, the other son of a bitch shoots back. And if you think that doesn’t matter, you’re dreaming.”
Armstrong only grunted. He was sure it didn’t matter. He could do it here. As far as he was concerned, that meant he could do it, period.
The drill sergeant said, “Some of you think I’m kidding. Some of you think I’m talking with my head up my ass. Well, you’ll find out. It’s different in the field. A hell of a lot of guys get out there and they don’t shoot at all. There’s plenty of others who don’t aim first. They just point their piece somewhere—in the air, probably—and start banging away.”
“What a bunch of fools,” Armstrong whispered to the recruit next to him. He wanted to laugh out loud, but he didn’t. That would have drawn the drill sergeant’s eye to him, which he didn’t want at all.
As things were, the sergeant sent a scowl in his general direction, but it didn’t light on him personally. The veteran noncom went on, “There’s just one thing you’re lucky about. The other side will have as many fuckups as we do. That may keep some of you alive longer than you deserve. On the other hand, it may not, too. A machine gun isn’t awful goddamn choosy about who it picks out.” His face clouded. “I ought to know.” He wore the ribbon for a Purple Heart, too.
“Question, Sergeant?” somebody called.
“Yeah, go ahead.”
“Is it true the Confederates are giving their soldiers lots and lots of submachine guns?” the youngster asked.
“Yeah, that’s supposed to be true,” the sergeant said. “I don’t think all that much of the idea myself. Submachine gun only fires a pistol round. It doesn’t have a lot of stopping power, and the effective range is pretty short.” He stopped and rubbed his chin. It was blue with stubble, though he’d surely scraped it smooth that morning. “Of course, submachine guns do put a hell of a lot of lead in the air. And the goddamn Confederates can hold their breath till they turn blue, but they’re never gonna have as many men as we do. I expect that’s why they’re trying it.”
Another recruit piped up: “Why hasn’t somebody made an automatic rifle, if a submachine gun isn’t good enough?”
“The Confederates are supposed to be trying that, too, but there are problems,” the sergeant said. “Recoil, wear on the mechanism, overheating, having the weapon pull up when you fire it on full automatic, keeping it clean in the field—those are some of the things you’ve got to worry about. I wouldn’t fall over dead with surprise if we start using something like that, too, one of these days, but don’t hold your breath, either. And the Springfield is a goddamn good weapon. We won a war with it. We can win another one if we have to.”
He waited. Sure enough, that drew another question: “Are we going to fight another war with the Confederate States?”
“Beats me,” the drill sergeant answered. “I’ve done my share of fighting, and I am plumb satisfied. But if that Featherston son of a bitch isn’t … You need two for peace, but one can start a war. If he does start it, it’s up to us—it’ll be up to you—to finish it.”
Armstrong Grimes had no complaints. If he had to be in the Army, he wanted to be there while it was in action. What point to it otherwise? He didn’t think about getting hurt. He especially didn’t think about getting killed. That kind of stuff happened to other people. It couldn’t possibly happen to him. He was going to live forever.
The sergeant said, “And if he does start another war, you will finish it, right? You’ll kick the CSA’s mangy ass around the block, right?”
“Yes, Sergeant!” the young men shouted. They were all as convinced of their own immortality as Armstrong Grimes.
“I can’t hear you.” The sergeant cupped a hand behind one ear.
“Yes, Sergeant!” The recruits might have been at a football game. Armstrong yelled as loud as anybody else.
“That’s better,” the drill sergeant allowed. “Not good, but better.” Hardly anything anybody did in basic training was good. You might be perfect, but you still weren’t good enough. They wanted you to try till you keeled over. People did, too.
Supper was fried chicken and canned corn and spinach, with apple pie à la mode for dessert. It wasn’t great fried chicken, but you could eat as much as you wanted, which made up for a lot. Armstrong used food to pay his body back for the sleep it wasn’t getting.
After supper, he had a couple of hours to himself—the only time during the day when he wasn’t either unconscious or being run ragged. He could write home—which he didn’t do often enough to suit his mother—or read a book or get into a poker game or shoot the breeze with other recruits winding down from an exhausting day or do what he usually did: lie on his cot smoking cigarette after cigarette. People said they were bad for your wind. He didn’t care. He got through his three miles without any trouble, and the smokes helped him relax.
“You think there’s going to be a war?” somebody asked. The question had been coming up more and more often lately.
“If there is, the goddamn Confederates’ll be sorry,” somebody else answered.
“Damn right,” Armstrong said in the midst of a general rumble of agreement.
“We can lick ’em,” someone said, and then added what might have been the young man’s creed: “If our fathers did it, hell, we can do it easy.”
“Damn right,” Armstrong said again. Two hours after he sacked out, they had a simulated night attack. He bounced out of bed to repel imaginary enemies. He didn’t miss the sleep. Why would he? He was already too far behind for a little more to matter.
Colonel Clarence Potter imagined a man he had never seen. He didn’t know if the man lived in Dallas or Mobile or Nashville or Charleston or Richmond. Wherever he lived, he fit right in. He sounded like the people around him. He looked like them, too, and acted like them. When the time came to shout, “Freedom!” he yelled as loud as anybody. When he had a few beers in a saloon, he grumbled about what the damnyankee innovation of the forward pass had done to the great game of football.
And when he was by himself, this man Potter had never seen would write innocent-looking letters or send innocent-sounding wires up to the United States. He would be doing business with or for some firm or other based north of the Mason-Dixon line. And some of his messages really would be innocent, and some of them would go straight to the U.S. War Department in Philadelphia.
The man Potter had never met—would never meet—was the mirror image of the spies he ran in the USA. He’d had the idea. He had to assume his opposite number up in the United States had had it, too. He didn’t like that, but he had to believe it. He kept wondering how much damage that imaginary U.S. spy could do.
Trouble was, the bastard almost certainly wasn’t imaginary. A German had trouble sounding like a Frenchman, and vice versa. But a Yankee and a Confederate were too close to begin with. Differences in accent were small things. If you came from the USA, you had to remember to say things like note or banknote instead of bill. People would follow you if you used your own word, but they’d know you were a foreigner. But if you were careful, you could get by.
Something else worried Clarence Potter. He ran spies. The probable counterpart of one of the fellows he ran would also be a spy. If you had people in place as spies, though, wouldn’t you also have them in place as provocateurs? As saboteurs?
He didn’t know whether the Confederates had provocateurs and saboteurs lurking in the USA. He didn’t know because it was none of his business. What he didn’t know, he couldn’t tell. In philosophy up at Yale, though, he’d learned about what Plato called true opinions. He was pretty damn sure he had one of those about this question. He also had some strong opinions about where he’d put provocateurs and saboteurs.
He sat down in front of his typewriter to bang out a memorandum. In it he said not a word about spies, provocateurs, and saboteurs in the United States. He did mention the possibility that their U.S. equivalents were operating in the Confederate States. It would be unfortunate, he wrote, if the USA were able to take advantage of similarities between the two countries in language, custom, and dress, and it is to be hoped that steps to prevent such dangerous developments are currently being taken.
When he reread the sentence, the corners of his mouth turned down in distaste. He didn’t like writing that way; it set his teeth on edge. He would rather have come straight to the point. But he knew the officers who would see the memorandum. They wrote gobbledygook. They expected to read it, too. Active verbs would only scare them. They were none too active themselves.
As soon as he fired the memorandum up the chain of command, he stopped worrying about it. He judged he probably wouldn’t get an answer. If the Army or the Freedom Party or somebody was watching out for suspicious characters, he wouldn’t. Nobody would bother patting a busybody colonel on the hand and saying, “There, there. No need to worry, dear.”
A few days later, he was writing a note when the telephone on his desk rang. His hand jerked a little—just enough to spoil a word. He scratched it out before picking up the handset. “Clarence Potter.” He didn’t say he was in Intelligence. Anyone who didn’t already know had the wrong number.
“Hello, Potter. You are a sneaky son of a bitch, aren’t you?”
“Hello, Mr. President,” Potter answered cautiously. “Is that a compliment or not? In my line of work, I’m supposed to be.”
“Hell, yes, it’s a compliment,” Jake Featherston answered. “It’s also a judgment on us. We’ve been thinking a lot about what we can do to the damnyankees. We ain’t worried near enough about what them bastards can do to us.”
When his grammar slipped that far, he was genuinely irate. He’d also told Potter what the call was about. “You’ve read the memorandum, then?”
“Damn right I’ve read it. Those two whistle-ass peckerheads above you kicked it up to me. They were going, ‘What do you want to do about this here?’ ”
Clarence Potter had a hard time swallowing a snort. Featherston might be president of the CSA, but he still talked like a foul-mouthed sergeant, especially when he took aim at officers. Potter asked, “What do you want to do about it, Mr. President?”
“You asked the questions. I want somebody to get me some answers. I sure as shit don’t have enough of ’em right now. How would you like to do it? I’ll make you a brigadier general on the spot.”
Only two promotions really mattered: the one up from buck private and the one to general’s rank. All the same, Potter said, “Sir, if I have a choice, I’d rather work on our assets there than their assets here. I want to hit those people when the time comes.”
“Even if it costs you the promotion?” Featherston could only mean, How serious are you?
“Even if it does,” Potter said firmly. “I didn’t expect to come back into the Army anyway. I didn’t do it for a wreath around my stars. I did it for the country.” And to keep from giving you an excuse for getting rid of me. He didn’t say that. Why remind Featherston?
“All right, then. You’ve got it—and the promotion,” the president said. “That’s your baby now, General Potter.”
It did feel good. It felt damn good, as a matter of fact. And it felt all the better because Potter hadn’t expected he would ever get it. When he said, “Thank you, Mr. President!” he sounded much more sincere than he’d thought he would while talking to Jake Featherston.
“I reckon you’ve earned it,” Featherston answered. “I reckon you’ll do a good job with it, too. You wait half an hour, and then you go right on into Brigadier General McGillivray’s office and get to work. From here on out, it’s yours.”
“Yes, sir,” Potter said, but he was talking to a dead line. He wondered briefly why the president wanted him to wait, but only briefly. He’d known Jake Featherston more than twenty-five years. He could guess what Jake would be doing with that half hour.
And his guess proved good. When he walked into his superior’s—no, his former superior’s—office, Brigadier General Stanley McGillivray was white and trembling. “I gather you are to replace me?” he choked out when he saw Potter.
“I gather I am.” Potter had ripped into a good many incompetent officers in his time, but he didn’t have the heart to say anything snide to McGillivray. The other Intelligence officer was a broken man if ever he’d seen one. He was so terribly broken, in fact, that Potter, for once, was moved more to sympathy than to sarcasm. “I hope the president wasn’t too hard on you?”
“That, Colonel Potter—excuse me: General Potter—is what they call a forlorn hope,” McGillivray answered bitterly. “I think you will find everything in order here. I think you will find it in better condition than I have been given credit for. Good day. Good luck.” By the way he stumbled out of the office, he might almost have been a blind man.
“Poor bastard,” Potter muttered. Anyone who ran into the cutting torch of Jake Featherston’s fury was going to get charred. He’d seen that for himself, more often than he cared to remember.
And then he put Stanley McGillivray out of his mind. He was familiar with only about a third of the work that this desk did. He had to learn the rest of it … and he had the strong feeling he had to learn it in a tearing hurry. Featherston sure as hell wouldn’t wait for him. Featherston had never been in the habit of waiting for anybody.
Potter went through the manila folders on the desk one by one. Some of them held things he’d expected to find. A few held surprises. He’d hoped they would. If he’d been able to figure out everything McGillivray was doing, wouldn’t the damnyankees have done the same thing?
Some of the surprises were surprises indeed. The Confederates had been running people in Philadelphia since before the Great War. They’d recruited young men who needed this or that—and some who needed to make sure this or that never became public. Not all those young men had lasted. Some had died in the war. Some hadn’t had the careers they’d hoped they would, and so proved useless as sources. But a handful of them, by now, were in position to know some very interesting things, and to pass them on.
The assets farther west were interesting, too. Most of Potter’s notions of where they were proved right. Again, he got some surprises about who they were. That didn’t matter so much. As long as he could use them …
He also checked the procedures Brigadier General McGillivray had in place for staying in touch with his people in the USA in case normal communications channels broke down—in plain English, in case there was a war. They weren’t bad. He hoped he could find a way to make them better. The real problem he saw was how slow they were. He understood why that was so, but he didn’t like it. “There’s got to be a better way,” he muttered, not sure if he was right.
Late that afternoon, the telephone in the new office rang. When he picked it up, Anne Colleton was on the other end of the line. “Congratulations, General Potter,” she purred in his ear.
“Jesus Christ!” Potter sat bolt upright in his new swivel chair. It was a different make from the one he’d used before; he wasn’t used to it yet. Its squeak sounded funny, too. “How did you know that?”
“I had to talk with the president about something,” she answered. “He told me he’d promoted you.”
“Oh.” Potter’s alarm evaporated. If she’d heard it from Jake Featherston, it was hardly a security breach. “All right.”
“He told me some of why he promoted you, too,” Anne said. “Do you really think the damnyankees are going to raise hell here if we go to war?”
“Well, I can’t know, not for sure. But I would, if I were in their shoes. I do know they gave our niggers guns during the last war. If there’s another one, they’d be fools not to do it again. They’re bastards. They aren’t fools. We thought they were in 1914. We’ve been paying for it ever since.”
“Can we track down the people they’ve got here?” Anne asked.
“Of course we can,” Potter answered, thinking, No way in hell. More truthfully, he went on, “The harder we go after them, the more careful they’ll have to be, too.”
“Uh-huh,” Anne said in thoughtful tones.
She was, dammit, plenty smart enough to see the contradictions between the two things he’d said. He changed the subject: “What were you talking about with the president?”
“The timing of a propaganda campaign here in South Carolina,” she said. Potter wondered just what that meant. He didn’t want to go into details with her. God only knew how secure this line was. But the likeliest explanation he could come up with on his own was, We were talking about when the war will start.
Abner Dowling raised field glasses to his eyes and looked across the Ohio River into Kentucky. The mere act of observing Kentucky from afar made him so angry, he wanted to swell up like a bullfrog. As far as he was concerned, he shouldn’t have been looking into a foreign country when he eyed Kentucky. He should have been in the state, getting ready to defend it against the Confederates. If they wanted to take it away from him, they would have been welcome to try. He could have promised them a warm reception.
Now … Now he had to figure out how to defend Ohio instead. The General Staff had generously sent him some plans prepared before the Great War. They would have been just what he needed, except that they ignored airplanes and barrels and barely acknowledged the existence of trucks. Things had changed since 1914. Dowling knew that. He hoped to God the General Staff did, too.
Some of what the old plans suggested was still sound. All the bridges across the Ohio had demolition charges in place. Artillery covered the bridges and other possible crossing points. Antiaircraft guns poked their noses up among the camouflaged cannons. If the Confederates were going to try to bomb his guns to silence, they wouldn’t have an easy time of it.
He kept his main force farther back in Ohio than the old plans recommended. Again, the airplane was the main reason why. He also wanted to get some notion of what the Confederates were doing before he committed his men.
Custer would have charged right at them, wherever they first showed themselves, he thought. The way he rolled his eyes showed his opinion of that. Custer would have charged, sure as the devil. Maybe he would have smashed everything in his way. Maybe he would have blundered straight into an ambush. But he could no more keep from charging than a bull could when a matador waved his cape. Sword? What sword? Custer would have thought, bullishly.
For better or worse—for better and worse—Dowling was more cautious. If the Confederate Army crossed into the USA, he wanted to slow it down. The way he looked at things, if the Confederates didn’t win quick victories, they’d be in trouble. In a long, drawn-out grapple, the USA had the edge. Dowling didn’t think that had changed since the Great War.
He raised the field glasses again. Kentucky seemed to leap toward him. Jake Featherston had lied about keeping soldiers out of the state. He’d lied about not asking for more land. How was anybody in the United States supposed to trust him now? You couldn’t. It was as simple as that.
Even Al Smith had seen the light. The president of the USA had said he would fight back if the CSA tried to take land by force. Dowling was all for that. But so much more could have been done. It could have, but it hadn’t. Everybody’d known the Confederates were rearming. If the USA had been serious about showing Featherston who was boss, the country could have done it quickly and easily in 1935. Nothing would be quick or easy now.
And the United States weren’t so ready as they should have been. Dowling thought about all the time wasted in the 1920s. The Confederates had been on the ropes then, either on the ropes or smiling and saying how friendly they were. Why build better barrels when you’d never have to use them? As happened too often in politics, never turned out not to be so very long after all.
“Sir?” said an aide at Dowling’s elbow. “Sir?”
Dowling had been lost in his own gloom. He wondered how long the younger man had been trying to draw his notice. However long it was, he’d finally succeeded. “Yes, Major Chandler? What is it?”
“Sir, Captain Litvinoff from the Special Weapons Section in Philadelphia has come down from Columbus to confer with you,” Chandler answered.
“Has he?” Dowling was damned if he wanted to confer with anybody from what was euphemistically called the Special Weapons Section. Regardless of what he wanted, he had little choice. “All right. Let’s get it over with.” He might have been talking about a trip to the dentist.
“Max Litvinoff, sir,” the captain said, saluting.
Dowling returned the salute. “Pleased to meet you,” he lied. Litvinoff looked even more like a brain than he’d expected. The captain with the cobalt blue and golden yellow arm-of-service piping on his collar couldn’t have been more than thirty. He was about five feet four, skinny, and homely, with thick steel-rimmed glasses and a thin, dark mustache that looked as if he’d drawn it on with a burnt match for an amateur theatrical.
However he looked, he was all business. “This will be good terrain for the application of our special agents,” he said briskly.
He might have been talking about spies. He might have been, but he wasn’t. Dowling knew too well what he was talking about. Dowling also had a pretty good idea why Litvinoff didn’t come right out and say what he meant. People who ended up in the Special Weapons Section often didn’t. It was magic of a sort: if they didn’t say the real name, they didn’t have to think about what they were doing.
“You’re talking about poison gas.” Dowling had no such inhibitions.
Max Litvinoff coughed. His sallow cheeks turned red. “Well … yes, sir,” he mumbled. He was only a captain. He couldn’t reprove a man with a star on each shoulder. Every line of his body, though, shouted out that he wanted to.
Too bad, Dowling thought. He’d been up at the front with General Custer the first time the USA turned chlorine loose on the Confederates in 1915. “Gas is a filthy business,” he said, and Captain Litvinoff’s cheeks got redder yet. “We use it, the Confederates use it, some soldiers on both sides end up dead, and nobody’s much better off. What’s the point?”
“The point, sir, is very simple,” Litvinoff answered stiffly. “If the enemy uses the special agent”—he still wouldn’t say gas—“and we don’t, then our men end up dead and his don’t. Therefore …”
What Dowling wanted to do was yell, Fuck you! and kick the captain in the ass. Unfortunately, he couldn’t. Litvinoff was right. Handing the CSA an edge like that would be stupid, maybe suicidal. “Go on,” Dowling growled.
“Yes, sir. You will be familiar with the agents utilized in the last war?” Captain Litvinoff sounded as if he didn’t believe it. When Dowling nodded, Litvinoff shrugged. He went on, “You may perhaps be less familiar with those developed at the close of hostilities and subsequently.”
So I am, Dowling thought. And thank God for small favors. But he couldn’t say that to Litvinoff. He was, heaven help him, going to have to work with the man. What he did say was, “I’m all ears.”
“Good.” Captain Litvinoff looked pleased. He liked talking about his toys, showing them off, explaining—in bloodless-seeming terms—what they could do. If that wasn’t a measure of his damnation, Dowling couldn’t imagine what would be. Litvinoff continued, “First, there’s nitrogen mustard. We did use some of this in 1917. It’s a vesicant.”
“A what?” Dowling asked. The Special Weapons Section man might have his vocabulary of euphemisms, but that didn’t even sound like a proper English word.
Reluctantly, Litvinoff translated: “A blistering agent. Mucus membranes and skin. It does not have to be inhaled to be effective, thought it will produce more and more severe casualties if the lungs are involved. And it is a persistent agent. In the absence of strong direct sunlight or rain, it can remain in place and active for months. An excellent way to deny access to an area to the enemy.”
“And to us,” Dowling said.
Captain Litvinoff looked wounded. “By no means, sir. Troops with proper protective gear and an awareness the agent is in the area can function quite well.”
“All right,” Dowling said, though it was anything but. “What other little toys have you got?”
“Walk with me, sir, if you’d be so kind,” Litvinoff said, and led him away from the officers and men in his entourage. When the young captain was sure they were out of earshot, he went on, “We also have what we are terming nerve agents. They are a step up in lethality from other agents we have been utilizing.”
Dowling needed a second or two to figure out what lethality meant. When he did, he wished he hadn’t. “Nerve agents?” he echoed queasily.
“That’s right.” Litvinoff nodded. “Again, these are effective both by inhalation and through cutaneous contact. They prevent nerve impulses from initiating muscular activity.” That didn’t sound like anything much. But his next sentence told what it meant: “Lethality occurs through cardiopulmonary failure. Onset is quite rapid, and the amount of agent required to induce it is astonishingly small.”
“How nice,” Dowling said. Captain Litvinoff beamed. Dowling muttered, “I wonder why we bother with bullets any more.”
“So do I, sir. So do I.” Litvinoff was dead serious—under the circumstances, the exact right phrase. But then, as grudging as a spinster talking about the facts of life, he admitted, “These nerve agents do have an antidote. But it must be administered by injection, and if it is administered in error, it is in itself toxic.”
“This is all wonderful news,” Dowling said—another thumping lie. He had been looking forward to lunch. He usually did. Now, though, his appetite had vanished. And a new and important question occurred to him: “Good to know we have these things available. But tell me, Captain, what are the Confederates likely to throw at us if the war starts?”
Max Litvinoff blinked behind his spectacles. “I am more familiar with our own program… .”
“Dammit, Captain, I’m not just going to shoot these things at the enemy. I’ll be on the receiving end, too. What am I going to receive? What can I do about it?”
“Respirators are current issue. Protective clothing is rather less widely available, and does tend to restrict mobility in warm, humid climates,” Litvinoff said. Dowling tried to imagine running around in a rubberized suit in Ohio or Kentucky in July. The thought did not bring reassurance with it. The Special Weapons Section officer went on, “The Confederate States are likely to be familiar with nitrogen mustard. Whether they know of nerve agents, and of which sorts, I am less prepared to state.”
“Does somebody in the War Department have any idea? Can you tell me who would?” Dowling asked. “It might be important, you know.”
“Well, yes, I can see how it might,” Litvinoff said. “Unfortunately, however, defenses against these agents are not my area of expertise.”
“Yes, I gathered that. I’m trying to find out from you whose area of expertise they are.”
“Knowing that does not fall within my area of expertise, either.”
Dowling looked at him. “Captain, why the hell did you come out here in the first place?”
“Why, to give you information, sir.”
He meant it. Dowling could see as much. Seeing as much didn’t make him very happy—or give him much information, either.