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“And why else? Why else, goddammit!”
“To observe,” Frankum squeaked. “To observe and report, and make sure that you do your jobs without … any…” His face was turning red, but he
forced out the last word anyway. “Interference!”
“From people like them?” MacGruder waved a hand toward Maria and Henry.
“From … anyone…”
The captain released his grip. Frankum’s knees folded, and he dropped to the ground, feeling at his throat as if to make certain he was still in one piece. MacGruder stalked back toward his nearest lieutenant and said, “We’re stopping here. We wait for Bradley to come back with word from Washington, and then we’ll reevaluate. And those three”—he pointed balefully at the cargo ship’s crew and captain—“are staying right here with us. Tie them up and throw them into the crawler. If they want to watch the bomb that badly, they can sit on top of it. ”
“No!” Frankum objected, loudly and suddenly. “No, you can’t do that!”
“Why’s that?”
“Because … because…” He swore under his breath, yanked off his hat, and threw it at the ground in a gesture of protest. “Because the damn thing won’t hold much longer. ”
“It’ll hold, so long as no one blasts it from the air. None of our crew has anything big enough to set it off. We’ll need your ship’s turret gun for that. ”
“No, no, you won’t. We’re here with our ship to shoot the thing and set it off—that’s true; I swear it’s true,” he said, hands aloft again, protesting innocence. “But we’re running so late, and there’s the failsafe built in…”
“Failsafe?”
He cleared his throat. “An accidental failsafe, really. The bomb is too hard to control—it isn’t stable. Once it’s set and armed, it has half a day before the gas corrodes the interior components. ” He was speaking quickly now. “Half a day, while the gas eats the metal like acid. If we don’t detonate it as planned, it’ll go off on its own. ”
“Half a day?”
“We haven’t got another two hours to wait for your messenger,” Frankum insisted. “We may not have one. If you want to follow orders, Captain MacGruder,” he said, trying to keep a sour note out of his voice, and only succeeding because he sounded so afraid, “there’s still time to get Maynard to … to the edge of Atlanta. The gas will settle, spread, and roam anyway; precision in this regard was never very important. ”
“Oh, God,” the captain said, though how he meant it, Maria wasn’t certain.
“Follow your orders. Finish the mission, and, and, and we’ll fit all of you into our craft somehow. We’ll get all of you out of here safe and sound, I swear it on my mother’s grave. We can take you out of the blast range—which isn’t far: the gas does the damage, not the detonation, and the gas is heavy. It’ll stay low, and we’ll go high. Just … you can’t keep us here. None of us can stay here much longer, that’s what I’m saying. And that’s the truth—that’s the God’s honest truth, and I swear it. ”
MacGruder returned his attention to Maria and Henry—who by now had slid down into a seated position. He’d recovered a little of his coloring, but still looked weak. “Do either of you know how far this gas can travel? How much space it can cover?”
Maria put her hand on Henry’s shoulder. “No one knows. It’ll roam like a cloud, killing everything it touches until it dissipates. ”
The captain looked mad enough to chew nails and spit tacks. But he couldn’t afford to lose his temper in front of his men, not at a moment like this, when the nervous chatter was whispering its way to a crescendo of frightened soldiers, the rumor fleeing back and forth along the caravan to anyone who wasn’t present to witness the exchange.
“All right,” he said, his teeth grinding against the words. “Apparently we don’t have time to fulfill our mission objective; we’ll never make the air base in Atlanta with this cargo, not now. These guys,” he said, with regards to Frankum and his crew, “aren’t going anywhere without us. And we’re not going anywhere without them. Evans,” he said to a uniformed soldier standing by. “Get me that map from the front car. We’ve got to find someplace to dump this. Sanders—” He signaled someone else. “As per my original request, I want these three tied up and stuck in the crawler with the bomb. ”
“But Captain—”
“Not another word out of you. We don’t have time to wait for Bradley, which means we’re acting on faith. Now, the rest of you—in teams, as we talked about before—start digging. We need those wheels free in less time than it’d take you piss by the road, or else we’re all dead men. ” He turned to Maria and Henry, then gave Henry a second, appraising gaze. “He’s not looking so well. We don’t have a doctor, but we can put him in a cart so he can rest. ”
Maria looked down at Henry, who indeed seemed on the very verge of fainting. “Henry, I think you’d better let them help you,” she said wearily.
“No, I’m fine. ”
“No, you’re not. Here, someone get him up,” she pleaded, and MacGruder nodded toward one of his fellows. As Henry was lifted up and assisted to someplace more comfortable, Maria turned to the captain and said, “You’re doing the right thing. ”
“At present, I’m only making a go of it. ”
“Do you have a plan?”
“No. ” Evans returned with a map roll. MacGruder took it and stretched it out across the back of a crate they’d pulled down off the crawler, hoping to lighten the load. He weighed down the paper with a rock on one side, and his fist on the other. It was a detailed production, with known farms, small towns, and topographical features all marked out. With his free hand, the captain traced out the particulars as he spoke. “We’re right about here,” he told her—and Evans, too, who lingered at his side. “Still a good forty miles from Atlanta, but there are a few little towns between here and there. And behind us, too. ”
“What about … what about a lake?” Evans asked, pointing down at a wide, oval-shaped spot to the east. “We could drag it out to a lake, and toss it inside. Maybe the water would, I don’t know … hold down the worst of the gas?”
