Don Pendleton - Civil War II (2 page)

"Screw your goddam whitey computer," Harvey muttered. "I don't want arguments, I want
credits
." He sighed heavily and asked, "All right, how much of a cut?"

Winston lit a cigarette and exhaled noisily toward the ceiling. "I warned you last time ... I told you what would

happen. Four and a half percent, John."

"Dirty bastards! The dirty rotten whitey bastards! Okay, what is it? It's not the work refusals, is it? So what is it? That little bit of noise on the Bay Bridge last month? The excursion to Castro Valley? Listen, we disciplined those kids. And that's all it was,
kid
stuff, regardless of what you damned honky newspapers had to say about it. We don't need to be slapped with a four and a half percent cut to stay in line."

Winston smoked quietly for a moment. The guy needed to save face, and Winston could stand a bit of abuse. Presently he said, "You know I can't do anything about the cut this time, John. Pull up your performance during this quarter and we'll try to restore it. You know the routine as well as I."

"Some routine," Harvey replied, snorting with repressed rage. "Listen,
you
listen. Those work refusals. You know what they were. Ten credits a day, in the Vallejo cabbage fields.
Ten credits.
The work is twelve hours long, the transportation day is four more hours. Sixteen damn hours a day, Commissioner, for ten lousy credits. White men in the very next field are getting
twenty five,
and they work eight hours, and their transportation day is ten minutes long.
Work
refusal!" He snorted some more, then muttered, "It's
slavery
refusal, Commissioner."

Winston returned his attention to the man at the desk and told him, "It's not the fields that are hurting you. It's your Uncle Tom quotas that are killing you."

"Oh, hell—
that
again," Harvey growled.

"Sure. You carried something better than a thousand unfilled requisitions this past quarter. That's a hell of a lot of jobs going begging, and permanent jobs at that."

"Permanent is right!" the Mayor yelled. "You call those
jobs?
That's worse slavery than the fields. It's twenty-four hours a day and it's total isolation in an alien world. I can't force my people out there to live with the whiteys!"

"What's so bad about it?" Winston wanted to know.

"You really don't know, do you."

"Frankly, no. I'd like it if I was a
light
—a fractional Negro. I'd get to live in a natural environment instead of in this stinking cement ghetto. Instead of working fields in the hot sun or swinging back and forth on the factory shuttles or barely existing on a government handout, I could chauffeur some rich guy around, or take care of his garden—maybe even service his wife or daughter when nobody was looking. What's so damn tough about Uncle Tomming?"

"You really don't know."

Winston shook his head. "No, dammit, I don't."

"The black man has his pride, Winston. Even a
fractional
black man. He's not going out there and serve Ol' Massa, not for all the material comfort in the world. And living like that is grinding to a man's soul. You can't expect a man to live totally isolated from his own kind."

"A lot of 'em are doing it," Winston pointed out.

The Mayor shook his head adamantly. "Not
real
black men, Winston. Black is not in the color of skin, it's in the quality of soul. No black men are serving Ol' Massa. Uncle Toms, sure. But no black men."

Winston was certain that they had repeated this stale argument several thousand times. But he went on. "And the federal blacks? What of them? Four million of your people, John, serving Ol' Massa on the federal payroll, practically
running
Ol Massa's white establishment for him, and protecting him against foreign adventures to boot."

"Not my people," the Mayor insisted. "A government nigger is even worse than a Tom, and you know it. Those people live in a fool's dream. Some day they're going to wake up and feel those chains on their ankles."

Winston sighed and leaned across the desk to put out his cigarette. "Try to improve your performance figures this quarter, John," he suggested. "You do and I'll get that four and a half percent back for you."

"And in the meantime what do we do?" Harvey asked dismally. "This town is bankrupt, as of the minute you walked in that door. I wanted that eight percent raise for street repair. As bad as the streets are, we needed the jobs even worse. Instead, you're taking away. We have no tax base now. What good does it do us to send out Uncle

Toms? A few bucks off the dole roll, sure, and that's a drop of sweat in the bay. What we need is—"

"Get that performance curve climbing," Winston interrupted with a heavy sigh. "You know that's the only thing that counts."

"People
count."

"Not to a computer, John." Winston picked up his briefcase and went to die door.

The black man remained dejectedly at his desk, eyes studying the palms of Ms hands.

Some of the starch went out of the Commissioner of Urban Affairs and he muttered, "Dammit, I feel as bad about this as you do, John." He went on through the outer office, showed the pretty receptiomst a sober smile, and made Ms way through the heavy traffic of the corridor, stonily avoiding the stares being directed his way. Then, on an impulse, he spun about and retraced his steps to the mayor's office.

The receptionist was disappearing through the doorway to the private office. Winston crossed quickly, followed her to the threshold, and pushed his shoulders through for a quick word.

The girl had turned about and was regarding him with obvious confusion and indecision, frozen in her tracks halfway across the big room. Harvey was standing behind Ms desk and grinning at two, other black men who were entering from an adjacent office. His grin also froze as he became aware of Winston's presence.

The two men in the opposite doorway halted momentarily, and it appeared for an instant that they were going to turn and leave. Then the one in the lead smiled at Winston and came on in.

Winston's gaze flashed across to the dismayed face of Mayor Harvey, and he told him, "I just wanted to say, John, that I am not a computer. I'll delay the funding for a week. Give me at least an indication of a promising curve characteristic and I'll override the machine's decision."

Harvey showed him a glassy smile and replied, "Thanks, Commissioner. I appreciate that."

Winston nodded at the other two, pulled the door shut,.

and returned without further dalliance to the hovercar. He rose quickly to the transit altitude, then used Ms F-VIP code to request an immediate uncontrolled transit to San Francisco International Airport. The airflow computer responded without hesitation to the F-VIP override and cleared him for direct flight.

With a bit of scrambling he could make the nine-thirty commuter to Washington. It had suddenly become very urgent that he do so. He wanted to determine if General Jackson T. Bogan, Army Chief of Combat Forces and the country's highest ranking Negro officer, had a spitting-image double. If not, then h© wanted to know if the nation's top government nigger made a practice of donning civilian clothes and visiting towns in the company of Abraham Lincoln Williams, lord Mgh potentate and soul daddy of all town rnggers everywhere—and why they should be so upset over the discovery of their visit to Oakland Town by a lowly Commissioner of Urban Affairs.

Not that anything had made much sense in the Negro world for the past few years—but there were some things that even a second-echelon bureaucrat could not swallow. Mike Winston could not swallow Bogan and Williams tiptoeing about the back rooms of the Oakland town hall, even if he could accept the mere fact of them being together.

And somehow he knew, the entire scene with John Harvey had been some sort of silly game. The guy hadn't been really concerned about the budget cuts, and even less impressed with Winston's second-thought offer to personally intervene in the funding settlement.

So what
was
he concerned about? And Bogan, and Williams. What the hell were
they
so concerned about?

Mike Winston did not know. But he for damn sure was going to find out.

CHAPTER 2

It had once bean the home stadium for a national champion football team, and there had been times when eighty thousand and more fans had lifted roaring approval to the heavens over the legal mayhem being committed across the artificial turf of the playing field. Cheers and chants had long since disappeared and the tiers of seats lifting in all directions toward the skies were showing the evidence of years of crumbling neglect. Still, the stadium had become the hope, the dream, and the rallying point for the million black townsmen of Oakland—and was regarded as the unofficial soul-quarters of some twenty million others.

Now, tall, muscular young men practiced games of another sort here. They were games of survival and death. Here they learned the game of war and the machines of war. They learned to shoot, unemotionally and accurately, and they learned how it felt to be shot at. And here they dreamed of war and plotted for war and prayed for war. This place was called
The Warhole,
because that's what it was—a hole in space, a place of stealth for men who plotted for dignity and freedom.

Abraham Lincoln Williams paced up and down the former locker room, now operations central for the

Western Division of the Black Militia, impatiently awaiting the arrival of Norman Ritter, Chief of Militia Intelligence and also, officially, Special Intelligence Aide to the U.S. Army Chief of Staff.

The others were already present—General Bogan, in charge of all black military operations, legal and otherwise; Mayor Harvey, senior civil authority for the western region; and Major General Hawley Matthews, Commanding Officer of the U.S. Air Force Tactical Air Command.

Williams stepped to the open doorway and gazed out Norman Ritter—a thick and powerfully built man of indeterminate age, soft red hair and freckled skin—was moving briskly along the ramp.

Williams moved back inside as Ritter hit the outer door and all but exploded into the operation center. The man's every movement seemed to be accompanied by an explosive release of stored energy; he moved quickly and bouncily whether the task be climbing a stairway or lighting a cigarette. He passed in front of Williams, showed him an upraised fist, and plowed into a chair witih a backward fling that would have rendered some men unconscious.

Williams got to the point immediately. "They're onto us," he declared simply, his eyes on Ritter.

The intelligence chief shrugged. "Had to happen sooner or later," he said mildly. "Who got smart?"

"Who else? Our esteemed Uncle Mose from the Urban Bureau. Our old buddy-buddy Mike Winston, the white man with a conscience."

"What exactly does he know?" Ritter asked, smiling grimly.

Williams dropped into a chair at the head of the small conference table. "I don't know," he replied. "But enough to make him suspicious and wondering, I know that much. That guy is danger, with a capital
D.
There was a time when he was one of the most awesome men in Washington."

"In the Urban Bureau?" the air force general asked humorously.

"Hell no, before that," Ritter put in. "He was one of the first federal oops when the FBI was revamped. Got into some kind of trouble. But don't think he's not just as dangerous. I've been uneasy as hell, frankly, ever since they transferred that guy into Urban."

"You think maybe it was a cover transfer?" Williams asked. "And you're just now mentioning it?"

"All you had to do was ask
me,"
General Bogan said. "I've known about Winston all along. His trouble was genuine, nothing put up about it. He got busted, pure and simple. And I can tell you why. He wouldn't go along with their programmed suppression of the blacks. It's as easy as that. So old Arlington thought he was being cute by transferring an Uncle Mose into Urban. An act of mercy, he called it at the time. Mercy!"

The general laughed, a gentle wheezing. "By presidential direction, Mike Winston was transferred to the Urban Bureau instead of being drummed out of federal service. And after all these years, it probably tums out to be the smartest move old Arlington ever made."

"All right," said Williams, "let's forget about Winston's troubles and talk about our own. When that guy starts digging, what's he going to find?"

Ritter shuffled his feet nervously but said nothing.

Mayor Harvey spoke up, almost apologetically. "I imagine he'll start by looking at the Toms."

"Why that?" Ritter, the intelligence man, asked quickly.

Harvey shrugged the massive shoulders. "Because I think he's already starting to wonder about that. You've been gobbling them up too fast, Norm. Faster than we can shove in replacements. Yeah. That's next. He'll start wondering why so many Tom requisitions these past few years."

"Well, then, that will really cut it," Williams declared angrily. "I warned you to be discreet about that business, Norm."