“Uh, yes, sir,” Pat Cooley said again. This time, it wasn’t doubt in his eyes as he looked Sam over: it was bemusement again. Sam laughed inside himself. No, the mustang isn’t quite what you figured on, eh, kid?

The light cruiser’s skipper didn’t choose to linger to continue the one-sided gun duel. The flotilla steamed south. Sam hoped the Mexicans didn’t have anything more up their sleeves than what they’d already shown.

For you, the war is over. The Confederate officer who took Major Jonathan Moss prisoner after his fighter got shot down over Virginia had sounded like an actor mouthing a screenwriter’s lines in a bad film about the Great War. The only thing that had kept Moss from telling him so was that the son of a bitch was likely right.

Moss strolled near the barbed-wire perimeter of a prisoner-of-war camp outside the little town of Andersonville, Georgia. He didn’t get too close to the barbed wire. Inside it was a second perimeter, marked only by two-foot-high stakes with long, flimsy bands supported on top of them. The red dirt between the inner and outer perimeters was always rolled smooth so it would show footprints. The goons in the guard towers outside the barbed wire would open up with machine guns without warning if anybody presumed to set foot on that dead ground without permission.

Other officers-fliers and ground pounders both-also walked along the perimeter or through the camp. The only other thing to do was stay in the barracks, an even more depressing alternative. The Confederates had built them as cheaply and flimsily as the Geneva Convention allowed. No doubt U.S. accommodations for C.S. prisoners were every bit as shabby. Moss didn’t care about that; he wasn’t in a U.S. camp. What he did care about was that, when it rained here-which it did all too often-it rained almost as hard inside the barracks as it did outside.