When Jake came out of the studio, Saul Goldman stood in the hall with eyes shining behind his glasses. “That… that was outstanding, Mr. President,” he said. “Outstanding.”

“Yeah, I thought it went pretty well,” Featherston said. Around most people, he bragged and swaggered. Goldman, by contrast, could make him modest.

“No one in the United States will have any doubts,” Goldman said. “No one in the Confederate States will, either.”

“That’s what it’s all about,” Jake said. “I don’t want anybody to have any doubts about what I’ve got in mind. I aim to make the Confederate States the grandest country on this continent. I aim to do that, and by God I’m going to do that.” Even Saul Goldman, who’d heard it all before, and heard it times uncounted, nodded as if it were fresh and new.

Aship of his own! Sam Carsten had never dreamt of that, not when he joined the Navy in 1909. He’d never dreamt of becoming an officer at all, but he wore a lieutenant’s two broad gold stripes on each sleeve of his jacket. The Josephus Daniels wasn’t a battlewagon or an airplane carrier-nothing of the sort. The U.S. Navy called her a destroyer escort; in the Royal Navy, she would have been a frigate. She could do a little bit of everything: escort convoys of merchantmen and hunt submersibles that menaced them, lay mines if she had to (though she wasn’t specialized for that), bombard a coast (though that was asking for trouble if airplanes were anywhere close by), and shoot torpedoes and her pair of four-inch popguns at enemy ships. She was all his-306 feet, 220 men.

Commander Cressy, the Remembrance’s executive officer, had been surprised when he got her-surprised, but pleased.