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end up going along with Abe Williams anyway. So why talk it to death? I thought everything was settled."
    "We never completely agreed with Abe in the political area," Elliot said impatiently. "Now we're just trying to explore the possibilities. Thafs all. And it wouldn't hurt for you to add your thinking to this. Even if you were a baby when all this started. Your thinking wouldn't hurt none."
    "It seems pretty clear cut to me," Johnson said, sighing. "United we stand, divided we fall. Isn't it that simple?
    Whitey is the enemy. Not Abe Williams. If he says take and hold, then we take and hold. Isn't it that ample?"
    "Abe doesn't understand the southern psyche," the intelligence man put in. "Now we know we can't just take and hold. Not down here. Not in Mississippi, Joe. You don't remember that much, that's the trouble. We either take and kill, or we take and get killed. It's as simple as that."
    "Speaking from the military standpoint, I say thafs a lot of townshit," the younger man commented. "If the battle order holds up, and things go the way we figure them to, then whitey's going to be helpless. He can't move against us."
    Hatfield was glumly shaking his head in an emphatic rebuttal. "You don't know some of these people down here, Joe. You been protected from them all your life. That's why we towned up, to get away from them. You don't know. You just don't know how hard they hate."
    "We got some hate working for us too," Johnson shot back. "And we got more than that. We got outrage. Outrage. Now there's a strong weapon."
    "I take it, then, that you're in favor of bowing to Abe Williams," Eliot said.
    "It's not a matter of bowing," Johnson replied uncomfortably. "It's just common sense. Somebody has to call the shots for this thing. Abe's calling them. I say let 'im call them."
    "I say I wish we'd had time to settle this matter," Elliot flashed back.
    "Well we don't have the time," Hatfield told him. "So it looks like we better just go along. And play the thing by ear. We'll go along to whatever extent the situation allows. Then ... if things start getting rough ,.. then we do it our way."
    "You see that as our only recourse?" the Mayor asked.
    Hatfield nodded, a faint smile playing upon Ms face. "That's the way Atlanta sees it. They're going to play it as cool as possible. But if things start getting too mean, Georgia's going to think General Sherman came back."
    Eliott said, "Well, I guess we should . . . uh, I hope
    everybody appreciates the unique situation we have here in the south. There's a lot of old, painful memories down here, on both sides. We got a lot of boyg in our militias who grew up without mommas and daddies, or without nuts, or without brothers and sisters—because of those wild men out there. And a lot of them are still out there."
    Hatfield shrugged and said, "I told Norman Ritter he could count on my operatives to play it straight." He chuckled. "Course, he don't know about that list we got, but I guess we can make some disposition of those bastards when the time is right."
    "You're speaking of the triple-k," the young soldier spoke up.
    "Yeah. You wouldn't know much about that. Not first hand. But a lot of us do. A lot of us." He shivered. "That last big outbreak in '81 is gonna be remembered by a lot of us."
    "We have unique problems here in the south," the Mayor repeated. He grunted and scratched his white-domed head. "I guess nobody ever has really understood that."
    "I understand it," the troop commander said. "They terrorized us off the land, now we're going to terrorize our way back onto it. It's as simple as that."
    "So, the south is gonna rise again, isn't it," Hatfield said, grinning.
    "Yeah," Elliot growled. "It's going to rise about two feet. In blood."
    CHAPTER 5

    "Abe Williams ain't no Black Messiah!"
    "Well, hell, I didn't say he was." Phil Smart, Mayor of Kansas City, stepped to the window and let his eyes follow the gently rolling terrain clear to the horizon. "But goddammit, give