Shadows of Annihilation Page 13
“The Yankees’ little brown monkeys are serious little brown monkeys,” Röhm observed. “Ah, they’re bringing the airship down.”
The red-haired American officer raised a flare pistol and fired into the air, the shell bursting green. In response the airship hovered overhead and dropped a cable; men on the ground secured it to a huge boulder, and a winch whined until the craft was down below a hundred meters, its nose much lower than its tail and not far above the tips of the pines. A bosun’s-chair arrangement was dropped next, out of an open door that had a boom and pulley; wounded men, bodies, and bundles of gear began shuttling upward, and other bundles that probably held food and ammunition came down.
“Efficient!” Horst said. “They’ll lose a lot fewer of their hurt if they can get them out fast by airship like this. The first couple of hours are the crucial ones with a serious wound. And bringing in supplies like that means lighter loads and faster movement.”
“Wouldn’t be practical if anyone was shooting at them,” Röhm remarked, rising and slinging or tucking away his gear.
“Right,” Horst said, picking up his own rolled blanket and slinging it from left shoulder to right hip. “Time to go.”
He called to Pablo: “Let’s get some distance before the headhunters are after us. That pass the airship came over is open now and they haven’t caught our trail; we can go west and circle back farther south. With some luck they’ll never know we were here.”
They moved off briskly, but with due care for cover, the men with the assault rifles before and behind for emergency firepower at close range, Chango behind the leader and Horst second to last. He spoke over his shoulder to Röhm.
“Someone is extremely sensitive about guerilla activity in this area—that wasn’t everyday precautions we just saw.”
Röhm nodded. “Colonel Nicolai was right. The Americans have put their V-gas factory in Zacatecas and they’re ramping up security in the area. They’re calling it the Dakota Project—the time we wasted sending men to that stretch of nowhere! For a while Nicolai was convinced it was in that place where Teddy the Cowboy had his ranch! That let them get it nearly finished while we were rushing around an empty steppe and they picked our men off. But they’re about finished and that’s the best time for an attack, and they know it.”
He paused and said thoughtfully: “Wahrscheinlich haben sie dafür einen Großkopferten aus dem Stab geschickt.”
That meant he thought they’d probably sent in a hotshot troubleshooter from HQ to oversee it—though Großkopferten meant literally “big-head.”
Röhm used an English idiom next, rather badly, with malice aforethought and a grin in his voice:
“Or maybe a Großkopfjäger, a big headhunter. But the headhunter won’t know about the toys I brought. The Yankee Big-Head-Hunter doesn’t want to be our brother, so we’ll use my toys to . . .”
“So schlag’ ich dir den Großkopf ein,” Horst said with a slight cruel smile; that completed an old saying Röhm had been playing on, with an appropriate modification. “Smash his Big-Head.”
The original went:
Und willst du nicht mein Bruder sein
So schlag ich dir den Schädel ein.
Which meant: If you don’t want to be my brother, I’ll crack your skull.
“Exactly, Horst. Exactly.”
SIX
City of Zacatecas
State of Zacatecas
United States Protectorate of México
JUNE 19TH, 1917, 1917(B)
Luz followed her usual morning routine, developed since she and Ciara started routinely sharing a bed: rise first, start breakfast, brew coffee, and wave a cup of it near Ciara’s nose until her eyes blinked blearily open, before kissing her.
“Up! Up, slugabed!” she said, retreating and holding up the cup. “By the Power of the Omnipotent Bean of Wakefulness I conjure and command thee to arise from the inky depths! ¡Adelante, mi corazón!”
The younger operative staggered into the breakfast nook of the little apartment in the government guesthouse, managed to tie the belt of her robe over her nightgown on the second try, and slumped into a chair, blinking in the bright morning light from the courtyard. Luz set the coffee in front of her and poured in thick yellow Jersey cream—which must be from the Durán hacienda—and two spoonfuls of sugar.
“What do we do today?” Ciara asked. “More studying of the files?”
After she swallowed a mouthful of the coffee; her morning persona grew rapidly more lively with caffeine.
“No, I think we’ve got all that. Today we play tourist, mostly; that means a lot of walking up- and downhill, so wear good stout shoes.”
“I will . . . oh, my goodness, that smells wonderful! Seafood and onions and . . . what on earth is it?”
“You are waking up,” Luz said with a grin, whisking a small ceramic dish that bubbled gently in from the small kitchen with its compact, efficient modern gas range and icebox. “It’s something my mother liked for breakfast.”
“Cuban, it is?” Ciara asked.
“Sort of. Huevos a la Malagueña. Shrimp in lime juice, sweet red pepper sautéed with onions and garlic in olive oil, stir in tomato paste, wine, saffron, and bay leaf, put it all in a dish and break the eggs on top, sprinkle some cilantro on them, and bake for twenty minutes or a bit more. There was a baguette—someone must have opened a French bakery in town, of all things—so I toasted some of that to go with it. There’s a Copeman Electric Stove Company automatic toaster, the very latest thing.”
“Shrimp and wine and olive oil and saffron and French bread? And our hostess said she had a few basic things put in the kitchen here!”
Luz took a bite herself, making no comment. She detected a slight tinge of the hum of the wasp in the words, and it wasn’t even really unfair. Julie had been cheerfully uncomplaining of hardship, filth, and squalor back when they were in the field, but she had old-money ideas of what constituted the civilized basics at home.
Instead Luz turned back to work:
“I need to develop a sense for this place again—it will have changed a good deal since my last visit—and you need to pick one up. Besides, it’s what our cover identities would do if they were really traveling around scouting places for technical schools for girls. And we’ll make contacts. You can’t say ahead of time which will be useful, but some of them will be. And you need to take it easy for a little while to get acclimated to the altitude—that hits some people hard. Say so if you feel you can’t catch your breath.”
Ciara frowned a little. “It’s a pity we’re not looking for places to put technical schools for girls,” she said. “How I could have used something like that when I was younger! Secretary Addams is so wise to set them up, and they need it here even more.”
Luz grinned to herself. She agreed that the program was very worthy, but she also very much doubted that any vocational institute, even those established by Secretary of Education Jane Addams, could have outdone what her lover had accomplished by self-education and correspondence courses and the help of her aunt Colleen the unofficial accountant and amateur mathematician, and honorary auntie Treinel the certified high school teacher. Students at a conventional coeducational high school might well have mocked and frightened her out of pursuing her native talents in science and technology, which would have been a crime . . . and was also an unofficial reason Secretary Addams was establishing separate institutions for young women.
Though Stanford’s engineering faculty, as the war allows . . .
“Fear not, mi amor,” she said. “There is exactly such a program just getting started now down here, and we can probably swing something for Zacatecas if we feel it deserves it. Uncle Teddy and the Director tend to smile when you ask for favors for someone else, so it doesn’t draw down our . . . line of credit. We need as much of that as we can get, frankly, being circumstanced as we are.”
“Does . . .” she almost squeaked, and went a little pale. “Luz! Does the president know about . . . about you and me?”
Luz’s eyebrows went up. “Well, I’d be extremely surprised if he didn’t, sweetie. He’s a brilliant man, a polymath genius, the smartest president we’ve ever had bar none. Brilliant about people, too; I’ve never met a better judge. You danced with him at that barbecue we had at the Casa on New Year’s! And we haven’t exactly been hiding our light under a bushel.”
“A lot of men don’t pay . . . pay attention to women?” Ciara said hopefully. “If you know what I mean. They miss things?”
“I certainly do know,” Luz said.
She’d taken advantage of that weakness more often than she could count in the unforgiving trade she plied. It had helped keep her alive, and made quite a few oblivious men very dead.
“But Uncle Teddy?” she went on, shaking her head. “He looks, and he listens and notices. Did you think he didn’t know about . . . oh, Secretary Addams and Mary Smith? Uncle Teddy and Addams have been close political allies for years now—she gave the speech putting him up for the nomination at the convention in 1912, and people are still talking about how daring that was!”
“You think he wouldn’t mind, then?” Ciara said hopefully.
“Not a chance, sweetie. He’s a sincere and honest Victorian prude—I’m morally certain he’s never touched a woman he wasn’t married to, for instance, and as rich, powerful, handsome, charming men go that makes him a prodigy—so I very much doubt he approves of us, or of her. But she’s useful to the country and the Party, and as for us . . . my papá went to Cuba with him in the Rough Riders, he was good friends with my parents after that, and he watched me play with his children as a little girl and told me stories. And most of all you and I have both done the United States very great service, and with Uncle Teddy the country always comes first. After the Breath of Loki . . . and Projekt Heimdall on top of that . . . nothing else even comes close.”
“Oh,” Ciara said, breathing out and taking a big gulp of water. “You frightened me a bit there, darling!”
“Sorry, sweetie. I wish we didn’t have difficulties that way, and in an ideal world we wouldn’t. But in this world we do—and you are so utterly worth it.”
That got her a brilliant smile, and Ciara returned her attention to the spicy richness on her plate.
“I’ll want to look at the Dakota Project plant site, and the construction,” Ciara said after a few moments of consumption. “Plans are one thing, actual machinery another. I’ll need to walk over it to see the potential vulnerabilities—hopefully starting soon while it’s still new-built. I don’t see what you and I can do to increase security at the plant, but maybe something will come to me.”
“We’ll need to arrange excuses for that. We don’t have to do exactly what our covers would do, but we have to retain their general rhythm. And we’ll have clandestine meetings ourselves with various panjandrums, but discreetly, also to avoid blowing our cover. I’m going to avoid the FBS as long as I can—in terms of concealment, they have trouble remembering to button their flies after using a toilet.”
Ciara giggled and then looked thoughtful. “Speaking of covers, how has Julie kept the station secret?” she said.
Luz chuckled. “Since 1913? She hasn’t, that’s how. You can’t, not when you’re operating out of a stationary HQ in a city of forty thousand. Not everyone knows, but everyone who’s interested knows, or strongly suspects. She can keep some things secret, though: the identity of sources, safe houses like this, and so forth. And it helps to keep the pretense of Universal Imports up; you don’t have to ram something into people’s eyes. Can you just imagine putting the winged dagger over the door?”
Ciara rolled her eyes in agreement. The Black Chamber’s blazon—produced by el jefe himself back at the foundation, and fitting his romantic, boyish love of adventure—showed a double-edged dagger point-down between eagle’s wings, with the All-Seeing Eye in a pyramid over the blade.
From the shadows, steel . . .
“We don’t even have that at headquarters,” Ciara chuckled; they’d gone there for a second debrief on the Heimdall mission a few months ago, mostly for her to talk to scientists. “Not outdoors! It’s . . . it’s ostentatiously plain there. But what if someone saw us at Julie’s?”
“Sometimes a visible outpost can be useful as a trap,” Luz commented.
“So you can sneak up on people while they’re looking at it and kick them in the backside?”
Luz smiled and took a bite and picked up one of the papers.
“Exactly! And it’s not a problem for us; part of Julie’s job is to keep an eye on newly arrived gringos in her territory, particularly Protectorate employees, so being invited there when you get in is par for the course, though most won’t get a nice dinner and a chat about old times and a complimentary pistol. And she’s openly part of the social scene here; the people we’re supposed to be would need to liaise with the local power structure. If everyone’s suspect, nobody in particular is.”
The papers included the Mexican Herald, the English-language newspaper from the capital; nowadays it was the Protectorate’s unofficial official organ along with its Spanish-language equivalent, El Progresivo, also helpfully provided. Luz propped the first up against the saltcellar, unlikely to be needed with this meal. It was important to keep up with the world and not get too locked into professional tunnel vision. Things were changing, and very rapidly indeed. The world where she’d have to spend the rest of her life was in the process of being born.
Let’s see . . .
“Greece and Portugal are dropping out of the war,” she said. “The Portuguese and the Spanish and the Italians are forming a League of Latin Neutrals. Or Brotherhood of the Utterly Terrified, really.”
“I don’t blame Portugal—the British left the Portuguese division behind in France,” Ciara said; she was never going to like the British Empire.
“And the British are handing over most of Africa to the USA,” she said, then winked at Ciara’s surprise and went on: “The Union of South Africa.”
“That must cark Lord Protector Milner, giving all that to Botha and Smuts,” Ciara said, with a degree of Schadenfreude. “They having fought the English back when I was a little girl and they made them look so silly, the whole great empire taking all those years to beat a few little farmers riding about on ponies. And Milner was so cruel to the poor Boers!”
If the British Empire had invaded hell, people of the Fenian persuasion would have raised volunteers to aid the satanic host against the Saxon aggressor. She didn’t explain that the union was getting millions of British refugees as well as millions of square miles of—mostly already inhabited—territory, and wouldn’t be run by Boers much longer, thus finally fulfilling one of Milner’s fondest dreams back when he’d been Imperial proconsul there at the turn of the century.
Instead Luz held the paper up and tapped a headline: “And Ireland, including Ulster, is to get a Home Rule parliament,” she said.
“Éirinn go Brách!” Ciara said cheerfully: “Ireland Forever!” Softly: “Colm and Da would be so happy. They’d have preferred a republic, of course, but this is . . . very good.”
“Lord Protector Milner says Britain, Australia, and South Africa are all to have local parliaments too,” Luz said, reading on. “And India. The five will be of equal standing, and have equal representation in an imperial parliament set over all to deal with the Army and Navy and trade, the currency and other joint matters . . . it’ll be meeting in New Delhi in January 1920 . . . suitably out of bomber range of Germany. Kipling’s there writing a poem about it.”
The rest of the war news amounted to inconsequential skirmishing, mostly in southern Palestine and Mesopotamia
between the British-Indian forces and the Ottomans, and some air fights over the English Channel and raids with bombers carrying what were coming to be called conventional weapons; all unpleasantly final for anyone killed there and their relations and friends, but small-scale.
Plus the grim and endless naval guerilla between the U-boats and the USN and Royal Navy. It was an odd feeling, to have the Eastern and Western Fronts both shut down after three years of epic bloodletting . . .
The remainder was filler. One article extolled the success of the Burnham-Duquesne plan to introduce hippos in the bayous of Louisiana as a solution to the high price of beef. Which was at least more interesting than Governor Haynes’s promise in California to work with the Bureau of Reclamation to create fifty thousand new family farms in the Central Valley and Imperial Valley irrigation projects—very worthy and very dull, unless you wanted to start a farm near Bakersfield and grow raisins while turning into one yourself. And an artist’s conception of what the giant new Boulder Dam would look like when it was finished had a certain grim majesty, with a seven-hundred-twenty-six-foot-high American eagle spreading its twelve-hundred-foot wingspan in low relief across the face.
And last but not least, a triumphant article proclaiming that ninety percent of the butter in Wisconsin was now made by farmer-owned co-ops, those pillars of the Party’s Country Life Program.
“¡Dios Mio! Think of that, ninety percent—the millennium is at hand!” Luz said sardonically.