Shadows of Annihilation Page 26

  “Yes, sir!”

  Luz spread her hands. “But that’s a palliative. As Frederick the Great said about concentration on the Schwerpunkt . . .”

  “He who tries to be strong everywhere, is weak everywhere: He who defends everything, defends nothing,” Major Dicot said, picking the appropriate quote easily.

  “Our enemies only have to be strong in one place, and only for one moment,” Young said. “While our position requires us to defend everything all the time.”

  Luz motioned agreement. “Fortunately, our responsibilities are more limited than yours, General. I’m still getting a feel for the situation here . . . but what bothers me most is this contact the Air Corps and then the Rangers had with a bandit gang in the Sierra.”

  “I saw the report. Air surveillance is probably the biggest single innovation in warfare since I was a young man, and air attacks on ground targets come second. A chance encounter, surely?”

  “Yes, but the mules the Rangers found, and their loads of food, indicate that they’re getting local support . . . from people who would presumably shelter them and help them move if they get closer to Jerez, or Zacatecas. The ammunition from an assault rifle—their StG-16—definitely indicates a German presence. I learned long ago not to disregard that nagging feeling that something is going on and I’m not seeing it.”

  Young’s smile was grim, and his eyes saw something far distant for a moment.

  “I lost any disdain for that sort of feeling traveling up the Gándara River on Samar in the Philippines, jungle dense as a fortress wall on both flanks and swarming with ladrones out to slit our throats, thick as the mosquitoes and almost as dangerous,” he said.

  “So I’m putting some effort into dealing with it, General Young. The station chief is activating all local contacts and sources, we have interviews with the Ranger officer and the Falcon crews planned, and I’m pushing for vigorous action in the Sierra.”

  Dicot raised one eyebrow. “Reading the contact reports, I was surprised the Navy released two airships for action this far inland,” he said. “And that it was done so quickly. The admirals are generally more protective of those patrol semirigids than they are of their children . . . and they’re very fond of their children.”

  So that was you and you have serious pull if you’re able to override the Navy that fast went unspoken.

  It was a good thing that the airships had come up, because it meant both men knew she wasn’t someone they could disregard without consequences even if they wanted to, and this way she didn’t have to be blunt about that to the point of antagonizing them.

  Young nodded confirmation.

  “There are reasons for the naval high command keeping their patrol airships close,” the commander of the 32nd said softly, looking at her. “The U-boats are a constant threat, and Tampico is a priority target for the enemy; they keep many of their newest and best long-range submarines on that route. Those semirigids are the best counter to submarines we’ve found so far. Men may die because they were diverted.”

  Die burning alive in torpedoed tankers, she knew he was thinking. Die vomiting the fuel oil they’d swallowed before they were pulled out of the water. Choke by inches in utter darkness, in air pockets trapped in the hulls of sunken ships, with nothing for their kin to bury and nothing to remember them by but an official telegram.

  “Well, that’s war, General,” Luz said steadily. “Resources are always limited, and priorities have to be set as to where they’re sent. We’ve both put our lives on the line for the Republic when our superiors told us to, trusting that they knew the necessity . . . and we’ve both taken command responsibility, which means sending others to die and never knowing for certain if our decisions were the best ones. Men . . . and women . . . die, but they die that the nation may live.”

  Young met her eyes for a long moment and nodded, murmuring:

  “To every man upon this earth,

  Death cometh soon or late.

  And how can man die better

  Than facing fearful odds

  For the ashes of his fathers

  And the temples of his gods?”

  They ran through the rest of the details, including methods to convey messages quickly through Dicot, and finished before the call for guests to be seated. As they stood, the intelligence officer said casually to Henrietta, with just the right shallow bow and respectful tone:

  “If you have no escort for dinner, Miss Colmer, I would be honored.”

  “Why—”

  Henrietta’s eyes moved slightly toward Luz, who gave a very small up-to-you shrug.

  It was a pity that men didn’t generally wear wedding rings, but she thought Dicot probably single. General Young’s indulgent smile was a good indicator; much like Uncle Teddy he was rather straitlaced even for a man of his generation. At least according to his Black Chamber dossier, a type of document that gave details of rather different and sometimes rather more intimate things than the conventional service “jacket” in the Iron House files back in Washington.

  And Henrietta’s a big girl who can look after herself. And there’s no job-related reason she shouldn’t have a pleasant partner for dinner conversation, rather than sitting next to someone who thinks she should be out in the kitchen washing the dishes or that all Negro women are harlots, or both. In fact, a known social acquaintance between the two of them might be helpful because it’s so plausible. It gives her a good reason to visit with him . . . which gives us a good way to communicate unobserved. I’ll tell Julie, though she’ll probably notice anyway.

  “Why, that would be lovely, Major Dicot,” Henrietta said. “Thank you so much.”

  After they’d left with the usual polite formulas, Ciara offered her arm to Luz with the same stylized gesture Dicot had used, and they both laughed.

  “I need to talk to that Ranger captain,” Luz added. “Business. Let’s go see if we can do that naturally, or at least have Julie set up a time for going into details with him later . . . that would be better, in fact. He wouldn’t be here if there weren’t news. And we can enjoy dinner; Julie couldn’t boil an egg herself, but she does have a very good nose for a cook.”

  ELEVEN

  Town of Jerez

  State of Zacatecas

  United States Protectorate of México

  JUNE 21ST, 1917, 1917(B)

  The Jerez warehouse Pablo led the Germans to in the long rainy summer twilight was stone-built and centuries old, with carvings in the elaborate style of a bygone time on its pinkish-yellow exterior. The big main doors were sized for wagons but locked for the day. They filed through a smaller side entrance from an alley into the dim interior.

  Pablo vanished into a series of hugs and back slapping and genial swearing and insults with the dozen or so men waiting to meet them, or at least with the Mexicans among them, only one of whom got something as cold and reserved as a handshake and a Good evening. He was the man with the keys and looked like a model of middle-class respectability next to the others . . . many of whom made Pablo look respectable.

  As ripe a collection of unhung rogues as I’ve seen, Horst thought. But we’ll see. I think some good use for the Fatherland can be had from them.

  “Keep quiet!” the man with the keys said.

  Everyone ignored him, until Pablo added a curt “He’s right. Shut up, you fools. I want to kill more gringos and traitors before I die.”

  The darkened warehouse had none of that almost painful feeling of raw newness Horst had noticed so often in America; he doubted that this was the first time a gang of armed conspirators had met there—and probably it had seen bandits even more often. Even the beams supporting the second story well overhead were massive time-blackened things that bore the chisel-like marks of being hand-squared with adzes on top and bottom; the sides were left in the natural curves, though any trace of bark had vanished long generations ago.


  Jerez had been founded in the same year that Martin Luther finished his translation of the Bible off in Germany, nearly four hundred years ago. First as a little fortified outpost on the road to the north during the wars against the Chichimeca nomads—the term was Aztec, and meant dog people. And then a market center for the haciendas whose grain and livestock fed the indio laborers in the mines, and their masters too.

  The warehouse wasn’t quite that old, but . . .

  It smells ancient, he thought, as he stripped the false bandage from his face and pulled on his eye patch. Though the wet air may be bringing that out.

  The relief unbinding his eye brought was even more profound than what he felt reclaiming his weapons, leaning the rifle nearby and tucking a .45 into the waistband of his trousers under the long shirt. It wasn’t a gun that made him a man and a soldier; he’d proven that often enough. But pretending to be blind made the skin up his spine and across the back of his neck tighten worse than concrete physical dangers did.

  Know yourself, he thought. Something deep within me fears helplessness far more than death.

  A kerosene lantern on a cord running through a pulley on the ceiling was turned up after the alley door was closed, and Pablo’s contact—whose plump fleshy face looked gray with fear, though part of that might be the light—led the way through a maze of piled goods; six of the men picked up rifles or pistols and dispersed to the entrances and second-story windows. The contact with the keys was going by the name Zacarías, which might or might not be anything his parents would recognize.

  From the ancient smells, the warehouse had held many things through the generations, things whose scents had soaked into the mortar between the flagstones of the floor or the walls and rafters; leather and corn and peppers, the ghost of dried fruits, and things that gave off smells of minerals and chemicals, and tarry-spicy sawn pine wood. Right now what it mostly had was stacks of baled wool about four meters high and ten on a side, in a checkerboard pattern, with dirty-brown tufts sticking out through rents in the burlap coverings.

  Horst suppressed a momentary grin. That smell was rather nostalgic, since the wool sheds on his family’s estate had exactly the same greasy lanolin odor, one he associated with losing his virginity in an enthusiastic if smelly grapple with a Polish harvester girl about fifteen years ago.

  And two more men who weren’t Mexican followed the contact, looking relieved not to be alone with Pablo’s brothers-in-arms anymore. Both were nondescript, one in his twenties with a bushy mustache that emphasized the unfortunate size of his nose, skinny neck, and large Adam’s apple, and the other a thirtyish clerical type with ink-stained fingers peering through round wire-rimmed spectacles.

  Like Zacarías they were dressed in suits with waistcoats and shirts with buttoned modern turn-down collars and ties. His were good quality but not new, and theirs the cheaper off-the-rack versions of the sort worn by town dwellers of the petite bourgeois anywhere in the Western world, more or less—dress varied much less by nation and region in towns than in the countryside, and much less among the middle classes than with laborers. Like Horst and Röhm they were much fairer-skinned than most Mexicans, but not implausibly so unless the four of them stood side-by-side—there was a lot of variation here, and their brown hair wasn’t anything of note. Then they braced to attention and visibly almost snapped off salutes.

  “At ease, you dumb-heads,” Röhm said with soft venom. “Permanently. You’re not in Germany now. You’re not in uniform either—you do realize what the Yankees will do to you if they catch you?”

  “Yes, sir—ah, yes,” one of the two said. “That was made clear before we left, sir.”

  “Stop calling me sir!”

  “Yes, s . . . ah, yes.”

  America and Germany both worked according to a set of rules that gave you certain protections—not rights exactly, more in the nature of mutual concessions—if you were captured. If the angry, exhausted, and frightened soldiers at the point of the spear didn’t just shoot you anyway, which happened about half the time. And provided you were in uniform, carrying weapons openly, and enrolled in a recognized sovereign government’s armed forces. According to the same set of guidelines, anyone else trying to fight a regular army—spies, guerillas, rebels without a state behind them, or civilians supporting any of those—were vermin and could be shot without trial if taken.

  Or tortured and then shot, though that wasn’t publicized as much. Or whatever other unpleasant fate the captor decided was expedient.

  Even as a regular prisoner of war, Horst had gotten the impression from the questions his military interrogators asked that the Yankee army and the Black Chamber had waged a quiet little bureaucratic skirmish with each other over him, and he had no illusions as to what his fate would have been if the Chamber had won.

  Fortunately, he had been in uniform when he was wounded and captured, fighting American and French soldiers in the company of other armed, uniformed German troops . . . including Ernst Röhm, who’d escaped with the remnants of his squad of Stoßtruppen. Horst’s captors had been American soldiers themselves. The fact that he was working for Abteilung IIIb, the military intelligence agency, didn’t matter to them and they were sensitive about preserving the niceties, lest it be their turn someday. And to be sure also for considerations of honor.

  Fighting their soldiers as well as the bitch, he thought sourly; he’d been so close to killing her. Moments, seconds . . .

  These two with Röhm aren’t soldiers, not really, in uniform or not, which is probably why he’s so short with them. Whatever his faults, Röhm is a soldier and a very good one. They’re more like technicians, but that’s what we need.

  “Your names,” he said to the two men. “And your occupations and military specialties.”

  “Otto Schäfer, si—Sorry!”

  “Artur Kraus,” the bespectacled one said; he seemed a little quicker on the uptake, or possibly basic training hadn’t taken quite so well. “Herr Schäfer was at the Berlin higher technical school—”

  The term he used was Technisches Lyzeum and was difficult to translate directly into English. Schäfer wouldn’t have been conscripted in peacetime, when only about half the young men were called up, and less than that in the cities. Things were very different now, of course.

  “—before the war. I was . . . ah, a documents specialist.”

  Whatever that means. Something I don’t need to know, probably—you certainly meet all types in this clandestine business!

  Schäfer finally spoke for himself. “I had been working in Luftstreitkräfte electronic signals intelligence since I was called up, until I was transferred to the Alberich project last year.”

  “You can both speak some Spanish, I assume?” Horst said . . . in Spanish.

  “My father was agent for an export company in Cádiz for many years,” Schäfer said in the same tongue. “My identity papers say I’m a Spanish salesman for a firm there dealing in mining equipment.”

  He didn’t have a German accent at all, but he did have a European Spanish—specifically Andalusian—one that a Mexican would probably place at once, and he made a perfectly convincing native of that kingdom. You found the same range of physical appearance in Spain that you did in Germany; it was the frequencies that were different, so that you could tell a crowd of a hundred Germans from a hundred Spaniards, but not two individuals. Spaniards weren’t common here but they weren’t rare enough to be a wonder either. Plenty had lived and worked in Mexico during the Porfiriato. Not all had managed to get out during the chaos and the American invasion afterward, and a trickle had come back since things stabilized.

  They weren’t much liked in Mexico, though that shouldn’t be a major problem. Even larger streams were heading west from Spain recently, to Cuba or Argentina or Uruguay or Chile, or even here, since “European neutral” and “target on your forehead” were now roughly equivalent te
rms.

  “I also,” Kraus said, also in Spanish; he had an accent but was fully fluent, much better than Röhm. “That was a qualification for this assignment. I am supposed to be a Dutch engineer working for a Swiss company that makes telephone switchboards.”

  That showed Colonel Nicolai’s attention to detail; in German Kraus sounded like he came from Oldenburg and had grown up speaking the local Plattdüütsch dialect . . . which was very close to the Netherlandish spoken just across the—former—border. That was what colored his Spanish. If the colonel couldn’t get an accentless speaker with the necessary technical skills, at least he’d gotten one with a plausible accent. Not many Mexicans could tell the difference, but a lot more Americans knew German. And some knew its subdivisions as well.

  “Show me the equipment, then,” he said bluntly.

  “We have one explosive payload left—the others have already been transferred to the ultimate location to match up with the rest,” Schäfer said. “All the other gear is at the launch site; it is not nearly so heavy.”

  Pablo’s contact Zacarías broke in: “That was very unwise! The gringos suspect something—more police, more soldiers, more searches. I warned you!”

  One of the other revolucionarios scowled at him and spat. “I didn’t notice you shedding much sweat,” he said. “And there were only eleven of us for the whole job—we could have used an extra set of hands . . . Doñito Zacarías.”

  The warehouseman fell silent; that diminutive tacked onto the honorific don meant something like little lordling and directed at an adult male meant something like worthless snob. Pablo looked at him while Kraus and Schäfer went to work on a big plain wooden box, and the local man went even grayer. The scarred guerilla’s face normally bore an angry sneer; Horst thought it was a little more pronounced now because Pablo disliked townsmen, disliked the rich—which the man Zacarías was, compared to a peon—and utterly despised cowards, and Zacarías was also in a pitable funk. Which was very odd indeed.