Shadows of Annihilation Read online

  For years he’s been a rebel with the American authorities—with the Black Chamber, for the Virgin’s sake—hunting him. How has he gone on so long, if he crumples with fear so easily?

  One answer was that if he didn’t keep the flame burning, someone like Pablo, that seeker of blood and man without pity, would pay him and his family a visit, or one of Pablo’s friends like the one scowling with his hand near the hilt of a curved skinning knife right now. That was only a partial answer, though.

  Sometimes you had to shoot men on your own side who broke and ran in battle, lest panic spread like a contagious disease. Horst had himself. But not even a formal army could work that way very often if it was going to work effectively at all—as witness the fate of the hosts of Nicholas II, very former Czar of All the Russias, where common soldiers had been treated like serfs under a continuous rain of blows and abuse and sometimes fired on by their own artillery if they retreated.

  You cannot expect a man to be a frightened, beaten dog in peace and a lion in war, Horst thought.

  In an underground force, sheer terror was essential as a deterrent but even less practical as a standard tool. Men had to want to fight under those conditions, where they were putting their families at risk, not just their lives.

  He dismissed the matter from the forefront of his mind as the side of the crate came down. Inside was some sort of bomb, though without the fins at the rear that those dropped from zeppelins or aeroplanes had: a simple steel tube as long as Horst’s body and a meter through with a single riveted seam . . . In fact, it reminded him of the canisters that had destroyed London and Paris and Bordeaux, though it was much smaller.

  He looked a question at Röhm. The Bavarian smiled unpleasantly—Horst had yet to see anything pleasant in any of his smiles—and shook his head.

  “That was considered, but no. Just high explosive. Though in the right place, it will release plenty of the Yankees’ own V-gas, eh? They cannot even accuse us of violating the gentlemen’s agreement not to employ the gas anymore—they did the same to us last November, you may remember.”

  Horst nodded at the dry understatement. He did recall the terror he’d felt in the control center of the gas plant in Staaken when he realized what the sabotage had done, and remembered it very vividly indeed, even compared to being underneath endless Trommelfeuer artillery barrages or in a U-boat under attack by depth charges. Invisible, odorless, and a lethal dose smaller than the dots marking the umlaut in von Dückler; as General Ludendorff himself had said after witnessing a demonstration on captured Czech rebels back last year, V-gas was a terror weapon of great frightfulness.

  Röhm was even more frightened than I. But I think he enjoys the sensation, at least in retrospect. No matter. We both did our duty regardless, and that is all you can ask of any man.

  A circle of six bolts was countersunk into each rounded end of the steel tube; the bolts stood out from the metal, with bolt heads at the end of a handspan of threaded shaft. That must be the way it was fastened to the frame before and behind; three more stood on either side.

  “A hundred fifty kilos of explosive,” Schäfer said, with that happiness Horst had often noted before in men explaining something they knew well to a neophyte. “You see, this is also structural—it is the central part of the fuselage.”

  A flying weapon? he thought. Ingenious! But then, without Germany’s scientists the Fatherland’s soldiers could not have won her so much in this war.

  “The frame that holds the upper wing—there is only one, above the body of the machine—is bolted to the sides here and here, with booms carrying the tail fins stretching backward on either side. The engine and the pusher propeller to the rear, and the guidance system to the front. The fuel tank goes above the explosive—it amplifies the effect a bit, and every bit helps.”

  That was more explosive than even the largest shell or any but the largest bombs dropped from the newest four-engine aeroplanes.

  The casing doesn’t need to be thick to withstand stress the way a shell does, he thought. And the wings and engine don’t need to carry anything but the bomb. A flying torpedo!

  “Guidance system, you say?” Horst said.

  “An electrical gyrocompass, mein H . . . señor. Connected to the control surfaces by hydraulic actuators and cables. The original idea was Yankee—an inventor named Sperry, a few years before the war. An altimeter controls altitude, and a counter records the number of rotations of the propeller—it can be set to cut off at any point. For range, you see? At that point the engine stops, the wings fall off, and the load continues on a ballistic trajectory until impact.”

  He beamed at the bomb, as if seeing it in flight.

  “You establish the bearing and distance from the point of launch, the craft takes off and ascends to the preset altitude, and proceeds on that bearing until it reaches the preset distance; the gyrocompass corrects automatically for anything tending to push it away from the bearing.”

  “Range? Speed? Accuracy?” Horst asked.

  There had been plenty of new weapons in this war, and some of them had been instant smashing successes like V-gas . . . while a rather larger number were humiliating failures, some succeeded but weren’t worth the resources and effort needed to produce them, and a majority required extensive testing in actual use and then changes to be practical.

  “Range is a hundred twenty kilometers! Well, a little more or less depending on the direction and intensity of the winds.”

  “Ach, so!” Horst said, a pleased, impressed sound.

  The technician beamed as his child metaphorically showed off its paces; that was about seventy-five American miles, and it was much farther than artillery could reach. And with a bigger load of explosive than any but super-heavy siege guns like the Krupp and Škoda monsters that had shattered the Belgian forts in the opening weeks of the war.

  So. It can deliver a heavy load to a great distance.

  “Speed . . . about ninety kilometers per hour.”

  This time Horst’s grunt was less enthusiastic; that was about the top speed of a good motorcar on a good road.

  “Easy for fighting scouts to intercept, then. Or even for antiaircraft fire, since it can’t maneuver.”

  “No, s . . . no, not at all!” Schäfer broke in. “They can be launched at night with no effect on accuracy! The guidance mechanism does not need light at all, you see. It is electromechanical.”

  “Ach, so,” Horst said, thoughtfully this time.

  The technician nodded enthusiastically. Fighting scouts couldn’t operate at night to any purpose, and darkness made even takeoff and landing very risky indeed. A Telemobiloscope might help, but they were far too large to be mounted in any heavier-than-air craft for now. Direction from the ground or an airship would be extremely cumbersome, given the short time available for interception and that wireless sets small enough for a fighting-scout aeroplane were still experimental, heavy enough to degrade performance, and unreliable to boot.

  Again, for now, Horst thought, rubbing thoughtfully at his jaw. Things change so fast in our times! What did that Marx fellow say . . . all that was sacred is profaned, all that was solid melts into air? Perhaps he should have been a poet, not a failed prophet.

  He said aloud: “Speaking of accuracy?”

  “Ah . . . the air torpedo itself, sir—”

  He nodded: Lufttorpedo was a striking term and caught the concept well.

  “—has a circular strike radius of four kilometers at extreme range. The air currents, you see, we are working on that but . . .”

  “No, I don’t see,” Horst said. “That’s an area-bombardment weapon at best, able to hit targets like a substantial city. Possibly very formidable if it were using V-gas—”

  Which, now that I come to think of it, is an understatement; you could do raids of the sort that destroyed Paris and London that way, launching hundreds of t
hese things at night, and it would be unstoppable. And at increasing distances, as the equipment improves in range and speed . . . fleets of these things swarming over cities . . .

  “—but what use is it for this mission?”

  The technician and the documents specialist and Röhm all smiled in eerie unison, and all looking equally carnivorous for a moment. Kraus actually rubbed his hands together in glee while he said:

  “Ach, so, we have a little refinement.”

  He lifted the lid off another box. This contained a piece of electronic apparatus, with dials and switches and gauges on its surface.

  “A wireless transmitter. With this the error radius is . . . Schäfer?”

  “Ten meters. It must be placed very near the target, of course.”

  Röhm laughed. “You are the answer to that problem, Horst.”

  Kraus unfolded a cardboard container and passed him the set of identity documents inside; a folded American uniform lay under them.

  “I have been working on these since we arrived,” he said. “With information and models provided by our local allies, that was why I had to be here at all.”

  Horst glanced through the documents; they showed a Major Reitmann, U.S. Army Engineers, born in Racine, Wisconsin, and educated at the University of Chicago, commissioned in 1915 courtesy of the Reserve Officer Training Corps . . . who apparently looked very, very much like one Horst von Dückler, down to injuries incurred in a training accident with explosives . . .

  His mind started sorting possibilities. “How to coordinate with the launch?” he said.

  “The air torpedoes can be set up, and then launched either by timer or by the action of the transmitter itself, and the transmitter can be set to activate after a delay,” Röhm said. “Setting up the launch is my job; I cannot plausibly impersonate a Yankee, even one of German stock, even for a few moments. But you, my dear comrade—”

  “Where’s Zacarías?” Pablo said suddenly. “He’s been in and out since we got here like an old man with a weak bladder, but—”

  He’d been waiting patiently through the German conversation, occasionally giving the bomb a glance that said he knew that it was explosives destined for the Americans and loved the general idea. His followers were doing the same; some of them actually patted it and grinned.

  Now his head whipped around.

  “Everyone, stay back and keep watching for gringos!” he snarl-shouted, and plunged away through the dim lanolin-smelling heaps, with Horst close by on his heels and Röhm not far behind.

  The two technicians froze like deer in a strong light, bewildered by the sudden shift; the revolucionarios watching the windows and entrances called questions, to be met with obscene shouted commands to shut up and stay alert.

  Horst had memorized the layout of the building when he came in, more or less automatically. The office for the warehouse was a cubicle built much later than the building itself, near the wagon-sized main doors . . .

  And it has a telephone.

  It also had a stout door, which was locked; Horst heard thumping and cursing as Pablo tried to break through. He had a pistol out by the time Horst arrived there, and was aiming at the lock—though at least he was showing enough sense to stand to one side and hold the crook of his arm over his eyes before he tried to shoot it out.

  “¡No!” Horst barked. “Out of the way!”

  At the same time he turned his motion from a trot to a sprint, then leapt into the air with his legs crooked. Both slammed out just before he struck the door, smashing his heels into the old warped wood right beside the latch and the lock.

  There was a thump, a crunch of breaking board, and a snap of metal parting.

  “Scheisse!” he snarled, and then “Uhhhf!”

  His body had forgotten he was wearing rope sandals, not the stout hobnailed boots of a German officer. The eighty-eight kilos of bone and muscle and the strength of his long legs still broke the frame of the door in two places and ripped most of the lock out of the door and the jamb both, along with a bolt that had been shot from the inside. Pain shot up his legs at the same time; he’d come close to breaking his own bones too.

  The grunt happened as his shoulders slammed into the packed dirt floor, and then again when Pablo stepped on his stomach as he dove into the room with a knife in his hand; fortunately he’d already tensed the muscles of his gut as he prepared to rise. There was a yell and a crash from within the office.

  “No guns!” Horst barked as he raised his legs and jackknifed them down, using the momentum to flick him up into a crouch and then a forward stride.

  He spoke in German, because Röhm was right behind him with a Luger in his hand, and they couldn’t afford the noise. Jerez wasn’t the sort of place that ignored gunfire in the night, even on a rainy evening in this commercial district. Too many people lived over their businesses, or next to them, and the Yankee-trained police reacted quickly to calls.

  The office was big and cluttered and dark, but more of the twentieth century than the warehouse outside; desk, side-cranked adding machine, telephone, wooden filing cabinets piled with a clutter of papers and ledgers and invoices. There was an electric lamp on the desk, and the gloom was deeper because Pablo had overturned and broken it as he was kicked backward and fell in a heap. The hips and legs of the fleeing warehouse manager Zacarías still showed as he tried to wiggle all the way through the window—only half of it was in this cubicle built onto the inside of the original wall. And he’d somehow pushed the two vertical iron bars loose, despite the fact that they were set directly into the stone of the wall—like most Mexican windows, this didn’t have a wooden frame.

  Probably . . . almost certainly . . . he’d weakened them well before against just this sort of chance. Probably about the time he became an informer for the Black Chamber; the only people more insanely suspicious than secret rebels were double agents pretending to be secret rebels, because they had to look both ways at once, every hour of every day.

  Horst lunged across the dimness of the room in three long strides. His right hand closed on an ankle and he hauled backward with a strength huge to begin with and multiplied by desperation, twisting as he did. Zacarías shrieked, high and thin as a trapped rabbit, a mixture of fear and pain as the leverage ripped at his knee and hip joints. Horst could feel the sudden resistance as the man grabbed at the outside of the window, scrabbling with blind desperation, and he heaved again as the scream of pain turned into words—though not intelligible ones.

  Zacarías released his hold suddenly and popped out of the window like a cork from a bottle; there was a knife in his hand and he whirled and slashed as Horst staggered backward. The blade was broad and had a curved cutting edge and an eagle-headed hilt, the silver glinting in the dim light. It might have struck, if the man’s injured leg hadn’t given out as he turned and cut. Then Pablo was on him, a knife of his own in his hand, and the two Mexicans locked together for an instant. There was a flurry too swift to see, and Zacarías staggered back.

  Horst grabbed his knife wrist and the hair at the back of his head. The man half turned, and blood gouted out of his mouth with a wet choking sound, pulsing in rivulets that looked black in the darkness. Horst grunted in disgust; he knew the signs, and he didn’t need the sight of Pablo’s knife hilt standing out of the waistcoat to know that the twenty-five-centimeter blade had gone up beneath the breastbone and into the lungs.

  The German wrenched sharply. Neckbone snapped with a green-stick crackle, and Zacarías’s body jerked and went limp with a sudden sharp stink. The blood slowed, no longer pumped out by the heart—that was why Horst had finished him, to cut down on the possibly dangerous and certainly inconvenient mess—and the German dropped the corpse. Faceup, which would also help with the flow problem. Pablo came over to retrieve his knife, which was fine now that the wound wouldn’t gush. He had a cut of his own on the back of his left forearm, and
worked the fingers to make sure nothing important was severed, giving a nod when his fingers moved normally. Sweat sheened his face, probably from pain as well as the sudden burst of effort.

  Röhm paused in the doorway to call back that the emergency was over and to summon his two subordinates, then holstered his Luger beneath his long campesino shirt and—rather surprising Horst—gave the cut a dash of mezcal-cut water to clean it and a quick efficient field dressing with a swatch of rags.

  “In a knife fight, the winner gets bandages and the loser gets a hole in the ground,” he said, and then translated it into bad Spanish.

  Pablo, unexpectedly, grinned at that. It made his scarred, bruised, and battered face even more like a caricature in a catalog labeled sinister looks than before.

  Horst looked down at the dead Zacarías and bit back, Did you have to kill him? We could have made him talk.

  He hadn’t been the one facing Zacarías’s knife, after all, and Pablo had. A face-to-face knife fight operated on a very thin margin, which was why you didn’t have one if you had any alternatives—stabbing from behind was much safer. Horst knew both from experience; he had a cut-down bayonet with a knuckleduster across the grip, what Frontschwein called a trench knife, tucked away himself. And in any case the man’s behavior had already answered the basic question.

  “We’ll have to get out of here, and quickly,” he said.

  Overriding a jolt of alarm as generalized danger turned in an instant into a specific, immediate threat, and feeling every sense sharpen, until the very air he breathed in was laden with knowledge.

  “The traitor could have—”

  The telephone rang, a harder, lower-toned sound than the one used in Germany. Horst stepped over to it and raised the old-fashioned separate receiver on a cord to his ear, using his free hand to wave the others to silence.

  “¿Bueno?” he said, schooling his voice.