Shadows of Annihilation Read online

  Which is probably my fault, Luz thought. Since I was the one who suggested a stepped-up surveillance flight tempo in the first place, when the Director told me where we’d be going. Of course, having the base here was also probably one reason the high command picked this location for the Dakota Project in the beginning.

  Julie swung the Guvvie along the side of the big building, down a lane half-lit by the glow from the clerestory windows, and halted at the rear, where an overhead lamp cast a puddle of light before a door leading into the closed-off block of office space at the rear of the hangar. They all piled out to where a sentry with a Thompson slung under a rain poncho and drops pattering on his helmet as if on a tin roof gave them a surprised look and examined their laissez-passer before letting them through.

  A clerk behind a metal desk greeted them inside, a young woman in WAC uniform with glasses on the end of her nose as she worked on some sort of account book at a stamped-metal desk. Bare bulbs lit a pine-board and plywood interior and concrete floor; the metallic-chemical smells and muffled grinding and clanking noises hinted at the work going on in the hangar.

  “Can I help you ladies?” she said, obviously bursting with curiosity.

  “Tell Lieutenant Nudelman that the party he’s expecting at 1630 hours is here, please, Private,” Julie said pleasantly.

  The WAC clerk’s eyes went a little wider. The four of them would have been unremarkable in New York or Chicago, down to the attaché case Henrietta carried, and the practical raincoats and plain hats and sensible low-heeled shoes they all wore. Henrietta might have gotten a second glance in those cosmopolitan surroundings, or not. Here they were a mystery. Her eyes darted toward them as she picked up a telephone and hit a switch, then away again as she spoke into it.

  What’s going through her mind is some sort of Secret Service thing probably, Luz thought. And she’s keeping that to herself, which is good.

  Lieutenant J. Nudelman (Intelligence Corps, with the key-sword-sphinx badge on his collar) was prompt; he was also tall, skinny, pale with a parchment look that was sallow at the same time, frizzy military-cropped black hair already retreating a little despite his being only about Luz’s age, and self-evidently Jewish.

  “Can I help you ladies?” he said politely, in a moderate New York accent.

  “You were told to expect a J. Durán and party?” Julie said, and showed him her ID.

  Nudelman’s glance flickered over her, and the rest of them. Creditably, he showed nothing except a widening of his mournful brown eyes; even more creditably, he didn’t ask anyone else’s name before simply saying:

  “This way, ma’am. I’ll bring the men you requested immediately; they’ve been told to expect some visiting firemen and to cooperate fully.”

  The room set up for the interviews was as bleakly functional as the rest of the base, with chairs on either side of a long deal table, and corkboards on the walls stuck with cryptic notes. One wall had a poster of a Puma fighting scout doing a victory roll in a blue sky as a German Albatross plunged in flame and smoke.

  The inevitable presidential poster was near it; this one showed Uncle Teddy operating a huge steam shovel while dressed in a white linen suit, done from a photograph of his famous visit to Panama in ’06 to inspect the progress of the canal that was his brainchild, the first time a serving president had left the United States. Beneath in block letters was:

  AND NOTHING GETS IN HIS WAY!

  “Would you like coffee, ma’am?” Nudelman said to Julie.

  “Thank you, Lieutenant. Send in the pot, in fact, and some extra cups for our interview subjects. I’ll have my staff forward you a redacted transcript of the results.”

  Because the last thing we need is you looking over our shoulders, Luz thought. Not if you were a fool and even less so since you aren’t.

  The clever Lieutenant Nudelman took the hint and left.

  The WAC clerk returned with a tray and poured for them all and set out cream and sugar. Luz sighed as she sipped; it was nostalgic, but not in a particularly good way. She’d long ago lost track of the number of bases, bivouacs, and in-the-field campfires where she’d drunk varieties of vile Army coffee during the Intervention; somehow soldiers managed to keep it uniformly bad even in Mexico, where they grew excellent coffee and usually brewed it well.

  To be fair, this was the way Uncle Teddy liked his coffee too: cowboy-style, burnt and strong as the devil.

  The room was warm after the coolish wet outside, kept that way by the hissing kerosene stove in one corner. They hung up their hats and overcoats to hooks on the wall; Julie also removed her jacket, and after a moment Luz imitated her, guessing the reason; Henrietta and Ciara followed suit. They sat at the table, Luz by Julie’s left and Ciara by hers; Henrietta took the right. The two local Black Chamber operatives set out their files, and Henrietta put down a steno pad in addition and checked the lead in her mechanical pencil because she’d be taking shorthand notes.

  Julie took a gauze-wrapped parcel from her secretary and opened it; within were the remaining pan dulce—campechanas, conchas, empanadas, and other Mexican pastries—from their meeting with Captain York in the salle d’armes. It was a small touch, but interrogation was a delicate art, a matter of fluctuating moods and tripping signals in people’s minds they weren’t aware of themselves.

  “Send them in,” Julie said, taking a cigarette from a gold case.

  She lit it with a Ronson Wonderlite—a thing like a little whiskey flask, except that when you pulled on the knob at the top a metal perpetual match came out and lit as it made contact with the air.

  New as the building was, it was obvious that she wasn’t the first to smoke in it, and not just from the ashtrays. Luz sometimes thought that the military ran on coffee and tobacco as much as on rations and ammunition. To the Army, Uncle Teddy was a mystic seer sent from some military Asgard or Olympus, and General Wood sat at his right hand, Thor to his Odin or Apollo to his Zeus . . . but they certainly weren’t paying any attention to the presidential view of cigarettes.

  Four young men filed in from the door opposite them, in uniforms that were neat and clean but field-service drab and practical. Two were lieutenants, the others a sergeant and a corporal—the pilots and the observers of the selected Falcons from the flight that had engaged the guerillas in the Sierra. You couldn’t talk effectively with a group of more than four.

  One of the officers was tall and lanky, a blond with a bleached complexion and pale eyes in a lumpy, horsey immobile face; that would be Lieutenant Isaac Stoddard, the name and the old-stock Yankee look were unmistakable, and the file said a ROTC commission from Harvard. The other was nearly as tall, as olive-skinned as Luz with a heavy tan on top of that save for a slightly paler area around the eyes where his goggles would rest in flight. That contrasted with snapping black eyes, a heavy fleshy nose, and the blue-black stubble of a man who had to shave twice a day; his raven hair would have been curly if it weren’t cut so short.

  Lieutenant Nicolas Vlastos, she thought.

  His parents had fled Turkish oppression in Smyrna and ended up running a diner in a Rhode Island mill town. Their son had gone through officer’s training and flight school at the same time.

  Sergeant Michael Rourke, brown hair and freckles and a snub nose, from Esplen, a sooty working-class neighborhood under the shadow of the blast furnaces and open hearths in Pittsburgh.

  Corporal Jack Hayes, a stolid-looking fresh-faced farm boy with a dark russet crop and jug ears and green eyes, from Washington’s rolling Palouse wheatlands.

  The young airmen stopped and looked around for the males they’d assumed would be waiting for them, a little puzzled to see four women instead.

  “Ah, ladies, is this some sort of Red Cross or YWCA thing?” Lieutenant Stoddard said, in purest Ha’va’d Yaahd tones. “Or an interview for a newspaper article about our bombing run on the bandits?”

&
nbsp; Vlastos was a little quicker on the uptake; he blinked three times, and Luz thought she could follow his mental processes as he snapped his eyes to the identical shoulder holsters and .40 automatics all four women wore, added in that his orders had been to report for a further debriefing, ran through a roster of U.S. government organizations, and settled on one that best fitted all the facts in front of him.

  Black Chamber was what rang up in his eyes, and definitely what he whispered to Stoddard, though she got that from lip reading rather than sound.

  Four female operatives conducting an interview about an incident involving an attack on Mexican guerillas wouldn’t be likely under any circumstances . . . very unlikely indeed . . . but unlikely things did happen, this one was happening right in front of him, and the Black Chamber was the only real possibility. The Chamber had a reputation for not following any conventional rules . . . for mad but effective eccentricity, in fact. Legend had it that anyone from a circus performer to your kid sister could be a member without your knowing it.

  Then he nudged his observer and the process was duplicated. All four men came to ramrod braces and saluted.

  Someone who can see the obvious when it bites his foot, Luz thought. Good. So many would rather hug the mast of the Good Ship Preconception as it sinks into the shark-infested waters of reality below, muttering Not happening! Not happening! as the dorsal fins draw near.

  Julie smiled in a friendly manner. “At ease. No need for excessive formality; we’re not in your chain of command. Do sit down, gentlemen,” she added. “Coffee’s in the pot there; help yourself to a pastry if you feel the need, we may be here a while and I know it’s near mess call for you. Would any of you care for a cigarette?”

  She produced her monogrammed gold cigarette case and opened it, offering the Moghuls. All four men murmured thanks and took one as she extended the case, and a light from her Ronson, with only Stoddard not giving the cigarettes a quick look of surprised pleasure at the mellow strength of the tobacco. Even Luz had to admit that the smell wasn’t as unpleasant as she usually found the weed, particularly compared to what soldiers usually smoked, though she had personal reasons for that.

  It was the perfumes of Araby compared to the chemical blowtorch smell of a French Gitaine.

  “Now, let me make one thing clear. I’m not here to appraise your performance as war aeroplane crews. That’s not my area of expertise,” Julie said.

  She placed a finger on the files.

  “Your superiors’ reports say that your behavior was exemplary and I’m not going to second-guess them. What I need is to pull information out of you that you may not know you have.”

  She took a pull on the cigarette and blew smoke meditatively. “You may have noticed that the fighting with Germany has died down since we withdrew from France a little while ago?”

  They all nodded. “Yeah, and I don’t like it for . . . beans, ma’am,” Vlastov said. “Nobody here does.”

  His voice was half New England and half generic working-class Eastern big-city, with only a hint of his parents’ speech in the way he rolled final r’s and separated the last syllable of a word.

  “After what they did to Savannah, killing American citizens on American soil, they need a good kicking to teach ’em respect for Uncle Sam. The sort of kicking where you hear bones snap.”

  Beside Luz, Henrietta stiffened and vibrated in agreement at the remark, and her fingers tightened on her pencil, though none of it showed on her face.

  “Well, those decisions are made above any of our pay grades,” Julie said pleasantly.

  She met their eyes one by one and continued: “That doesn’t mean the war I and my colleagues fight has gone quiet. Quite the contrary. The enemy’s malice never sleeps. Think of the plots against America that have been broken. That fight doesn’t stop.”

  Their faces were absolutely serious now. Everyone in America knew about the foiled horror-gas attacks on the eastern cities; even with time to evacuate most of the people, the one on Savannah had been terrible enough. The official communiqué had simply said that American Secret Service personnel had foiled the Breath of Loki by giving the locations of the U-boats to the Navy for capture or destruction. The Department of Public Information saw that everyone with access to a printing press used that phrase and nothing else, but most people believed the whispers that said Black Chamber.

  “Ma’am?” the horse-faced Yankee said. “I was in Boston on the 6th. I’d like to show you something, if you don’t mind.”

  He reached into his jacket pocket; he didn’t notice the very slight pistolward motion of Luz’s right hand before it was checked by her conscious mind, and a fractional instant later of Julie’s. The other lieutenant did, though, from the way his quick dark eyes flicked between them, and his thick black brow with the bridge of hair over his nose rose a bit.

  I’m sure Stoddard’s brave and a good pilot, Luz thought, noting the faint byplay. But in any sort of fight, my money would be on the Greek. I like his instincts.

  What the New Englander brought out was a small leather folder, like a wallet but one that opened out in accordion pleats. Inside were photographs, small ones and slightly battered. They showed an older couple whose kinship to the pilot was plain as day, a moderately pretty girl in her best, sitting stiffly—her best obviously included an old-fashioned laced and boned corset under the frilly white dress—and smiling the same way and holding a bouquet, a couple who also looked like relatives with a pair of toddlers, and two younger editions of the pilot showing how much more unfortunate his looks would be if you were a girl in your teens.

  “Ma’am, I was there because I had leave, and my older brother . . . he’s in the Navy, detection officer on a destroyer . . . did too. Me, my brother, my two sisters, my sister-in-law and my niece and nephew, my fiancée . . . the whole family.”

  Ciara started to catch Luz’s eye and give a slight smile: We did that; the Chamber did; you and I did. We saved them, people we never knew.

  Luz shook her head, just the beginning of the motion, but it was enough. From the shadows, steel. As we do our deeds in darkness, we win no public praise.

  Ciara went expressionless, but there was a message in her eyes: But we did do it, and you and I know.

  And another when the younger operative glanced over at Henrietta’s immobile face: This must be very hard for her. This man’s family lived and hers died that day.

  “You say what you need done, ma’am, and we’ll do it,” Stoddard said flatly.

  The others all nodded. Luz thought one of the noncoms unconsciously mouthed something on the order of Fuck, yeah.

  Julie nodded impassively and Henrietta’s mechanical pencil poised over the pad.

  “Here’s what will happen. I will ask you questions. My colleagues may ask you questions. You do not ask us questions unless they’re necessary to clarify your answers. It will take some time and it will be . . . strenuous, because we’ll be asking the same things over and over in slightly different ways, which we know is as irritating on the receiving end as it is boring on ours. You’re intelligent and spirited men and you’ll want to know things yourselves. Suppress that urge; the information flows from you to us, not us to you. Once we’re gone, you just had a meaningless interview with some bureaucrats about . . .”

  “Carburetors,” Ciara said. “They’ve been having problems on them with the Falcon V’s engines since they increased the compression ratios so much, they need redesign work.”

  The sergeant from Pittsburgh looked at her. “Yeah, miss, you got dat right,” he said. “Don’ I know it. Gotta keep at ’em all the time, is what, and replace ’em all the fff . . . foolish time too. Everyone bitches about it . . . pardon my French.”

  “I understand a replacement will be out in a month or so, Sergeant,” Ciara said.

  “Or what was that idea you had, Lieutenant?” Julie went on. “The YWC
A doing an article? That might be better, for us. Don’t try to make up detailed lies about this afterward. You’re not trained for it. Just be vague if you have to talk at all and don’t talk about it if you don’t absolutely have to, and don’t be ostentatious about not talking either. Don’t talk to each other, or to your best friends when you’re drinking together, or to your sweethearts or fiancées.”

  She touched a crucifix she wore at her neck. “Not to your confessors, either, if you’re Catholic. Nobody. Ever.”

  Stoddard nodded, and gave his companions a glance as he did. They all soberly repeated the gesture; that was about as good as they were going to get. Threats would be useless and worse than useless in this context. Right now they were all pulling together, and team spirit . . .

  Or tribal spirit, Luz thought whimsically, remembering her conversation with Ciara on the train to Zacatecas a few days ago.

  . . . could work wonders on the human mind. Even beating down the almost irresistible urge to talk about something that made you look important.

  “Now,” Julie said. “Your aircraft are . . .” She repeated their registration numbers. “And you’ve named them Hellpig and Mr. McBeelzebuddy Flies?”

  Possibly a faint tinge of bemusement showed in her voice. Rourke from Pittsburgh answered again; he seemed to have an inbuilt cocky, scrappy approach to the world. Luz would have guessed his father and uncles had all been steelworkers and union men to boot, back when that was dangerous beyond the real and hideous dangers of the work itself amid fire and molten metal and gigantic unguarded machinery. Because it could mean pitched battles with the Pinkertons that Carnegie and then U.S. Steel had used as strikebreakers and goons, or with the Pennsylvania Coal and Iron Police. Nowadays everyone in the mills belonged to the Party-aligned United Steelworkers of America, and things were settled by arbitration boards, but memories lingered and attitudes would for longer still.