Shadows of Annihilation Read online

  She crossed herself again and turned away toward the waiting room and the exits in a murmur of thanks. Ciara took her arm and smiled beside her as they passed a handcart going in the other direction that held the promised dinner, judging from the appetizing smell of the frijoles refritos and eye-wateringly chili-rich local birria de cabra—goat stew—and the round baskets of tortillas, festival food by peon standards.

  “That was kind of you, my darling,” she said quietly.

  Luz shrugged. “Well, it was good for them and for the country,” she said, slightly embarrassed. “Build your body and your mind to build yourself, but build yourself to build America,” she added, falling back on a basic Party slogan.

  If there was one thing the New Nationalist movement agreed on, it was that you had to put duty to the whole first. That was why extending rights and education for all was policy. Not for the sake of individuals, who were only cells in the body politic, but for the welfare and future of the nation and its people, because it made each citizen better able to contribute to the country.

  As they reached the arcade facing the street, a hand beckoned from the window of a plain Model T.

  THREE

  Sierra de Cardos

  Near Jerez

  State of Zacatecas

  United States Protectorate of México

  JUNE 15TH, 1917, 1917(B)

  Röhm grinned at them and held up the odd-looking rifle; another lay at his feet, on top of webbing bandoliers of ammunition.

  “This, example of one, a von Dückler StG-16 is, a Sturmgewehr, a . . .”

  He seemed lost for the Spanish word for a moment, his scarred face working. Horst filled it in:

  “Fusil de asalto,” he said: assault rifle.

  That wasn’t an established term in Spanish, but then until late last year it hadn’t been one in German, either.

  I coined it myself because nobody would have taken something named Federov Avtomat seriously. Now I’ll get the credit, even though all I did was arrange to steal the weapons and machinery from the Russians after we beat them. It makes you wonder about the official versions of history, it really does. Though it looks like they’ve made a few improvements—the sights, and the grip on the forestock is farther forward and the machining is smoother, probably better steel too.

  “Correct, assault rifle,” Röhm said. “Let me what it can do ge . . . be showing.”

  He held the weapon with the butt on his right hip and pointed with his left hand.

  “These rocks there.”

  The StG-16 leapt to his shoulder. Crack! Crack! and two rocks the size of a man’s head leapt off a boulder four hundred yards away. There was a murmur, but Horst thought it was for the shooting, which was impressive, rather than the weapon; the Mexicans were familiar with being on the receiving end of the Yankee R-13 for years now. Horst had taken his from a guard at the POW camp in El Paso, who didn’t need it after his head acquired a 180-degree turn to the rear in Horst’s grip, thus illustrating the old saying about there being no dangerous weapons, only dangerous men.

  Weapons can certainly help, though.

  “Now that,” Röhm said, pointing to a similarly sized lump of pinkish stone.

  It was much closer, but still around two hundred yards from where Röhm stood. His thumb flicked a little lever down at the back of the trigger guard, and then he shouldered the rifle again, leaning into it a bit.

  This time there was a stuttering crackle, a raakkkk sound. Brass flew out of the ejection port as the German officer fired a series of short bursts, three or four rounds each. The rock jumped into the air and shed fragments in a peening, hammering circle. Each following burst struck just as it landed, until the assault rifle clicked empty.

  There was another murmur from the Mexicans as silence fell and he quickly switched in another magazine and repeated the process.

  An excited murmur this time—except for Pablo, who was lying where he’d fallen and now snoring in the way men who’d been clouted in the head often did, bubbles of blood growing and popping on his smashed nose, along with the inevitable flies. This time the guerillas were impressed on a more technical level; they were familiar with the American machine pistol, the Thompson, and how its heavy .45 pistol rounds could blast men to bloody sausage meat . . . but two hundred yards was about twice its effective maximum range. Some of them looked extremely thoughtful.

  Nothing on a battlefield was ever easy, but the Great War had proven attacking was hard for a malignantly and mutually reinforcing mass of reasons. Defending was hard too if you didn’t have access to a regular army’s crew-served heavy weapons. Sometimes a compromise like the assault rifle gave you the best of all possible worlds. All the Mexicans were excited, and the more thoughtful ones were running possible scenarios of attack and ambush through their minds.

  They started to crowd around Röhm, their questions louder and louder as they stumbled over each other’s eagerness. Horst’s head whipped up.

  “Silence!” he shouted.

  It fell in seconds, and then there were yelled curses and a few crossed themselves. There was a faint sound in the air they all recognized, a snarling buzz—radial engines, the nine-cylinder models the U.S. Army Air Corps preferred. That shook Horst fully back to alertness, like a jolt of cold water on a hot day. It came from the north, though that was hard to judge amid the echoes from steep rock-faces all around, and it was definitely getting louder.

  “¡Ay, chingao!” someone yelped. “¡Aviones gringos!”

  Nobody needed to say a word after that. The guerillas and the muleteers ran the animals upslope until they were under a brushy overhang of rock, then started frantically stripping their pack saddles.

  Everyone who wasn’t helping with that ran for cover themselves. Horst did too, but he paused to snatch up his R-13 and then the semiconscious Pablo, throwing the man over his left shoulder as he ran back uphill to the spot where he’d waited for the mule-train half an hour ago. Röhm arrived at almost the same moment Horst tucked Pablo under a bush without wasting time on gentleness, either because he’d been following or because he had as good an eye for ground as Horst did, a survival trait in a fighting soldier; he had both the assault rifles and their ammunition.

  “I suppose you think that because you beat him and then rescued him, Pablo there will become your most faithful vassal and blood brother?” he said sardonically as he found a place with overhead cover.

  Horst didn’t turn his head away from the direction he expected the aircraft as he answered; there would be more than one, from the sound that was echoing off the mountainside. It was very pleasant to speak his own language again, after more than half a year living in English and then Spanish.

  Even speaking with Röhm, he thought, and went on aloud:

  “Hauptmann Röhm, do I look like a complete idiot? Or Old Shatterhand?”

  “Not like a complete idiot, no,” Röhm said, with a chuckle of recognition at the reference.

  That was the sort of thing that happened in a Karl May novel; May was a writer of adventure stories set all over the world, but mostly in a highly colored version of the American West, where the German frontiersman known as Old Shatterhand and his Apache companion Winnetou wandered around, slaying enemies and animals and waxing poetic about their feelings and the landscape in fine subromantic style.

  Very few German men of their generation—Röhm was about four years older than Horst—had grown up without reading them in their teens. Horst still did occasionally, or had back in Germany, for relaxation and nostalgia’s sake. Though he knew that despite May hinting it was all true and that he was Old Shatterhand, the author hadn’t even crossed the Atlantic until he’d written most of them and had never gotten closer to the wild Western lands than a good hotel in Buffalo, New York.

  “Incidentally, I’m not a captain anymore,” Röhm said; that was what Hauptmann meant. “It
’s Major Röhm now. The Sturmgewehr did very well—all the Stoßtruppen use them now. Ten magazines each, grenades, a Lewis or two per squad, and you’re ready for anything—twice the firepower we had before for less weight. They’re thinking of re-equipping the regular infantry the same way. You may be sure I wasn’t shy about how I got them for us, and my battalion and regimental commanders were very impressed.”

  “Ach, so,” Horst said, a usefully noncommittal verbal placeholder. “Congratulations. Well deserved, I’m sure—we heard about the Yankees running out of France with their tails between their legs.”

  Christ and His Mother! He was hard enough to deal with when we were of equal rank.

  From his taunting grin the Bavarian knew exactly what Horst was thinking, and let the moment stretch out before going on:

  “You’re a major too, now. I’ve got the paperwork here with me somewhere.”

  Horst grunted in surprise; they were both extremely young for the rank in prewar terms, and fairly young for it even after two years of very heavy casualties—in proportion to their numbers German combat officers always had higher casualty rates than their men, up to about battalion command level. Before he went back to intelligence, at one point Horst von Dückler had been commanding a battalion for a little while . . . or what was left of it . . . as an Oberleutnant, simply because nobody more senior was alive and unwounded to do it. But on a personal note . . .

  “I got promoted for that beschissene mess in Berlin? Or that was in Berlin until the enemy spies sabotaged the Annihilation Gas works and then escaped in the confusion with one of our naval airships and the secret radio-range-finding apparatus.”

  “Escaped with you and me in valiant pursuit all the way to the front in France!”

  “I recall taking a Navy semirigid at gunpoint to do that,” Horst said dryly.

  “Exactly! Why waste precious time with bureaucratic formalities when you can grab a man by the throat and stick a Luger up his nose instead? I was impressed. You may be sure I upheld your credit manfully when I debriefed,” Röhm said. “After all, I was involved too, so it was my credit as well. I emphasized my observations of the enemy tanks, too, and that was one of the first contacts—we’re calling them Panzerkampfwagen, Panzer for short, by the way. Everyone’s worried about them, and the War Projects division of the Emperor’s Institute has a new crash program.”

  Horst gave a curt nod of acknowledgment. Röhm could have blamed everything on Horst, who wasn’t there to defend himself, but that was the cautious move: deflecting blame while admitting a disaster. Claiming credit for what happened and trying to make it all out as an epic of heroism was much riskier . . . but it did require giving a share to Horst, as well, and if they’d both been promoted he must have done it very skillfully. Horst supposed that someday his career would mean something to him again, and in any case there was now a debt.

  “Your Colonel Nicolai . . . I’m seconded to Abteilung IIIb too, now . . . managed to throw most of the blame on the Navy. They deserved it, too, the bumboy twits—they never even realized something was going on until we warned them, and did nothing about it until we came in at the last minute. Right now there’s a lot of credit going around for everyone. Except the Navy, and even there the U-boats are stars. You’re due major kudos for the Sturmgewehr, too, since your name’s on it. These last few months everyone’s polishing their medals and kissing arse and angling for a château . . .”

  “Happy as God in France,” Horst said, quoting an old German saying for ease and plenty.

  “Precisely! Nicolai says you can have a nice one with a good vineyard, if you want it, by the way—the Custodian of Enemy Property is a very good friend of his.”

  “The colonel looks after his people,” Horst said—truthfully.

  “Though he’s just been given an estate south of Kiev himself, three thousand hectares of black earth,” Röhm added with a sneer. “He’ll build a Schloss, I suppose . . . Schloss Spionage . . . and play at being a Junker in his spare time.”

  Horst looked over his shoulder for a moment and gave him a brief cold smile; Nicolai was no more of noble birth than Röhm. The von Dücklers were Uradel—nobles as far back as written records went, into deep time.

  “He deserves his share. What’s the point of winning a war if you don’t plunder the defeated? And land, land is the best booty of all because in the end all other wealth comes from it. As for playing the Junker, did you think our lines sprang by magic from the loins of Wotan in the mists of time? Every Hochgeboren family tree starts with a lucky soldier—a commoner, too—planting the acorn with his sword, watering it with the blood of his enemies, and fertilizing it with his plunder.”

  “A point,” Röhm said grudgingly.

  “And you? I didn’t think you’d give up a combat command for intelligence work.”

  Röhm wasn’t just a competent professional soldier; Horst had pegged him as a war lover, one of the rare breed who simply reveled in combat and were very good at it.

  “The war’s over. It’s been over since I walked into the Mediterranean up to my boot-tops,” Röhm said casually, then grinned. “And then unbuttoned and pissed in the direction of the Yankees and the Parlewuhs.”

  “That was a campaign, not the war,” Horst said, puzzled.

  Röhm shrugged. “The real war, the main armies hitting each other head-on, the war of massed divisions and the Western Front and the Eastern Front . . . that war is over, all but the armistice and the negotiations. We’re demobilizing now that the Yankees are out of Europe. Twenty-five divisions’ worth of troops—all the older year-classes, a lot of skilled workers, the married men . . .”

  “We are?” Horst said, shocked.

  I think some part of my mind assumed the war would go on forever, he thought, contemplating that sensation.

  “We need more aeroplanes and submarines and Panzers, not masses of infantry,” Röhm said. “And to repair the railroads and five dozen other things we let slide because we had to, and then there are the new territories to whip into shape to yield what we need, since the Navy has Scheiße gebaut—”

  Which was roughly equivalent to the English phrase fucked up royally.

  “—and the Yankees and Englanders still control the oceans. With V-gas around on both sides, that big-war game isn’t worth the candle, not until someone comes up with a defense, and the scientists say that won’t be soon. We’ll be putting down rebels and partisans for a generation inside our wonderful new Greater German Empire and that’s better than nothing, but a bit boring. And God did not make me to be the founder of a line of Junkers!”

  He cocked an eye skyward. “That little affair where we chased the Yankee spies and hijacked the airship, that wasn’t boring at all. And this . . . this isn’t boring either. Colonel Nicolai keeps his chosen men busy!”

  The engine noise was much louder now, and all the guerillas were thoroughly concealed.

  “And Colonel Nicolai didn’t send me alone, magnificent German warrior that I am,” Röhm said. “I came with presents besides your promotion papers, and little helpers . . . because the longer the Yankees take to get their own V-gas plant going, the better our negotiating position will be at those armistice talks sooner or later. It’s all code-named Alberich.”

  Horst made an intrigued sound. That was the name of the king of the dwarves in the Nibelungenlied, the legends that Wagner had used as a basis for his Ring cycle. Alberich’s tribe had made the magical swords and rings and invisibility capes of myth.

  “Where?” he said.

  “Had to stash them some distance away, far too bulky to drag into the mountains, and the helpers are technicians, not fighting men.”

  “Ach, so,” Horst said with satisfaction.

  He wouldn’t get any details until he really needed them, of course. And working with Röhm might be difficult . . . but Röhm needed him, his superior command of the lan
guage and even more his local contacts and knowledge.

  Röhm looked skyward again. “We can have fun with the toys, assuming we don’t die today. How are your Lumpenpack of brown clowns here for fire discipline, by the way? They hide pretty well, but you learn that quick when you’re attacked from the air. If you survive the first time or two.”

  “They’re surprisingly good,” Horst said—again, truthfully. “The incompetents and absolute brainless fire-eaters are all dead or in labor camps or back in their villages hoeing beans and hoping the Yankee secret police never find out about them. Darwin got them, you might say. The few still in the field know their business—natural selection eliminating the unfit.”

  Röhm grunted. “There must have been a lot of them to start with, then,” he said. “In my regiment we were laying bets on whether the Yankees would give up on it and pull out, back just before the war in Europe started.”

  Horst shook his head. “Roosevelt doesn’t give up on a fight once he’s in it, and neither do the ones he picks for command, like Wood . . . Wood pacified the southern Philippines back after the Americans took it from Spain. That was as bad as Mexico was in 1914. Here . . . the Yankees killed three hundred thousand of the Mexican rebels and caught and executed all their best leaders, and made it plain they weren’t going anywhere and would go right on killing until they got things quiet, and that discouraged most of the rest. Then the Yankees gave an amnesty, and they’ve been surprisingly mild to those who don’t fight. They like to hand out candy and pats on the head to children, and build new wells and schools.”

  “Stick in one hand, carrot in the other,” Röhm said. “I prefer sticks in both hands . . . each of them wrapped in barbed wire.”

  You would, Horst thought.