by Billy Roper
She realized that it might be a mistake to underestimate the locals. That was a classical colonial error. The New Americans, even after the body blows they had taken, had certainly pulled things together in time to withstand the siege of Albany. And now, they were even stronger, because they didn’t depend on the St. Lawrence Seaway for European goods. Yvette interpreted that as simply calling for more subtlety. And the thirty-something bombshell was all about subtlety. Just ask her ex-husbands.
It would be uncharitable, she felt, to describe her as a ‘spy’. James Bond had never shopped where she did, when she was home in Paris. But Yvette Le Blanc was more than just a diplomatic attaché. She was, by any measure, an intelligence asset for the French government, as well as their territorial regime in Montreal.
If a New American border guard stationed in Schenectady had gambling debts, she would find out to whom and for how much. If a ship from New Detroit passed through Trois Rivieres, Yvette would know whether the manifest was accurate before it hit international waters. Her business was information. And business was, as always, very good.
Most of the time, she lived and worked in Montreal, but travel was a daily part of her job, as well. From Connecticut to Quebec City, nobody was better connected. Up and down the New England coast, she had informants in every sleepy town where the TriColour now flew, and the schoolkids had learned to speak French in school. Yvette was one of the cogs in the wheel keeping France in control of five former U.S. states and as many Canadian provinces. All of it centered on Quebec.
She had just been a schoolgirl when the French Foreign Legion, then the French Marines, then the whole army, had been called up to assist their cultural and linguistic brethren in North America. With their shared history and the obvious opportunities available, all Quebec had to do once they declared their independence from a fragmenting nation, was to ask. Yvette remembered how the media coverage of the colonization had changed over time, from a humanitarian mission to a peacekeeping mission to a stabilization mission. Now, the citizens of France would have another revolution if they were told they had to live without the natural resources and tax income and, for many of them, free land, made possible by their continued presence here. Yvette was a patriot. If it were possible that her deeds could be known by the public, she would be a hero. Alas, that would kind of defeat the whole purpose, however, and render her ineffectual. Oh well, perhaps when she retired. She could write her memoirs, and change some names and dates to protect some sources. She took another vape drag, an affectation she had picked up in Boston, and looked out the window as her train rattled north towards the night.
This new assignment, posing as a new secretary to the scandalously drunken Quebecois consul to New America in Winnipeg, would be the challenge of her career. Not because she would have to cripple her Parisian accent to make it sound Quebecois. That she could do, and had done, any number of times. The hard part would be pretending to be a secretary until she could arrange to meet the Governor.
Intercepted traffic indicated that the New American government was going to go through another of their agonized and self-humiliating mandatory DNA tests. Probably to identify and quarantine any of their citizens with the faintest trace of Asian or AmerIndian admixture. This subjecture was arrived at by the FN home office because the only enemy which St. Louis had left standing which current science would allow a genetically targeted viral attack against was the Indonesians.
Her job was merely to confirm this, but secondarily, she might remain in position in case there was a future opportunity to destabilize their rival. First Lady of Manitoba wasn’t exactly Queen of the Realm, but it would serve her needs. Yvette looked at the picture of Paul Martin in the lamplight. His dossier said that he seemed to like blondes with sob stories. She would dye her hair and rehearse a cover with a lost family angle in the morning. She vaped again, enjoying the rush of the nicotine turned to maximum.
The early years when the starving Americans had welcomed the blue helmeted French soldiers had yielded to protests and revolt before she had made it out of the slums. She had been too busy hiding with her Algerian mother when the mass deportations of Muslims began. Even though she was half French, she would have been sent off, too, and she wouldn’t abandon her mother to that fate, anyway. Her father had never come for them, like he had promised. Abandoned and hopeless, knowing that her daughter could pass for White but she could not, Yvette’s mother had killed herself, running at a row of riot police with a Molotov cocktail while her daughter watched helplessly from hiding. From that day forward, she had been on her own, in the chaos of the era. She had survived. She preferred not to dwell on how.
By the t ime Paris has been declared ‘cleansed’ of Muslim immigrants, Yasmine had become Yvette, and learned to speak and walk and eat and act as if she belonged there. She had joined the youth branch of the Front Nationale’ as further cover, then moved up in the ranks. The Turkish Flu had put her in bed for a week when it swept through, but many Mediterranean French suffered similar collateral effects from the pandemic, so her illness went unnoticed amid so many others. Three years later, she found the slumming French man who had dishonored her mother, then abandoned them. He was living with his other family, a wife and two children and a cat in a fancy apartment near the city center. The fire was ruled an accident. Only the cat escaped the inferno.
What had reminded her of that?, Yvette wondered. Looking out the window at the skeletal remains of burned out buildings left over from the resistance to the occupation, as they rolled by? Perhaps so. Some day there would be enough immigrants from the French working class seeking a new life to rebuild or replace all that had been lost from this corner of the continent, and more.
As she turned off the vaper, the olive-complexioned woman gave a silent prayer of praise to Allah that the French, in their arrogance, had never implemented the kind of mandatory DNA tests that the racist American Nazis used on their own people. Not even high value government assets such as herself, Yvette thought with some amusement. With a second moment of gratitude, she thanked the Prophet that she had been given a chance to be in a position to perhaps, perhaps, save the remnant of His faithful whom the infidels sought to slaughter.
Her intelligence report indicated that the new Speaker had endorsed her target in the ongoing re-election campaign. Well, his new girlfriend might convince Governor Martin to ask Randall Balderson to visit his state and give an in-person speech. Something to really win the crowds over. Yvette wondered if losing two Speakers to assassination in less than a year would awaken the unbelievers to the futility of opposing the will of Allah?
“Yes, there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run There's still time to change the road you're on
And it makes me wonder…”
The visitations to his royal residence, still under repair from the attack, continued relentlessly, every hour. Sur Moerdani fumed at the kidnapping of the young noble children, many of them offspring of his closest supporters. The families should understand, though, that life or death came only through him. He, as Caliph, was the right hand of the almighty, and he alone could provide the vaccination booster which would allow their children to live as mortal Gods among the thronging multitudes of Java. Or, they could keep bugging him, and their surviving children could spend the rest of their lives locked up in quarantine. Just however they preferred.
This latest headache couldn’t have come at a worse time. True, his naval forces were getting two or three new boats refurbished and reconditioned to seaworthy status each week since the battle. Most of them, though, were small to medium sized pleasure craft, or yachts, with only a couple derelict Taiwanese cruisers giving him any real reason to smile. They would just have to keep salvaging every port in the South Pacific they could get to without straying into Russian territory in the North, or New American and Australian territory in the East and South. What he really needed was to rebuild his air force, which had been worse than decimated. That was a harder quest, it seem
ed. Even in hangars, modern airplanes succumbed to the elements, and quickly. And from what he had seen, there weren’t exactly loose nuclear weapons just laying around to be picked up. The Russians had seen to that, throughout the region.
He could only guess that the Australians had taken the innocent children. Maybe for the New Americans. Five times a day, after the ritual was satisfied, he sent hatred towards the unbelievers. Especially since he was constantly reminded that his rug faced a city filled with the bones of the believers.
The doctor he had once been itched away at the corner of his mind with a paranoid fear that the missing children represented a plot by the infidels to unleash Satan’s fury on his people. He knew it could be done. As the Turkish Flu had closed in, he had used the same amoral methods of research and development, to find a cure. He even knew how it might be done. He did not know whether the White faithless cowards had the will and devotion to anything required to see it done. They had proven that they lacked the will to use nuclear weapons against him, probably lest they poison the air of Northern Australia. They had proven that they lacked the will to sacrifice enough of their mortal flesh and blood lives to conquer the Javanese nation by conventional means. Had they been believers, any cost would have been accepted, and martyrdom welcomed, for victory. That, the Caliph knew, was the main difference between his worldview, and theirs…and that was why he would win. Or rather, all praise be to Allah, the merciful, the victory would be granted to the righteous.
All he could do for now was vaccinate as many of his most crucial people as possible, perhaps framing it as a benevolent gift to soften the pain of their losses. Meanwhile, they would continue to prepare for a final confrontation, a climactic showdown, with evil. When he was ready, he would send a force of millions of believers down onto Darwin and trap the infidels therein Australia, to destroy them. The three nuclear research reactors on Java had yielded enough radioactive byproduct for two good-sized dirty bombs. Enough to poison Perth and Brisbane and open the continent up to invasion. Many of his men, some of his best engineers, had died obtaining and securing the material. They were now enjoying the promised seventy-two virgins, just as he had promised them as they lay dying. Now, he needed a delivery system, and the right opportunity to slip them past the infidel fleet. All else the Caliph needed, was time.
In the fullness of the seasons, as the Prophet had promised, victory would be given to the faithful who were worthy through righteousness to conquer in His name. Sur Moerdani would tell them when.
Chapter Nine
“We must delve into our roots and reconstruct what history has divided.”
-Kemal Ataturk
“Where am I to go, now that I've gone too far?”
The laser printer chirped, spitting out a color photograph of the latest Most Wanted pictures sent from the Intelligence Division in the New American capitol. Commander Nelson uncurled the still damp paper, glancing at the faces which Secretary Bullens considered the most dangerous on the continent. Two serial killers, targeting isolated colonists in what had been the New African dead zone. A former double asset provoking conflict between Deseret and the New Americans in California. A woman suspected of being a French espionage agent. An old man who led an organized crime ring looting national treasures in ruins from Philadelphia to D.C., to sell on the international black market. And his man, an immune survivor of the Gulf cartel.
Pablo Juan Castrito was somewhere in the mountains of Eastern Cuba, all reports indicated, organizing the virus survivors into resistance cells, in exchange for their oaths of loyalty, of course. Like some modern day Castro, the Commander guessed. That explained the new alias he had chosen as a nom de guerre. He was building an army, right between Brad’s Texas Rangers and the German Commandos holding Guantanamo Bay. Which way he would hit, was anybody’s guess. With President Hampton’s approval, Nelson had reached out to the New Americans for some help with that. He wanted to see just how deep this new alliance went. So far, so good.
“Hey, Brad, is that our bad guy?” his adjutant Terry asked, getting a cup of coffee. Running water had been the first priority once the local power grid was brought back up in Havana. Fresh coffee hadn’t been far behind.
“Yep, that’s him, along with some other winners we’re supposed to keep an eye out for,” Nelson replied.
“Well, I’ll be sure and watch for them, while we’re doing another residential sweep today,” Terry joked. With the power turned back on, brownouts were still a problem. Only the Rangers with combat experience outside the loop were actively hunting for Castrito. The rest were working their way outwards from the Bay to the Loop, replacing transformers and turning off junction boxes while guarding the Texas Electric utility workers.
“Yeah, how’s that going?” Brad asked. The goal was to have the downtown ready for re-colonization by the first of next month.
“We’re on schedule, but from what I hear, they’re selling citizenship to British nationals in exchange for re-colonization assignments. It might not be fancy enough for their tea parties.”
The Commander just smiled. “Well, if you lived on a crowded island where it had been snowy and wet and cold your whole life, you’d be lining up to live in a tropical paradise like this, too, Terry.” Because his wife wasn’t a native Texican, he had a more open mind towards foreigners than most of the intensely nationalistic Rangers.
“Hey, don’t be giving the Swedes and Norwegians any ideas, they’ve been frozen solid since the little ice age started. They might want to come next,” came the grumbled reply.
“What’s the matter, you want to switch the mission parameters to keeping the beaches free of Swedish girls, too?” Brad joked.
Terry finished his coffee, then stretched thoughtfully. He shook his head, smiling. “No, I reckon not.”
While the rumor among his military officers that President Hampton was ‘selling’ citizenship to the British wasn’t exactly true, it was close. Thousands of English citizens, miserable from two decades of weather that had been even wetter and colder than in the past, were also eager to escape their dependence on foreign imports on their island. Texas needed skilled workers, especially those with technical and engineering or utility backgrounds, as colonists for their new possessions. It was a good fit. Though most native Texicans had plenty of room to move South or West if they wanted new land to settle, very few were drawn to Cuba. The Brits would have to learn to drawl.
When they first arrived, they would be set up in temporary prefab housing units alongside the Rangers installation, for their own security. After a week of orientation classes on the local geography, climate, flora, and fauna, the Brits would be assigned work details clearing residences that the Republic of Texas’s Corps of Engineers had judged to be habitable. Then the teams would be divided up to remodel and repair what needed to be, to make them ready to move into. It would be rough on them for a while, but eventually they’d get settled in.
The Commander of the smaller Ranger unit running a parallel operation in Cancun was running a race with Brad, to see which of them would be ready to take on colonists first. The first hundred were expected at the former resort hub in two weeks. It would be a close competition. Havana was better set up to accept families, though, so it would draw more colonists.
In the SouthEastern corner of the island, the Germans were moving the first of their naval assets into Guantanamo Bay. Aside from the North Atlantic, the Mediterranean had become a German pond over the last generation, so their ocean-going fleets had expanded along with their abilities and opportunities. Greater Germany was stationing a squadron consisting of a destroyer and two cruisers, along with their support craft, at Gitmo. Two thousand sailors and Marines were already there, and that number was expected to double. That didn’t worry Commander Nelson much.
“We all feed the gods we choose to serve,” he had told Terry, when the adjutant had expressed concern over the influence of Greater Germany. There was no way around it, they needed the technical and sc
ientific assistance, and the trade. Now that they were friendly with the New Americans up North, it looked like the Republic of Texas was just making nice with everybody. It made Brad feel a little better knowing that ‘The Eyes of Texas’ was not only growing every day, the orbital station was installing an offensive capability, as well.
Pausing in his mundane paperwork duties, Brad had a sudden thought. What if the New American lunar base, and the Russian and German and British stations, all had the same idea? He guessed that there was a rocket scientist or intelligence chief in Austin, just like Tommy Bullens in St. Louis, who was tasked with thinking about things like that. Way above his pay grade.
Thinking of Bullens, the second and third sheets spilling out of the printer held the Unified Command’s estimates of enemy forces remaining on Cuba. According to satellite imagery provided by the New American Space Command’s honcho, Gen. Matt Ball, their technicians guessed there were around seven to ten thousand surviving Cubans on the island. That was along with a handful of black pirates thrown in there that would probably be slaughtered by the vengeful islanders, themselves, once they caught them. The New Africans hadn’t treated the Cubans too nicely, when they’d taken over.
Most of those Cubans had moved into the Eastern half of the island. There was one remaining pocket living off the land in Zapata National Park to his South, but the rest were mainly clustered in the Sierra Maestras. That meant that they would be a bigger problem for the Germans, especially once Castrito had them organized. He faxed over the information and accompanying satellite reconnaissance photos to Guantanamo, as a courtesy.
In Berlin, Gerta looked over faxed copies of the images. Her eyes were weaker than she wished, but it was clear from the text that the Greater German garrison at Guantanamo Bay would have to be strengthened. Punitive raids into the wilderness West of the base would be required. The Chancellor of Greater Germany would leave those details to the NPD Council, or to the new Chancellor, or to the local base commander. Somebody else, besides her. Today was her last official day in office. Tomorrow, she would begin boxing up her personal effects. By the end of the week, she would be back home in Bavaria, where it was a bit warmer. She had great-grandnieces and greatgrandnephews to spoil.