by Paul Taylor
Hamilton kept the carriage erect and on a straight path ahead, not wanting to risk veering left or right and losing precious seconds to the ants. I peered out the window. The large adobe buildings indicated we were entering a more populated area. I smelled the scent of corn and saw a structure flanked with silos to our right rear.
“Head back to that factory!” I cried.
Hamilton hesitated.
“Doubling back will put us into the ants!”
“Trust me, Mr. Hamilton!” I assured.
Hamilton yielded to my request and swung the carriage in a sweeping arc. The ants followed, and gained on us, turning more sharply than our horses would allow.
The horses panicked. Our carriage overturned, throwing Hamilton and I onto the dusty path leading to the factory ahead. Several ants had already hooked our ankles in their jaws when the first insect wave surged forward from a grotesque black horizon and washed under our feet.
“Run!”
We ran through the stinging pain of the bites, up a ramp and through an open window. The factory was housed in a loose wooden frame and the ants spilled easily through its foundation.
“Pull the silo levers!” I cried.
We outstretched our arms as we ran and threw the rods at the base of each silo inside. With no chutes attached, the cornmeal poured onto the factory floor in mounds.
The sea of ants parted, swarming toward the growing heaps of cornmeal.
“Dr. Franklin,” said Hamilton, slowing his pace, “the ants are devouring the meal!”
I joined him in respite.
“The marabunta species of army ant craves cornmeal,” I explained, catching my breath. “Yet they cannot digest it. This swarm will feast, then swell up and die. The locals may be short of tortillas and tamales for the season, but they have been spared being eaten themselves!”
We walked the remaining distance to Mexico City, where we met President Hidalgo in his church. Hidalgo, a Roman Catholic priest who questioned the absolute authority of the Spanish king, led a rebellion against Spanish economic policies that gave trade preferences to the home country and left the Mexican people in poverty. Mexico’s War of Independence led to the collapse of the colonial government of Spain.
“Thank you for saving my people,” said Hidalgo. “Hundreds of our citizens were killed in the swarm, but thousands more would have been buried by them had you not diverted their appetites to the silos.”
“A terrifying act of nature,” I said.
Hidalgo adjusted his priestly collar uneasily.
“It was not an act of nature,” he said solemnly. “It was an act of terror. The Barbary pirates have taken credit for infiltrating the Lerma River Bridge construction project and engineering the integration of the army ants into its very design.”
“The Barbary pirates?” asked Hamilton. “What interest would they have here?”
“They follow the new Pasha, who urges the creation of a world theocracy,” said Hidalgo. “The Pasha took advantage of Mexico’s social unrest during the revolution and embedded many terror cells here. His agents integrated themselves into our communities, but secretly plotted to conduct suicide missions to kill vast numbers of those who do not follow their creed. Indeed, several pirates lost their lives to the ants during the bridge operation. We found their bones in its remains.”
Hidalgo rubbed the cross on his neck.
“The Barbaries have made it known that all manner of buildings and other structures may have been infested with the ants,” he said. “They could be released at any moment by a suicidal pirate.”
“How insidious!” said Hamilton.
“Indeed,” said Hidalgo. “I have striven to make our policies friendly toward industriousness. I myself am a beekeeper by trade. My symbol during my rise to power was the worker bee, and I run an apiary to this day. But now commerce has come to a halt. People stay home, fearing more attacks. And as their economic condition grows worse, more and more seek salvation in the Barbary cause, which condemns the freedom to choose which capitalism fosters, and exalts subservience to religious law. The Pasha seeks to make economic conditions here so dire that my people will come to see the killing of infidels today as an attractive means toward earning rich rewards tomorrow in an imagined afterlife.”
“Who leads this movement in Mexico?” I asked.
“A recent convert to the Barbary cause, a local imam who goes by the name Armaan Burayd, meaning one of a skillful mind. He has a remarkable gift for convincing the people to make great sacrifices to achieve an impossible utopia.”
I wrote to Jefferson immediately, informing him the Barbary advances into Mexico constituted a clear violation of the Monroe Doctrine and that he should prepare the United States marines to defend Mexico’s sovereignty.
In the mean time, Hamilton and I engaged in what trade negotiations we could. But Hidalgo’s attention was diverted by successive Barbary attacks. Mexican citizens suffered the ravages of army ants after boarding ships, opening packages, and placing letters in mailboxes. The populace was so fearful, and the government so unsure of its ability to protect them, that official celebrations of Mexico’s Day of the Dead were cancelled for the first time in memory.
Still, when Hamilton and I left for the day’s negotiations, a small band of celebrants had gathered outside the cantina on the ground floor of the inn where we stayed. They were clothed in the vibrant colors that characterize the Mexican national holiday and wore the traditional skull masks in honor of their ancestors’ passing.
Three particularly distinctive characters walked alongside us down the thoroughfare. Each was wearing a crimson robe, a matching flat-topped sombrero, and white gloves. Wrapped in discussion as we were, Hamilton and I did not pay them much notice until we found our mouths and noses covered by pairs of wet white gloves. I smelled the whiff of chloroform, then fell quickly unconscious.
I awoke in a moist cellar. I tried to rise, but could lift only my head as my arms and legs were circled in chains that directed my limbs toward the four metal rods that marked the corners around me. Yet the chains did not extend to the rods themselves. Instead, they hung in midair, pulled straight out, vibrating slowly in synchronicity to a low humming sound.
Hamilton was to my side in an identical predicament.
“Crank the wheel!” came an order from a figure at the end of the room.
It was then I noticed that two of the crimson robed figures, their skull masks still in place, were standing at our feet. Each was next to a handled wheel which they began to turn, slowly at first, and then with increasing speed.
The void between the metal rods and the chains wrapped around my limbs grew suddenly smaller. My joints tore ever so slightly. I heard Hamilton scream. I think I did as well.
“Enough!” cried the leader, stepping from the shadows. He, too, was in skeletal mask and crimson robe. But his red sombrero was much larger than the others.
“I did not expect the Spanish Inquisition!” I said.
The figure lifted his mask, exposing a dusty complexion and a heavily waxed moustache that sprung from his head like rapiers.
“We never went away, Dr. Franklin,” said the figure. “We just bent our allegiance to the Barbary pirates. After President Hidalgo removed the influence of the church from politics, and the governing regime in Spain collapsed, we allied with the Pasha to serve another theocracy. While the Pasha opposes modernity, he knows our application of science to terror can help him achieve a worldwide caliphate. Again!”
His assistants cranked the wheel further and I felt more of my sinews begin to separate from bone.
“The United States marines are on their way to Mexican shores!” said Hamilton. “You’ll not get away with this!”
The Inquisitor smiled.
“Light the chamber!” he yelled.
One of the assistants moved to the far wall and pulled a lever embedded in the stone. Two huge electrostatic spheres sparked to life, hurling their lightning across and through a large tank of wate
r that was surrounded by copper pipes.
“If the marines come by sea, the Pasha’s pirates shall be ready in the air,” said the Inquisitor, waving toward the tank. “As you no doubt have inferred, Dr. Franklin, the tank is filled with brine, and the charges are separating hydrogen and chlorine through electrolysis.”
“And the hydrogen will fuel an armada of airships,” I muttered through the pain.
“Indeed,” said the Inquisitor, signaling to his assistants. “It is a shame you will not be around to see it.”
I complimented the Inquisitor on the electrostatic generators that surrounded Hamilton and me. They were evidently transforming mechanical work into electric energy through friction and running the charges through wires surrounding our chains. The result was a magnetic field that held us aloft without a table. Our limbs would still be pulled from their sockets, but with an invisible elegance far exceeding that of the rack.
“Thank you, Dr. Franklin,” said the Inquisitor. “Again!”
The wheels were spun once more, and the chains binding our limbs pulled yet tighter. I wanted to arch my back, so intense was the pain, but I knew doing so would only increase the tension. I relaxed as best I could and felt for parts of the magnetizing wires surrounding the chains. On the next spin of the wheel, I used a simple hangnail to clip the wire, and the chains on my right arm fell loose.
The assistant nearest me noticed my arm drop, and drew a sword. He would have hacked off my left foot had it not become stuck to the magnetic rod next to it. I used my free hand to separate the remaining wires and grabbed the sword as it fell loose from its electromagnetic grip. As the assistant reached for the weapon, I performed a swift fleche that cropped both his hands.
I ran to Hamilton’s side and used the sword to slash the wires connecting the battery to his electromagnetic rack. He fell in a heap of loose chains.
“Grab the chains!” I yelled to Hamilton, “And come with me!”
We dashed to the base of the tank. I twisted several of the knobs jutting out from the pipes until I whiffed a distinctive metallic scent that mixed hints of pepper and pineapple. It was the smell of chlorine gas, a byproduct of the electrolysis process.
The Inquisitor yelled for reinforcements. I wove Hamilton’s chain through our respective belts and told him to hold on.
I hurled the end of the chain above our heads. As I expected, the lightning shooting from the electrostatic spheres had permanently magnetized the iron in the ceiling braces. The end of the chain caught its magnetic pull and we were lifted aloft until the chains flattened against the braces and left us hanging from a rafter.
Below us, the Inquisitor’s reinforcements streamed into the room with muskets and flintlocks. But before they could steady their aim, their arms lurched to their necks. The chlorine I had released from the pipes, heavier than air, had settled at the bottom of the room, leaving Hamilton and me free to breath but leaving the Inquisitor and his men smothered under an invisible pillow of caustic gas.
We steadied ourselves atop one the rafters and found a hatch near one of the pipes that extended from the tank into the ceiling above. We opened it and climbed up as the Inquisitor and his henchmen twitched their last, their throats and lungs burned to a chemical crisp.
The hatch led into a tubular chamber topped with another hatch. Hamilton turned its lock slowly open and peeked through a small crack into the chamber above.
He dropped the hatch suddenly.
“I saw boots,” he whispered.
We waited for the light tap of feet overhead to work themselves far enough away to allow us a secret entrance into the chamber above. When the time was right, we spirited ourselves up into the gondola of a pirate airship and quickly hid ourselves behind a large, pulsating leather bellows.
A door creaked open and some dozen boots clamored onto the deck.
“Gather the Barbary warriors!” yelled the pirate closest us.
The gondola shook, and we could hear the murmur of a pirate horde gathering above. Peeking through the undulating bellows, I caught a glimpse of the pirate captain, a tall man with an ebullient beard and a turban dangling three horsetails, indicating his status as Pasha.
“Chart course for Hidalgo’s apiary!” he yelled.
Valves were opened and levers pulled. We heard the Barbary airship drop its moorings as it lifted off.
I could only gather our whereabouts from the brief glimpses we saw of the ground as the ship made a series of sharp turns in the air. From the looks of it, we were headed north, up the Mexican hills.
“Bring the ship down below that ridge, out of sight and beyond gunfire range,” ordered the Pasha. “The Prophet tells us that as honey is the remedy of bodily illnesses, the Koran is the remedy for illnesses of the mind. Attack, Barbary brothers, and know that both honey and salvation await you!”
We felt the ship descend. After a loud rumbling of boots, it became noticeably more buoyant as its pirate horde unloaded.
The Pasha extended a spyglass. With his attention occupied, Hamilton and I peered through the gondola window. We saw, just over the hillside, rows of furrows lined with wood, each containing hundreds of red clay pots. Behind each furrow there appeared white-clothed members of Hidalgo’s army, bearing the flag of the worker bee.
The pirates, having made their way to the hillside from the ship, began their fusillade. Hidalgo’s men, peppered with musket balls, retreated behind the pots.
“Fools!” said the Pasha to the few pirates left to man the gondola. “They seek shelter from balls of iron behind jars of clay!”
The musket balls hammered the pots to pieces and Hidalgo’s men were left to shield their faces from shards of both metal and clay.
The cloud left by the pirates’ fusillade grew thick.
“Cease fire!” called one of the pirate captains below. “Let the smoke clear, and then recommence!”
But the smoke only grew darker. And darker. And then it moved toward the pirate horde.
“Bees!” cried the Pasha.
Now refugees from their red clay abodes, the bees swarmed angrily round the pirates before falling upon them like nails to timbers.
“Strafing maneuvers!” cried the Pasha, and his crew swung the ship directly above the swirling insect mass.
“Divert the coal shafts!” he ordered, and a pirate turned a wheel. The smoke from the heating core billowed from the fore of the ship, relaxing the bees and halting their frenzied attack.
“Now charge the electrostats!”
The crew pulled two levers and a stereophonic hum shook the gondola floor.
“And fire the magnet!”
A resounding crackle filled the air as the metal figurehead at the front of the airship began to coarse with electricity. Then the lazy cloud of docile bees began to lose its shape entirely, as the insects began to fly randomly. I surmised the pirates were using magnetism to thwart the bees’ navigation system, which relies on magnetoception and the earth’s magnetic field to perceive direction, altitude, and location.
The bees began to dissipate to the winds. When the path ahead was clear for the pirates, the Pasha’s minions charged the aviary.
“The infidels are surrendering!” cried the Pasha. “Set us down, and let the victors nourish themselves on Hidalgo’s honey stores!”
The Pasha and his pilots slipped off the airship down a ramp. Hamilton and I followed stealthily after and watched the pirates fan out through the rows of shattered clay pots from behind a thick bush of azaleas. Indeed, I noticed the fields surrounding the apiary were dominated by the red-flowered azalea shrubs, giving Hidalgo’s breached hideaway the air of a funeral.
“Feast on the honeycombs, my brothers!” yelled the Pasha to his men. “Then we shall prepare Hidalgo for sacrifice at the Temple of Montezuma!”
The Temple of Montezuma was on the Yucatan peninsula, bordering the Bay of Campeche, the planned landing spot of the American marines.
“Come, Mr. Hamilton,” I said. “We must fe
rret ourselves to the bay and direct the marines to the temple.”
In a half day’s time we met the small contingent of American marines under cover of night and marched through the jungle to the edge of the temple. It was a huge Aztec ziggurat, composed of tier after tier of smaller and smaller square terraces. It was surrounded by a teeming mass of frenzied worshippers who pressed to get close to the bottom of a flight of steep stone stairs that led to a sacrificial stand at the top.
At the apex of the ziggurat, under a stone statue of Huitzilopochtli, the Aztec god of war, stood a feather-festooned high priest who led the ceremonies. Next to him was another statue of a reclining figure. The figure had a bowl in its lap, filled with glistening entrails, fresh from the sacrificial victims who lined the corners of the ziggurat’s topmost tier.
“It’s Armaan Burayd,” I told the assembled marines. “He is the convert to Islam who is the religious leader of the Barbary forces in Mexico.”
At the top of the ziggurat, Burayd raised a huge flint knife, carved in the shape of a scimitar.
“Brothers and sisters!” he yelled to the crowd. “Terror is not to be feared! It is to be worshipped! Terror is nothing more than the quick, severe, and inflexible justice Allah demands, and the Barbary caliphate requires!”
The priest’s words rang familiar to me.
“He sounds like Maximilien Robespierre at the height of his Reign of Terror!” I said.
“And that voice,” said Hamilton, “is that of the notorious Aaron Burr!”
I pulled a spyglass from one of the marine’s saddlebags. Sure enough, beneath the face paint and turquoise headdress, the contours of Burr’s visage were unmistakable.
Burr motioned for the guards to lay down the next victim. A young Mexican woman resisted in vain as two burly pirates strapped her hands and legs to a sacrificial slab.
Burr raised the flint scimitar above his head, holding it aloft in dramatic fashion. The crowd roared a deep-throated bloodlust.
The sword came down hard on the victim’s abdomen, spraying jets of blood on Burr’s priestly garb. Unfazed, Burr immediately raised the knife again and brought it down on the victim’s neck, severing it seamlessly at the nape. The woman’s head bounced down the stairs, chipping off bits of skin and bone as it fell.