Trouble in the Wind

by Chris Kennedy

  The bombardment moved further south.

  Aimed at the 27th…or what’s left of it, not us, he thought. They haven’t realized what’s coming up on them. The enemy infantry should be in sight soon.

  He could see bodies in the infinitely drab grey-brown-green of modern American field uniforms, and a Lewis-gun team in a crater waiting for the boys in equally inconspicuous feldgrau; the colors weren’t that different, so the quickest visual recognition signal was the shapes of the helmet, the flared turtle dome of the American model and the coal-scuttle German. The Americans were trying to help the French to dig in and establish their new Loire Front solidly. The storming advance of the Kaiser’s legions had slowed at least. The new duo of Generals Foch and Lyautey, who were as much government as France had these days, claimed it was because they were getting a grip on things.

  Roosevelt’s own opinion was that the Germans were slowing down mainly because they were outrunning their supplies, not because of French resistance; bringing anything across the wreckage of the old Western Front and its poisoned remnants had to be a nightmare. And he thought Foch and Lyautey knew it, which was why they were shoveling every French civilian into anything that could cross the Mediterranean and dumping them in French North Africa—newly christened as the National Redoubt.

  When the Huns get the railways working again over the old front line it’s kitty bar the door, he thought grimly. Our logistics stink even worse, and we can’t improve them by making prisoners repair a rail line and die.

  They’d hit the 27th and its neighbors an almighty knock with their stosstruppen and infiltration tactics, which were just as nasty as the reports said, or more so. The only good thing was that they weren’t using V-gas anymore, and hadn’t since the 6th of October.

  That’s because they know we captured hundreds of tons of V-gas when we took the U-boats they sent to destroy our east coast cities. They don’t want it shot back at them.

  V-gas stood for Vernichtungsgas, Annihilation Gas. Some were calling it horror-gas; it was fantastically more lethal than chlorine or phosgene or even nitrogen-mustard, some sort of nerve agent so deadly that a tiny dot the size of a period at the end of a sentence on your skin would kill. The Zeppelins had unloaded hundreds of tons of it on the Entente’s capital cities, and shells had rained down as much more on trenches, artillery parks and railway junctions from the North Sea to the Swiss frontier. A million troops and three times that number of civilians had died in the course of one day. Indirectly it had killed as many again since then, and the toll wasn’t complete. Reports said even Hindenburg and Ludendorff had been surprised—and the Kaiser fainted dead away, not having been told about it before the massacre of his British royal relatives and legions of their subjects.

  But they don’t know we don’t have much horror-gas ready to deploy yet because it’s so hard to get it out of the rocket-mortar shells without killing everyone concerned.

  Fortunately the American tanks showed two could play at the game of deadly surprises. There was more ringing hail on the armored hull of his beast—the men were calling it the Lobo, the wolf, as well as the code-name that had stuck as a descriptor for the type of machine in general. After the Intervention, modern American military jargon was chock-full of bits of Spanish.

  The clanging on the hull went on and on, a Maxim gun’s distinctive stutter, and 7.92 rounds went peening off the steel in trails of sparks he could see through the vision blocs, enough to mow down a company’s worth of men caught in the open. Machine-guns had ruled the Great War’s battlefields…until this year.

  A ruined stone farmhouse lay ahead, blackened by fire and with its roof caved in, smoke-marks up from all of the windows…but ruins made good strongpoints, and he caught muzzle flashes from a basement window. They might not know what a tank was or what it could do, but they did know it was American—the white star was a giveaway.

  “Driver, tank halt. Loader, HE,” he said into the speaking-tube.

  There were three men in a Lobo Mk. I’s turret, and together with the gear they filled the squarish shape—that was one more crewman that his old Lynx armored car had needed in Mexico. A Lynx used a pom-pom firing little shells from a belt as its main armament.

  The loader was a weasel-quick, wiry-strong young man named Martinez who swore he was from Laredo, Texas and probably actually hailed from well south of there. Regardless of nationality, Martinez was snake quick as he plucked a 57mm shell out of the rack at the rear of the turret and slammed it into the breech of the six-pounder cannon. One of the privileges of command was picking the best from the replacement pool as the Great War and conscription continued the yearly doubling or tripling the Army had undergone since the plunge into Mexico in 1913. And the—unwritten—policy was to accept Mexican volunteers and provide identity papers to regularize them. He’d noticed Martinez that spring when the first tanks reached them, and he needed to expand the three-man crew of his personal Lynx to five.

  Desmond up in the bow geared down and then put the tank into neutral, and Roosevelt jammed his good hand against the front of the cupola as the massive weight surged forward and back and then settled still on its treads. The sheer inertia of these beasts required care.

  The British had been working on tanks, too, when London was destroyed on October 6th, though they’d gotten no further than prototypes: Their landships had been pushed by the head of the Navy, of all things, a man called Churchill who’d fallen from office, gone out as a battalion commander and met a shell almost immediately, which had taken the steam out of it. The two projects even had the same cover story as armored water-tanks, hence the name.

  Roosevelt had seen the plans for theirs. There were advantages to the fact that his father was President, and that General Wood, the Chief of the General Staff, was a longstanding friend of the family and honorary uncle. Helped along by the fact that Roosevelt Jr. had won the Medal of Honor during the Mexican Intervention in a way even his father’s enemies admitted was fully justified, though they tended to attribute it to both father and son being bloodthirsty maniacs.

  Which is just what you’d expect of hysterical poltroons like William Jennings Bryan and Woodrow Wilson.

  The British experimental vehicles were huge rhomboidal monsters with the guns in sponsons on the side of an absurdly high hull rather than a turret and no suspension between track and hull at all—possibly because their top speed was about four miles an hour, as opposed to twenty for the Lobo. The American version had tracks running on three two-wheel bogies on each side cushioned by massive springs. It wasn’t a soft ride, but it was much better than nothing at keeping you from being battered to death.

  “Up! Up!” Martinez shouted as the breechblock clanged shut: which meant loaded and ready.

  “Target machine gun; ten o’clock, range six hundred, McGregor,” Roosevelt said to the gunner. “In that basement window.”

  “Got it, Colonel,” the gunner said, spinning the traversing wheel; they’d been together since ‘13.

  Including that monumental screwup in Durango. By God, just surviving that was worth a medal! Turning it around…I should have gotten promoted to God, j.g., not just handed the Medal of Honor and a major’s bars!

  The turret moved with a whir and clack of manually-driven gears meshing—there was talk of an electric or hydraulic motor, but everything was short and time most of all. McGregor’s foot flicked up the guard-bar with a clang and touched the firing pedal.

  “On target!”

  “Fire!” Roosevelt barked.

  One of the things I like about armored cars…and tanks…is that you get to fight personally even if you’re a commander…and you’re not being irresponsible.

  Crack on the last syllable of the order, and the six-pounder cannon recoiled like the piston in an engine, just missing the loader as he bent and ducked in drilled reflex.

  “Hit! Hit!” McGregor said.

  The twenty-six tons of the tank rocked back on its suspension slightly—that was pure
Newton, since the shell moved at eighteen hundred feet per second. There was a backflash from the basement window as it exploded within…then a bigger one, with sparks flying out at high speed and a crackling like fireworks on the 4th of July. The noise of the secondary explosions was audible even through the armor and engine-growl. Someone had left a can of belted machine-gun ammunition where they shouldn’t, or maybe a crate of grenades.

  Or both. Probably both.

  Seconds later smoke began drifting up—evidently there was something in there still ready to burn, too.

  Then figures in feldgrau and coal-scuttle helmets broke free of the re-burning ruined farmhouse. One had a Lewis gun in his arms, and several of the others had Thompsons, unmistakable with the drum magazine; all of them had stick-grenades thrust through loops on their webbing and they were moving in a quick zig-zagging sprint towards a location picked in advance.

  Those boys have been to school.

  Roosevelt didn’t need to say anything; his crew had been ready for survivors to break cover rather than choke or fry.

  McGregor cut loose with the coaxial machine-gun, a .50 Browning, and the bow-gunner—an Oklahoman named Albert Drowning Bear—was an artist with the .30 in a ball-mount in front of him. He claimed his name also meant “Chief,” which was what everyone called him. He was also a wireless radio enthusiast, which helped since unlike most, this commander’s vehicle had a two-way set as of June 15th and he doubled as its operator.

  Tracers stabbed at the Germans and dirt spurted up all around them. Several fell, limp or thrashing. Roosevelt felt a cold satisfaction. Germany had attacked America first, and without warning, back at the beginning of October.

  Though granted, we were obviously getting ready to intervene, Theodore thought. With the Mexican Intervention’s demands winding down as the Protectorate turned peaceful, the Army and Navy had both been newly enormous and thoroughly prepared. Even more ominous from the German perspective, the Army had begun to add multiple divisions per month as universal service took hold.

  Only inspired work by the US secret services had kept the V-gas strike from killing millions of Americans too. Despite warning and frantic evacuation, over a thousand military and civilians had died in Savannah, which was the only port where the U-boat had survived long enough to surface and launch.

  So Germans in general had it coming…

  The survivors went to ground in an outbuilding and shot back, showing more balls than brains—or just less experience with tanks. A Lewis gun was nearly as portable as a rifle; both sides built their squads around them now.

  Dad made our Army adopt the Lewis back in ‘13, he thought.

  The innovative, scientifically-inclined President had had to fire the chief of the Ordnance Department, a reactionary fossil named Crozier, to do it.

  Then the Kaiser made the German Army adopt it when he saw that newsreel film of Dad shooting a Lewis from the hip in ‘13…which was just so absolutely like him, and the Kaiser. Then in ‘14 they thought up the quick-change barrel, and we adopted that. Then Thompson came up with his gun, and God, wasn’t that useful in Mexico…so the Germans copied that in 9mm last year, and found it was even more useful for trench fighting. Everyone copies everything these days; isn’t Progress grand?

  “Driver, forward to that stone wall two hundred yards northwest. Loader, HE.”

  Clang again, as the loader worked the lever of the breech and the shell sprang out to clatter with others at the bottom of the turret basket. A fresh wave of sharp-smelling gasses from nitro powder joined the staler previous residues, to a chorus of coughs; that was why you delayed opening the breech after a shot if you could.

  Roosevelt kept a mental list of suggestions and wrote it down most evenings unless he was fighting for his life; some way of keeping fumes out of the turret went on it now. It had been bad enough with the breeches of a machine-gun and a pom-pom in with you. A real cannon bid fair to choke the crew like poison gas, especially when artillery fire made you keep the hatches closed—that hadn’t been a problem in Mexico, where the enemy started with a few guns and kept none after a couple of months.

  They halted again by the stone wall, but before he could give the order to fire heavy Stokes mortar rounds began smacking into the place he’d marked as where the German Lewis-gun team had set up, though they were bobbing and weaving between one firing position and another. The finned bombs—those were an American innovation, though Stokes was British—were nearly silent until they arrived; he couldn’t hear them at all inside the turret or even the bampf of firing.

  Then they exploded with a fast crump-crump-crump, as fast as the gunner could drop them down the tube, throwing dirt and dirty snow and rock…and probably parts of bodies and weapons…into the air.

  He looked back, and saw that another tank—this one a turretless model functioning as a mortar carrier—had come up a few hundred yards back and opened fire, showing commendable initiative. The American army thought highly of that; unfortunately, so did the other side. Two more of the same type accelerated forward as it did; those would each have a squad of dragoon infantry with Thompsons and grenades, ready to hop out over the side and mop up.

  He grinned again, the distinctive tooth-baring expression he shared with his father: it was with pride this time. The 2nd Cavalry’s motto was Toujours Prêt—Always Ready—and they were living up to it. He’d been in the 2nd since 1913 when the Mexican Intervention started, beginning as a captain and moving up to command the regiment as of this spring—and helped them live up to it.

  The radio had been clicking for a minute. As they halted, Drowning Bear spoke, “Sir. Orders from Division.”

  There was a rustle as the loader leaned forward. Glancing down, Roosevelt could just see a big brown hand—Chief was a big man, and about two-thirds Cherokee—extending backward with a page torn off his message pad. His father’s famous Rough Rider regiment had included a lot of men of Indian or part-Indian or Mexican blood. The vast volunteer influx in ‘13 had imitated that, along with much else, and Chief had been among the rush to the colors.

  Martinez handed it up to McGregor, who passed it to the commander.

  “It’s a pretty odd message, sir,” he added as the colonel read.

  It started: Orders from GHQ follow—

  Roosevelt’s eyebrows went up; that meant Expeditionary Force HQ just outside Marseilles. Regimental commanders didn’t usually get directives from that level. From the date-stamp they’d come in during the last half-hour, which meant minimal time taken on coding, something only done for urgent matters that would be over too quickly to make the enemy listening in relevant.

  “What the hell?” Roosevelt said as he took in the brief directive. “Chief, you sure of this?”

  The 1st Mechanized Division was the point of the spear, though—they’d been brought over despite the logistical problems of feeding their thousand-odd vehicles with gasoline because they could really move, four or five times the speed of a conventional infantry outfit even without counting their ability to punch through opposition. The 2nd Cavalry were the very tip of the point of the spear, and probably the only coherent American unit close enough to what seemed to be a sudden emergency to have any hope of getting there in time.

  American agents with crucial repeat crucial secret enemy device have crashed in captured German airship at your square G-7.

  He glanced at his current tactical map; Square G-7 was about six miles away, across territory under Entente control until last Monday and which nobody really controlled at present…According to the French ordnance survey this map was based on there was absolutely nothing there except a large farmhouse or small manor, some outbuildings, a road and woods and fields, the woods thickening towards the north and west.

  “All right, this is like something out of Argosy All-Story,” he muttered.

  That was the magazine that published the likes of Edgar Rice Burroughs and A.A. Merritt; at nearly thirty, Roosevelt considered himself beyond his youthful
consumption of that sort of thing. Though he had a good friend with a first-class mind only a few years younger who devoured them, interplanetary travel, lost cities, lost races, evil occult masterminds, and mad scientists with secret weapons and all.

  “On the other hand, God knows this war has been full of nasty technical surprises,” he went on.

  “Damn right, sir,” McGregor said.

  “October 6th for starters, colonel,” Drowning Bear added.

  Roosevelt read on: German air and ground forces moving to recapture material. Maximum repeat maximum priority that agents and material be recovered regardless of cost. Proceed with all speed. Air units also moving to support; recognition code in force. Impossible to overstate importance of mission.

  “Well, that’s unambiguous, at least,” he muttered.

  Do it or die trying was about what it amounted to. Experienced soldiers rarely jumped for joy when they got that sort of order from on high.

  Then he went on aloud: “Chief, acknowledge, say will carry out, then a message to the battalion commanders.”

  He looked at the map again, thinking rapidly. At least all the battalion and squadron commanders’ vehicles had wireless—much more than would be present in an ordinary infantry unit. And they would need some extra transport for whatever-it-was that had the General Staff’s knickers in such a painful twist.

  “Dispositions as follow—”

  * * *

  “Well, that’s spectacular,” Roosevelt said, lowering his binoculars.

  The gunner and loader were head-and-shoulders out of their hatches too—the cold damp air was paradise after the choking stinks inside—and were looking up as well.

  “It’s fucking awesome, sir,” McGregor said.

  Martinez whistled softly. “¡Híjole!” he said.

  Which meant roughly the same thing—everyone in this crew could speak fair Spanish, and Roosevelt was quite fluent. He didn’t swear much himself but it didn’t disturb him the way it did his father, who would walk out of a room if someone started a mildly smutty story.