Shadows of Annihilation

by S. M. Stirling

  Röhm gave another of those infinitely cynical grins. “And most of these here, they’re the ones their own families would . . . how do the Yankees put it . . . I have been studying that abortion of a cross between Plattdüütsch and Froggie called English and what I’m thinking of is a lot like jemanden verraten . . .”

  “Rat out,” Horst said, dropping into that language’s American version for a moment; he spoke it well, though with a noticeable accent.

  “Ja, that’s it, the ones their own families would rat out if they went home. Americans are great ones for coining a vivid phrase!”

  It was perceptive of Röhm to figure that out so quickly—he must have come across by U-boat, one of the big new cargo carriers, and paddled ashore in a rubber raft to some deserted beach not more than a couple of weeks ago, to meet locals able to help him transport and hide Nicolai’s toys and their operators.

  U-boats are so very useful. To think of all the money we wasted on battleships! Thank God we started developing them seriously a little before the war, at least. The Kaiser insisted on outdoing everything Roosevelt tried . . . and imitating a smart man’s actions is almost as good as being smart yourself.

  “And here are our Yankee friends, ready to shit on our heads like pigeons in the Englischer Garten back home,” Röhm said.

  They were talking normally; neither was the sort of man who whispered simply because he felt anxious.

  The aeroplanes were a flight of four Curtiss Falcons, two pairs flying in a loose gaggle along the front of the mountains and banking in to hug the curve. Röhm had a pair of small field glasses out, little ones the size of a palm that he held inside his hand to shield them from reflections—you could see the glint off a lens from the air.

  “Falcons,” he said, and grunted thoughtfully. “The latest model, with the three-hundred-fifty-horsepower engines. They gave us hard trouble in southern France whenever the fighting scouts couldn’t keep them off, like artillery firing over open sights from the sky when you didn’t expect them, bombing and strafing our front-line positions . . . and the artillery and the supply columns. I’m surprised to see them here away from the front lines . . . No, damn me, I’m not! Why cross the Atlantic through the wolf-packs to sit on their backsides in Corsica or North Africa, and lose more ships supplying them?”

  Horst studied the enemy aircraft through the scope. They were neat twin-engine biplanes with spatted landing gear, a bit larger than a fighting scout but not much, four Browning machine-guns built into the pointed nose, a shark’s mouth and staring eyes painted below, and two more machine-guns on a ring mount manned by the observer who sat back-to-back with the pilot. Bombs were slung under the lower wing, two large or four smaller ones on either side of the engines.

  They were close enough now that he could see the heads of their pilots and observers, encased in leather helmets and goggles and with their scarves fluttering in the slipstream, turning from side to side as they looked at the shrubs and rocks and trees below. Horst examined the loads of the war aeroplanes through the x3 sight of his rifle and swore to himself before shouting a warning in Spanish:

  “Gas bombs!”

  A volley of colorful curses came from various places of concealment, rippling farther away as the warning was passed on. Even Mexicans allowed themselves to show that they were frightened by poison gas, which you could neither see nor fight back against . . . and none of them had masks. One of the Falcons had green or yellow crosses painted on the noses of its load, four of each; the Yankees used the same color-coding as Germany, since they’d copied it along with the war gases themselves.

  Green cross meant diphosgene mixed with a little chlorine to help it spread, and it could blind you but mostly killed by destroying your lungs. Sometimes at once, sometimes you started choking and it got worse and worse, and sometimes you just abruptly dropped dead hours later; it was nearly invisible, and detectable only by a slight smell like new-mown hay; as an added bonus it quickly corroded the filters in gas masks of the sort they didn’t have.

  Yellow cross was even worse news. That meant a newer weapon called nitrogen-mustard introduced last year; it was a viciously effective invisible vesicant smelling like garlic or horseradish that burned every part of your body it touched, soaking freely through cloth, the wounds swelling into huge and agonizing liquid-filled blisters, crippling and blinding and killing like third-degree burns inside and out . . . or like being flayed alive in a tub of acid.

  Röhm and Horst had both seen them in action and Horst felt his mouth go dry. Neither was as bad as Annihilation Gas, of course. But dead was dead, and V-gas was at least quick: Green cross and yellow cross were both as painful as the worst sort of belly wound for a slow hard passage to oblivion. Or to the afterlife he no longer really believed in at times like this. Gas was feared more than other weapons because it didn’t just threaten you with death, it threatened you with death by slow torture.

  “Himmihargodzefixsaggramentallelujamilextamarschscheissglumpvarregts!” Röhm shouted, a thick Bavarian dialect mixture of blasphemy and scatology that couldn’t even be translated into standard German well, much less English.

  “What is it?” Horst said.

  “Look at the last pigdog in the arsehole chorus line of pigdog flying Yankee swine farts,” Röhm said.

  Horst swung his rifle. The four bombs under that one’s wings were just long smooth ovals, painted black on top and light gray below.

  “You know the stuff we put in Flammenwerfer?” Röhm asked rhetorically; flamethrowers were a German invention and used modified fuel oil. “Well, just lately the ingenious inventive Yankee swine took that and made it worse—gasoline thickened to jelly with soap, with powdered magnesium and aluminum so it’ll burn underwater and something that makes it stick like glue and burn you to the bone. I’ve had it dropped near me twice now and that’s twice too many.”

  “Well, damn that,” Horst said mildly, despite feeling his scrotum clench. “Of course, weapons are supposed to hurt.”

  “How philosophical, you Junker cunt!”

  “I have to tell you that I love you too, Ernst, just this once before we die,” Horst replied, and they both laughed in a harsh bark.

  The aeroplane bearing the firebombs had a personalized sigil on its side, a red fire-breathing boar’s head with horns, and under that the legend Hellpig. That made more sense now.

  It seemed to be a theme of this Schwarm, what Americans called a flight. The others had names too: Satanfist and Hellhammer and Mr. McBeelzebuddy Flies. The last one took him a moment to figure out—humor was one of the last things that came across as your command of a language got better.

  “The other two have four HE fragmentation bombs each, standard forty-kilo models,” Horst added.

  Which since aircraft bombs didn’t need thick heavy casings meant each bomb had an explosive load equivalent to four or five shells from 210-millimeter heavy howitzers.

  “Fucking joyous Christmas Day,” Röhm snarled as they waited motionless for the aircraft to sweep by; at least it wouldn’t take long, not at a hundred eighty kilometers an hour.

  “Let’s hope none of the Mexicans gets a wild hair up his ass,” he added.

  None of them did . . . but the mules were much less disciplined.

  One broke free of its handlers, probably spooked more by the smell of the fear in their sweat than by the racketing buzz of the engines as it built to a climax. The animal danced sideways away from the cliff overhang, braying and bucking and kicking in a circle, then dashing away down the slope toward the path it had climbed only a few minutes before. One of the handlers did lose his head then, running out to follow it, waving his arms and shouting, which let another break loose as well.

  “You don’t notice it!” Horst said in what was nearly a prayer. “It’s just a mule . . . it looks like a deer to you, your president loves wild animals, he’d crucify you if you machin
e-gunned a deer from the air . . . it could be running wild . . . oh, Holy Mother of God!”

  One of the Yankee aeroplanes had spotted the mules running down the narrow path; it turned away from the mountains and then up and over in a showy Immelmann turn that left it flying straight back toward the path; the others went into a circle at slightly higher altitude, waiting. It dipped lower, until it was skimming the slope, and the pilot squeezed off a burst from the forward-facing machine-guns, walking them toward the target with the forward motion of his craft.

  The sound of the short burst hammered at their ears in an overwhelming BRAAAAPPPP!

  The sharp nose of the Falcon disappeared for an instant in muzzle flash as the tracers stabbed out. The mule nearly disappeared from sight in the dust the burst raised as well. When the debris from a hundred-odd rounds blew away, it was lying shredded on the ground in a pool of blood and parts and scattered cornmeal and dried beans from ruptured sacks, and giving its last dying kick.

  The mule driver was just behind it. He survived the burst unharmed by some freak of ballistics and might have passed unnoticed if he’d simply leapt for cover or even just frozen, but in what was either hysteria or reflexive courage he brought up his rifle and began firing at the thing that had killed his animal.

  The pilot certainly noticed that, and the observer swiveled his twin weapons and gave him a half-second burst as the aircraft banked away; six or seven of the heavy high-velocity bullets hit the muleteer, tossing him aside in an instant’s jinking dance like a loose-jointed wooden doll shaken by an angry child. The second mule shied violently around the bloody corpse of its companion, then disappeared down the slope at a gallop.

  The aeroplane went by overhead looking close enough to touch, pulled up and looped again to avoid the cliffs, and soared out over the basin to the east. The others approached it; Horst brought up the rifle and saw broad gestures exchanged as they circled, ending with the flight leader waving his right arm in a circle overhead and then chopping it toward the mountainside with a striking motion, the edge of his palm forward like the blade of an ax.

  “For what we are about to receive . . .”

  “May the Lord make us truly fucking thankful,” Röhm finished.

  Horst thought of shooting—there was less point in concealment now—but warned by the muleteer’s futile gesture all the American aircraft kept higher, enough to make that a waste of ammunition, especially since he knew the latest Falcons had light armor around parts of the engines and the crew’s seats. Which didn’t prevent all twenty-odd of the guerillas from blazing hopefully away, but Horst thought a similar number of Germans would probably have done about the same thing. Once one man shot, most found joining in irresistible.

  Mr. McBeelzebuddy Flies came in first with the gas bombs and released all eight behind Horst’s position as it climbed, so that they arced out gracefully . . .

  Upslope, Horst thought suddenly. Against the cliffs above us.

  “Rennt!” he screamed: Everyone run!

  The bombs detonated with a muffled liquid thump of dispersal charges, precisely placed to flush anyone downslope out of cover. Horst jumped to his feet and just barely remembered to make his yell in Spanish this time:

  “¡Huyen! ¡Huyen! Run for it! Poison gas is heavier than air! It’ll flow down toward us like water and saturate the whole area! Certain death! Run! Run!”

  Pablo was awake enough to be cradling his injured head. He screamed in pain and surprise as Horst grabbed him again and threw him over his shoulder before dashing away down and across the slope. Röhm loped not far away, but the Mexicans were a little slower. He heard the snarl of engines again and a Falcon was heading straight for him . . .

  Hellpig swept by overhead and released its load of fire, the flame bombs tumbling by above them, turning end-over-end. Horst risked a single backward glance and saw that the target was a clump of fleeing guerillas unfortunately close behind. He wrenched his attention back to the rough ground as he stumbled and recovered with a hard twist against the uneven weight on his shoulder and flogged himself to run even faster, grunting with effort at each long stride.

  “Don’t just run, scatter!” he yelled. “Don’t give them big—”

  There was a hiss like a dragon’s coughing roar, then a rumbling thunder of flame and acrid chemical reek; the back of his neck felt as if it were on fire. Pablo shrieked like a gelded hog, and gobbets of fire did fly past, landing on brush with malignant hisses and setting it aflame. A man ran by, a pillar of moving, howling fire, and then collapsed ahead of him. Others shrieked like damned souls behind. Horst leapt heavily over the burning corpse and his trousers were only smoldering when he landed, coughing in the bitter chemical smoke underlain by a roast-pork stink.

  “—big targets!” he choked out to himself.

  Machine-guns chattered in the air, the tracer rounds stabbing down like twisting corkscrews of death as the aeroplanes circled above their foes, the observers using their twin weapons to squeeze off bursts at anything they saw moving.

  CRUMP, and a hundred-pound bomb exploded, shaking the earth under his feet.

  Fragments of hot razor-edged steel went by with a malignant whine, and the blast made him stagger on the edge of a fall that would mean death. The ground opened up ahead; he went down the side of a ravine in a half-controlled fall, and for a wonder it was narrow enough that trees along the edge above gave good cover. His mind sketched distances.

  “Just . . . a minute,” he wheezed, and halted.

  This wasn’t a pace men could keep up for long, particularly not carrying heavy burdens. He set down—dropped—Pablo and scrambled for his canteen, half-coughed and half-spat out a mouthful. Carrying that much weight at speed was something he could do, but it wasn’t easy. Some of the water came out through his nose, and he coughed and spat again to clear his mouth. The Brownings were still chattering behind him, as if the American gunners feared ammunition would be outlawed tomorrow. It was maybe a thousand meters or so behind him now, and they were thoroughly out of view. Which gave them a few precious seconds of safety, perhaps a minute or two, and the ravine would take them a kilometer or more under cover.

  Röhm was sobbing for breath not far away, fumbling to lay his StG-16 down so he could get to his own canteen and then bend over with hands on knees before he caught enough breath to speak:

  “That . . . was too much of not boring,” he managed to gasp.

  He’d moved very fast over the short distance, but only by pushing himself to ten-tenths of capacity and a little more. Röhm had the sort of build that was a knot of muscle on muscle under field conditions but would go to hard bulging fat if he had ease and plenty of food, especially when . . . if . . . he reached middle age. Horst weighed about the same as the Bavarian, between eighty and ninety kilos give or take, but his long limbs and runner’s constitution gave him the advantage here.

  But Röhm is death in a fight; don’t forget that.

  Horst choked on the second swallow, kept it down, and followed with another. Then he could talk:

  “One of them will have a wireless set,” he said. “There will be more aeroplanes like flies on dead meat, and there’s a garrison of Rangers in Jerez. They have motor trucks and the roads they’ve made down there are good, so they can get to a spot an hour’s walk from here in twenty minutes. Did I tell you how happy I was to have you show up and bring me the good news of my promotion, Röhm?”

  Before the Bavarian could reply, Pablo stirred. “Gringo pig, I kill you soon now,” he gasped, and began to vomit half-digested tortillas and beans over Horst’s boots.

  The two Germans looked at each other.

  “Hello, Major Shatterhand,” Röhm said, and they both began to howl with gasping laughter.

  Things were moving. If luck was with him, he might get a chance to deal the enemy a stinging blow . . . and while it was a very big war, the part of it people l
ike him fought was much smaller. So he might get a chance—

  I might get a chance at . . . her. He knew it was obsession talking, but he couldn’t make himself care about that. It will be her. It must be.

  FOUR

  Black Chamber Station HQ

  City of Zacatecas

  State of Zacatecas

  United States Protectorate of México

  JUNE 15TH, 1917, 1917(B)

  This is a lovely home, Station Chief Durán,” Ciara said politely.

  And sincerely, Luz thought. Though she’s been very quiet. I hope this isn’t going to be a problem.

  Ciara patted her lips with the linen napkin and put her fork down for a moment. She’d been making an occasional wordless sound of appreciation as she ate, though the assault on her delicate Irish taste buds waged by the chilies warred with a healthy appetite to bring beads of sweat to her brow and frequent sips at the tall cool glass of Carta Blanca beer that accompanied the meal.

  “And a lovely dinner.”

  The Black Chamber headquarters in Zacatecas was also the station chief’s residence, common enough in a backwater like this, or what had been a backwater, and her extremely capable cook had laid on a late working meal here in her office. There were platters of gorditas—crisp fried corn pancakes stuffed full of onions and pulled chicken or the tangy soft local cheese or chicharrón pork cracklings; asado de boda, a slow-cooked pork stew with a long-simmered sauce made from dried guajillo chilies, almonds, peanuts, raisins, cumin, cinnamon, mashed garlic, dark chocolate, and yellow onion; and pinto beans, red rice, and tortillas on the side, all scenting the air pleasantly.

  “The layout reminds me of our home in Santa Barbara,” Ciara went on.

  “The Casa de los Amantes? That’s flattery, Miss Whelan, albeit we’ve tried,” Julie Durán said.

  Luz winced slightly, as Ciara’s eyes narrowed just a bit at the reminder that Julie had been to the Casa first.