A casa grande this size had scores of rooms, built around several courtyards; the renovations had restored them all, but a good many were still very sparsely furnished. The one they were eventually ushered into was on the opposite end of the house from the kitchens and servants’ quarters and other utilitarian functions, of modest size and pale white; there were stacked heaps of pipe and sacks of grout a little farther on. It had an exterior window barred with iron grillework, and a niche with an archaic-looking Madonna and Child of painted wood. The single table was massive and genuinely ancient carved oak, something Cervantes or Cortés might have been comfortable sitting at . . . unless they smacked a knee on the supports beneath. There was a very faint smell of drying plaster lingering in the air.
The 32nd’s commander and his intelligence officer rose with gentlemanly courtesy from the equally massively antique leather-wood-and-brass chairs on the other side of the table, and inclined their heads. Luz nodded back; she thought she saw the younger man’s eyes skim over the three of them and then click back to Henrietta for a second or so, taking in the impact of the gown and the way it went with the contents.
That one’s about thirty. Even these days that’s young for a major, Luz thought.
“And may I introduce Major Andre Dicot? Chief of my intelligence staff and a very capable man,” Young added, as they all shook hands—with a very slight hesitation on his part, since women doing so man-fashion was still slightly advanced. “I have complete confidence in him.”
A grin. “I was going to say despite his youth, but obviously that’s not going to be a problem in this room, where I’m the Methuselah at fifty-two.”
The American military had doubled or more in size every year since Uncle Teddy’s return to power in 1912 . . . or to put it another way, it was now about twenty-five times larger than it had been in that eventful year and still rising, if not quite as fast. Added to that was the way the president and General Wood had ruthlessly purged the last overweight, aging barnacles who’d clung on since the Indian Wars in the upper ranks of the tiny, ossified force that had dragged out its days and decades in dusty forgotten frontier outposts, before the shambolic chaos of the war with Spain in the late ’90s revealed the extent of the problem.
Back then forty-year-old lieutenants had been common; nowadays, the military combed the country for talent wherever it could be found and had an even younger command structure than the Party. The chief of the General Staff was the oldest general on active duty now . . . and Leonard Wood was all of fifty-seven.
Still, thirty and a major . . . he’s either a hotshot prodigy, or has powerful patrons, or both. Probably both.
“Pleased to make your acquaintance, Executive Field Operative, Field Operative,” the young officer said; his voice had a musical cadence and undertone that said New Orleans to her, and probably raised in a French-speaking neighborhood, middle-class at least. “And to see you again, Miss Colmer.”
They sat; Henrietta had a small pad in front of her, but it was rather ostentatiously closed, with the mechanical pencil laid atop it.
“No names, no punishment drill,” Young said approvingly. “I’ve met Miss Colmer briefly before, and your station chief here assures me she has full clearance in these matters.”
Which means he appreciates she’s here to report to Julie, Luz thought. Julie and him and Ciara and I disappearing at the same time would catch too many eyes, given how many people know what Julie’s job is. Nobody notices a secretary—probably a lot of the locals think Henrietta is some sort of personal lady’s maid.
Then his eyes swept over them with a slight expression of bemusement. “Though . . . I’ve also heard of you, Executive Field Operative. After Puebla and the explosion at the enemy HQ via the Army’s rumor mill . . . Good God, but they were disorganized there when we hit them after that bomb went off . . . There was the capture of Villa . . . and more reports since last October, however heavily redacted, which I now realize were about you two ladies. You and your associate—”
He nodded to Ciara.
“—are . . . not quite what I expected, really.”
“I can understand that things might look a bit unprecedented from your side of the table, General Young,” Luz said smoothly, acknowledging that everyone on her side of it was wearing a skirt.
At the same time she made a small gesture that started with her hand pointed in his direction and then curled her fingers back toward herself, one that might have been construed as:
And the same thing from over here, for slightly different reasons.
The previously stone-faced and gimlet-eyed Major Dicot actually smiled for an instant, and Young laughed aloud.
No flies on either of them, and they’re more mentally flexible than most regulars. Good. If there’s one thing I abominate, it’s working with . . . which means working around . . . high-ranking idiots. All the more so if their stupidity is self-inflicted because they let emotion override reason, rather like an unfortunate inheritance like a clubfoot.
“Not a comparison I’d immediately think of, but I do see your point!” Young said.
Dicot murmured something like Touché under his breath, the fencing term for a hit, and Young smiled a little before he continued:
“Perhaps Susan B. Anthony would have too, or the Grimké sisters!”
Luz remembered from his dossier that he was a friend of W.E.B. Du Bois, the Negro intellectual leader and nowadays irritating but influential Party gadfly, from the days when they taught together at Wilberforce College in Ohio; unlike most, he’d be familiar with the historical links between the women’s suffrage and abolition movements.
And you certainly couldn’t go through Bryn Mawr without hearing about it! she thought.
Then, soberly, the general went on:
“Ours is a very great nation, Field Operative, and in more ways than its size and power—though thank the Lord we have that! Not perfect, no human creation is . . . and even God had to allow for a serpent in paradise . . . but very great, and in the world as it is now the last bearer of the hopes of the human race. I was born in Kentucky a year before Lincoln’s assassination. My father had to run for it even to enlist as a private soldier in that war, though Kentucky never left the Union; after peace came he had a little one-man livery stable in an Ohio town nobody outside fifty miles’ distance has ever heard of, while he learned to read and write from my mother. Yet here I sit—”
His hand turned inward for a moment as hers had, indicating himself . . . and by implication the stars on the standing collar of his dress jacket.
“—a man born a slave, born in a place where the law forbade me even to learn my letters. It is an honor beyond price for any . . .”
He stopped himself smoothly before saying any man, a hitch in the words most people wouldn’t have noticed.
“. . . any citizen to serve that great nation as we do . . . as all of us here do.”
“Agreed, General Young,” Luz said sincerely, and then: “Build your body and build your mind to build yourself; but build yourself to build America. And America can only be properly served . . . best served, served as she deserves . . . if the nation can draw on all her children, according to their ability and loyalty. We here are proof of that. Now let’s concentrate on precisely how we’re to deserve well of the Republic in this instance.”
Dicot spoke: “None of us would be here if this weren’t of a very high priority indeed; and that we were selected is rather flattering. And racking to the nerves, when you think about it . . . which it is to be presumed we all have.”
Luz nodded, absently noting that while his English was very fluent there was sometimes a trace of French in the word order and turns of phrase he used.
“Operative Whelan and I have been involved in a number of, ah, significant operations, and your division was picked as most suitable . . . out of any number sitting idle at the present,
” she said.
Both the soldiers grimaced very slightly; nobody in the Army was happy with the way the horror-gas had frozen the chessboard of the Great War. Being too weak to fight was one thing and bad enough; having plenty of force and not being able to find a way to use it added insult to injury.
“I suspect many other factors went into the decision to put the Dakota Project here: everything from geography and railroads and wind patterns to the civil governor’s record. But as you say, Major, high expectations are a curse as well as a compliment. America must have what the Project produces, and we must have it soon. The problem is that it’s just as obvious to various people on the other side, most especially Colonel Nicolai and Abteilung IIIb, so that thwarting or delaying the operation of the Dakota Project is a high priority for them.”
Young nodded. “I presume you’re not just speaking of keeping this district nailed down as we’ve been doing, or the conventional security measures around the Dakota Project.”
Luz shook her head. “No. The bandits are a spent force in terms of major operations around here, even with a few Germans possibly helping them. So in terms of raw power, we already have far more than we need. Packing yet more men around the plant and digging more machine-gun nests and putting up more checkpoints to ask people for their papers won’t increase our degree of protection and might even decrease it.”
Major Dicot gave a quick sharp nod. “Yes, exactly, Field Operative. More men would just get in each other’s way.”
Which marked him as an intelligence specialist rather than an infantryman in spirit. In Luz’s experience few combat soldiers ever thought you could use too many men in an operation, and in conventional fighting they had a point. There was a sort of brutal basic arithmetic to head-on combat where more was by definition better . . . but this was a contest in sneakiness, not weight of metal.
“Doing that sort of thing tells of a poverty of the imagination,” Dicot went on, confirming her estimate. “Or of doing things to look busy for the brass in the Iron House.”
“Fortunately General Wood and the president have a low tolerance for that type of nonsense,” Young noted, and made a curt Go on gesture to put the conversation back in Dicot’s hands.
“Our enemies here most probably will not be so obligingly stupid that they try to fight us head-on; fight us on our own terms, that is to say, when that’s been a disaster for them every time they tried it,” Dicot said.
Young made a balancing gesture. “Though you can’t always count on the other side being smart, either. I saw that in the Philippine Insurrection when I was a captain with the 9th Cavalry, on Sulu and in Mindanao and Luzon, and again here, in the first year or two, particularly in Morelos. They often did choose head-on confrontation, long after it should have been obvious to them it wouldn’t work.”
“Yes, General Young. But . . .” Luz let the word hang.
“But yes, that doesn’t matter, because if they’re that obligingly stupid the problem is self-solving with the measures already in place. We have to focus on the worst possible outcome, not the best.”
“The more so as the Germans are involved,” Luz said. “They don’t give a damn about their local dupes’ interests, short or long term, and they’ll manipulate them into doing things that are stupid from the bandits’ perspectives if it serves their purposes. Harming the Dakota Project is more than enough incentive to burn those assets to the ground.”
“Good point,” Dicot said.
Ciara leaned forward and spoke, the awkwardness she’d felt at being part of a high-society dinner party falling away as she moved into an area she was thoroughly comfortable with:
“The technical side makes our problem more difficult, General, Major, because you don’t have to apply much force to a plant like this to wreck it. Just a tap in a precise place—nothing that one man couldn’t do, if he got in and did it exactly right. As, um, our organization demonstrated in Germany last year.”
Young’s eyebrows climbed, and Luz shook her head as she said:
“Our organization in the collective sense; my colleague and I weren’t tasked with knocking out the plant in Berlin, no. We did have a chance to observe it very shortly after the fact, one of those improbable things that happen more often in covert operations than you might think—”
“Especially as I would think they’re probably kept hermetically sealed from each other,” Dicot said shrewdly. “As much as possible.”
Luz made a palm-up gesture of assent and added a slight wiggling movement of the fingers that emphasized the as possible part as she continued:
“—and we do know the field operative concerned. All the guards, barbed wire, machine-guns, and searchlights didn’t matter at all, and believe me, the Germans did not stint in those regards.”
Dicot’s dark eyes narrowed. “And the filthy stuff is so damned lingering,” he said. “I understand that’s why the Germans took so long to get their plant back in operation. Everything had to be decontaminated by men in rubber suits.”
“Or by prisoners and forced laborers,” Luz said.
Ciara nodded. “But we were lucky there; they were starting a production run when we . . . our operative . . . managed to overload the valving and then blow the catalytic chamber.”
Dicot frowned as he parsed the technicalities, but the general laughed. “So he didn’t even have to use a bomb!”
“Yes, he used the system to create the overpressure by . . . by taking control of the controls, you might say,” Ciara said. “Though I admit it sounded like a bomb at the time—we were nearly a mile away.”
Now Dicot chuckled too, a sound that perfectly expressed the emotion that Germans called Schadenfreude.
“Much easier to walk in with a knowledge of the plant’s controls than with sixty pounds of explosive in your pockets! Elegant!” the intelligence officer said. “Devilish, in fact. Worthy of . . . that organization you belong to!”
Ciara nodded, then doggedly returned to business: “V-gas doesn’t store well . . . currently the impurity levels are high even with best-practice methods . . . so that’s only done just before deployment. The damage would have been much greater if it had been further along, with more of the actual agent in the storage tanks.”
And Ciara and I would have been most certainly killed, Luz thought with a slight inner shiver.
Remembering the effort of will it had taken to drive through the base at Staaken knowing that invisible, impalpable death might be pooling around them and they’d never know until the night went darker still and their hearts and lungs simply . . . stopped . . . or every muscle in their bodies convulsed hard enough to snap their bones. They’d both seen horror-gas used on human beings while they were in enemy territory under deep cover, at a demonstration for Germany’s supreme warlords Hindenburg and Ludendorff. Ciara still had nightmares about that, sometimes, and woke crying out as the shell burst once more over the prisoners. It made the same danger for yourself unpleasantly . . . visceral.
“You can be sure our plant isn’t vulnerable to that particular form of attack,” she said as an aside.
Ciara went on: “Unfortunately, the whole process involves high temperatures, high pressures, and materials that are . . . are conventionally toxic even before the synthesis. It’s at the very edge of what’s technically possible with today’s latest methods; that’s why the Germans came up with it first, they’re ahead of us in organic chemistry . . . ahead of the world, really. They started work on it just before the war, they had the production process on a laboratory scale, and even so it took two years to industrial production and field deployment, and the process and product are still very imperfect. Our copy of their process is even more improvised because our chemical engineers had to work backward from the material we captured, guessing and taking chances along the way.
“There were . . . accidents in the process. Losses. Some of them of peo
ple it will be hard to replace,” she added gravely. “We had to . . . cut corners. We still are cutting corners, really. If it weren’t wartime, this would have taken twice as long or more.”
Young thought for a moment and spoke to Ciara.
“There are more ways of dying for the country than enemy bullets. Perhaps, Field Operative, you could give us an internal listing of the most vulnerable spots, places where a knowledgeable enemy agent could do the most damage, so that we could do more than hold a perimeter? And we’ll compare it to what the plant engineers say, of course.”
“Yes, of course, General,” Ciara said with a smile. “Though I need a convincing reason to survey the plant personally. Plans are wonderful things, but observation is even better.”
Dicot tapped thoughtfully at the table, turning his eyes up slightly in thought before saying:
“Sir, a good way to dispel the . . . ludicrous rumors . . . about the plant being dangerous would be to arrange tours. By yourself and your lady . . . the governor and his lady . . . officers of the division . . . selected civilians, such as a pair of visiting Department of Education employees . . .”
Ciara made a finger-in-the-air gesture to acknowledge the elegant solution.
“That would do nicely, Major Dicot. I’ve studied the plans in detail; what I need is to do visual checks.”
“You have an evil mind, Major; I thoroughly approve,” Young said. “And you should familiarize yourself too, of course.”
“And we must have reaction squads within the plant area, men who’ve been thoroughly briefed and drilled in responding to any alarm with no lost time,” Dicot said. “I think the reconnaissance battalion should be the unit tasked with that. Guarding the perimeter is one thing, but this requires quick thinking, keen powers of observation, and initiative. Scouts are selected for that.”
“Excellent thought, at least initially,” Young said. “Coordinate with Major Johnson of First Battalion, and get me a plan within twenty-four hours. It’ll have to be constantly updated, but we’ll have a framework to proceed from.”
Shadows of Annihilation Page 25