Lightholler got to his feet and retrieved the other pistol.
“We have to get out of here,” Morgan said. “This piece of shit,” he gestured towards Reid with a nod, “just called in some backup.”
Despite a thousand questions, Lightholler shifted the tac agent to one of the chairs while Morgan attended to Agent Malcolm.
“I’m sorry about that.” Morgan was extending an arm towards her. She waved him away angrily and rose to her feet. “Take a seat.” His gun was now trained back on her.
She dropped into one of the chairs.
Reid was making feral noises at the back of his throat while the tac moaned a low keening lament. Blood pooled on the dirty floor. Morgan tugged the bandages away from Reid’s mouth.
Reid tried to spit.
“Who’s coming?” Morgan asked.
“Girl scouts.” Reid’s saliva was more formed, it splattered against Morgan’s shoes.
Morgan turned. “Any ideas, Captain?”
Lightholler stared back wordlessly.
Morgan’s eyes narrowed. He looked over at Malcolm, who now sat with her hands under her thighs, rocking gently. “She can get us airborne.”
“Don’t you do a fucking thing for them,” Reid said through gritted teeth.
Morgan advanced on him with the back of his hand raised. He turned to Malcolm, as if seeking her approval. She looked away. He dropped his hand and replaced the crude gag. He reached for the phone and ripped it from its socket. He grabbed the back of the tac agent’s chair and pushed it up against Reid’s. He tied their wrists together with the bandages and the phone cord. He examined the tac’s wound and bound the skin above it with a spare strip.
Gesturing towards Malcolm with the gun, he said, “This way, if you will, miss.”
She rose unsteadily, avoiding the wild fury of Reid’s eyes. Lightholler took her arm and this time she didn’t resist. They followed Morgan out of the interrogation room.
IX
The sounds registered indistinctly at first, faint and far away—the muffled slam of a door, the furtive scurry of running feet—but the gunshot’s echo rang clearly in Kennedy’s ears.
His thoughts pounded inchoate; murderous and feral, plotting impossible retributions. A part of him realised that it had been small arm’s fire, loud and abrasive, rather than the softer crack of a rifle. He felt the raw graze of his throat but couldn’t recall shouting. Only the gripped steel bars of his cell were real. Those, and the gunshot’s proclamation: no companions, no journal and no hope.
The running footsteps drew nearer, quickened, and a part of him realised that it would all be over soon.
His eyes fixed on the gun first. He only had a vague impression of the forms that stood beyond the bars. They blurred into the aspect of Lightholler and Morgan. He’d sought to save a world by snatching it from fire. He’d only served to fan the flames. Morgan’s spectre, the charred evidence of his crime, shambled to one side. He wondered where Hardas’s ghost hovered and it was all he could do not to mouth a muted apology.
“Major, are you okay?” the spectre rasped.
Time jerked forwards. The gun didn’t fire, the shapes didn’t resolve into his enemies. He stared at Morgan thickly for a moment, trying to make sense of it all.
“Joseph?” Lightholler advanced. He had a set of keys in his hand.
Kennedy stepped back from the cell door. Lightholler wore a spray of dried blood on his shirt. Morgan, scarred by older wounds, had a smear of fresh blood on his sleeve. Blood on the keys.
“We’re alright,” Lightholler said.
“Whose blood?”
“A bit of everyone’s, Joseph.”
Only then did he notice Patricia. She was standing across the room from him, watching their reunion with silent censure. She stood awkwardly, favouring her left leg. Her clothing was rumpled but there was no apparent sign of injury.
“What happened?” Kennedy asked.
“I’m not entirely sure.” Lightholler entered the cell and rummaged around, grabbing his jacket. He gave the bunks a quick inspection and said, “Let’s go.”
“What about Reid? Where’s Hardas? What’s going on?”
“It’s good to see you again, Major.” Morgan spoke softly, but swiftly. “Hardas is dead.” He held Kennedy’s gaze, didn’t shy away or blink. “Reid and another agent have been secured. Agent Malcolm says that the other tac is at the airfield with the Raptor. That’s where we’re going.”
Kennedy looked at Patricia. She remained silent.
“Reid called in backup,” Morgan added. He motioned Kennedy towards the doorway. “Backup he isn’t supposed to have.”
Patricia nodded briskly.
The details could come later. Kennedy walked out of the cell and inspected the surroundings. He took in the adjacent cell—the one Morgan had occupied—the blinded windows and the corridor that must have led down to the interrogation room.
“This is a field office,” he said.
“County Sheriff’s,” Patricia replied.
“And we’re still in Arkansas, right?”
“We’re just outside of Hot Springs,” she answered wearily.
He turned to Lightholler and said, “The journal?”
“Downstairs in the safe.” Lightholler offered a wicked smile. He rattled the keyring. “Nothing’s been touched.”
Kennedy shook his head and muttered, “Evidence Response.” He gazed at Patricia with relief. Anybody else would have turned that manuscript inside out by now.
He followed the others towards an exit that had been obscured from view.
Morgan was alive. They had the journal. They had a plane.
Nothing was impossible just because it was improbable.
X
April 28, 2012
CSS Patton
Webster stood at an unfiltered view port. At sixty thousand feet, dawn was a swift transition. Cloudscape flashed pink at the world’s edge and moments later day was upon him.
The stratolite’s Eye pulsed with activity. Intel techs pored over the latest maps. Meteorologists jostled with navigators for the scopes that ringed the glass-walled sphere. Surveillance officers peered at the various monitors and compared notes. Command and control.
A table had been cleared among the work stations and a young officer stood before it, propelling coloured markers back and forth across a map of the West Coast with each new intelligence he received.
Webster took meticulous note of the general conversation that flowed around him. He glanced at various screens, taking memory snaps of their contents for later analysis. A deputation from the German Expeditionary Forces was due aboard the Patton at 0900 hours. That left little time to finalise his dossier in preparation for their parley.
The fossil of a smile creased his face. He’d forgotten how good all this tasted.
Recent years had brought him an accumulation of paperwork, of other people’s projects to be ratified or vetoed. Conferences were attended and hands were shaken, but the last decent thing he’d sunk his teeth into was Camelot, and look where that had led. He put the thought aside.
Clancy had told him to kill the Kennedy angle, and amazingly enough he had been able to do just that. It was only forty-eight hours since the matter had been discussed, but apart from the exchange with Reid, he had given Kennedy scant thought. His smile broadened. All those long months of suppositions and counter schemes and all it took was an atomic detonation, a civil war and the threat of world-spanning conflict to place everything into perspective.
He put together a sketch of the latest reports. There had been delays in the relief of New York. A Canadian recon party had turned up a pair of Luftwaffe pilots thought lost in an earlier sortie. They hung from makeshift crosses in a cotton field outside of Scranton. An uprising by the surviving enclave of New York’s Japanese residents had been brutally suppressed.
British marines had arrived on the outskirts of the city to be greeted by scenes of misery and terror; lean-faced Bra
ndenburg troopers with empty eyes escorting convoys of the civilian dead out of the ruins.
German paratroops had skirmished with a detachment of Union regulars at Fredericksburg, and there had been reports of entanglements between Union and Confederate forces all along the Mason-Dixon Line. The conflict was thus far confined to firefights and artillery exchanges, but there was little hope of averting full hostilities between the two Americas.
At the southern border, a column of Mexican tanks had crossed the Rio Grande. There had been heavy fighting outside of Laredo, but no further advances had been noted. The most recent scout sweep suggested that the Mexicans were entrenching within sight of the border, and it was only with a small amount of resentment that Webster wondered if memories of Kennedy’s last campaign in Mexico had curbed their enthusiasm for a rapid advance.
At sea, the new German submersibles had exceeded all expectations, tearing through the Japanese shipping and disrupting commerce between the West Coast and the Japanese Isles. The 5th Fleet dominated the waters.
Further afield, the reports were less reliable. A widely cast net gathered more rumour and hearsay than facts. Espionage agents in India provided reasonable evidence of an insurrection in Delhi, following the Japanese encirclement of Lahore. The Japanese were apparently being welcomed as liberators as they pushed into the subcontinent.
Less convincing was the report of an entire Russian army group’s surrender following a tactical atomic blast in Kazakhstan. To Webster’s mind, it was more likely the result of a maladroit attempt to destroy supplies as the Russians fell back on their proven strategy of “scorched earth”.
He included it all in his appraisal, highlighting the information he felt could be endorsed by credible sources. He noted that offers had been made by Ryuichi to the reigning families of the Saudi Peninsula. Another fortnight of similar successes in East Russia would bring the Japanese to the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains. The Japanese were, in a vast pincer movement, closing on two-thirds of the planet’s known petroleum reserves.
He didn’t plan on saying anything at all about the German stratolite fleet.
President Clancy had told him two days ago that a flotilla of six stratolites had been observed above a Russian weather station at the polar ice cap. The most recent account, garnered from a Bureau agent aboard a Norwegian whaler off the coast of Sakhalin, placed them six hundred miles from the Hokkaido shores. They could strike at any time.
Whilst the military applications of stratolites had yet to be officially demonstrated, Webster had read reports of colonial disputes where rebellious towns and cities had mysteriously burnt to the ground under mysteriously clear skies. And he’d seen the stockpile aboard the Patton. Three ugly cylinders, snub-nosed and fin-tailed, arrayed beyond the standard ordnance of high-yield conventional explosives. They comprised fifty per cent of the Confederate atomic stockpile, and they were all at his fingertips.
If the Germans hadn’t seen fit to inform their Confederate allies of their intentions above the Japanese Home Islands, it was of no immediate concern to him. The knowledge might provide useful leverage in the months to come, though, when dealing with the victors of this war, whomever they might be.
Webster moved away from the view port. One of Clancy’s three-star generals was examining the central map. He gave Webster a cursory nod and vanished swiftly.
Yesterday, at a meeting with senior staff, the same general had chided him for offering input into the military aspects of the campaign and Webster had smiled thinly. The general had gone on to remind him that his role was merely one of intelligence rather than the formulation of strategy. Webster had taken the general outside and reminded him that screwing a fifteen-year-old schoolboy in a room of the Tucson Holiday Inn was an interesting combination of statutory rape and sodomy. The general, pale and trembling, had agreed that Webster’s point of view might well be of some value in the coming meeting with the Germans. Webster had assured him that he would leave the big decisions to the experts.
He scanned the dispositions of the Japanese forces on the central map. So much for not trying anything in the desert. The japs weren’t supposed to cross the Black Rock, the Smoke Creek or the Mojave deserts. They were supposed to come from the north—that was the projection. So what were they doing in Yuma? What were they doing in Reno? There were two divisions massed at the edge of the Demilitarised Zone, an unhealthy mix of Union regiments among them. They had to have been airlifting troops since Berlin to have mobilised so rapidly.
The Confederacy had one reinforced division dug in along the Grand Canyon. Between them and the Japanese forces were three regiments, hastily brought across from southern Texas following the Mexican encroachment; that was all.
The Germans had promised reinforcements, but the Confederacy’s western defences appeared bleak. Still, he felt certain he’d be able to wring a few extra battalions from the thinly stretched German Expeditionary Forces. And, at the end of the day, there were always the atomics.
The Eye was filling rapidly as the morning staff arrived to relieve the previous shift. Webster elbowed his way across the crowded chamber and made for the lift. It rose slowly towards the underside of the Patton’s massive hull. A throwback to gentler times, its clear walls had been designed to offer a spectacle to the newly arrived. It gave one the impression of floating upwards, past the inverted spars of antennae and the spiralling tubules of water-capture devices, into the belly of an immense creature of the air. He only half-seriously considered taking a purple.
Back in his quarters, he found himself thinking again about the map. Military strategy was hardly his strong suit, though he’d found over the past few days that his suggestions had been met with more than polite acceptance. He wondered if it might be more useful to utilise some of Kennedy’s men, after all. They were trained in sabotage and demolition work. Why ship them down to Alamogordo when they might be of more use interfering with Japanese supply lines?
He smoked a cigar. He was thinking about Kennedy again. He changed tack and, like a reformed addict, prided himself with another example of abstinence while berating the craving. He told himself he would check in with Reid after the meeting.
There was a knock at his door. A smooth-cheeked military police officer stood at attention outside the cabin.
“You’re wanted on the bridge, sir.”
Webster followed the young officer down one of the long corridors that spanned the stratolite. There seemed to be more traffic than usual for the hour. Depending on proximity, most of the transport aboard the Patton was provided by motorcar or mini-rail. Now, however, squads of crewmen and sailors were marching in both directions along the causeway. The pilots were suited up in thermals and flight jackets.
He became aware of a strange sensation in his stomach, and realised what was happening.
“Why are we climbing?”
The MP pulled up and replied, “We’ve just got report of two jap strats on a long-range scout sweep.”
They were now rapidly ascending. Fire crews moved to their stations, while scout crews mustered for launch. The fact that no alarms had been raised did not alter Webster’s preliminary assessment. The Patton was preparing for battle.
He was ushered onto the bridge and led to where Admiral Illingworth stood with his senior staff. He picked up snatches of conversation as he moved across the deck.
A pilot was examining a series of silhouettes in a large bound folder and pointing to two of the images. “That one and that one,” he said.
An observer remarked, “The Hiryu and the Soryu. They’re supposed to be over the Pacific.”
“Well, they’re here now,” the pilot replied grimly.
Nearby, a navigator and his radar techs were bent over a scope. The navigator reached for a chart and said, “See? They caught a mid-strength jet stream at forty-five thou. They don’t want to be flying any lower than that with the draught they’re carrying. If they hold to current, they can make up to one-seventy miles an hou
r and still maintain a scout swarm. We need to be at sixty-five ourselves and running silent if we want to slip their radar.”
“We need to be at seventy if we want to avoid their scouts,” one of the techs commented.
“We hit them now,” the other tech muttered, “and we go through them like shit through a goose.” He lowered his voice at Webster’s passing.
The mammoth stratolites, under their own power, could barely exceed velocities of fifty miles an hour in a calm. With a jet stream behind them, however, they could reach speeds of up to one-seventy. Any faster and structural damage became a genuine risk.
As for the scout swarm, scouts were the only aircraft that could match altitude with a stratolite. Anti-aircraft fire balked at eighteen thousand feet and surface-to-air missiles scattered at thirty-five. The latest prototype jet fighters maxed out at fifty-five, so the only thing that could touch a stratolite was one of the small gnat-like planes. Webster pictured the anti-aircraft weaponry he’d seen on his first tour of the Patton. There had also been some larger-bored weapons amongst the bristle of turrets. At the time he hadn’t really considered their implementation, but he had to wonder now what uses they might be put to in the hours to come.
Illingworth welcomed him with a gruff nod. He gave a brief update. The two Japanese strats had been sighted over the DMZ and were bearing due east. All evidence suggested that they had no knowledge of the Patton’s current position. The Germans were now aboard but the meeting would have to be delayed. He would be much obliged if the director began a pre-emptive discussion with the envoys.
Illingworth’s staff moved over to the foredeck’s large view port. The sky was filling with scouts. Some hung in the air, as if suspended by invisible wires, while others swooped past in practised ellipses that orbited the vast stratolite. The bridge’s buzz was rising to fever pitch as more of the staff assembled.
Webster made his way to the exit.
The German delegates were being debriefed on the operations deck. Webster decided to take a detour via his cabin. He was due for his eye drops and wanted to see if he had any updates on the file concerning the Japanese air fleet. He found some comfort in the fact that two jap strats over Nevada meant two less to trouble the German flotilla over the Sea of Japan. Their deployment struck him as a curious misuse of resources.
The Company of the Dead Page 42
