Horst was crouched across from her like a great cat in the darkness, deadly and experienced and quick, and she could feel his senses combing through the night. She’d have only a few seconds alone with him anyway, and by then . . .
The skinny executive officer came up next, right on her heels, swinging neatly out of the top of the tube and into another of the rubber boats. His voice directed the others as they emerged, calling the crewmen’s names and directions. Whatever you might say about the U-150’s crew, they were sailors who knew their business on or under the water.
The lights of Boston glittered in the near distance west and north and south, even though it was well past midnight, enough to make about as much light as the gibbous moon would have if it were up. Modern cities of the electric age were bright; she’d seen that become more and more so over her own lifetime as that hard glow replaced the softer yellow flicker of gaslights, though traveling outside the United States or a few other countries was also like stepping back in time. The city silhouetted the ships at the docks; more lights there showed up those at anchor farther out waiting their turn in the busy port.
“What a set of targets, lit up like Christmas!” one of the U-boat men said. “And these aren’t German.”
“Don’t worry, we’ll take care of them all,” someone else said.
“Quiet!” Obersteuermann Göttsch said. “Silence fore and aft.”
It was chilly but not cold, around fifty degrees, though it felt colder in her damp greasy clothes. A light wind blew off the island-studded bay and the ocean behind them, and there was a slight swell that rocked the trio of boats. The South Boston harbor wasn’t far off to their left. That was where the Clann na nGael would be waiting . . .
The two technicians who’d primed the launch controller came up next to last. “Everything good, sir,” one of them said to Horst. “It’s ticking away, purring like a kitten. Tonight, the day, the night, and then in the morning . . .”
I wonder if I can shoot them first? Luz thought idly.
She brought the Thompson around and clicked off the selector-safety, moving it from S through SA to A; the slotted cocking knob on the top still had to be twisted through ninety degrees and pulled back for the weapon to be ready to fire, but that could be done very quickly.
No, shooting them would be self-indulgent. They’re not really fighting men. In fact, we want to take them alive if we can; they know more about the Breath of Loki than anyone else on the boat. Off to the local Room 101 with them, and a nice happy ending that will be. Though not for them.
Kapitänleutnant Denke was the last man up, having dogged the hatch in the roof of the crew chamber behind himself. He was even more sopping wet than the rest of them, and coughing as he emerged, too.
“Just in time,” he said. “The leaks in the tube were getting worse fast—the water was pouring down on my head like a hose when I started, and by the time I’d closed the hatch it was climbing—I had to stick my head under to finish. Dann sollten wir mal die Kuh vom Eis holen. Let’s get it done.”
The three inflatable boats were simple boxes with a bluntly pointed bow at one end, more like rafts than anything else; they had paddles secured in loops on the floors, and the sailors used them to tow the escape tube backward, so that when they cut it free the water-filled sunken snake of rubber and steel would drape over the conning tower and stern of the U-150, not over the launchers.
“Fräulein Whelan?” Horst said. “Are you properly oriented?”
It was a serious question; if you weren’t a sailor, getting turned around on the water was very easy. Ciara took a deep breath.
“Yes, Mr. McDuffy and I rowed out here half a dozen times at night. There’s the light on top of the Custom House Tower. The warehouse is—”
Her hand moved in an arc, to point nearly southward. “They’ll have been on watch for the last week, and they’ll be watching now.”
“Then you must do the honors, Fräulein,” he said politely, and handed her a heavy flashlight.
Luz moved in the darkness, laying a gentle hand on her arm for a moment. Ciara took a deep breath and began to thumb the on-off switch. It was spring-loaded on this military model, which made it easier, and she adapted seamlessly.
That’s my girl, Luz thought. Well, no, she isn’t, worse luck, but in the other meaning of the term, yes.
The sequence was longs and shorts, like Morse but not any recognizable combination. Ciara repeated it twice and waited. The moment stretched, and Luz let her focus widen. Telling distances and directions in the dark was surprisingly hard, even on familiar terrain. Then a bright yellow light began to strobe at them from the spot Ciara had pointed at.
Blink . . . blink-blink . . . blink . . . blink-blink-blink.
“Sure and that’s it!” Ciara gasped.
The light came from a little east of south; there were no ship’s riding-lights there, nor cranes operating round-the-clock as there were in other parts. It looked quiet, away from the growl that never quite stopped in a great city.
Ciara repeated her initial signal, and it was answered again.
“Unhitch the line,” Denke said. “This boat leads. Stay close.”
The three boats each had about ten occupants, with four paddlers to a side.
“Stroke . . . stroke . . . stroke . . .” Obersteuermann Göttsch called softly.
The paddles bit into the brackish, stale-smelling water, full of mud stirred up by propellers and generations of bilgewater pumped out into the harbor and garbage dumped into it. A waft came from the land as well. Coal smoke was the universal scent of an urban area. So was stale horse-piss on the streets, though not as much of that as there would have been when she was a little girl, when a prosperous city had a horse for every fifteen or twenty people, or even a few years ago. A lingering tang of automobile exhaust; not as much as there would have been in Los Angeles, but more every year everywhere. And a used smell, one that she associated with big dense populations in a confined space. After the U-boat, it was all like the citrus orchards of California in blossom.
The light blinked again twice before they reached the dock. Once they lay quiet for ten minutes, faces down and paddles still as a steam trawler passed them a few hundred yards to the south, a strong smell of mackerel and cod coming from it. The new Fish Pier—it had opened in 1914—was there, and it never really closed; the stink from it was much stronger and more rank than the trawler’s, two years’ worth of guts and scales as the contents of holds were swung ashore in the nets. The warehouses there worked three shifts, and there were canneries not far away, and the throb of ice-making plants. The old T-Wharf on the northern shore mostly handled the smaller boats these days, while the big commercial fleets were based here.
They waited until the sleepy fishermen guided their craft in for one of the late-night landings that were part of their trade, along with the stink and hard labor and danger, and in winter the spray turning to ice in their beards, frozen winds hard as the teeth of hell.
Then more paddling; the crew of the U-150 knew how to handle small boats, and they’d trained on these models specifically as part of the run-up to the mission. Luz left it to the experts and kept her gaze focused ahead. At last the dock loomed over them, huge tarry timbers enclosing the landfill and supporting the decking, all fairly new and still smelling strongly of the chemicals used to treat the wood; this whole area had been reclaimed within living memory, from the sea and the old tidal mud flats. The water was conveniently most of the way up to the top, since the tide was still making and nearly at full.
Men were there, a half dozen of them dressed in workingman’s dark rough clothing and cloth caps, and one carrying a shuttered lantern that he opened just long enough for the rubber boats to pull in. She noticed weapons there, too: sawn-off shotguns, and probably pistols and knives and blackjacks.
“A hundred thousand welcomes, but quick now,” a man’s voice
said. “Is it that Miss Ciara Whelan is with you, gentlemen? Throw the rope!”
Irish-born and raised there most of his life at least, Luz thought. Dat for that and t’row for throw. And listen to the way he treats his r’s and turns o to a, he said raawp for rope. County Cork. And a hard man, and one used to giving orders, I’d judge; not too young, but still strong.
“I am that, Mr. McDuffy,” Ciara called back, a bit of a quaver in her voice.
Luz couldn’t tell whether it was genuine, but she knew that her friend feared and hated him for deceiving her into the mission that had left her in Castle Rauenstein.
“And the German gentlemen, and a lady,” she added.
“This way!”
Luz took the time to whisper: “It’ll be soon,” in Ciara’s ear.
That would make her more tense, but it had to be chanced, and she’d just have to hope very hard that Ciara wouldn’t freeze when it started.
Everything I’ve done . . . we’ve done . . . comes down to the next few minutes. Apostar por el todo o nada. Do or die.
Hard strong hands took hers and helped her to the dock. She hopped up and pulled on the sling of the Thompson, bringing it around so she could cradle it muzzle-up in her left arm.
“Thank you,” she said, and added the same in Irish, a phrase she’d learned with a few others from her father: “Go raibh maith agat.”
“Tá fáilte romhat,” someone said.
That was an automatic you’re welcome in the same language, and a safe bet among a group of Clann na nGael stalwarts whose reverence for Irish Gaelic knew no bounds, at least in boozy song and a few rote-learned phrases. Then he caught the outline of the weapon and started convulsively.
“Jayzus, lady!”
“I’m not here to take tea with Father Callaghan, boyo,” she said.
She gave her voice a little more of the accent that her father had used when he was laying it on for effect or was a bit tiddly after a party, though not much. Elisa Carmody had first learned her English at the knee of an Irish-born grandfather, a self-made man born a peasant, though by report she’d smoothed it in later education.
“Now let’s be about it. ¡Vámonos!”
“An excellent idea,” Horst said, dropping into his accented English and then adding, “Schnell!”
The wharf had cranes, silent now, and two sets of railway tracks set into its concrete surface tram-style, with a four-story warehouse on the other side, brick-faced over a steel frame with loading bays in its side. Some of the Clann na nGael men heaved the doors open; Luz noted that they were sheet metal and boards. Others helped the German sailors pull the inflated boats out of the water; knives slashed them open with a hiss of rubber-smelling air, and they were rolled up and tied into sausage-shaped bundles. The man at the door hissed himself and waved them in. Horst and McDuffy came behind, shepherding their followers to make sure nobody was left standing outside. Anyone who’d dealt with moving groups, especially in the dark, knew how appallingly easily that could happen. Luz could see McDuffy relax a little as they entered the building and the doors swung shut behind them.
“The others?” Horst asked with a snap. “From U-148?”
“Sent on their way last night,” McDuffy said.
“Ah, excellent,” Horst said.
Luz cursed inwardly; she hadn’t expected anything else, but it was still bad news. Lights came on overhead, leaving the interior a crazy-quilt of shadow and pools of brightness. The warehouse windows had been covered on the inside with newspaper; anyone who saw it would think that the owners were being conscientious and implementing the blackout regulations ahead of time. She’d known what most of the ground-floor storage was through her nose. Bales of tanned cow hides and bales of raw wool loomed around them, both stacked up nearly to the high ceiling of this ground floor in a massive checkerboard that left just enough space for trucks or wagons to pass between.
That made it boringly ordinary, which was the best camouflage. New England still had the greatest concentration of textile mills and shoe factories in America, though plants farther south were starting to give them hard competition on the lower end of the market, and Boston was the biggest port for the raw materials. All of those factories were running on three shifts with the mobilization, sucking in the contents of places like this. Turning out uniforms and boots and belts and knapsacks by the millions, to match the rifles and machine guns and trench mortars and grenades pouring out of the region’s machine shops and foundries.
The way the goods were laid out had made it easier to use for the Clann na nGael’s purposes; they’d just taken advantage of a spot where two of the stacks had been shipped out and not yet replaced, empty space in the midst of pungent abundance. Five automobiles were parked there, all products of the Ford assembly lines at Highland Park, all suitably nondescript and battered-looking and in government military-drab paint, a color used for uniforms and vehicles and equipment that somehow managed to combine dirt-brown and sagebrush-green. Four were the long-body light truck version of the Model T with slatted board sides and a canvas top, which could haul a ton or so of freight or a dozen crammed-together men when they had bench seats like these. The military and the FBS had been buying them in bulk for years, and so had everyone else from farmers to delivery companies.
The other vehicle parked beside the row of trucks was the passenger version of the omnipresent Model T, but the special type that had only started mass production early last year; it had a shorter wheelbase, only two doors, broader tires, and a four-wheel-drive conversion. It was in the same dust-green-brown color but without branch or unit insignia. The Federal Bureau of Security used a lot dressed up that way; the Chamber did too sometimes, as double camouflage.
The Army had sprung on the first models of the nimble little vehicle with pantherish cries of joy when the inventor Livingood demonstrated them before General Wood and the divisional commanders down in the Protectorate.
Understandably, Luz thought. Por Dios, how many times did I use one myself? They climb like goats and laugh at sand and rocks and mud. Everyone loved them except the diehards who think it’s against God to ride anything qué no comer heno y caga. How I wish we’d had them from the beginning!
The General Staff had immediately leaned hard on Ford Motors to get production going on the General Utility Vehicle—GUVe for short, universally pronounced Guvvie. Police forces had bought a good many of the others, and they were popular with ranchers and people who liked to imagine themselves country gentlemen. Uncle Teddy had three.
Ford Motors had been reluctant; Henry hated anything that distracted him from driving down the price of his standard you-can-have-it-in-any-color-as-long-as-it’s-black model and was a bit of a pacifist anyway. But these days even a major business mogul knew better than to get the Party thinking he wasn’t a patriotic New Nationalist.
Especially after the example we made of Hearst, Luz thought; she’d detested the newspaper magnate anyway and thought being allowed to sulk on his ranch was too good for him. And Ford’s making plenty of money out of it anyway.
The light also showed faces. McDuffy was a man in his forties, lean but strong-looking, with a square chin and wiry black hair starting to recede into a widow’s peak, and bright blue eyes; it was a nondescript face, except for batlike ears and a few scars. Most of his followers looked like dockers, or those who did similar strong-back labor, battered and thick-muscled and tough, but he was in a stiff-collared suit and tie with a bowler hat on his head, the sort of thing a clerk or shopkeeper would wear.
He looked at Ciara and nodded; then his eyes skipped over Luz, stopped, and visibly backtracked for a second puzzled look.
“We need to get you out of town quickly,” he said to Horst. “They’re expecting the declaration of war within the next week, I hear, and the Navy is jumping about like a frog on a griddle the last few days for some reason.”
Horst nodded. “Your plan?”
“With these autos . . . and one of our men riding shotgun with those lovely Thompsons in each . . . it’ll look like an FBS squad taking prisoners off to work on some road project or the like. Those bastards don’t put their names on the side of their trucks, and the local police don’t ask them questions. There’ve been some protests about the draft, you see—people with German names, mostly, and a few of us who don’t fancy fighting to rescue the empire of the Sassenach. Section Fourteen arrests. That’s a disguise as will get you as far as . . . Poughkeepsie, didn’t you say?”
“Yes, your men can drop us off there,” Horst said, giving no further details. “I know my route past that point.”
“Good luck go with you.”
Horst nodded approval of the scheme, though most of his compatriots were baffled by the details, even if they could follow the English. Section Fourteen of the Universal National Service Act of 1916 made it a federal offense to resist or encourage others to resist the draft for any but religious reasons—Quakers and Hutterites and the like could get away with it, as long as they couched it strictly in terms of absolute religious pacifism with no political overtones, but nobody else. The precise wording, which a Chamber operative of course had to know, was:
Such persons are subject to arrest and detention in the custody of the Federal Bureau of Security; detention and trial shall be by administrative procedure on suspicion of actions prejudicial to the security of the state in time of war or apprehended war.
That in turn was a modification of the statute that had been passed several years ago when some of the usual suspects—including William Randolph Hearst—tried to organize a movement against the Intervention, the way some had in the political campaigns against the wars with Spain and the Philippine rebels, back at the beginning of the century in Uncle Teddy’s salad days at the head of the Navy and then commanding the Rough Riders.
He took an extremely dim view of giving aid and comfort to the enemy in any way, shape, or form, and he’d gotten fiercer and fiercer about it as time went by. As far as he was concerned, the politics stopped when the first bullets were fired at American soldiers, and after that the only permissible debate was over how to win most efficiently. Anything else was treason, only marginally better than shooting at the American flag and uniform yourself.
Black Chamber Page 37
