The Great Game (A Captain Gringo Western Book 10)

by Lou Cameron

  ~*~

  By midnight Captain Gringo had been in Camelia more ways than he’d thought she’d go for and he was getting nervous about Bubbles. He’d casually asked the dusky maid, during a smoking break, if she’d ever played three in a bed. Camelia had said it sounded disgusting and added that she’d scratch the eyes out of any woman who looked at her adorable Deek. He’d been afraid she was sort of old-fashioned.

  So when they heard a discreet rap on the door as they were going at it dog-style, Captain Gringo muttered, “Oboy” and withdrew to move over to the door, wondering what the hell he was going to say to Bubbles.

  But it wasn’t Bubbles. It was Gaston. Camelia gasped and snatched the covers over herself as Gaston came in. He nodded politely, and said, “Very nice. Exclusive, Dick?”

  Captain Gringo said, “Yeah. Let’s go in the other room,” while Camelia covered herself, head and all, either crying or giggling.

  In Gaston’s room, Gaston said, “That species of a Dutchman is on his way to French Guiana with our launch and the small arms, Dick. I don’t think he is out to cheat us. I told them the machine guns were not part of the deal and he left them behind, along with the 155 shells.”

  “Left them behind where?”

  “At his boathouse, of course. Did you think I would run off into the jungle to find them at that cove? It was all trés proper. I was just with his woman. Unfortunately loyal to the Dutchman but rather ugly in any case. I just missed them as they set out in our launch on their grand adventure. They even left the cases of shells stacked neatly and it must have been most tempting to take the machine guns. I told you he was an old comrade from La Legion.”

  “Yeah, yeah, so we know where we can get our hands on a brace of Maxim guns, but you let the silly bastards steam off with all the ammunition!”

  “Mais non, we have a couple of belts of ammo attached to the gun and we still have the shells, non?”

  “Great. What the fuck am I supposed to do with howitzer shells when we don’t have a howitzer?”

  “I’ve no idea. But at least the Dutchman did not steal them. His woman says he shall return in about a month, if he and his friends make it.”

  “Screw the Dutchman. I heard some shooting before.”

  “Ah, the usual political adjustments before the real fighting starts?”

  “Could be. The Brits could be moving up the river right about now. The tide’s due in just before dawn.”

  “Eh, bien, that is when I would do it, if today were the day. I noticed the old monitor out on the river had smoke rising from her funnel. The Venezuelans may know something we don’t, hein?”

  “Not that much to know. Every day they delay means a chance an American fleet will come over the north horizon and I don’t think the Brits want that to happen. Coming in with the rising sun behind them and deeper water under their keels make a lot of scary sense.”

  “In that case,” Gaston said shrugging, “what are we waiting for, Dick? There’s a smaller launch down at the Dutchman’s. His woman is trés nervous and has agreed to let us have it if we will take her with us, inland.”

  “We’re not going inland, Gaston. I was just talking to that scared little gal in the next room and ...”

  “You call that talking? I have always called it something else.”

  “Shut up. She’s a good kid and I’ve a couple of friends over at the consulate, too. We’re going to have to stop the British invasion, Gaston.”

  Gaston raised an eyebrow and said, “Let me feel your brow, my ancient mariner. You are obviously trés delirious. I am not at all certain the American Navy could stop the Royal Navy. Stopping them with a couple of machine gun bursts is too droll to consider.”

  “They’ll have more 30-30 rounds at the consulate. Wait here, I’ll say adios to Camelia and get dressed.”

  “Dick, it’s after midnight. The consulate will be closed.”

  “So we’ll wake ’em up, if they’re not on battle stations already.”

  Gaston yawned and added, “Merde, I was just looking forward to some sound sleep, too. Have you considered that since you brass-balled your way in and out of there they may have had time to check with Washington by cable, Dick?”

  “I have, now. Jesus, Gaston, what makes you such a cheerful optimist? Look at the bright side. If the Americans shoot us we won’t have to fight the British, right?”

  ~*~

  The lights were burning at the American consulate. The entrance was sand-bagged and this time the marines on sentry duty there were dressed in battle kit and challenged him. He’d have had some trouble getting by a marine sergeant, but fortunately the O.D. standing close enough to yell at was a second lieutenant and Captain Gringo was good at yelling at second lieutenants. So he promoted himself to a short colonel and bulled on through, with Gaston in tow.

  The snooty receptionist wasn’t there. He saw light coming from an open doorway and went into a conference room full of military and civilian Americans and Venezuelans, all talking, or rather, yelling at once.

  Captain Gringo shouted for order and when nobody listened to him he drew his .38 and blew a divot out of the ceiling. That did it. Everybody froze but one beefy middle-aged man, who frowned and asked, “What’s the meaning of this? Who the devil are you?”

  “I’m Lieutenant Colonel Walker, G2. Lieutenant Bronson, over there in the corner, knows me. Who the devil are you?”

  “I’m Cranshaw, U.S. Council General. Why wasn’t I informed the Army had arrived? How many troops have you brought with you, Colonel?”

  Captain Gringo pointed his chin at Gaston as he put his gun away and said, “M’sieu DuVal is it. He’s with the French, and they’re not coming either. I tried to call you from my hotel and the line was dead. I assume all the cable and telephone lines out of here have been cut?”

  “They have, goddamn it,” Cranshaw said nodding. “But let’s get back to what the blazes you’re doing here!”

  “Later. Have the Brits evacuated their place down the street?”

  “How the hell should I know?”

  “Simple. You send a patrol to look. Bronson, get some scouts down there on the double. If they’ve evacuated their people after cutting the communication lines we can assume the balloon’s going up. Who’s in command of the Venezuelans around here?”

  As Bronson left the room, grinning, an older officer wearing a chest full of fruit salad on his tropic uniform, moved over to throw Captain Gringo a snappy salute and announce, “Major Hernan Moreno Valdez y Robles, Colonel Walker. What are your orders for my battalion?”

  “Battalion? That’s all you’ve got here?”

  “Si, the main forces are far to the south-east, guarding the border with British Guiana in case they invade us as everyone thinks.”

  Captain Gringo snorted and snapped, “Great. The Brits have the biggest navy on earth, so naturally they’ll foot slog through a couple of hundred miles of unmapped swamp instead of simply steaming in to occupy the main sea port and provincial capital. Where are your men posted right now, Robles?”

  “They have set up command posts around the city to control the populace, of course. We are military police, not infantry. Caracas has been warned that several rebel factions may rise to stab us in the back if the British really attack.”

  “Oboy. I don’t know how many rebel factions we have to worry about, but let’s worry about the Brits. Does anybody around here have an educated guess about enemy strength?”

  A man in U.S. Navy tropic whites raised his hand and said, “We’ve been patrolling the sea in disguised fishing craft, Colonel. They’ve had what looks like a small task force anchored on the three mile line for almost twenty-four hours, now. But there was no sign of activity at sundown. Looks like a battle cruiser, flotilla of torpedo rams, and some transports. Figuring the Lime Juicers crowd their transports more than we do, I’d say they have at least a couple of brigades of army or marines out there. You say you’re all Washington sent?”

  “There
may be more on the way. Meanwhile, what we seem to have here is a replay of the Battle of New Orleans. The other side must have figured that out by now, too. The Brits are slow learners, but they seldom repeat a mistake and they’ve had a long time to brood about how they fucked up at New Orleans in. 1814. Any armchair general can tell you they never should have landed miles from New Orleans to march through the mud, while Jackson and his irregulars got set up. They’ll probably send the transports right into town, behind a screen of rams with the big guns of the cruiser backing them up. We don’t seem to have anything worth torpedoing or ramming except that old monitor. But the rams will have four-inch deckguns to pepper us, so there goes the great idea old Jackson had with the cotton bales, even if we had some cotton bales. We can’t dig trenches. They’d turn into canals before we could take cover in them. I guess our first move should be to move the monitor downstream, fill its ballast tanks to put it on the bottom, and hope its plates hold when they fire those six-inchers.”

  Robles looked uncomfortable and when Captain Gringo paused, he sighed and said, “I regret to say my countrymen aboard the monitor are gone. They did not inform us why they were steaming inland up the Orinoco, but one gathers they do not like noise.”

  The American naval attaché started to say something nasty but Captain Gringo silenced him with a warning look and said, “Well, fair is fair and that old tub wouldn’t last long swapping shots with a modern cruiser. But we’ve still got the Venezuelan Army and this figures to be a land against sea fight anyway.”

  Lieutenant Bronson returned to announce, “The British have pulled out. They even took their light bulbs.”

  Captain Gringo wondered what else was new. He pointed at Gaston and said, “Get a work detail together and go with M’sieu DuVal, here. He’ll show you where we have some machine guns and 155 shells. I want ’em inside our lines before somebody else stumbles over them.”

  Bronson was used to taking orders from his old upper classman and left with Gaston on the double, sans comment. But another army man protested, “What good are 155 shells, Colonel? We don’t have any cannons here!”

  “I know that and you know that, but the Brits don’t know that. Have any of the guards, here, been qualified on the Maxim heavy machine gun?”

  “I don’t think so. But a lot of them have marksman and sharpshooter’s badges and a machine gun’s just a fast shooting rifle when you get right down to it, right?”

  “Wrong. Putting an unqualified man behind the breech of a machine gun is asking for wasted ammunition and a blown off face. Aiming is easy enough to learn in a day or so, but if you don’t know how to adjust the headspacing as the weapon heats up, they tend to blow up at the breech.”

  He shrugged and said, “We’ll cross that bridge when we talk to some of the enlisted men. Who’s got the situation map?”

  There was an exchange of blank looks.

  Captain Gringo manfully resisted a chance to make a crack about chocolate soldiers and explained, sweetly, “A map is a piece of paper showing the lay of the land. A situation map has one’s own positions crayoned on it in blue with the enemy positions in red. Sometimes it helps to know where everybody is, see?”

  Smitty, the draftsman, who’d earlier forged new papers for him, said, “I’ll get a large-scale map of the province, Colonel,” and ducked out.

  Captain Gringo nodded at the naval attaché and said, “We’ll put Smitty’s map on this conference table. You stand over there and be the Royal Navy and I’ll stand here and see what I can do with my blue crayon.”

  “You mean you want me to mark the positions of that task force?”

  “Why, no, I thought you might like to draw some dirty pictures for us.”

  “Let’s not get snotty, Colonel. I can map where they were at sunset, but that’s not saying where they’ll be at dawn!”

  Captain Gringo nodded, grimly, and said, “I know. We’ll mark where they were and then try to figure the best way for them to come in. They can’t run ocean-going ships up narrow channels. They can’t land troops just any old place. You figure where ships can go and I’ll figure where a smart land-fighter would want to put him men ashore. Between us, we ought to be able to set up some sort of half-ass defenses.”

  As Smitty came back in with the rolled map and a box of crayons, the Venezuelan, Robles, said, “I do not like this talk of half-ass defenses, Colonel Walker.”

  “I don’t like it, either, but that’s all Jackson had at New Orleans, so what the hell. We don’t have to stop them cold. Jackson couldn’t have done that at New Orleans if the British had been going all out and to hell with casualties. Jackson blooded a probing action good, so the red coats decided there had to be a better place to invade the Mississippi Valley. They’d have done it, too, if word hadn’t come that the war was over.”

  Council General Cranshaw nodded in sudden understanding and said, “I see your plan. It almost makes sense. It’s no secret that everyone thinks Washington is bluffing. If we can hand the invading task force a good shellacking, Whitehall may decide it’s cheaper in the long run to sit down at the bargaining table after all, eh?”

  There was a mutter of approval, mostly among the civilians around the table. The naval attaché shook his head and said, “I know the jerk-off in command offshore. Admiral Rice-Davis is going to take some convincing before he backs off! He thinks he’s a British Bulldog and I don’t see how you stop any kind of dog with a few flea bites!”

  Captain Gringo nodded and turned to Robles to say, “We’re going to have to use your men, too.”

  “But my colonel, if they do not watch the people, the people may turn against us.”

  “We’ll have to risk it. That task force is no maybe, it’s big! The handful of marines here must have extra uniforms. We’ll dress as many of your non-coms as we can like U.S. Marines. That way anybody getting cute with spyglasses should assume they’re facing a serious joint command.”

  Robles frowned and said, “I do not understand. For why would my men look more impressive led by U.S. Marines?”

  Captain Gringo tried to come up with a nicer answer, decided there wasn’t any, and said, “No offense, but we’re up against a pig-headed enemy commander with an Anglo-Saxon superiority complex. I know I can count on you and your men. But let’s face it, your gunboat crew did run away, and Latins are supposed to do that a lot. Wait! I know you and your men are willing to fight, damn it! I want the Brits to know it, too. The U.S. Marines don’t retreat and those other guys know it. They won’t expect native troops led by U.S. Marines to retreat, either, and they’ll assume they’ve had better training than usual down here.”

  Robles flushed, started to say something, and then he shrugged, saying, “I understand. But what if my men are forced to retreat, dressed as marines or not?”

  “We’ll all have to retreat, if they really come at us all out. We’ve got to convince them in the opening round that they’re getting into a more serious fight than they bargained for.” He turned away, then added, “Let’s get that map spread out and get to work, gents.”

  ~*~

  Secret Agent Greystoke was sweating despite the cool dawn breezes, as his launch tied up to the torpedo blister of H.M.S. Pandora and he was piped aboard. Trusting Sir Basil Hakim seemed about as sensible as trusting one’s canary to the cat, but The Great Game called for risk and the stakes this morning were awesome. Greystoke didn’t think of himself as a particularly brave man. As a pro he avoided taking any chances with his precious ass that duty didn’t call for. But he really thought it was a bloody shame he’d never get the V.C. for the gut wrenching ride out to the task force with nothing but Sir Basil Hakim’s word between him and a rather messy end.

  Since he’d helped in the planning, Greystoke knew Admiral Rice-Davis’ orders as well as the admiral did. So he wasn’t surprised to find the flagship still at anchor and the puffy old Welshman pacing the bridge, muttering, “What, what, what?” as smaller sleeker rams moved in, steaming dead slow for t
he pencil line of swampline on the western sky line. The transports trailed, with two rams staying by Flag as escort.

  As Greystoke joined the admiral on the bridge the older man smiled grimly and said, “You just missed a fine flap, what, what, what? Saw bloody smoke to the north. Sent a patrol boat. Perishing German freighter. Where’s this American fleet everyone’s worried about, what, what, what?”

  Greystoke consulted his pocket watch and saw he’d timed it closer than he really liked to think about. He said, “Odd you spotted a German vessel, Sir Reginald. You know, of course, that the Kaiser has offered to sit with the French and other interested parties at the conference table, if Whitehall decides to settle this peacefully.”

  “What, what, what? Interested parties? Balderdash, say I! Germans have no interest in this border dispute. Kaiser has no perishing colonies anywhere near here. French may be interested. Dutch may be interested. Bloody Germans have no business in this matter. Never have been able to understand that little Kaiser Willy. Met him at Windsor one time. Ugly, strange lad with a withered arm. One of Her Majesty’s grandchildren, and just a boy at the time. Stole toys from the other children and had a temper when he had to give ’em back, what, what, what?”

  “We know he’s a bit, uh, strange, but Germany’s on good terms with the U.S. at the moment. Cleveland says he accepts their good offices in this dispute. By the way, we’ve evacuated the delta, officially, but of course I still have agents in the field over there. As I was putting out this morning I picked up some rather alarming reports. I don’t think the Yanks are bluffing.”

  “What, what, what? Of course they’re bluffing! I have my own sources, too, you know. Naval Intelligence signals the one gunboat they had has made a run for it inland. Nothing to oppose us but a handful of those rather overrated marines of theirs.”