The Rods and the Axe Page 15

  Lenneberger Grosser Sand, south of Mogons,

  Sachsen, Tauran Union, Terra Nova

  There was probably no greater proof of the Noahs’ intent to create on Terra Nova a nature preserve cum animal and plant sanctuary than the Lenneberger Grosser Sand. Though there had never been, so far as could be determined, a glacial period in Terra Novan history, there had been plants on Earth, in the vicinity of the city of Mainz, which depended on the sandy environment created by the last of the glaciers. This environment, grass-covered sand dunes, basically, had been recreated here, south of what would eventually become Mogons, Sachsen, and it had been done without any glaciation at all. It was at a campground fronting this area that Khalid had set up his tent.

  The morning sun was at about forty-five degrees by the time Khalid roused himself. His sleep had been lousy, continuously interrupted by two gay guys, one apparently named “Stuart” or maybe “Slade”—it was hard to be sure, what with the slurred speech—and the other named or nicknamed “Thanas,” buggering each other in a nearby tent until all hours of the night and early morning. Then, too, it was possible there were three or four rather than two. The only line he could be sure of was, “Oh, my, that’s a big one.”

  Khalid, a Druze, was somewhat more tolerant of such activity than some. What he was not tolerant of was having his sleep interrupted. Only the fact that he had a more important mission kept the two, or four, buggerers alive. Ah, well, joke ’em if they can’t take a fuck.

  Still, it was in a foul mood that Khalid drove the few miles to the center of Mogons. He stopped at the first postal receptacle he came to, got out, and deposited the six score envelopes of the resurrected. Then he immediately got back into the rental and headed for Mauer, a university town on the River Nikros. There he simply parked and dozed, waiting for night.

  The Sachsen are efficient, thought Khalid, in their postal services as in everything else. The people in Target List One, should be getting their envelopes right about now.

  Mettmann, Sachsen, Tauran Union, Terra Nova

  Frau Lang, an older woman, heavyset, and gone to gray, opened the official-looking envelope, and read the first sentence. Immediately, she gave off an inarticulate cry and collapsed in a heap by her front door. The door was still open and the cry, if inarticulate, was still loud enough to be heard by the neighbors. If was mere minutes before the first of the neighbors arrived to investigate. By that time, the initial shock had lessened enough for her to begin to weep, to moan, and even to get out a few words.

  “My son, my son, my son, he is fallen!”

  “But how?” asked her nextdoor neighbor, Frau Muckenfuss. “The government told you he was safe and a prisoner.”

  Frau Lang drew in several deep breaths, finding in the effort a little moral strength, too.

  “They lied!” hissed the stricken mother. “My David was killed. The enemy, or the enemy of the Tauran Union, told me as much.”

  “How can you believe the enemy?” asked Frau Muckenfuss.

  “They have no reason to lie! Only our own people, the ones who brought this disaster upon us, upon me, have a reason.”

  Frau Muckenfuss took the letter from the other woman’s hands. She read until . . . “Yes, yes, it does have the ring of truth to it . . .”

  One of the other neighbors, Frau Pfannkuchen, picked up the envelope and looked inside. She drew a very official looking check from it. “I don’t know anything about the letter, but this certainly looks real enough.”

  “The letter says they were sending a death gratuity,” said Frau Muckenfuss. “I suppose it is real.”

  “I don’t care about that,” Frau Lang sniffed, “I want my son back.”

  “Maybe a mistake was made by somebody,” said Frau Pfannkuchen, consolingly.

  “If so, it was made by the idiot frogs running the Tauran Union,” said Frau Muckenfuss, who had never been enthusiastic about the Tauran presence in Balboa. “I’m calling the Tagesstern,” she added. “This kind of incompetence—no, it’s not just that; it’s also heartlessness—cannot be allowed to stand.”

  “Splash,” said Khalid, watching the demonstration on the television, over a beer, in a guesthouse west of the city of Mauer. It gave fair promise of turning violent.

  Now I can dump everything into the system.

  Tauran Defense Agency, Lumière, Gaul, Terra Nova

  “Do you think they were putting on a show?” asked Fournier. The map was laid out on the desk, between himself and Campbell.

  Jan blinked, in surprise. After so many hours of debriefing, and with the jet lag, she was nearing complete collapse. Even so, the question gave her a moment of alertness. And besides, she already had experience of the bloody Gauls torturing data to come up with the politically desired answer.

  “Show?” she asked. “What kind of show?”

  “Letting you see some heavy fortifications, to convince you that they were unconquerable?”

  She was about to snap at the gendarme, but, exhausted or not, she had to admit the Balboans had shown some ability to date with disinformation. It was a fair question. She answered it fairly, too.

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “For one thing, they were building the Parilla Line years ago. I can’t say that any of the reports got sent here, but I read them when I was at Fort Muddville. The line was fairly heavy, if not as deep—in either sense—as it might have been. The mines I saw them laying were real enough, and the care they took in arming them seemed pretty real, too.”

  “But why does it face north when we, the obvious main enemy, would be coming from the south?”

  Jan nodded. “I understand that. There was a Sachsen I spoke to, there where we were building ‘antianimal ditches,’ who thought that logistically, an attack from the south would be very difficult. He thought the Balboans thought it might be impossible. So that might explain why the fortifications face away from us.

  “Then, too . . .”

  “Yes?” prodded the Gaul.

  “Maybe they’re absurdly good at predicting events. We all know at this point they’re no slouches, but maybe they’re better than that, even.”

  “And?”

  “We want peace now, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  Sometimes extreme fatigue can induce confusion. Sometimes, though, it can induce clarity, and even insight. For the moment, at least, Campbell thought it was giving her an insight. “Well, as near as I could tell from the limited news I could see, the Zhong don’t. All those fortifications could be aimed at wearing out a Zhong invasion. That would explain the layers, wouldn’t it? First that uncrackable nut—or nearly so—of an island fortress out in the Mar Furioso. That bleeds the Zhong. Then the battle for the city. Then the Parilla Line. Then Fortress Cristobal. Even the Zhong might get sick of the butcher’s bill before they won out.”

  Fournier shook his head doubtfully. “No . . . it’s tempting, but no. I’ve had access to the views from space of the battle in Balboa. They did not predict us; they baited us. The bait was their existing military structure, the hidden hooks were the battalions of cadets they had been preparing for—well, you tell me; how long did they spend, how much effort, in advance, getting those hides for their cadets set up?”

  “Years,” Jan said.

  “And they could do that because of the bait. But predicting the loss of a Zhong carrier on a humanitarian mission? Now, that requires weapons-grade crystal balls and batteries of Ouija boards. They may very well have based their fortifications on a presumption that invasion via the Shimmering Sea was logistically impossible, as your boche thought. But they didn’t do it because of the Zhong.

  “Now look at the map and show me where you think you were digging their ‘antianimal ditch.’ ” He passed her a pointer.

  Jan’s pointer traced along the map. “Can’t be sure, you know . . . they just came along and said ‘dig from here to there’ . . . but . . . I think . . . this section, from here to . . . here . . . about here, anyway.”

&
nbsp; Fournier tapped a spot with a pencil’s point, a couple of thousand meters south of where she had indicated. “Did you see anything here?”

  “No. Why?”

  “There are some big concrete things, rounded lumps, more or less, we don’t understand there.”

  “Sorry, never saw them.”

  Karlesforst, Sachsen, Tauran Union, Terra Nova

  Herr Kunth and his wife danced across their living room floor, with an old waltz keeping time. In an instant, with a single letter, their universe had gone from despair to boundless joy. After all, their only child, not so little Hauptgefreiter Kunth, was reborn, so to speak, resurrected from the dead. The letter from the Balboans said so.

  Herr Kunth stopped the dance, took a couple of deep breaths, then released his wife with an affectionate pat. He then went to the front door and announced, at the top of his not inconsiderable lungs, “My son is alive! He’s alive, I tell you! The stinking frogs didn’t get him killed after all.”

  After making the announcement, though, Herr Kunth closed the door. The letter had a strong suggestion which, after just a moment’s thought, he decided to take. It had also said that, in the interests of not adversely affecting his finances, the Government of Balboa would delay giving the true report of Hauptgefreiter Kunth’s status until he’d had a chance to secure himself and his finances. Though they hadn’t outright said so, the Balboans had strongly implied that any financial benefits their own government had given the Kunth family might just be withdrawn.

  Going to the family computer, he dug up a gold dealer and began making arrangements to turn the tax-free three-hundred-thousand-Tauro insurance payment into gold and having that delivered to his work.

  Fuck ’em; they deserve to pay for the heartache they inflicted on myself and my wife.

  Feydeau, Gaul, Tauran Union, Terra Nova

  Monsieur Paul Hisson closed the door on his mother’s apartment. Mama had been dead for many years, now, but her corpse had stopped stinking, at least, and still provided a nice little check monthly.

  Not that he really needed Mama’s retirement for the nonce. With his wife long since disappeared and the death gratuity for his late son, killed somewhere in Balboa, Hisson was fairly flush. Still, one never knew when the money would come in handy, so in her bed Mama’s remains remained, as they would until Hisson himself passed on.

  I’d rather hoped Paul Junior would be able to collect on both Mama and myself until he was old and gray, but . . . c’est la vie. Pity, really.

  Hisson went to the front door, humming and subvocalizing a popular new song, “Fuck the filthy Tauran Union.” The mail was due in a few moments and if the yellow bicycle didn’t have Mama’s check, the papers would hear of his indignation.

  The bicycle-riding girl making the delivery was easy enough on the eyes that Monsieur Hisson wished for a moment he were twenty years younger. Still, the important thing was the check; with that he could pay for anything he might need in the way of feminine attention.

  Scanning the half-dozen envelopes delivered by the charmingly feminine cycliste, he came to one that looked semi-official.

  Hisson opened it and began to read. “Désastre!” he said, feeling mildly faint, followed by, “Catastrophe! Calamite!”

  Ah, well, he thought, after beginning to take the problem philosophically, at least young Paul will get the benefit of Mama’s corpse. She’d have wanted it that way.

  Bjorvika, Hordaland, Tauran Union, Terra Nova

  While Khalid the Assassin had become a Balboan citizen in years now long past, and while Balboa’s “military only” immigration policy had helped keep the legion topped off to strength, the numbers of former citizens of the states of the Tauran Union in the legion was not large. Moreover, of those there were, many had previous military training that made them more valuable in Balboa than they would have been supporting Balboa in their own countries. Still, there had been some who could have been used. It was Fernandez, himself, who had nixed that idea. “They’ll be loyal enough in defense of their new home,” he’d told Parilla and Carrera, “especially since we can watch them. We might be able to get a few into the intelligence-gathering business, that not being something that kills anyone directly. But to ask them to attack their old home, in their old home, while putting their former fellow citizens and soldiers at risk, or even killing them directly . . . I think that’s asking a little bit too much. Of anyone. I’m not sure we should trust, or even permit to enlist, anyone who wouldn’t be troubled by that.”

  Thus, direct action by former Taurans, against the Tauran Union, within the Tauran Union, was right out. Conversely, though, they had Sumeris, immigrants to various Tauran states who retained still their loyalty to their old country and its current ruler, Adnan Sada. They had some Xamaris they’d recruited directly. And, of course, there were a fair number of Volgans slurping at the legionary trough, which trough was on the TU’s western border.

  One small team of these, two Xamaris, who lived in Hordaland, and a single black Balboan who had come across the Scandza border and spoke the language, receipted for a single shipping container, delivered by truck and left at a small warehouse complex on the outskirts of Bjorvika.

  The container had been marked “glider.” It had come from Jagelonia, which had some reputation, internationally, for building and selling gliders, and, when the Hordalander customs folk had looked inside the container it had, after all, been a glider inside, albeit disassembled.

  It had taken five trips in the back of a locally purchased and registered Gothenberg 3T to get all the parts out of the container and move them to the residence of the two Xamaris, a small tree farm (not that Xamaris knew a blessed thing about tree farming). There, in the shed, they’d put together the glider, the BLS, or balloon launch system, and installed the incomplete warhead. Since the warhead had had to pass through customs, it was completely devoid of anything smelling even slightly of explosives. Instead, it had a carbon black cartridge married to a liquid oxygen cartridge. This was more than adequate to the task.

  After that, it was only a matter of waiting.

  Tauran Defense Agency, Lumière, Gaul, Terra Nova

  Fourier wasn’t alone this time, Jan was surprised to see. There was an older gentleman—his suit reeks of Burlington Lines, thought Jan—who seemed to speak French exceptionally well. Jan would have taken him for a Frog, until he turned his received pronunciation on her.

  “Major Campbell—” the old gentleman began.

  “Captain,” she interrupted.

  “Majors do not interrupt lieutenant generals, even retired ones,” he said. “Neither do they correct them on matters of fact. I said ‘major,’ and I meant ‘major,’ I’ll thank you.”

  “Yes, sir,” answered Jan. “If you insist. Sir.”

  “I do. I am, by the way, Sidney Stuart-Mansfield, of Pimlico Hex, and I know all about you.”

  “Indeed?” Jan’s head tilted to one side, a study in skepticism.

  “Oh, yes, Major. I know things you do not even know yourself.”

  “For example, sir?”

  “I know, for example, what you’re going to be doing for the next several months.”

  “And what would that be? Sir?”

  “You’re going to be resurrecting our intelligence apparatus in the Republic of Balboa,” said Stuart-Mansfield.

  “Not possible,” she answered. “The files are lost. We don’t even know—”

  “It is possible,” said Fourier. “Intelligence operations in Balboa were a Gallic purview, almost entirely. We do not operate as you do. You would have lost the ability to contact agents with the loss of the local files and handlers. We have duplicate files here. We know still who was in our network and how to contact them.”

  “You know less than you think,” Jan said. Before the Gaul could reply, she added, “You don’t know who’s still alive. You don’t know who’s been turned. You don’t really know who was a double agent from the beginning. You don’t know how m
any have been mobilized now, and cannot be reached by any practical means. You don’t know—”

  “But I know something, Major Campbell,” said Stuart-Mansfield. “I know that you’re going to take this in hand, and do your very best with it.”

  PART II

  CHAPTER TEN

  Negotiation in the classic diplomatic sense assumes parties are more anxious to agree than to disagree.

  —Dean Acheson

  Hotel Cielo Dorado, Aserri, Santa Josefina, Terra Nova

  This first plenipotentiary meeting took place at the very civilized hour of two PM, local. It was not impossible that some of the diplomats had drunk to excess the night before, hence, tactfully, the meeting was delayed until at least the worst of the hangovers might have dissipated. This also explained why the cart-mounted television in the conference room was plugged in and hooked up to a cable, but not turned on. It sat at one end, past the tables laden with coffee and rolls, cheese and jam.

  And the really frightful damned thing, thought Lourdes Carrera, is that three out of the five of us agree, the war must go on. At least, unofficially we agree. I’d be happy enough with peace, after all, it’s my son and husband at risk. But when three-fifths agree on war, even if they can’t admit it, even to each other, war there is going to be.

  Only four of those five currently sat around the traditionally doughnut-shaped table: Balboa, Xing Zhong Guo, the Federated States, and the UEPF. And just getting the FSC to sit down at the same table with the Earthers had been a frightful exercise. Three generations after the blasting of Botulph and San Fernando, the Federated States of Columbia still hated the United Earth Peace Fleet beyond words, beyond even measure.