Baltic Gambit: A Novel of the Vampire Earth (18 page)

The Kurians shelled some government buildings in return.

The Nova Scotians, showing tremendous courage, carried out, on one night of rain so heavy it was difficult to see more than a dozen meters, a small boat raid on the ships in the harbor, planting improvised limpet mines on the hulls. They sank three of the four destroyers—the crew was a far cry from the trained USN crews that had once operated the destroyers, and when the bombs went off they panicked and jumped overboard—and the rocket-battery ship managed to blow itself up in a spectacular explosion while firing a reprisal attack into the heart of the city.

The surviving destroyer hurried south, never to return. The garrison in town decided to give up and handed over all light and heavy weapons, and a good deal of valuable material was salvaged from the wrecks of the destroyers and the rocket ship.

The third “battle” took place a year later, when long-range planes bombed the harbor, mostly ineffectively, over a course of weeks. The Nova Scotians had nothing to fight aircraft with other than a few old cannons. They noted that every raid consisted of fewer aircraft. The Kurians were losing some due to mechanical failure and not a few defections with each wave, and while there was a good deal of loss of life on the ground, the Kurians finally decided that Halifax could be left on its own.

Which may have been a mistake. Over the decades, the Free Canadians built up a small but powerful Coast Guard, mostly small boats that waged seagoing guerilla warfare against the Kurian Order from
the Maine and Massachusetts coasts to the Great Lakes. The Kurians produced a few seagoing surprises of their own, including amphibian Grogs, which Valentine identified as “Big Mouths,” having had some experience with them on the Great Lakes and in the Pacific Northwest. Big Mouths could be trained to be adept at the sort of raids that had sunk the three destroyers at the Second Battle of Halifax. The Free Canadians now offered a bounty on Big Mouth heads, and there were a few tough crews who maintained a very nice, but sometimes short-lived, lifestyle as Grog hunters on the bounty system.

“Big Mouths are vicious bastards. Anyone who goes after them deserves their money,” Valentine said. “If you can find the bases and get their trainers, they’ll cause just as much trouble for the Kurians.” Valentine told a few stories of his own experiences with them in the Pacific Northwest. Some of them Duvalier hadn’t heard in full before.

“Maybe on your return trip, you could spend a few months as a technical adviser,” Ableyard said. “The Coast Guard would love to pick your brain.”

“We’ll see how things are going back home,” Valentine said.

He was still worried about the summer’s campaigning in Kentucky. But Duvalier couldn’t think of a way to take his mind off his worries, with nothing to do on a fishing boat rolling west. She had her own troubles—she was more and more nauseous with each mile into the open ocean.

She was seasick for a good part of the rest of the voyage and remembered very little of the first leg, save for not really caring whether the
Out for Lunch
sank or not in the rough spring seas.

According to Ableyard, the weather was “about average” for this time of year. Rolling around in the boat’s lower forward cabin like a pea in a can, she would have hated to experience a bad spell.

Just about the time she was able to digest something other than crackers it was time to say good-bye to Ableyard and his “marked boat.”

“It won’t be so bad. A new radio mast, a couple of changes to the cabin and railing and you won’t recognize her.”

They were handed off to a German fishing boat somewhere halfway between Iceland and Ireland. That in itself was a tricky process in the spring seas. The boats threw over every fender they had and swung them across in a canvas sling with a safety line looped about the chest at the end of a yardarm.

The
Schöne Anna
out of Cuxhaven was somewhat larger, but had a similar arrangement to the
Out for Lunch
. It had a false wall in two of the fish holds. The Germans had engineered a better ventilation system, so fresh air could be brought in through a vent—it even had a small heater. With luck, they’d need it only for the final run into the Frisian Coast.

Obviously, the conference wasn’t taking place up one of Norway’s fjords, or they could have just turned east. Kind of a shame. Duvalier had seen pictures of the fjords while paging through old books and magazines, and the stark contrast of mountain and sea appealed to her.

No, they were heading for Germany’s North Sea coast. She’d set foot in Europe in an area not famous for much of anything she’d ever heard of. No Eiffel Tower or Amsterdam dens of iniquity for her.

Duvalier made friends with one of the crewmen, a young sandy-haired fellow who knew just enough English to offer obscene suggestions. He called her “tiny thing” and gave her his heavy wool coat—well, traded. He was interested in her duster and it was oversized enough to fit him—“
sehr wunderbar
,” he called it. The seaman’s coat was of the type Sime called a “duffel” and worked superbly in the wind and wet.

The captain’s English was somewhat better.

“Ach, ve have little trouble. Kurians don’t care about one or two. Most of those escapers, to a Kur, is better off without, yes? Keep him where he is, he so unhappy he make trouble. Maybe start resistance. So why not let the restless go?”

It was a puzzle. Duvalier didn’t care for mental house-of-mirrors games, where everywhere you turned all you saw was your own back, open and inviting to the enemy’s knife. She liked to think about what she was going to do to them, rather than what they might do to her.

Still, someone tipped off the Kurians. They knew where they were leaving from and what day, but they didn’t know that it was the
Out for Lunch
that bore them. That made a leak in the Refugee Network and its connections to the Baltic League less likely, as their passage had clearly been planned in advance.

So, a couple of gunboats had been lurking just over the horizon. Valentine had a point: the Kurian Order had plenty of advance warning of their departure.

Nothing made sense, however. It wasn’t like their presence at the conference held some key to humanity’s future. Sime was going on
the trip to tell the rest of the freeholds, in no uncertain terms, that Southern Command was taking a breather. Who needed that message squelched, and why?

Or perhaps it wasn’t the message, but the messenger. She, Valentine, and Ahn-Kha had given the Kurian Order plenty of reasons to wish them dead—perhaps Ahn-Kha most of all, since the Coal Country, where Ahn-Kha had fought with the central Appalachian guerillas, was still a mess and electricity was being rationed on the East Coast. Perhaps someone wanted Sime out of the way for reasons of high politics. She idly wished she’d read the newspapers that irregularly arrived by mail at Fort Seng.

Of course, for all she knew, Stamp might have been the target; in that case the entity that set them up had lucked out. She’d hinted that she was deep in UFR politics. If they were as cutthroat as some of the Quislings she’d known, it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility.

T
he Frisian Coast: Alessa Duvalier may have wished for fjords, but she landed on a sunny coast as flat as if it had been rolled out on a baker’s table, full of treacherously shifting sandbars and deceptive shallows. The sandbars form little islands guarding the coast, often reachable by the locals, who can wade out at low tide to some or row out through reeds to others. The sandbars are popular with clam diggers, individual fishermen who smoke their catch before taking it inland, teenagers looking for a private place to enjoy a bonfire and some beer, couples seeking some sun for a private thrill, or those who just enjoy a solitary walk next to the sea.

Smugglers also make use of the tricky waters of this coast. The sandbars are a perfect place for deep-sea craft or shore-hugging flat-bottomed barges to meet smaller boats, exchanging negotiable valuables for luxury items unavailable to everyone but top-ranking Quislings. Then there is just a good deal of everyday trade between fishermen; the English and Germans and Danes often meet in these waters to swap tea for schnapps, cider for cigarettes, and news for news, very little of which is good.

On the true shoreline, patches of the coast still serve as a resort area, with different grades of recreation. The best beachfront and most picturesque towns tend to be frequented by
Mitteleuropean
Quislings and
their entourages escaping late summer heat. They bring enough money for there to be some of the traditional tourist-industry businesses: fine dining, boat charters, small, exclusive hotels, and of course health spa-resorts dedicated to the one common concern of the Quislings—keeping an energetic and youthful appearance.

Others further down the food chain still go to this coast, but stay at cheaper lodgings with smaller, muddier beaches, or go to campgrounds in the wilder and reclaimed areas of the coast.

There is a good deal of “reclaimed” coastline. Dredging and other shore management improvements have been ignored for decades, as the Kurians don’t see much need for intercoastal trade—the more Balkanized and isolated their subject peoples, the better. The very few birdwatchers are pleased that coastal flocks are thriving in the newly wild areas, but for others in dying, cut-off towns in the border areas, the wilder parts can mean danger.

The fishing boat made use of one of only two channels kept open to this part of the coast, running a gauntlet of broken-down sea windmills. The thin windmills gave Duvalier a bit of a chill, since from a distance in the predawn they looked like a line of crucified Grogs she’d once passed through near Kansas City, Missouri.

The
Schöne Anna
paused at a sandbar on its way back into Cuxhaven. It passed into German territorial waters with only the most cursory of searches. A pair of sailors came on board, swapped Turkish cigarettes for Scottish whiskey and a couple of Norwegian gold coins, and that was the end of the search. The Scotch was provided by the captain, the gold supplied by the Refugee Network.

The sailor who had traded coats with Duvalier gave her a little piece of knotted line fashioned into a bracelet as a souvenir. “Schöne Alessa,” he called her. Then said something that began with
Vielleicht
, which Duvalier understood meant “perhaps,” but she didn’t understand any of the words that followed.

They spent no time at all in the little seaside village; they were under orders to get inland as quickly as possible, as the coasts were more closely watched than the interior areas, which were largely peaceful under the Kurians. This was accomplished by one of the wives of a hand of the
Schöne Anna
, who bundled them into a high-sided horse-drawn wagon with potatoes, a live pig, and some chickens as camouflage. Sime’s dark skin and Valentine’s Amerind features drew a few curious glances from the Germans, but the coast was frequented by tourists, so there could be a number of explanations, including a breakdown of transportation and a ride from a friendly local.

They rode for three hours, going northwest and therefore inland. Wind-farm graveyards turned into cow pasture, and they enjoyed a picnic dinner of cheese and bread and dried fish before she handed them over to Zloty.

Zloty was a Pole who’d lived in Germany most of his life. Duvalier liked his big, sad eyes. There was something of the tragic clown in him. He was a roofer by profession and had a permanent cough from the chemicals they used, though Duvalier also noticed that he smoked frequently, dreadful hand-rolled cigarettes that had only a hint of tobacco amid all the noxious chaff. How he was involved with the Resistance he did not say and no one asked. His English was quite good.

“I am to drop you off on a stretch of road. You will be picked up before dawn. A single man must stand with this torch,” he said, handing them a flashlight. “Shine it on the old sign like you are trying to read it.”

“Who is picking us up?”

“I do not know. Better that way. They try to have it so we are at most three people, and one outside our cell. Better if we are taken, you know?”

It was cool at night this close to the sea.

He led them, by dark, through cow pastures fragrant with what you expect to find in a cow pasture.

It was slow and tiresome, skirting fields and climbing fences in single file, but apparently it was safe. A few dogs barked, but no one investigated.

“The Reapers don’t prowl around at night?” Valentine asked.

“Them? No, there are not that many, and it would be a waste of time. They wait for their blood at the hospitals and police stations. It is bad to be a vagrant in Germany. It is worse to be convicted of a crime of violence. Those sorts of troublemakers are never heard from again.”

“That’s not sufficient in the United States to keep a Kurian going. They need hundreds of lives every year.”

Their guide shrugged. “We probably have more things against the law here. Just to live fully in these times is to be a criminal.”

A mass of forest stood west of them. An old road simply disappeared into the woods—trees had broken up the pavement and grown up through the cracks; what was left of the asphalt was hidden by shadow.

Zloty inspected it closely before they moved on.

“Why the caution, then?”

“This can be a bad area. Few live here, many abandoned farms. The ones that remain are more watchful but less talkative, you know?”

“Will we be resting anytime tonight?” Sime asked, looking at the mud and cow filth on his hiking shoes.

Zloty replied, “We cannot stay at a hotel. The registrations, you know? There is a farmhouse; the farmer is friendly. We can stay above the cows and be cozy. Sorry to take you across the cow paths, but we are sure to be questioned if police see us on the road.”

Later, when reflecting on it, Duvalier thought the ambush was like something out of
Robin Hood
. Dozens of young men dropped out of the trees in front of them, and a few behind. Some hopped over the wall they had been paralleling as they crossed the field.

They were mostly lanky teenage boys with a few young men. Duvalier thought she spotted a flash of hair and earring that might indicate a female, but you never knew.

It was a good-sized gang, certainly more than twenty. They wore a mix of cast-off military gear, fancy dress (one character sporting a monocle wore a battered silk hat with erotic postcards shoved into the band, making him look like a cross between the Mad Hatter and a doorman for a classier strip joint), peacoats and wool knit hats, and trench coats. One thing all had in common was scarves, mostly long, wound several times around the neck, giving their heads a turtlelike appearance. Their hair was either messily hanging all about the face or tied back in a rough braid. Nobody went for the skinhead look. Maybe it was out of style.

They formed two small bands, one in front on the cow path and one behind. Now that she was alerted, Duvalier’s ears picked up what were probably a few more of them creeping along the wall and moving through that deeply black forest to the east.

She’d been right about the girls. There were a few too-young-to-be-travelling-with-this-crowd girls with them. Duvalier thought they should have been at the dinner table doing their math homework at this time, not casting about the overgrown countryside looking for trouble.

“Is this the neighborhood watch?” Sime asked.

“We call them ‘the Black Youth,’” their guide said in a low voice, talking toward the ground and spitting out the words quickly. “They live rough, hiding from the labor conscription and civic indoctrination. Just ignore them. If they want something, let them have it. A jacket or a timepiece is not worth your life, you know?”

Top Hat gabbled something, and Zloty nodded and responded, holding out his hands as they talked as if to caution him against coming any closer.

“Stay still,” Zloty said. “He says we came too close to his forest. They wish an accommodation.”

They look thin
, Duvalier thought. Of course, they were mostly teenagers. Teenagers could thrive on about anything, and tended to be lean.

She hoped it wouldn’t come to fighting. It would be like killing the Lost Boys from
Peter Pan
.

Top Hat walked up and down the line of “prisoners.” He was careful to stay out of Ahn-Kha’s reach—not knowing, of course, that she’d seen Ahn-Kha leap eight feet from a relaxed crouch like the
one he was currently maintaining. Top Hat would have his head messily popped off like a shaken soda bottle being opened.

He paused in front of her and openly looked her body up and down.

Why was I born a woman?

Top Hat reached out and groped her through leather gloves. First he tried a breast. That must have disappointed him, because he switched from overhand to underhand and shoved it underneath the front of her jacket and between her legs.

“Is that all?” she asked. “Kid, I’ve been fingered by men with artificial arms that did a better job.”

He didn’t understand the English, but he took the tone as a challenge. He pulled up his hand, stuck the middle finger of his glove between his teeth, pulled it off, leaving the glove hanging there giving her the finger, and wormed his hand into her waistband.

A swirl of motion to the right caught her eye.

“Enough of that,” Valentine said. He’d drawn his old .45, the backup pistol he carried everywhere, and now held it leveled at Top Hat boy’s head. “Let’s not get piggy.” His line of fire was well clear of her, but not the rest of the gang, and a few of them shifted.

The Black Youth produced weapons of their own. Mostly they were edged weapons, and a couple of short, sharp fishing gaffs that were probably more threatening-looking in theory than practice. But one boy had a double-barreled shotgun with a few inches sawn off the end that could take out half their party if it had buckshot in it.

Most of them were eyeing Ahn-Kha. And keeping out of his reach. So they had a certain amount of street smarts.

“Translate for me,” Sime said to their guide.

“Let’s all settle down,” Sime said, stepping forward and holding his arms out in each direction, one toward Valentine and the other toward the boy with the shotgun. He gave the translator time to catch up. “If anyone shoots, there’ll be bodies in somebody’s cow pasture. The authorities can’t ignore that. They’ll call out soldiers to sweep the woods. No matter how good your hideout is, they’ll find it.

“I have here two gold coins. Maybe I have more, but you’d have to kill all of us to get them, and we have powerful friends. I’m willing to pay to stay the night in this area; that’s one coin. Your silence has a price, too. That’s the second coin. So, what is it going to be? An exchange of gold, or an exchange of lead and blood?”

She was tired of the hand gripping at her pants. She briefly considered using her claws, but instead reached her own hand across, and found the trouser leg with his testicles. She pressed hard and he gave a little yelp and what she recognized was a German profanity. What a fool. Even a backcountry cop in Kansas knew to wear a cup in case of any rough stuff.

“Best take the offer,” Duvalier advised. “Unless you want to be a featured singer with your Youth Vanguard Boys Choir.”