The Lotus Eaters (33 page)

It also tended to keep costs down.

In an abandoned four story building, once a mansion and now fallen on hard times, standing not so very far away from the Presidential Palace, a group of not quite fifty of the five hundred odd police who had remained loyal to the old regime practiced hostage rescue under the tutelage of some of General Janier's commandos. The money for the exercise, indeed for the entire training program, came from Janier's office. The commander of the group, one Moises Rocaberti, was another of the old President's nephews. In many ways, Moises was the preferred among those nephews. The sounds of firing, albeit blank firing, and of the simulators used, echoed across the pigeon infested squares of the old city.

"It's not as bad as all that, Uncle," Endara-Rocaberti said, trying his best to ignore the sounds of firing. "After all, if the . . . other . . . government seized several tons of the stuff that will just drive up the price generally. I doubt we'll lose that much, overall. Certainly the demand won't go down."

"Oh, the demand will skyrocket," the rump president agreed. "The problem is that that demand will be filled, if at all, by stockpiles already south of us, in Atzlan, the FSC and the Tauran Union. We'll get none of it and as soon as we and our friends on this end replace our stocks—and that's going to take
months
, the price will drop. Like a lead brick. No, nephew, this is disastrous."

The nephew sighed. He found himself doing that a lot lately, when in discussion with his uncle. "Maybe it's time to pull up stakes and leave, Uncle, to sell what we can and get out. Maybe we could sell our interest to Parilla, give him this corner of the republic. Surely he'd prefer a nice clean monetary arrangement to a war."

Rocaberti, senior, shook his head, dismally. "We're not the ones he's facing; the Taurans are. We could leave and he's still got a fight on his hands with them. It doesn't change Parilla's position in the slightest. So why should he pay? On the other hand, we can stay and, if he loses to the Taurans, we get our old position back."

"I spoke to some of the Taurans on Janier's staff," Endara-Rocaberti said. "You know, in relation to the little project you set me to? They're worried, badly worried."

"You didn't tell them about our plans for Parilla and Carrera, did you?" the rump president asked.

"Oh, no," Endara assured his uncle. "I just wanted to see what the general air was about their headquarters and ask maybe about being put in touch with one or another of their private military groups."

"I thought," the uncle said, "that you were going to the Santanderns for help."

"I did. I am. But they tell me they don't really have the system in place or the skills for this kind of thing. Set a bomb off in a crowded market? Sure. Kidnap an unguarded journalist or judge? Easy. But both Carrera and Parilla are
hard
targets. I thought that maybe a private contractor from the Tauran Union, coupled with some muscle from Santander, might be just the ticket."

"And?"

"And," the nephew continued, "I've got two . . . mmm . . . two specialists from a Gallic firm—one of them is actually a gringo—flying to Santander next week to link up with the Belalcázar cartel. Five or six weeks after that they'll be ready. Then we bring them into the country. I've made arrangements for that, for a place for them to stay hidden while we await an opportunity. I have my own sources to identify when such an opportunity may arise."

The ex-president nodded, gratified. "You have done well, nephew."

Endara-Rocaberti rocked his head from side to side, signifying a mix of agreement and disagreement. "I've done well enough in preparing something we probably shouldn't do, uncle. Before I give the final word to proceed, I wish you would think very seriously about the risks of what we've embarked on. And wait for Pigna and his Seventh Legion to be at Fort Cameron."

"No."

"What do you mean we should 'de-escalate'?" Janier asked of his intelligence operator, Villepin. For a change, Janier was wearing Gallic battledress rather than his blue velvet atrocity.

"I mean,
mon general
, that the Balboans are raising and equipping forces at a rate that is rapidly making them unassailable by us here. Already I am not convinced we can win. In a year? I think we cannot win. In two years? I shudder. Moreover, there is a chance, a good chance, that the disaffected legion commander I told you about may well solve our problems for us if we'll just be patient, as he is being patient."

Villepin continued, "Fact: they've recently purchased something on the order of
six hundred
jet fighters. At least that's all we know about. Are those fighters obsolete? Yes. But they're still six hundred. Worse, they're being upgraded, perhaps substantially. Fact: they've reorganized into a four—maybe five—corps force of what may be eleven divisions, or perhaps twelve, and a number of independent regiments. Are those corps and divisions full strength? No. But they
will
be. Fact, and this is in many ways the most disturbing thing of all: they are building fortifications as if
they
believe they can defeat any initial attack here and would then have to face a larger attack later. Clearly
they
think they can defeat that first attack or they wouldn't waste the money and effort they've committed to digging in."

"They're living in a dream world," Janier countered. "Along with your 'facts,' have you not noticed they are mere militia, peasant rabble, at best?"

"An arguable point, 'at best,'
mon general
. The cadre for that peasant rabble are all long service regulars, with a decent, even enviable, combat record. And that cadre recently took some of that peasant rabble into the deepest darkest jungle in the world and routed out some thousands of the guerillas that infested it. Quickly, too."

"I know all this," Janier said. "This is why our plan is to take out that cadre first, leaving the rabble leaderless. What flaw do you see in that?"

"Assuming we have to, if Pigna fails us, none, in principle," de Villepin conceded. "Which does not mean that there is not a flaw, or that the Balboans will accommodate us. Or that that task does not become more complex with each passing year.

"There is something that troubles me, though," de Villepin said, "something that goes to core principles. I think you are basing your estimate of what will happen if we can take out the leadership on what would happen in the Tauran Union."

"Accurate enough," Janier agreed.

"Well . . . back home, the bureaucrats who rule us have spent decades indoctrinating the young to obedience, accommodation, and faith in the group, in the consensus, and in following customs and mores, rather than in the prowess of the individual."

"Which gives us the obedient cannon fodder on which out military strength rests," Janier said.

"Just as a thought," de Villepin mused, "what would it mean if the young of this place are educated to place primacy on individual initiative?"

"Then they'll have build a castle on a foundation of sand," Janier said.

After all these centuries the great stone castles and their ancient guns still kept watch over the normally sleepy port and its town. It was a little less sleepy, this day, than usual as the bay was about to be witness to the most complex technological effort the legion had yet undertaken. (Indeed, it was so complex that most of the workers and all of the design staff were expatriates, mostly Volgans, on contract to the legion. It would be many years, decades even, before the native educational system was up to so high a level of technology.)

The first Meg Class submarine should have been ready two years prior. The sad fact was that it was only now that a seaworthy version was ready for trial runs and depth tests. That submarine, SdL-1,
Submarino de la Legion
1, christened the
Megalodon
, rocked gently in the sheltered harbor, tied to a bumpered pier and surrounded by some of the ex-Volgan warships and sundry merchant carriers purchased by the Legion in years past but never restored to full operating condition. Not far away from where the sub lay at anchor a construction crew was building a sub pen, while yet another crew laid a special, double tracked rail line from the factory down to the rising shelter.

One at a time those old Volgan ships were being towed to the
Isla Real
and sunk or dismantled for fixed positions or cut up locally for scrap. Some of the scrap went into fortifications, both on the island and along the south side of the Gatun River, or for ammunition production. A great many artillery and mortar shells could be made from ten or twenty-thousand tons of steel ship. Indeed, a great many—millions, in fact—
were
being made from old steel ships.

And precisely none of that steel went into the production of the
Meg.
In fact, the submarine was about ninety-four percent engineering plastic, by volume, exclusive of any water in the ballast tanks. That had been much of the problem with production of this first, test, model. Prior to the
Meg
, the largest plastic casting machine on the planet of Terra Nova had been able to cast a cylinder no more than four and a half meters in diameter.
Meg
's pressure hull was made up of cylindrical and hemispheric sections, milled, machined, and heat bonded together, of six meters in diameter. Thus, the shipyard had had to have designed and built a plastic casting apparatus from scratch. Worse, the only company that had seemed capable of doing so was in Anglia. As a practical province of the Tauran Union, deprived of its own foreign policy, Anglia had balked at providing military technology to Balboa, however much the military nature of the project had been disguised.

Ultimately, in order to get approval for the project, they'd had to declare the Meg Class to be for drug interdiction, then redesign it to have external torpedo tubes, with the torpedoes to be carried inside the tubes, in distilled water, between the pressure hull and the smooth, teardrop-shaped exterior fairing. With that, Balboa had been able to claim, "How can this thing be an offensive weapon? It doesn't even have torpedo tubes. No, no; it's for police work . . . and research." (Which was, at least for this first model, and at least for the time being, true.) This, along with some not insubstantial bribes (and the assistance of some very anti-TU Anglians), had finally secured permission for the creation and export of the casting apparatus.

The power source had been another, non-trivial, problem. Nuclear? There had been two practical possibilities, a Pebble Bed Modular Reactor or a very small nuclear reactor developed by the Hakunetsusha Corporation, in Yamato. The former, however, was too large while the latter depended on convection cooling that would have been problematic in a submarine intended to operate and maneuver much like an airplane or glider. (On the other hand, some of the Hakunetsusha reactors had been ordered for emergency power supply to the
Isla Real
and the Gatun Line. There was, obviously enough, a serious disconnect between what various government bureaucracies and treaty regimes
thought
were militarily significant technologies, and what really
were
militarily significant technologies. In fact,
everything
was militarily significant, down to and including machinery for canning food.)

Failing nuclear, the designers had had to come up with some other Air Independent Propulsion, or AIP, system. None of the Taurans, naturally enough, had wanted to sell their systems. Ultimately the choice had come down to Molten Carbonate Fuel Cells or Solid Oxide Fuel Cells. The latter had won out, primarily because the concept permitted shapes more suitable for application in a smallish—at thirty-six meters in length, within the pressure hull—submarine.

The
fact
of the prototype's existence couldn't be hidden in the long run. What Carrera and Fernandez hoped was that the
number
and capabilities of the final design could be hidden.

But,
thought Carrera, standing on the dock to wish good luck to the test crew,
if this one just disappears into the ocean there won't
be
any more to keep hidden. We couldn't afford the waste.

Two years lost,
he mourned.
Two years. There was a time, just before I broke down, I might have shot one of the engineers to inspire the rest. Now I've fenced myself around with chains to keep me from doing any such thing. That's tactically moral, I'm sure. But is it strategically immoral to possibly lose having an important weapon in time to be of use? No, matter. Even if I had shot one of them, that would still not have guaranteed that they could have completed the job any faster. And it just
might
have guaranteed we'd never have the subs. Better to be a civilized man. As much as I can be, anyway.

The seventeen sailors on the test crew, along with Miguel Quijana, the captain of the second boat, the
Orca
, still being assembled, were all graduates of the Legion's
Cazador
School. They waited expectantly in two ranks. Carrera rarely had patience for the kind of formality that suggested. He put his arms out at about shoulder height and beckoned with his fingers for the men to cluster around. They didn't need to be told a second time. They immediately broke ranks and formed a small semi-circle around their
Duque
.

Carrera looked at the first sub's captain, Chief Warrant Officer Chu. Formerly a "yacht" skipper under Project Q, which had done so much to crush the Islamic pirates of Xamar during the war against the Salafis; Chu had been hand selected by Carrera and the
classis
commander, Roderigo Fosa, for this first submarine because he was one of the most mule-headed, determined squids in the
classis
. Chu, along with thirty-three others, had spent the last year detached from the Legion and floating around the world, often literally, their roles rotating between unpaid "volunteers" to various civilian undersea research projects and "Officer Under Instruction" with three different submarines in the Volgan Navy, plus one each in the navies of Yamato and Zion. A couple of them had also spent some time understudying at the plant of the Solid Oxide Fuel Cell manufacturer, in the Federated States.