The Victorious Opposition (22 page)

Sometimes not having rank was a comfort. Sam knew that from his days as a petty officer. If you weren’t important enough to give any really important orders, you couldn’t get into really big trouble. When he was a petty officer, he would have figured a lieutenant commander had the clout to screw up in a big way. From Harrison’s point of view, though, that exalted status belonged only to the skipper.

Of course, Harrison wasn’t thinking small. He was talking about starting a war. Back in Sam’s petty-officer days, he couldn’t have imagined a decision with that much riding on it. Even though he’d clawed his way up to officer’s rank, carrying
that
much responsibility still didn’t seem real to him.

It must have to Lieutenant Commander Harrison, though. A little later, Sam saw him talking on a telephone line that led straight to the bridge. And, not too long after that, elevators started lifting aeroplanes from the hangars belowdecks. Pilots raced to the aeroplanes, some of them putting on goggles as they ran. The
Remembrance
turned into the wind, what there was of it. One after another, the aeroplanes roared off the flight deck.

Were they hunting submersibles, too? Carsten couldn’t think of anything else they might have in mind. Maybe Captain Stein thought that, if the Confederates were getting in some training, he might as well do the same thing. Or maybe the skipper just believed in wearing both suspenders and belt. In his place, Sam knew he would have.

He wished he could hang around the wireless shack and find out what the aeroplanes were seeing, but the skipper chose that moment to sound general quarters. Maybe it was a drill. Undoubtedly, most of the crew would figure it was. But maybe, too, one of the pilots had spotted something that made him jumpy. The
Remembrance
had been a nervous ship going through the Straits of Florida a few years before, and for many of the reasons also relevant today.

Sam’s general-quarters station was deep in the bowels of the ship. He sighed as he hurried down to it. He still wished he had another post besides damage control. He’d been stuck with it for years now, but that didn’t mean he liked it. He wished he could see, could be part of, what the ship was doing against its enemies. Cleaning up the mess after the guns and aeroplanes had failed to stop trouble was a lot less appealing.

It was to him, anyhow. Some people wouldn’t have done anything else. Some people fancied sauerkraut, too—no accounting for taste. Lieutenant Commander Pottinger found damage control fascinating. He probably liked sauerkraut, too, though Carsten had never asked him about that.

By now, Hiram Pottinger had had more than a year to learn the ropes around the
Remembrance
. He really led the damage-control party, which he hadn’t when he first boarded the carrier. Part of Sam chafed at losing the responsibility that had been his. The rest insisted he’d never wanted that particular responsibility in the first place.

“Do you know anything, Carsten?” Pottinger asked. “Have any idea why the captain called us to general quarters? You like to hang around on the flight deck.” By the way he said it, that was a faintly—or maybe more than faintly—reprehensible habit for a damage-control man to have. Sam told what he’d seen and heard. Pottinger frowned. “Do you think it’s the real McCoy?”

“Sir, I don’t know for sure one way or the other,” Carsten answered. “All I know is, it
could
be the McCoy.”

“Yes.” Pottinger nodded emphatically. “Of course, that’s the way we have to treat every general-quarters call—something to remember.”

He spoke now to the seamen and petty officers in the party, not to Sam.
Their
nods held varying degrees of impatience. They knew the truth of that better than he did. Most of them had served on the
Remembrance
when the war with Japan broke out. Pottinger hadn’t. As far as Sam knew, he hadn’t seen combat.

The damage-control party waited, down there in what they knew could easily become their tomb. A torpedo hit in the engine room, and the light bulbs that were the only illumination in this world of narrow steel corridors smelling of paint and oil and sweat would go out, trapping them in the darkness while, all too probably, the sea surged in around them.

Maybe my trouble is too much imagination,
Sam thought unhappily.
Damage control’s no place for somebody who sees all the things that can go wrong before they do.

But that thought had hardly crossed his mind before the all-clear sounded. As always, sighs of relief accompanied it. If they seemed more heartfelt than usual this time . . . well, they did, that was all.

Reprehensible habit or not, Sam made a beeline for the flight deck as soon as he could leave his station. He soon found out the call to general quarters had been a drill, and hadn’t sprung from sighting a submersible or anything else that could have been hostile. That was all to the good.

On steamed the
Remembrance
, into the Gulf of California. She was scrupulous about staying outside the territorial waters of both the Empire of Mexico and the Confederate States. Legally speaking, she was as much on the high seas as she would have been halfway out from San Francisco to the Sandwich Islands. Somehow, though, neither the Mexicans nor the Confederates seemed to feel that way.

A rusty gunboat flying the Mexican flag chugged out from La Paz to look her over. A Confederate coast-defense battleship, a much more serious threat, steamed into the Gulf from Guaymas. On the open sea, the
Remembrance
could easily have outrun her. Here in these narrow waters, the slow but heavily armored and armed ship had no trouble sticking close.

And, as they had in the Straits of Florida, aeroplanes flew over the
Remembrance
. Her own machines leaped into the air to warn off the intruders. The Confederacy was supposed to have no military aeroplanes, but. . . . Carsten waited for another general-quarters call. In his time as a seaman and petty officer, he’d served the carrier’s five-inch guns. These days, they fired at aeroplanes as well as aiming at targets on land and sea.

When the alarm didn’t come, Sam drifted over to the wireless shack. He let out a snort when he found out the strange aeroplanes overhead were labeled
CONFEDERATE CITRUS COMPANY
. “What’s so funny, sir?” asked a wireless operator, a youngster who hadn’t been aboard on that earlier cruise.

“That’s the same outfit that eyeballed us when we sailed between Florida and Cuba,” Carsten answered. “Do the Confederates even grow citrus over by Guaymas?”

“Damned if I know, uh, sir,” the operator said. Sam didn’t know, either. He did know the land there would have to be more fertile than the sorry, sun-baked soil of Baja California to give anybody even half a chance.

He didn’t know the Confederate Citrus Company was a smoke screen to get around the military restrictions the armistice had imposed on the CSA. He didn’t know, but he’d wondered even back in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean. Here in the Gulf of California, he went from wondering to downright suspicion.

The wireless operator said, “Sir, shall we remind the skipper the name’s the same now as it was then?”

“He’s bound to remember,” Sam said, but then, “Yes, go ahead and remind him. It can’t hurt, and it might do some good.”

He went back out to the flight deck. The aeroplanes from the Confederate Citrus Company seemed about as swift and maneuverable as the ones that had sprung into the air from the
Remembrance
’s flight deck. Why would an outfit that dealt with oranges and lemons and limes need machines like that? Carsten didn’t know, but he got more suspicious.

About twenty minutes later, the aeroplanes that had flown out from the coast of Sonora suddenly went back the way they’d come. Rumor, which flew faster than any aeroplane, said Captain Stein had warned them he would have his pilots shoot them down if they lingered.

Sam didn’t know if the rumor was true. If it was, he didn’t know if it was connected to the reminder. But, when he got the news, he said only one word: “Good.”

T
hrough the coffeehouse’s front window, Nellie Jacobs watched a tweedy man come out of the cobbler’s shop across the street. The fellow’s long, lean face bore an unhappy expression. She wasn’t surprised; the shop had gone to the dogs in the more than three years since her husband, who’d had charge of it from not long after the turn of the century, passed away.

The tweedy man crossed the street, heading her way. He almost walked in front of an auto; the horn’s angry bray pierced the plate glass. Nellie wasn’t sure the man even realized the horn had been aimed at him. Once safe on the sidewalk again, he took a notebook out of a jacket pocket, consulted it, and then headed for her door.

She brightened. Business hadn’t been brisk this morning. Business hadn’t been brisk a lot of mornings lately, or afternoons, either. The man pulled at the door when he should have pushed. Realizing his mistake, he tried again. The bell over the door rang.

“What can I get you, sir?” Nellie asked from behind the counter.

“Oh.” By the surprise in his voice, he hadn’t thought of ordering anything. Then he nodded to himself, deciding he would. “A . . . a cup of coffee, please.” He set a dime in front of Nellie. Tiny and shiny in silver, Theodore Roosevelt’s toothy grin stared up at her.

“Here you are.” She gave him the cup. “Cream and sugar right there.” She didn’t bother pointing them out to most people, but he might not have noticed without help.

“Thank you,” he said, and used them. After a sudden, pleased smile at the coffee, he asked, “Excuse me, but were you acquainted with the gentleman who used to run the cobbler’s shop across the street, Mr., uh”—he paused to check that little notebook again—“Harold Jacobs?”

“Was I
acquainted
with him?” Nellie echoed, scorn in her voice. “I should hope I was! Aren’t I the mother of his daughter?”

“Oh!” The tweedy man brightened. “Is that why he wasn’t there, then? Is he here? May I speak with him, please?”

She eyed him with even more scorn than she’d used while speaking. “Good luck, pal. I wish
I
could. He died in 1933. Who the devil are you, anyway?”

“My name is Maynard G. Ferguson, Mrs. Jacobs.” Ferguson used the title with some hesitation, as if unsure she deserved it. She gave him a dirty look. He hurried on: “I am a professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. I’m studying the way the United States gathered intelligence in Confederate-occupied Washington. Would you know anything about that?”

“I hope I would,” Nellie answered. “Haven’t I got my own Order of Remembrance, First Class, put on me by Teddy Roosevelt his own self, for the help I gave Hal during the war? What do you need to know?”

“Order of Remembrance, First Class?” Out came the notebook again. After peering into it, Maynard Ferguson said, “Then you would be . . . Nellie Semphroch?”

“Not now,” she said, as if to an idiot. “You said it yourself—I’m Nellie Jacobs.”

“Yes. Of course.” Ferguson scribbled in the little book. “Then you would know how information was smuggled out of the city and over to the U.S. lines?”

“I know pigeons were a part of it,” Nellie said. “There was a fellow named . . . Oh, what was his name? Lou Pfeiffer, that was it! A fellow named Lou Pfeiffer who used to keep them. You could ask him about the details.”

“Mr. Pfeiffer, unfortunately, is deceased. He died in. . . .” Professor Ferguson flipped through the pages of the notebook. “In 1927. In any case, I am not chiefly concerned with the pigeons. I am interested in the man to whom Mr. Jacobs—and every other man in the Washington spy ring—reported, a Mr. William Reach. Were you by any chance acquainted with
him
?”

Ice ran through Nellie. “With Bill Reach?” she said, through lips suddenly numb. “I knew him a little bit, but only a little bit.”
And you can’t prove anything else, God damn it, not now you can’t.
“Why do you want to know about him in particular?”

“Primarily because he’s such a man of mystery,” Maynard Ferguson replied. “He conducted such an important intelligence campaign throughout the occupation, then disappeared without a trace just before U.S. soldiers retook Washington, D.C. I’ve been on the trail of that mystery for more than ten years now, ever since I started doing research on this topic, and I’m still hoping to get to the bottom of it.”

Well, you won’t, not from me. You’ve just come to the end of the trail.
Nellie could have told what she knew, or at least some of it. It was safe enough now, with Hal dead. But she’d been keeping the secret so long, hugging it so tightly to herself, that letting go of it never once crossed her mind. She said, “My best guess is, he was killed in the shelling. An awful lot of people were.”

Ferguson looked disappointed. “It could be, I suppose. Somehow, though, I want to believe he had a more dramatic end, and that someone still living knows what it was. He doesn’t strike me as the type who would have gone quietly.”

A more dramatic end? He did.
Nellie still remembered the feel of the knife as she drove it into Bill Reach’s chest.
And somebody does know, sure enough. But
you
never will
.

“If you don’t know what happened to him, could you at least speak to what he was like?” the man from Pittsburgh asked.

“I didn’t like him. He wasn’t a gentleman, and he drank too much,” Nellie said, and every word of that was true. “I have no idea how he got to be a spy. He was a reporter, wasn’t he, back in the days before the war?”

“Yes, that’s correct, with the
Star-News
,” Ferguson said. “How did you know? You are the first person with whom I have spoken who did.”

“I . . . used to know him back then,” Nellie answered unwillingly. “I’ve lived in Washington all my life. I was here—I think I was five, or maybe seven—when the Confederates shelled us during the Second Mexican War.”

“It was in 1881,” Maynard Ferguson said. Maybe he was expecting her to tell him how old she’d been then, from which he could figure out exactly how old she was now. She wondered if he’d ever had anything to do with women before. After a moment, realizing she wasn’t going to do anything of the sort, he asked, “Were you . . . romantically involved with Mr. Reach?”