The wind had shifted in the last few minutes.
Distantly, the sound of the Weser’s labouring pumps carried into the room. It was a faraway roaring, thumping like persistent gunfire just over the horizon.
“Paul, stay please,” von Schaffhausen decided. He had never got to the bottom of why, exactly, Peter Cowdrey-Singh had been on the bridge of the Weser, nor when, within minutes of the opening of the battle poor Albrecht Weitzman was cut down, the Anglo-Indian had assumed command, ordering his own men – effectively up until then passengers, quasi-prisoners – to fight beside their German comrades, and fought the ship.
Had he not stepped in the Weser would probably have been sunk, or possibly captured by her assailants. It was a moot point which of the two eventualities could have had a more malign impact on Dominican-German relations.
Inevitably, the Dominicans wanted the heads of both young Kemper and of Peter Cowdrey-Singh and the other thirty-three surviving members of the crew of HMS Achilles.
“How go the repairs to the Weser?” Von Schaffhausen inquired of Leutnant Kemper.
“Slowly, Herr Minister,” the young man apologised, as if it was his fault those Dominican destroyers had raked his ship with cannon-fire and achieved half-a-dozen hits with larger shells, killing and wounding over a hundred men. Kemper glanced to his companion.
“If the pumps stop, she’ll sink onto the bottom, sir,” Peter Cowdrey-Singh grunted, resignedly. He leaned towards von Schaffhausen. “I must ask you again, sir,” he apologised tersely, “what communications you have received from your side as to the arrangements for the repatriation of my men?”
Von Schaffhausen grimaced.
“I have received no reply to my request for matters to be clarified, Commander.”
The other man thought about this.
Slowly, he rose to his feet.
“In that case, I am serving no useful purpose here, sir. I will return to the Weser…”
“Commander, I was hoping we might have a more constructive conversation…”
“About what, sir?” The Royal Navy man retorted, quietly indignant. “About how the Kaiserliche Marine attacked Achilles and murdered hundreds of my men? Or about how it was left to Captain Weitzman, on his own initiative, to attempt to do the decent thing for the small number of survivors of that war crime? Or about how the great German Empire is powerless to do anything to clean up the mess your lords and masters at the Wilhemstrasse have made of things?”
The others had risen to their feet, also.
Von Schaffhausen groaned.
“Things are more complicated than you realise, Commander Cowdrey-Singh. There have been further battles at sea. The Indomitable has been sunk and one of your new aircraft carriers has been badly damaged. Your Navy has withdrawn from the Gulf of Spain and the Caribbean; on land the army of New Spain has routed Colonial forces in the mountains and deserts of the South West. Consequently, the governments of the Triple Alliance are in a triumphal, unreasoning mood.” He hesitated. “Moreover, the sad death of the Kaiser has left,” he hesitated again, “a vacuum of power in Berlin. Nobody is making any decisions until the new Emperor is elected. Until then, please, I ask you to be patient. I have given you my word of honour that I and the forces under my command will defend the German Concession, and all those under its protection.”
“Herr Minister,” Peter Cowdrey-Singh replied, brusquely. “You have sixty Marines and an ad hoc German civilian militia of seventy or eighty men and boys to defend a community of what, three hundred expatriates and civil servants. If those maniacs across the bay cut up rough there is absolutely nothing you, or anybody else can do about it!”
The trouble was, von Schaffhausen knew, was that the battered and rightly, embittered Royal Navy man, was right.
At the moment the only thing that was stopping the Inquisitors dragging his English ‘guests’ and the Weser’s German ‘criminals’ to the Inquisition’s torture cells, was a lingering – possibly fast-evaporating – fear of the wrath of the German Empire.
Sooner or later somebody in the Dominican regime was going to realise, that with the demise of the old Kaiser the German Empire was temporarily, in a state of near paralysis.
Chapter 10
Thursday 27th April
Big Springs, Unincorporated Crown Territory of West Texas
William Lincoln ‘Bill’ Fielding had not known what to do with himself when he got out of prison last year. By then he was pretty much alienated from his brothers, and his old Getrennte Entwicklung Congregation had cast him out – in retrospect, not such a big problem because he had lost his faith – and he was broke. Worse, there were still people out there looking to recoup the gambling debts he owed them.
Playing cards and betting on horse and dog-racing were other things he had got out of the habit of, or simply dumped, like his belief in a merciful God, while he was in prison in Albany. Finally getting to confront his Pa had been a cathartic, transforming moment. It was weird the way he still felt guilty sometimes about punching out his Pa that way; even though he knew he would likely have killed the old fool if his brothers had not grabbed him.
Initially, he had not thought it was a very good idea talking to Albert Stanton; but the others, Abe and Alex, had pretty much opened their hearts to him and he had turned out to be a reasonably straight arrow kind of guy. For a newspaper man, leastways.
‘You’re a qualified mechanical engineer, right?’ Stanton had said to him afterwards. The Manhattan Globe man had picked him up at the hostel in Brooklyn Heights where he was dossing down most nights, taken him down to Brighton Beach for a beer and fish and chips.
Despite Bill’s suspicion the two men had got on okay.
‘Yeah,’ he had conceded.
‘With a lot of hours tuning and repairing high-performance speed boat engines?’
This too, was true, Bill could hardly deny it. It had been his work, for, among others the Long Island Speedboat Company at Gowanus Cove – on several of the boats which were driven at high speed into the sides of the battleships in the Upper Bay – which had originally got him into so much trouble after the Empire Day atrocities.
‘Yeah,’ he had agreed, again.
‘Alex tells me the CAF are crying out for guys like you. Three square meals a day, a roof over your head, work clothes provided and, according to your big brother, the Service pays top rate for qualified men.’
Bill reckoned that Alex had put the newspaper man up to it.
At the time he could not afford to be prideful; truly, pride had gone before his fall from grace and now, somehow, he had to atone. If not to God, then to himself and his kith and kin, whether they still cared for him or not.
Citing his elder brother as a reference, he had breezed through the CAF’s candidate technician selection process. Notwithstanding, he had still had to do the normal ninety-day induction ‘square bashing’, to endure the interminable kit inspections, the calisthenics and the route marches carrying a combat pack, personal weapons – a rifle, a pistol and a bayonet – and pass a final selection panel to get into the Colonial Air Force Reserve. Most new recruits then got hived off to a training establishment to prepare them for their chosen branch of the service, or in quieter times, discharged straight back into civilian life on a small annual retainer or one-third pay; however, Bill had been posted directly to the newly re-activated Patuxent River Naval Air Station in the Colony of Maryland, located, blissfully in the middle of nowhere, far, far away from his creditors.