“How did they get their soldiers to soldier if they didn’t award medals?”
“They were fighting for a cause they believed in,” Pippen said.
“They were defending slavery, for God’s sake—”
“Most of the Confederate soldiers didn’t own slaves,” Pippen said. (Things that Martin had picked up during those visits to Fredericksburg so many years earlier were coming back to him.) “They were fighting so the North wouldn’t try and tell them what they could do and what they couldn’t do. Besides which, when the war started, Lincoln—I’m talking about Abraham, the president—didn’t have the slightest intention of abolishing slavery and freeing the slaves. Nobody on either side of the Mason-Dixon line would have accepted this because nobody had any idea what to do with the millions of slaves in the Confederate states if they were freed. Yankees didn’t want emancipated slaves trekking north and stealing their manufacturing jobs for lower salaries. Southerners didn’t want them homesteading Confederate land and growing cotton that could be marketed cheaper than plantation cotton. Or even worse, voting in local elections.”
“He really is something of a Civil War buff already.”
“Our Lincoln Dittmann ought to have been a professeur at one point, don’t you think?”
“He could have taught Civil War history in some college. Why not?”
“Problem: To teach in a college you need an advanced degree. Even if he reads up on the Civil War, he might not be able to convince a real Civil War expert that he earned a Ph.D. in the subject.”
“Let him teach at a junior college, then. That way he wouldn’t need an advanced degree. And what he knows about the Civil War could pass muster.”
“It would add to his credibility if he were to write a book on the subject.”
“Hang on,” Pippen said. “I don’t think I have the stamina to write a book.”
“Takes more than stamina. I know because I’ve written three. You need mettle if you’re going to refuse to be intimidated by all the options.”
“We could farm out the book. We could get it written for you and have a small university press that owes us a favor publish it under your name. The Battle of Fredericksburg by Lincoln Dittmann.”
“I’ve got the perfect title: Cannon Fodder. With a subtitle: The Battle of Fredericksburg.”
“Let’s not get bogged down with the title, for goodness sake.”
“What do you think of all this, Mr. Pippen?”
“It’s first rate cover. Nobody would suspect an arms dealer who had been teaching Civil War history at a junior college of being CIA.”
“There’s something’s missing from this legend.”
“What?”
“Yes, what?”
“Motivation is what’s missing. Why has Lincoln Dittmann sunk so low. Why is he associating with the scum of the earth, people who, by definition, are not friends of l’Amerique?”
“Good point, Maggie.”
“Because he’s angry at America.”
“Why? Why is he angry at America?”
“He got into a some sort of jam. He was humiliated—”
Dante piped up from the sideline. “I don’t mind being humiliated, but I’d appreciate it if sex weren’t involved. You people always think of sex when you want to put something into a biography that discredits the principal. Next thing you know Lincoln Dittmann will be a closet transvestite or something like that.”
“We take your point, Mr. Pippen.”
“What if the jam involved plagiarism.”
“He swiped the heart of Cannon Fodder from a treatise published in the twenties or thirties that he found in the stacks of a library.”
“That would simplify matters for us. We wouldn’t have to pay someone to write the book on Fredericksburg; we could find a treatise—there must be thousands of them lying around on shelves gathering dust—and copy it.”
“My luck,” Dante groaned, “I finally get to be the author of a book and it turns out I plagiarized it.”
“It’s that or sexual deviation.”
“I’ll take plagiarism.”
“A reviewer in an historical periodical—tipped off by an anonymous letter sent by us—could blow the whistle on Dittmann, at which point he would lose his tenure and his job.”
“His professional reputation would be ruined.”
“Nobody else in the wide world of academia would touch him with a ten-foot pole.”
“Now we’re getting somewhere. The colleges put pressure on you to publish or perish and they expect you to hold down a full teaching load and do the research and writing in your free time.”
“The experience left Lincoln Dittmann a bitter cynic. He wanted to get back at the college, at the system, at the country.”
“I’d say we’re halfway home, gentlemen and ladies. The only thing that remains is to try all this out on our taskmaster, the DDO, Crystal Quest herself.”
Dante Pippen reached for the cane propped against the wall and used it to push himself to his feet. Dull pain stabbed at his lower back and sore leg, but he was so elated he barely noticed it. “I think Crystal Quest is going to be very satisfied with the Lincoln Dittmann legend,” he told the members of the Legend Committee. “I know I am.”
1991: LINCOLN DITTMANN WORKS THE ANGLES OF THE TRIANGLE
“HOW DID YOU GET INTO THE BUSINESS OF SELLING WEAPONS?” THE Egyptian wanted to know.
“Chances are you won’t believe me if I tell you,” Lincoln Dittmann said.
“If he don’t believe you,” said the short American with the tooled cowboy boots and tapered Levis and slicked back hair, “you’re in deep shit.” He spoke in a Texas drawl so silky that Lincoln had to strain to make out the words.
The Egyptian and the Texan, strange bedfellows in this godforsaken Paraguayan frontier town across the border from Brazil, both laughed under their breaths, though there was no trace of mirth in their voices. Lincoln, sprawled on a sofa, his bad leg stretched straight out in front of him, the cane within arm’s reach, his hands clasped behind his head, laughed with them. “I was teaching Civil War history at a junior college,” he said. “My area of expertise—I wrote a book on the subject once—was the battle of Fredericksburg. Collecting Civil War weapons seemed like the natural thing to do. My pièce de résistance is a rare English Whitworth.”
“That there’s a sniper rifle, ain’t it?” said the Texan.
Lincoln looked impressed. “Aren’t many people around who can tell the difference between a Whitworth and an ordinary barnyard Enfield.”
“My daddy had one,” the Texan said proudly. “Feds went an’ impounded it along with his other guns when he was nabbed for burning a nigger church to the ground in Al’bama.” He tilted his head back and regarded Lincoln warily. The Texan, who had introduced himself as Leroy Streeter when he’d picked Lincoln up in front of the mosque with the gold-tinted roof on Palestine Street across the border in Foz do Iguaçú, said, “Go and describe your Whitworth?”
Lincoln smiled to himself. Back at Langley, they’d learned from the FBI that Leroy Streeter’s father had once owned a Civil War Whitworth; they’d reckoned the son would be familiar with the weapon. If Leroy’s quiz was what passed for checking bona fides in Triple Border, it certainly was amateur hour; an undercover agent wouldn’t name drop—even the name of an antique rifle—if he couldn’t backstop it with details. Fact of the matter was that Lincoln did own a Whitworth—a collection of Civil War weapons went with the Dittmann legend. He’d even fabricated cartridges and gone out to a remote landfill in New Jersey to see if the rifle was as accurate as its reputation held. It was. “Mr. Whitworth’s rifle,” he told Leroy now, “came factory-equipped with a low-powered brass scope fixed atop the hexagonal barrel. Not many of the Whitworths around these days, even in museums, still have the scope. Mine also has the original brass tampon to plug the barrel against humidity and dust. The scope’s fitted with little engraved wheels to sight the rifle and adjust for latitude and longitude errors.”