“Even without Pacov we still would’ve won. We were on our way, slower but just as sure. Our North-European heritage… our ethnos, our Aryan blood… cannot be denied! Look at Germany: she lost two world wars but she’s very much a power again! We come through in the crunch: we don’t give up, and we don’ t die easy. Like the sick cannibal said about the missionary he ate for dinner: ‘You can’t keep a good man down.’”
“That’s awful! And you stole it from Wrench!”
“Who stole it from somebody else, who stole it from some other jizmo, all the way back to the clowns in the Colosseum. Look, Alan, we were working on a long-term economic campaign. That was our strategy!”
“Which might’ve taken another hundred years, if it succeeded at all.” Better to argue than give her another chance to make moves on him. He said, “All I’m saying is that we ought to make amends, compromise, and make peace… provided those things gel us where we wanted to go in the first place. Hell, I’m the soldier; when there’re wars I’m the guy who has to duck the bullets! Like my dad said, ‘Rather finagle than fight.’”
She tilted her head and grinned at him. “You know, Alan, you have all the makings of a a great lib-reb. The only thing you haven’t figured out yet is the first part of ‘make love, not war.’” She buttoned her coat and went outside to join Mullet. He followed her into the snow-dusted air. His armored command car stood waiting across what had been the main northern parking lot of the Lava Beds National Monument. Now the tourists and campers and cars and picnic baskets were only memories; instead, Cadre banners flapped fitfully below the Stars and Stripes over khaki-colored, plastic huts, ice-crusted vehicles, and white mounds of tarp-covered stores. Wrench and Morgan had wanted a distinctive Cadre flag, like the silver runes on black of the old SS, but Mulder had vetoed it. He had allowed only a white “C” in the upper-left corner of the Party’s regular flag. That would have to do for now.
Lessing stalked across the dirty, hard-packed snow and climbed into the passenger seat beside Stan Crawford, his driver.
Mullet came up to gesture and shout, but the engine drowned out his words. Lessing could guess that he wanted to send an escort along. That shouldn’t be necessary if Lessing read this Gottschalk right. The lib-rebs would surrender as promised. On the other hand, if Gottschalk were lying, the shit would get very deep.
Lessing thought about it one more time, then waved Mullet away. He wasn’t stupid, he wasn’t a show-off, and he wasn’t particularly brave, but in some odd way he felt himself “fated.” When his lime came he would go and not before. Maybe some of Islam’s qismat— “kismet,” destiny — had rubbed off on him in India.
The chill of the plastic-leather Parodex passenger seat made him wince. The next winter war the Cadre fought, he would see that the cars, the tents, and the toilets had plush seats!
“Heading, sir?” Stan was Ponape-trained, tough, thirtyish, and plain, a dishwater blonde from Charlotte, North Carolina.
The hell with military jargon. He jerked a thumb and drawled, “That a way.”
Snow drifted down in sad, little gusts and whorls as they drove, filling the ruts and potholes with powdered sugar. Captain Jack’s Modoc stronghold lay slightly off to the left, with Canby’s Cross, Gillem’s Camp, and Gillcm’s Bluff beyond. On their right much of Tule Lake was once again filled with water as it had been in Modoc times; the farms and fields of the later settlers were gone, a consequence. Mullet said, of the Viet-Chincse Atomic War of 2010. The locals took this as a sign that Crater Lake, up north in Oregon, was about to erupt again after a sleep of six or eight thousand years.
Stan spotted the lib-rebs before he did: a ragged, black line against jagged, black rocks. Black and white like an old movie: a grey sky, a monochrome landscape. He was reminded of one of Mulder’s ancient newsreels: German troops trudging through the Russian desolation, leaving equipment and frozen corpses behind as they straggled back toward the crumbling frontiers of the Reich.
“You want me to drive right up to ’em,” Stan asked, “or do we wait here?”
He glanced around. “There’s a picnic table,” he suggested. “We can clean off the snow—”
“Excuse me, but you’ll freeze your butt… sir. Standing up in the hatch is better. Say your piece, sit back down, and stay warm. We can put some of their wounded and womenfolk into our passenger compartment. Good publicity… uh, if you think it’s wise.” His expression said he did not.
Publicity: Wrench’s specialty. Words and pictures were more important than any military victory he might win. He looked in the rear mirror and caught the glint of a moving silver-metallic dome: a Magellan unit keeping pace with them, its cameras grinding away for posterity. Ken Swanson, his corn-officer, would have telephoto holo-vid crews up in helicopters as well.
He might as well look heroic.
He clambered up onto the seat and undogged the ceiling hatch. Ice-tipped wind-fingers clawed at his cheeks and forehead as he put his head out; he jerked his cap down and turned up his coat collar. Stan stopped the car, and his ears rang with the sudden stillness.
If this had been a movie, any minute they’d hear the lib-rebs heroically singing their battle-song as they marched out to surrender. Lessing grimaced at the fancy.
There they were, emerging from among the trees, silent except for the crunch of boots in the snow. Through the binoculars Stan passed up to him he saw what a tired, hungry, scruffy lot they were: weaponless, dispirited, dressed in drab, civilian clothes, parts of uniforms, and blankets. The one in front must be Gottschalk: a tall, skinny man with frizzy, black hair and a beard. Beside him was a dark, hatchet-beaked woman who carried a quilt-wrapped infant and herded five older children along before her. Lessing counted two boys and three girls, perhaps seven to twelve years of age. The smallest girl bore a bundle— no, it was a teddy bear, nearly as big as she was. The others in the vanguard were adults: soldiers, would-be soldiers, and play-soldiers caught up in a reality they had never expected.
He tried the bullhorn. “Hey! Attention!”
That wasn’t very eloquent. Out of the comer of his eye he saw the Magellan recording the scene.
“You rebels!” he called, more loudly. “I am Cadre-Colonel Alan Lessing of the American Freedom Brigade, United States Army.”
“Pog yourself, bastard!” A voice from the column squawked back. Others made more pungent suggestions.
“Look, if you’d rather fight some more, we’ll oblige. Send out your noncombatants, and let’s go to it.”
Gottschalk— the skinny man— yelled at his troops for quiet. To Lessing, he said, “You know what we’re here for, uh… colonel. No food, out of ammo, and coldcr’n a bitch. We need medical treatment for our wounded… fifteen men, three women, and a frostbitten kid.”
“Yes… sure. I’ll call for ambulances. No need for your injured to walk the rest of the way.” He passed the order to Stan.
Gottschalk’s woman sat down on a boulder, the children in a defensive ring around her, the others standing or squatting where they were. The lib-reb leader himself came over to the command car.
“A fine end for a Stanford Ph.D.” Gottschalk said. Stan kept their mounted machinegun trained on him. “You ‘re not ended yet.”
“I get a fair trial? A jury? My civil rights? Then you hang me?” “Sorry. We aren’t into hangings.”
“I… we all… just disappear? Is that it? Death-squad style? Or maybe a shower bath that’s really a gas chamber?”
“That’s crap!” Lessing answered tiredly. “You and your people are in revolt against the legally elected, constitutional government of the United States of America. That’s treason! What do you expect from us? Cheers? A peace prize?”