He’d sat hunched like this for hours. Somewhere between five and twelve hours—probably closer to five—and it seemed like days. He coughed, and he felt faintly feverish.
I’m getting a fucking cold, he thought.
But he’d complained once, and he wasn’t going to let himself complain anymore, because Carmen’s tone told him she was one step from contempt for him.
And the worst of it, the deep muddy trench of it was, the drugs were gone.
Here he was, slogging along in a boat Frankie’s source used for smuggling drugs, among other things, but the hold was empty now, and they’d gone through Carmen’s supply and Rickenharp’s three grams—one gram ruined by a slopover wave when they’d boarded from the rowboat… They’d done them all, and now he felt burnt and enervated, and he was on a tightrope over the pits of the various pits of his personal hells, pits he knew like a man six months in solitary knows his tiny cell.
How much longer? he wanted to ask.
Is it much farther to Denver, Mom?
Your father’s fed up with hearing that. You kids play with your holo-boy or something…
The fever rose, and warmed him, and he slipped into a pleasant delirium; driving with his parents across the country, he could almost feel the vinyl of the car’s seats against his cheek…
We’ll never get there, the little boy whined, in the delirium.
“We’ll get there.” Carmen’s voice, from somewhere. “Or we’ll drown and it won’t matter.”
“Nationalism is the key to any nation.” Watson was saying. He smiled urbanely. “Seems obvious, doesn’t it? The very impulse that normally serves to exclude foreign control can insure the success of foreign control—if the key is turned from within the target country.”
Watson was standing at the mini-terminal where Ellen Mae had stood; across from him Swenson took notes at his mini-terminal.
“We have NATO’s leave,” Watson went on, glancing at his notes, “to establish behind-combat policing bodies in Belgium, France, Norway, Spain, Greece, Italy, and, very soon, Holland. England for the foreseeable future will continue to be administered by the National Front, but—” he smiled “—the distinction is superfluous.” Chuckles around the table. “They’re all doing Our Work…”
Swenson smiled companionably. Doing Our Work.
“Our Work” meant full control over the countries in which the SA was established. It meant a takeover. It meant the Eclipse project.
“…establishing Our Work in these countries is simply a matter of utilizing each target nation’s nationalist sentiment, a sentiment that is, everywhere, stronger than ever. The scenario is as follows, and I give it to you in a brief, general way with the understanding that the details that will come later are most important:
“Each target country is already in desperate need of order. Like Lebanon in the last century, the targets are unable to police themselves and have requested outside assistance. The SAISC being the only ‘independent’ security force large enough, being multinational, and being essentially a business without political loyalties—”
Here he paused to smile and they were allowed to chuckle again.
“—was awarded the policing contract for the target countries without significant dissent from the United Nations. The majority of our troops were in place as of last Friday midnight. Paris remains an exception; the war has severely damaged logistic channels into France. The troops will be airlifted in as soon as the neutrality agreement is finalized with Moscow. Once we’re in place, the Russians will find out just exactly how ‘neutral’ we are…” Watson paused for another round of polite chuckling. With Crandall there was never a need for the polite response; the group responded to him naturally, liturgically, sincerely. But, of course, Watson was a typical high-military British bore. “…Each target nation has assigned a native liaison to coordinate policing efforts between the SA and the target’s government or provisional government. In every single case, I’m proud to announce, our liaison was placed by the SA’s Advance Services Bureau. The liaison is one of us. In each case it is a man with a public reputation for nationalistic sentiments. The man in France is Le Pen, great grandson of the last century’s famous Front National organizer. The popular sentiment for nationalism has grown in France as in the other nations as a result of the incursion of immigrants, who take jobs away from nationals, and who transform their neighborhoods into something alien; and the Third World War itself, which, of course, has not made the common people pleased with foreigners. Steeped in this sentiment, young Le Pen is one step from the presidency.
“Our procedure in France will be roughly as follows: First, our troops will arrive and restore order. The food rioters, the looters, the bands of thieves, and the various terrorist and radical factions will be arrested, shot, and generally discouraged. Second, we will arrange it so that Le Pen will take credit for the restoration of order. Third, an information campaign will convince the public that Le Pen is in complete control of the SA troops, and that the presence of the troops is equivalent to the triumph of French nationalism. The problem, of course, is that most of the SA troops will be foreigners—the contradiction will be ironed out by inducting increasing numbers of sympathetic French nationalists into SA forces, and by creating the illusion that the SA is the tool of the French people, and completely in their control. Fourth, French troops thoroughly indoctrinated into the SA way of thinking will by degrees completely replace the rank-and-file of street-visible SA troops. But their superiors will ultimately be SA proper. Now…” He paused dramatically, looked up and down the table, and made eye contact. “Now, if we follow this simple formula, and follow through on its one thousand and one necessary details, we will, in less than five years, control every West European country of any significance. To put it bluntly, Europe will be ours. And we will begin to clean it up. The Zionist/neo-Stalinist conspiracy that controls half of the continent, and the Muslim conspiracy that controls the rest, will be eliminated, and eliminated with finality. The solution is at hand.”
Hard-Eyes and Jenkins sat side by side in twentieth-century steel-and-wood classroom desks. Jenkins looked fairly miserable. He was too big for the desk. Hard-Eyes felt all right. He was full; they’d just come from lunch. They ate well here, as Steinfeld had promised, and the room was warm, heated by an oil furnace in the basement of the old Paris school, an école supérieure; the vents gave out slow-rolling waves of warm air and a faint petroleum scent, a kind of industrial perfume which Hard-Eyes somehow found comforting. He was warm and well-fed. On an age-darkened bulletin board to one side were posters from twenty years before, extolling in French the virtues of democracy for some Parisian civics class. But listening to Steinfeld drone about guerrilla cell organization, Hard-Eyes was alternately mangling his own favorite victim of persecution, his right-hand thumbnail, and with his other hand nervously tracing the scorings of initials carved into the blond wood of the desk top. He felt himself careening, tottering on the edge of the abyss that was his future.
Steinfeld was saying, “Internal cadres organize into cells of three persons, only one of the three interfacing with command or other cells. A cell of three persons is the standard cell formation used in a classic guerrilla movement.” As he spoke he drew a diagram on the blackboard.