“Then it’s settled,” Oliver said. “I will attempt to find you some… samples.”
“Excellent,” Hoover said, and held out his big beefy hand. Oliver shook it firmly, and then called for Cora to show the two men out. Once they had left the building, and the car of FBI agents had driven off behind them, he pulled a basic ELINT scanner out of his sealed safe and scanned the room. A bug, larger than any he’d ever seen outside of a museum, had been left down the back of Hoover’s chair.
“Now that was clever,” Oliver said with genuine admiration, after he crushed it. He hadn’t seen either of them place the little bug. He made a mental note to review the security camera records from his office; he’d catch who’d done it later. For the moment, he called Cora into his office.
“Yes, Mr Oliver?” Cora asked. Oliver took a moment to study her; her dark skin blended nicely with her white shirt – with two buttons undone – and knee-length skirt. She was very attractive… and available. Still, he needed her opinion.
“Tell me, what did you think of our new friends?” He asked. “Fairies or flics?”
“They didn’t find me attractive,” Cora said. She was also very bright; he liked that in his assistants. “That might not prove anything, but…”
“True, true,” Oliver said. It didn’t prove anything, but it was interesting. “I want you to run a full ELINT scan of your office and the corridor to the office, and then call in the security team. It’s time that they did something instead of standing around drinking my tea.”
Cora didn’t argue or ask questions. “Yes, sir,” she said, and left, allowing Oliver to contemplate his report to Roth. The Abwehr agent in the United States, Nikolaus Ritter, had been ousted during the Goddard scandal – and Roth had insisted that Oliver give him a hiding place. Fortunately, the man insisted on remaining well out of sight, instead of coming to the office everyday.
“With Hoover’s backing, there might be a chance to get out of this,” Oliver said, and felt real hope for the first time in six long hard months.
Chapter Nine: Black Fire and Ice
Nr Huntsville
Alabama, USA
5th April 1941
The men were not the Marines that Marine Lieutenant Jones Robinson was used to working with, but the raw material was there. Their source had reported on the transport… and he was determined to put the goods to better use than they would have been originally. He’d hesitated in committing his foremost action brigade to the battle – although if everything went well there would be no battle – but this era seemed to take no security measures at all. Only a place that thought itself totally safe would transport hundreds of guns and thousands of bullets though potentially hostile territory.
Robinson shook his head angrily. The weapons, which were meant for the National Guard, would probably end up being pointed at black people. Several regions were quiet; black and white were living together almost peacefully, but in other places…
He still shuddered when he thought of the frantic gun battle in Texas. The Ku Klux Klan had decided to strike at a black church, one where voters were being registered to vote, and they’d come loaded for bear. The blacks had also been armed… and the mutual slaughter had been terrible. The ensuring outburst of long-repressed hatreds had nearly laid the entire town waste before it had burnt itself out.
Bet it was all blamed on us, Robinson thought grimly, feeling something inside him die. He’d never anticipated having to lead what amounted to a underground war inside America – no outside power had seriously threatened America with invasion since 1860 – but if violence was the only way that black men could get justice, then he would give the Klan all the violence it could take. Those who lynched in darkness with burning crosses were hunted down and killed; those who sought to pay black men less than whites were punished.
And if it was too much like the tactics the Viet Cong had used, Robinson tried to forget it, to push it aside. He was fighting for a higher cause, and the Klan deserved everything it got.
“Jones?” His grandfather said. “They’re coming.”
Robinson lifted his binoculars and peered into the darkness. This America lacked the interstate system that his America had possessed; it had been quicker to ship the weapons to the nearest coast and transport them overland. It reminded him of the old movies set in Prohibition times; the stream of lorries in the darkness, their lights probing ahead.
Idiots, he thought. If it had been up to him, he would have sent the weapons via aircraft or escorted it with a full regiment of infantry. For all of the recent unrest, the Contemporary Americans simply weren’t used to acts of… terrorism.
“Everyone get ready,” he muttered, and slipped on his night-vision goggles. The computer-controlled goggles, completely irreplaceable except in Britain, compensated automatically. The barricade across the road should show up clearly; the heat signatures of the black men and women would be invisible to all, but him.
The dull sound of the motorcade became a roar as the first of ten lorries and escorting jeeps moved along the road, and then saw the barricade. “Now,” Robinson snapped, and shot out the wheels of the lead jeep. It skidded into the barrier and the noise of screeching brakes drowned out everything else; the soldiers hopefully thought that the shot had been a simple blowout.
“Hands up,” Robinson snapped, into his tiny voder. His amplified voice screamed through the night. “Anyone without his or her hands up in ten seconds will be shot!”
A flare burst in the night, illuminating the scene. Robinson winced as the NVGs adjusted themselves for the light, revealing stunned GIs lifting their hands. His people, masked and garbed to hide their identities, stepped forward.
“Everyone out of the vehicles,” he bellowed. “Gather at the barricade. We won’t hurt anyone who will cooperate!”
He watched grimly as the GIs slowly climbed out of their vehicles. They were young, too young for what they were called to do, and pitifully under-trained for their task. Pussies, he thought coldly; none of them had the training to know what to do in such circumstances. The United States Army wouldn’t learn until after Vietnam took its bloody toll on the same young men.
“Into the vans,” he muttered, ordering the drivers forward. “You know where to go.”
“Yes, grandson,” Jackie said. The future baseball star jumped into one of the vans. Slowly, the lorries headed into the night.
“I’m sorry about this,” Robinson said, addressing the GIs. One of them was even crying; a boy who’d lied about his age. “We want to have the same rights as you, you see, and we’re prepared to fight for them. We’re going to leave you here; Huntsville is several miles in that direction.” He pointed. “Goodnight.”
According to tradition, Robinson thought wryly, the freedom fighters should have an underground base with all the technology they could ever want. Black Power, the organisation he’d founded with some help from his backers, had only a handful of hiding places that stored weapons and some wanted fugitives; most of the members worked in plain sight, as it were. Like the Vietcong, the movement would be hidden in plain sight – and would be quite happy to punish traitors.
“We got five hundred of the new Sherman weapons,” Jackie said. Robinson, who knew the ‘Sherman’ as the AK-47, chuckled. “There’s also nearly ten thousand clips, pre-loaded with ammunition, and thousands of spare bullets.”
“Excellent,” Robinson said. He reached over to the small laptop; the children of the small house loved playing with it and kept it fully charged with its flywheel. Every time someone span the wheel, it generated a little power for the laptop. He checked the battery – it would be difficult to get supplies for the system if something had gone wrong – and logged onto the new network.