“And as for Congress. If those bastards are willing to sell us down the river, if they’re maneuvering to splinter the Republic, then they deserve to be hung as traitors, every one of them.”
“What you’re saying is treasonous,” Andrew snapped. “If this be treason, make the most of it,” Hawthorne cried.
Vincent looked over at Hans. “Ask Ketswana to tell us what he learned.”
Hans nodded and quickly spoke to Ketswana in the dialect of Chin which the captives had used while in slavery. Ketswana replied in broken Rus.
“Roum soldier, one who hung. Was in tavern five minutes before shot fired.”
Surprised, Andrew looked at Hans.
“I have my own intelligence net here; they answer to Vincent when I’m not around.”
“This was never authorized by me.”
“It was by me. The Chin and Zulus were neutral; they could talk to both sides, Rus and Roum. With the stress developing between the two sides I thought it best to act, so I got this going last autumn.”
“Something about that shooting didn’t sit right from the start,” Vincent replied. “I checked that poor boy’s record.
Promoted to corporal for heroism at Rocky Hill. Invalid due to dysentery and the last nine months in hospital. But everyone said he was a good soldier, eager to get back. Not the assassin type.”
“But he was found in the church?” Kathleen asked.
“Yes, he went running in to try and catch who did it. Then a mob grabbed him, claimed he had a gun, and he was dragged out and hung.”
“According to who?”
Hans looked over at Ketswana.
“One of my men drink with him, follow, see all, get away before he hung, too.”
“So who was leading this mob?”
“It might have been a crowd carried away with frenzy. It might have been more, though,” Hans said.
“Go on.”
“Kill the president. There’s no vice president; therefore, the Speaker of the House, Tiberius Flavius, becomes president. Either he was plotting to do it or someone else.”
“Flavius is an honorable man,” Andrew replied sharply. “I knew him as a damn good officer who came up through the ranks, and he’s a wounded veteran of Hispania. He’s not the type.”
“Or then a countercoup,” Hawthorne replied. “Blame Flavius for the death of Kal, claim it’s a plot by Roum to seize the government, and break the Republic in the process.”
“Bugarin?”
“My likely candidate,” Hawthorne snapped bitterly.
“Damn all.” Andrew sighed. So that’s why Hawthorne is thinking coup, strike first in order to prevent one.
There was too much to assimilate. He had been far too preoccupied with the preparations for the offensive and the dealing with the results to give serious consideration as to what was going on seven hundred miles away in the capital. He knew there were tensions but prayed that a successful attack, even one that was just a partial success, would quiet the differences and create the resolve to push the war through to its conclusion. He wondered self-critically if that concern had clouded his decision-making to go ahead with the offensive.
He suddenly felt exhausted, unable to decide what to do next. He knew that a mere nod of his head would mean that Vincent would get up, walk out of the room, and within the hour Congress would be arrested. Besides the training school of cadets who were now the 35th Maine and 44th New York, there was a sprinkling of forty or fifty men from the original units in the city, holding various key positions. There was a brigade of troops garrisoned there and thousands of discharged vets in the factories who could be called out in an emergency. He’d have the government by morning, straighten out the mess, then go from there.
And, damn it, destroy forever what I wanted to create here. Of that he was certain. Once the precedent had been set, it would be forever embedded in the heart of the Republic. Washington had resisted the temptation knowing the history of Rome and Greece when it came to coups. He would rather have seen the Revolution go down to bloody defeat than betray it. Napoleon, rather than Lincoln and Washington, would then be the model for this Republic, this entire world. The concept of a republic which he had so carefully nurtured since first setting foot upon this world would be lost forever.
Yet even if I did seize control, then what? The war is still being lost. We might hold on for a while, maybe even create a stalemate on the Capua Front, but still Jurak will wear us down, for he has the labor of millions of slaves to support him, and if need be feed him with their own flesh. Either way we lose.
He looked at his friends. How to admit it, that after ten years of valiant effort, they were losing. Have we been losing all along, he wondered, and were just not willing to admit it? If that’s true, then is the dream of a republic one that is ultimately doomed to failure? Though he wanted to believe in Kal, he sensed that his old friend was weakening under the stress, and for the time being he was out of the picture. The other side promised peace. And the greater complexities of the issues-well, tragically, the average person just didn’t seem to grasp them.
He had been in the army too long, he realized. In the military issues were far clearer-there was survival or death, that was drilled in from day one. You did the right thing, you survived, make a mistake … you died, or worse yet, good men died because of you.
A hell of a lot of good men had just died because of his mistake, his not realizing that the very nature of the war was changing yet again.
It’s changed again, so we have to find a way to change it back in our favor. He looked over at Emil.
“I want the truth from you, my friend.”
“Go on.”
“Since I got wounded, I mean since I came back to command,” he hesitated.
Emil leaned forward in his chair. He sensed Kathleen’s watchful gaze on him.
“I’m not the same. Something’s changed in me.”
“We’re all changed,” Emil started soothingly, but an angry wave from Andrew silenced him.
“No, I don’t mean that. It’s deeper than that. I feel like I’ve lost something. Not just my edge, far deeper, the very mettle of my soul. All along I sensed a problem with our assault at Capua, I sensed it but failed to clearly get ahead of the problem and reason it out before it happened.”
“No one could have anticipated the response from their new leader,” Emil replied.
“But I should have. There’s no damn room for a mistake in my position.”
He looked around the room at his old friends, wondering for a moment if he was about to dissolve into tears. Do that, though, and we’ve all lost. In the end, he realized, all of it, from the moment they had come through the Portal of Light, back so many years, so many ages ago, all rested upon him.
Damn, I never wanted this, and then he hesitated with his inner remorse as the truth surged up from within. The self-humility was a lie, a damnable lie. He had indeed wanted it.
He had wanted command of the regiment, Hans knew that as far back as Fredericksburg. He loved his old commander, Colonel Estes as a father, but like any son of ability, inwardly he longed to transcend what his father was and could be. And when Estes fell at Gettysburg he had mourned him, yet he had sprung to take his place.
He had wanted a brigade, knowing he could do better than far too many of the damned fools Meade and Grant allowed to command. Here was a harsh realization. One is taught to have humility, to admire one’s elders and emulate them, and a display of raw ambition is somehow immoral.
Yet he knew in the core of his soul that he was blessed with something, and that something was the ability to lead … and to dream of all the greatness that a republic could be. Yet so unfortunately a republic, and a volunteer army of a republic, far too often drew into its folds the weak, the venal, those who were ambitious for their own sakes.