“I apologise for not getting through to you earlier, sir,” the Head of the Colonial Security Service apologised, his Virginian drawl belying the fears both men shared. “I’ve only just landed in New Orleans.”
Although the Mississippi Delta had been border-country in the two men’s youth, successive dirty little wars had since pushed the frontier all the way into the badlands of West Texas and Coahuila since the 1950s. The lands west of the vast Louisiana Territories had been a harsh, windswept desert wilderness in those days, a terrible place to fight any kind of war. However, the most recent◦– 1971◦– ceasefire in the borderlands had held, more or less intact. Not so much because the regime in Mexico City was any less acquisitive or embittered than any of its predecessors but because it understood that it could not win◦– other than at immense cost◦– a ‘long war’ in the South West.
Successive New England governors had driven railheads and a network of broad, arrow-straight highways across the coastal flats of the Gulf of Spain and the rolling plains west of the Mississippi. New boom towns had been founded and now dotted the previously empty landscape, and factories had moved into ‘tax and tariff free’ zones. Lately, the fast-expanding gulf ports of Pelican Island and Buffalo Bayou west of the Delta had accelerated the rush to claim and develop the new territories opened up to settlers and immigrants from the East.
In retrospect, had the same policy of incentives◦– free land grants and Imperial agricultural subsidies been made available in the south as had been promoted in the north back in the 1930s, it might not even have been necessary to fight the border wars of the mid-years of the century. But that was hindsight and little use to man nor beast…
The ‘land rush’◦– essentially, loosely regulated ‘land-grabbing’ and settlement right up to the borders with New Granada◦– had gone into overdrive in the last few years. Huge ranges had been opened up to cattle farmers and in the last two or three years the small garrisons stationed, much in the fashion of trip-wire, or deterrent outposts, close to the contested border line had been mainly pre-occupied keeping the peace between the newcomers and the indigenous Apaches and Cherokees.
De L’Isle hoped above hope that memories of how those railroads and highways had enabled Empire forces to win the logistics war and eventually, to crush the last foray of an invading army onto New England soil, were still fresh in the mind of his counterpart in Mexico City. In the last big ‘border war’ in the late 1960s the enemy, reliant for all his supplies on a few narrow un-metalled roads and tracks across the deserts and through the mountain passes that guarded Nuevo Mexico, Chihuahua and Coahuila had swiftly run out of ammunition, fuel and food once it moved into New England territory.
He hoped they remembered that because right now, all those recently planted towns and villages, cattle and sheep stations lost in the wilderness of the South West, were potentially in the firing line and if things went badly, there was nothing he could do to protect them in the short-term.
Worryingly, what was going on in Old Spain had the look and the feel about it of a madman lighting the fuse to…
God only knew what!
“How are things down there, Matt?” The Governor of New England inquired urbanely.
“Calm enough for the moment. The party started when the Navy came up the river a couple of days ago and people are still getting over their hangovers!”
Philip De L’Isle guffawed at this.
New Orleans was over a hundred miles from the Gulf of Spain but the Mississippi was easily navigable for even very big ships, as had been proven by the despatch of the forty-two thousand ton, eight-hundred-and-fifty feet-long battlecruiser HMS Indomitable and a squadron of fleet destroyers ‘up river’ to reassert that neither he, nor the Royal Navy had forgotten the people of the city or of the vast, poorly mapped and still relatively sparsely populated country to the west between it and the rapidly expanding Pelican Island-Buffalo Bayou port complex, the opening of which had prompted a rush of fresh private investment into the express development of the oilfields of West Texas.
The light cruiser HMS Devonshire and two more destroyers, detached from Indomitable’s squadron, had steamed west to Pelican Island with orders to ‘make their presence felt’ in international waters along the coast of the Spanish province of Coahuila.
Every war plan the Governor had ever seen predicted, that in the event of a general war with the Empire of New Spain two things would happen: firstly, the Royal Navy would blockade the Gulf of Spain, Cuba and Santo Domingo and destroy ‘enemy’ maritime assets in detail at its leisure; and secondly, that the Army of Nuevo Granada would make mechanised thrusts◦– in strength, possibly with columns simultaneously emerging from Nuevo Mexico and Coahuila◦– into West Texas, or east into the unincorporated protectorate of Sequoyah, or conceivably, north into the mountainous Colorado Valley concession. In this scenario, Pelican Island would be an obvious early objective for the invaders, possibly opening up a deep-water port he might employ as a bridgehead, thereby bypassing the virtually impassable terrain of much of the borderland and obviating the supply issues which had hamstrung every previous attempt to push the boundaries of New Granada farther to the north and east.
Thirty years ago, a Spanish column had advanced along the Gulf coast before bogging down in swamp land only a few miles short of being able to bring long-range artillery fire down upon New Orleans…
That fiasco had led to the summary dismissal of the then Governor. But every Governor in the Empire understood that the one indefensible, unforgivable sin of a man in his position, was to allow events to make his masters back in London look silly. That was invariably the sort of thing which sent a fellow into the sort of retirement from which there was no resurrection!
Unfortunately, with the best will in the world there were an awful lot of things beyond the control of even a pro-consul as mighty as the man who sat in Government House in Philadelphia.
For example, even though Colonial forces in the South West had been beefed up in recent months, albeit from a ‘skeleton level’, well short of a general mobilisation New England land and air resources might, if the Spanish really grasped the nettle◦– which they had never done before, admittedly◦– and exploited their problematic but undeniably much shorter lines of communication, and took advantage of the fact that well over half their standing army and air force was already stationed within a hundred miles of the border, there would be very little that his forces could do to seriously inconvenience the invaders in the opening days of the campaign. The enemy had a huge numerical superiority in men◦– easily ten-to-one or greater in manpower◦– and a four or five-to-one advantage in armoured and other vehicles. Likewise, although their aircraft tended to be older, and less capable than those operated by the small number of scout and reconnaissance CAF squadrons permanently based within range of the border, the Spanish had perhaps, twenty aircraft to every operational machine on the New England side. Put bluntly, if the Spanish attacked with everything they had, they would simply roll over the ‘trip wire’ Colonial units, and rag-tag civilian militias theoretically barring their path.
Granted, colonial land cruisers were markedly harder nuts to crack and carried far deadlier high-velocity long-range rifles in comparison to their Spanish counterparts, and the latest CAF scouts were formidable aircraft but if the worst came to the worst, they would inevitably be ‘mobbed under’ by sheer weight of numbers.