Harrison glanced at his wristwatch.
Sighed, knowing he needed to be on the next ferry across to Elizabethtown if he was to catch the 14:11 train down to Philadelphia. After that the next express service did not leave until after four o’clock and he needed to confer with the Governor this evening.
His best guess about the ‘Spanish situation’ was that a cadre of officers within the military◦– possibly both the Army and the Navy, the Air Force tended to keep out of politics◦– had sided with one or other of the Court factions, there were several of those in both Ferdinand and Sophia’s palaces, and possibly with a coalition of the more ‘traditional’ Inquisitions but at the end of the day all that was pure guesswork.
He looked out of the window of the tea rooms where he had taken shelter from the morning’s showers. Out on the street everybody was going about their business as usual.
Ignorance was indeed, bliss!
The Empire Day outrages had somehow let a terrible genie out of his bottle and soon, he feared, they were all going to have to pay the price.
Matthew Harrison had come to New York the day after the murder of the Governor and his wife and the Temple Gardens bombings. There were twenty-seven dead, another one hundred-and-five people, men, women, children, two of them babes in arms still in hospital, many of them critically ill and yet here in Manhattan all was calm and few of the uniformed police on the streets carried fire arms.
He had immediately offered the full resources of the Colonial Security Service to assist ‘in any way required’ by the Colony’s constabulary, and as he had anticipated, had his offer politely, curtly rejected notwithstanding the locals were obviously desperately chasing shadows again with little or no idea how to begin to uncover the support networks which had to have existed, and had to have left significant evidential trails, given that the three suicide car bombers had contrived to wreak such havoc.
Of course, the idiots did not have the first idea what they were actually looking for, and he had little or no confidence that even if they stumbled over what they were looking for, they had the expertise or the native wit to recognise it for what it was!
It was Empire Day 1976 all over again…
I should have had Melody Danson recalled from Spain!
Honestly and truly, I was stupid to let her go in the first place!
Problematically, no amount of wishful thinking or retrospective existential angst was going to change a single damned thing; he was dying and the woman he had first floated as his long-term successor shortly after the smoke in the Upper Bay had cleared twenty months ago was, for all he knew, dead.
He paid his bill, collected his hat and coat and ventured out into the street. Threatening rain drops splashed heavily on the pavement even though the nearest bank of grey-black storm clouds was retreating to the east.
He had no idea if Melody Danson would have accepted the role that he still envisioned for her; for all he knew she might have laughed in his face. Nevertheless, that would have been the sort of conversation a man would pay good money to have a ring-side seat at!
He forced himself to focus on his contemporaneous mistakes and misapprehensions. Specifically, were there still terrorist attacks to come and if so, where and directed against whom?
He began to walk west down Bridge Street towards the ferry port on the Hudson bank.
Bridge Street…
The road had been carved through late nineteenth century Manhattan at much cost and against huge public opposition◦– on account of so many private buildings having to be demolished to make way for it◦– because the colonies of New York and New Jersey had briefly agreed that a bridge on the model of the King Edward VI, already spanning the East River linking Long Island to Manhattan should be built across the Hudson River. That concordat had only survived a couple of years and by then Bridge Street and the footings for two rail tracks had already been substantially constructed most of the way across Manhattan. Nowadays, the magnificent straight road across the city was regarded as a salutary epitaph to inter-colonial non-cooperation and misunderstanding, a folly worthy of comparison with any of those ridiculous aristocratic landscape jokes of yesteryear back in the Old Country.
A depressing aspect of the current crisis was that the complacency he witnessed everywhere in the First Thirteen had its roots in the misconception that somehow, if war came, the greater part of the burden would be borne not by the East Coast but by the Old Country and the peoples of the trackless western hinterlands. The general view on the East Coast was that not only would the war industries of the Ohio and the Monongahela Valleys and the vast sprawling cities around the Great Lakes take much of the economic strain, but that the sons of other parts of the Empire and of the anonymous factory workers of the interior would largely populate the regiments, man the ships and fly the aeroplanes which would enable life in the First Thirteen◦– and of course Maine and Vermont◦– to go on ‘as normal’ until such time as the unpleasantness was concluded.
As in all previous ‘conflicts’ with the rump of New Spain the exchequer back in England would take the strain while in New England it would be ‘business as usual’.
In any event, nobody in the middle or upper colonies took the notion of the supposedly ‘raggedy’ despotic Spanish colonies of the Caribbean, the Central Americas and the northern shores of the Latin Southern continent ever ‘getting their act together’ and uniting in common cause very seriously.
Heck that was as unthinkable as the First Thirteen ever agreeing about anything other than that they deserved preferential treatment within the Empire!
As for talk of a ‘Triple Alliance’, comprised, according to who one listened to, of New Granada, Cuba and Santo Domingo or any number of the other estranged Spanish provinces like Panama, or Colombia or one or other of the fractured colonies of Nuevo Valencia, Maracaibo, Caracas or Barquisimeto, that seemed almost too incredible to be true. Likewise, few people were aware that the German Empire’s so-called ‘1966 Concessions’, among them Aruba and Curacao, and the ports of Cumana and La Cruz in the South and San Juan, the original Spanish ‘rich port’ or Puerto Rica in the Americas, had been conduits through which the Germans had injected unknown treasure and technological assistance to their allies in the region.
In the last half-a-dozen years the German Navy had been granted facilities in Cuba at Guantanamo Bay, at the city of Santa Domingo and at Port au Prince by the Dominicans and perhaps, most significantly, at Vera Cruz on the Caribbean shore of New Granada. Nor was it commonly recognised that trade between the Empire of Germany and the Spanish colonies they had ‘befriended’ in and around the Caribbean had expanded exponentially in those years from a nett worth of a few tens of millions of pounds sterling◦– the currency of all international transactions◦– thirty-fold or more just since the mid-1960s.
The World was changing but the mindset of New Englanders was not. Several Colonial Legislatures had already cavilled at the increased military expenditures suggested for the financial years 1979-80 and 1980-81 by the Governor’s Office in Philadelphia, increases designed to ensure that there was a realistic, working recruiting and supply administration, and that planning for a future expansion of military capabilities was carried out on a continual basis in every colony and protectorate in the Commonwealth of New England.