The Eternal War

whales.

‘What the hell are those?’

‘Aircraft?’

‘Too slow for airplanes,’ said Maddy. ‘And too large. They look like balloons or Zeppelins of some kind.’

They watched the faint shapes manoeuvre, their profiles long and nautically slender, topped by an irregular outline of stacked protrusions that made them look eerily like battleships.

Then through the haze Maddy caught a strobing flicker of light on the ground. A distant flash through the haze that momentarily revealed the broken-teeth outlines of far, far away bomb-damaged buildings. A moment later they heard the faint percussive thump of explosions.

‘Sounds like some place is being bombed,’ whispered Maddy.

‘It is a war that is still in progress,’ said Becks.

Maddy looked across the river at the ruins of Manhattan. The hazy air over there was clearing momentarily and she was able to see a little more detail. She saw movement. The glint of metal, something that looked like a gun turret slowly rotating on an artillery platform. In among all the chaos of gutted skyscrapers, knotted and rusting support cables, sagging floors and slopes of rubble and dust she thought she detected the regular, ordered geometry of pillboxes and bunkers.

She turned her back on the river and Manhattan to look north-east towards Brooklyn and Queens, or what was left of it. Across warehouses with collapsed roofs, and twisted industrial cranes no good to anyone now, low apartment blocks pockmarked and deserted, she thought she also saw the telltale signs of an entrenched front line.

‘Great,’ she muttered. ‘Just great.’

‘What is it, Madelaine?’

She turned to gesture at their archway — little more than a crumbling mound of red bricks somehow still managing to hold together and not collapse in on themselves.

‘That’s a front line over the river … and on this side, over there, that looks like another front line. Which of course makes where we’re standing … no-man’s land.’

Their pitiful-looking archway was half buried at the bottom of this large crater. It looked like it was an old crater, from an older war. It was bisected by a shallow trough lined with sandbags in places, and almost completely filled in in other places. Abandoned trench works. Abandoned some time ago by the look of them … an old battle line left to slowly fill itself in.

She wondered who the soldiers hunkered down amid the rubble of Manhattan were. She turned to look at the signs of defence structures amid the shattered industrial ruins of Brooklyn and wondered who was dug in there. Not that it mattered.

We don’t want to be stuck here.

She glanced back at the archway, looking like a pile of bricks salvaged, recycled, from some old tenement block pulled down to be replaced with something else; a mound of broken masonry at the edge of a building site. She supposed back inside — while it was still managing to hold itself up — the news wasn’t going to be any better. Sensitive equipment, computers, motherboards … how any of that could have survived that impact …

‘We’d better go back inside and see if anything’s working,’ she said eventually.

CHAPTER 27

2001, New York

Colonel William Devereau could feel the vibrations of the distant bombing raid through the floor. It felt like they were giving the front line further north, up near Queens, a pounding. They liked to do that every few days. A reminder that they had air superiority and could deliver destruction on any stretch of the front line that they chose.

Not that it achieved a whole great deal.

Their carpet bombing would create another hundred new craters, shift rubble around from one place to another and maybe inflict a few dozen casualties, but that was about the size of it. All the way along the New York sector, they were dug in deep as ticks. The damage was psychological if anything.

Devereau pulled out a crumpled packet of cigarettes: Gitanes, French made. They were as bitter as bile, but far better than the American-made lung-shredders. He lit up, took a pull and hacked a gobful of thick phlegm on to the floor. He might have bothered to quit smoking except for the fact that, statistically speaking, a sniper’s bullet or a sky-navy bomb would probably get him first anyway.

Quicker than cancer.

He took this morning’s high-command communique and swiped open the sealed envelope with the tip of his bayonet. His French was just about passable. He could read it even if he struggled to speak it. A page of telegraphed pronouncements … the usual rubbish. The war was going well, the Sheridan-DeGrise Line, running from the Atlantic, west across America, was holding true. The troops were to be congratulated and to be told keep up the good work.

Devereau balled up the communique and tossed it on to his small desk. Few of the troops spoke a word of French anyway; he could just as well tell them anything he wanted. French was the language of high echelons of command. The Union’s generals were mostly imported. Most of them well-connected, Paris-based sons of billionaires who fancied carving out a few years of military glory for themselves before settling down to a cosy life back in mainland Europe.

The troops, on the other hand, the poor wretches cowering in their bunkers right now and hoping today’s bombing raid wasn’t going to drift further south, were all local boys. Lads from Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York State, Ohio. Sons of soldiers, grandsons of soldiers who’d held the line here for the Union for the last hundred and thirty-odd years.

He laughed dryly at that. Once upon a time it was the Union of Northern American States. But not any more. The ‘Union’ by name, perhaps, but no longer run by American generals and presidents.

He sighed. Long ago he’d given up trying to explain to the lads under his command that the French and their other European allies weren’t over here bank-rolling this war for them, for their dream of a united nation of free men. They were doing it for all their own reasons. Political reasons, complicated reasons, that were hard to explain to young men who could barely read and write.

Anyway, careless talk like that about their French benefactors could end up with him smoking one of these Gitanes in front of a hastily assembled firing squad.

Ah well, do your duty, come what may. Fais ce que dois, advienne que pourra.

On the wall of his small bunker room, damp concrete sweated in patches. Among the patches hung an old sepia photograph in a wooden frame. A collector’s item now.

Devereau stood in front of it and studied the row of generals in camp chairs smiling for the photographer as they held their ceremonial sabres to one side. Generals from the old, old times, the very first period of the civil war. Generals, all of them proud sons of America: Meade, Sherman, Grant, Hancock, thick whiskers and proud smiles beneath their soft felt hats.

A soldier could fight and die for men like that. For a cause like that … a united America. For freedom. He shook his head sadly. But not for this, not for what this stale war had become: generation after generation of American boys dying on one side for the French …

The room vibrated from the sonic boom of far-off ordnance.

… and on the other side for the British.

CHAPTER 28