She felt Musso radiate waves of hostility and sensed the tension that suddenly strained at every muscle in his body. Blackstone, meanwhile, seemed to be enjoying himself again, grinning like a cat in front of a big bowl of cream.
‘I learned lessons in Vietnam, Kate. But I learned even more later, including the most important - which was to never stop learning, to never stop questioning your basic assumptions. Colin Powell, God rest his soul wherever it may have been taken, used to be fond of lecturing us about the lessons of Vietnam and the limits of power. But he never questioned himself about whether those limits had changed in the years between our ignoble defeat in Vietnam - for that is what it was, and the revisionists be damned - and the moment of half-achieved victory he engineered in the First Gulf War. If he had asked himself that question, I don’t believe we would have been sitting in the desert in 2003, waiting to finish the job, when the Wave swept everything away.’
‘I don’t recall you being in the desert in ‘03, Governor,’ said Musso, as though he was actually racking his memory. ‘Weren’t you in … Fort Lewis? Yes, that’s right. I seem to recall something about a military junta you were trying to impose there.’
None of the anger she had seen flash in his eyes was evident in Blackstone’s reaction to the taunt. He laughed.
‘Indeed, I was not in the desert, Tusk. Nor you, as I recall.’
Caitlin was certain this was a cue to revisit the subject of Musso’s surrender of Guantanamo to the Venezuelans, and prepared to intercede before the meeting descended into a shambles. But the Governor waved off Musso’s diversionary attack.
‘I suppose we should cherish the memory of Powell for not finishing the job the first time around. It meant we were lucky enough to have so many of our forces outside the Wave in March ‘03. But what I really wanted to say, Kate, is that I believe we are living through a time of shattered, discontinuous history, and I have come to the conclusion that it will fall to us, as it fell to our grandfathers, to resist a tyranny, to prevent it establishing itself in our world.’
‘You see yourself as Winston Churchill, then, Governor?’ Musso deadpanned.
‘No, but I see us facing the same question Churchill faced in the years when he alone stood before the truth of what was coming.’
McCutcheon returned with a steel briefcase before his boss could build up another head of steam. He placed it on the table around which they sat, careful not to scratch the surface. After entering separate combinations for both locks, he snapped open the lid and took out two folders, which he handed to Caitlin and Musso. Inside hers, Caitlin found transcripts of interviews and photographs of four men.
‘What you have here,’ said Ty McCutcheon, ‘is a record of the interrogation of the surviving members of a Federation special forces squad captured by long-range TDF patrols in central Florida -‘
‘Wait a minute,’ protested Musso. ‘Florida?’
‘Hey, I said long range,’ McCutcheon replied.
‘You’re not supposed to be in Florida.’
‘Neither are they.’
Caitlin could see the exchange getting off topic. This incident was obviously why Blackstone had sought to mend his fences with Seattle. This was why he thought he needed help. A point of weakness.
‘Gentlemen,’ she said, in Katherine Murdoch’s best warning voice. ‘Perhaps you could give us the
Blackstone’s aide checked with his boss, who nodded.
‘These four men were captured in the St Teresa area, an hour south of Tallahassee. They were part of a six-man squad, but two of their number were killed during the encounter with our lurps.’
‘Long story short, Roberto knows it will be a good ten or fifteen years before he’s consolidated his power and built up his military forces to the point where he can go head to head with us,’ said McCutcheon. There was no trace of the drunken frat boy who had entertained everybody in the bar last night. Not much trace of a hangover either. ‘Our residual power is considerable, for now. Meanwhile, he’s trying to weld together a transnational force from the bits and pieces he cherry-picked from the carcasses of the South American states he took over.’
Caitlin glanced across at Musso, who had lost interest in butting heads with Blackstone and was now immersed in the documentation.
‘But Morales understands that we are completely overstretched in the three areas we do control. The Pacific Northwest, the New York-New England enclave and Texas. From the debriefing of his special forces guys, we’ve ascertained that he is interested in seeding colony settlements well outside our area of influence and direct control. That’s what these guys were doing. Forward recon. The idea is they grab up the turf, establish squatters’ rights, and dare us to do something about it when we eventually discover them.’
Caitlin didn’t bother reading the transcripts. As Colonel Murdoch, she was willing to take McCutcheon’s word for the gist of the document.
‘That didn’t work for Baumer and Ozal in New York,’ she said, curious to see whether either man would react to the two names. They didn’t, for which she had to credit them. ‘Surely New York disabused Morales of the idea he could just wander in here and plant his flag?’
Blackstone seemed pleased to have been asked that one. ‘That’s where Morales has proven himself to be smarter than Powell,’ he replied. ‘Predictably enough for a former gang leader. You would expect him to understand turf wars. What he learned from New York was modesty. When you sit down and read the transcripts, and I don’t expect you to do so now, you’ll see the Federation takes away from New York a realisation not to challenge us openly, head on. There’s no military component to what they were planning in Florida, apart from the special forces doing advance reconnaissance. They intend to set up small, discrete civilian colonies, to grow them quietly, until the point where the colonies would declare themselves for the South American Federation, rather than us. At that point, it would actually benefit Morales if we responded in the way we did in New York. They could then sweep in and portray themselves as the protector. Any civilian casualties would count against us. The settlements would beg for protection from the imperialist
‘They weren’t that special, as it turned out.’ McCutcheon grinned.
‘We’ll need to debrief the prisoners ourselves,’ said Musso, who appeared to be trying to keep an open mind.
‘Not a problem,’ the aide shot back. ‘Well, sorry … there
Musso sent a withering look his way, although Caitlin could see the former Marine had been thrown by the unexpected development. As much by Fort Hood’s activities in Florida as by Roberto Morales, she imagined. She purposely closed the folder and returned it to the table.
‘This is interesting, gentlemen,’ she said. ‘And I mean that. The Chief of Staff, and I imagine the President, will be both interested and grateful to see this. It will go into my report.’ She glanced over at General Musso. ‘But given that we’ve caught this so early, do you really think it’s necessary to reassign scarce military resources when we could achieve the same result, scaring him off, with a quiet, diplomatic word?’
‘Ty? Would you?’ Blackstone asked, nodding towards the pastry tray.
‘Sure,’ said his aide, standing up to retrieve a danish.
‘I suppose we could do that, Kate,’ said Blackstone. ‘Me, I’m an old-fashioned guy. I’d just nuke the son of a bitch. You take this information back to Seattle, you might even find that James Ritchie agrees with me for once. After all, he tossed off a couple at Chavez on Musso’s behalf.’
The federal officer shrugged off yet another dig at his Guantanamo record. ‘This does need to be dealt with,’ he began, holding up one of the interrogation transcripts. ‘But Colonel Murdoch is correct. You caught this early. It’s a little problem, needing little effort to address. Especially since we have the prisoners. There’s no explaining them away.’
At that, Blackstone mulled so long that Caitlin started to wonder whether he intended to simply ignore
