"Yes, nice to meet you, sir," Deitel said. "So where is . . ."

And his voice trailed off.

Deitel looked at Chuy, then at Rucker, and then at the ginger.

Finally, Deitel found his voice.

"Um, Tracy?"

"Why, of course, old boy," Tracy said excitedly.

Chuy and Rucker didn't blink or seem phased. Actually, they looked amused. This was another of their jokes?

"I, um . . . that is, er . . . you're Tracy? You've been married to Chuy for three years?"

Tracy grasped Chuy's hand and squeezed it. "Three years and three days."

Chuy gave Tracy a peck on the cheek.

Deitel just didn't know what to say. If he had any thoughts on how libertine or decadent these western societies were, he did not consider them now. He chose the most appropriate and polite option-he said nothing.

"No worries, old boy. Yes, we're benders. Nothing to be embarra.s.sed about for you or us, yes?" Tracy said. "But I expect that it's not exactly what you expected."

Deitel nodded and smiled a stiff grin.

"But life would be very dull if everything occurred as expected, no?" Chuy finished.

Deitel, well, he was Old World. He had to ask.

"You're serious? You're not having me on?" he asked, though very respectfully.

"Well, it's not exactly common-more common in Brazil than the Freehold," Chuy said. "But the Freehold has its share of pansy clubs. William Haines is the biggest screen star in Cabo Madera, after all, and he's made no secret that he bends. Married to Jimmie Shields."

"And a tall drink of water Jimmie is," Tracy said in a teasing voice.

Chuy poked the English ginger playfully in the ribs and then put his arm around him.

"So . . . um . . . you're sure then?" Deitel asked, cringing at the stupidity of the question.

"Last I checked" Chuy said.

"It's not even legal in Britain, and one suspects it's the national past time of at least half of all British men," Deitel said.

Rucker laughed at that one.

"Well, here it's a church's business who gets married, not the law, so long as everyone's of age," Chuy said. "We have a wide variety of churches."

And there it went-that sense of normalcy. It crept in over breakfast, and then it slipped away like trying to hold mercury. Not that falschamenn, as they were called in Germany, were unheard of-especially among the upper cla.s.ses, or as part of the boarding school experience. But to engage in such brashly open deviancy was, well, unseemly in most of German society even before the rise of the New Order.

Oddly, though, this wasn't the strangest thing Deitel had seen since his arrival in the Western Hemisphere. So there was that.

Rucker checked his watch.

"Doc, you and Tracy stick around. Lysander should be arriving in about twenty minutes. Chuy and I need to go finish prepping the Raposa. Terah has a private conference room set up for one P.M. for the briefing."

"The Terror?" Chuy asked, his expression unsettled for the first time.

"Don't even start," Rucker said as they headed off the to the maintenance deck. "Yeah, she's here."

Deitel didn't know what to expect when he was stuck one-on-one with Tracy-an English bender. No, that wasn't very polite. He was Chuy's . . . um . . . He was Chuy's, and proper manners meant he shouldn't take notice. Even though in his mind he was already seeing all the coming awkward silences. The start/stop cadence of forced fraternization and obligatory laughter. He groaned inwardly.

Twenty minutes later and Deitel's sides hurt from laughing.

Tracy's medical knowledge was impressive. The man knew horses like a professional breeder. And they even talked about their mutual fear of heights.

None of that mattered.

Tracy Lago knew the best dirty nurse and dirty medical schoolteacher jokes Deitel had ever heard.

When the PA announced that the charter from Austin would be landing presently, he was giving Tracy his own cynical take on the New Order and its mustachioed master-expressing criticisms that had been bottled up inside him for five years now.

"What I still don't get is, how did the little man not get into art school? I mean, all you have to do is open the door, really," Tracy was saying. "The only thing that's more of a joke in terms of university concentration is the 'education major' they offer in Union States."

"Ach. I don't know. But I'm sure somehow the Hebrews were to blame," Deitel said. "He manages to blame them for everything, anyhow."

Tracy paused for a moment.

"Before Lysander gets here," he said, "how is Rucker holding up? You know, with the whole Terah thing?"

"It is difficult if not impossible to say. When I first saw them together, it looked as if she'd kissed him and then hit him with a closed fist," Deitel said. "Or hit him and then kissed him."

The Englishman nodded. "That sounds about right."

"On the flight here, they spent most of their time behind closed doors, and at least some of the noise they made was not amorous in nature," Deitel said. "When I asked Rucker if he felt okay, he said, 'Sure. Why wouldn't I?' And nothing more. Except, 'Shut up, Hans,' which is what he calls me when he's avoiding my questions."

"West Texans are like that. The more they feel something, the less they show it," Tracy said, putting out his cigarette. "They have only two moods they let the world see: happy or angry."

He could see Deitel didn't follow.

"You have to remember where they come from, how their country was forged, and what kind of people it took to tame that land. Texans don't live in the softer, subtler pastels. They live in the bold primaries," Tracy said. "The Brazilians, too. It's why I moved here. That, and Chuy. They're a pa.s.sionate people. Not wild-eyed, uncontrolled pa.s.sion, mind you. Focused pa.s.sions. Their edges honed."

The doctor nodded.

"What happened with Terah and Rucker?" Deitel asked, out of genuine concern rather than voyeuristic curiosity. Okay, maybe there was a little of that in there, too.

"You're probably asking the wrong man. Or the wrong type of man," Tracy said, and Deitel raised an eyebrow at his joke. "But she is beautiful and pa.s.sionate. It probably doesn't help that she's a little crazy, from what I'm told."

"When I first saw her," Deitel said, "she'd just carved letters into the forehead of the American amba.s.sador to Hawaii."

"Well then, probably not the best first impression. But remember, that was a rational act."

"That's strange. I thought I just heard you say desecrating a body was rational," Deitel said.

"It's for the family of the little girl that monster defiled," Tracy explained. "He took the girl's innocence. Terah took his life and signed her work. It's not an ethic I grew up with-I'm from the east end of London-but as I understand it, it settles accounts."

A little silence followed.

"What do you think of this practice, though?" Deitel asked.

Tracy lighted another cigarette and considered his answer.

"If you'd asked me five years ago, I would have said it was a revolting and barbaric practice. What one expects of the primitive colonials," Tracy said, mocking his own English accent. "But then five years ago I was living in a country where you can have damages a.s.sessed and levied against you for defending yourself against a burglar. It's a country where men like me are subject to taunts and physical a.s.sault. By people on the street. By police. All for whom we love. So my perspective on what's barbaric and revolting has evolved somewhat."

Deitel didn't know what to say to that.

"Well maybe you can tell me one thing-the name Rucker's friends call him-Fox. Is that his true name? Is it a common name?" Deitel asked.

Tracy pursed his lips.

"Well, you didn't hear this from me, but Fox is not his given name. It's a nickname he picked up in flight school, from what Chuy tells me."

"Oh, like he was crafty as a pilot?" Deitel asked.

"Not exactly. You see, during the initial evaluation at the flight school Rucker went to, there was a checklist of basic skills you had to pa.s.s on day one. Physical Fitness, Flight Orientation, Basic Controls, Instrument Reading, and so on. Each identified by its initials-PT, FO, you get the idea. A student pilot would get a check if you pa.s.sed and a red X if you failed," Tracy said. "Well, apparently Rucker wasn't exactly a natural. He failed Flight Orientation five times before he got it right: FO-X. Other students made it a nickname to razz him, but he wore it as a badge of honor. He just wouldn't quit trying. That's what I think is so special about him. Once he sets his mind to something, he will not stop."

Deitel suddenly looked pale.

"Mein Gott," he said. "I've been flying across the country with a man who failed the first day of flight school five times."

Tracy smiled.

"But he pa.s.sed the sixth. Come, Doctor, let's go and greet Mr. Benjamin."

Lysander Benjamin and his most talented Difference Engine technician, a bookish little man by the name of Jonathan Biel, brought the two crates of materials that Terah requested by radio. With an hour before Terah would be ready for her briefing, Deitel, Lysander, Tracy, and Biel took an early tea together on the westerly observation deck.

Benjamin, Deitel learned, was a Jewish immigrant to Texas from the CSA. His great uncle, Judah Benjamin, had served as president of the Confederacy from 1868 to 1876. Lysander, incidentally, was named after President Benjamin's successor and close friend, Lysander Spooner.

Lysander attended Oxford and then the Sorbonne in the late 1880s. As a mechanical engineer with a decidedly entrepreneurial bent, Lysander had built and sold several successful small businesses in the CSA. He retired relatively young and traveled the world for more than five years. When it came time to settle down, he chose to emigrate to the Freehold. Asked why, he said the women were the most pleasing.

Lysander had a much larger perspective than most men his age, who usually have minds in the process of contracting. Lysander thought that Rucker had been only half right when he'd explained why the Freehold and its sister nation of Brazil had remained neutral in world conflicts over the past seventy years. There was far more to it, he argued, than the ugliness and guilt after the San Marcos Ma.s.sacre.

It came down to money.

"Freeholders want customers, not subjects," Lysander said.

"And yet your sphere of influence is called the Tropical Empire," Deitel said.

"They do have irony in Germany still, yes?" Lysander asked with a twinkle in his eye. "In the last days of the nineteenth century, a company out of Lamar, Texas, called Cactus Jack's Tropical Sun Goods and Sundries, started opening franchises in just about every country on the far horizon. He'd go anywhere people wanted fresh tropical goodies and had the money to pay for them."

Cactus Jack's wasn't the first franchise exporter or global delivery firm. And Cactus Jack himself wasn't a native Texan or Brazilian-he was an immigrant from Corsica, of all places. He was just a genius at branding.

"An orange is an orange and a mango is a mango. But when you couple that exotic taste with that distinct pith helmet and palm tree logo, customers start asking for you by name. And hence his compet.i.tors started complaining about the Freehold and its 'Tropical Empire.' "

To Deitel's mind, Lysander's take was rationalized mythology. But then he weighed it against the appalling New Order beliefs his own countrymen had embraced recently, when only fifteen years before Germany had been at the forefront of Western philosophy, scholarship, culture, and art.

Conclusion: Deitel had no high ground on which to stand.

Of course, the whole of this New World perspective with its emphasis on moneymaking was hard for the European mind to grasp. To most Europeans like Deitel, wealth was morally suspect and economic mobility even more so.

Economic stasis was considered desirable for the stability and security it provided. It ensured less rootless mobility, and protected against disparity between the cla.s.ses, neither of which seemed to concern the Freeholders. The European model ensured a sense of community and unity that the Freeholders, the Brazilians, and the French couldn't conceive of or appreciate.

All this time Tracy was politely silent. Biel, who had been tapping at his portable Difference Engine throughout tea, never looked up. About then Chuy and Rucker sat down-their flight check complete. Terah entered the cafe and walked to the head of the table.

"Gentlemen, if you'll join me in the conference room, I'm ready. I know you're worried about n.a.z.i transgenic engineering and these cannibal creatures. And you should be. But the scenario we're actually facing? It's far, far worse than you think."

"It usually is," Rucker said.

Lieutenant Otto Skorzeny joined Hitler's movement a year before the Beer Hall Revolution of 1922 that brought the n.a.z.is to power. It was a quick end to the nascent, weak Weimar Republic. An engineer by education, Skorzeny had shown a remarkable talent for planning and executing unorthodox military tactics in his early days as a noncommissioned officer in the Sturmabteilun Brown Shirts.

When he transferred to the newly created SS, Skorzeny's daredevil att.i.tude made him a pioneer in paratrooper and glider tactics. His ferocity and incorporation of eastern martial arts into small unit training led to his creation of the first independent SS commando unit, created from the combat engineering team he had originally been a.s.signed.

His superiors noted that Skorzeny's brilliance and ruthlessness in intelligence work made him more dangerous than a full company of elite soldiers. His devilish good looks and very non-German nonchalance made him a favorite in upper Waffen-SS circles.

By the time the Waffen-SS had put down the Brown Shirts and marched into Austria for the Anschluss, Skorzeny was heading up the entire SS special services division. He was a brilliant planner and field commander, and yet he was just as comfortable and capable of operating as a lone wolf or working undercover. A man of singular talents, he was putting them to work now tailing the Freeholders in the hope they would lead the way back to the threads lost because of the incompetence of Ahnenerbe agents.

This was how it came to be that he was executing a unique variant of the high alt.i.tude, low opening parachute jump called HALO by fallschirmjager troopers. He'd jumped from about two miles above Airstrip One-fully four miles above sea level-and opened his chute barely two hundred feet above the tiny target that was the floating aerodrome control tower. It was one of only two blind spots on the entire upper deck. His target was the top of the control tower.

Just fifteen feet above the tower roof-and only seconds since he'd deployed his chute-Skorzeny cut it loose and dropped the rest of the distance. This allowed his chute to be carried away from the tower and out of sight in the strong winds.

He climbed down the side of the tower and gained access to the interior of Airstrip One through a vent shaft. Inside, he stripped off his jumpsuit to reveal casual civilian clothes.

It had never occurred to Skorzeny that this fantastic structure was a civilian aerodrome, not a Freehold military installation. He could simply have landed like any other flight, as any paying flight was welcome.

But the fact was, even if he had known, Skorzeny would have preferred this approach just for the excitement.

"Sehr gut," Skorzeny said to himself, then switched to near perfect English. If there was any trace of his German accent, he disguised it with a slight and faux Castilian accent.

"Now we play cowboys and Aryans."

CHAPTER TEN.

Airstrip One Conference Room "It's called the Spear of Destiny. We don't know how, but it could determine the very destiny of the world because the Germans seem to think it will make them invincible."