Vavilov thought dourly. Why should you, when we’re willing to do it for you?
“I believe we understand each other,” Vavilov said.
“I hope so, Vee. But in the event I have not made myself clear, let me reiterate that the official invitation of the United States to the Soviet Seventeenth High Seas Fleet remains unaltered and in force. I trust it will be concluded to the complete satisfaction of all who love peace.”
“Governor Traynor on one,” President Wynn’s personal secretary announced in midafternoon.
Wynn lifted the receiver and said smoothly, “Tom! How nice of you to call, and how opportune-I was just about to call to congratulate you on your speech at the Statehouse yesterday. A real stem-winder. If I could declaim like that, I’d have been elected president twenty years ago.”
“Thank you, Mr. President I just said what had to be said.”
“I know. Public service can be brutal.”
“Mr. President,” Traynor said, clearing his throat, “I have something disagreeable to say. Disagreeable, but necessary if innocent lives are to be spared.”
“Then by all means say it.”
“I may have got carried away with my rhetoric- I’ll admit that-but I’ve dealt the hand and we’ll play it. Trouble is, we’re short of chips.”
“By which you mean, I suppose, that you lack the arms to launch a rebellion against the United States?”
“We lack arms to defend our homes and families, sir. The National Guard is standing by, awaiting orders. But there are tens of thousands of veterans and plain Texans armed only with deer rifles and Saturday-night specials. As their governor, I cannot let them commit suicide.”
“Then let them stay at home. That would be a wise course, and a dignified one. It would-”
“Sorry to sound impatient, sir, but that’s neither here nor there. My people need weapons. There are plenty in the federal arsenals at Nacogdoches, El Paso, and Amarillo.”
“Hmmm, that would be a problem, Governor. You see, yesterday, to celebrate Independence Day, I gave all employees at federal arsenals in Texas a week’s holiday. My secretary of Defense said they’d been working overtime and badly needed a rest, I seem to recall. Now, ordinarily the commanding officer of the arsenals would be available to tell you why it is legally impossible to release any materiel for the purposes you have in mind. But under the circumstances, I doubt that you’d find him or anybody else within miles of Nacogdoches, El Paso, or Amarillo. I’m really sorry, Tom….”
Even now, at close to midnight, they kept coming. Texans were alive to the Russian threat; they had voted secession from the United States rather than submit to it; and they were coming to Houston to fight for it.
None came unarmed, but other preparations-provisions, accommodations, a supply of ready cash-had been ignored in the rush of the moment. The urge to kill their invader blotted out all other considerations. Sleep? They would have little time for that. Hunger? They hungered not for food but for Russian scalps. Money? What they wanted only courage, not cash, could buy.
From his office high in the Herald building, Gwillam Forte watched them come, and wished Karl Marx could be at his side. That bearded philosopher conceived of man as an economic animal, a puppet pulled this way and that by the strings of the profit motive. What would he have made of this ingathering, where men were ready to sacrifice fortune and life for that most impalpable of things-self-respect?
His secure-line telephone rang.
“That you, Will?” Governor Traynor boomed.
“It’s me, Tom. I heard your sermon in stone, and I want-”
“My wants first, tonight.”
“Shoot.”
“Have you observed the traffic lately?”
“I have.”
“Well, so far it’s only cars. In about an hour you’ll be seeing trucks coming down from Nacogdoches. Early tomorrow they’ll be rolling in from El Paso and Amarillo as well. Thousands of trucks, full of arms and ammunition, from anti-tank guns to Peregrine missiles to .45-caliber pistol ammo. Thousands of tons of the stuff, and it’s got to be put out of sight on arrival. If it isn’t, it will be spotted by Russian spy satellites.”
“Where did this stuff come from?”
“It’s where it’s going that matters now, Will. It’s got to be undetectable by the Russians, yet accessible to the ship channel for our defenders when the Russians come.”
“SD-1?”
“I was thinking of those huge tunnels you drilled under the channel. Open up the entrances, and the trucks could drive right in.”
“Tell them to come right along.”
“Thanks, Will-I already have.”
6 JULY 1998: MORNING
At dawn, along the fifty-kilometer-long Houston Ship Channel from Houston down to Galveston Bay, factories and refineries, warehouses and wharves, were astir with business. The business was war.
Behind the earthen bunds that surrounded oil tank farms, men young and old were digging in and siting artillery pieces. Atop the tangled scaffolding of cat-crackers and fractional distillation columns snipers stockpiled food, water, and cases of ammunition for the long day ahead, already as hot and muggy as a tropical swamp, when they would pick off individual sailors on warships steaming up the channel. The roads were jammed with vehicles bearing supplies and ammunition, some already daubed with red crosses to bear away the inevitable casualties.
Here and there ingenious citizens were preparing a welcome of a different sort for the Russians.
At a loading dock, a hundred men and women formed an assembly line to make mines to be sown in the path of the advancing Russian column of ships. Oil drums were filled with dynamite, with just enough air spaces to provide buoyancy, then sealed, painted dirty brown-the color of the channel water-and festooned with contact fuses. The drums were linked together and towed downstream in a long line, with an interval of a hundred meters between drums. One end of the string was secured to a convenient dock, the other to the opposite shore. When the first ship hove into view, the string would be loosed from its moorings.
The lead ship would run into it, and the drums would swing in toward its hull. Three or four would explode, sowing others along the path of the following ships. Wholesale devastation would ensue. . . .
Old salts gave the sweaty saboteurs the horselaugh: dynamite wouldn’t so much as dent the Russian water-line armor plate, they claimed. The grim man in charge-a former captain in the U.S. Naval Reserve, newly commissioned at the same rank in the Texas Navy-told them to sheer off. He was well aware that it was all labor in vain, but the exploding barrels would make a hell of a racket, convey the illusion of fire power the Texas Navy didn’t possess, and give his people something to keep their minds off the overwhelming superiority of their foe.
Another group of enterprising if misguided defenders had somewhere collected five solar mirrors ranging up to two meters in diameter and were installing them atop a grain elevator at water’s edge. Their leader, who recalled the legend of Archimedes setting fire to the Greek fleet at Syracuse, proposed to make the blazing sun their ally. The concentrated rays of the sun were to be focused on the bridges of the oncoming ships, blinding helmsmen and navigating officers conning the ships and causing them to run up on the channel banks. There they would be game for the slum youth, who were already busily digging foxholes from which they intended to emerge, like pirates of old, boarding the enemy with grappling irons and bashing Russians with ball bats and bicycle chains.
Meanwhile, three dredges used to keep the channel clear were busily shifting the bottom and building shoals in the hope that deep-draught Russian vessels would run aground. Like a lot of other Texans that day, they were embracing fantasies and clutching at phantom hopes.
By four-thirty that July morning, with the sun lazily hugging the horizon, an estimated 600,000 men, women, and what the courts called children but their families proudly called men, had converged on the ship channel from all over Texas.
They were the amateurs.
The professionals-men who had served in the American armed forces, made more practical dispositions. The earliest-mobilized sited their artillery at advantageous points along the entrance to the channel, with overlapping fields of fire, reinforcing them with sandbags and even hastily poured concrete revetments. They organized provisioning parties, ammunition trains, first-aid stations, command posts, and observation stations, and were linked together by citizen-band radios from their automobiles. Enough ex-generals were on hand to staff twenty divisions, but Governor Traynor went over the heads of all of them to appoint a young, tough, energetic colonel to command.
By 0800 on 6 July, Colonel Walker had his day-old Texas Army in position facing the channel mouth, waiting for the enemy, as ready as it would ever be.
Fifteen miles out at sea, just over the horizon, the Soviet Seventeenth High Seas Fleet and its train of auxiliaries steamed slowly toward the Texas coast, just making steerageway. In the van, with destroyers on each beam and off the bow, was the flagship Karl Marx, a huge long ship whose main deck seemed to hug the surface of the sea. In the cabin of Admiral of the Soviet Union Vladimir Grell stood a handsome young man at rigid attention.