After a moment’s glaring test of wills, the other man obeyed. “Admiral Cunningham, your objections are noted. You will now cooperate fully in carrying out the decisions of the Minister of Marine and the Naval Staff, or you will tender your resignation immediately. Is that clear?”
Twenty minutes later John Hosten sank back in his chair, shaking his head as he looked at the door that Cunningham had carefully not slammed behind him.
“I hope there aren’t too many more like him, Dad,” he said.
Maurice Farr sighed. His close-cut hair and mustache were gray now, but he looked as trim as he had when he stood on the docks of Oathtaking nearly two decades before.
“I’m afraid there are quite a few,” he said. “A lot of the officers are convinced that this is being forced on the navy by politicians—and Highlander politicians from the east, at that, with their industrialist friends.” He smiled. “They’re right, aren’t they?”
“But—” John began, then caught the look in his stepfather’s eye. “You can still get me going, can’t you?”
Farr laughed. “You take everything a bit too seriously, son,” he said. “Don’t worry; Artie Cunningham would rather eat his young than resign just before the first big naval war in a generation. If he has to swallow that”—he nodded at the model of the aircraft carrier that filled the center of the big table—”he’ll swallow it, for the sake of the battlewagons.”
Farr lit a cigarette. “He’s not stupid, just rather specialized,” he went on. “I can understand him; I’m a cannon-and-armorplate sailor myself. But I don’t like operating blind.” He stared at the model. “I do hope this concept’s as workable as you and Jeffrey say. It looks good on paper, certainly, but I don’t like ordering straight from the drawing board.”
“Dad, I’m as sure as if I’d seen them fight battles myself.”
pearl harbor, Center said helpfully. the pursuit of the bismark. taranto. midway—
Great, and how do I tell Dad that? John replied. Hastily: That was a rhetorical question.
Maurice Farr rose and began stacking papers in his briefcase. “No rest for the wicked—I’ve got to get back to HQ and deal with more bumpf. God, for a fleet command.”
“Not long, I think, Dad,” John said.
A long moment after his stepfather had left John heard the door behind him open.
“Touching,” a voice said in Landisch.
“English,” John said sharply. “Tradecraft.”
“Oh, indeed.”
The man—he was dressed in Santander civilian clothes, with a well-known yachting club’s pattern of cravat—came and sat not far from John. He looked at a duplicate set of the airshipwreck photos.
“What caused this?”
“The design was overweight and underpowered; they took out a section in the center and enlarged it to take an extra gasbag. The bag chafed against the bolts internally, and they had a terrible problem with leaks. Probably they nosed in on that hill in the dark, or there was a fire from static discharge, or both.”
“Sloppy,” the Chosen officer said, tucking the pictures away. He nodded to the model of the aircraft carrier. “Will this work?”
“Probably, after a fashion. I can’t turn down all the good ideas, you know—not and keep my standing with the military and defense industries.”
“Indeed.”
“I suppose we’ll have to build them, too. Dirigibles are so vulnerable to heavier-than-air pursuit planes.”
“Perhaps,” the intelligence officer said. “And perhaps not.”
* * *
“Straight and level, straight and level, damn your eyes,” Horst Raske said, in a tone that was as close to a prayer as one of the Chosen was likely to get.
The bridge of the Grey Tiger was vibrating itself, very slightly, despite the skilled hands on the wheels and controls set about the U-shaped space. Through the vast semicircle of clear window they could see the teardrop shape of the experimental airship carrier Orca as she quivered in the clear air over the Land’s central plateau, a hundred miles north of Copernik. The craft was huge, nearly a thousand feet from nose to stern, with beautiful swept control fins in an X at the rear, its smooth sheet-aluminum hull showing it to be one of the new metalclads.