The Company of the Dead (30 page)

“What is the time at home, Colonel?” the Prince asked in a soft yet distinct voice.

“It would be five o’clock in the morning, Highness.”

Sada-Omi grasped the briefcase clasps and opened the lid. The top of the case was lined with black velvet. At the bottom was a small silver console embedded in similar material. The console was bare, with the exception of two small switches. The Prince flicked the left switch forwards. The console emitted a small high-pitched note.

“
Sonno joi
,” the colonel said.
Revere the Emperor, expel the Barbarians
.

The Prince placed his right hand on the second switch. He looked up at the colonel.

“Once,” he said, “I went with my father and brother to stay with our cousins in Kyoto. On the last morning of our visit I was awakened by a soft knock at my door. It was Keiko, my oldest cousin. She would have been nineteen at the time. I was sixteen.”

Sada-Omi could feel Morishita’s breath against his neck. The colonel was gazing at him thoughtfully.

“She led me out of the house and down through the palace gardens to the temple. Are you familiar with the temple in Kyoto?”

“I am,” the colonel replied with a little smile.

“She took me to the edge of the lake that lies before the temple’s entrance, bade me to sit down on the shore, and, without a word, she dived into the water. She emerged a few moments later and stood upon a small rock a short way out into the lake. The sun was just rising and the water was the lightest shade of blue.”

Sada-Omi shook his head slowly, the fingers of his right hand stroking the soft felt around the second switch.

“I looked at her and at her perfect reflection as she stood upon this little rock, and I willed my own likeness, my mirror image, to go out and embrace hers. Recalling that moment, I think the time must have been about five o’clock.”

He flicked the second switch.

The royal train had left the Bismarckplatz at eight o’clock, bound for Danzig. Kaiser Wilhelm Friedrich Ludwig III sat in the rear-most carriage.

He had yet to offer his apologies to Prince Sada-Omi for his absence from the upcoming peace talks. That could wait till morning. He faced the rear of the carriage. By day he enjoyed viewing the countryside, a thin plume of grey smoke marking the train’s serpentine trail. By night he took pleasure in watching the city lights recede in a tide of luminescent hillsides and valleys.

The Empress had contacted him two hours earlier to inform him that his youngest son had taken ill. She’d implored him to leave the capital as the royal physician was concerned about the boy’s health. He had then spoken to the doctor himself, who had earnestly reassured him that the boy would be well. The truth be told, he was more concerned about his wife’s well-being.

These Romanovs have been nothing but trouble for my family
, he mused, sighing.
My wife may well be Empress of Prussia but she’ll always be the Tsar’s daughter.

He reached out a hand and grasped the gold-braided rope by his side, giving it a gentle tug.

He pondered the events that had led him to this moment. His marriage had been one of convenience, orchestrated by his grandfather whilst he had been studying at Oxford. The royal wedding had been the culmination of an arrangement forged thirty years before his birth to cement the ties between the royal families of Germany and Russia.

Following the Great War and the subsequent revolution in Russia, Tsar Nicholas II had petitioned all the royal families of Europe for sanctuary. The Windsors had refused. They had enough troubles in the wake of England’s defeat without having to care for a royal family that had more legal claim to their throne than they did. In Spain and Austro-Hungary, the Romanovs were again turned away. Finally, the Tsar had been forced to request a meeting with his enemy, Kaiser Wilhelm I of Prussia. The armies of White Russia, by this time exhausted, were on the verge of defeat at the hands of the Bolsheviks. It was exile or death for Tsar Nicholas and his family.

Wilhelm accepted the Romanovs’ plea with a single stipulation. He offered the deposed Tsar a palace in Königsberg by the sea. He accorded Nicholas every honour in exchange for one promise: should the Romanov family ever be reinstated to the Russian throne, the Tsar’s first-born daughter would be betrothed to the German Prince-Regent. The crown of Russia would then pass to their descendants, linking both nations under one rule. German rule. The empire, thus formed, would extend from the Rhine to the steppes of Asia.

Less than a generation passed before this gentlemen’s agreement became a possibility. In February of 1941, following a brief skirmish with the Japanese over Eastern interests, Stalin had turned his attention to the West. The USSR invaded Lithuania, Estonia and Carpathia. The recently formed Duchy of Poland turned to the Germans for assistance, fearful that the Soviets would refuse to halt at their borders. The English, beholden to Germany for its aid during the Irish revolt of 1925, and fearing communist expansion, offered naval support. Then, in a surprising turn of events, the Axis Powers, comprised of the fascist governments in France, Italy and Spain, declared an alliance with the Russians.

Though France and Russia had been allies in the Great War, their unconditional defeat and respective revolutions had led to the formation of regimes that lay at opposite sides of the political spectrum. Yet they shared a common goal: the destruction of the German Empire. Less than twenty-five years after the War to End All Wars, the major nations of Europe were once again embroiled in conflict. The European War had begun.

There was a knock at the carriage door. Wilhelm III glanced up at the rear-carriage window.

“Come.”

A servant in a white dress coat entered the cabin. He glided with a steady grace, unmindful of the train’s undulation, and placed a metal tray on the Kaiser’s lap. He bowed slightly and backed out of the carriage.

Wilhelm III returned to his musings. The European War. A brief but bloody conflict that ended with German victory and the restoration of monarchies to all the nations of Europe. A continent of kings, but with only one Emperor. Wilhelm II, his grandfather.

He sipped slowly at his brandy.

I love my wife
, he thought.
A happy accident, all things considered, but she has only brought me liability. The Russian Empire is a toothless lion that I am now obliged to defend. They
chose
to provoke a century-old argument with the Japanese, and look what it has brought them.

The Japanese now hold a line from Tiksi to Vladivostok. They obviously have had a hand in the uprising in Kazakhstan and there have been rumours of Japanese troops sighted as far west as Omsk. What do they hope to achieve?

It happened with great swiftness.

Wilhelm felt the train lurch forwards.

A wave of pure force swept through the carriage. It crushed him into his chair, forcing it back on straining hinges. Caught in that moment between reflex and reason, he watched as the stained glass windows shattered in rapid sequence. The spinning brandy glass, caught mid-turn, exploded in a shower of glittering motes. And then the wind came.

The fires still raged over the horizon yet it was deathly cold. Wilhelm sat in the front seat of a wagon beside an elderly man wearing a worn greatcoat. Behind him, a few of the blast’s survivors huddled on the wagon’s sawdust-strewn tray. Looking about, he made out various cloaked figures on horseback.

A thin fog had risen, skirting the trees.

His entourage was made up of cavalry officers and cooks, statesmen and servants. After the blast had struck, the train had careened wildly of its tracks. The locomotive and its first four carriages slammed into the side of a station house, bursting into flames. Caught in the winds that accompanied the explosion, they were engulfed by an inferno.

The last three carriages had remained on the rails. Wilhelm, crouched behind his upturned seat, watched in wonder as his carriage traversed the wall of fire to emerge, unscathed, on the other side of the small building.

In moments he’d been dragged from the carriage and into the open air. Slowly he realised what had occurred, even though it was beyond any measure of comprehension.

Berlin was gone. Where the city had once stood, a vast rolling cloud was settling. It pulsed and glowed with unearthly light beneath an expanding mushroom of heated air and flame.

Most of his honour guard lay crushed or burnt inside the wreck. The remainder formed around him, phantoms in their dark cloaks and mud-specked helmets. Behind them, a ragged squad of the other survivors stood in disarray. There were no radios. The torches did not work.

Nothing worked.

His men stood, shoulders slack, faces pale and slick with perspiration. And then the words had issued from his mouth. “Stand firm. We will mourn our city once we have avenged her.”

Those who could walk followed their Kaiser along the railway track. Somehow he’d led his men to a derelict farmhouse and enlisted the aid of this elderly man. Sitting now in the wagon, he could not recall a further word he’d said.

There was much to do.

Once he reached a functioning radio, he would need to set up headquarters and assess the extent of the damage to his empire.
How high was the detonation? What was the range of the pulse?

Even in the unlikely event that this horror was the action of a third party, there was no doubting that the Japanese would capitalise on the situation. They already had large numbers of men committed in East Russia, but there were numerous potential fronts for armed conflict. From the westernmost provinces of Occupied China, they could enter and support the communist rebels in Kazakhstan. They could also, just as easily, swing southwest into India and Pakistan, threatening German interests there as well. And they could always rely on the Mexicans to make trouble in Confederate America should they consider taking on the Southern states.

Of course, the Reich had been mobilised for weeks now. When the
Titanic
had sailed out from the new Harland-Wolff shipyards in Bremen to pick up the delegates at Southampton, she already had a complement of nearly three thousand men on board. Two years of meticulous planning had delivered the cream of Germany’s shock troops past all of the Japanese defences. In the unlikely event that ongoing peace talks succeeded, they would be redeployed elsewhere. Perhaps secreted into the soft underbelly of Japan’s East Asian holdings where they might play havoc for years, undetected. Moreover, the 5th Fleet remained deployed in the Atlantic, under the pretence of war games. Crack troops in Bavaria, India and the Confederate States of America were available for active duty.

War with Japan.

Wilhelm considered the scenarios, played each of them out in his mind to their violent conclusion.

It starts with an atomic strike. A crippling blow to destroy my government, crushing my people’s spirit. They will dig in to their positions in Russia,
forcing a stalemate. They mean to dispose of the Confederacy, apportion the Southern Continent to the Mexicans. Canada, cowed by the threat to its borders, will not take action, and we will be compelled into an unacceptable peace, leaving the New World to the Japanese. That is what I would do, were I Ryuichi.

But God in Heaven, they started with an
atomic strike
. We have always entertained a contingency plan to
end
any possible conflict with nuclear weapons, but to
commence
one with them? Where will this end?

No long-range bombers could have reached Berlin, not without raising an alarm. Therefore the device had to have been aboard the
Kamikaze
. So it was unlikely that any other cities had been attacked, as yet. The enemy
had
to be under the assumption that he was dead, that his government was undone. Why else risk the enmity of the world, unless they concluded that this would bring them swift victory? Cut off the head of the empire and leave the carcass floundering while they divided it piecemeal.

They had made their play and it was found wanting.

He would find the place where the electromagnetic pulse of the blast had waned. He would broadcast the orders himself. Coordinate the vast movements linking the Anglo–Canadian forces in the North with the Germano–Confederate forces of the South. He would seize and hold New York—the Shogun would die in his place. The city would burn for Berlin.

Where would this
end
? He’d seen what happened to the survivors of the first atomic tests in North Afrika, and he’d been caught too close to his city to escape that fate. But he would have his revenge. His stratolite fleet would visit such vengeance upon the Japanese Isles. They would make a suitable pyre for his own inevitable funeral. They would sink beneath their own ashes.

He felt his eyelids flutter and grow heavy. His men were singing softly, an ancient song of war and conquest. He fought the urge to sleep. He saw his men through the swirl of the mist. The old horses they rode, ribbed and manged, seemed transformed into mighty steeds. The cooks and train engineers had become his squires and footmen. He dreamt he was a Teutonic Knight, riding eastwards into history.

Nightfall, and the tanks were rolling down Broadway.

Eight days earlier, the
Titanic
had berthed at the Lower West Side docks of Manhattan. After the fireworks and the speeches, as twilight settled upon the city, the first wave of Brandenburg shock troops moved into position. Once in place, the operatives who’d strolled down the ship’s gangway in suits, overalls and crew uniforms met with their various contacts. In bars and cafés, private homes and movie theatres, they went over their various assignments.

Eight days, then the world changed forever.

Protocols had been put into place and they were followed with meticulous fervour. Power lines went down and fuel dumps blazed. Computing systems were disabled and a series of assassinations were carried out throughout the blackened city. Frogmen, emerging from concealed hatches beneath the
Titanic
’s waterline, swam out to attach magnetic mines along the hulls of nearby Japanese warships. They targeted the engine rooms, sonar domes, screws and rudders, and were safely back aboard their ship before the first explosions rocked the harbour.