George Washington's Ghost

Having imagined he understood a little bit about the tortured religious and political realities of this part of the world; he had discovered, to his cost, that he had got a lot of things wrong. For example, while the Mother Church seemed to be an integral part of the governance of the Greater Antilles – Cuba, Hispaniola and Santo Domingo – New Granada, or México, as seemed to be the modern customary usage in this part of the world, was a kind of quasi-democracy in which church and state were constitutionally separate, albeit co-operative entities. Further, ‘New Spain’, a generic term he had employed for as long as he could recollect to describe, in vague terms, the Central Americas from the southern shores of the Caribbean to the line of the Rio Grande river in the south western borderlands of New England, including the vast gold and timber-rich Alta California territory which stretched half-way up the Pacific coast to Canada and included much of the Oregon Country, was actually the term the Catholic Church and the countries under its umbrella called all of the lands surrounding the Gulf of Spain. Therefore, to be a Mexican or a Cuban, Hispanic or Dominican, or to Colombian or a Venezuelan or even to a Guyana, or a Portuguese Brazilian, practically everything south and west of the Crown Colony of Georgia and the Carolinas was, in the eyes of the Mother Church, to be a citizen of ‘New Spain’. Moreover, nobody within the ‘Triple Alliance’ – another misnomer because it had more than three members – regarded the ‘Border Lands of Sonora, or Texas, let alone the Louisiana country – any of it – as ‘English’’; furthermore, Florida was no more or less than a ‘stolen colony’, and Jamaica was now a freed ‘slave state’.

Peter Cowdrey-Singh had decided that he could never be a diplomat. Diplomats had to put aside their anger and their grudges, prejudices and scruples. He doubted he would ever trust a German again, and as for the bloody Spanish, well, the sooner the Atlantic Fleet got its act together and sorted this mess out the better!

He had no idea whatsoever what he was supposed to make of von Schaffhausen’s assertion, that had ‘the British Government extended an olive leaf to the Mexicans after they overthrew the idiots who caused the last Border War,’ there would have been no opportunity for Germany to step into the regional vacuum of power. The German Minister had concluded that, as unlikely as it seemed now, there had been a genuine window of opportunity for a lasting peace, back in the mid-1960s at around the time the British and German empires were squaring up to each other in Africa and the Mediterranean; a simmering quarrel only ever thinly papered over by the Submarine Treaty.

The Emden sounded her fog horn.

One last blast of defiance.

Chapter 15

Saturday 29th April

Trinity Crossing, Unincorporated District of Northern Texas

The swirling wind had been gusting up to fifty miles-an-hour when Acting Flight Lieutenant Greg Torrance had decided, having circled for nearly twenty minutes, that he was going to have to risk attempting to land on the already muddy, well-puddled strip about a mile north east of Trinity Crossing. As it was, he had very nearly cut it too fine, with the Goshawk III’s engine misfiring as he gunned the throttle and the turned for what would be, one way or another, his final approach.

Clinging on, buffeted in the narrow space behind the pilot’s seat and the cockpit bulkhead, Flight Sergeant Bill Fielding, had heard the misfiring engine’s note alter, steadying as his pilot thinned the mixture as lean as he dared without risking seizing the fuel-starved Gloucester-Royce radial.

‘THIS IS GOING TO BE BUMPY!’ Greg Torrance had yelled.

Needless to say, Bill Fielding had already worked that out for himself!

The Goshawk had previously made several low-level passes over the field and been waved off each time, presumably because the dirt strip had been reduced to a quagmire by the cloud-burst they had passed through south of Trinity Crossing. The problem was, that there was no other strip within fifty or sixty miles, and crash-landing in the deserts flanking the Trinity River and its nearby forks, held little attraction as the darkness closed in. At least if they crashed here there was an outside chance somebody would pull them from the wreckage.

Bill Fielding felt the undercarriage lock down.

There was loose talk about the new generation of ‘jet’ aircraft being configured with nose wheels so they could land ‘fully upright’. That made sense because with the ‘jet’ installed – as was suggested – in the back of the aircraft there would be plenty of space for landing gear, guns and all sorts of other equipment to be installed in the front end of the machine…