George Washington's Ghost

Every site had to be photographed, measured, samples taken, and in this case, hacked out of the heat-fused earth; tasks that needed to be accomplished in a screaming hurry because, despite the otherwise generally relaxed atmosphere of the incursion into the contested lands thus far, this was still a war zone.

Rodrigo looked to the ridiculously young lieutenant of horse, commanding the fifteen men of the 103rd Republican Reconnaissance Troop, around the circle of dusty soldiers, and at the poker faces of his faithful Navajo scouts.

“Ceterum autem censeo Carthaginem esse delendam,” he said, quirking a grimly rueful smile. “So said Cato the Censor over two thousand years ago, to the Senate of the Roman Republic after Rome had been defeated by the Carthaginians in two wars.”

“What does it mean, Don Rodrigo?”

Another man, one of the surveyor students stepped into the circle of faces.

“It is Latin,” he explained before he reconsidered the wisdom of speaking without his professor’s leave.

Rodrigo nodded to him to continue.

“It translates, I think to something like: ‘Furthermore, I consider that Carthage must be destroyed.’”

The older man nodded again.

“I think we have come to a place of death, gentlemen.”

Rodrigo let this sink in.

“In the coming days we will survey the rest of the plateau. Then we will return to the south.” He straightened to his full height. It would be dusk soon, it had been a long, hard day in the saddle and his people needed to set up camp, heat their rations and sleep if they could in the cold of the desert night. “Let us get about making camp. We will move out one hour before dawn tomorrow morning!”

Rodrigo watched his men going about their work.

Presently, he realised that the student who had spoken lingered at his side.

“Is that what this is, Don Rodrigo?” He asked, grimly. “Our wars with the English, I mean? Some latter-day version of the Punic Wars?”

Rodrigo smiled thinly.

The boy was related to that notorious Imperial playboy, the Duke of Medina Sidonia. His father was that popinjay Pérez de Guzmán’s first cousin. Hopefully, if the rumours about some kind of popular rebellion in the old country were true, people like him had been the first up against the wall and shot! Allegedly, young Carlos, a handsome young man, closely resembled the younger 18th Duke at his age.

“I think you know what this is, Carlos,” he said lowly, waving a hand at the twisted, heat-deformed stump of the tower less than thirty feet away.

The boy was reading Geology and Roman History, the former an obsession and the latter his ‘hobby’, he was an exceptionally bright kid, the sort of student who excelled at everything he touched but might as easily, stumble at the first hurdle when he departed the cloistered, insular world of academia. But that was a problem for the future.

“I don’t want to believe what I think it is, Master,” Carlos de Guzmán confessed, using Rodrigo’s formal University title in his anxiety.

His professor shrugged.

“Isn’t the lesson of history that great powers, like Rome and the English, one day lose their patience and determine to destroy their enemies? Roman history is your subject, not mine,” the older man reminded his protégé, “but didn’t Rome get so fed up with Carthage that one day it decided to destroy it so utterly that not one stone remained above another?”

“Yes,” Carlos said. He looked to his tutor; his eyes troubled. “But not even the English would destroy whole nations? Would they?”

Rodrigo did not know the answer to that question.

All that he knew was that before him, stretching away to the horizon to the north and the east were the abandoned, secret testing grounds of bombs which might, one day soon, sweep the civilisation of New Spain off the face of the Earth.

Chapter 3

Monday 24th April

Leigh Halt, Kent

His Majesty George the Fifth, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of His Other Realms and Territories King, Head of the Commonwealth, and Defender of the Faith, stepped down, shot his cuffs and turned to offer his wife his arm as she joined him on the platform of the railway station.

Normally, the 10:17 from Charing Cross would have swept on past the picturesque rural station at the village of Leigh to Tonbridge, some three miles to its east; but then normally, it only had one, not two First-Class carriages, the second of which, today, had been commandeered by the Royal Party. In the way of these things, the short journey by car to the King and Queen’s destination that morning, whether setting out from Leigh or Tonbridge, a little farther away, would have been neither here nor there. However, there would inevitably have been a lot more fuss and bother in Tonbridge, whereas, at a little-used halt in the countryside, the fiction that the ‘Royals’ were fulfilling a ‘private family’ engagement was, if not wholly convincing, then at least, plausible.