New England 05 - George Washington's Ghost, page 1
James Philip
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GEORGE
WASHINGTON’S
GHOST
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The New England Series – Book 5
Copyright © James P. Coldham writing as James Philip 2020.
All rights reserved.
Cover concept by James Philip
Graphic Design by Beastleigh Web Design
THE NEW ENGLAND SERIES
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BOOK 1: EMPIRE DAY
BOOK 2: TWO HUNDRED LOST YEARS
BOOK 3: TRAVELS THROUGH THE WIND
Book 4: Remember Brave Achilles
BOOK 5: GEORGE WASHINGTON’S GHOST
Coming later in 2020
Book 6: Imperial Crisis
FUTURE TITLES
BOOK 7: THE LINES OF LAREDO
BOOK 8: THE HALLS OF MONTEZUMA
BOOK 9: ISLANDS IN THE STREAM
BOOK 10: THE GATHERING PLACE
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Details of all my books and future release dates will appear first on my web site
www.jamesphilip.co.uk
Contents
PROLOGUE
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
EPILOGUE
Chapter 39
Author’s Endnote
Other Books by James Philip
GEORGE
WASHINGTON’S
GHOST
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The New England Series – Book 5
A.D. 1978
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PROLOGUE
Chapter 1
You and I share a common analysis of the errors our forebears made in earlier wars with the English. Fortunately, His Excellency Il Presidente de Soto, as evinced by the unwavering support he has given the General Staff, understands perfectly the lessons of our ongoing post-conquest struggle with our historic enemies.
A hundred years ago, what are now the South Western territories of the Commonwealth of New England, were provinces of New Spain, administrative entities within the Empire of México. Now our fortresses and mines in Alta California, and guarding the passes of the Sierra Madre are all that remain inviolate north of the Rio Grande. In short, not even the Great Valley of México is safe from the avarice of our enemies, who already covet and send raiding parties to disrupt the gold mines of California which are so critical to our ongoing national development. In every war we lose more ground, or are driven back to our start lines in the mountains or the deserts of our North East; and at home another schism strikes at the heart of our government. And always, those in power – people like you and I, and his Excellency, Il Presidente, whom I believe to be a profoundly good, and wise man – have sheltered behind the myth that we were always doomed to fail.
The enemy is too powerful!
We are too weak!
Frankly, we have never been honest with ourselves. The truth is that in previous wars the English have rarely committed more than a tiny proportion of their Imperial energy to ‘swatting away’ our piecemeal attempts to reclaim what is rightfully ours.
We, the Mexican people, even today in alliance with our Catholic brothers on Cuba, Hispaniola and Santo Domingo, and in league with our so-called coalition of the willing – which we both accept may not amount to anything meaningful in military terms when the going gets tough – of our Central and Southern American friends, notwithstanding the technical assistance and equipment gifted to us by our German colleagues, cannot hope to prevail if and when even a small part of the nascent military and economic resources of just New England, let alone the rest of the British Empire, are mobilised against us as surely, one day they will be.
Thus, we must accept that in the long-term, we cannot defeat the English on the battlefield.
What we can do, and never have done before with sufficient steadfastness, is to test the moral fibre of our enemies. This time we must fight well-enough and long-enough to discover if New England (particularly the ‘Commonwealth’ of those pampered East Coast Colonies) has the stomach for the long haul, and more importantly, we must prolong the war for however long it takes to allow the fissures we know to exist between the First Thirteen and the ‘Old Country’ back in Europe to widen.
In this, I do not think that we can rely on our German friends.
Their interests lie in weakening English power in the Americas and in controlling the oil wells of Gran Colombia, Venezuela and the Southern Caribbean. It remains to be seen how deeply embedded Berlin’s Concessions in Sucre, Anzoátegui, and Monagas are in fact, rather than theory. Personally, I doubt if those presences in Caracas, Cumaná and New Barcelona, are worth any more to the Kaiser than that fetid enclave-cum-abomination at San Juan. Nevertheless, if the Germans (while they obsess over oil wells in the Southern Caribbean) are happy to continue to offer our forces ongoing materiel and technical support, and to make available to us intelligence which otherwise would be denied to us, we must ‘play along’.
I know that this is as painful to your sense of honour as it is to mine, my friend. Especially, as our Kaiserliche Marine allies treat your people like serfs but we must tolerate it a little longer. If things go according to plan you will soon be rid of them. I think we can take it as read that when the shooting starts Berlin will order its ‘advisors in the Indies’ to return home for fear of inflaming tensions in Western Europe.
Shortly, all our plans will come to fruition.
For what it is worth I believe that the English will fight this war, at least at the beginning, as they have fought every war with us in the last century. At the outset they will think it is just another ‘border war’, and that they can deal with us at their leisure.
Little do they suspect that this strategy will not work this time!
Digressing, I think that your perceptive analysis of the lasting effects of the attack by Dominican irregulars on the British Atlantic Fleet in New York Bay two years ago, is spot on. The response of the New England authorities was heavy-handed and chaotic, and alienated large numbers of previously loyal former citizens of New Spain who mistakenly, were under the impression that they were in some way ‘safe’ in the First Thirteen. You were right to suggest that the attacks tended to dent the Royal Navy’s aura of invincibility. The other thing we learned from that episode was that, within the old English colonies the ruling elite were not so much worried about another war with us, as to who exactly they could get to pay for it!
In any event, I reiterate the consensus of the last meeting of the Chiefs of Staff, which has since been formally ratified by the President of the Republic.
We will use all the tools in our arsenal this time.
Moreover, we will demand that the Germans fully participate in the initial stages of the war. We will use all our modern aircraft. We will employ every available submarine against the English…
Extract from a letter dated 3rd February 1978 written by General of the Army of New Spain Felipe de Padua María Severino López de Santa Anna y Pérez de Lebrón, to Vice Admiral Count Carlos Federico Gravina y Vera Cruz, the Chief Minister of Defence and Commander-in-Chief of the Armada de Nuevo Granada.
Chapter 2
Saturday 22nd April
El Ojo del Diablo, Provincia Norteña de Sonora
Eyebrows had been raised among his colleagues back at the University of Cuernavaca at El Departamento de Geología de la Academia Nacional de Ciencias Naturales - the Geological Department of the National Academy for the Natural Sciences – when Professor Rodrigo de Monroy y Pizarro Altamirano, despite being six years past the customary ‘active service’ cut-off point of fifty-five years of age, had volunteered for active military service last year.
He was still the tall, broad-shouldered, rangy man he had been in his prime except, inevitably, not so fleet of foot and he ached in the mornings, and was sometimes, stooped with weariness. His formerly dark head of hair was ever-more streaked with grey, and his face, darkened by the Aztec ancestry that had long been ingrained in all but the most recent generations of migrants from Old Spain, was lined and weathered, set around grey brown eyes which had retained their capacity to unexpectedly twinkle with rueful mischief.
Inevitably, many of his oldest friends, and to a man, the majority of the Fellows in his departmental common room who had arched eyebrows, suspected some unseemly military fervour had gripped their esteemed Dean, whom everybody had assumed had long since bidden farewell to the warrior mantle.
True, Rodrigo was a hero of each of the three most recent wars with the gringo interlopers of New England; last time around, back in the 1960s he had been captured and held by the ungodly, for nearly a year as the bickering about the so-called ‘de-militarised zone’ dragged on interminably.
It was also true that although he still proudly retained the rank of Teniente Coronel – Lieutenant Colonel – in the Reserve Forces of the Ejército de Nueva España (the Army of New Spain), notwithstanding his long friendship with Army Chief of Staff Felipe Santa Anna – with whom he had fought beside in two of those wars - for several years after the last war had been a prominent, albeit gentlemanly, voice in the Peace Movement, a veritable thorn in the side of successive regimes in México City.
In fact, Rodrigo had been hard-pressed to explain to his wife, Magdalena, why he felt he had to return to the colours. In the end he had had to tell her exactly why he seemed to have ‘gone loco’. Only then had she understood; afterwards, she had spoken of it no more.
Other, that was than to observe, tartly: ‘If you go and get yourself killed, I will never forgive you!’
Which, all things considered, was fair enough.
However, once Rodrigo had learned of the fragmented. frightening stories coming out of the Colorado country, far to the north of the 1964 ‘border’, and beyond the twenty to thirty mile-wide DMZ, in reality a skirmishing zone for raiders and bandits from both sides, he had been inexorably drawn back to the harsh landscapes in which he had made his academic name, prospecting and studying, in his rebellious younger years.
His now famous paper about El Ojo del Diablo – the Eye of the Devil – a massive meteoritic impact crater, had eventually established him as Nuevo Granada’s, México’s, leading geologist. Located at an elevation of over five thousand feet on the great sandstone plateau of the northern Sonora badlands, although eroded by wind and rain for countless millennia and partly filled by drifting sand, El Ojo del Diablo was still three-quarters of a mile across and over five-hundred-feet deep, and its rim still reared, in places some one-hundred-and-fifty feet above the surrounding desert. If ever a man needed to be reminded that his life was but a miniscule mote in the eye of a greater god, he could do no better than stand on the edge of the Eye of the Devil and look down into the void.
Rodrigo had been only twenty-six when he first trekked north into the then ‘disputed lands’ – turned into ‘borderlands’ and then ‘buffer zones’ and finally incorporated into the Commonwealth of New England by the victorious gringos in treaties signed after each successively more humiliating war – in search of adventure, knowledge and yes, if he was being honest about it, fame.
Those were halcyon, free-wheeling days before he had settled down with Magdalena, found academic respectability with his seminal published papers on the stratigraphy of the rocks of the middle and lower grandes acantilados – great cliffs – carved down through over a mile of rock over untold millennia by the Colorado River. As a young man he had been bewitched by the Eye of the Devil, assumed until then by generations of Granadan geologists to be a well-preserved, caldera-like feature associated with ancient volcanism because of its relative proximity to the San Franciscan ridges, themselves thought to be the remnants of ancient volcanoes, some forty miles to the west.
Had he known that day he first looked down into the great impact caldera that the great men in his field would go to almost any lengths to guard their complacent orthodoxy, and that before they finally surrendered would have attempted, in desperation, to have him declared heretic, perhaps, he would have never returned home.
Other than, of course, for Magdalena…
In the end everything had changed, text books had had to be re-written and every aspect of his field rigorously, critically re-evaluated. Eventually, evidence had won the day. The day he found the first fragments of nickel-iron, many of which must have been molten, viscose when they fell to earth, calving from a celestial body probably well over one-hundred-and-fifty feet in diameter with a mass of hundreds of thousands of tons as it plummeted through the Earth’s atmosphere at a velocity in excess of thirty thousand miles-an-hour, before exploding on impact with the limestone plateau with a force equivalent to millions of tons of high explosive, had been the moment that Rodrigo’s former life had ended.
Another man might have dwelt upon the long years in the wilderness labelled a ‘young maverick’, when he had been castigated and decried by his elders and every last one of his contemporaries on account of his supposedly ‘unscientific ramblings’. Some of the old fogeys, men who claimed to be scientists but invariably trusted the literal letter of Biblical text over ‘the scientific method’ they claimed to adhere to, had never forgiven him.
Accepting a commission in the Ejército de Nueva España in 1949, had been a blessed relief from the hothouse feuding of Cuernavaca in the old days.
Serendipitously, assigned to an artillery regiment he had persuaded the Army’s Office of Ballistics to conduct trials, ostensibly studying the destructive potential of high-powered rounds against sloping cemented plate, and shown the most craven of doubters the conclusive proof of his thesis on the mechanics of crater creation. Those grainy slow-motion sequences of bullets and armour-piercing rounds being fired by experimental high-velocity rifles crashing into sand tray targets had, virtually overnight, made his reputation. Within weeks, he had been the University of Cuernavaca’s poster boy.
That was a long time ago, of course.
War and the consequences of the uneasy peace along the Border had denied him access to the high plateau of the Colorado Country for over a quarter-of-a-century. For much of that time only the Navajo and their sometime Apache enemies, and gringo adventurers and bandits had roamed the high plains of the old nineteenth century northern province of Sonora.
Farther back in time these lands had been part of ‘the Comancheria’ – a huge swath of the South West under the brutal rule of the ‘horse people’, roving Comanche tribes, the masters of the Southern Plains – not finally vanquished until the 1860s, when Spanish suzerainty had again been bloodily re-established. Mexico, or New Granada as it was in the early years of the nineteenth century, had always claimed Sonora. History, like the desert winds, had slowly eroded its title, long before the ‘border wars’ with the English had moved the lines on the maps. Even now, hardly anybody lived high on the plateau; and yet so much blood had been spilled over where the lines ought to be drawn on those ancient maps of the 1820s.
It had been so long since Rodrigo’s last expedition to El Ojo del Diablo, that his old Navajo friends and guides had stopped sending him specimens – rocks and fossils – and he had got on with his career, and with raising his family. And then, a couple of years ago, realising that there was going to be a new war; this time not a series of brave, futile ‘demonstrations’ but a ‘war to the knife’ to reclaim all that had been lost since the New Englanders stole the Delta lands, West Texas and the historic, post-conquest borderlands of Nuevo México from the old Empire of New Spain, he had tentatively sought permission to ride deep into the enemy’s country, and to return to the Sonoran deserts.
Ostensibly, to all bar a select group of very senior Army officers his mission had been mooted as a long-range reconnaissance, a patrol behind enemy lines but by the time he had crossed in to what had been enemy territory, the gringo lines had splintered so fast, nothing except the harshness of the terrain had slowed his passage north.
It was a surreal contrast to his experiences in the last war. Fifteen years ago, he had been stationed in faraway Alta California, a cavalryman posted to the Modoc Country, a backwater of the war until the English Navy had landed troops to seize the heights guarding San Francisco Bay.
Rodrigo still awakened some nights in a cold sweat, his nightmares turning around the scene that day when those two leviathans – he had since learned they were the battlecruiser Invincible and the battleship Hercules – had duelled with the batteries guarding the Golden Gate while a tide of Marines had swept ashore…
