He was still worried about the summer’s campaigning in Kentucky. But Duvalier couldn’t think of a way to take his mind off his worries, with nothing to do on a fishing boat rolling west. She had her own troubles—she was more and more nauseous with each mile into the open ocean.
She was seasick for a good part of the rest of the voyage and remembered very little of the first leg, save for not really caring whether the Out for Lunch sank or not in the rough spring seas.
According to Ableyard, the weather was “about average” for this time of year. Rolling around in the boat’s lower forward cabin like a pea in a can, she would have hated to experience a bad spell.
Just about the time she was able to digest something other than crackers it was time to say good-bye to Ableyard and his “marked boat.”
“It won’t be so bad. A new radio mast, a couple of changes to the cabin and railing and you won’t recognize her.”
They were handed off to a German fishing boat somewhere halfway between Iceland and Ireland. That in itself was a tricky process in the spring seas. The boats threw over every fender they had and swung them across in a canvas sling with a safety line looped about the chest at the end of a yardarm.
The Schöne Anna out of Cuxhaven was somewhat larger, but had a similar arrangement to the Out for Lunch. It had a false wall in two of the fish holds. The Germans had engineered a better ventilation system, so fresh air could be brought in through a vent—it even had a small heater. With luck, they’d need it only for the final run into the Frisian Coast.
Obviously, the conference wasn’t taking place up one of Norway’s fjords, or they could have just turned east. Kind of a shame. Duvalier had seen pictures of the fjords while paging through old books and magazines, and the stark contrast of mountain and sea appealed to her.
No, they were heading for Germany’s North Sea coast. She’d set foot in Europe in an area not famous for much of anything she’d ever heard of. No Eiffel Tower or Amsterdam dens of iniquity for her.
Duvalier made friends with one of the crewmen, a young sandy-haired fellow who knew just enough English to offer obscene suggestions. He called her “tiny thing” and gave her his heavy wool coat—well, traded. He was interested in her duster and it was oversized enough to fit him—“sehr wunderbar,” he called it. The seaman’s coat was of the type Sime called a “duffel” and worked superbly in the wind and wet.
The captain’s English was somewhat better.
“Ach, ve have little trouble. Kurians don’t care about one or two. Most of those escapers, to a Kur, is better off without, yes? Keep him where he is, he so unhappy he make trouble. Maybe start resistance. So why not let the restless go?”
It was a puzzle. Duvalier didn’t care for mental house-of-mirrors games, where everywhere you turned all you saw was your own back, open and inviting to the enemy’s knife. She liked to think about what she was going to do to them, rather than what they might do to her.
Still, someone tipped off the Kurians. They knew where they were leaving from and what day, but they didn’t know that it was the Out for Lunch that bore them. That made a leak in the Refugee Network and its connections to the Baltic League less likely, as their passage had clearly been planned in advance.
So, a couple of gunboats had been lurking just over the horizon. Valentine had a point: the Kurian Order had plenty of advance warning of their departure.
Nothing made sense, however. It wasn’t like their presence at the conference held some key to humanity’s future. Sime was going on the trip to tell the rest of the freeholds, in no uncertain terms, that Southern Command was taking a breather. Who needed that message squelched, and why?
Or perhaps it wasn’t the message, but the messenger. She, Valentine, and Ahn-Kha had given the Kurian Order plenty of reasons to wish them dead—perhaps Ahn-Kha most of all, since the Coal Country, where Ahn-Kha had fought with the central Appalachian guerillas, was still a mess and electricity was being rationed on the East Coast. Perhaps someone wanted Sime out
of the way for reasons of high politics. She idly wished she’d read the newspapers that irregularly arrived by mail at Fort Seng.
Of course, for all she knew, Stamp might have been the target; in that case the entity that set them up had lucked out. She’d hinted that she was deep in UFR politics. If they were as cutthroat as some of the Quislings she’d known, it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Frisian Coast: Alessa Duvalier may have wished for fjords, but she landed on a sunny coast as flat as if it had been rolled out on a baker’s table, full of treacherously shifting sandbars and deceptive shallows. The sandbars form little islands guarding the coast, often reachable by the locals, who can wade out at low tide to some or row out through reeds to others. The sandbars are popular with clam diggers, individual fishermen who smoke their catch before taking it inland, teenagers looking for a private place to enjoy a bonfire and some beer, couples seeking some sun for a private thrill, or those who just enjoy a solitary walk next to the sea.
Smugglers also make use of the tricky waters of this coast. The sandbars are a perfect place for deep-sea craft or shore-hugging flat-bottomed barges to meet smaller boats, exchanging negotiable valuables for luxury items unavailable to everyone but top-ranking Quislings. Then there is just a good deal of everyday trade between fishermen; the English and Germans and Danes often meet in these waters to swap tea for schnapps, cider for cigarettes, and news for news, very little of which is good.
On the true shoreline, patches of the coast still serve as a resort area, with different grades of recreation. The best beachfront and most picturesque towns tend to be frequented by Mitteleuropean Quislings and their entourages escaping late summer heat. They bring enough money for there to be some of the traditional tourist-industry businesses: fine dining, boat charters, small, exclusive hotels, and of course health spa-resorts dedicated to the one common concern of the Quislings—keeping an energetic and youthful appearance.
Others further down the food chain still go to this coast, but stay at cheaper lodgings with smaller, muddier beaches, or go to campgrounds in the wilder and reclaimed areas of the coast.
There is a good deal of “reclaimed” coastline. Dredging and other shore management improvements have been ignored for decades, as the Kurians don’t see much need for intercoastal trade—the more Balkanized and isolated their subject peoples, the better. The very few birdwatchers are pleased that coastal flocks are thriving in the newly wild areas, but for others in dying, cut-off towns in the border areas, the wilder parts can mean danger.
The fishing boat made use of one of only two channels kept open to this part of the coast, running a gauntlet of broken-down sea windmills. The thin windmills gave Duvalier a bit of a chill, since from a distance in the predawn they looked like a line of crucified Grogs she’d once passed through near Kansas City, Missouri.
The Schöne Anna paused at a sandbar on its way back into Cuxhaven. It passed into German territorial waters with only the most cursory of searches. A pair of sailors came on board, swapped Turkish cigarettes for Scottish whiskey and a couple of Norwegian gold coins, and that was the end of the search. The Scotch was provided by the captain, the gold supplied by the Refugee Network.
The sailor who had traded coats with Duvalier gave her a little piece of knotted line fashioned into a bracelet as a souvenir. “Schöne Alessa,” he called her. Then said something that began with Vielleicht, which Duvalier understood meant “perhaps,” but she didn’t understand any of the words that followed.
They spent no time at all in the little seaside village; they were under orders to get inland as quickly as possible, as the coasts were more closely watched than the interior areas, which were largely peaceful under the Kurians. This was accomplished by one of the wives of a hand of the Schöne Anna, who bundled them into a high-sided horse-drawn wagon with potatoes, a live pig, and some chickens as camouflage. Sime’s dark skin and Valentine’s Amerind features drew a few curious glances from the Germans, but the coast was frequented by tourists, so there could be a number of explanations, including a breakdown of transportation and a ride from a friendly local.
They rode for three hours, going northwest and therefore inland. Wind-farm graveyards turned into cow pasture, and they enjoyed a picnic dinner of cheese and bread and dried fish before she handed them over to Zloty.