And He Sees Across a Weary Land a Straggling Road in Spain

Captain Hoffmann had panicked briefly, when she had fled the burning Project Windmill site with Admiral Castro and his bodyguard on Don Quixote’s back. As it turned out, however, Higuchi hadn’t been strictly necessary to Minister Fernandez’s plan, and the needed additions to the Quixote could be done at a missile factory near La Paz. The loss of the one facility and the one intelligence asset might slow down the People’s Republics’ long-term plans, but their immediate goals could quite easily get back to their regularly scheduled programming.

Hoffman and the Quixote launched to the final round of the Duel from an aircraft carrier in the Caribbean, two massive tandem-rotor helicopters lifting the Duelist by its shoulders. As the people on the deck shrank away, she eyed the blue United Nations helmet of the Duel referee who had supervised the final compliance inspection on the Don Quixote, a colonel assigned to the Peacekeepers from the Irish Army. He had wanted to raise a stink about the two massive missiles that had been added to either side of the Duelist’s backpack-assembly, but they were conventional explosives, not nuclear, and therefore in compliance with the Treaty of Budapest, whatever their yield. Per Fernandez’s instructions, Castro had stacked this carrier with officers who could go drink for drink with even the most pickled Irishman, and ordered regulations on hard liquor consumption be relaxed the moment Hoffmann had launched. With the right encouragement– and not much of it, if the stereotypes held up– the Peacekeeper would be well into his cups by the time the missiles were used, and when he was sober enough to connect the dots, it would be far too late. As she approached the jamming bubble, she sent one last call out to make sure her team was in place.

Meanwhile, on the runway of a former Cuban Revolutionary Air Force base controlled by the Boubonists, Cristina was about done running through the quality inspection checklist Jen had written up. The Duel referee, finished with his own inspection, stood aside next to Shinzo– who was now severely behind schedule shipping out to Australia, thanks to the whole reactor affair– and lit up a cigarette.

“So, why did the reactor have an empty space about the right size and shape for an ignition system?” the diplomat asked with a thick Polish accent.

Shinzo’s hands went clammy, even though he consciously recognized that the inspector had already signed off on the Don Juan’s compliance. “Oh, that. We, uh… didn’t put it there. This reactor was, um… acquired through intelligence channels.”

“You put a stolen nuclear reactor on your Duelist?” The Pole raised an eyebrow. “At least you caught it before one of my technicians did.”

“It was a nasty setup. Would’ve dumped just enough free neutrons into the reactor’s fissile material to… well, it would have been low-yield, as far as atom bombs go, but a very, very dirty bomb. I hope, uh… some other nation isn’t sending a Duelist out with something like that.”

“We did catch the Colombians with a suicide reactor like that before the first match, actually, but it was a preliminary inspection, and seeing as it was the first match of the first-ever capital-D Duel, they were given a chance to remediate it without penalty.”

“Holy shit.” Shinzo muttered. As the Don Juan de Austria was boxed up and ornithopter-lifted off to battle, he added, “Watch your back, Chris.”

Chris was dropped 11.25km from the gate on the northeast corner of Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. 7.5km to his southwest, between him and that gate, he saw the Don Quixote descending like some manmade parody of an archangel to face him.

Because the corner of the base marked their boundary, the communications-jamming bubble around the Duelists ran straight through the American facility, killing any phone or internet connections that relied on wireless connections running across the east side of the base. This probably wasn’t the sole reason the Colombians had wanted to hold the match here, nor why the Cuban Communists had agreed to it, but neither held itself above being a petty nuisance to the capitalists when given the opportunity.

Perhaps the regime in Havana had simply wanted to force this area to remain neutral ground for a time, give the rebels diplomatic reasons to avoid it, but what they stood to gain from that, Chris couldn’t say. The two villages that each fell partly within the arena, Yateritas to the east and Boqueron to the west, had both been evacuated in an earlier stage of the war, and if the match had delayed the rebels from taking up positions in them, it would be a short delay in the grand scheme of the conflict.

The terrain was also pretty unnoteworthy. He was on the uphill side of a ridge, this time, but nothing nearly so dramatic as the last match. He wouldn’t have a direct line of sight on the Quixote until he advanced a little, but aside from that, they were essentially fighting on a flat, open coastal plain. In addition to the handful of buildings spilling in from the two villages to the sides, there were some trees and rocky hills around and behind Chris, a portion of the bay at whose mouth the American base sat stretching into the arena north of Boqueron, and of course a minefield at the south edge of the arena, behind the Quixote to its right, between the wall enclosing the Guantanamo Bay base and a fence surrounding it at a distance. If there had been mines in the thin strip of land between Boqueron and the base, then either they had been cleared by American-aligned rebels at some earlier point in the Cuban civil war, or Chris’ handlers had just failed to mention them. All of these elements besides the ridge, however, were along the periphery, none of them guaranteed to impact the fight at all.

From the cameras that some American news network had planted around the arena, millions watched as Chris fired off a few shells at Quixote’s starting position, then advanced. The Shogun, with General Earp and his other ministers, watched from his office in Shinkyo. From the Politburo meeting room in what had once been the nave of the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception & Saint Peter of Bogotá, Javier Fernandez watched with his nominal co-rulers of Gran Colombia, including Admiral Castro, on a massive screen set where the altar had stood. In an office in Langley, Virginia, Joe Cooper watched with the CIA’s deputy directors of Intelligence and Science & Technology, also joined by Jen Higuchi and a diplomatic courier who had flown in for an interview. Though all the camera feeds were being distributed from the company running them to several different news organizations raw, so they could play the match live and switch between cameras as they wished, all three feeds switched to a view from atop the wall of the American base at once, as the Don Juan de Austria crested a ridge near the center of the arena, about 7.5km away, where, more acutely than its man-shaped silhouette, they saw the glint of its white panels in the morning sun, and the dark spot on the green-and-brown countryside of its black. In the foreground of the shot, the brazen dish atop the Don Quixote turned, the Colombian Duelist doing an about-face from its retreat into in the middle of the no-man’s land between the American inner perimeter and the Cuban outer fenceline.

When Chris saw the Quixote had retreated that far back, all the way to the edge of the arena, he considered the risk this Interior Ministry officer, this Captain Hoffmann, was taking. On one hand, if he hit her with a shell and the blast knocked her out of bounds, he would win on a technicality, a rules violation that the drafters of the treaty clearly hadn’t spent all that much time considering. And why would they, considering the size they had designated for the arena? The Duelists had nearly four kilometers to retreat, how often would they use all of it?

Chris realized that Hoffmann meant to start an international incident. She was a backup pilot, after all, while he had fought two matches and killed her predecessor. What chance did she stand? If she could bait him into hitting her with an artillery barrage that would also damage an American base, she might at least get something out of this last match by worsening relations between Gran Colombia’s two chief rivals. It would be an understandable enough slip-up on his part that nothing of substance would happen in the public eye, but there was still a band of Bolivian fugitives and Shinobi agents hiding in the Andes, and if they made to escape the country, it might make their lives far easier if the CIA was willing to help them sneak over a border, or a US Navy vessel ferry them across the Caribbean.

Chris decided not to play into her game. He dropped the Don Juan to one knee, and aimed an EMP shell.

Inside the Don Quixote, Hoffmann smiled, and back in the desecrated holy place in Bogotá, Fernandez smiled with her. The moment before Chris fired, she launched most of Don Quixote’s original, smaller missiles, as well as one of the two giant rockets, almost as tall as Don Quixote itself. The smoke of their backblast enveloped her Duelist, but she knew this last-minute smokescreen wouldn’t throw off Hernandez’s aim more than a little. Even a little would help, but her plan would withstand even a direct hit.

Chris saw the enormous smoke blown out by the missile barrage, and recalled that the source codenamed Mountain had seen two massive warheads added to Don Quixote’s arsenal on a visit to an arms factory, but hadn’t gotten any technical details. He loosed his EMP shell, then immediately engaged the missile interception mode on his back-mounted railgun. At least the big one would be an easy target.

Just as the missiles lifted off, the instant Don Juan loosed its EMP shell, Hoffmann threw the Quixote onto its back, and loosed her second large missile. This one had no advanced targeting system, enough fuel to carry it maybe two kilometers, and as much cutting-edge high explosives as they could cram into the thing. The EMP shell flew past the Quixote, punched through the barred and deserted American gate, and exploded just inside the Guantanamo Bay perimeter. Near-simultaneously, Don Quixote’s missile, flying through the gate, detonated after punching through the first major structure it encountered, the GTMO Recycling Center, about a kilometer inside the perimeter.

The explosion’s yield hadn’t been calculated beforehand with all that much precision, but it was somewhere roughly between ten and fifteen tons of TNT, on the same order of magnitude as both the GBU-43/B MOAB bomb, the Americans’ heaviest piece of conventional ordnance, and the W54 warhead as outfitted for the Davy Crockett device, the smallest nuclear weapon they had ever developed. The shockwave knocked the entire northeast quadrant of the perimeter wall to rubble, kicked the prone Don Quixote back into the air, and shattered windows in the nearest densely-populated part of the spread-out base, around the naval hospital four and a half kilometers away, where the explosion was felt through the ground comparably to a magnitude-six earthquake.

Guantanamo Bay was a large naval base, and the explosion had gone off in its most deserted corner, killing only a handful of residents and failing to cripple its operational capacity. It didn’t need to do more than that, and in fact it did its job better for leaving plenty alive. The EMP, similarly, had been big enough for American surveillance instruments to detect, but small enough not to inhibit communications any worse than the preexisting jamming bubble. Most importantly, the explosion was powerful enough to leave a mushroom cloud towering over the base and the battlefield, for every camera for miles around to linger on.

That evil cloud still lingered on the TV screen in the Langley office when one of the Deputy Director of Intelligence’s underlings burst in. “Sir,” the panicked analyst squeaked, “A call just went out from NORAD– to us, NSA, the Pentagon, the White House, just about everybody who might matter. They got a good look at that explosion through a magnetic imaging satellite. It picked up an EMP, consistent with the gamma radiation emitted by a very small thermonuclear detonation. We can expect a follow-up shortly, once they decide whether to kick the military up to DEFCON 2, or all the way up to 1. That Californian Duelist… it might have just nuked us, sir.”