A fine mist fell from a gun-metal sky, adding a soggy undertone to the chill that ate into me from the surrounding air. Mud sucked at my boots as I eased along the fence, listening for any sounds of human activity, especially the sloshing tramp of a sentry making rounds. I'd researched what a minié ball could do to human flesh and didn't want to gain any personal experience with humanity's current state-of-the-art in maiming-and-killing technology.
Still, you gotta do what you gotta do. Portsmouth, Virginia, on 12 January, 1862 certainly offered rotten weather and the threat of deadly violence, but it also likely held information of great importance to me and my client. I'd jumped into Richmond, the capital of the American Southern Confederacy, looking for clues to a possible Intervention and the biggest clue I'd found here-and-now pointed to this spot. A former U.S. warship, a frigate to be precise, had been burned to the waterline at Portsmouth in 1861 when U.S. government troops pulled out one step ahead of the Confederates. The useless wreck had later been towed out and sunk in Hampton Roads after the Union retook the city. Which made the here-and-now work around the frigate's hulk very interesting indeed. Why had Richmond ordered a Confederate shipyard to waste time on a burned-out ship? One more sailing ship, more or less, couldn't make any real difference in the war. It was an anomaly, something that didn't fit with the history I knew, and that made it number one on the list of things to check out.
Of course, I could just jump several years ahead and see What had happened When to help the Confederates, but then I'd be fighting history instead of working with it. Momentum helps a lot. Besides, Interventions snowballed. A small Intervention early on could produce major changes down the line, so that I'd waste effort fighting the big changes and still not identify or counter the original Intervention. The people I'd been hired to stop knew that as well as I did. So, here I was in 1862 getting rained on.
Despite its aged appearance, the fence around the shipyard felt pretty sturdy wherever I tried it. Bowing to the inevitable, I reached up and swung myself over, blessing the fact that barbed wire hadn't yet been invented. On the other side, the mud was even worse, a fact I confirmed by sinking into it up to my ankles when I landed. An assortment of two-story brick buildings loomed in the mist, surrounded by the usual piles of shipyard junk. Ahead, the Elizabeth River rolled sluggishly toward its junction with the branch of the Chesapeake Bay known as Hampton Roads. On the other side of the Elizabeth, the buildings of Norfolk were invisible in the gray drizzle.
The dry-docks were big ship-shaped holes lined with brick, set below the level of the river, protected from the water by huge gates. Given the nearly-non-existent status of the Confederate States Navy, it was hardly surprising that most were empty. One, though, had a separate fence around it, a fence obviously of newer vintage than that surrounding the shipyard as a whole. It also had lamps hung at more-or-less regular intervals and entirely too many sentries in gray cloaks pacing around, each huddled against the weather but obviously still alert for intruders.
"Jeannie, do you have a map of this place in 1862 on file?"
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