Tags:
Fiction,
General,
Mystery & Detective,
Women Sleuths,
Mystery Fiction,
California,
Police Procedural,
San Francisco,
Policewomen,
San Francisco (Calif.),
Murder - Investigation,
Policewomen - California - San Francisco,
Kate (Fictitious character),
Martinelli
Presidio, the entrance to the Bay was pretty thoroughly covered.”
“This is a gun, what do you call it, emplacement, then?” Kate asked.
“Right. DuMaurier was more or less contemporary with Battery Wallace and, other than being smaller, is similar in layout. That’s Wallace on the hill over there—those two openings in the hillside? The battery fills the entire hillside between them. There aren’t any guns there now, of course, just their settings. You can see Battery Alexander just north of Wallace—Alexander had mortars—and Smith-Guthrie and O’Rourke with four guns each beyond that. Closer in is Mendell, just along the cliffs.”
Kate studied the decrepit sprawl of concrete that was Battery Mendell, stretched out along the cliffs and exposed to the elements, then glanced at the gray faces of the double guns of Battery Wallace on the next hill inland from where they stood. Wallace resembled an enormous frog, two elongated concrete eyes set into a wide, green face, its mouth shaped by one long building of the conference center at their feet. She did not bring up her fanciful image, merely said, “Wallace seems to have stood up to the sea air a lot better.”
“What you see dates only to the Thirties, when Wallace was casemated and covered. Again like DuMaurier, in fact, although DuMaurier only had a single gun, a twelve-inch breech-loading rifle. The only single gun in Fort Barry, in fact.”
“What is that mushroomy thing on the other side of Mendell?”
“That’s a base-end station, used for triangulating fire. They’re located all up and down the coast. And those concrete half circles you passed where you parked? Cisterns, for the lighthouse. There’s also a number of submerged structures used to keep an eye on the mine-fields laid out in the shipping lanes. To say nothing of the miles of tunnels and storage facilities, most of them falling apart and a real hazard—those doors we check all the time. All of this, as you can well see from here, is harbor defense. Around the time of the gold rush, the powers that be back in Washington noticed that San Francisco was the key port of the entire West Coast, and the cannon they had at Fort Point and Fort Mason wouldn’t go far to repel a determined enemy. So they started putting in bigger and bigger guns, on both sides of the Golden Gate and on Alcatraz, cutting edge all the way, until eventually the distances covered became so enormous that it was actually counterproductive, since nobody wants to keep a warhead right on top of the city limits. After Nike missiles became obsolete, harbor defense moved back a bit, like to Nevada. But for the better part of a hundred years, nothing could get into the Bay without being watched by a lot of men with their fingers on some very big triggers. Metaphorically speaking,” he added. “Cannon don’t have that kind of triggers.”
“There’s nothing up here but the gun emplacement, then?” Hawkin, having caught his breath, was less interested in history than in the case at hand.
“Right, just Battery DuMaurier,” Dan said. And because he seemed incapable of bypassing an opportunity for educating his public, he added, “All the guns have names, usually given to commemorate a soldier—base commander, Great War hero, that sort of thing. DuMaurier is usually understood to have been a Civil War general, but in fact, the name was that of the first base commander’s beloved horse.”
The two detectives eyed the ranger for a moment, but he was looking over the view, and continued, unaware of their skepticism.
“We’ve got emplacements on the headlands from the Endicott era, beginning in 1891, to the 1940s. The Nike missiles went in during the Fifties. The early structures are like Mendell, mostly open-air, but by the end of the First World War it became obvious that airplanes were the way of the future, and nobody wanted to sit out in a gun emplacement that might as well have had a giant flashing arrow