by Tom Kratman
“And that, Rall, is why they’re concentrating on trying to slow us down, to give the enemy a chance to catch up to our retirement.”
Rall just nodded. That retirement had effectively stopped for a few hours, while three dozen machine gun teams formed a ring around what was hoped to be a very tempting target for the next Balboan strike, half a dozen trucks held up in column by an apparent accident between two more on the road. They were centered in an oval bowl, of sorts, of about three kilometers by four.
There were no soldiers on the trucks; at the typical range the aircraft had been using for this terrain, there was little chance of a soldier being noticed, though groups of them could be.
Marciano, about a kilometer from the trucks, consulted his watch. As he did, air raid sirens began to sound all around. “If you can’t count on a Balboan air strike,” he asked, rhetorically, “what can you count on?”
“You suppose it’s something about the clockwork precision required to even operate an aircraft carrier?” asked Rall.
In reply, Marciano just pointed to his Ligurini—mountain soldier—insignia. How the hell would I know, Rall?
“There,” Rall announced, pointing at the latest attack inbound, just appearing over a ridgeline to the north. There were two aircraft coming in, as before, and, as before, they were in echelon left. This time they were closer,
The range of the rockets was actually fairly impressive, at about fourteen kilometers. The effective range, however, was much less so, under a fifth of that. So far, the Balboans had used terrain—and pretty well, Marciano admitted to himself; I suppose being infantry-oriented even in their air crew has something to do with that—to get close enough. They’d never before, though, had to come so close in to a target.
And that’s why I picked this spot.
Marciano held out one hand, palm up. Automatically, an RTO placed a handset in the palm. Just as automatically, the general raised it to his face. He saw the first puff of smoke from the lead aircraft, a single puff, indication of a ranging shot.
Marciano pressed the key and ordered, “Fire! Fire! Fire!”
Instantly and simultaneously, those three dozen machine guns opened up, firing from all around the clock and at a combined rate of over twenty-five thousand rounds per minute. Following the tracers, Marciano saw an oval of glowing bits materialize all around and especially just in front of the two attack craft. The second one flashed—probably hit some onboard ordnance—and then began to tumble over to its left. A long burning, smoking descent followed, ending in a series of rumbling explosions, a considerable ball of flame, and then a rising cloud of oily smoke.
The lead bird, meanwhile, maybe in the hands of a more experienced pilot, jerked radically to port, apparently on that pilot’s having seen the first few tracers rising in front of him. The machine guns followed, continuing to place a wall of flying lead in front of the attacker. The pilot jerked in the other direct, then apparently pulled back on his stick enough to invert completely. He jerked left again, again, and then to the right yet again. Still the remorselessly vindictive fire followed him.
And then the plane wasn’t really there anymore. In its place, instead, was an aerial fireball enclosing a mass of disassociated parts.
Unconsciously, Marciano crossed himself, offering a brief and silent prayer for the souls of his enemies.
“Okay,” the general said. “Now, Rall, I want the next few hours spent on getting the hell away from the roads and camouflaging everything to the Nth degree. Also get a couple more ambushes prepared, but hide the bait. If I know Fosa, and I do, he’s coming back with blood in his eyes and with everything he can get in the air. They’ve a long loiter time, those planes, so they’re going to hang around overhead for hours. Once they’re gone, they’re also slow, so we’ve got some hours to move like hell.”
“Where did you learn that, sir?” the Sachsen colonel asked.
Claudio laughed slightly. “From Carrera actually. Or how do you think he managed to get himself whole blocks of time to deploy and support his forces?”
BdL Dos Lindas, off the coast of Santa Josefina
Fosa gripped the railing around Vultures’ Row so hard his knuckles turned white. Over the speakers, one of his pilots reported the ambush they’d flown into in heartbreaking detail for as long as he could. “Firing from all around the clock! Trixie Two-two is down, I repeat, ‘down.’ Crap, where did all this come from? Dozens, anyway. Jesus, I can’t dodge them forever. Bullets, not cannon she—”
The transmission cut out. For the next several minutes the bridge’s radioman attempted to reestablish communications. Finally, the commander of the air wing told him, “Forget it; he’s gone.”
“Air boss?” Fosa called, his voice calm and even. One would have to have known him very well to detect the murderous anger within it.
The entire bridge crew, which did know him well, thought, Oh, shit, somebody’s going to pay.
“Sir?”
“Break out a couple of the partially broken down and stored reserve planes. Hold all flights. I want to assemble a very large strike package, everything we have. We’re going to go get our two lost men a fine funeral escort.”
“Sir! Umm . . . sir, it will take until nightfall.”
Fosa looked at the angle of the sun. Nightfall, yes. “So—barring the Gabriels, since they have integral night vision—make sure they have their NVGs.”
“Sir!”
Road to Santa Cruz, Santa Josefina,
Task Force Jesuit command post
Marciano didn’t know how many recon drones came in the first wave. If he were to believe the reports, there were as many as fifty. Were he, instead, to believe his own eyes, he thought there might be four or five.
But the wise guess would be that there are maybe twelve. And they’re up there expressly looking to draw fire.
“This is exactly like what the guerillas felt like, isn’t it, sir?” asked Rall.
“I suppose. So?”
“So this; if they felt anything like I feel, with those sons of bitches hunting us from the sky, we had better not surrender under any circumstances. They’ll just stand us all against walls, unless, of course, they have enough rope and trees.”
“And you know this because?” Marciano asked.
“Because that’s what I’d like to do to them.”
At this point, thought General Marciano, I suppose he’s right. We can’t surrender to the Santa Josefinans, when the time comes that we can’t hang on anymore. I suppose I’d best put del Collea to finding the materials to build us our own internment camp. Maybe some land, too . . . something with a beach, I think.
“They’re spotted something,” Rall announced, pointing to a spot where one drone circled and to which at least two more appeared to be hurrying.
“Who’s over there?” Claudio asked.
“A mess unit,” Rall answered. “One set up to feed the troops passing up the road. Maybe they didn’t get the—”
Suddenly, the treed area under the circling drone flashed with what seemed a mix of thermobaric, high explosive, and incendiary. Claudio looked to where the fire seemed to have come from just in time to see one of those wide-winged crop dusters ducking down behind the tree line.
“. . . word,” Rall finished.
Looking through his light-amplified field glasses, the general saw a fair number of his men running away from the targeted mess. That was the cue for two more of the attack aircraft to swoop in. From underneath each plane two silvery canisters dropped, tumbling end over end until they reached the ground. From where they touched down four long tongues of flame leapt out, continuing in the same direction as the plane that had dropped them, engulfing the soldiers caught inside.
He didn’t need light amplification for this; with his bare eyes Marciano saw a dozen men disappear inside the curtain of fire. That was bad, but not so bad as the three human torches he saw running out of the flames, burning from head to foot, dripping fire fr
om whatever remained of fingers on waving, burning arms. One by one the three fell, to lie writhing on the ground until death, mercifully, took them.
Shaking his head slowly in the waning light, Claudio thought, No, we can’t surrender to the guerillas at all, can we? Every one of them is going to have a memory close enough to that that they’ll want to skin us alive.
There were half a dozen more attacks between sunset and roughly midnight. Two of those were on point, and some of the men of Task Force Jesuit died under them. The rest appeared to be an attempt to spook the defenders into exposing themselves. The attackers were, in any case, few enough in numbers that Marciano took them to be stragglers or late launchers.
Marciano listened carefully for when the time came that there was no more buzzing, whether of drones or manned recon birds or strike aircraft. It came not long before midnight. At that point, he told Rall, “Turn the men out. Get them moving fast. Balls to the wall for the planned battle positions. Traffic accidents, to include fatal ones, are, at least to some extent, acceptable. We’ve got to move before those bastards can refuel, rearm, and come back for more.”
CHAPTER SIX
The difference between stupid and intelligent people—and this is true whether or not they are well-educated—is that intelligent people can handle subtlety.
—Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age
Estado Mayor, Sub camp C, Ciudad Balboa, Balboa
Carrera didn’t really listen to the quartermaster as he droned on about how many shipping containers had been packed with which arms and what ammunition. It was too soon for it to be that many, anyway. Instead, his eyes focused on a chart behind the legion’s chief quartermaster, showing ships, how many Taurans they held, how much food was aboard in tons, whether they’d taken over feeding themselves, and who, specifically, was in charge.
He held up a hand to stop the briefer, then said, “Look, I know it’s too early for there to have been any real progress. So tell me, do we have enough shipping containers?”
Clearing his throat nervously—Carrera rarely asked pointless questions or let thoughtless answers get by—the QM answered, “Think so, Duque. Even if not, though, we don’t need the Parilla Line or the fire support area any more and there are tens of thousands of them there to take at need.”
“Redeployment of First, Second, and Third Corps to face the Zhong; where are you establishing the main log base?”
“We’re keeping what we have,Duque; it’s well enough situated already.”
Carrera spared those three corps commanders a set of sidewise glances. They nodded agreement.
“Fourth Corps; Xavier, how many days’ food on hand?”
Xavier Jimenez, Fourth Corps commander and longtime best friend of Carrera, stood, as propriety demanded. “Days, Patricio? Tons of Tauran rations—tons? More like seven thousand tons—have fallen into our hands. I haven’t started issuing it—hell, we’ve barely started inventorying it—but with that and what’s left of our own, we’re good for maybe two months. If you want it all to feed the prisoners, though, I’ve got maybe a dozen days left. More if we tighten our belts a little.”
“QM?” Carrera asked.
“It’s a question of transportation, sir. We’ve got plenty of food to feed the Taurans. Oh, it may not be what they’re used to, but if it’s good enough for our men . . . anyway, we can feed them from our stocks near the capital. I need the trucks we’d use to exchange food with Fourth Corps to move everything else, especially the artillery.”
“Moving the artillery” really meant moving the still impressive stockpiles of ammunition. No battery or battalion in the force had enough trucks for all they might shoot. At best, they had and could carry enough for immediate needs in the expectation that more would be delivered.
Carrera nodded, answering, “Right. Perfectly sensible. Xavier, eat Tauran.”
“Wilco, Patricio. I will ask for a couple of tons of legionary rum; most of the Taurans didn’t include any with their combat rations. In fact, only the Gauls did . . .”
“QM?”
“That much we can do, Duque, though we may have to issue by the barrel. For some reason, though they flattened damn near everything else they could, the Taurans never bombed the distilleries.”
“Professional courtesy,” was Carrera’s pronounced judgment. “That, and they wanted booze to celebrate victory with.”
Hospital Ship Mary Ann Ball, Muelle 81, Ciudad Balboa
The mildly rocking ship had just as strong an odor of antiseptic and blood as any hospital Carrera had ever visited. “How is he?” Carrera asked of Bertram Janier’s attending physician.
The doctor gave a shrug. “As you commanded, he’s our number one priority. We’ve set all the bones that we could . . . some . . . well, there’s no way and no point. I am worried about three things, pneumonia, concussion, and infection. He’s conscious if you would like to . . .”
“Yes, I would.”
“Well, as I said, I am concerned with infection. Do you mind scrubbing . . . ?”
“Does this hospital gown make me look fat?” Carrera asked of the prone and largely cast-covered Gaul on the hospital bed.
“I think you have lost weight, actually,” answered Bertrand Janier, late commander of the late Tauran Union Expeditionary Force, Balboa. “What can I do for you?”
“Nothing really; just stopped by to see how you’re doing?”
The briefest hint of a smile crept onto Janier’s face. “Yes, of course. Nothing subtle or suspicious in that, is there? No sneaky plans hidden from view. Only the . . .”
“Tsk, Bertrand; you wound me.”
“Not as much as I tried to.”
Now it was Carrera’s turn for a slight smile. “That was just business; nothing personal. I took no offense, of course.”
“Of course. But you still haven’t answered me. Or, at least, you haven’t answered me honestly. You are here for something and I’d like to know what it is.”
“Really, Bertrand, no subtlety or obfuscation here; I wanted to see for myself and hear your prospects from your doctors with my own ears.”
“‘Infection, concussion, and pneumonia,’” Janier echoed. “Well, for that, I do get a little nauseous from time to time. I don’t think it’s from the big bomb you set off more or less under my feet. What are they called? And how did you set them up?”
“They’re called ‘Volcanos,’ and they were on a seismic trigger with a timer to prevent them from going off prematurely.”
Janier nodded. “Ah. Well, that turned out to be clever. I’ve heard there are Tauran POWs who are convinced they’ve got radiation sickness from artillery-delivered nuclear weapons. I don’t suppose . . .”
“We have no artillery-deliverable nuclear weapons,” Carrera answered, careful to keep his voice completely without inflection.
“Interesting how you phrase that and what you don’t say,” Janier observed. “In any case, I think the concussion is from landing on that lake and being skipped like a flat stone for a quarter of a mile . . . or however long it was.
“Pneumonia? My lungs feel fine, really. Oh, it could happen, but so far it doesn’t seem likely.
“Infection? Your country is a cesspool of infection for those who are unlucky or not careful. Careful I was, but lucky I was not; I may succumb to that. Some of my broken bones, after all, did break through the skin.”
“I remember. I also remember you refusing care so that your troops would be taken care of. The citation will follow but . . .” Carrera reached into his pocket and withdrew a silver cross on a ribbon and hanger. This he clipped to Janier’s pillow.
“I might be a whore,” Janier said, glancing at his newly awarded Cruz de Coraje en Acero, “but I am not a cheap whore. It will take more than a medal to buy me.”
“Then call it a down payment,” was Carrera’s retort. He began to turn to go, then thought better of it. “I’ll have one of my personal staff check on you daily. For reasons I don’t think you need t
o know yet, it is very important to me that you get healthy again.”
“Why does this newfound care and concern for my person not fill me with joy unstinted?” Janier asked rhetorically, as Carrera actually did turn to go.
“Probably because you’re a bloody frog,” he answered over his shoulder. “Be seeing you.”
“Before you go, could you check on the disposition of my aide?”
“Malcoeur, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
It was dark by the time Carrera left the Ball. Already, three moons were showing and the constellation of the Tap was filling the Beer Glass Galaxy, overhead.
“Where to, boss?”Soult asked as Carrera reached the sedan he used for the city and highways.
“Let’s go back the Estado Mayor, Jamey. Kuralski and the Ia are supposed to have a plan for dealing with the Zhong out on the island.”
Headquarters, Task Force Wu, Isla Real, Balboa
A medal hung on a concrete wall in between two citations. One was personal, to the Zhong commander, for leadership and valor. It shook with the concussion of a near impact. The other, a unit commendation, was addressed and covered the entire command.
The Zhong lodgment on the fortified island was thin. In no place was it more than three kilometers deep and it was less than one deep for more than half its length. Of course, at the ends it trailed off to nothing where sea met shore. Indeed, sometimes the tides made the troops on the very edge of the shore displace inland.
It was also crawling with antaniae, the septic-mouthed winged quasi-reptiles that fed on the young and the weakened and the foolish. Though they looked reptilian, the Mandarin name for them translated out to, “Genetically engineered murder pigeons.”