by Tom Kratman
Corporal Moya—no first name, no surname, just “Moya”—wearing just a loincloth and the temporary tattoos called “jagua,” and carrying a Volgan rifle, watched the ambulance pass by. He vaguely remembered that the big red crosses weren’t supposed to be attacked, that it was, as the Cazador team that had come to train the men and older boys of Moya’s village told them, extremely bad magic to do so. From the bushes in which he and his men hid, Moya raised two fingers. Immediately, blowguns and rifle butts were lowered, as the men relaxed again, waiting for their next opportunity. The Cazadors had originally offered regular pay for regular work, as regulars, but the Chocoes really weren’t interested in that. What had brought them over were the twin promises of rifles better than any they had, and payment—and in real silver coins, no less—for Tauran heads. That was something the Indios understood.
Unfortunately, as the first platoon pursuing an Indio-initiated ambush had discovered, the Chocoes owned the jungle. You couldn’t see them, you couldn’t hear them, and if they wanted you dead, a small poisoned dart from a blowgun worked about as well as anything else in jungle range. The platoon had learned that, albeit the hard way, and had never been able to pass the lesson on as men need heads to speak with and they’d lost all theirs.
Moya and his men frowned. A head, was after all, a head, but they didn’t want to risk the evil magic. They heard a sound then, one which had become familiar. It was, they’d smiled as they saw it, another truck, one without the forbidden markings, coming down the road.
The medevac helicopter that would bring the stretcher-bound Verboom to the ship for extensive surgery and possible return to Haarlem disgorged some other people as it touched down on the old fort’s parade ground. Most of these were Tauran troops, previously lightly wounded, being returned to duty. One, however, was Sergeant Juan Sais, being returned to a prisoner of war camp. Sais still had his protective mask, and his helmet—those belonged to the soldier carrying them, even if he was captured—and still wore regular legionary battle dress, which had been cleaned and repaired for him on the hospital ship where his wounds had been treated.
While a stretcher team, assisted by the helicopter’s crew chief, worked to buckle Verboom into one of the racks in the bird, a two-man military police team had shown up to take charge of Sais and bring him to the POW camp. This was actually not all that far away, straight line, at maybe twenty miles. Going by road, largely because a helicopter was too important to risk on a mere POW, was a little longer.
The MPs put flexicuffs on Sais before helping him into their vehicle. “Nothing personal,” said the Anglian MP, “but you gents have proven a little difficult in the past.” Sais understood, actually. Given half a chance I’d be off this son of a bitch and into the jungle in no time.
Still, he took the whole trip philosophically, right up until the jeep came to a place where the two highways across the isthmus came close together. A substantial increment of construction equipment was in the area, busily digging trenches and later holes for bunkers. There weren’t any concrete mixers to be seen, but off in the distance, he could hear a number of chain saws in operation. Sais had a sort of sinking feeling at seeing all this, for a couple of reasons. Then they turned to the right and toward a former housing area for legionary officers and senior noncoms.
Sais expressed his feeling on that sotto voce, “Oh, fuck!”
Janier barely noticed the lone MP vehicle following the asphalt road toward the small POW camp near the former housing area. It wasn’t an especially important place, anyway, what with fewer than five hundred prisoners being held there for now. The buildings were useful for interrogators and the staff of the corps responsible for this area, neither of whom, after all, were used to roughing it.
He wasn’t especially concerned about the siting of the defenses being dug in this area. He was concerned with their strength.
Janier jumped up and down on the earthen overhead cover on a section of trench. It bounced. Stopping, he began to turn until he caught sight of a senior noncom.
“Get me your company commander!” shouted the general. “And while you’re at it, get the word I want to see your battalion and brigade commanders, too. And fast!”
As the noncom trotted to find his commanding officer, Janier folded his arms and put on a fierce mien. The expression gave no clue to his inner thoughts.
I’ve made so many mistakes, the Gaul thought, I cannot be sure I am not making one, by standing fast, now. But I see no other choice. It’s taken months to get everyone ashore that we have, very nearly the entire deployable military force of every state in the Tauran Union. I’d be lucky beyond my desserts if I could get a quarter of them out—and that without their equipment—without Carrera finding out and launching on us immediately. And the three-quarters that would still be stuck here would be out of positions and probably panic-stricken. And I wouldn’t blame them a bit.
Our only chance is to stand here together. He’s only got one bolt to shoot at us, after all, assuming the information my lovely Major Campbell was given and analyzed was correct, and that’s the way to bet it. He can hit us with a massive barrage for several hours, enough to have destroyed us in the open several times over, but probably not enough to do so if we’re dug in. Well . . . I hope it’s not enough. And if we can survive, we can beat off the attack that will follow on the barrage. And if we can do that, his bolt is shot and we can march into the capital as victors.
But what did the Spartans say to Philip? Ah, yes, I remember; “If.”
Janier noticed then a captain standing off to one side. “Are you the company commander, son?”
“Yes, sir; Captain Bengliu, Dacian Gendarmerie.”
Janier stepped off the overhead cover he’d been bouncing atop, then ordered, “Jump up and down on that a few times.”
“I will, sir,” said the Dacian, “but it’s really not necessary; I know it’s shit. But what can I do? The court has ordered no destruction of the rain forest because of the treaties . . .”
Janier stepped forward, and put a sympathetic, even fraternal, arm around the Dacian’s shoulders. “Ah, I see the problem. They didn’t, you know, Captain.”
“But, sir, my government said . . .”
“Fuck them,” Janier interrupted, amiably, “and fuck the court, too, at least in principle. What that never sufficiently to be damned court did was to forbid the bombing by air or artillery. Their ruling seems to have missed chain saws entirely. Now, shall I call the engineers and have them loan you a few?”
“Oh, General, the tuica’s on me for life if you would.”
“Consider it done,” said the broadly smiling Gaul, adding, with a wink, “and I’ll hold you to that booze, after we win.”
Hide Position Sierra Two-Nine, Cristobal Province, Balboa
Flores hauled Sergeant Rojas in through the narrow entrance, then both of them pulled in Domingo. With him inside, Flores closed the light barrier and turned on their backup light, a crank-driven piece.
The sergeant and the soldier—technically and by title, the cazador—had been topside for one of the not especially frequent patrols launched from their hide. It was vibrations felt through the sodden ground that had sent them topside. Both were breathing fairly heavily, causing Flores to ask, “What happened? Did you get spotted? Are they on your tail?”
“None . . . of . . . the . . . above,” Rojas got out, with some effort, words interspersed with heavy breathing. “But . . . we do have . . . guests. There’s a company of . . . something—heavy machinery or tanks, based on the sounds—maybe three hundred meters . . . from here, digging in like crazy. Domingo and I . . . heard the sounds and got as close as we could to investigate. We’d have . . . gone closer but”—Rojas held up one hand to show several black spikes sticking in it—“we ran into this crap. They probably, and sensibly, cut it down . . . to get it out of the way, but where they left it I crawled right onto the shit. We couldn’t get through.”
“Okay. Radio Balboa put out
several radio messages while you were gone, Sarge.” Flores pulled from his pocket a small notebook, removed it from a plastic bag, and read off. “‘Yvette has a monstrous dildo,’ was one. ‘It is a time of great sorrow,’ was the second. And ‘there was a fire at the steamship company.’ Important?”
“Yeah,” said Rojas. “The second one means maximum reconnaissance of all areas of operation; report by most secure means available. We did tonight’s, so far. The first one isn’t for us or the deep stay behinds in this area, as far as I know. I don’t know who it is for. The third one means ‘counterattack in three days.’”
“No shit, huh.”
“No shit. This merits a pigeon. You get one ready; I’ll prepare the message.”
Headquarters, Tercio Amazona, deep in the jungle
“But I do not have a monstrous dildo!” insisted the radio operator, indignantly. “I don’t!”
“It’s all right, Yvette,” answered her tercio commander, like his partner and the tercio exec, seconded to the Amazons from the Tercio Gorgidas. “I’m sure someone here does if you need one. In the interim, we need to get the word out to the maniples to go ahead with their attacks.”
Ramirez’s Battery, “Log Base Alpha”
The battery commander and his command group, plus the chief of the fire direction center, all sat around the radio listening. The FDC chief wrote frantically as the latest meteorological message came through: “Line 00 follows: direction . . . 26 . . . speed . . . 18 . . . Temp . . . 00 . . . density . . . 946 . . . line 01 . . . direction . . .”
Blue-eyed Rodriguez’s guitar was laid aside for the time being. Instead, he looked through the sight of his light artillery piece, aligned for the nonce with the tube of the gun. In his sight, engineers, hanging from straps in the trees, were clearing away lower branches or wiring the upper ones, or the trees themselves, for demolition on command. The engineers on the ground were connected to the individual guns by field telephone lest radio traffic give the game away. From there, they directed the men in the trees on what to cut and what to prepare for demolitions based on guidance from the gunners themselves. They didn’t try to be perfectly thorough for at least two reasons. One was precisely to avoid tipping off the Taurans. The other was that they didn’t have to; the guns could do a degree of clearance themselves with their first couple of salvos.
“Right,” said Rodriguez to his engineer liaison, “that big branch to the right of . . . mmm . . . yeah, that one. It needs to go before we open up. Right, demo will work.”
Centurion Avilar stuck his head into the opening through which the cannon protruded. “Any problems, Rodriguez?” he asked.
“No, Centurion,” Blue-Eyes answered, without taking his eye from the sight. “It’s going to reduce the effectiveness of our fire, though, when we have to blast our way through a layer of the jungle before the shells can fly free.”
“You would think so,” Avilar agreed, “but that’s more important for surprise fire and time on target. When you’re simply going to rearrange a chunk of the planet it matters less.”
“Fair enough,” the gunner agreed, then said into the field phone, “Right . . . okay, now that set of vines about fifty meters past that trunk . . . yeah, those . . . can we take them down?”
Avilar tapped the open door of the shipping container to indicate he was finished, then walked to the next gun.
Headquarters, 10th Artillery Legion, “Terremoto,” Ciudad Balboa
There were twenty-four artillery tercios in the legion—one of which was manned by sailors from the classis and fired land-based torpedoes—as well as enough separate batteries and cohorts to make up at least another ten tercios. There was, however, only one artillery legion, the Tenth “Terremoto,” or “Earthquake.” The Tenth, like the others, was an outgrowth and expansion of the old Eighth Cohort, which first saw action in the invasion of Sumer. It had grown a great bloody deal since then.
Five of the twenty-four tercios were under the Tenth’s normal and direct command. It also had the wherewithal, in terms of command, control, communication, and coordination to take charge of the efforts of all the rest, plus infantry mortars. In this case, it was somewhat undertasked, since Fourth Corps, around Cristobal, would take care of its own problems, while the Twelfth Brigade of Artillery, oriented to the defense of and—for the most part stationed on—the Isla Real, couldn’t range.
“Undertasked,” however, was something of a relative concept. In Tenth Legion Headquarters, currently set up in a thickly walled shelter under a parking garage in the city, nobody felt remotely undertasked as they distributed the fire-support plan, supervised the preparations for its implementation, or made the sometimes large but sometimes rather minute changes required of an unfolding situation. These showed up on a map, of sorts, projected against a screen almost five meters on a side.
The map had areas of impact, color coded for the density of fires to be directed against them, called “Density One,” which showed as green for “go,” red for “Density Two,” “Density Three,” which was blue, and Density Four, which was yellow. Some eleven spots, quite circular, and, in scale, about seven hundred meters across, were in deep black. Others were squares and ovals in various shades and colors. Black meant that no one was expected to survive in the impact area or that it was a no-fire area, for a period of time. Green indicated a serious level of casualties, but more shocked than dead. The various colors darkened as pixels, representing shells and shell weight over a given period of time, were added. Five deep lines were carved in green into the Tauran depth, one of those being the road to Cristobal, along which were also nine of those black circles. Date-time groups written next to the circles and connected by lines to them indicated the periods for which they were to be no fire areas.
Screens to the left and right of the main one showed committed and uncommitted batteries by time.
One area, surprisingly close to a swamp, showed an undetermined but heavy Tauran unit. No fire had been planned for it, initially, as it hadn’t been there, initially. The commander of the Tenth, Legate Pablo Carrasco, looked at the hole in the plan, graphically portrayed, then looked left at what was unassigned. He made a best guess of what was in range, and said, “Assign a battery of one-eighties to it, if they range.”
A non-com, one of a dozen on the work stations updating the fire-support plan, typed in a few numbers and used a mouse to paint the area as a square. “They range, but not enough power, Legate,” he judged.
“Reason?” asked Carrasco.
“Sir, it’s reported to be a heavy target,” said the sergeant. “Might be engineering equipment but also might be self-propelled guns or tanks or infantry fighting vehicles. We just don’t know. The norms we inherited from the Volgans demand a heavier weight of fire, and some kind of anti-armor round, for that kind of target.”
“Any three-hundred-millimeter rocket launchers uncommitted? I don’t see any, but . . .”
“There are two batteries being held in reserve after the initial volleys, under the direction of the counterbattery radar, sir. You could use one of those for one mission, if you’re willing . . .”
“To accept the risk,” Carrasco finished. “No, we’ll need the counterbatt. Give me something else.”
The sergeant scrolled through his spreadsheets, looking for someone underemployed. “The heavies that are doing the Volcano mission are also supposed to go to counterbatt, if they survive. We could put them on it.”
“No . . . no,” said Carrasco, after a moment’s consideration. “They need to go silent to preserve the illusion as long as possible.”
“The Aviation Legion has got a couple of dozen Condors with fuel-air-explosive cargos, if you want to deal with the air folks, sir.”
Carrasco nodded, then shouted out, “Get me a call in to Lanza with the Alae. Let’s see if he can fill our gap.”
Joint Headquarters, 16th Aviation Legion/18th Air Defense Legion, Ciudad Balboa, Balboa, Terra Nova
It could have
been considered rather advanced thinking for Balboa to have formed a joint headquarters, under the command of their air force, the Sixteenth Aviation Legion (which had alae, Latin for wings, instead of tercios), to control their own air space. For his part, if asked, Carrera would likely have said there was really “No other way to make it work. Somebody had to be in charge. They’re both just different methods of doing the same thing. I could have flipped a coin, I suppose, or I could have promoted somebody into the job and created a whole headquarters around him. But, in the first place, I don’t have that many hypertalented senior officers to spare and, in the second place, since they only had to act two or three times, it wasn’t really necessary to do so.”
So far it had worked, not only to humiliate the Taurans but to force them to stop using a very efficient “conveyor belt” method of aerial attack and go to assembling much less efficient large strike packages. This was not only hard on the ground crews, but it wasted fuel, as strike packages were assembled in the air, which also meant it reduced ordnance, and generally provided Balboa with a day where their skies were clear more often than not.
And the director of the effort, when the effort had to be made, was one Miguel Lanza.
“Lanza, here . . . one FAE Condor? Yeah, we can do that. I’m saving them mostly for something else but I can spare one . . . yeah, I could probably spare more than one but let’s not get ambitious or greedy, Pablo; you may just find something else you need hit . . . yeah, sure . . . I’ll give the order, just have your people send the request over . . . Yeah, you’re welcome.” Lanza hung up.