A Pillar of Fire by Night

by Tom Kratman

  Carrera was sitting in his office at the time. “What did Pablo want? Rather, I gather what he wants but why did he need it?”

  “He’s got a target, a new one, unplanned, that he doesn’t have a good way to take out with his own assets, so he asked for an FAE from me.”

  “How the hell is that going to survive the trip over during the prep?” Carrera asked.

  “It won’t. We’ll send it a couple of hours early and let it ditch in the trees, then go off on a timer.”

  “Fair enough. Now how are we on recapturing our airspace for a day or so?”

  “A lot depends on whether Sixth Corps, which is to say, Fifth Mountain and Thirty-sixth Amazona, plus the citizen guerillas, can force a major air effort from the Taurans. And that, because of the ban on bombing, is an open question.”

  Carrera smiled, slyly. “You’re not rebuking me, are you?”

  “No, Duque, I am not. But I am wondering how we guarantee the Tauran air forces will put in a max effort.”

  “Oh ye of little faith. Tsk. Double tsk. The short version is that when Fifth Mountain attacks the ports of Capitano and Armados, and the Amazons and guerillas go after the bases in their area, none of it is actually jungle . . . okay . . . not none, but so little as not to matter. So, yes, their air forces will put a major effort into saving their gains and their troops. Which should be of effect . . .”

  “In about three days,” Lanza finished. “But if they’ve been so scrupulous about not bombing the rain forest, how do you know they will go all out when we begin our attack?”

  “Because survival cancels programming.”

  Parilla Line, Stollen Number One-Twenty-Six

  A “stollen,” so-called for its resemblance to a Sachsen Christmas cake, was a very thick and very strong concrete bunker, big enough to serve as an assembly area for large numbers of men, even up to cohort sized, in a few cases. This one, formed in years past into the cut-out slope of the ridge that formed the spine of the Parilla Line, then covered and camouflaged with fast-growing trees, was about thirteen meters by twenty-four, and of only one floor. In other words, it was big enough to shelter an infantry maniple, to provide for them adequate room to sleep, in triple bunks, mostly against the walls, plus twelve stalls for toilets and ten urinals, and with minimal facilities to heat rations. There were chemical septic tanks under the stollen for the waste. Tunnels connected the six stollen assigned to the second cohort, three for the infantry maniples, one for combat support, and two slightly smaller ones for the headquarters, those being for the field trains and the combat trains and tactical operations center, together. More tunnels, none larger than required for a short man to walk upright, connected the headquarters of the cohort with tercio HQ.

  A four-wheel-drive vehicle pulled into a small, C-shaped and gravel-layered cut in the jungle, then stopped briefly. From it Sergeant Major Ricardo Cruz rotated his legs over the side and straightened up to stand with his feet on the gravel. Cruz winced as he did; he was barely out of the hospital. His wounds had been severe, his loss of blood considerable, and the almost inevitable infection a touch and go thing for weeks. Even now he still sported bandages and could, under some forms of movement, set blood to oozing again.

  But I wouldn’t miss this one for the world. And it’s only oozing, after all, not gushing.

  Other than his cohort commander, now Legate Velasquez, and the tercio sergeant major, “Scarface” Arredondo, he hadn’t seen a familiar-looking face since Centurion Ramirez’s brother, just before he’d passed out. And they’d only been allowed to visit him in hospital for a brief period of time. Cara, his wife could not come, of course. It had been a miserably lonely time, there in the hospital. Even though he’d never been here before, Cruz felt like he was going home.

  A young private from the cohort’s personnel office, or II-shop, met the sergeant major just off the cut. He carried a shotgun over his shoulder. Cruz glanced around and saw the remains of a couple of blasted antaniae not far from the road. The area was notorious for the noxious little bastards, so he was unsurprised. The ruined bodies were covered with ants and reeked, to boot.

  The boy stood to attention and said, “Sergeant Major Cruz, Private Arredondo, to lead you to the cohort.”

  “You Scarface’s boy?” Cruz asked. There was some degree of family resemblance.

  The private shook his head. “No, Sergeant Major; I’m his nephew by an older brother.”

  “Good enough. Lead on.”

  Cruz noticed that there was surprisingly little sign that the stollen even existed. Following Private Arredondo, he asked about it.

  “Well, Sergeant Major,” said the boy, “when we first holed up here we did cause wear on the ground. You’ll get that when a couple of hundred men pass by in single file in a short period of time. After that, though, the tunnels—”

  “Wait, we’ve got tunnels?”

  “Yes, Sergeant Major; they connect the maniples and headquarters to tercio headquarters. There aren’t any, as far as I know, to connect tercio with legion. Anyway, for most purposes the tunnels allow sufficient intercommunication that essentially no one in the cohort, or, indeed, the entire Second Tercio, absolutely has to go topside. So, once we took over the position, the jungle, and grass where there was no jungle, came back very quickly.

  “Note, though, that the tunnels are narrow and a bitch for two men to pass going in opposite directions.”

  Cool, thought Cruz, weaving through the trees behind the boy. Cool, narrow or not.

  At length they came to a concrete facing, pierced by what looked to be one heavy door and that flanked by two ball-type firing ports with periscopic vision blocks. The firing ports looked real and the vision blocks looked as if salvaged from an obsolete or wrecked armored vehicle. Hell, they probably are real; wouldn’t cost much and they would provide some sense of security.

  Young Arredondo reached over and pulled a little cord, then stepped out of the way. The door opened. Cruz walked in to find. . . .

  “Welcome home, Cruz, you malingering ass!”

  That was Scarface’s melodious voice, melodious for the nonce, in any case. Cruz knew in his bones that, yes, he was home at long last.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  “Wounds my heart with a monotonous languor.”

  —Radio Londres message announcing D-Day

  Port of Capitano, El Toro Province, Balboa

  The terrain leading to the port was odd, being a series of widely separately but remarkably steep parallel ridges running from the mountains, in the southeast, to either side of the port itself, to the northwest. In the valleys between the ridges, various hides and caches had been long prepared against the day of a counterattack. Between the jungle cover, the heat, and the clouds and general humidity, it was believed that even the Peace Fleet, orbiting overhead, would be hard-pressed to identify the troops’ movement.

  Because of the caches, which included food, ammunition, sundry other supplies, and even a battery of eighty-five-millimeter guns, with auxiliary propulsion, the troops could move light and fast, and with only a comparative few donkeys for outsize loads. Moreover, because they’d established the caches themselves and left local guerillas to secure them and the routes to them, they could move safely, with only minimal attention to security. In short, the two cohorts ordered by Carrera to take the town could arrive long before they were suspected of having left their mountain base.

  As much was true of the other two cohorts, aiming for the port of Armados, though the terrain, physical and human, both, was different.

  The port itself was small but well equipped, outfitted to export a huge quantity of bananas for consumption and tranzitree fruit for rendering into wax and candles. Indeed, it had been well equipped before the Taurans showed up. Now, with a large company of stevedores and cranes, it was better than it had ever been. The bay to the south and east of the port was enormous, protected by large islands further out into the Shimmering Sea. Indeed, the total protected water ar
ea exceeded sixty square miles. This was sometimes taken to mean that either God or the Noahs had a sense of humor, since the area was never wracked by a storm of any significance and never had been since the day of founding.

  Currently, the town and port were held by a battalion of Gallic Gendarmerie, a supply battalion and a transportation battalion, which included the stevedores, a detachment of engineers, a battery of mortars, manned by reservists, as well as a small squadron to service the planes that brought supplies landed at Capitano to the main Tauran force investing Cristobal. Shipping by sea would have been more efficient, and not necessarily all that much slower, once loading time was accounted for, but the fear of Balboan Meg Class submarines, never actually seen but confidently believed to be lurking in some of the many inlets along the Shimmering Sea coast, ruled that out.

  As it was, the port was just worth having, allowing stockpiling of supplies of some importance, and easier and faster transshipment of those than would have been possible from Cienfuegos. In a different world, had it been deemed cost effective to fight the half division or so of mountain troops based—and well dug in—around Hephaestos, and to clear and keep clear the highways over the country’s central spine to the city of Cervantes, and from there to the capital, it could have been a war winner. Unfortunately, none of those things seemed possible: The Fifth would have fallen back to the jungle and come out at times and places of its own choosing, the highway could never have been kept clear, and Carrera’s human minefield of a refugee center meant that the more logistics sent that way, the more the refugees would soak up; the International Community of the Ever So Caring and Sensitive would see to that.

  Worse, the Taurans would have had to coordinate as peers with the Zhong, a prospect utterly distasteful to both parties.

  It had been a very different war here from the beginning. The population density was, for one thing, quite low, with maybe one hundred and thirty thousand people across the province. The Taurans held the port, plus the town on the other side of the bay, on the island of Colombo. In theory, those held perhaps twenty or twenty-one thousand Balboans between them.

  Every other town in the province was firmly held by Carrera’s Sixth Corps, the partisan corps, with a mix of discharged veterans, legionary retirees, cadets, and sundry well-wishers and new volunteers. After a few weeks of more or less continuous sniping, of mines and booby traps, of ambushes executed with surprising skill and ferocity, to say nothing of daily mortaring of their positions in the town of Capitano, the Tauran commander had decided, perhaps wisely, “Enough is enough. Let them keep the bananas and the tranzitrees. If they’ll leave us alone, we’ll leave them alone.”

  To emphasize the point the Gallic commander put a series of thick barriers of mixed concertina and single strand-based barbed wire fences around the town, with a berm behind that to protect his men from direct fire, and anti-personnel boobytraps—no mines being officially available—between the two.

  It was, perhaps, not insignificant that the gendarmerie commander answered, ultimately, to a very different chain of command from Janier’s. It was also possibly significant that, although the locals took the hint and ceased their mortaring of the port, they never officially agreed to any permanent halt or cession of the port to the Taurans.

  There were a number of towns outside of the port, mostly owned by fruit companies. Those fruit companies had once been based overseas but, since the ascension of the legions to power, they had for the most part been nationalized. Unusually enough, the nationalization had been with full compensation, rather than simple government-sponsored theft. Moreover, after nationalization, the land and other facilities had been neither socialized nor distributed among the workers, but continued to operate as they always had, only with new, in some ways harsher, management.

  That management was harsher because military, there being essentially full integration between the fruit companies and one cohort, plus some support, of the Fifth Mountain. Thus, when that cohort came down from Hephaestos, in little packets of a squad here and a platoon there, they simply fell in on the houses and families they had left behind. A careful headcount could probably have determined there had been an unaccountable increase in population. However, the Gallic commander wasn’t well positioned to take that headcount, while the people who were, notably the UEPF and the various Tauran air forces, never really thought about it.

  “It’s going to be a hell of a surprise for the motherfuckers,” said the cohort commander, Legate Durham. Durham was tall, skinny, and blacker than sin. For all that he was native-born Balboan, he spoke an odd English dialect, with roots in Elizabethan England, on Old Earth, more than he did Spanish. He spoke Spanish now, though, for the benefit of the allied mountain battalion that was placed under his own for this attack.

  “Probably,” half agreed the other commander, lieutenant colonel and honorary legate Ugarte.

  “You don’t like the plan, do you?” Durham asked.

  “I don’t see a good choice,” Ugarte said. “Mixing troops, or attacking side by side, given the terrain, seems to me problematic. Not just that, but your boys’ Spanish and my boys Spanish don’t have all that much in common.”

  “Precisely. This way we fix them all around their perimeter, and when I make them weakest in the south, I turn over command of that maniple to you and you push through them.”

  There was, in fact, a good road that would have served as a dividing line but for three things. One was that the road itself was divided into two parallel ones, with a wide and heavily built-upon strip in the middle. This could have been overcome by assigning that strip to one cohort or the other. It might have been confusing amidst the smoke, fire, and soiled underwear, but it was doable.

  The other problems could not be so easily overcome. One was that, to the north, the actual port, a fifty-meter-wide, nonfordable inlet from the sea, ran perpendicular to the road. That would have left whatever cohort had the northern side stumped and frustrated before they got fairly into the town. The other problem was also water based, in that the dividing road, itself, then split further, and had yet another very lengthy, also unfordable, inlet between the lengths of road. Thus, there was a quarter of the town—and that the most important quarter—that was protected by major water obstacles with only a narrow gap of about two hundred and fifty meters that was not blocked off by water.

  “The trick,” continued Durham, “is to get them to commit entirely for the perimeter of the town, then to keep pushing hard on their flanks until they weaken the center. They’ll do it; my boys are good and brave and know the place well. We’ll make them do it.”

  Sergeant Paul Cheatham and his squad had bunkered down with his parents, on the floor of the living room. They had an allied fire team with them, but it would stay temporarily at the house when Cheatham and his boys moved out. Neither of Paul’s parents were veterans, though his grandfather, who also lived in the house, had joined Tercio Socrates some years prior, and was still not discharged. The old man kept his rifle—not an up to date F-26 but an older one that used brass-cased cartridges—in the thatch of a bohio, taking it out only to snipe from time to time.

  Paul was rather proud of the old guy, really. Good thing he’s farsighted, though, rather than nearsighted, since the rifle has only iron sights to it.

  Cheatham consulted his wristwatch, an old-fashioned, wind-up issue item, green, robust, with a mildly radioactive dial. His stomach lurched, just a little bit. About that time.

  “Let’s go,” he said to the squad, flipping his monocular down over his eye. “After all, we don’t want third squad to get first pick of the girls.”

  The squad, eleven men, made a few last-minute adjustments to their armor, mostly of the open every louvre available sort of adjustment, then went in single file out the back door, the one away from the town. Overhead, the moons Bellona and Eris shone down, each at about forty percent. A cloud obscured the Leaping Maiden, for the nonce, though not the Smilodon that stalked her. The Beer Ga
laxy and The Tap hadn’t arisen, yet, although The Dragon constellation hadn’t yet set.

  The point man, Cheatham’s B Team leader, Clarke, turned around and physically pushed his four men into a wedge, then made a brief trot to take the lead. He had a monocular, too, as did the other team leader, but the rank and file did not.

  Ahead, their platoon leader, Centurion Lee, came out of a nearby house and gave two red-filtered flashes. Clarke aimed straight for those. Lee had the weapons squad around him, as well as his optio. Clarke and Cheatham both sensed nearby company. Looking left and right they saw the other two squads, first and third, angling in toward Lee. Those two squads stopped short and took a knee about one hundred meters to Lee’s left and right. Cheatham could see long tubular projection over some of the men’s shoulders, bangalore torpedo sections to get through the wire and what informers assured them were either mines or booby traps. A bangalore could generally clear at least a three-meter-wide path through wire and a meter-wide footpath through mines, though it was still at least a little chancy. Against Volgan concertina it was nearly useless, but the Taurans weren’t using that.

  Clarke, on point, passed Lee, who told him, “No changes.” Cheatham got exactly the same message, which he acknowledged with a nod. Since Lee didn’t ask for more he figured the centurion had either seen it or figured Cheatham knew it, since Lee hadn’t said that there were any changes.

  Cheatham’s squad moved past Lee and Weapons to take point. Another glance left and right showed that first and third were on their feet again, but waiting for second to make some progress. After a few minutes careful advance, Cheatham turned around to see the whole platoon in a diamond shape, moving quietly ahead. Here and there Cheatham also caught glimpses of the other platoons of the maniple, and possible even of another maniple.