by Tom Kratman
The shimmering black water of the river was surprisingly cold as Arcand, despite his best efforts to side slip away, plunged into it. He had to fight off panic as the water went right up his nostrils and the impact forced the air from his lungs.
Schwartzengrosse had begged him not to jump with the 2 REP, but Arcand had insisted. There was little he could do to affect the battle from his headquarters in KDM anymore. He might do some good out on the ground with the regiment. It was his job as the commander to be present to affect the battle at the decisive point.
“Besides,” he’d said, with patently Gallic nonchalance. “I have more than a dozen combat jumps, I’ll be fine.”
Didn’t mention that your last combat jump was twelve years ago, you arrogant fuck, did you?
The struggling general managed to get his parachute released before it tangled, bunched and started to drag him under, but in his flailing motions, he managed to release his rifle and everything not secured to his load-bearing vest as well. The current was not overwhelming, but it was fast enough to carry weapon and pack away from him rapidly and into the muck of the river bottom.
Merde.
Arcand thought about diving for it, but the river was pitch black, and his night optics, while water-proofed, were of little use in seeing under water in moonlight. He began to sidestroke for the shore, hoping his flailing hadn’t attracted a crocodile or some other carnivorous megafauna that wouldn’t find the entire magazine of his pistol ticklish, much less fatal.
His limbs were burning from pulling himself through the water by the time his boots dragged on the first pebbles of the shallows, and he nearly sobbed in relief as he waded up and out of the water. Out of shape and scared shitless though he might be, he had the presence of mind to get into the woodline, flip his night vision monocle down and start scanning for an IR strobe, the prearranged marker for an assembly area.
The chill of the river water receded rapidly as Arcand made his way through the jungle vegetation, checking his wrist GPS to ensure he stayed on course for the nearest assembly area. His sweat ensured that his uniform stayed damp. With a mildly shaking hand he unsnapped his holster and pulled out his pistol.
After some minutes moving by himself, Arcand spotted a singular IR strobe.
Better to travel with friends, Arcand altered his course toward the strobe.
Arcand estimated he was less than thirty meters from the strobe when the beam of an infrared laser sight, invisible to the naked eye but bright and terrible in his own night optics, slashed through the jungle scape to settle on his chest.
“Cannae!” A harsh, low voice growled at him.
“Zama!” Arcand responded immediately, his hands going up, palms out reflexively.
“Advance and be recognized,” the voice said.
Zeroing in on the voice, Arcand could now make out the legionnaire kneeling amidst an array of palm fronds, rifle leveled at him. The general took a few careful steps forward. Once he was within three meters, the legionnaire stood up, lowering his rifle.
“General Arcand, sir?” The rifleman had a Turkish accent to his French, and his voice sounded much younger now than the initial challenge had.
“That’s right,” Arcand said, his voice low. “Do you have a squad assembled yet?”
“No, sir,” the soldier said. “Corporal Mushki told me to pull security this direction until we did. We were waiting on one or two more.”
“Well, I’m one more,” Arcand said. “Let’s get your squad leader and head to the nearest assembly area. What’s your name, Legionnaire?”
“Yavuz, sir,” he said. “Sir, where’s your rifle?”
Arcand drew himself up and scoffed, making a show of returning his pistol to its holster.
“I’ve got you, Yavuz, why would I need a rifle?”
1st ZAR Main Line of Resistance
Thenjiwe’s radio crackled to life, the voice that came through it was low, but clear.
“Assegai Six, this is Oh-Pee Three,” the whispering voice said. “I estimate enemy strength as two-thousand plus. Maybe half modern arms, half crossbow or musket. Lots of movement, I think they’re going to attack soon.”
Alexander took the proffered mic from Thenjiwe and keyed it, hoping his forward observer had remembered to put his ear piece in and put the radio on whisper mode.
“Oh-Pee-Three, Six,” Alexander said, his own voice unconsciously low. “Roger. How are they arrayed; can you identify where the advance will be weighted?”
“They are arrayed evenly across the base of the ridge, Six,” the observer reported. “Expect frontal assault.”
“Understood, Oh-Pee-Three,” Alexander said. “Remain silent unless you have to report something vital. God be with you.”
“And with you, Six.”
“Six, out,” Alexander said. He let go of the transmit button and took a deep breath. He’d feared the CLF would attempt this. If they’d committed to this course of action yesterday, or even this morning, there would’ve been no question they could crush the Zulu lines with simple weight of numbers. Oh, their own formation would have been devastated and incapable of follow on operations for quite some time afterward, but that would’ve been little comfort to the Zulus.
Alexander turned to Mjanwe.
“You heard,” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
Alexander thought furiously for several seconds, but he couldn’t think of a preparation he hadn’t made. He couldn’t think of a further adjustment to their position or plan that was an objective improvement and not just busy work. He looked into Mjanwe’s eyes, saw the old man’s recognition of his fear and uncertainty and looked down in shame.
He felt the old warrior’s strong, gnarled hand grip his shoulder and looked up. Mjanwe smiled at him, the expression nearly cracking his visage.
“Prince Alexander, you have done all you can,” said Mjanwe. “If we die here today, it is not due to any lack of courage or competence. You are every ounce your father’s son, and it has been an honor to serve you.”
Alexander, despite the heat, despite his thirst, despite the possibility of his impending death and the death or capture of his men, felt his heart swell at Mjanwe’s words. Never, in all his life, had Nkosiphindule Mjanwe dispensed such praise in Alexander’s earshot.
“Sir,” Thenjiwe said, handing him the radio mic again. Alexander took it and smiled his gratitude at both men before keying the mic to talk.
“Guidons, guidons,” Alexander said, a traditional term to call for his subordinate commanders’ attention. “Prepare to receive the enemy. Keep fire discipline and be prepared for close combat. They’re not stopping this time, so we’re just going to have to kill every last one of the malebe. Six, out.”
The Walls of Champasak
Champasak lay in a clearing amongst the jungle-coated hills. Its walls were twelve feet high and made of thick plastered adobe and anchored with stone pillars at regular intervals. The city’s defenses had been designed, initially, to protect it from Zhong marauders from the South. Ironically, those same marauders were a cornerstone of the UN’s publicly stated casus belli for occupying the colonies of Northwest Urania. Arcand hadn’t considered the UN’s propaganda in months, but he snorted a bit at the hypocrisy of it all just then, moments before he would likely give the order to storm the colonists’ safe haven from the depredators the UN avowed they were protecting them against.
Since the CLF had secured the walled city as their base of operations, the primitive adobe walls had been supplemented with wire obstacles and minefields. Arcand’s men were poised all around the walled town with mine-clearing charges, Bangalore torpedoes for the wire, and breaching charges for the walls. But he was going to try something else first.
Corporal Mushki and his squad had stayed close throughout the advance. Now, Yavuz, the young Turkish legionnaire, held aloft a white flag affixed to his rifle to signify truce, he marched out beside Arcand in plain view of the CLF insurgents manning the walls.
/> “Why me, sir?” Yavuz whispered.
Arcand stifled a grin.
“Think before you point a rifle at your general next time,” he said, giving the young soldier a wink.
Turning to the walls, Arcand raised his voice to a bellow.
“I am General Arcand,” he shouted. “I would speak with your commander.”
Many of the defenders stirred on the walls. They could just shoot him, but he hoped their leaders, at least, would be smart enough to know that killing one man, even a general, would do nothing to improve their odds of survival and might, indeed, doom them. Arcand and Yavuz stood in the midday sun of Lang Xan, sweat pouring down their faces leaving streaks in the grime they’d accumulated fighting through the jungle, before someone finally spoke.
“I am Colonel Nguyen,” a cochin man of indeterminate years climbed up onto the wall in front of them. “Speak.”
“Colonel, I have your fortress surrounded. My mortars are trained on your position while your indirect fire assets are forward near Savannakhet, I possess the means to breach your defenses in minutes and I estimate we outnumber your force by a ratio of ten to one. Also, I suspect you have little in the way of modern armaments while all of my men are armed with semi-automatic and automatic weaponry.
“Given the military reality of the situation, further bloodshed would be meaningless. I implore you to consider surrender,” Arcand said.
“You’ve been imploring us to surrender for years, yet we’re still here,” Nguyen said. There were a few laughs on the wall at that, but to Arcand they sounded half-hearted.
“Your courage and skill are unquestioned, Colonel,” Arcand said sincerely. “But due to that skill, I know you recognize the truth of my words. Forcing me to storm Champasak will cost me lives, yes, but ultimately it will do nothing to aid your cause, and all your men will die for nothing. It may surprise you to know I do not want that any more than you do.”
There was another long silence.
“What terms do you offer?”
“First,” Arcand said. “Are the men and women you captured at the Green Valley firebase alive and unharmed?”
“Yes,” Nguyen said. “We are not animals. Though I cannot, of course, guarantee their safety should you storm the fortress.”
Not animals my ass, Arcand thought of his mutilated men angrily, but he quickly shoved the emotion aside. Righteous outrage wouldn’t help him accomplish his mission today.
“That is good,” Arcand said. “My terms are simple; first you will return my captured personnel, unharmed and alive. Second, you will lay down your arms and submit yourselves to captivity. Neither you nor your men will be tortured or executed, you will be treated as legal combatants, even though your status as such is dubious.”
Nguyen stared at them, his face inscrutable.
“We will give you our answer by sundown,” Nguyen said.
No, “Colonel,” genuine anger coursed through Arcand’s veins. No stalling.
“You will give me your answer in the next five minutes,” Arcand shouted back, his voice filled with cold fury. “Or I will order my men to storm your fortress and kill you all. And if your prisoners are harmed in the assault, I will ensure that you, personally, Colonel, are taken alive. You and any other captives we have when Champasak falls will take several weeks to die. Before you die, I will see to the death of every single relative and friend we identify from your blood and the words we wring from you and your men.
“Your spies are competent, so you know I make no idle threats. Surrender now and live out the war in, if not comfortable, then safe captivity with your wives, children, parents and siblings unmolested. Fuck with me and I won’t simply kill you all, I will erase all trace of your existence from this world.
“Choose wisely, Colonel.”
1st ZAR Main Line of Resistance
The enemy’s main force crested the ridge in black rivulets of men, like streams of angry ants pouring down the rocky forward slope. Alexander’s men held their fire, keeping their positions concealed from these fresh troops and waiting to expend their ammunition to maximum effect as the enemy closed the range between them.
“Mortars,” Alexander said into the radio. “Stand by to fire Target Group Tango-One-Fox.”
“Mortars, ready,” Alexander’s mortar platoon leader said. For this operation, both the battalion’s and each individual company’s eighty-one millimeter mortar platoons were concentrated in Savannakhet, the better to mass fires on the attackers, totaling fifteen tubes.
Alexander gauged the enemy’s rate of advance versus the small rise that delineated the targets. Ideally, he would match their speed with the time of flight of the mortar rounds so that the bulk of the barrage caught the main body of the enemy in the open.
Right . . . about . . . now.
“Fire Tango-One-Fox,” Alexander commanded.
“Shot, over.”
Crumps and booms shook the thick, afternoon air, followed by whistles and freight-car shrieks as the rounds sailed overhead toward the advancing enemy. The rivulets of CLF infantry slowed to a trickle under the fire, creating a separation in the echelons of the attack, just as Alexander had intended.
CLF riflemen and machine gunners on the ridgeline poured fire over the heads of their advancing comrades onto the Zulu line. If their marksmanship training wasn’t as good as the Zulus, what they lacked in quality they accounted for in quantity.
A mixed horde of uniformed and civilian clothed men began tossing grenades while still more than a hundred meters from the ZAR’s forward-most position. Alexander stared in befuddlement for a moment; it was too long a pitch for the strongest men to reach the Zulu battle line. Then the pitiful smoke laid by the enemy’s mortars began to build higher and he understood.
Smoke grenades.
Through the smoke, Alexander could see dozens of man-shapes within meters of the wire obstacles. They were avoiding the obvious avenue of approach the engineers left in between the wire, correctly guessing it to be mined.
With a series of muted booms, six gray clouds blossomed just above the enemy smoke screen, and released a deluge of steel rain on the attackers. Through his binoculars, Alexander saw insurgents flattened by overpressure, eviscerated by jagged steel shards. Devastating as the mortar fire was, though, there were simply too many attackers and too few tubes to stop them.
“Guidons, Six,” Alexander said. “Weapons Free, fire at will.”
Two seconds later, the entire front line of the ZAR erupted in gunfire. They interlocked as best they could, the right side of the line sweeping the left wire strands, the left targeting the right.
The first attacker to reach the razor wire was an old, white-haired man in baggy peasant tunic, sprinting onward even though his left arm ended in a bloody stump. He carried no weapon but flung himself bodily on the wire. The entire first line, rank would be too orderly a word, of attackers followed him in falling to their bellies on the wire, allowing its blades to lacerate them through their thin, ragged peasants’ clothes.
For a wild second, Alexander thought the combined weight of direct and indirect fire had broken the first wave of the advance, but then it dawned upon him what he was seeing.
A body-breach en masse, he thought. I’ll be damned.
At a lack for demolition charges or other sapper equipment to breach the wire, the CLF was using what they had; expendable bodies. Alexander noted that none of their modern-equipped troops were on their bellies being shredded by the razor wire. It was a ruthless and intelligent tactic.
The second and third lines of attackers reached the wire seconds after their comrades. These troops were younger, fitter, most wielded modern rifles. They trampled the older men without hesitation.
Their smoke screen was a bare curtain of wisps, but it didn’t matter. Alexander watched as grazing fire from his machine guns ripped the guts out of a uniformed rifleman in a spray of gore less than a soccer pitch from his own line, but he was replaced by three more. Every mete
r of ground cost dozens of CLF lives, and yet they pressed.
The cacophony of the battle was like a living thing assaulting his senses. The acrid stenches of spent gun powder and fresh corpses laced the thick air around him. The staccato rattle of the machine guns, the crump and boom of the mortars, the screams of rage, and the screams of the dying all pressed in on him; driving his heart rate higher and higher. Alexander was overcome by contradictory urges to laugh wildly or to crumble to the ground and bury his head in his hands.
The sharp clack of a rifle bolt locking back right next to his ear brought Alexander back to his sense. Mjanwe had just run another magazine dry. The old warrior patted his magazine pouches frantically, but they were empty.
“I’m out!” He shouted.
Alexander tossed him one of his own magazines, then picked up his hand mic as the human tide before him cleared the obstacle belt. All along the line he saw the same thing repeated. Even aiming every burst, every shot, his riflemen were running out of magazines, gunners were down to their last drum.
“Mortars, this is Assegai Six,” Alexander said. “Fire the FPF.”
In seconds the mortars began falling in a sheet of steel rain on a line almost four hundred meters across, adding to the long ragged columns of dead and maimed enemy. The massive display of fire shook the ground around him with each volley and occasional pieces of fragmentation zipped overhead past his position. The term danger-close was a memory; they were within critical risk-estimate-distances now. It wasn’t a matter of if the mortars caused friendly casualties, but how many.
It was a calculated, reasonable risk, but it was not without consequence. Even as the enemy continued to rush the Zulu line over their own maimed and dying comrades, an errant chunk of fragmentation whistled into Alexander’s own foxhole, shattering his radio hand mic and ripping through Thenjiwe’s face in the bargain.
The young man fell silently to the muddy bottom of their fighting position, his face above the left cheek bone a ruined, bloody mass.