Robert Frezza - [Colonial War 02]

by Fire in a Faraway Place (epub)

  “It seems like a lot, but I don’t know.”

  “Look, why don’t you ask Bory how much ammo he’s got? I bet he’s only got three hundred sixty rounds.”

  “You’re on. Five rand says he’s got at least four hundred.” Kriegler snorted. “More fool you. Last week, he kidded me because I was carrying a full tube of toothpaste. Hey, Bory! How much ammo have you got?”

  Corporal Uborevich looked up with interest.

  “We’ve got a bet on,” Kriegler explained.

  “Well, let’s see. One in the gun.” Uborevich considered himself above such trivia as the ancient distinction between a rifle and a gun. He opened up the ammunition pouches on either hip. “Eight more here.” He reached up and opened the breast pockets on his jacket. “And eight more here.”

  Vosloo noticed that Uborevich had sewn little loops in his pockets to hold the magazines in place. “That’s six hundred eighty rounds.”

  “You win,” Kriegler said disgustedly.

  “Hold it.” Uborevich began patting his pockets. He found three more magazines in a thigh pocket. Then he wrinkled his nose, obviously perplexed. “You know, I can’t think of what I did with the rest of it. Maybe I left it in my rucksack. Well, it doesn’t matter. Orlov always carries extras, and I can borrow a few from him.”

  “Got some thread?” Vosloo needled his friend.

  Uborevich winked so that only Kriegler could see and whistled, perfectly imitating the sound of an incoming artillery shell.

  Vosloo immediately dived into the nearest hole, which, like most holes in the upper Vaal Valley, contained about six centimeters of standing water. Several seconds later, he realized that he had been had. “Damn you, Bory, that’s hard on a man!” “Good practice, good practice.” Uborevich chuckled. He immediately heard a voice over his radio. “Wanjau here. Bory, is that you fooling around?”

  “Yes, Platoon Sergeant.” Uborevich sighed.

  “I thought so. Wanjau out.”

  “What did the platoon sergeant want?” Kriegler asked. Uborevich sighed again. “Based on past experience, I think the platoon sergeant wants me to show you kids the best way to dig a latrine. Or maybe several.”

  RAUL SANMARTIN ASSEMBLED THE POLITICIANS EVACUATED TO THE

  Drakensberg caverns and stood on an ammunition box to address them. “If I may have your attention.” He studied them as he waited for the murmuring to quiet.

  “My wife tells me that some of you have been complaining about the menu here, which pretty much consists of stew today, stew tomorrow, and stew twice on Thursdays. I regret that this is not a hotel. I assure you, you are eating what I am eating, which is the same thing that the soldiers are eating when they get to eat.”

  He paused. “Our battalion does not have very much in the way of an administrative element. A number of years ago, Lieutenant-Colonel Vereshchagin asked everyone whether they’d like more amenities and things like beer in the field, or fifty extra people carrying rifles at the sharp end of things. The vote was unanimous. After we took it two or three times. If you would like to organize yourselves to help out with the chores around here, we would appreciate it.”

  He tamed them over to Betje Beyers, who chose Eva Moore as her first assistant.

  As Sanmartin would have admitted if anyone had asked, they could have brought in some extra civilians to do drudgery, but leaving a few hundred politicians and notables without meaningful labor did not strike anyone as particularly intelligent.

  Friday(315)

  WORKING THROUGH THE NIGHT, ADMIRAL HORIl’S STAFF PUT Together a plan to launch probes north of Bloemfontein into the foothills of the Drakensbergs, feeling that Vereshchagin’s men could not have traveled very far. The plan was adopted at Admiral Horn's morning staff meeting without significant discussion. The First Battalion of Colonel Uno’s Manchurian Regiment was assigned the mission under Colonel Sumi’s overall direction and given twenty-four hours to prepare.

  “We will smash them!” Uno exclaimed exultantly as the meeting broke up.

  Horii grinned at his aide, Watanabe, as soon as the room cleared. “The first drum makes courage, neh, Watanabe?”

  “I do not understand, honored Admiral,” Watanabe admitted sheepishly.

  “Our strategy should be to make a show of being slow, then to attack Colonel Vereshchagin without warning when he is not expecting it. You must research this, Watanabe,” Horii said placidly.

  WHILE COMMUNICATIONS WERE STILL RELATIVELY SECURE, HANNA

  Bruwer and her fellow politicians organized a human chain, from Upper Marlboro in the south to Boksburg in the north, as a peaceful protest.

  Rejecting Colonel Sumi’s advice, Admiral Horii chose to largely ignore the demonstration and only allowed the Manchurians and blacklegs to use batons. As a result, only two civilians died.

  Saturday(315)

  SIPPING TEA FROM THE MUG IN HIS HAND, SENIOR COMMUNICA-

  tions Sergeant Timo Haerkoennen watched Matti Harjalo playing solitaire on a small field desk. “I hate sitting around waiting for something to happen,” Haijalo announced loudly.

  “Patience, sir. Patience,” Timo Haerkoennen kidded Haijalo, knowing the source of Hasjalo’s discontent.

  Haijalo stared at his cards and then threw them in in disgust. “All right, Timo. Anton says that they’ll send company-sized probes through the highlands, either today or tomorrow. What say you?”

  “Today, if they’re moderately incompetent. Tomorrow, if they’re grossly incompetent.”

  “Tomorrow, but it won’t be a company-sized probe. Horii will want to end this quickly, so I expect him to try and find us and then pile on.” Haijalo began dealing out another hand.

  The communications board that Haerkoennen and his assistant, Communications Sergeant Esko Poikolainnen, manned in shifts was the battalion’s nerve center, and never more so than at present. Admiral Horii’s signals section had the best communications detection and intercept equipment that Earth could produce, forcing Vereshchagin to dot the countryside with clusters of short-range relay nodes—the rough equivalent of stringing telephone wire to each unit—to keep radio messages from being jammed, or worse still, used to pinpoint the location of the senders.

  Poikolainnen shook Haerkoennen by the arm. “Something’s coming through garbled.”

  Twirling around in his chair, Haerkoennen helped him make delicate changes in the relay path. Haqalo came over and stood behind the two of them. The radio crackled. “Bad jamming,” Haerkoennen said quietly. “Okay, we have them. This is Haerkoennen. Go ahead.”

  It was Lieutenant Thomas, the reconnaissance platoon leader. “Thomas here. I’ve had trouble getting through. A flock of aircraft just took off from the spaceport on a 348-degree heading. One group just took off consisting of four Shidens, four choppers, two Sparrows, and twelve, repeat twelve, transports. There are two more gaggles of equal size waiting to go.” “Four Shiden, four choppers, two Sparrows, twelve transports, the first group of three groups on a 348-degree heading,” Haerkoennen repeated.

  “Correct. It looks like the Shidens in the lead group are armed with a normal load. Thomas out.”

  Vereshchagin had somehow divined the need for his presence and joined them from the side passage that served as his bedroom.

  “We have company coming. No, actually, we have about three companies coming. The middle Drakensbergs, do you think?” Harjalo asked him.

  Vereshchagin tapped his unlit pipe against his thigh. “Yes, it would appear that they are going to pick out a landing zone or two to explore after a few course changes to throw us off the track.” He picked up an electronic pointer and began tracing patterns on the map. “The Shidens aren’t carrying the munitions they would need to manufacture landing zones, so they have about a dozen choices.”

  Another call came through from a different sender. “Mintje Cillie here. There’s an armored column leaving the spaceport barracks and heading north on the Pretoria road. It looks to be battalion size.”


  Harjalo looked at Vereshchagin.

  Called to duty a few days ago, Cillie, an economist, was a member of Vereshchagin’s reserve reconnaissance platoon, the “Baker Street Irregulars,” whose mission was to provide information that Vereshchagin needed to fight. Like the other members of her platoon, Cillie was not trained to fight like a soldier. She was trained to die like one if it came to that.

  “Haijalo here. What vehicles so far?” Matti asked her.

  “Six slicks and seven Cadillacs, so far. They are keeping hundred-meter intervals, but there are a lot more coming. A lot more.”

  “Very fine. Let us know when you have a complete count. Haijalo out.”

  The road network through the Drakensbergs was largely undeveloped, and the armored column filled in one piece of the puzzle for Vereshchagin. “They will land here, or here,” he said, framing two relatively open areas north of the village of Valkenswaard on the electronic map. Part of Ivan Sversky’s B Company was posted there. Looking at Harjalo, he asked the all-important question, “Where are the warships?”

  “About thirty-five kilometers up. They started drifting north in a tight diamond formation about ten minutes ago,” Haijalo said.

  Several dozen observers with a varied collection of astronomical equipment kept Admiral Horii’s warships in constant view and constantly communicated changes in their positions.

  The warships and the geosynchronized satellites they used for targeting were superbly equipped with visual and thermal detection gear that could penetrate all but the thickest clouds or vegetation. Vereshchagin’s men and vehicles were shielded and as well hidden in the forests as they could contrive. However, as rebels had discovered on a dozen worlds, the heat of weapons firing showed up unbelievably well to warships overhead.

  “Admiral Horii will use the Manchurians in the transports to flush the game for his ships,” Vereshchagin commented.

  “We’ll need those ships heading in some other direction if we want to play hell with the Manchurian boys,” Haijalo replied. ‘Timo, tell Thomas to initiate the feint we talked about, then get me Sversky.”

  Thomas had one section of his recon platoon waiting patiently near the east end of the spaceport runway where the Im-pedal Guard battalion maintained an outpost. Thomas’s men would give the unlucky guardsmen a small dose of concentrated hell and then disappear, leaving behind enough exploding fireworks to simulate a continuing attack. Hopefully, Admiral Horii would mistake it for an assault of major proportions and divert the warships to support them.

  If the warships turned around and the Manchurian assault force did not, Sversky’s men would have a window of opportunity.

  A SHALLOW UNDULATING BOWL OF OPEN AREA TWO-THIRDS OF A

  kilometer in diameter, the landing zone arbitrarily designated Gifu Chiba was framed by forest and the mountains looming to the north. Riding in a two-man ultralight Sparrow aircraft, Colonel Sumi circled the LZ; his tiny plane, built from radar-absorbant materials and fitted with panels that matched the ambient light, was virtually invisible.

  As Sumi watched intently, two Shiden ground-attack aircraft followed tiny Hummingbird reconnaissance drones over the landing zone, dusting it with antipersonnel bomblets and raking the north tree line with,cannon fire. When the thunder of the bomblets died away, two more Shidens dropped canisters of liquified fuel that spread into a sticky blanket and exploded a few meters off the ground, searing the scrub vegetation and creating an overpressure that would detonate any mines laid.

  The fire quickly burned itself out, and helicopters took up overwatch positions at the four comers of the LZ to cover the troop landings. “We observed no secondary explosions, nor did we receive return fire,” the Shiden flight leader told Sumi. “We will proceed down the valley.”

  Sumi called Colonel Uno, riding a Sparrow a thousand meters lower, and directed him to proceed.

  Moments later, a single tilt-prop landed, the four huge propellers on the front and back of its wings pointing skyward to lower it gently. It spilled out sixteen nervous Manchurian reconnaissance troopers who immediately fell prone. As soon as the tilt-rotor took off again, two more transports landed and disgorged the remainder of a Manchurian recon platoon. The Manchurian recon troopers spread themselves out in the blackened, waist-high ferns and began cautiously probing.

  Unknown to the Manchurian troopers, far to the south, Lieutenant Thomas’s men had turned a quiet afternoon into hell, sending a sleepy platoon of Imperial guardsmen sprawling into

  their shelters. As they fired at their unseen opponents, the guardsmen frantically requested maximum artillery and warship support.

  Working from hastily crafted contingency plans, artillery shells from the 210mm gun-howitzers at the spaceport pounded the area around the outpost, and Admiral Horii’s four warships turned and sped south. Despite the suspicious timing of Thomas’s attack, a “real” threat to the Japanese national troops at the spaceport was a higher priority than the potential threat to the Manchurians.

  As the Manchurian recon troopers reached the tree line to the north and east of the glade, they began to relax, and Sumi impatiently directed Colonel Uno to proceed.

  Moments later, loaded with D for Date Manchurian company and part of a mortar platoon, a tight, nine-ship wave of transport aircraft came floating in. As the tilt-rotors grounded, the Manchurians poured out and began fanning out in all directions under the watchful eyes of Colonel Sumi and Colonel Uno, who were monitoring the company radio net to countermand or revise orders.

  Elated as his transport touched down, Section Sergeant “Sawtooth” Ma jovially told his men, “Now, remember to find a few souvenirs for your old sergeant.” Like the Manchurian recon troopers, Ma failed to notice the sensors that Captain Sversky’s B Company had inconspicuously placed in the tree-tops.

  From prepared positions in the tree line to the southwest, an eight-man half section from Sversky’s No. 7 platoon watched and reported the Manchurians’ progress to Sversky, a dozen kilometers away.

  “Pihkala here. One platoon and one company so far. The company is half unloaded. We’re prepared to engage with remotes.”

  Ivan Sversky looked at his company sergeant, Rodale. “Engage. Sversky out.”

  Seconds later, two 7.7mm general-purpose machine guns opened up on the Manchurians from the east side of the landing zone, chewing holes in the grounded transport aircraft and scattering surprised Manchurian infantrymen.

  With four platoon leaders, a company commander, a battalion commander, the helicopter company commander, Colonel Uno, and Colonel Sumi all in evidence, the Manchurians on the ground were immediately deluged with orders. They laid down a base of fire and prepared to assault while the helicopter gunships nearest the disturbance plastered the east tree line with fire.

  Unfortunately, the enemy they were preparing to assault literally wasn’t there. Vereshchagin’s armorers had mounted a few-dozen spare gp machine guns on concrete pedestals, wrapped them in composite matting, and equipped them with camera eyes and electronic triggers to command the more obvious landing sites. Undeterred by the heavy fire, the Pihkala’s soldiers on the southwest side rotated the seven-sevens with joysticks, firing sporadically to make the carefully camouflaged guns difficult to spot and to keep from burning out the barrels.

  While the two machine guns in action were not inflicting many casualties, they helped the bemused Manchurians reach the natural and erroneous conclusion that the s-mortar rounds that Pihkala was dropping almost vertically onto their positions were also coming from the eastern side of the LZ.

  Repeated helicopter strikes succeeded in knocking out one of Pihkala’s guns. Reaching agreement, Colonel Sumi and Colonel Uno ordered two sections of No. 16 Manchurian infantry platoon to move into the north tree line and maneuver around what they perceived to be Pihkala’s flank. Immediately, two more remote-controlled machine guns opened up from the southeast and northeast comers of the perimeter and caught them in a raking cross fire.

  From his vanta
ge point high over the battlefield, Colonel Sumi counted the general-purpose machine guns peppering the Manchurian company and reached an understandable and perhaps predictable conclusion. He opened up a channel to his senior officers. “Colonel Sumi here. Attention! We have succeeded in engaging at least two platoons of Vereshchagin’s men. Date Company will lay down a base of fire and pin down the enemy forces. Beppu Company and Chiba Company will proceed to Landing Zone Gifu Beppu and move on foot to trap the enemy. Crush all resistance. Sumi out.”

  LZ GB was a good four kilometers away through terrain cut by ravines and cloaked in dense forest; it would take the two companies at least two or three hours to “trap” Pihkala’s force. While Sumi’s maneuver was not a battle tactic that Vereshchagin would have employed, it was what the textbook called for, which meant that it was exactly what Vereshchagin expected.

  Even as Sumi was issuing his orders, Lieutenant Per Kiritinitis was moving the rest of No. 7 platoon into place around LZ Gifu Beppu. “Bee point command. Break.

  Kiritinitis here,” he reported through bursts of static from the jamming. “Ivan, we’re in place and so are the two Cadillacs. The firing positions have a little water in them, but they’re in pretty good shape. The Manchus are about to land—are the mortars up yet?”

  Sversky balanced himself precariously on a tiny utility vehicle carrying a 105mm mortar and its crew as it bumped along a narrow trail cut between firing points. “Sversky here. We’ll be there. I’m moving a section of number six to reinforce you.” Moments later, the vehicles with the four mortars of Sversky’s No. 8 mortar platoon reached their initial firing points and lowered their little spade feet so the mortars could fire.

  As Kiritinitis watched beneath the fern trees, the section from No. 6 platoon filtered into place from the depths of the forest. In the clearing ahead, clouds of red, green, yellow, and violet smoke expanded like the petals of a flower as the Manchurians advanced toward the tree lines on all sides. “Kiritinitis here. Number six is in position. The second wave is about to touch down. The Manchus are firing off colored smoke grenades, but I can’t think why.”