Robert Frezza - [Colonial War 02]

by Fire in a Faraway Place (epub)

  “The problem with a national redoubt,” Harjalo argued, “is that the Imperial Government will either nuke it until it glows and send a batch of reliable settlers out, or even worse and more likely, they’ll keep trying out biological agents until they find one that we can’t stop. We can’t replace warships, and we can’t count on being able to ambush the next couple of frigates they send. We might be able to wreck a task group or maybe even two, but eventually we’re going to lose.”

  “Hans?” Vereshchagin said mildly. “I see that you have been waiting to speak.”

  “ ‘You may triumph on the fields of the Pelennor for a day, but against the Power that has arisen there is no victory,’ ” Coldewe declaimed triumphantly.

  Harjalo suppressed a smile. “Hans is right. We can’t take on a new expedition from Earth every six years forever.”

  “Another thought which has occurred to me is that we might export revolution to other colonial planets and force the Imperial Government to disperse its resources in this manner,” Henke said.

  “No good.” Harjalo shook his head. “At least no good for the people here. By the time the Imperial Government finds out that we’ve launched revolutions in three or four other places, there will be a task group on our doorstep.” Vereshchagin spoke. “Raul? Now that we have run through other possibilities, I believe that it is time for you to outline your idea.”

  Sanmartin nodded. “First, I think that Chiharu is right when he says that USS and the people running things in Tokyo are going to believe that letting us go will cause other planets and nations to get wrong ideas. Second, if the Imperial Government takes us seriously and wants us badly enough, they can bury us. I think they’ll take us seriously, so the only way for us to win is to go to Earth and persuade them not to want to come here.” Ohlrogge almost fell out of his chair. “With one battalion, we’re going to attack Earth?”

  The Iceman’s eyes gleamed. He patted Ohlrogge on the shoulder. “You will get used to this sort of thing around here, Ulrich.”

  A glimmer of a smile touched Sanmartin’s face. “While there is a modest disparity in odds, to quote Virgil, ‘Possunt quia posse videntur,’ which means, ‘They can do it because they think they can do it.’ ”

  Seeing De Wette eyeing him skeptically, he continued, “When I first got to this battalion, Steel Rudi Scheel told me the battalion had sisu and lots of it. I had to ask him what sisu was, and he told me that it was mostly being too ignorant to ever know when you’re beaten. Our people think that they can take on the known universe and win. They may be right.” “Comments?” Vereshchagin asked, looking around the table. Kolomeitsev folded his arms. “Raul is correct. Having let the jinn out of its bottle, we must go to Earth. We cannot win here, and if we lose, it scarcely matters how. We have three assets: surprise, warships, and a small cadre of excellent soldiers. As someone said, ‘With a lever long enough, I can move the world.’ There comes a time to smash the cauldrons and scuttle the boats. I think that time has come.”

  “I agree it sounds quite risky,” Yoshida said calmly. “However, there is an expression, ‘To capture the baby tiger, you must enter the mother tiger’s lair.’ ”

  “If we succeed, with luck we buy time for humanity to mature,” Vereshchagin said. “And time, to a man who has great objects in view, is the most precious commodity of all.” “Who said that?” Harjalo asked.

  The Variag winked. “According to Plutarch, Quintus Sertorius did.” He looked around the room. “First, who precisely is our enemy, and what precisely are our objectives?” “The last time I checked, I was shooting at Imperials,” De Wette said. “Aren’t we fighting the Imperial Government? I think that they would take us seriously if we burned down Tokyo.” Yoshida said icily, “My sister’s family lives in Tokyo. The Imperial Government is a glove that many hands wear. Cut the hands, not the glove. Our enemy is United Steel-Standard.” “USS is part of the DKU keiretsu and is financed by the Daikichi Sanwa Bank. I see no reason to leave them out of any reckoning,” the Iceman commented.

  “What is a keiretsu?” De Wette asked.

  Captain Saki Bukhanov, the battalion’s logistical genius, had dabbled in running the banking systems on two different worlds, and he recognized that Vereshchagin had brought him to answer such questions. “A keiretsu is a loose grouping of companies under one of the major banks. The bank provides financing to its companies and owns substantial amounts of the stock. The directorships interlock. The bank has the right to appoint management, and senior officials move between companies. In effect, USS is one tentacle of a very large octopus.” “So, in effect, we are declaring war on a number of corporations,” Henke observed. “How do we fight them? They do not have bodies or souls to punish. If we blow up a factory, the insurance company will pay off.”

  Coldewe grinned. “Insurance companies don’t cover war risks.”

  “The DKU group is big,” Sanmartin said. “You aren’t even thinking close to the proper order of magnitude. Knocking off a factory is a small pinprick to these companies.”

  “Captain Sanmartin is correct,” Yoshida said. “The Daikichi Sanwa is Japan’s largest bank. It must have more than a trillion yen in assets, without counting its subsidiaries and its keiretsu companies.”

  “Add some zeros,” Bukhanov commented. “The DKU group has a larger GNP than some continents on Earth.” Haijalo said, “I understand the point, and I’m still a simple soldier. How do we hurt them?”

  Sanmartin sucked in his breath. “Well, corporations don’t bleed. People do. To use Chiharu’s analogy, we need to strip away the glove and take a cleaver to the fingers. These corporate groups are larger than any army, but only a few people make the decisions. If we target them, and quantities of the politicians and ministry bureaucrats who keep them powerful, they will feel the pain.”

  Yoshida stated with artful simplicity, “I wish for Japan to survive. I do not believe that this will occur unless the ministry officials and corporate leaders who control the Imperial Government change their thinking.”

  “If we shoot enough of them, they’ll get the message,” Harjalo said. “I gather we’re talking about a quick tip-and-run raid on Tokyo.”

  “Yes, the bureaucrats and corporate heads concentrate there. The city of Tokyo is extremely large, roughly a hundred kilometers in diameter. I do not believe that we could take control of more than a few points with the manpower available,” Henke said doubtfully.

  He thought for a moment. “There are only a few battalions of troops billeted within the city, but there are at least a hundred thousand riot police—kidotai—stationed there, and perhaps an additional ten thousand security police. Both the riot police and the security police have some infantry training, and the riot police hold regular earthquake drills. I suspect that the National Police Agency could evacuate and cordon off the entire city center of Tokyo in two or three hours.”

  Jankowskie, the junior officer present, spoke up. “Do we even need to send people in? Why not just hit them from space?” “The question is a fair one, but I believe that the city has defenses against attacks from space,” Kolomeitsev said.

  Yoshida nodded. “There are always a number of warships at Yamato Station, and even though Japan demobilized its space-based missile defenses several decades ago, there is still a ring of missile interceptor sites around the Tokyo metropolitan area. They were intended to knock down intercontinental ballistic missiles, but they can also destroy orbiting warships. They would keep us at a distance, and we would undoubtedly cause severe civilian casualties in attempting to destroy the ministries and the USS Building.”

  “Well, we might not even have to hit them at all,” Jankowskie persisted. “If we took out Yamato Station, we could always threaten to mix a nuclear-tipped missile in with enough other stuff to saturate the defenses. Or we could threaten to hit some other city if Tokyo turned out to be too tough a target.”

  “Detlef, I am fairly certain that they would not believe that we could hit Tokyo wit
h an atomic missile unless we actually demonstrated that we could do so. And I will not use a nuclear weapon on a city, no matter what,” Vereshchagin said with simple finality. “I have always said that we should only kill the ones we cannot reform. Moreover, war is the controlled application of violence to achieve political objectives, and I do not believe that we have one chance in a thousand of altering the Imperial Government’s policies unless we selectively prune some of the persons presently controlling the Imperial Government.”

  He absently tapped his pipe against his knee. “As a final thought, there is something indefinable about what we are doing. Warships are very impersonal. If we simply blast away from the relative security of space, I suspect that the Japanese will perceive us as less than fully committed. Above all, we wish to make this a very personal matter for the Japanese people.” “Yes, sir,” Jankowskie said, nodding agreement.

  No one spoke for a moment or two. Then De Wette said flatly, “It all sounds impossible, Anton. And even if it is not, I think that attacking Tokyo would give them even more of a reason to crush us.”

  “As Raul has grasped, our war in truth is not against the Japanese people or even against the Imperial Government, it is against certain people who have caused a war to come into existence,” Yoshida said.

  De Wette shook his head. “Maybe I am still missing the point here.”

  “Look, winning means convincing whoever is running the Imperial Government that they really don’t want to apply the force they need to pound us into topsoil—agreed?” Harjalo said, pointing his finger at De Wette.

  “Agreed,” De Wette said, nodding slowly.

  “No victory we win here is going to change things in Tokyo. Even if we win, it’ll be years before anyone knows, and at best, somebody nonessential like the prime minister will resign. If we sit back and wait for the Imperial Government to come to us, all we can try to do is absorb whatever punishment they can mete out. Esdraelon is an example of what happens when they get tired of fighting fair. Eventually, their ability to mete out punishment is going to exceed our ability to absorb it—agreed?” “Agreed,” De Wette said reluctantly.

  Harjalo stared him down. ‘To put it baldly, whatever we try has a high risk of failure. If we go to Earth and shake things up, they might fall out the right way. If they don’t, we might as well die gloriously so that the civilians here maybe have an opportunity to surrender on reasonable terms.”

  Vereshchagin said, “Christiaan, in terms of your own people’s history, if someone had assassinated Rhodes, Beit, Milner, and Chamberlain in 1898, it is quite possible that Britain would have never gone to war with the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. Raul, can you add to this?”

  Sanmartin laid his hands on the table in front of him. “We win by convincing the Japanese people that they don’t want to win. Sometimes the Japanese act like a school of fish swimming in tight formation—all of a sudden, they turn around and swim the other way. If a few of them are half-convinced already, well, maybe we can get all of them turned around.” Yoshida nodded. “The psychological effect of an attack on USS and the ministries in Tokyo would far outweigh the military effect. I believe that it is essential for us to convince the

  Japanese people of our sincerity in acting and the purity of our motives, and that in doing so, as Raul suggests, we will alter the consensus impelling the Imperial Government to send yet a third task group to Suid-Afrika.”

  Jankowskie gave him a quizzical look. “I am not sure I understand what you mean when you talk about our sincerity.” “From a Japanese point of view, the sincerity of individuals is often equated to their willingness to uphold principles in the face of overwhelming disapproval, or even to die for them.” “The forty-seven ronin,” Kolomeitsev said.

  Yoshida nodded again. “The Chushinguru—the Treasury of Loyal Retainers—is the story of the forty-seven ronin of Ako, and it excellently illustrates this point. When the young lord of Ako failed to pay off a corrupt courier of Shogun Tsunayoshi’s government, the courier caused him to be disgraced, and Ako tried to kill him. Ako was ordered to commit seppuku. His retainers secretly swore to avenge him.”

  Sanmartin took up the thread of the story. “They waited three years to allay suspicion, then the forty-seven of them who stayed with the program sealed a pact in blood, turned the courier and his guards into dog meat, and presented themselves to the shogun for execution. The Japanese people collectively went nuts over the incident. Their grave site is a national shrine. Whether or not they were right, the Japanese agree that they were sincere about it, and they’ve been writing stories, songs, and plays about the forty-seven ronin for the last five centuries.”

  Yoshida nodded yet again. “If we were able to present an assault as revenge against USS and their creatures, our sincerity, as evidenced by our attacking our enemies in the heart of Tokyo, will make it much harder for the Imperial Government to justify an expedition against us. Possibly, it would also strike fear in the hearts of ministers who would order such an expedition.”

  De Wette finally nodded. “It is a strange way for people to think, but all right, you have convinced me.”

  “Matti?” Vereshchagin asked.

  “Unless someone has a better idea, I know where we want to go. Let’s go back to talking about who we want to hit when we get there,” Haijalo said, looking around the table for contradiction.

  “I believe that we should target every individual in USS corporate headquarters, Daikichi Sanwa’s corporate headquarters, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, and the Ministry of Security,” the Hangman said, counting off on his fingers.

  “There will be no shortage of volunteers to go after the blacklegs,” Kolomeitsev said. “In addition, I would suggest eliminating the bureaucrats in the Ministry of Finance who set banking policy, and the people in the Ministry of Education, who promulgate that execrable kokugaku history which justifies all sorts of villainy. We also should kill a few political bosses—it would gain us a certain amount of public sympathy, and I would personally find it very satisfying.”

  “How about the Ministry of Defense?” Kiritinitis asked. “The MoD would be a tough target, maybe a tougher target than the Ministry of Security—guards, deep fortified shelters, filtration systems,” Harjalo admitted, “but to be honest, unless things have changed a whole lot, the people there pretty much do what they’re told to by the ministries with real power.” “Agreed,” Vereshchagin said. “However ironic this may appear, I do not see any reason for us to view the Ministry of Defense as a military target. Moreover, in the event that we are successful, they will be fully occupied providing explanations. Are there other suggestions?”

  “Perhaps we should also attack the Ministry of Construction. It is the single largest source of corrupt deals to use in bribing politicians,” Yoshida said.

  “I think not, Chiharu. To be comprehensible to the Japanese people, our actions should take the form of action against the centers of power which have directly influenced the Imperial Government to subjugate Suid-Afrika,” Vereshchagin said. “The use of the MoC as a source of bribes would appear to be a problem for the Japanese to resolve, rather than our problem.” “There is also Dentsu-Hakuhado to consider,” Sanmartin said at length. “I think that we need to address them as well.” “What is Dentsu-Hakuhado, Raul?” Henke asked.

  “An ad agency, the world’s largest. They essentially have a monopoly on advertising on television stations and in major magazines, which gives them ties to all of the major corporations and politicians, and enormous leverage over the media. As an extra service, Dentsu-Hakuhado pressures newspapers and magazines into modifying stories that might embarrass their clients.” Yoshida nodded agreement. “In effect, my country has two censorship systems, a public system managed by the Ministry of Security, and a private one administered by Dentsu-Hakuhado. Inasmuch as we will wish people to know our side of this matter, Raul is correct to say that we should deal with Dentsu-Hakuhado.”

  "Hakk
aa Paalle, ” Matti Haijalo said. It was an old Finnish battle cry. It meant, “Cut them down.” “USS and the other big corporations have been fighting a lot of dirty little wars. It’s time that we showed them how to wage one properly.”

  “Detlef, can the transport Chiyoda be repaired quickly?” Vereshchagin asked.

  “I am not sure,” Jankowskie answered soberly. “Raul made an awful mess of her bridge, but most of the other damage is superficial.”

  “That gives us a frigate, a corvette, and possibly a transport. Does anyone have another proposal for us to consider?” Vereshchagin asked deliberately.

  No one spoke, and he nodded approval. “I thought not. Raul, Piotr, and Chiharu, please stay behind so that we can work up a plan to discuss and to present to President Beyers and the government. I thank the rest of you for your efforts,” Vereshchagin said, bringing the meeting to an end.

  Monday(319)

  COLDEWE’s COMPANY TOOK UP RESIDENCE IN THE VILLAGE OF

  Platkops. As Coidewe cheerfully explained, the last tenants of the Johannesburg casern left it a mess. Arguing that the sauna and the kitchen were the two things too important to be left to officers, he turned the task of reestablishing them over to Wanjau and Kasha.

  Coidewe was both surprised and disturbed when Raul San-martin appeared with his bergen and a hammock under his arm.

  “Raul, what are you doing here?”

  “Moving in with you. You want to find me a room?” Sanmartin walked past him into the building. “Isaac said that there’s a nice one on the first floor that nobody’s claimed.”

  “It’s next to mine.” Coidewe caught up with him. “Why aren’t you home with Albert? Don’t tell me you want to bring Hendricka here. She’ll have a hundred uncles in residence, and we’ll never get anything done.”