Robert Frezza - [Colonial War 02]

by Fire in a Faraway Place (epub)

  Haerkoennen squared his shoulders impatiently. “I mean, we’re killing the people who run USS and Daikichi, but we’re not really touching the people who own these companies.” “Good point. Go on.”

  “I mean, companies like Daikichi have been manipulating Japan’s stock market for decades. We ought to return the favor.” Haerkoennen smiled crookedly. “I got some ideas. Just remember that you need me along when it comes time to choose up personnel, sir.”

  Sanmartin nodded. “I read once that every ship should have a Finn aboard to calm storms and call up a wind, and you’re the closest thing we have to a wizard.”

  After Haerkoennen explained his ideas twice, Sanmartin threw up his hands and took him to see Vereshchagin, who smiled and set Haerkoennen and Saki Bukhanov—the nearest thing the battalion had to a financial expert—off to see the only professor of economics at the university who understood stock-market modeling.

  Thursday(319)

  SANMARTIN LOOKED UP FROM THE FIELD DESK WHERE HE WAS

  working when Isaac Wanjau ushered Pieter Olivier in.

  “Major Sanmartin, do you have time to see me?” Olivier asked.

  “Yes. Pull up a chair.” Sanmartin looked around his tiny room. Wanjau reached one huge hand outside the door with a flourish and produced a straight-backed chair for Olivier to sit in.

  Olivier watched in fascination. Then recovering himself, he sat down. “Heer Sanmartin, I am very sorry about the death of your wife.” Having some idea of Sanmartin’s temper, he refrained from making comments about Wanjau that Sanmartin might find offensive.

  “Thank you. What can I do for you?”

  “I am sure that you are aware from your spies that I am the current head of the Afrikaner Bond.”

  The Bond was a semisecret and fervently nationalist Afrikaner organization. One faction of it, the Afrikaner Order, had launched the rebellion. Olivier had been involved up to his neck, and Raul Sanmartin had personally accepted his surrender.

  Sanmartin nodded, neither confirming nor denying Olivier’s statement. “What brings you here?”

  “I owe a debt of gratitude to you for keeping me alive and not transporting me, and as much as I dislike Colonel Vereshchagin and his policies, it occurs to me that I owe a greater debt to him for preserving the Volk,” Olivier said formally, the sour expression on his face betraying his somewhat mixed feelings.

  “And?”

  “Christos Claassen tells me that you are preparing an expedition to Earth. Our interests coincide. I can offer you our assistance.” He opened his briefcase. “We have control of several hundred million francs invested in Zurich. It represents the last remaining portion of the gold and foreign currency reserves of the former Republic of Suid-Afrika. While the interest goes to fund various activities for the Afrikaners remaining on Earth, our organization retained control of the actual trust principle. Heer Claassen seems to feel that you could use this money.” Sanmartin leaned back. “Are you sure that the people we transported haven’t cleaned out your accounts?”

  Olivier smiled slightly. ‘To ensure that this money was not diverted to improper uses, the access number to the account has always been divided between the Bond’s treasurer and assistant treasurer. After the rebellion, the assistant treasurer refused to give his portion of the number to anyone being transported.” “That’s right. They murdered his brother-in-law.” Sanmartin thought for a moment. ‘Timo Haerkoennen came up with a scheme. Do you know, we might even be able to turn a profit. Is there someone in your organization you can trust to send to Earth?’

  “Yes,” Olivier said. “Me.”

  “Hmm?”

  “My children are grown. My wife left me several years ago.” Sanmartin studied his face. Olivier’s cheeks were puffy, and he had put on some weight, but traces of the man he had been were still there. Sanmartin shook his hand firmly. “Welcome to the party.”

  Friday(319)

  WITH THE ASSAULT PLANNING COMING TOGETHER, SANMARTIN BE-

  gan working on other aspects. Late in the day, he brought a university professor in a simulated tweed jacket to see Hans Coldewe.

  “Hans, this is Dr. Jacob Van der Wurte. Jac is a lecturer in astrophysics, and I’ve asked him to help us with the problem of bringing your shuttle down on Japanese soil without anyone noticing. Jac, Hans will be commanding the assault group.” Coldewe shook Van der Wurte’s hand. Eyeing Van der Wurte’s bushy hair with distaste, he said to Sanmartin, “I’m not going to like this, am I?”

  Van der Wurte enthusiastically set up a portable display screen he had brought along. “I think that you will be pleasantly surprised once I explain my concept to you, Heer Coldewe. Now, Sol systems has a great deal more orbiting debris than most solar systems, and a lot of it is man-made junk orbiting around Earth. Although a ship would stand out—” “Like a clown at a funeral,” Coldewe interjected.

  “A shuttle is much too small. So, if you cut loose from your frigate at a point just inside the outer Van Allen belt with a great deal of initial velocity and make your approach to Earth via the planet’s south axis—there’s an ice continent there—no one will notice that you are not just another stray piece of rock.”

  “What about astronomers?”

  “Someone’s equipment may register you, but it’s not as though people expect to see shuttles appearing out of nowhere,” Van der Wurte said with an academic’s certainty.

  “We’re painting you with a black, silicone-based paint to confuse your radar signature, and you won’t have to fire your engines for most of the trip,” Sanmartin said reassuringly.

  “The paint will bum away when you enter the atmosphere, which will make you look even more like a meteorite.” Van der Wurte pointed to his display. “Your actual entry will be at a point northeast of an island called, ah, New Zealand. From there, it will be an easy trip. You overfly an island called, ah, Guam to let Heer Olivier off and then head for Japan.” Coldewe put on the smile he wore to charm people. “Doctor, you were bom here on Suid-Afrika, weren’t you?”

  Van der Wurte beamed. “Why, yes. How did you know?” “A lucky guess.” Coldewe looked out the window. “Doctor, just out of curiosity, how much of a safety margin will we have in terms of things like food, oxygen, water?”

  “Well, not a great deal. Of course, if something goes wrong, you might be able to ditch on one of the islands there,” Van der Wurte admitted.

  “And just how long is this trip going to take?” Coldewe asked suspiciously.

  Van der Wurte brushed a stray piece of lint off his jacket. “Oh, roughly three hundred forty hours.”

  “Raul—we’re going to spend three hundred and forty hours inside a shuttle?”

  “It beats walking.”

  “Major Sanmartin and I have discussed installing things like a shower, a recycling plant for water, an extra tank for liquid oxygen—•” Van der Wurte began to say.

  Coldewe shut his eyes, evidently in great pain. “This is going to rival the Black Hole of Calcutta, isn’t it?”

  “After you string hammocks, it will be tight but manageable,” Sanmartin said firmly. “Five will get you ten the boys start a nonstop tarok game back there.”

  “All this comes from letting the inmates run the asylum,” Coldewe complained.

  Saturday(319)

  VERESHCHAGIN REVIEWED THE DRAFT PLAN HE WAS GIVEN AND

  made a number of changes. Tne most important one was to cut down the number of men involved to 140. “It is enough. Taking more will not appreciably increase our chances of overall success and will only increase our casualty list in the event that we fail.”

  “This isn’t very many men to invade a nation of a hundred and seventy-five million,” Coldewe complained.

  “ ‘The Midianites, Amalekites, and all the Kedemites lay in the valley, as numerous as the locusts. Nor could their camels be counted, for these were as many as the sands on the seashore,’ ” Sanmartin quoted.

  “All right. He’s Moses, and you’re Gid
eon. I stand corrected.”

  Sanmartin nodded. “While I am thinking about it, the ladies of Johannesburg have sewn us a battle flag—real silk. It’s not bad, the salamander on it even sort of looks like a salamander.”

  The battalion emblem was a white salamander with three black spots and emerald green eyes on a black field.

  “How nice of them,” Vereshchagin said.

  Malinov grinned like a skeleton.

  “I hope you asked them why they waited until the war was over,” Haijalo demanded. “What are we going to do with it? We’re a rifle battalion. We have a crest—it’s nicely broken in, too. Rifle battalions don’t carry flags. This isn’t another silver samovar, is it?”

  The neo-Baroque samovar he referenced was a parting gift from the citizenry of Orenburg on NovySibir. It came out of storage once a year on May Day. Its aesthetic qualities were of the sort that took years to fully appreciate.

  “Thank the ladies kindly, Raul,” Vereshchagin said firmly. “Perhaps someone will build a museum we can offer it to.”

  Sunday (320)

  WHEN HARJALO ANNOUNCED THAT THE BATTALION WAS GOING TO

  Earth, there was a second or two of silence and then a deep-throated roar. Their people kept it going for nearly a minute until Matti started tapping his foot.

  “They’re interested,” Coidewe observed.

  Then Matti announced that only 140 men would go.

  The battalion immediately began whistling—the Russian equivalent of booing—and began a chorus of “Matti’s got a bald spot, Matti’s got a bald spot!” which was the traditional and rather silly way they dealt with any unpopular pronouncement from on high.

  Then Vereshchagin asked for volunteers. Half of the battalion knew what the icebox meant, and Vereshchagin made certain that the rest knew what the time differential would do to the relationships left behind. He also made sure that would-be volunteers knew the odds against success.

  It was a difficult decision for some, and Vereshchagin forced the ones who volunteered immediately to think it through overnight.

  He ended up with a few more than three hundred volunteers to fill the 140 places. Only five of the reservists in De Wette’s company volunteered, while the surviving hard cases in Degtyarov’s No. 2 platoon volunteered to a man. Vereshchagin went among them, man by man, and quietly thanked the ones he would ask to stay behind. He accepted a fair number of Afrikaners and a few cowboys, but if he mostly selected veterans who had been with him for a half dozen years or longer, no one begrudged him this.

  Meagher, Snyman, Karaev, and Thomas would command elements of the assault force under Hans Coldewe’s control. Degtyarov and Savichev would command the elements of the Iceman’s support force. Jankowskie would command the frigate, and Sanmartin would fly the corvette.

  Choosing men who had worked together as the nucleus of the assault groups, Vereshchagin selected most of the men

  from first section, No. 1; first section, No. 2; second section, No. 9; and the recon platoon. He also took a mortar team from No. 4, and light attack men. A scattering of men came from the other rifle platoons and from the engineer and aviation platoons. Some men Vereshchagin chose because they could pass for Japanese; the rest he picked for their skills and experience.

  Matti Haijalo would stay to form a coherent force from the ones who remained behind.

  Monday(320)

  JUST BEFORE THE EXPEDITION LEFT, THE QUESTION OF RENAMING

  the warships arose in the Assembly. A proposal to rename the frigate Maya the Hanna Bruwer was gently rejected, and an accompanying proposal to rename the corvette Ajax the Louis Pretorius Snyman was withdrawn.

  After considerable discussion, Maya was renamed the General Hendrik Pienaar, and Ajax was sensibly rechristened the Corporal Lightwell Gomani after a dead A Company trooper from Ashcroft. Vereshchagin’s men were already calling the 210mm penetrators that Reinikka was loading aboard her “Lightwell’s pencils.”

  When Jankowskie’s men painted the new names and tiny Vierkleur flags on the ships’ hulls, they also painted a small, white gallows insignia on each for luck.

  Thursday(323)

  ESCORTED BY A LARGE CROWD INCLUDING CHILDREN RELEASED

  from school, the last shuttle left the spaceport to the wail of bagpipes from the battalion band. With all of the confusion, the legislature hadn’t gotten around to adopting a national anthem, so instead the band played the “The Little Tin Soldier,” “The Whistling Pig,” and finally, the Finnish anthem “Our Land.” As Matti Harjalo watched the shuttie recede into the sky, he turned to Per Kiritinitis and said, “Okay, tell the pipers that that’s enough. I can see little kids sticking fingers in their ears.”

  Outbound

  A FRIGATE LIKE THE HENDRIK PIENAAR IS NOT A TROOPSHIP, NOR IS

  it designed for an eighteen-month voyage—nine months out and, assuming luck, nine months back—without resupply. Nevertheless, a frigate is not a small ship. As Maya, the Hendrik Pienaar had carried a crew of 130 to enable her to conduct around-the-clock operations, plus an additional thirty-six men to man her three corvettes. Because a reduced complement was more than sufficient to steer her between planets, she had a ninety-six-space hibernation unit.

  In place of the two missing corvettes, Vereshchagin could carry two of Suid-Afrika’s last three shuttles, both stuffed with equipment, and a pair of supply pods. Putting Kolomeitsev’s support group and a scattering of other personnel into the icebox gave him enough room for Coldewe’s assault group to live and train for their part of the mission. Yuri Malinov went into the icebox.

  Lightwell Gomani’s nickname had been “Speedy,” which soon became the corvette’s nickname as well. The patrician Hendrik Pienaar became known to her crew as “Granddad.”

  Sanmartin and Kolomeitsev made strenuous efforts to refine the plan further. The first four times they ran Haerkoennen’s simulation, there were varying levels of success and few if any survivors. They made appropriate changes.

  When Sanmartin brought the third set of changes back to Haerkoennen, he asked one question. “Timo, I noticed when we were running through the assault on the Ministry of Security Building, there was a little cutaway on the screen that said, ‘Press Tab N for Option G.’ What was that all about?”

  “Try it and see,” Haerkoennen said, turning his chair and proffering his terminal.

  Sanmartin entered the last simulation he had saved and moved ahead to the Ministry of Security. Haerkoennen had stolen the graphic images for the buildings from some architectural program, and the screen portrayed an amazingly realistic aerial view of the ministry.

  “The architect who built, that deserves jail time,” he commented as he pressed Tab N.

  The building rotated until Sanmartin found himself looking south-southeast toward the reclaimed land in the Port of Tokyo. Suddenly, a huge reptilian creature lifted itself out of the waters of the harbor. Stepping out onto Kaigan-dori Avenue, it began moving toward the Ministry of Security in a series of measured, menacing steps.

  Sanmartin folded his arms and looked at Haerkoennen. “Captain Coldewe suggested it,” Timo said gleefully as the simulation began counting down how long it would take to scramble aircraft from the military airfields in the vicinity of Tokyo.

  Approximately one month into the voyage, Captain Chiharu Yoshida asked Lutheran lay minister Erixon, who was also serving as spiritual adviser to the Dutch Reformed adherents on board, to accept him into the Dutch Reformed faith. Superior Private Erixon, a tolerant soul handy with a machine gun, agreed without hesitation.

  PERHAPS THE MOST MACABRE TOUCH DURING THE LONG TRIP WAS

  the “casualty pool.” For a five-rand bet, troopers pulled out numbers ranging from 0 percent to 100 percent. On the return trip, half the pot would go to the soldier whose number most closely approximated the percentage of casualties suffered during the operation; the remainder would go to charity.

  A hulking farmer’s son in the Iceman’s Support Group, Superior Private
Kobus Nicodemus, drew the ticket that equated to 100 percent casualties and observed, “Now I know what they mean by mixed feelings.”

  WHEN THE TIME CAME TO TURN COLDEWE’S SHUTTLE LOOSE, RAUL

  Sanmartin’s prediction about a nonstop tarok game turned out to be dead on.

  VOID

  The Pacific Ocean, Earth

  SUCKING OXYGEN FROM THE ATMOSPHERE RATHER THAN FROM ITS

  almost empty internal tanks, the shuttle skimmed along a few meters above the rough waters, barely cresting the tallest waves in the darkness. Although the lights in the cabin were turned off and instrument lights dimmed, the shutde’s nose still glowed very faintly from its burning passage through the upper air.

  As the pilot, Kokovtsov, made a course correction to head the craft almost due northwest, Hans Coldewe commented from the command seat, “You know, I never realized you could fly a shuttle this close to the water.”

  Kokovtsov broke his habitual silence. “You’re not supposed to.”

  His copilot, Zerebtsov, one of Thomas’s recon boys, said reassuringly, “Don’t worry, sir. If something goes wrong, it’ll be over so quick you’ll never notice.”

  “Thank you very much,” Coldewe said, fingering the nondescript civilian clothes he was wearing underneath his uniform.

  An hour and nine minutes later, Kokovtsov said, “Get the civ ready,” and Zerebtsov went back into the main compartment to awaken Pieter Olivier.

  From his seat next to the right emergency exit, Olivier’s face looked grayish under the blue cabin lights. He looked around at Coldewe’s troopers who were mostly asleep. “I keep asking what I have gotten myself into.”

  “We’ll be passing over the island of Guam in eleven minutes. We’re not slowing down, so I’m pushing you out the door in nine,” Zerebtsov told him. “Try not to miss the island.” “I will try not to,” Olivier assured him.