A Boy and His Tank

by Leo Frankowski

  The eight tanks assigned to the task of tunneling under the Serbians were approaching the base's perimeter, timed to enter underground at the same time as the first of our surface units. The noise of our arrival would cover any slight sound that the tunnelers might make.

  Everything was going so smoothly that there was nothing to do but wait.

  Combat Speed is wonderful when things are popping faster than you can think, but when you are sitting there waiting and trying not to chew off your knuckles along with your fingernails, it can be a major drag.

  I found myself almost wishing that some problem would crop up, just to have something to do.

  As we approached the gate of the base, we got a message from the Serbian general who thought he was our commander, welcoming us and telling us to hurry up, since the party was already going strong. I had the professor answer for us, since for months he had been impersonating the Serbian officers we'd killed, saying we'd be along as soon as possible.

  Then we simply drove through the gate, past the single guard, and proceeded to our assigned parking spots.

  I was beginning to think that now would be a good time to pass the Scotch around, since my nerves certainly needed it, but I didn't do it.

  I just sat there, trying to look like the calm, confident leader that I wasn't, to keep up the morale of the others.

  They all looked calm enough. Probably, they were faking it just to keep my morale up.

  The Serbians had an almost all-male army, and most of those in the lower ranks were fairly young.

  After parking their tanks and guns, some ten percent of our forces got out of their machines. They were all young, physically fit men who thought that they could fake a Serbian accent reasonably well. In the fading twilight, they washed, shaved, and smeared themselves with that combination skin dye and suntan lotion.

  They set their squidskin uniforms for Serbian colors and insignia, and then hit a snag. When the Serbs issued the survival kits three months ago, they hadn't bothered with making sure that things fit.

  There was a fair amount of trading among them, trying to get uniforms that fit properly. Then they tried out their earphones, which linked them with the professor, and he was eventually able to sort things out. The fit of our young men's uniforms was soon good enough to permit them to impersonate the enemy reasonably well.

  Then our men got back into their tanks and guns, but did not refill their coffins with fluid. This kept them dry and ready to move out, but still protected in case we had to go to plan Z.

  "I wish I could join them," Conan said.

  "You're not alone in that," Kasia answered.

  "Unfortunately, neither one of you even remotely fits the appearance required in the real world," I said. "Kasia, you don't even speak the right language."

  "I know. But that doesn't mean that I have to stop wishing. Sitting and doing nothing is driving me out of my mind."

  "I know the feeling," I said. "Professor, this waiting is getting on all of our nerves. I want you to change our time scale to, say, twice real time. But take us all back up to Combat Speed the instant anything happens. And I do mean anything."

  "Ah, the impatience of youth. But as you wish, Mickolai."

  We felt no change, but motion on the screens speeded up.

  "You should have said, `Ah, the impatience of hydrocarbon-based humans,' since even us old farts are thoroughly sick of this peculiar combination of boredom and tension," Conan said.

  "I thought of saying something like that, my boy, but I feared being called a racist."

  "Nah," Lloyd said. "If you believe that machines are superior to humans, you're not a racist. You're a machinist!"

  The rest of us studiously ignored him.

  As soon as we were parked, our tanks had released some of their drones, to tie us together with optical fibers. In stationary and fairly permanent positions such as those we had assumed, it was customary to run these fragile cables underground, where they were less likely to be damaged. We still retained communications through our comlasers, of course, but in any military situation, redundancy is always desirable.

  Within a few minutes, Serbian drones came up and tied us into the base communications net, for which we formally thanked them. This let us talk to the other Combat Control Computer, and to the Serbian generals, but not directly with all of their forces. At the same time, they could only communicate to our forces through us.

  This was because of a point of military etiquette. According to the lights of the Serbian command, my colonels and I still commanded our division, and would continue to do so until we were formally relieved of our command. The ceremony to demote us down to being a mere backup for the other computer and staff was not scheduled to take place until noon tomorrow. Until then, it would be impolite of them to talk directly to any of our people without going through us first.

  Not that the Serbians had any interest in talking to our troops, anyway, since to them, our people were all just enemy prisoners of war, but there it was.

  We, however, had a great deal of interest in talking to their tanks, guns, and personnel. You have to be able to talk to the nice people if you are going to lie to them successfully.

  Shortly after the Serbian drones went home, although at the time it seemed to us to be eons, drones from the tanks we sent in underground hooked us up to the lines they had tapped into while crawling under the enemy Combat Control Computer. We could now hear everything that it heard or said. We were hooked up in parallel to it, and could transmit as well as receive.

  The beam of an X-ray laser at full power heats the air it travels through sufficiently to make it white hot, and visible from hundreds of kilometers away. But according to our calculations, at eight percent of full power, the beam should not be noticeable without special instrumentation.

  True, every enemy tank contained and regularly used just such special instrumentation, but the Serbian tanks were parked far away from their Combat Control Computer, with lots of trucks and guns in between. We hoped it would be enough.

  Further computations said that four tanks, at eight percent power and at a range of two meters, should be able to fry the brains out of a Combat Control Computer in about three hundred twenty microseconds, which we deemed to be sufficient.

  Now, admittedly, all this was purely theoretical. We didn't have a spare Combat Control Computer to run any tests on, even if we could have gotten it to volunteer. But it was the best we could come up with, and we still had plan Z ready as a backup.

  Four other tanks, also using X-ray lasers at low power and at short range, were to do a similar job of murder on the Serbian command, currently partying down at the huge officers' club.

  Once all eight tanks were in position underground, I gave the professor a few more minutes to be sure that he could imitate his opponent perfectly.

  "I'm as ready as I'll ever be, my fine boy."

  "Fire!"

  The lasers mounted above each of our eight buried tanks exploded up through the desert sand and fired, while the professor filled the enemy's communications net with a loud burst of static. We gave their computer three full seconds of cooking, just to make sure, and the officers' club was raked for a whole minute.

  We heard a few dozen thumps, a short scream, and the crash of a tray of glassware that sounded from the club, and then all was silent. The Serbian Combat Operations Computer made not a sound in dying. Neither target looked a bit different being dead, except that they were both a bit warmer. Fortunately, nobody but us had an infrared scanner on them.

  We waited for two minutes and nothing moved.

  I ordered the tanks to sink back down into the desert sand, I had twelve hundred young men get out of the safety of their armored machines, and I prayed.

  Our troops straggled forward in the outwardly undisciplined fashion of modern troops. These were not the brainless strutting marionettes that passed for soldiers in the past. These were all highly trained technicians.

  The problem
was that they were not highly trained as infantry.

  Indeed, none of them had walked a single step for three months before this day. That they could walk at all was a tribute to the exercise routines done inside their coffins. The few times they'd used their rifles had been in simulations, and we could only hope that the enemies they went up against were as poorly trained as they were. The only thing that gave me any confidence in our plan was that every one of our men was using the earphone from his survival kit. They were each in constant contact with the professor.

  The professor contacted the Serbian guards at the gates, the guards at the concentration camp, and the guards at the Serbian infantry barracks, telling them that the new troops, being junior, would be taking over their duties so that they could take the night off.

  Most of the Serbians were happy about the change of plans and felt it unwise to rock any boats. In any military, nice things sometimes happen; the "Fairy Godmother Department" occasionally comes through.

  Some of the guards were cautious, or suspicious, or paranoid, and called in to confirm these new orders. But whoever they tried to call, they got through to the professor, who faked it from there. He told them privately that the new troops had screwed up and were being given guard duty as a punishment detail. This was a story that any trooper could believe, and only two men, sergeants both, caused any trouble.

  These two came down with mild cases of broken necks and were officially put on sick leave.

  A team of our guards went to the mouth of the tunnel that went back all the way to Serbia, and relieved the small detachment stationed there. After the Serbs had left, our men were reinforced with two dozen tanks, just in case something unexpected happened.

  If anything did come in from New Serbia, our troops were to either let them go about their business, detain them, or kill them, as the case seemed to require, with the professor monitoring all decisions.

  Another of our teams went to the officers' club, checked out the piles of dead bodies inside, and posted guard around it.

  There were some forty-five hundred dead people inside the huge club, far more than I had expected. I had seen the place on our maps, but had assumed that they had shown not the size of the building but the size of the lot it was on.

  Modern armored troops only have a tiny percentage of their personnel commissioned, and I had expected that all the Serbian forces would be organized in this fashion.

  The truth was that I had never asked, so the professor never told me.

  Yes, their armored troops had a command structure like ours, but their infantry, set up for police and garrison duty, had a hierarchy that was almost as stupidly top heavy as that of Hitler's army. Then, too, most of the Serbs had brought their wives or girlfriends along with them to the party.

  And there were cooks, waiters, entertainers, waitresses, bus boys, bartenders, musicians, and other hangers-on there as well, not one of whom really deserved to die.

  I felt rotten about the situation, but it was too late to do anything about it.

  Damn it, it wasn't like they had been invited here. I never told them to invade somebody else's country in the first place.

  I had the professor give us a quick replay of the scene of a few months ago, where the Serbians were raping the refugees before putting them into tanks. I worked at getting angry all over again, and some of my guilty feelings evaporated. Not all, but some.

  The Croatians on the general staff didn't act the least bit downhearted. Even Mirko laughed on seeing the carnage we'd caused, and Conan was positively ecstatic.

  It didn't seem to bother the troops that we had guarding the club, either, except that some of the men regretted the waste of so many attractive women. Not so much their deaths, since they seemed to all be Serbians, but the fact that we could have found better uses for them. They even made jokes about it.

  The situation disgusted me, but there was nothing that I could do about it.

  I could control my troop's actions, but not their attitudes. Hates that are centuries old never seem to go away.

  Then the long wait continued. The civilians in the concentration camp barely noticed the change in guards and went to sleep shortly after dark, which was fine. We couldn't be sure what their reaction to being freed would be, and we didn't want them making any noise until the rest of the camp was secured.

  Another two thousand of our own troops decanted themselves, cleaned up, and dressed in Serbian colors. Soon, they were among the empty tanks and guns of the division that was on leave.

  Using Serbian codes, the professor told each war machine that it was to be given some electronic maintenance, and machines are very good at obeying orders.

  As a Croatian troop came to each of them, it obligingly opened up, and the memory module was removed, rendering the machine close to comatose, barely able to close itself back up as ordered.

  Some twelve thousand memory modules were brought back to our division's area, to be stacked neatly awaiting reprogramming.

  Occasionally, through the night, people on one errand or another approached the officers' club. These people were quietly detained when possible, or quietly killed when all else failed, and in either case taken to an empty barracks that had been found in the concentration camp.

  Serbian infantrymen returning from town were simply allowed to go back to their barracks. Many were warned to get a good night's sleep, since they had a long walk ahead of them in the morning.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  MORE LIES, MURDER, AND A WEDDING

  Two hours before dawn, the Serbian armored division, the one that had a full complement of troops, was mobilized, courtesy of the professor.

  They drove off into the desert north of the base and began an elaborately choreographed series of maneuvers and war games. Tomorrow we would worry about just what to do with them. For today, there were other problems.

  An hour before dawn, the senior sergeants of every Serbian infantry company were phoned by what they thought were their officers. The general staff had decided that the troops were getting entirely too soft, and that a thirty-kilometer march on Sunday morning was just the thing to toughen them up.

  They would have their men fall out at dawn, with full field packs and personal weapons. Heavy, antiarmor weapons could be left behind, but rifles were required.

  They would start immediately, escorted by a few tanks, and march north until ordered to stop. Breakfast would be served on the road at eight. Any questions?

  Of course, there were thousands of questions, and even more complaints, but the professor was adamant, and by and large, orders were obeyed.

  Bleary-eyed, hung over, and profoundly unhappy, almost a hundred thousand Serbian troops marched out into the desert. Some of them even marched in step. I noticed that they all wore black uniforms, and didn't feel a bit sorry for them.

  In a few hours, automatic trucks caught up with the straggling columns, and unloaded just enough field rations, bottled water, and medical kits. After an hour's rest break, the black-shirted troops were ordered to continue the march.

  Many of them noticed that their officers were not with them, and complained loudly about this flagrant abuse of rank, but it got them nowhere. The sweating sergeants yelled, and the troops slogged onwards.

  Meanwhile, back at Beach Head, the Croatians were busy.

  The Serbian infantry camp was completely searched and some six thousand men, sick or malingering, were arrested.

  The officers' housing area was likewise combed over, and another nine thousand people, mostly women, children, and servants were taken into custody.

  Then the rest of the huge Serbian base had to be searched, and another thousand people, from janitors to mistresses, were interned.

  And finally, the inmates of the concentration camp were informed of what we had done. Most of them were wildly enthusiastic, but a surprising number of them simply couldn't believe that they were free.

  They were told that they were liberated, but not ou
t of danger. They were still far behind enemy lines, but that we had a plan to get them back to the rest of New Croatia. They were to meet with us at four in the afternoon on the parade ground, and everything would be explained to them then.

  In the meantime, we had other uses for the concentration camp, and since they were obviously in need of clothing and other necessities, they were welcome to loot the Serbian Officers' Housing Area to satisfy those needs. Additional food and medical help would be available at the chow halls and the base hospital.

  The prospect of loot quickly motivated the most downhearted of them, and the camp was soon emptied.

  It was soon filled again, with Serbians of various sizes, ages, and sexes. That is to say, with all those Serbs who were neither dead nor out obeying orders in the desert.

  There were a small number of Serbian officers who had escaped the carnage at the officers' club, and with my permission, the professor put one of them in charge of the people in the concentration camp. He was given a phone to request whatever he needed, and the camp was surrounded by thirty of our tanks to keep people from escaping. Since we only had one tank with antipersonnel weapons, this meant that any escape attempt would have to be met with rail gun fire, and the death toll would be huge. The officer seemed to be the sort who would do the sensible thing and simply keep order in the camp.

  Conan was convinced that most of the former internees could be talked into joining the Croatian forces, or at least getting into a tank as the safest and easiest transportation back to our own lines.

  A check with the computers in the enemy warehouses showed that there were plenty of helmets and spinal inductors around, so we put the program into action.

  Since Conan was so enthused with the program I put him in charge of it. We'd all agreed that he would have to go out and talk to the people in person. Words coming out of a speaker on a war machine just wouldn't have the right effect.

  Conan spent the early afternoon cleaning up and getting ready for his four o'clock speech.