Cain's Land

by Robert Frezza

  “A river runs through this land,” Hiltunen whispered, “and we will set it free.”

  Lin looked at him. “Are you feeling okay, sir?”

  Cuextla: 2309 hours

  “IT’S SPOOKY HOW EMPTY THIS PLACE IS,” KALLE KEKKONEN MURMURED. He pointed to a door. “How about this one?”

  De Kantzow shrugged, and Kekkonen tried the lever. “It’s locked.”

  De Kantzow growled something that probably did not qualify as a tribute to Kekkonen's perspicacity.

  As the two of them had rapidly discovered, the Blues only ran stairwells from one floor to the next, and scattered them around. There was even less consistency in the cryptic characters inscribed on the doors. The metallic whine of the building's airconditioning was unsettling.

  Kekkonen handed de Kantzow his submachine gun. “I have a picklock.” He produced it from his side pocket and carefully inserted it into the oval hole in the barrel of the door handle. His patient fiddling failed to produce results. De Kantzow busied himself scanning the ceiling for stray cracks.

  After a moment, he nudged Kekkonen aside. “I have a picklock, too.” Thumbing the safety on Kekkonen's submachine gun. he fired one round into the door, pausing to observe penetration and ricochet. Satisfied, he nodded and fired the rest of the magazine into the door in short, carefully aimed bursts. He pivoted on his left foot and executed a savage kick that snapped the door free of its lock.

  Kekkonen accepted his submaehine gun back. “You know, DeKe, you take all the fun out of this.”

  “You and your frosting mathematical probabilities,” The Deacon growled as they stopped inside. “I told you we should have turned right”

  The room had high, vaulted ceilings and elaborately woven tapestries on the walls. A very long table and dozens of carefully carved chairs filled most of it. The floor was covered with ornate scrollwork. “DeKe, this looks like a throne room or something,” Kekkonen whispered.

  “It’s almost as fancy as the whorehouse we trashed on Odawara,” The Deacon solemnly agreed.

  Dolly wandered over to investigate the brilliantly decorated high seat. She walked around and sniffed at it a few times. A few seconds later, Kekkonen said softly, “DeKe, did you just see what I just saw?”

  De Kantzow shook his head “No. And you didn't either.”

  Dolly walked back to Kekkonen wagging her tail. He reached down to pat her. “Do you think she knows?”

  “No.” The Deacon shook his head. “Not a chance.”

  Kekkonen considered. “If we tell anybody, do you think they'll believe us?”

  “No.” The Deacon shook his head. “Not a chance. Come on, we're frosting short on time here.”

  Landing Zone One: 2314

  MAJOR AICHI GLANCED AT KOKOVTSOV AND TOUCHED THE RADIO in the shuttle's darkened cockpit. “Recon point one-three. Break. Aichi here. Sergeant Salchow, how is the road?”

  Assistant Section Sergeant “Abdullah” Salchow, head of the three-man recon team “occupying” the six kilometers of road arbitrarily designated Landing Zone One, replied, “You're clear to land, Major.”

  Kokovtsov let down his landing gear and began to measure his approach. Seconds later, an 88mm round from a recoilless gun lit up the night

  The radio clicked. “Salchow here. Now you're clear to land, sir.”

  Kokovtsov chuckled as the massive shuttle glided to a halt. Mikhail Remmar’s Cadillac and a slick rolled down the ramp and sped off carrying a half section of Aichi's second platoon to establish a blocking position farther up the road. Another section pushed a transport plane out the back and locked its wings into place, while the rest of Aichi's men filtered into position along the dikes. Moments later, the transport flew off to retrieve the first and second sections of No. 9 platoon. Kokovtsov flew the shuttle off to circle.

  Supply Dump: 2320 hours

  FROM AOBA'S FAVORITE HIDING PLACE BEHIND THE LESSER MOON, JANKOWSKIE AND Kobayashi monitored events on the planet’s surface with what remained of their satellite array.

  “So far we appear to be on schedule,” Kobayashi said.

  Jankowskie nodded to the signals rating. “Jan, this is Detlef. Unless you say otherwise, we are going to make with our part of the program.”

  Maintaining radio silence, Snyman made no reply. Jankowskie turned to Kobayashi. “Let’s go.”

  Moments later, Aoba and Chokei emerged over the water side of the planet, flamed two Blue satellites, and deposited precision-guided, five-hundred-kilogram projectiles on a half-completed offshore missile complex and three observation stations the Blues had established on oceanic islands.

  Accelerating to the highest speed they could manage in atmosphere, the two warships waited until just before the supercontinent appeared on the horizon and then discharged most of the projectiles remaining in their magazines, carefully calculating on inertia, prevailing winds, and the rotation of the planet to carry them to their targets. The two ships broke for open space.

  As they did so, Chokei positioned herself above Aoba, and Aoba launched her lifeboat --crudely doctored to imitate Chokei's radar signature--on a preset course that carried her in the wake of the projectiles launched.

  A dozen Blue missiles rose to greet the lifeboat, and three of them turned it into atomized dust. Fourteen minutes later, the first five-hundred-kilogram bomb directed itself at an airfield on the continent’s bleak western coast, and the rest drifted down at intervals. Although some projectiles had their flight disrupted by the explosions that vaporized the lifeboat, and others lost track of their targets in the overcast, bombs are very accurate; they almost always hit the ground. The result was pandemonium.

  The goal, of course, was to keep the Blues unenlightened about the nature of the attack as long as possible. Conditioned to expect assault from space, the Blues would find it difficult to distinguish the demolition of dam B from the other reports flooding in.

  Jankowskie gestured to the signals rating. “Jan, Detlef again. Hope you're well. It looks like somebody kicked over an anthill down there. A blizzard of radio traffic, spent missiles in many directions, and aircraft sorties everywhere.” He chuckled. “I haven't seen this much excitement since my mother took me to the World Cup.”

  Cuextla: 2342 hours

  “FREEZING HELL, THEY HAVE TO BE AROUND HERE SOMEWHERE,” DE KANTZOW quietly complained. He halted and held up one hand when be saw Dolly stop. Silently exchanging weapons with Kekkonen, de Kantzow turned a comer and emptied the magazine of Kekkonen's silenced submachine gun into a crowd of armed Blues.

  “You get them?” Kekkonen wheezed.

  A fusillade of shots answered his question. “Frosting hell,” The Deacon replied. He armed a grenade and flipped it around the corner. When it went off, he knelt down and poked his head

  around to observe results. He promptly loosed a fléchette round from his s-mortar. “One of them twitched,” he explained, handing back Kekkonen's submachine gun.

  “That rips it,” Kekkonen said, slamming a fresh magazine into his weapon. “We're almost out of time, and the Blues know we're here.”

  ”You got any ideas?”

  Kekkonen bent down and patted the dog. “Dolly, you remember Isaac? Go find Isaac!” Dolly bounded off. “Do you think--” he started to say.

  “Just shut up and follow her,” The Deacon said.

  Seconds later, they found her pawing a door. “You teach her to shoot, and we're out of a job,” de Kantzow commented as Kekkonen blew the lock off.

  The room was empty. Dolly whimpered. “You want to try again?” Kekkonen asked her.

  Two Blues later, they found the right room.

  “You people sure make a lot of noise,” Corporal Kobus Nicodemus observed. “What kept you?”

  “Leave everything. We've got to move fast,” Kekkonen panted “I'll take point, DeKe, you bring up the end.”

  “You have an extra weapon?” Isaac Wanjau inquired softly. De Kantzow handed him his
sniper’s rifle and two spare magazines, while Kekkonen sheepishly produced a second submachine gun for Kobus Nicodemus. Motofugi and Marais assisted Dr. Seki.

  Landing Zone One: 2347 hours

  THE TILT-ROTOR LOWERED ITSELF, ALLOWING ITS WHEELS TO TOUCH. THE HUGE PROPELLERS kept spinning as Platoon Sergeant Kivela rushed Uborevich's section off the plane, shoving laggards out bodily.

  As the transport lifted to pick up Hiltunen, Aichi sent Uborevich to reinforce Remmar and the infantry half section up the road. He watched as they pedaled their little bicycles into the darkness.

  Twenty minutes later, Kokovtsov's shuttle reappeared out of the night and roared to a halt on the highway. Emerging from the sodden fields, Aichi's men began laying strings of mines across the road. At a nod from Mikhail Remmar, Prigal drove Cadillac 14/3 out of a ditch and delicately knocked down the back wall of a stone toolshed. A few minutes work around the doorway with a cutting bar gave Remmar a clear field of fire.

  Dam A: 2349 hours

  MAJOR JAN SNYMAN HAD GIVEN EACH OF THE DAMS NAMES: dam C with its multiple arches was the opera house; dam B was the tower. Both depended upon horizontal arch action rather than sheer size and weight to hold back water. In contrast, dam A was the wall, the great wall-low, squat, and massive.

  Built of layered earth and rock around a huge ceramic spillway, it was 160 meters high and nearly four kilometers long. At a guess, 250 million cubic meters of earthen fill had gone into its construction, and it held back a sea 420 kilometers long, intended to supply water to the fields along a thousand kilometers of riverbank for thirty-five rainless nine-days.

  Dam A was the point d'appui, the fulcrum, which is why Reinikka had recommended a nuke, and why Jan Snyman had assigned himself to the assault. And along the entire lonely stretch of dam that Snyman bad selected, for the entire twenty seven minutes it took to maneuver the assault boat into position and tie it down at the sixty-meter mark, Snyman, canying a shot-up black umbrella Karaev had lent him, and the third section of No. 9 platoon saw not a single Blue.

  It was all very anticlimactic.

  They set all three detonators--Reinikka believed in backing up his backups-for a time seven hours hence, and basically got the hell out of there.

  The tilt-rotor that came to pick them up was even on time.

  Dam B: 2356 hours

  “IT FIGURES,” HILTUNEN SAID, UTTERLY DISGUSTED.

  The explosives-laden assault boat bad hung up halfway down the dam. Engineer Sergeant Nikoskelainen suspected one of the hydroplanes bad caught on a trash rack.

  “How much longer?” Hiltunen demanded.

  Nikoskelainen scratched his bead. “They're working at it with cutting bars. Maybe another ten minutes.” He shrugged. “Mika, you ever by to cut through four centimeters of steel underwater?”

  The wave of bombs from Aoba bad already hit, which meant

  that the delicate timing that was intended to cover their activities was already wrecked.

  “What happens if we blow it in place?” Hiltunen asked.

  Nikoskelainen thought about it for a moment. “Probably nothing much. The way they got the boat hung up down there, the axial cavity of the charge isn't parallel to the dam. which means the detonation shock wave and the expanding gases aren't going in the right direction.” He considered explaining the mechanics of an underwater bubble pulse and decided against it “You lose a lot of effort that way. I could show you the math.”

  “Frost it, that’s six-point-whatever tons of explosive down there!”

  Nikoskelainen thought for a moment more. “Mika, this stuff this dam is built from isn't brittle like concrete. What the charge has to do is to shape the shock wave of the blast so that it spreads laterally from two plane surfaces, splitting the material and creating enough sideways motion in the structure so that the water can just blow the whole thing open.” He elbowed Hiltunen in the ribs. “Of course, I wanted to use a nuke, but somebody said that the Blues would notice a nuke, which would cause problems for Jan downstream. Of course, that was when we thought we'd be on schedule.”

  Hiltunen felt his radio. “What is it?”

  “Meiring here.” Thys Meiring was one of the two reconnaissance-platoon scouts who were now manning listening posts. “More company, Mika. Looks to be a couple of dozen of them, this time. They're standing around the roadblock arguing.” Hiltunen had ignored the roadblock the Blues had positioned on the winding road that led to the top of the dam, until several of the Blues manning it interested themselves in the activity on the lake, whereupon Section Sergeant “Mother Elena” Yelenov and the four-man team providing far-side security eliminated the problem and stacked the bodies out of sight. Unfortunately, the problem was back.

  Hiltunen, who ordinarily didn't swear, swore succinctly and to the point

  “The roadblock again, huh?” Nikoskelainen eyed Hiltunen sympathetically. “Don't you just hate interruptions?”

  Hiltunen stared at Nikoskelainen. “Just get the bomb in place.”

  He rode his bicycle toward the far side. Realizing what a target he made against the partially moonlit water, he ended up crawling the last quarter kilometer.

  By the time he arrived, the Blue patrol had decided to investigate, and Mother Elena and several friends had resolved the matter. Unfortunately, in the process, Private Lin took two rounds through the upper body, and several of the Blues escaped

  Hiltunen hoped it would take them a while to find a radio and call in help.

  Cuextla: 2358 hours

  “THE FROSTING PEOPLE FOLLOWING US,” DE KANTZOW WHISPERED, “ARE GETTING CLOSE.”

  Wanjau caressed his rifle. “All right.”

  “One is all it takes, and the Variag wants you back.” De Kantzow shook his bead. “Isaac--if some frosting thing goes wrong, tell Lara I tried. Just tell her that.”

  Wanjau nodded and left.

  De Kantzow listened to the footsteps of the Blues. Waiting until he judged that the stairwell was full, he tilted his body forward and fired three fléchette rounds into the mass of bodies. He followed up with an incendiary grenade and reloaded as he ran down a narrow corridor that snaked in and out, his ears full of the sound of small-arms ammunition exploding from the heat of the thermite.

  He stopped opposite two doors. “Frosting hell, was it a left or a right?” He noticed one door had LEFT, IDIOT! emblazoned on it in flaming red brush strokes.

  When he reached the top of the last set of stairs, the roof was crowned in black smoke from smoke grenades. “I sent your Sparrow on ahead,” Lieutenant Wessels explained. Still thoroughly annoyed, he turned the detonator key at his belt and blew the last two sets of stairs into scrap.

  De Kantzow followed Wessels on board the transport. Slamming himself into a seat, he watched as Miinalainen and Kekkonen poured five hundred rounds from a 7.7mm GP machine gun into the smoking hole in the roof, just in case, as the tilt-rotor bounced itself into the air and leveled out.

  “Why are you frosting grinning like that?” de Kantzow asked Kekkonen sourly. His body ached.

  “ 'Tell Lara I tried.' See what happens when you many a girl half your age? You get silly.”

  Seeing Rikki Sanmartin, her hair cut impossibly short, sitting between Dr. Ando and Gerrit Myburgh, de Kantzow swallowed what he intended to say.

  “Life's a circle, Deacon,” Kekkonen observed philosophically. “I started out behind a machine gun, and now I'm back.”

  It wasn't until the transport was about to land that de Kantzow noticed he had been shot cleanly through the left shoulder.

  Landing Zone One: 2359 hours

  LIEUTENANT TSUKAHARA SAW MAJOR AICHI APPROACHING IN THE DARKNESS and snapped to attention.

  Aichi returned the salute. “A quiet evening, isn't it, Tsukahara. How are the men?”

  Aichi had placed his first platoon behind the shuttle and his second platoon and a mortar team in reserve. Six kilometers up the road, he stationed Uborevich's first
section of No. 9 platoon, who had more mobility because of their bicycles, and Mikhail Remmar’s half of the light attack detachment.

  “Straining to prove themselves worthy, honored Major,” Tsukahara replied. Anxious to keep any kind of criticism from his voice, he searched for words. “To be so far from Earth for so long and not to even see an enemy!”

  “Perhaps you could show me your positions. I would like to reinforce my orders to withhold fire to the last instant to keep our presence unsuspected as long as possible,” Aichi said. watching carefully to see if Tsukahara took this as a reflection upon his own abilities. He was relieved to see that Tsukahara, a conscientious officer, did not.

  As Tsukahara proudly walked him through, Aichi was pleased to see that the positions interlocked and covered the ground.

  As they looked out over the blank expanse of roadway, he explained quietly, “Ours is a dry, unostentatious mission, Tsukahara, yet one completely necessary to success. To be successful, our expedition's attack must be carried out as swiftly as a flashing demon and withdrawn as fast as a passing wind. We must cover that withdrawal.”

  “All the same,Japanese racial quality is especially not well suited for such missions,” Tsukahara argued. “It hardly seems like war.”

  “Please tell me, Tsukahara, what is this phenomenon of war?” Aichi smiled. “Some people believe that war is like sumo wrestling: a display of one brilliant feat is all that is desired. In war, the quick stroke is what the conjurer uses to deceive. At this moment, two men in a small Sparrow are doing more to bring victory by infecting plants than the rest of us combined.”

  He continued, “I have learned very much from Colonel Vereshchagin. In his view, an ideal war would not even be fought. I agree.”

  Tsukahara flinched ever so slightly.