by Tom Kratman
I really shouldn’t criticize those boys. I once, years later, took my girls to a male striptease. Women can be, if anything, at least equally silly under the right circumstances.
I’d guess that the word had gone out that the Amazonas were on pass. The boys along the corridor were waiting for us. I won’t repeat their comments, they were demeaning and, under the circumstances, very, very unlikely.
The boys began to chant and clap their hands in time. Unfazed, Trujillo walked forward as if they weren’t even there. She walked, that is, until one of them tried to reach a hand under her kilt. (Old joke: Is anything worn under a kilt? Answer: No, everything is in perfect working order.)
I’m pretty good with a knife. Inez was something else. She had drawn her dirk and slashed the boy’s arm nearly to the bone in far less time than it takes to tell about it. One-armed, she pushed the gasping boy against the wall, then pinned the offending hand to the paneling with the dirk. Then she stood there in the middle of the hallway, arms folded and calm as could be, and asked, “Who’s next, boys? You?” she pointed at one with her chin. “How about you two? Why not all at once? Come on, you’re big and strong, you can take on little ol’ me. Of course, it might get a little messy.”
By that time the rest of us had our dirks out, stroking them, and were standing close behind Inez.
I have never seen so nonplussed a group of slack-jawed, bug-eyed men in my life. It must have come as quite a shock.
Finally, one of them, maybe a little less drunk than the rest, said “Cortizo, get an ambulance for Hernandez. Don’t call the MPs.”
To us he said, “You are obviously not who we were waiting for. Pass, Ladies.” His voice added the capitalization.
Inez pulled the dagger from the wall, cleaned it on the boy’s uniform, and resheathed it. He fell to the floor when she released his shirt. Then we walked into the dance area unmolested.
Barbaric, no, having to actually fight for one’s dignity? Why shouldn’t Inez have left it to the law to preserve minimal respect for our persons? Weren’t we entitled?
Sister, in this world you’re not entitled to anything that isn’t bought and paid for, and then only if you can defend it. I have no doubt that we could have called the MPs. I also have no doubt that we could have ruined the lives of some young men whose only fault was stupidity and immaturity. (I’m glad we didn’t. A number of those boys gave all they had, later on, for our good and the country’s. You can forgive a lot in someone who died for the country…and for you.)
Then, too, if we had, they would have despised us for it. Maybe that boy Inez slashed and pinned hated us afterwards. Or maybe not, men are funny about wounds. They often don’t mind a scar or two. And they’ve got a sense of justice, most of them, that can accept being slugged when they deserve it. But hated or not, those boys at least knew we were like them, soldiers, warriors.
I think Inez did more for us in that moment than anyone ever had or would.
The dancing itself was pretty uneventful. Only a few boys had the courage to ask one of us. I can’t recall that any of us declined. But, much like them, we were mostly too bashful to ask. Silly, no?
Some of them had a drinking contest going on, off in a corner. They didn’t invite us and we had no interest in joining. We did, however, watch as—one by one—the boys passed out, semi-comatose. I didn’t envy them their hangovers in the morning.
Though the spirit of the competition I found intriguing. We didn’t do that sort of thing.
Interlude
“I’m telling you, Balthazar, I quit. I’ve had it. Santiago was the last straw.” Franco’s eyes glistened with tears.
“Up yours, cueco. Up yours, cueco,” the trixie shrieked from its perch.
Franco glared at the thing with hate.
Garcia said, “Oh, stop whining about it, will you? She’s dead, Salazar’s dead…worst of all, Castro’s dead. But they’re dead. There’s nothing you can do about it. It’s over.”
“No, it isn’t. It will never be over. I knew, Balti. I knew before they were caught. And I did nothing. It’s my fault.”
Garcia shrugged, irritably. “Okay. Fine. Have it your way. It’s your fault. I can’t for myself see how, since if you really did know, then they were already guilty and just waiting to be caught, tried and executed. But, if so, so what?”
It had been a rhetorical question. Both men knew it. No answer was needed. To cover the silence Garcia pulled a bottle and two glasses from his desk drawer. He poured for both of them, then pushed a glass to Franco.
“You know, in a way, I knew it, too. Oh, no, not that anything had happened. But I knew it would, that something would.” He reached into a different drawer and pulled out a mid-sized file.
“These are the last peer evaluations from before the executions. Read them. No, no, forget the rule. Just read them.”
Franco read. “My…the girls really didn’t much like Miss Gloria, did they?”
“Nope. I should have realized they’re a pretty sharp crew, some ways, taken the hint and dropped her then. But I didn’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because I had hope for her, that’s why. Or maybe, since I’d already put a lot of time into her, I didn’t want to lose my investment. Or perhaps I thought there was a chance to return the lost lamb to the fold. Maybe all those things; maybe something else.”
“I don’t care,” Franco said. “I still want out.”
“Permission denied. If you did fuck this up…or if I did…we owe these girls something now. And we are going to see they get it. Now drink up, then go walk the barracks.”
It wasn’t until after Franco had left that Garcia poured another drink and downed it quickly. He wasn’t the kind to cry but, God, if ever I had reason to…
Chapter Seven
Ladies do not do that sort of thing.
—Victoria I, Regina Imperiatrixque
It had begun to feel so good to be an Amazon, a sister among sisters. Family.
By the time the women were being given passes there were a bit over two hundred of them left, out of nearly six hundred who had started. That represented pretty heavy attrition, and a heavy expense on the part of the legion. What were left, though, were pretty much pure gold. All the dross had been removed though, naturally, only after first being carefully crushed.
The eight remaining cadre in Maria’s platoon, Sergeant Castro and Corporal Salazar being dead, didn’t let up on them even a little bit. But, so it began to seem, they didn’t have to apply much pressure anymore, either. And, with eight of them for the twenty-seven women left in the platoon, the troops were given personal attention probably unequaled in any army, for either men or women.
They had become quite sharp, those girls, very clever. They knew they were, too.
Each one had gotten to the point where she could navigate in a pitch black jungle, alone—with no one and nothing to guide her beyond a map and compass—and still find her way to within a few meters of where she was supposed to be. Some of them could adjust an artillery or mortar shell almost into a enemy’s lap in three rounds, often two. They could—because they did—keep the same frozen position under a little bush so perfectly that once someone actually took a leak on one girl’s back and never knew she was there. (She knew he was there, though.) All but the very least graceful could slip between two alert sentries without either of them hearing her. They had become very good at emplacing and camouflaging mines and booby traps. They could also shoot, strangle, stab, chop, blow up, burn…destroy; all the womanly skills.
Many restrictions had been relaxed. Still the troops were absolutely not allowed to have alcohol in their tents or—when they were permitted to use them—barracks. It became a challenge, of sorts, because there was a beer machine not two hundred meters distant from Maria’s platoon’s hut. The entire area, to include around the machine, was patrolled by Gorgidas privates and corporals, day and night. One whole platoon had been given eight hours’ hard duty for trying to ge
t some beer from the machine and into the barracks. Getting at that beer machine had become a matter of pride.
It was arguable whether the Seventh Platoon girls had ever put as much planning into a tactical mission in the field as they did into the mission to raid that beer machine. Eighth Platoon, the pure lesbians, found out what they were planning and insisted on joining in.
“Fine,” Inez said, when the two representatives from the Eighth had shown up unannounced. “We needed a distraction anyway. You’re it.” The two girls from the Eighth just nodded. They were Sonia and Trudi who had formed a pair bond and would be, effectively, married upon graduation.
The women had built a terrain model, an earth, moss and stick representation of the compound, not far from the barracks, in the woods and out of sight of the cadre. The leaders of the enterprise, and the two lesbian girls, had crawled on their bellies to get to it the night before the raid. Four ponchos were snapped together and lay over them to keep in the meager light from the red-filtered flashlights.
It could, and did, get awfully hot with nearly a dozen people crammed in like that. This was the final rehearsal.
“All right,” said Inez. “One last time…the time is 0210.”
“H-Hour. Teams A and B are down in the pits,” they chanted softly. “Pits” was slang for under the barracks. “We crawl like worms to the drainage ditch…Team C digs the hole!” They had seen something like this poetic mnemonic technique in one of the war movies the cadre showed them in a steady diet, usually with snide comments for spice.
So what if it wasn’t good poetry? They were soldiers, not poets.
Inez pointed with a stick at a couple of twigs laid over a long indentation in the model. “0222?”
“We’re under the bridge that spans the ditch.” Earlier the girls had, in fact, timed how long it took them to low crawl to the ditch—twelve minutes—under the guise of practicing their craft on their own initiative.
Sonia and Trudi whispered together, “Eighth Platoon begins to brawl, a lovers’ spat that breaks some walls.”
“0227?”
From everybody: “Gorgidas runs to break up the fun.”
“0230?”
“Inez and the chicks await in the ditch. Maria and Marta head for the switch. Security!” Maria’s job, and Marta’s, was to cut the lights in the compound. There was a breaker box on a light pole not far from the footbridge. They also had an extra lock to make sure the cadre couldn’t turn the lights back on any time soon. The rest of Team A, Cat and Isabel, had left and right look out: “Security.”
“0235?”
“The lights go out. A new fight breaks out. Eighth can’t tell among friend or foe. Gorgidas, sadly, takes many a blow.” The women giggled a little over that line.
“0236?”
“Inez and crew charge for the brew.”
“0246?”
“The suds are stowed in the laundry bags. Who says the Amazons are just young hags?” Yes, poetry was not their forte.
“0251?”
“Marta, Maria, Inez and crew are back in the ditch with a beer for you. Pull in security!”
“0253?”
“Crawl away home.”
“0307?”
“The beer in the bags goes down in the pits. The girls go to bed while the cadre have fits.”
“0310?”
“Mission complete ’til next we meet.” They planned to leave the beer under their barracks overnight, then drink it when the cadre weren’t expecting anything.
Inez smiled. “Good. Very good. But there’s one last thing. You know how revenge isn’t so sweet if the person you rape doesn’t know he or she has been raped? Well…”
* * *
0210. H Hour. No plan ever survives contact with the enemy.
It started well enough. Faces painted black and green, all the raid team crawled without problem, though not without effort, to the ditch, then hid themselves in a tight cluster under the footbridge. A funny thing, adrenaline; they reached the footbridge almost ninety seconds early, then waited nervously for Eighth Platoon to begin their part.
From the direction of the barracks, “You lying, cheating bitch!” reverberated through the camp. That was Sonia! This was followed by a scream and the sound of breaking glass. The volume quickly rose to a crescendo of violence.
Marta snickered, “Say what you want about those girls; they can act!”
The raid team heard the pounding sounds of men’s feet on the little footbridge. The guard had abandoned the area near the machine. So far, so good.
“Come on, Maria. Isabel and Cat, go!” Marta tugged Maria to her feet, quite unnecessarily. While the other pair split to right and left, Marta and Maria sprinted for the breaker box. Maria carried an iron bar in her hand. Marta had the spare lock.
The sound from the Eighth Platoon was just beginning to die down as the pair reached the box. Not a lot of time left. Maria pushed the bar part way through the lock and twisted. It held until Marta threw her weight into the problem. Both hearts thumped when the metal of the lock split with an audible crack.
“Do you think they heard? If they did, we’re screwed,” Maria commented.
“Not likely,” Marta answered. “And not by them.”
The two had never seen the inside of the breaker box. It had two levers inside. Marta reached into it and flipped both of them. All the flood-lights died, but so did every light in the camp, including the lights emanating from the beer machine.
“Fuck!” Marta returned one of the levers to its upright position. The floodlights came on; the beer machine sat dead. Marta fumbled and brought the machine back up; but the floodlights were still on. With a curse she turned the floodlights off again.
What had sounded like a fight in Eighth Platoon’s barracks turned into a riot. Men’s shouts were intermixed with women’s.
“Sounds like a lot of fun.”
Inez and her crew padded past, almost silently heading for the beer machine. Marta and Maria dropped to their bellies and watched as best they could by the dim light of the beer vendor. Everything seemed to be going according to plan, when they saw Inez start thumping her head against the machine.
Maria had a sudden blinding flash of the obvious. “ ‘Exact change,’ ” she said. Marta looked at her quizzically. “Inez’s team only has single note bills to feed to the beer dispenser. If my guess is right, we’re fucked.”
“No we aren’t.” Marta grabbed the iron bar and began to sprint to join the other team. Maria followed.
“Screw it,” Marta announced when they reached them. “Like Inez said, the point is to get the beer and get away with drinking it, not to avoid being punished later on. We can prop the door shut for long enough to do that.”
The machine was secured shut by another lock, no better than the one on the breaker box. Into this Marta pushed the end of the bar. With both girls leaning on it, the lock split. The door swayed open.
Inez thought about it for a moment. “As for the lock…that lock is cheap. We’ll take six less beers than we planned on and leave the extra money to pay for a new one.”
The other grunted their assent. They were sneaks, and proud of the fact. They weren’t mere vandals or thieves.
To Maria, Inez said, “You and Marta go back per the plan. We can handle the rest…and, Marta, good thinking.”
As it turned out breaking the machine open saved them a lot of time over feeding bills into it one by one. It was much quieter, too. All the raiders reassembled in the ditch nearly three minutes early. Then they crawled back to the “pit” under their barracks where a hole was ready made to throw in their soiled uniforms, along with the all-important beer, and bury them. Team C, Zamora’s girls, with ponchos laid to keep the tell-tale dirt off, buried the loot while the rest of the raiders cleaned up—quietly—and crawled back to bed, to pretend to sleep.
* * *
It was daylight before anyone else figured out even a part of what they had done. The cadre hadn’t figure
d out quite who, of course. It could have been any platoon, or even all of them together.
Unfortunately, it was pretty obvious that Eighth Platoon had been in on it up to their ears. They were given a mercilessly shitty day, one harking back to the first days in training. But—good girls—none of them ratted.
About noontime, some one of the cadre found the broken lock for the beer machine. They found the money that had been left, too, and duly reported it. Everybody else’s day rapidly became miserable, too.
The Gorgidas searched high and low. All of the barracks were ransacked; the troops’ personal effects also, such as they had. The cadre looked in every nook and cranny of the place. Zamora’s people had camouflaged the stash well, however. The cadre didn’t notice anything amiss. Perhaps part of the reason that they got away with it was that their stash was in such an obvious place.
The cadre did find the terrain model on which they had done the planning out in the woods nearby. (Inez: “Shit! Big mistake. Forgot. Damn! Always erase your terrain model before going on a mission.” Zamora: “Don’t sweat it, Inez; everybody makes mistakes.”) The diagrams on it led almost straight to the guilty platoon, though it could have been any of three others, plus the Eighth.
Oh, did the cadre torture the women from those five suspect platoons. Grass drills, pushups, running laps with their rifles held overhead…and that nasty trick where the women got in position for pushups and, when the sergeant blew his whistle, threw their arms to the side and head back, thereby letting gravity beat their tits against the gravel…over and over and over again. Ouch.
This lasted till long after midnight. Finally, the cadre grew tired of it and sent them to sleep.
Of course, some of the women didn’t go to sleep. After lights out, and with aching muscles, Zamora’s team crawled below to retrieve the beer. One bag went next door to the Eighth, while the others were divided out among the raiding platoon, one beer per girl. They had a few to send to each of the other platoons, too. Six of them crawled on their bellies to deliver the beer. An apology? More of a victory statement.