by Tom Kratman
“All right, sixty,” Maria said. “And two more caches of fifty nearby.” As soon as she did, Marta took three women and a truck in the general direction in which Maria had pointed. They’d bury the mortar and the ammunition.
“Where else have you identified?” Zamora asked.
Maria pulled out a map and pointed in turn to four other spots where she’d had buried some of the very large issue of light equipment and weapons the legion had sent out.
“What about mines?”
Maria scratched at her ear and said, “I had an idea. You might not like it. Then again, you might.”
“What’s that?” Cristina asked.
“Mines, particularly antiarmor mines, are big, bulky, and noticeable, right?”
“Sure.”
“Detonators aren’t. I’m putting in plastic AT mines, pretty much everywhere, and recording the locations. When we want to arm one, we send out one or two girls in civvies and just uncover the mine, insert and arm the detonator, then cover it again and camouflage it. Nothing’s a mine unless we want it to be. Everything is mined where and when we want it to be.”
“See, and I knew there was a reason you’re in charge of a platoon,” Zamora said, smiling broadly, and patting Maria’s shoulder. “I’ll pass that trick on to the others.”
“There is one thing that bugs me, though,” Maria said. “Where did all these mines come from? I mean, we did sign that treaty after all.”
There was an engineer with Maria, a big husky girl named Ponce. She answered, “It seems that whoever drafted the silly document hadn’t bothered to ask about what a land mine really was. So…while we couldn’t stockpile the mines in advance, legally, instead, Carrera stockpiled millions of empty metal and plastic casings, more millions of pounds of explosive that just happened to be cast in chunks the exact shapes and sizes of those casings. Oh…and detonators and bouncing charges, of course. They were all stored separately so they weren’t mines until we put the parts together…”
“Cynical or realistic?” Zamora asked Maria. She had no answer.
Ponce continued, “The process of assembly takes about thirty seconds or so, each, and can be, and is being, done by little old ladies in tennis shoes in a couple of warehouses near Arraijan. It actually takes longer to record where we put the mines than it did to put them together.
“Kind of makes you wonder about the minds of people who try to ban certain types of weapons because of aesthetics, doesn’t it? I guess their delicate sensibilities make it just too, too distasteful for them to really try to understand the weapons themselves. So they fail.”
“Yes,” Zamora replied, “and a good thing for us, too.”
“We’re not just setting them up for harassment and road and area denial,” Maria said. “Sergeant Ponce’s putting in some fairly dense fields between places we think we’ll want to attack and places where we can hide. There’ll be paths through, paths we’ll know and the enemy won’t. We hit them; we run; we run right through the mines. If they follow, they’ll regret it.”
“You do that a couple of times,” Zamora commented, “and they’ll probably stop trying to follow.”
“That’s what we thought,” Ponce said.
“There are also some other places where we’re putting down just a few mines, along with a bunch of metal fragments or tiny magnets—”
“I know about the ‘Dianas,’ ” Zamora said. “It’ll make clearing those few a real chore, since it’s effectively impossible for a magnetic mine detector to tell the difference between a ‘Diana’ and a real mine.
“Okay, I’m satisfied, Maria. I’m going to go check out First Platoon. The Nguyens will be staying with you for a week or two. Treat them nice. They’ve got experience in this area and a whole bag of tricks.”
* * *
It turned out that Mrs. Nguyen preferred to be called “Madame.” Her Spanish was fair, though her husband’s was wretched. They both spoke excellent French. Maria had high school French, a couple of years’ worth. They got by.
“Recruited girl…name ‘Han,’ ” Mr. Nguyen said, in the Spanish he was still working on. “She marry one you people…or maybe white round eye. Not sure. She recruit bunch us. We help.”
His and his wife’s ages looked to be anywhere between seventy and one hundred. Gradually, in mixed and broken French and Spanish, it was revealed that they had something like a century’s worth of fighting as guerillas between them. They were a great help.
“You got sleep,” Mr. Nguyen said. “You got eat. You got…stand down…plan…prepare…rehearse. Enemy use that. Come in when sleeping…quick-quick…helicopter…no warning.”
“We could mine all the open areas,” Maria offered. She thought about that for a minute and said, “No, no we couldn’t. We have a lot of mines, not an infinity.”
“Got better trick anyway,” he said. “Need little air legion…you call, ‘ala,’ yes? Anyway, need little help from thems peoples.”
* * *
The engineer squad, under Ponce, was straining and groaning to roll a two-thousand-pound bomb into a hole they’d dug the night before. The hole—about twelve feet long and two wide—was centered in an open area about three hundred meters on a side. Fast growing vegetation in fertile Balboa’s soil and clime would cover the thing in less than a week. They had some fast-growing progressivine cuttings they intended to transplant to help camouflage along.
Ponce cursed aloud as the bomb plopped into the hole. Upset by that and by the squad’s activity, a bright gray and green trixie leapt from a tree at the edge of the wood line and flew across the open space, making its trixie cawing sounds.
“Trick with Zhong,” Mr. Nguyen said, “is threaten face.”
Maria shook her head. “Like…threatening to punch them?”
Frustrated with the difficulties in communication, the man said, “No…no…threaten…” Then he stopped for lack of the right word and concept. “What you call what show to world? Appearance?”
“Like…honor?” Maria asked.
“That it. You call ‘honor.’ With us—Zhong, Yamato, all us—we call word translate ‘face.’ With Zhong, must be able to make commander lose face.”
“What’s that have to do with putting a bomb in a field?”
“Big shame,” Nguyen said. “Okay lose helicopter once, maybe. Maybe twice. After that, commander enemy look stupid if lose a third. Won’t take risk.”
“Ohhh.”
“Yes, make lose face. Helicopter come…wind bend tree…tree has wire…wire runs bomb. Bomb go boom. Helo go boom. Do once. Do twice. Enemy lose face. After that, you sleep sound. Plan easy. Secure.”
“Ohhh.”
“You good girl,” Nguyen said, reaching up to pat her on the cheek. “Remind me own daughter.”
“How is your daughter?” Maria asked, quite sure that the daughter was a grandmother herself by now.
Nguyen looked very sad for a moment. “She dead,” he said. “Killed young…planting bomb.” Then he added, with a note of pride, his chin lifting, “In war against Zhong.”
* * *
If Maria needed easy communication, she really had to go to Madame. She found her standing in a hut in a village, lecturing a group from Maria’s platoon.
“Since your enemy,” Madame said, “has so very kindly given you so many, many bombs—such generosity!—during and after their last invasion, surely someone ought to get some use from them.”
Maria waited until Madame had announced a break, then called her aside. She scratched her head. They were putting in a lot of bombs, but, “Madame Nguyen, what about magnetism from the bombs. Won’t they be found? What about radar from the air?”
“Well, naturally, child, you should de-gauss them, if you can.”
“Degauss?”
“Ah…eliminate the magnetic signature. I’ve shown your Sergeant Ponce how to do it. And bury the bombs with a radar scattering shroud over them to keep the enemy from finding out which landing zones were so trapped
and which weren’t.
“Then too, some places, you can put the bombs in underground but don’t wire them to the saplings. Just like you are doing with some of the antipersonnel mines. That way, so you see, the enemy gets accustomed to using a particular landing zone, or trail, or road until some night you ladies pay a visit to the place and the next day—or the next, doesn’t matter really—it goes boom right in their overconfident faces. On the other hand, all you must do is get to the area and assemble the mines. You need not even carry detonators with you. Just bury them nearby. Then even a strip search would reveal nothing.”
Marta smiled, tentatively, as if she were long out of practice in smiling.
“I’ve got to ask,” she said, “and I hope you won’t think I’m prying, but where did you and your husband come from, that you know all this?”
Madame sighed, “The colonel and I?”
“The colonel?” Maria asked.
“Yes, he was a colonel. You would say a ‘legate.’ We’re from Cochin. For the last couple of years we’ve been teaching the Revolutionary Warfare course for about-to-be-discharged veterans.
“He’s more a regular who knows how to operate like a guerrilla than an actual guerrilla himself. I was a real guerilla, though some might say a terrorist.
“We fought for our country, between us, for over a century. Then we discovered that Tsarist Marxism wasn’t compatible with patriotism. Things got bad for us. We were recruited and came here.
“Listen to the colonel,” Madame warned. “I know a lot of techniques, but he understands things like intelligence, communications and coordination, and the consummate importance of never letting the enemy think he’s doing well.”
Madame checked her watch and announced, “Break’s over, girls, back to class.” Maria stayed to watch.
“Let me show you some of the difference, a trick,” Madame said, and beckoned them to follow. Maria did, into a concrete house, even though she wasn’t specifically invited.
On one wall was a picture, painted by a perhaps not terribly talented local artist. It was hanging askew.
“What’s wrong with that?” Madame asked.
“It’s crooked,” one of the very new Amazons answered. “So?”
Madame wagged her finger. “Only a fairly senior officer of the enemy is likely to be bothered by a picture askew. Idiocy and focus on mere appearances often increases with rank. So you booby trap the thing so the bomb goes off—so an electrical connection is made—when the picture is righted.”
The young Amazon’s eyes lit up. “Ohhh.”
* * *
Madame showed them how to pack a bicycle with explosives and a timer, and how to scrounge or make their own munitions when the materiel they’d been supplied ran out.
Marta snorted in Maria’s ear, “As if we’re very fucking likely to outlast the supplies.”
“Hush!”
Madame Nguyen also spoke to them at length about maintaining political control and what needed be done with enemy prisoners of war. None of the Amazons cared much for what she said on those subjects, which didn’t mean she was wrong or that they wouldn’t do it.
* * *
Supplies rolled in almost daily. Keeping track of them, receiving, accounting for, and transmitting them, was Marta’s job. One day, each platoon in the maniple received at least one “secret” weapon. It came in an electronics-proof case. When opened, the case revealed a remote controlled miniature tank with just enough armor to protect it from small arms fire and about a quarter of a ton of explosive. The little robots were wire guided and each carried a closed circuit lowlight TV for the operator to see where it was going. There was also a loudspeaker on each one so the operator could make announcements to the enemy.
“What the fuck?” Marta said when she saw it.
“I read about the idea in Franco’s class,” Maria told her, “in the single science fiction book we read. ‘I am a thirty-second bomb. I am a thirty-second bomb. Twenty-nine. Twenty-eight…’ ”
“Oh, funny!”
“How many did we get?” Maria asked.
“Three of the little terrors. They’re called”—she consulted the hand receipt—“ ‘Davids.’ ”
“Okay,” Maria said. She pulled up her mental map and said, “Send them to cache areas one…three…and four. And have one girl per squad trained to drive them.”
“Wilco, Centurion,” Marta answered.
* * *
Part of the Amazons’ cover was that there were men, from the Fourteenth Cazador Tercio, mixed in their operational area and among them. The leader of the nearest group to Maria’s was a Centurion named Cesar Pastora. His platoon and Maria’s got along pretty well, helped, perhaps, by the facts that the Cazadores were boys, that the Amazonas were girls, and that…
“My sister’s a squad leader in your regiment,” Pastora had told Marta. He told Marta a lot of things. It was just possible that he made excuses to find opportunities to tell her a lot of things. It was also possible that she didn’t mind at all. Marta had been lonely for a very long time.
“Let’s say that that gives me a certain perspective on the Tercio Amazona that some others may lack.”
Watching the Amazons dig in one day, Pastora added, “There may be some other things that we lack, too. Have you noticed, Optio Bugatti, that your women are actually quite a bit better at camouflaging things than my men are? No joke.”
“Could be,” Marta agreed. “Maybe all those years we’d been learning to coordinate colors and patterns had some indirect payoff. Don’t know.”
“Could I ask for some of your troops to assist mine?”
“Make it worth my while,” Marta said.
“I’ll cook dinner—which is to say, warm up our canned rations—for both of us tomorrow…”
“Tempting,” Marta answered, “but…”
“…and I’ll have my platoon dig a dozen bunkers for yours.”
“Done.”
* * *
“The enemy’s going to be coming in ignorant,” Pastora said, over what passed for dinner. Some cans still sat in the coals, near enough to keep warm but not so near as to scorch their contents. “But he’s not stupid. You ladies will be able to live openly but discreetly among the refugees, coming out to fight in secret and only occasionally. But only for a while. Eventually you’re going to end up going underground.”
While he spoke, Pastora made a show of cleaning out one can thoroughly, then mixing the ration-issue rum with water and the little fruit drink packets that also came in the rations. There wasn’t any ice.
“We know they’ll catch on,” Marta agreed. “We’ve made some camps in inaccessible places for the long haul.”
“Want me to look them over?” Pastora asked. He added hastily, lest Marta be offended by the offer, “I’m sure, based on everything I’ve seen, that they’re fine, but what’s a second opinion hurt?” He held out the can of fruit juice and rum, saying, “You can drink this safely; nothing can live in the presence of legion-issue rum.”
Marta took the can, sipped, and made an oh-Jesus-what-is-that-shit face. Not that she wasn’t used to the rum that came with the rations. But Pastora mixed his a little stronger than she was used to. Uncut, the rum was strong enough to use as a fire starter.
“Yeah, sure, Cesar,” Marta said, passing the can back.
“How’s the charcoal production coming?” Pastora asked. The charcoal was for underground cooking in the messes they’d dug here and there. Under the Nguyens’ tutelage, they’d run plastic, while it lasted, and then bamboo pipes a good distance from where the food would be cooked to draw off the smoke, if any, so the enemy couldn’t find them by that smoke.
“We’ve enough—rather, we’ll have enough—for a couple of months, if we’re frugal,” Marta answered. She took the can back from Pastora and sipped again, the fiery rum racing to her toes.
“You’ll have more than that,” Pastora said.
“No, not for all of us,” Marta disagre
ed.
“Dear Optio,” Pastora said, shaking his head, “it’s not going to be ‘all of us.’ ”
Marta shook her own head. “I don’t understand. Sure, we’ll take losses but—”
“You’ll take losses. We’re going to be destroyed.” Pastora laughed as if it were actually funny. “You know what they say: ‘On your feet or dead; never on your knees.’ When the enemy comes, we’re going out to fight him. When we’re crushed, he’ll think for a while that he owns this area. Then you girls have your turn.
“I remember you, you know,” Pastora said. “From the classis, off the coast of Xamar. You have a very distinctive…ummm…profile.”
Marta was suddenly horribly ashamed. She’d been hired as a sea whore, originally. Covering her face, she stood to go.
Pastora stood, as well, put his hands on her shoulders to stop her, and said, “No. I’m proud of you, Marta. One woman in a thousand, if that many, can do what you’ve done, rise as you’ve risen. I don’t think any less of you.”
Marta sat again and took a much longer drink from the rum mix. She shook her head. She really liked Pastora. He was a nice man, and especially nice to her. Sure, she’d been in love with a woman once, but that was because of the person that woman had been, that, and their shared life and experience. She wasn’t doctrinaire about it.
She put the can down, stood herself up again, and repeated back to Pastora, “ ‘On your feet or dead; never on your knees?’ Come on, I’m not that doctrinaire about it.”
* * *
“I am glad we are not alone in all this,” Marta said one day, as she and Maria watched a sweating and straining group of Cazadores hauling loads that none of the women could have hoped to.
“You’re glad? I am ecstatic that I am not entirely in charge,” answered Maria. “Speaking of which, how are you and Centurion Pastora getting along?”
“We get along pretty well, actually,” Marta said, smiling broadly.
“I know. And that surprises me. I thought you preferred…”
“I’m not doctrinaire about it,” Marta answered, primly. “Besides, it’s not like I’m the only one who’s gotten all gooey.”
Maria nodded her own head, sadly, thinking, Half my girls will cry themselves to sleep when the men march out. And don’t march back.