by Tom Kratman
We slithered away to our next firing position.
By the time we reached it, the enemy squad had begun to sort itself out. One man, the same one I’d noted as being the leader, was moving low from place to place checking on his men.
“Okay, Zuli, see the one with the big gut?”
“Right.”
“Shoot him in the belly.”
“I could shoot him in the head!”
“You want a challenge, put it through his spine…or his kidney, but leave him alive and conscious. Screaming would be nice. And two more random shots to keep them pinned down for a bit.”
At the same moment as the next gunshot, the enemy squad leader screamed in pain, flopping ungracefully to the dirt. Zuli fired twice more.
“Let’s go,” I said. “And head or heart shots after this.” The squad leader was screaming for help as we crawled and ran.
It took them a while before one worked up the nerve to go to his leader’s aid. Zuli tracked him in her scope for half a second then blew his brains out. I saw it. The man was running one minute and the next he was a headless corpse with a red mist atop his spraying neck.
Zuli finally got the idea and emptied the rest of her magazine, three rounds, in the enemy’s general direction. She managed to put in a new magazine as we raced along a dry creek bed, circling around to our next position.
After the next two went down, one more head shot and a heart shot, the others simply wouldn’t move. Then the squad leader stopped screaming for help, dead, maybe, or maybe just unconscious.
Did I mention that Zuli was using .34 caliber armor piercing ammunition? It went right through their vests and helmets. Despite some myths to the contrary, the nonstick coating didn’t help all that much to penetrate the armor. It was mostly to aid in reliable and consistent feeding of the ammunition. It was the armor piercing nature of the bullets—the hardened, sharpened point and dense alloy core—that spun right through the tough fibers of the enemy’s body armor. The coating also was good for keeping down wear and tear on the rifle’s barrel, which was very important to a sniper.
After a while someone managed to take charge of the remainder. I think it might have been the guy who’d been carrying the radio. They stayed low where even Lucinda couldn’t get a decent shot. They were trying to crawl out of our field of fire, I suppose. Couldn’t blame them.
On her own Zuli was much too proud to take a shot she didn’t think she could make. I had to order her to keep up the harassment, to keep pushing them in the direction they were going.
Then we were rewarded with a boom and another scream of pain. Who says mines aren’t useful?
The five remaining stood up to surrender, hands in the air. A couple of them were waving white rags.
Oh, oh. Decision time.
I had Zuli cover me while I walked forward, my F-26 at the ready. They seemed pathetically frightened and eager right up to where they noticed I had tits. Then they seemed angry. How unfair, being shot up by girls. I suppose it was, in a way.
I motioned with the muzzle of my rifle for them to start moving ahead of me. When I had herded them back to where the bodies were (all except for the one whose face had been ripped off and throat laid open by a mine; he was plainly dying), I stopped them and had them lie down on their stomachs in a row.
At my signal Lucinda joined me. She just shook her head and said “Centurion, they’ve seen who we are.”
“I know,” I answered. “Start collecting up their rifles. There’s another four or five and a light machine gun at the edge of the minefield. Be careful. It isn’t marked.”
“That’s okay. I helped put this one in,” she said, leaving.
The prisoners presented me with a considerable dilemma. Sure, we had solid reports, eyewitness reports, of them killing our prisoners. But that wasn’t the same thing as me killing theirs.
But, as Lucinda had said, they’d seen me. They could identify me to their side. After that, it would be a very short time before they carted me in. And then they’d shoot me…as they had a right to, I thought, my being a combatant but living out of uniform and all.
I figured Carrera probably would go ahead and hang those other prisoners who had been caught doing the same thing…if he knew they were going to shoot me, or had already done so. I suspected the enemy knew that, too. They’d just do it, probably unofficially. I doubted they would endanger their own people by announcing it.
And I had absolutely no way to hold these guys prisoner for any length of time. I wished I could have. It might have made the enemy a little more reluctant to bomb from the air.
I thought about Alma, about how much she needed me to come home to her. Cat’s kids, too.
When Zuli had gone out of sight, I said—though I doubt they understood me—“Sorry, boys, but getting back to my little girl’s a lot more important to me than you are. Sorry.” Then I raised my rifle and…found I couldn’t do it. Shit.
When Zuli returned, laden with weapons, I told her, “Put those down and tape these guys. We’ll try to evacuate them, when we get the chance, to headquarters.”
Once the prisoners were taped up, Zuli and I spent half an hour arranging the other bodies as best we could to look like they’d been killed in a sudden mass ambush. I shot Zuli’s victims so the enemy wouldn’t necessarily believe that one sniper did all that.
Let them think we were in the woods in droves.
It was a nice haul: Eight rifles with about two thousand rounds of ammunition, two light machine guns with nearly as much, a couple of dozen grenades, a map (unmarked, unfortunately), and a set of radio frequencies for the next week. The radio, of course was useless. I began to regret not letting Zuli shoot the microphone. Maybe best of all, we took a set of enemy-built night vision goggles. They were a little better fit than the Volgan-made ones we normally used and couldn’t now. Those I kept for myself on the theory that if the Earthpigs overhead were good enough to pick up night vision goggles, they’d like be good enough to tell the difference between Zhong and ours and not notice that mine was Zhong but in our hands.
We stripped the bodies of the head-shot victims for their uniforms and equipment. The loot we stashed about two kilometers away in a small hole in the ground, then camouflaged it as best we could in the short time available.
I sent someone back for it later.
* * *
We found two of our girls, a couple of days after the night they’d disappeared. We didn’t find them where they were supposed to be, but about a kilometer away. The cooing of the antaniae and the circling vultures led us to them.
Corporal Martina Espinar and Private Elpidia Sanchez were on mine-arming detail, their job to go to a road intersection and uncover, then arm and rebury, a series of mines we’d previously buried.
How the enemy spotted them I don’t know and, likely, never will. They were spotted, though, there was no question about that. And there wasn’t a lot of doubt about what had happened to them.
Sergeant Ponce led me there. “I didn’t move anything, Centurion,” she insisted.
They were lying side by side, a few feet apart. The legs of both were spread wide, their hands tied behind their back and their uniform trousers—because we were still following the rules of the Protocol—had been cut away. Their throats had been cut. That was gratuitous, though, because the tightened ropes around their necks had almost certainly strangled them before their throats were cut.
The antaniae—nasty little bat-winged fuckers—that had been chewing on their faces scurried away when we arrived. We had to identify them by their personal effects.
“Why?” I asked. It was a stupid question; I knew why. At least I thought I did.
My guess is that, when they were caught, and the enemy realized they were in uniform and so would not be punished for what they’d been doing, he decided to take things into his own hands. Not that the Zhong were squeamish about shooting people, but they were in the effective hire of the Tauran Union and the Taurans were s
queamish.
“Stupid of them not to have buried the bodies,” I said.
“They were probably in a rush,” Ponce answered, her voice gone cold and toneless.
“Yeah. Get pictures. Get a lot of pictures. We can burst transmit them to headquarters with one of the Yamatan radios. Getting them on the wire after that is their problem.”
I stood there for a long time, staring at the bodies, steeling myself for what I knew I was going to do. Finally, I said, “Bring me the five prisoners Zuli and I took.”
It took nearly half a day to get them there. By the time they arrived, led by ropes around their necks, we had a hole dug for my girls, and the location recorded. We put the prisoners on their knees, in a line facing Sanchez’s and Espinar’s bodies. They began to chatter in panic as soon as they saw the bodies and understood what I intended.
Little as I am, I was as big as these men, and they were kneeling. I went to the first one, the one on the right, grabbed his hair with my left hand and pulled my dirk with my right. Pulling his head back, I put the dirk to the left side of his neck and drew a deep line all the way to the right. His blood spurted out in a crimson fountain, the spray almost reaching Espinar’s corpse.
He went limp almost immediately. Then I walked to the next, still cold as ice. Then the next. The fourth one, I could smell, shit himself before I even grabbed his hair. The last one tried to get to his feet to run, but I wacked him atop his head with the dirk’s pommel, then threw myself on him, stabbing, stabbing, stabbing.
I’ll always regret we never did find out who’d murdered my Amazons. I’d have paid good money for the chance to have a little chat with them. But killing those five would have to do.
It’s called, “Reprisal.”
* * *
Not all our missions to arm land mines went awry, nor even most of them. I remember walking in civvies to one of my villages, ostensibly to check on Red Cross food distribution. On the way there I passed an enemy ambulance. There were already some rescue people around; the enemy’s, I mean.
But there wasn’t anything they could do. The mine the ambulance had gone over—it had about seven kilograms of high explosive in it, I knew—had literally flipped the thing one hundred and eighty degrees to land on its top. In the process the mine had ruptured the tank and set the fuel alight.
There were four charred bodies in the back of the ambulance, two in the front. I made appropriate sympathetic noises, even shedding a tear or two, before moving on my way.
Thank God my parents had sent me to those acting classes.
* * *
We got a helicopter near the town of Concepción almost the same way a week later. I was there to see that.
The Zhong weren’t really big on civil-military relations. In fact, in the short period of time since they’d landed on the mainland, they’d demonstrated complete indifference. This, from a Tauran Union-Public Relations point of view, was highly suboptimal. The pictures of Espinar and Sanchez making the rounds of the GlobalNet—the main news broadcasters and papers refused to touch that story—weren’t helping them any, either.
So, since the Taurans hadn’t yet occupied any area of the country with any substantial civilian population, they had all these redundant civil affairs types that they sent to “help” the Zhong.
Dressed in mufti, with a Red Cross armband on, I was speaking to the enemy battalion’s attached civil affairs officer, when it happened. I think we were talking about the vexing problem of condom distribution.
At my orders, and near sunset the night before, Zuli had gone to the perimeter of this enemy-held town to flirt with the guards at the gate that overlooked the landing zone. Zuli was decent looking, but nothing beautiful, except for her body which, even after my plastic surgery, made me feel like a boy. In any case, I counted on her body and her size to attract notice.
While she’d distracted the guards, another girl—I’d have to go to the memorial wall to remember her name; she didn’t make it through the war—had crawled out to the helicopter landing zone, or LZ, outside the town. A lot of the supplies used against us came through that LZ. To be fair, much of the food the enemy gave me to feed the refugees also came through the same place.
We’d buried a two-thousand-pound bomb—about a thousand pounds of it explosive—in the middle of the open area. There was a small sapling more or less off to one side. The other girl found the bomb in the dark—why not; she’d helped bury it—then connected it by a pull wire to the sapling.
The next morning, while I was chatting amicably with that civil affairs officer—he spoke Spanish, surprisingly enough, and flirted with me outrageously—a resupply helicopter came in for a landing with a big net full of cargo hanging by a strap beneath it. Two Zhong soldiers rushed out to guide it down.
You know, they really could move supply, those people.
I watched the guides out of one eye, the whole time trying not to act like there was anything wrong. It took all my self-control not to flinch as the sapling began to bend in the rush of wind from the helicopter’s main rotor. One moment the two soldiers were making hand and arm signals at the helicopter pilot. I actually had to look away to keep from diving to the dirt. The next moment I was knocked on my butt, ears and tail both ringing, and there was a big black cloud on the LZ.
I watched as the enemy helicopter was shoved to an angle then slid sideways to the earth. Its rotor splintered before the whole ship broke apart on the ground. Flames from its ruptured fuel tank roared up.
That civil affairs officer exclaimed, “Those fucking miserable terrorist bastards!” I think that’s what I remember him saying. I don’t speak English all that well.
Once he collected himself, the enemy officer became very considerate; even helping me to my feet before going to investigate. When the smoke cleared, and that took a while, there was little more than some disconnected parts of the helicopter and its crew. Of the men who had been guiding it to a landing there was literally no sign.
The burning wreck kept the landing zone closed for an entire day. For another day the enemy kept it closed himself looking for more bombs.
I gave Zuli and the other girl the next two days off, along with a can each of cigarettes and rum to split between them. I didn’t have the authority to award any medals, though I kicked a request up to Cristina Zamora, who did.
* * *
Retaliation wasn’t long in coming. The next day the enemy bombed the civilian camp nearest where Zuli and I had ambushed their squad. They did it with artillery…for two hours. When I went to that village with a few of my troops, all of us being in civilian clothes, all we found were bodies and parts of bodies. Some of them were tiny parts, from tiny bodies. There were also some burnt scraps of cloth and a lot of craters. The area smelled funny. White phosphorus, I guessed.
The three-person cell of reliable people I’d had there was reduced to one. He came in with about two dozen other adults and a like number of children later in the day and told me about it.
“I should have known,” he said, hanging his head with pain and shame, and holding the bandage over what I took to be a bad burn on his arm. It had been white phosphorus, all right.
The man rocked back and forth as he spoke, his voice devoid of emotion. He spoke in phrases, not sentences, as if he were somehow detached from the world. “I should have known…when the helicopter…appeared overhead. But I didn’t think…anything…much of it. It hovered there…for about five minutes…before anything…happened.
“Then…it left and…right after…all at the same time…there was…an ungodly racket, like a heavy freight train…going by. There were…it must have been…dozens of explosions…all around the outside…of the camp. Almost all…at the same moment. People…children, especially…the children…started to scream. They stood there…frozen…for…half a minute…I guess. Then the next…set of trains and more explosions…closer this time. We began running…for the little shelters…you had us dig by our tents.
&nbs
p; “Then it was right…on top of us. And it didn’t…let up. You couldn’t…ask it to stop…we tried. We begged…and pleaded…and cried. But it…never stopped.”
“Your family?” I asked, not seeing them with him.
“Gone…all gone.” Poor bastard was too far gone himself even to cry.
* * *
As I’d been taught in CCS, I did a crater analysis on where the shells had come from. It’s not too accurate a method, but it was all I had at the time. As it turned out, the battery that had fired on the encampment wasn’t even in our area. So I passed on the message to Zamora and asked her to handle it. I understand that artillery unit, and the men in it, received special treatment all the time they were in our country. That probably wasn’t fair. I imagine that they were told the camp was a guerrilla hideout and to shell it silly. I really doubt they knew any different at the time.
It wasn’t too long, though, before the papers got wind of the bombardment. In the enemy’s news it was initially treated as a great victory over us. And for “Democracy,” of course. In Latin papers it was reported as an atrocity. Right after that, Santander, which had been trying to stay neutral, set up a few deniable camps at their end of the trail that ran through La Palma Province to facilitate the increased flow of volunteers. The camps supposedly provided some initial training to those volunteers.
We got some good use out of the widower as well. Sort of. He asked me for a way to strike back. I had a way. I told him he could use an explosive bike, take it to the enemy, start the timer, and run.
He took the bicycle, the frame and saddle bags of which had been filled with explosives, by an enemy outpost, ostensibly to sell cool sodas. He didn’t try to run. He detonated it when he had gathered six of them around him. Though he died where none of them did, I had to call that one a win. All six had to be evacuated out of the country, we later found out. Most of them were missing big chunks of their anatomy.
* * *
I’ve mentioned the one town in my area, Concepción. Oh, no, it was nothing grand. The only monument near the place was that burnt out helicopter. Before the war the town’s population had been just under a thousand. What with the refugees and all, it was maybe five thousand now. The enemy battalion had set up its headquarters in the town center. They’d also set up billeting tents, mostly to one side. That’s why I’d been there to talk to the enemy civil affairs officer.