The Amazon Legion-ARC

by Tom Kratman

  Maybe they were there to take advantage of the creature comforts of the place, such as they were. Maybe it was because the town dominated the local road net. I don’t pretend to really understand them.

  The problem with the town was that there, where enemy largess could be most directly applied, the townspeople—some of them—were beginning to go over to the enemy. That could not be tolerated.

  There was one man, in particular, who had turned coats. It was the Zhong-appointed mayor of the place. The real mayor, being a veteran of the legion, had been locked up by the enemy the second day they’d been there. He was rotting in the town jail. Okay, maybe he wasn’t precisely rotting. The enemy actually took fairly good care of him. So?

  Anyway, I sent Zuli to take care of the turncoat. From three quarters of a mile away she put a bullet through his brain while he was talking to the enemy commander. The traitor dropped like a felled ox right there in the town square. I understand his wife was splattered with his bones, blood, and brains. Tough. She should have talked him out of turning his coat.

  It took a while after that for them to come up with a replacement.

  * * *

  It was about that time that the enemy, who—as I’ve said—were already showing signs of being quick learners, began to suspect that the resistance they were facing was more than just random. Life became more difficult for us.

  It started with ambushes; them ambushing us, or trying to. Sometimes it worked for them, sometimes it didn’t. But, after two of their ambushes had worked, they were no longer in doubt about who they were facing. I lost five girls—dead—before I wised up.

  The problem was that I needed to be able to send my Amazonas anywhere in my area. That meant the enemy had to be kept in the dark as much as possible. It wouldn’t be too long, so the Nguyens had told me, before substantial numbers of our people would begin to defect—helping the enemy mostly by informing on us—unless we kept up a regular presence in their camps and showed willingness to punish. And once that gradual defection began to happen? We’d have no place to hide. Even the ones who wouldn’t outright defect would stop helping us out of a sense of self preservation unless they thought we, or at least our side, was going to win. “Buying insurance,” Madame Nguyen had called it.

  We had one big advantage. I and my troops knew where our mines were…and were not. The enemy didn’t at first, and never entirely. I could move anywhere, to include right through the minefields, in places, anyway, without worrying about being blown to kingdom come with the next step. They couldn’t.

  Eventually, the bad guys started putting in booby traps, simple things like hand grenades on trip wires (no, you don’t attach the wire to the pull ring), to keep us from moving around our area so freely. We also found some homemade electric mines, one or two of them the hard way. You know the kind I mean: take a metal can, cut the top off, put the top on the bottom and perforate both with the sharp end of a bottle cum can opener. Fill the hollow space with explosive that’s been primed with an electric blasting cap. Connect the metal piece that you cut off the top to one wire, the blasting cap to another. Connect the other wire on the blasting cap to the main part. Put the can in a hole. Put the ex-top over the main part of the can with them kept separate by a sheet of paper or light plastic (in our climate plastic is much better). Camouflage. Pray. Connect the wires to a battery. Then, when someone steps on the can, the sharp triangles pointing down punch through the paper or plastic. The metal connects, the electricity flows, the cap goes off, and bye-bye foot. Or leg. Or, depending on size, life.

  They were a pain in the ass—errr…foot—to us, sometimes, but not so great a pain as our, real, mines were to them. Still, homemade mines, like other mines, work, even when they don’t. Before we were done more than a few of my chicas had wet themselves to find they were in an enemy mine field. You know the old joke about the farmer who tries to protect his melon patch by putting up a sign that says, “One of these melons has been poisoned.” They were crossing out my “one” and putting in “two.”

  Far more nasty, they used directional mines. We had them, too, although of a different type. The problem with them, for the enemy, was twofold. A really sharp troop, and most of mine were sharp, can spot the tripwire much of the time. Also, if we spotted it, you can bet we disarmed that mine and put it where it would do us more good.

  I later found out, though, that when the enemy requested normal antipersonnel mines to do to us what we’d been doing to them they were turned down by their highest political authorities, even though they had not signed the antilandmine treaty. I think that was the Taurans’ doing. Idiots.

  The question even generated some debate in their newspapers. One set of headlines I saw in a captured newspaper went, “Allies want to expand the use of illegal land mines.” The story line went to the effect that for them to respond to our mines by endangering more children by emplacing more of them was analogous to fighting for peace or fucking for chastity. The writer didn’t actually use the term “fuck,” of course, though she implied it.

  I was just as happy that the enemy weren’t using mines. The homemade booby traps and trip-wired grenades were bad enough.

  The enemy also began using daytime sweeps to try to find us or our caches of weapons. They usually weren’t too successful. For one thing, we generally didn’t have to fight them if we didn’t want to. For another, we’d hidden our goodies very well. For a third, we only had to keep existing, keep inflicting some casualties on them, make the roads insecure, attack their “face,” and eventually they’d probably get sick of it and go away.

  Even so, we did fight back from time to time, if everything seemed favorable. It usually cost something though.

  * * *

  “Look over there, Centuriona, by the big tree.”

  From the thick bushes in which I crouched I looked and did see…not quite see; I could sense…something. A shadow, maybe. I looked again and the shadow moved, only a little.

  The tree was a huge silverwood, easily ten or even twelve feet thick through the trunk. Cut down it would have been worth a small fortune. Its branches spread out, dominating the jungle and plunging everything beneath it into twilight.

  But, in that twilight, the shadow had moved.

  I had one of my squads out on a routine combat patrol. Routine, that is, if you can say so about something where you have absolutely no idea about what you’ll run into but are reasonably sure you won’t like it when you find it. Routine, when every step is a new and unique exercise in fear,

  Not that the patrol was random. We were checking out known gaps in our mines and traps, and routes parallel to them; places the enemy might be found.

  Like I said before; if we just rolled over and let the enemy have his way, we’d lose. We had to go out and fight his ambushes and sweeps on terms that favored us as much as possible. And we had to do so often enough that he wouldn’t start thinking he could go anywhere safely. We had to make them afraid of us. That’s all friction in war is about: Fear. No fear, no friction. No friction, and war really does become an industrial operation, with victory going to the side with the biggest, most efficient machines. Obviously, that wasn’t us.

  The shadow moved again. I concentrated. There it was, the outline of a soldier.

  Getting down myself, I pointed at the squad leader, squatting a few meters behind me, to get her attention and direct it to the enemy. Then I gestured left, right, down and pointed a fist towards the enemy patrol to show her what I wanted. She did much the same thing to her two team leaders and her machine gun crew. The squad began to fan out quietly, one team to each side, the machine gun team and squad leader to me. The girls were quiet as librarians as they crept up on line.

  Under and around the big tree I never got more than a glimpse, the merest sensing, of any movement. The enemy weren’t expecting us, necessarily. But they weren’t taking any chances either. They were learning.

  I put my hand to the machine gunner’s shoulder and squeez
ed it to steady her. She gave the tiniest little nod of understanding or maybe thanks.

  In the woods before us I began to catch many more glimpses of the enemy patrol. Unfortunately, I still had no sense of how many there were. Nor were any substantial number of them exposed for any length of time. I’d see one, then he’d disappear. Then I might catch sight of two more before they disappeared.

  When I started adding up the glimpses I’d had in my head I came up with a few too many for comfort. There was no way this was a squad. There were at least fifteen of the villains out there, and that meant—since it was more than a squad—that my girls were most likely facing a platoon. Thirty to forty enemy troops was more than I cared to tangle with, especially since they’d have artillery dropping on our butts within minutes—yes, that’s how good they were with it—of our opening fire.

  Reluctantly I looked behind me for an easy way out. Then I thought about how close they were and decided that we probably wouldn’t make it. I turned back to the enemy platoon and tried to make out a radio. Then I thought, Nah, what’s the use. A platoon will have more than just one.

  I didn’t have a radio. And even if I’d had one, it probably wouldn’t have been able to reach one of my mortar crews. (I’d taken a half dozen “refugees” and added them to the mortars to make two fairly full strength crews. You can train a monkey to drop a shell down in a tube…but he’s not likely to stay there when the enemy shoots back. That takes what we laughingly call, “intelligence.”) But even if I had one, and even if I’d been willing to risk one of my mortar crews, it would be far, far too long before they’d be able to help me. They’d have to hear my request, then run like hell to the nearest mortar. That was buried probably a kilometer or more away from them. The squad would probably get stopped by an enemy checkpoint on the way to the gun. Even if they weren’t stopped and got to the mortar in double quick time they’d have to unbury it. Then, when they fired, the enemy artillery would be on them like flies on crap. They used some very sophisticated radar to backtrack a flying shell to its point of origin. No mortar, I decided.

  I looked at the scout sniper I had brought with me. It wasn’t Zuli but another girl, Marielena. She was olive, like me, and kind of scrawny. I was glad she wasn’t Zuli, actually, because while I didn’t want to lose Marielena, I couldn’t afford to lose Lucinda. Mari had ended up carrying a sniper rifle because she was a somewhat better shot than most and I had the rifle to spare. She was, maybe, seventeen and a little awkward still.

  “Mari,” I whispered, soft as baby’s breath, “I need you to duck back about a hundred and twenty or so meters—quietly, you hear me?—then quarter circle around to our right. When the enemy gets with twenty-five meters of us I want you to start shooting at them. Concentrate on the ones nearest us, here. It would be nice if you hit one or two but I don’t insist on it. Got it?”

  She went without a murmur.

  To the rest, through the squad leader, I passed along the command, “No matter what, wait for the machine gun to start off.” The machine gunner, herself, I continued to squeeze into quiescence.

  For the next several minutes I mentally bit my fingernails to the quick. The whole time the enemy platoon—oh, yes, it was definitely a platoon—kept creeping closer, slowly and with exquisite care. They never exposed enough of themselves for me to risk having the machine gunner initiate our little ambush. Damn, but they were getting better in a hurry!

  The nearest was about fifteen meters, fifty feet, in front of our line when shots began ringing out from my right. Mari.

  She didn’t hit any of them that I could see. But she definitely got their attention. A fusillade of shots, everything from rifles to light machine guns to medium machine guns to forty millimeter grenades went in poor Mari’s direction. The enemy very quickly shook himself into a rough line and began assaulting Mari’s general location, making short rushes by individuals and small teams.

  Mari’s marksmanship, never of the absolute best, got noticeably worse. I’d almost swear one of her shots hit the tree I was hiding behind.

  Then three things happened at once: the rightmost soldier of the enemy assault line jumped—unwittingly—right on top of one of my girls; the remainder of that squad was in nearly perfect line with my machine gun; and Mari screamed. It had to have been her, they had no women in their infantry.

  I didn’t have to tell the machine gunner to open fire. So many targets, after the strain of waiting, were more than she could resist. She started to blast away to her front, all of the rest following her lead. I can’t say they were aiming all that well; few do.

  But, God, the chicas put out some fire. Everybody had loaded an M-26’s drum magazine, two hundred and fifty-five rounds, rather than the usual ninety-three. For just half a minute, or perhaps a little less, we put out more bullets than a maniple, even though we were firing burst rather than full automatic. The barrels were smoking when the magazines went dry.

  And that’s what saved us…most of us. The enemy couldn’t tell the exact number of bullets flying his way. But, let me tell you, five thousand rounds, give or take, going off in thirty seconds makes a terrifying racket. Even more, every bullet added its own “crack” in flight, two if it actually hit something solid, which in the jungle it typically did. That was about twelve or thirteen thousand distinct sounds of menace, in half a minute. Hell, it scared me; I’m not surprised that the bad guys decided, each on his own, to retreat, and reconsider. They pulled back completely out of sight, though they were competent enough to throw some fire in our general direction to wreck our marksmanship.

  The machine gun maybe got one or two more of them as they backed off. I can’t say so for sure, though. The one Amazona upon whom the enemy soldier had jumped was still trying to fight it out, hand to hand. Neither of them could get at a knife or bayonet and they were punching and scratching at each other, firearms useless and quite forgotten. I think the poor bastard had just realized he had a hand full of tit when I stuck him through the kidney with my bayonet.

  I told the squad leader to get her people out in a hurry. Some of them had been hit, though none too badly. It wouldn’t be long before their artillery began chopping us to hamburger. I accompanied the rest for a few minutes then went for Mari. I figured I had to.

  She was a mess. Worse, she was conscious. She didn’t even yet have the grace of shock to take the pain away. When I reached her she was writhing on the ground, trying so hard not to cry out she’d bit part way through her own tongue. I really don’t want to talk about what she looked like; what they’d done to her. I had to fight down the urge to panic…and to throw up. I guess training helped there, because I didn’t do either.

  But she managed to ask me, words smearing around her bloody tongue, “Please stop the pain, Centurion? Please, anything. Maria, please? Anything? Something? Please, Maria.”

  There was so little time. Already the artillery was dropping on where the patrol had been. I knew what I had to do. I just didn’t want to do it. But the look of agony of her face was more than I could stand, either.

  I flicked the selector to “R” for “rounds,” single shot. Mari stopped thrashing and tried to force a smile when she felt the warm muzzle against her head. She began to pray, her lips forming the words with little sound. I prayed with her: “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come…”

  When she seemed more immersed in the prayer than in her pain, I closed my eyes and shot her, once. Then I cried as I slung her body across my back and carried it away through the jungle shadows. You see, I had to hide her so the enemy wouldn’t feel he’d done well.

  Marta had to go into hiding not long after that. We got word that they’d found that old recruiting ad and identified her from it. Not long after that, they identified me.

  Which just goes to show that Carrera had his limits, intelligence-wise.

  Interlude

  In geosynchronous orbit, unheard and unseen by the primitives below, the Old Earth Ship,
Spirit of Peace, coursed through space. Peace’s eyes and sensors focused on the jungle far below. She and her sisters of the United Earth Peace Fleet—between them the most sophisticated intelligence gathering tools in Terra Nova’s history—saw everything that moved on the surface of the planet. Some of the newer ones—including the Spirit class—actually used radar to look into the ground. Still other sensors keyed on magnetic fields to identify large pieces of metal, a tell-tale sign of soldiers. From a number of ships, suborbital drones filled in gaps, both in area and in intelligence gathering technique. A steady stream of information beamed from Peace to the surface.

  Below the ships and the drones, but still high enough that a man could not breathe the air unassisted, soared reconnaissance aircraft, some Zhong but mostly Tauran, based out of Cienfuegos, a Tsarist Marxist-ruled island in the Shimmering Sea. These, too, used their sensors—infrared, magnetic, visual and radar—to find targets on the ground.

  Still closer to the planet, lesser aircraft—fighters, bombers, helicopters—used their eyes and their cameras to find an elusive foe.

  Yet each of these methods failed in one or more particulars. Cloud cover frequently blocked normal photography. The layers of thick jungle always blocked it where jungle existed. Rain could dilute, interfere with, and distort the heat of a human body. Strips of aluminum hung from trees, radar scattering and absorbing nets, the carbon-based and hence radar-absorbing trees themselves; all these rendered even ground penetrating radar problematic.

  Still, these methods produced literally millions of images and bits of information. These were collected at a headquarters far from the action. Thousands of overworked, bleary-eyed men and women labored around the clock to make sense of what the images showed…and of what they did not.