by Tom Kratman
Nguyen waited another minute after the mortar fell silent. Then, judging range carefully, he said, “Big gun girls, fire now.”
That order, too, Zuli passed on. Four of the Amazons sprang to the concealed 23mm and began tossing the cut branches lying over it off to the sides. One of them jumped into the metal seat, grabbed the handles and applied the pedals to make sure the thing would still traverse. The lead Zhong helicopter was about eight hundred meters distant when a stream of fist-sized tracers began their intercepting arc. Not expecting this, the Zhong pilot flew right into the stream of shells. His underside began to disintegrate under the pounding even before he lost control and arced off to crash into the trees. The other Zhong helicopter, apparently shocked, pulled up and veered off out of range. The Amazons were too well disciplined to cheer, but a quick glance at their faces said they were pleased as punch to get some of their own back.
“Now he call help,” Nguyen said, with an anticipatory smile. “Need help take care of ever-so-bad girls.” The ever-so-bad girls, not having a target in range, quickly reloaded their piece.
“Set thing on auto!” Nguyen called. “Wicked-naughty girls run!” The Amazon infantry still at the camp scampered off, followed by the four-woman gun crew who followed, their 23mm cannon spewing out random crap behind them. Also behind them, the Zhong helicopters proceeded to devastate the camp from which had come the fire that had struck down one of their own.
“Teach sharp lesson,” Nguyen said, looking over his shoulder at the smoke and flames rising above the camp, “about just who you support better.”
Nguyen, the old guerrilla fighter, had no moral issues with punishing a camp full of informers and traitors. That said, when two of the helicopters broke off their punishment of the camp, heading toward the direction the children had been taken in, he said, “Ooo…bad shit. Still…maybe useful.”
* * *
Rank be damned, Maria fumed at Nguyen when she was told. “If those people didn’t hate us before they sure as hell do now. Godammit that was just plain murder.”
Nguyen smiled almost indulgently. In his heavily accented Spanish, he answered, “No say…refugees—those who live—blame enemy for attack camp. They know we cause. But we not cause attack chop up kids. That enemy do. And civvie-traitor-fuckers learn three things important. One: Enemy no care, no matter what say. Two: Enemy no protect. Also no matter what say. Three: We punish. That camp? No trouble this after.”
“No!” Maria raged. “No, it won’t be. That’s because it doesn’t have that many people left!”
Nguyen shrugged, “So? And have some, yes. And there other people, other camps, other villages. They learn lesson too. The gunships do teaching for us.”
Nguyen finished, “You feel bad kids? What difference make, what you feel? What I feel; what difference? It happen. Maybe wish hadn’t, but this war. Bad things happen.”
* * *
“Those,” Marta muttered, bitterly, “are some bad news. I wonder what took them so long?”
Ponce, with Marta and Maria, plus a couple of girls for security, overlooked one of the intersections of the main coastal highway and a feeder road from one of the ports. She answered, “I guess it’s taken that long to build up one of the ports enough to offload such heavy equipment. Then, too, initially they’d have been restricted to the near vicinity of the port. The bridges in their area didn’t have a prayer of holding up under a tank’s load. But the Zhong have been busy with reinforcing the bridges, building new ones, and finding useable fords.”
Maria said nothing as she followed a column of four heavy tanks through her binoculars. Past the tanks, but still within her field of view, engineers were setting up a prefabricated bridge over a chasm.
Finally, Maria put down her field glasses and said, “Girls, this is a ‘bad thing,’ as we say in the business. Soon enough the Zhong engineers will have managed to put up decent bridges in enough places that the tanks will be able to run pretty much anywhere that isn’t heavily wooded.”
Marta shook her head, saying, “Fuck! More than half of our area is open farmland. Worse, not too many of the mines we planted will take out a tank. None of those we’d planted off the roads will.”
“Damn it!” Maria fumed. “Somehow, I never really expected them, not deep down. Things have been so bad I couldn’t imagine them getting much worse.”
“So?” Sergeant Ponce said, “Who’s never made a mistake? So forget the mistake, Centurion. Concentrate on the fact that we’ve got a problem.”
It was good advice; Maria took it. “Our entire defense, because that’s what we’ve been doing, despite the fact we’ve been attacking more often than not, has depended in large part on antipersonnel land mines. The tanks will clear out antipersonnel mines with irritating, invulnerable ease. They’ll just run right over them, setting them off. As often as not the crews won’t even know unless they’re unbuttoned. Even the antivehicular mines we’ve put in the roads won’t do any more than break a track. And that’ll just piss the bastard tankers off.”
“So what do we do?” Marta asked.
“Request some real tank killer mines and go after the bridges,” Maria answered. “And try to get them when they’re out of their tanks.”
* * *
A couple of Zhong tank crewmen were hurt once, when they set off an antipersonnel mine while trying to get their track back on their tank. That was the only real success with AP mines.
The Amazons tried to take out the bridges, when they could. One of the two problems with that was that the enemy watched the bridges pretty carefully. The other was that the Zhong could put bridges up faster than the Amazons could knock them down.
They had antitank weapons that would take a tank out, if they could catch it from a vulnerable angle, the sides or rear. This proved easier said than done. For one thing, it required considerable luck to find oneself in position to make that shot. For another, the tanks always worked in pairs, at a minimum, and always had infantry close at hand. Even if an Amazon found herself in a position to take a likely shot, the odds were good that the wing tank or the accompanying grunts would spot her and fire her up before she could do it. And even if not, they would pursue like furies if she shot and missed. The women did try just that a couple of times. It was not something they would afterwards recommend with any enthusiasm.
* * *
The night sky was completely overcast, with a deluge of rain threatening to pour down at any moment. In short, it was perfect.
There were four tanks in Maria’s area supporting the infantry battalion she’d been fighting. Of that number she was sure, having made a very careful count of them. She did have a weapon that could take one out. Rather, she had three of them—not four, unfortunately—and three only if they all worked.
One night, when the rain was pouring down so hard she didn’t think the Zhong had a prayer of spotting her or her troops from the air or ground, they rolled one of the “Davids,” under its own power, to within about two kilometers of the place where the tanks were based when they weren’t actively escorting or hunting.
The Amazons had kept the main gate of the place under observation for some days. They knew it always took a few minutes for the pair of tanks on patrol for the day to pass through. Maria lay very low in the position from which she’d kept the gate under observation. The gate through which the tanks would pass lay about four hundred meters distant.
Maria kept in touch with the operator of the David through a field phone and wire she had run out behind her on the way to the observation post. The Amazons had been issued a few of the phones and a limited amount of wire, just enough to be useful. Maria had also had the refugees on the lookout for any commo wire the Zhong might lay. This was not so much because the wire was useful in itself but because it tended to lead you right to them in both directions. Unfortunately, they didn’t use it much, preferring radio by far. And why not? They didn’t have an entire space fleet trying to pinpoint their radio signals.
> Lightning flashed, followed by thunder. Almost immediately, a sheet of rain came down that might as well have been solid water.
Four hundred meters from the gate, about two hundred meters from Maria, along the dirt road that led to the gate, Marta and a half squad of Amazons lay flat on their bellies in the rain- and track-churned muck, laying a half dozen of their hard to come by track-breaking mines. When they were done they crawled back out of sight, except for Marta herself who veered her course to pass by Maria and her sole guard, Arias.
“Job’s done.”
“Camouflaged?”
“Pretty well. It wasn’t hard to scoop out some depressions in this crap and cover the mines. And they were already mud-colored.”
Unseen, Maria nodded. “Okay, good. Now we find out if those wonderful thermal imagers they use can see that little difference in temperature in this weather.”
Marta began to lie down next to her chief.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
“I’m not leaving you.”
Maria answered, “If I am killed, you’re in charge. Don’t even think about arguing. This is an order; get out of here.”
Marta grumbled, but she left. Alone, Maria turned her attention back to the gate, captured Zhong night vision goggles strapped to her head. This close to the enemy, she didn’t think the Earthpigs would notice the thing’s electronic signature, even if they could pick it up. She tried to ignore the cries of the antaniae—mnnbt, mnnbt, mnnbt—and the howling of a pack of monkeys.
She heard a heavy diesel roar that was soon joined by another. In her grainy green image, one of the sentries at the gate lifted up a barbed wire “knife rest” and moved it out of the way. Looking past that, she saw first one, then another Zhong tank moving to the gate. Each of the pair seemed to be carrying infantry on its back deck, about a half a dozen per was Maria’s estimate.
The tanks passed the gate, slowly and carefully. It was unlikely that the tank crew gave a fig for the gate, but they didn’t want to have to clean barbed wire out of their tracks. The first one stopped, about one hundred meters past the gate, waiting for the other to join it. When it did, both moved out at a slow pace.
The night suddenly strobed bright as the first of the pair rolled right over one of the mines laid by Marta and the women with her. The sound reverberated through the jungle, setting antaniae to screeching and even non-nocturnal birds to flight. The howling monkeys kept up their howl as they retreated as fast as possible from the blast.
Risking a rise of her head, through the night vision goggles Maria saw that one tank was stopped dead. Nearby, on the ground, a few of the infantry that had been riding it were being given first aid by their comrades. Inside the camp, an ambulance’s siren began to hoot.
It didn’t look to Maria as if any of the Zhong were dead. The other tank of the pair and the infantry that had been riding atop it were taking up positions to guard the damaged one until they could get it moving again. They knew a stopped tank was a vulnerable tank.
Maria picked up her field phone and squeezed the large button on the side several times to catch the attention of the operator of the David. When she knew she had it, she whispered one word, “Roll.”
* * *
“Roger,” said the “driver.”
More than a kilometer distant, she flicked the engage switch of her control box, then thumbed the short control stick forward. Ground began to roll past in the grainy, fisheye image on her screen. It was a truly rotten picture; the worst of Volgan crudeness and legionary frugality.
“Maybe if it weren’t pouring cats and dogs and darker than three feet up a well-digger’s butt this might work,” grumbled the operator. She began cursing into her own phone about not being “able to see a damned thing.”
She need not have worried so much about that. Within minutes of the first tank being disabled, before the David could have reached the area, the night sky was lit by four huge flares hanging under parachutes. Yes, the rain reduced the effect, but still; there were four of them up there.
Maria cursed as her goggles blacked out with the sudden burst of light. Shit, she thought, tearing them from her eyes. I hope they’re not damaged. I wonder why they used illumination; they’ve got all those night vision devices. Maybe the mechanics working on the tank requested it.
The metal shell casings around artillery- and mortar-delivered flares tend to go off in unpredictable directions once they break free. Maria heard a rattle something like a distant freight train just as one struck the ground with a frightful thud not more than fifty feet away from her. Knowing that the casings were heavy and knowing they could kill her if one hit, Maria started to tremble a little.
The operator of the David called over the phone, “Centurion, I can see both tanks, maybe two minutes away. Which one do you want me to go for?”
Maria thought about that for a few moments. If we take out the undamaged one we—at best, maybe—get it and its crew, the accompanying infantry being dispersed…then they’ll fix the damaged one and use it again. But, on the other hand, there are a number of people clustered around the damaged tank. If we go after that, we might get the crew, a number of wounded—to hell with their wounded—some medics—to hell with them too—and that mechanic team that’s helping fix the track.
Besides, the undamaged tank might spot the David and get away. It’s much faster, anyway. And I can still hear the engine turning over. On the other hand, the damaged one’s going nowhere fast.
She forced the tremors from her voice. “Go after the first one. Go after the cripple.”
“Roger.”
Risking another peek up, Maria saw when the Zhong started to fire their rifles and machine guns. The David’s hull sparked wherever it was hit. The enemy fire increased as the miniature tank speeded up suddenly, sprinting for the crippled tank. One crewman tried desperately to crawl back inside the tank; maybe to use the heavy machine gun or the main gun.
Only it was too late for that.
* * *
Maria’s eyes saw spots and her ears rang. So that’s what fifty tons in flight looks like, she thought in wonder. Some spectacle.
The David had gone right underneath the tank before the operator set it off. The explosion had buffeted Maria half senseless, close as she was. Then there was a huge chunk of machinery flying up and out of an ugly cloud of black smoke. Every man aboard had his neck broken in an instant when the tank suddenly lurched upward.
Maria couldn’t see what became of the men clustered around it. She suspected there wouldn’t be a lot left.
* * *
“We’re still losing,” Marta said later back at camp.
“Maybe so,” Maria admitted. “But tonight was a good piece of work. We killed fifteen or twenty of the enemy for no loss ourselves. If you don’t count the David, that is, and I don’t. The tank has got to be a total wreck: Suspension ripped off, belly plate buckled and torn, turret mechanism and engine most likely destroyed beyond hope of repair. Better still, they’re not going to be so damned bold. And, with only three tanks left, they won’t be able to send out a pair every day like they have been.”
“We’re still losing,” Marta insisted.
“Don’t say that,” Maria ordered.
“Yes, Centurion Fuentes,” Marta answered, bracing to attention. “Now if that will be all…”
“Marta…”
“If that will be all, Centuriona?”
* * *
Marta left the bunker and went out into the falling rain. It didn’t matter, she was already wet and perhaps nature’s shower might clean off some of the dirt. She walked to a bohio, a shed of wood and grass, and sat down on a stump, feeling lower than whale shit.
It was a dirtier trick for me to use her rank against her than it was for her to use it against me. She’s my friend and I made her feel less than she is. Jesus, does everything I touch or care for have to turn to shit?
Still, orders or not, I’m essentially right. Yes, we�
��ve gotten what some might call a favorable kill ratio. That much is true even if that someone counts the men from Pastora’s platoon—Marta felt a sudden constriction in her throat at the thought of Pastora’s cooling corpse and what they might have become if he hadn’t offered himself and his men up as a sacrifice on the altar of the nation. She forced that down, as she did every time he came unbidden to her mind. Never mind that now; nothing to be done. But even counting the Cazadors who were killed or captured the first day, by any objective measure we’re doing well.
Counting civilian dead, of course, the forces against us are doing better than that. The enemy probably thinks he’s doing still better, but that will be a result of reporting dead civilians, along with dogs, cats, and cows, as dead guerrillas. By that count the enemy commander is a hero.
Naturally, that Zhong commander has to report all those spurious kills. Otherwise, he would certainly have been relieved. “Face,” as Colonel Nguyen said.
And we’re not immune. What was Pastora’s sacrifice but “face?”
But we’re not losing on body counts. His troops are quick learners; all the girls think so. Even if their commander, himself, is both an idiot and a coward. He hasn’t learned much because he rarely ventures out of the deep, safe bunker he made his troops dig for him.
They could be quick learners, and it wouldn’t be so bad. But they’re quick learners who can replace their losses more or less indefinitely. So long as their society’s and government’s political wills hold out and as long as the Taurans are willing to foot the bill and provide the shipping for support.
They’ll even replace the tank and crew within ten days, maybe less. The most we can hope for out of that is that they won’t quite replace the devil-may-care attitude the tankers had. Not that that wouldn’t be a big help. It isn’t about kill ratios, anyway, not to me it isn’t and, if she’d admit it, not to Maria, either. The Zhong can replace losses. Ours, on the other hand, are severe, crippling, and almost permanent. In the short term, our losses are irreplaceable, and at more than a personnel management level. Weapons, ammunition, all other supplies? Those we can get more of, if only at the rate of a trickle. But the women we’ve been losing are friends.