The Men in the Jungle

by Norman Spinrad

  Fraden got up, stretched, began the long walk back to camp. It was time for the Killers to make a move. They couldn’t live off the land, they couldn’t get supplies through from their base, and they were too low on food and ammo to survive a long forced march back to base. Something would have to give…

  “I don’t understand you, Bart Fraden,” Sophia O’Hara said. “I don’t understand you at all. I submit that I’m not a total ignoramus. I can understand, however murkily, why you want all those Killers holed up on some grubby hilltop the way they are. I can even understand why Bullethead isn’t supposed to attack them—they’re just supposed to sit there and starve to death. I admit that there’s a certain grisly economy in that—though you didn’t seem to give much of a damn about saving the lives of our loyal constituents when you just let the Killers run wild while our folks ran and hid and starved themselves, mostly. Even that I can understand, knowing how your warped mind operates. But now, after all the trouble you went to, after all the lives it cost, getting them trapped on that hilltop without food and ammunition, you’ve let hundreds of Killers just loaded with food and god-knows-what get almost to where their blood-thirsty buddies are holed up. Why? Why? Why?”

  Bart Fraden looked across the guerrilla camp to where Willem and his twenty ’heads, all armed with snipguns for the first time, were disappearing into the jungle. Giving ’em snipguns was a gamble, but the stakes were well worth it.

  “Fraden’s Rules of Revolution,” he said. “Rule one: make a pig of yourself, don’t settle for killing a thousand of the enemy when you can wipe out sixteen hundred. Rule two: don’t give up an opportunity to grab more ammo. Rule three: sixteen hundred starving men low on ammo are weaker than a thousand men with the same inadequate supplies.”

  “I’m glad you explained,” Sophia said. “It’s as clear as pea soup.”

  “Look, Soph, the idea is to let the men in the relief column get through to their boys we’ve got bottled up, but not the supplies. Then we’ve got that many more of ’em trying to march a hundred miles out of here to safety, and the more men they have to spread their food and ammo out among, the easier pickings they’ll be. Comprende?”

  “In the abstract, of course,” she said. “An idiot, I’m not But how many of our own men is all this finessing going to cost? You said yourself that even under perfect conditions, we can’t expect to kill any more Killers than the number of men we lose. That means, without taking off my shoes to count on my toes, that you expect to lose sixteen hundred of our own men. Just like that sixteen hundred men—blotto!”

  Fraden sighed. “There are fifteen million Sangrans and less than thirty thousand Killers,” he said.

  “So?”

  “So? So we can lose men from today till next year at five thousand a week if we have to. As long as we keep winning, as long as we keep expanding our control of territory, as long as we kill Killers, we’ve got a bottomless supply of gunfodder. It’s as simple as that.”

  “As simple as…” She stared at him, shook her head in wonderment. “Jesus H. Christ!” she exclaimed. “You’re talking about men, Bart, men! Human beings dying, not figures on some goddamned tally sheet. Human suffering, people dying! Men, Bart men!”

  What’s wrong with her? Fraden thought irritably. Why can’t she understand such a simple fact of life? “I’m talking about war,” he said. “What do you think-war is anyway, a nice little game of chess? War is killing, Soph. You think all those guns are for show? War is killing, that’s where war is at. A man who can’t face that has no business in this line of evil in the first place. A man who has to delude himself that he’s not really killing men when he sends troops into battle is a cop-out and a coward.”

  “I expected that from Chrome-dome, not from you,” she said quietly.

  That hurt him, a Wound in a place he did not care to examine too closely. Afraid to turn inward, he lashed out.

  “I expected a cop-out from Chrome-dome,” he mimicked savagely,“not from you. Who do you think you are? Where do you get that holiness from? I came in here a few weeks ago straight from stirring up the Animals, stirring ’em up to make ’em kill, and I succeeded but good, and you smelled it on me. You smelled that warrior smell. Did it make you sick then? You know the answer, Soph—you practically raped me. It turned you on, it really turned you on. What’s that make you? The Virgin Mary?”

  She cringed, frowned, then shrugged with a wan little smile. “I suppose it makes us a matched pair,” she said in a small voice. “A matched pair of… Touché, Peerless Leader, touché.”

  “Hah, look at ’em!” Willem Vanderling said, as he stood at the margin of the jungle staring out across the rolling stretch of open grassland leading up to the small hill on which the fortifications of the besieged Killers stood. “Like rats in a trap! Think they’re so damned smart!”

  The Killers had chosen what seemed like an ideal piece of terrain for a stand-off. Something like seven hundred of ’em—all that was left of the three now consolidated columns—were dug in atop the little hill. The hill was surrounded by low, coverless grassland for a distance of at least three hundred yards in all directions. The snipguns could not reach the Killer trenches from the cover of the jungle, and they were dug in too well for long-range rifle fire to bother them. To charge the fortifications across three hundred yards of open space would be sheer suicide. And the relief column, six hundred Killers—well not six hundred any more after ten days of continual ambushes—was fast approaching from the east, loaded down with food and ammo. Hie Killers just had to wait a few more minutes, and they would be home free…

  Or so they thought.

  “Your men ready?” he asked Gomez, who stood hollow-eyed at his side, greedily fondling his newly issued snipgun.

  “Ready t’kill, sir,” Gomez said. “Kill twenty, fifty, two hundred. Kill ’em all. Kill—”

  “Yeah, yeah. You just make damned sure they don’t blow it by rushing out of cover and charging ’em. Just let ’em keep coming and hold your positions and keep swinging those snipguns. Now get back to your side of the dealing and sit tight.”

  Gomez saluted and trotted across the narrow open space toward the opposing tongue of jungle which faced Vanderling’s position. Knowing they were there, Vanderling could just make out the shapes of the ten men crouching behind trees across the way. Vanderling glanced at the ten men who flanked him, crouched down behind a tree himself, and patted the barrel of his own snipgun. A sweet setup, indeed!

  There was only one path from the east wide enough to accommodate six hundred Killers, and it debouched into the clearing here, where the clear area sent a pseudopod about fifty yards long and fifty wide into the body of the jungle. The path ended at the tip of the projection of the open area, and the Killers would have to pass between two opposing walls of jungle. The clear corridor was only fifty yards wide, and the range of a snipgun was about fifty yards too. Vanderling had positioned ten ’heads armed with snipguns on one side of the corridor, ten more on the other. The relief column would have to run the gauntlet between them, between a crossfire of snipgun beams that blanketed the entire corridor.

  Vanderling laughed as he sighted his snipgun out into the clearing. They better know how to run and run fast! he thought.

  Ten, thirty, forty minutes, and then Vanderling heard the sounds of many men making their way through the bush. He motioned to his men, snipguns zeroed in on the clearing.

  Another five minutes of waiting, and then six Killers, toting heavy packs filled with food and ammunition, stepped out of the jungle and were spotlighted in bold relief by the hot red sunlight beating down on the clear corridor.

  Six more followed right behind them, and another six, and another and another, and in a couple of minutes, the end of the corridor nearest the jungle was filled with heavily-laden Killers. Vanderling held up his arm as the Killer column marched halfway through the corridor, close-order, till at least a hundred Killers were neatly positioned between the jaws of the ambush. />
  “Now!” he shouted, dropped his arm back to his snipgun, pressed the trigger, swung the snipgun back and forth rhythmically like a man reaping grain.

  Sudden howls of pain erupted, shattered the moment, as five Killers were sliced through at the navel, fell to the ground, dead and twitching, gushing bright red blood. From both sides of the clearing, the concealed herogyn-heads opened fire with their snipguns, slicing through necks, heads, torsos, limbs. Killers seemed to fly apart like burst sacs of fluid, whirled about in mindless little circles, trying to find their tormentors, trying to escape. But the crash of nearly five hundred men close-order marching into the clearing behind them pushed them forward, straight through that lethal gauntlet. The Killers milled about in massive confusion, throwing aside their packs, firing pointlessly into the jungle, a monstrous traffic jam, of severed limbs, decapitated bodies, the maimed and the enraged and fire dead and the dying. And still the black tide poured into the deadly corridor.

  It was like shooting blind, flopping fish in a barrel. The snipguns were ominously silent; there were no muzzleflashes. The only sound the Killers could hear was their own agonized screams, the only sight limbs, heads, dropping from bodies, their comrades slashed to bloody meat by the invisible assassins. It was like an explosion in a butcher shop, a convulsing whirlwind of blood and raw meat and death.

  Vanderling’s knuckles were bone-white as he swung his snipgun, his eyes laughing, glowing coals, his mouth a cruel scar as he sliced the black-clad men to ribbons. Son of a bitch, this was one sweet weapon! Look at those dirty mothers come apart! His arms were parts of a smoothly running killing machine as they swept the snipgun back and forth through the screaming horde of tormented Killers.

  Monomaniacally, Killers kept pouring into the clearing, blocking all escape, tossing aside packs, firing madly as they came, into the air, into the jungle, into the packed ranks of their own stricken comrades. Idiotically, they tried to hold their ground against the unseen enemy, milled about in a great, immobile clot, a clot of dying, bleeding, shouting men, a ghastly melee ankle-deep in limbs, heads, bodies, great puddles of gore…

  Vanderling laughed a harsh wild laugh—then suddenly dove on his face as a withering hail of bullets tore into the jungle all around him. He saw that three of his men were already hit, looked toward the fortifications on the hill, saw that hundreds of Killers had advanced to within easy rifle range of the battle, were firing furious, blind volleys into the jungle as covering fire for the relief column.

  The huge skirmish line of Killers held their ground wisely out of snipgun range, continued to pour volley after volley into the jungle, wasting more of their fast-depleting ammunition. The remnants of the relief column began to run madly toward them, forgetting the vital packs of food and ammunition, forgetting their dead and dying comrades in their dash toward safety.

  Under the covering fire, the survivors made for the hill, leaving hundreds of bodies and hideously maimed wounded behind on a battlefield that was a refuse heap of human rubble.

  When the last of the Killers, the fleeing and their saviors, had retreated to the far safety of the hill, Willem Vanderling emerged from cover to count the bodies and the booty.

  Man… he thought. Seven of his men had been killed by the blind fire, but look at all that lovely ammo just waiting to be picked up! As the herogyn-heads drifted out among the dead and the dying, sunken eyes still blaring with blood lust, to finish off the wounded Killers, Vanderling estimated that nearly half the relief column had been wiped out in a few minutes of unbelievable carnage. And the People’s Army got the food and ammo they had been carrying, not their own boys!

  Vanderling looked out over the vast heap of bodies, limbs, severed heads, their faces still locked in death’s head snarls, the torn human flotsam floating in a sea of rapidly congealing blood, and smiled a wide, satisfied smile.

  “Man,” he muttered aloud, “these sonofabitching snipguns are something else!”

  “Got t’have this spread all over y’district in two days, Bart says, so y’pay attention and get it right,” Olnay said, speaking to about thirty Sangrans, all sans the green sweatband and loincloth of the People’s Army, who stood three deep in a semicircle outside Fraden’s hut. Fraden stood just inside the doorway of the hut, half out of sight, watching Olnay, making sure he was getting it straight but letting even the agents get the story first from a Sangran mouth. Further inside the hut, Sophia stood quizzically watching Fraden watching Olnay.

  “Tell y’Animals this,” Olnay said slowly. “Tell ’em that y’People’s Army got all those Killers been marchin’ all over y’estates just about ready for y’kill. Tell ’em Bart says y’Killers die in two days. Tell ’em Bart says y’Killers’ll die in Triple Valley, two days from now. They want t’see the People’s Army kill a thousand Killers, they come t’Triple Valley in two days, but they stay put in the two outside valleys, leave y’middle valley alone, and stay out of sight and real quiet. Y’middle valley’s gonna be for y’big show. Tell y’Animals they want t’see the biggest battle Sangre’s ever seen, thousand Killers wiped out right in front of ’em, they gather in the outside valleys o’Triple Valley two days from now, and don’t get in the way of y’People’s Army. Y’got all that?”

  The semicircle of men nodded. “Okay,” Olnay said, “now move it!” The agents dispersed, began the trek back to their various villages to feed this latest story into the rumor mill. Olnay waved to Fraden, then ambled away toward the nearest cookfire.

  “I wonder what Nero would’ve thought of your methods,” Sophia said. “Short on bread, but long on circuses. See a thousand Killers torn to pieces! A thousand, count ’em, a thousand! See the battle of the century in living, bleeding color! Too bad you don’t have any Christians to martyr. But then, we’re kind of short on lions, too.”

  Fraden turned, sighed, said patiently, “You’ve got it all wrong. The forthcoming battle, oh Conscience of All the World, isn’t supposed to be a Roman Circus, it’s a piece of propaganda. Propaganda’s a big problem here. In the Belt, I used a clandestine radio and TV transmitter and an underground fax sheet. Can’t do that here—the Sangrans don’t have radios, they don’t have TVs and most of ’em can’t read. It’s all got to be word of mouth. The rumor mill works pretty well, but all it can do is tell. The best propaganda is propaganda that shows. That’s what I’m setting up. Let a few thousand Sangrans see the People’s Army wipe out a thousand Killers before their own eyes, and in a week or so the whole planet’ll get the message: the People’s Army can destroy the Killers.”

  “Why can’t you just kill your Killers and then have the rumor mill spread the story instead of turning the whole thing into a public spectacle?” Sophia said dubiously.

  “Because the Killers’ biggest weapon is their mystique,” Fraden replied. “For three centuries, they’ve been a legend of fear and invincibility to the Sangrans. Destroy that legend and the whole planet will begin to wonder about the so-called Natural Order. You don’t destroy a legend like that by telling people it’s a lie. You’ve got to show ’em, give ’em a counter-legend. That’s what propaganda’s all about. And if you have no mass media to work with, you’ve got to give ’em a little live action.”

  Sophia shrugged. “Who knows?” she said. “If Nero had read a good book on advertising, maybe we’d all still be speaking Latin.”

  Triple Valley was a series of four roughly parallel ridges that formed three troughs running east-west Bart Fraden stood at the southernmost of the two inner ridges looking down into a narrow valley. While the other two troughs of the Triple Valley system had streams running down them and thus had rather heavy undergrowth and jungle on their floors, this central valley was drier, had only scattered clumps of trees and tall grass. Not too far to the east, a couple hundred guerrillas were fleeing before the thousand Killers who were all that was left of the expeditionary force. The guerrillas were moving west at a measured pace, making sure that the Killers never lost the trail. Their job was to le
ad the Killers into this central valley, where the cover was nearly non-existent…

  Fraden glanced behind him, over the crest of the ridge, down the hidden slope. A thousand guerrillas waited there, hidden from view. A thousand more waited on the hidden slope of the opposing ridge. All that Fraden could see of the rest of his forces was Willem Vanderling standing on the crest of the opposite ridge.

  Behind the troops on the slopes of the ridges, down in the wooded valleys, Sangrans had been gathering all day, men, women, even children. Thousands of them. Fraden had passed among them on his way to the top of the ridge, and the atmosphere was a strange mixture of carnival and skepticism. Clearly, they were looking forward to seeing the Killers destroyed, but just as clearly they doubted the outcome of the impending battle.

  Fraden could understand the disbelief. At last the Killers would get the pitched battle they had been looking for for weeks, A thousand Killers against two thousand guerrillas, and under anything like normal circumstances, that would still leave the odds heavily on the Killers’ side.

  But there was nothing ordinary about these conditions. The Killers were weak from semi-starvation. They couldn’t have more than a few rounds per man left. And they were being led into a monstrous trap. As soon as the bait squad led the Killers into the valley, a thousand men would march up over the crests of each ridge and down into the valley, firing as they came. The Killers would be trapped in a massive crossfire; they would be thoroughly decimated before the guerrillas closed with them and it came down to the hand-to-hand stuff which was the enemy’s forte.

  Fraden knew that it would still be messy, costly, that many of his own men would die. It would be cheaper in terms of lives, far cheaper, to simply have the guerrillas fire from the ridgelines and wipe the Killers out without ever closing with them.