by John F. Carr
“I’m losing you, Colonel. Before we’re cut off, is there anything we can do to help?”
“Yes—” Then a veritable storm of static cut the conversation off.
“We’ve lost ‘em, Colonel,” the Sergeant reported.
Falkenberg cursed. “I was hoping to get some officers from the Seventy-seventh transferred here from Castell City.” He turned to the communications officer. “Let me know the minute you establish contact again with either the Governor’s office or Fort Kursk.”
“Yes, sir.”
With twenty thousand new recruits screaming for blood, the Mahdi was not yet ready to go on the offensive.
A Levant blockade runner had finally dropped some new radio equipment and reaffirmed his belief in their cause but so far only twelve token Saladin tanks had arrived. Still, if he didn’t move soon his troops would vote with their feet just like last time. And the word from Medina was that Falkenberg’s forces acquired newer and better arms with every drop. Better, the Mahdi reluctantly decided, to attack too early than too late.
“There are many possibilities, sir,” Major Savage said. “Bedouin scouts may be more numerous than we believed. Maybe the Levanters have given the Mahdi a spy satellite—no, I suppose Captain Kraft would spot that immediately.”
“Have you considered the more obvious possibility?” Falkenberg asked. “Top Soldier, what do you think?”
Sergeant Major Calvin’s reply was unhesitating. “We have a spy, sir.”
Three Gurkha patrols in a row had gone to stake out landing spots for supply depots. Each had been wiped out before any parachute had appeared to give their location away.
“How many people have to know?” the Colonel asked.
Savage indicated the map on the wall of the office. “Anyone could have passed through here. With only a dozen drops left they could have a detachment waiting at each one of them.”
Falkenberg frowned. “It’s that critical first half hour,” he said, “before they have time to dig in. How many people have to know?”
“Eventually everyone will have to know where the depots are. The drivers first, of course.”
“I mean at the beginning, before the drop.”
Savage looked at Sergeant Major Calvin. “I suppose we could keep it between the two of us, couldn’t we?”
“Yes sir,” the RSM replied.
“Good. Don’t even tell me.” Falkenberg stood and strode out of the office.
Savage and Calvin busied themselves with contour maps selecting alternate sites for the remaining dozen supply dumps.
Hassan the Assassin was not a natural born soldier but he had learned a few tricks during his year of forced service with a Bedouin unit. Of a naturally cheerful nature, he had settled well into the Forty-second. Until recently. The secret, like all secrets, was immediately common knowledge. The Forty-second had a spy aboard. What more logical candidate?
There was a knock on the office door and immediately it opened. While Savage hastily drew another map atop the one they had been marking up RSM Calvin turned to face Recruit Hassan el-Beqr standing at rigid attention. One eye was black and the young man showed other signs of hard usage.
“Sir, I do not complain willingly but I cannot defend myself.”
“Why not?” Calvin asked.
“They call me a spy.”
“Are you?”
Recruit el-Beqr took a deep breath and controlled himself with difficulty. When he could speak it burst out with the rapidity of automatic fire: “My English is as good as yours, Sergeant Major. I am no darker than any Spaniard or Italian and I speak both languages. Would a spy be fool enough to ID himself as an Arab? In any case, we Lebanese are not Arab. We are direct descendants of the Phoenicians. And my ancestors were practicing Christians when yours were still painting themselves blue and sacrificing POWs to the Wicker Man.”
It was the first time Jeremy Savage had ever seen Sergeant Major Calvin at a loss for words. “Wait outside,” Calvin finally managed. “I’ll have to take this up with the Colonel.”
The Colonel was busy with several other officers at the moment, for which Calvin was grateful. Hassan the Assassin’s difficulty was not the kind of thing to bother an officer with. Calvin could straighten the men out on his own. But if there were something to this spy business… He was still dithering when a hugely mustached Cousin Jack recruit knocked and entered. “Permission to speak to the Colonel?” he asked.
“Can’t you tell me about it?” Calvin asked.
“There’s a spy amoong us.”
That tore it. Major Savage was in the office and had to have overheard. Now the Colonel would have to know. “Do you know who?” Calvin asked.
“I know.”
“You have proof—something that’ll stand up in a court martial?”
“I do.”
Against his every instinct not to interrupt the Colonel in the middle of a meeting, Sergeant Major Calvin took a deep breath, knocked on the door, and entered. To his immense relief the meeting was just breaking up and the officers were all on their feet.
Falkenberg saw Calvin’s face and immediately asked, “What is it, Top Soldier?”
Calvin waited until the others had left the room. “Trouble, sir,” he said, and turned to beckon the hugely mustached Havener. “Says there’s a spy aboard. What’s your name, Recruit?”
Since no one told him to leave, Savage turned on his ears and his cassette recorder.
“Hunnicutt, Sir. Recruit Hunnicutt. You’ve a spy in the Forty-second, Sir, but it’s not that poor Arab kid. It’s me.”
There was a moment of total silence.
“I see,” Falkenberg said, although he did not see at all. “Sit down and tell us about it.”
Recruit Hunnicutt’s account of his involuntary participation in the stoning of that luckless Cousin Jack who had neglected to be circumcised was sparse and graphic. He went into greater detail about the colonel in intelligence who had recruited him and sent him to enlist in the CD forces.
“As I see it, sir, me wife and kids are dead. If you don’t bomb them that bastard butchers them. I ’ad a happy life among the Ayrabs until that fookin’ Mahdi turned ’em all bonkers. They’ve put paid to that so I’ll help you put paid to the lot of them.” Under the strain of the moment Recruit Hunnicutt’s English was rapidly regressing.
Falkenberg and Savage carefully refrained from looking at one another. Calvin struggled to remain impassive. Poor bastard!
“What can you do to help?” Falkenberg finally asked.
“Aweel sorr, there be’s somethin’ about the Mahdi’s plywood-and-pasteboard Saladins ee might not be knowin’.”
“Ah?” Falkenberg waited.
“Midst the lot of fake tanks be’s some real ones.”
Having had previous experience with the reliability of electronic equipment on Haven, due to electro-magnetic interference from Cat’s Eye, Falkenberg and Sergeant Major Calvin ignored Savage’s recorder and began scribbling furiously.
“And then,” Hunnicutt concluded, “There be’s that business of the Brotherhood.”
Jeremy Savage’s ears pricked up as he was reminded of who posted him to the Forty-second and where his true duty lay.
“You know for sure it was the Brotherhood?” Falkenberg asked.
“More fookin’ funny handshakes than a barrel o’ bricklayers,” Hunnicutt reported and it took Savage a moment to catch the reference to freemasonry. “And they’re thick as fleas with them Levants.”
Finally the Cousin Jack was wrung dry. Sergeant Major Calvin accompanied him and Hassan the Assassin who had been cooling his heels all this while in the outer office and explained to their messmates the dire consequences of ever accusing anyone of spying again.
Alone in the office, Falkenberg turned to Savage.
“Major,” he said, “Do you know anything about the Brotherhood?”
And just as abruptly as poor Hunnicutt, Savage realized he faced a watershed in his own life.
He carefully smoothed down the edges of his mustache with fingers.
“Funny you should mention it, sir,” he said, and went on to detail how he had been assigned to the Forty-second specifically to spy on Lermontov’s fair-haired boy.
“I see,” Falkenberg said. And this time he did see.
“It was before I knew you, sir.” Savage said. “Since serving here my values have changed.” He sighed. “I’d been planning to resign anyway.”
“Resign the Brotherhood?”
“The Regiment, sir.”
Falkenberg stared at him for a moment. “Nonsense!” he snapped. “You’ll do no such thing. Do you think it’s easy for me to find officers I can trust?”
“I hadn’t thought of it in quite that light.”
“If you feel strongly enough on the subject, then stay in the Brotherhood and do unto them what they’d do unto me.”
“Yes, sir,” Savage said. “I’ll write up a report of everything I know.”
Finally the last supply dump was in place, its perimeter concertina-wired, and Gurkha guards dug in against anything less than total assault. Twice dumps were attacked but the Forty-second’s airborne assistance was prompt enough in each case to teach would-be raiders that CoDominium supply dumps were too expensive. Each time a raid was discouraged a Gurkha detail would turn the raiders’ camels loose—after attaching transmitters to them.
Being as intelligent as they are ugly, the camels made no effort to find any human camp. Instead, they ventured forth in a frantic search for water. Each time a camel found a hitherto overlooked seep, the Gurkhas attempted to plug it. If it proved impossible to disrupt the flow with a plug of plastique and a short fuse, they shot the camel and left the carcass to rot on site. Finally the raiders gave up. Fewer of the Mahdi’s men appeared with each passing day. Falkenberg decided it was time to move.
Captain Hewlitt, newly promoted from the ranks of the Haven Volunteers, had started life nipping steel, which consists of picking up drill bits discarded by single or double jackers and taking them back to the forge for sharpening and re-hardening. From this apprenticeship he graduated to double-jacking which is two men swinging hammers alternately to drill a dynamite-hole into hard rock. On Earth this technique had been abandoned a century and a half ago in favor of pneumatic hammers but compressors and the fuel to run them were less plentiful on Haven than Cousins Jack.
Like many miners capable of more-than-average output, Isaac Hewlitt had foregone wages in favor of contracting. Then subcontracting. By thirty he captained a crew of forty double-jackers whose loyalty was preserved by the unusual method of giving them a fair share of the profit. When the troubles with Mahdi began and mining came to a stop, Hewlitt’s forty became one of the more reliable units of the Haven militia. With the demise of Captain Yeovil, the last regular commissioned officer, Sergeant Hewlitt had been the only logical candidate in Falkenberg’s eyes to reorganize the decimated and demoralized Haven Volunteers until reinforcement could be brought from Castell City. Hence his instant rise from buck sergeant to captain.
“You’ll hold Eureka,” the colonel told him. “The Forty-second, the Seventy-seventh, and every Gurkha that can be spared from the supply dumps is going with me.”
“After the Mahdi, sir?”
Falkenberg nodded. “Hold the fort.”
“That I shall do, sir.” Captain Hewlitt saluted.
FOURTEEN
THE NEW Mark XL tanks were driven by a fuel-cell engine fired with anything between Stoddard’s solvent and No.3 diesel. In a pinch the tanks would run on alcohols, on ketones, even on a two-stroke gas and oil mixture. Silent, apart from the grip-ding of reduction gears, the engine could spare enough power for air conditioning in all but the most extreme circumstances. Apart from the usual panoply of rocket launchers, it bore twin 7.6mm machine guns, with a single 25mm rapid-fire aimed by the same mechanism. Other armament consisted of a separately aimed 105mm gun. The Mark XL’s relatively light laminated steel-and-Nemourlon armor was coated with explosive cells to repel any armor-piercing round and cause it to explode prematurely. In extremis, the tank could drown itself in fire-retardant foam and still come out fighting.
The Colonel in one of his rare consultations had analyzed the Mahdi’s forces whose main constituent was numbers and will and not armor, and had foregone most of the heavy spent-uranium slug ammo in favor of shrapnel and grape-canister calculated to spread more damage among camel-mounted raiders. In this Falkenberg made a minor miscalculation. The Mahdi’s latest shipment from Levant had brought him a round dozen Saladins, which were carbon copy rip-offs of the Forty-second’s Mark XLs. On receiving Recruit Hunnicutt’s intelligence the colonel revised his plans a second time.
Sirdar Moulay Idris had been at great pains to conceal the existence of that dozen Saladins. Key personnel had been smuggled off-planet for training on Levant and others had made do with plywood mockups constructed via manuals and a pantograph. He was delighted to have any tanks at all, since the equipment captured in the first campaign against the Seventy-seventh had disintegrated with a regularity which made him suspect some sabotage had been built into them. Not that Idris was totally satisfied with Levant workmanship.
The Saladin I looked so much like a Mark XL that the Sirdar had been obliged to paint his tanks an Islamic green lest battle disintegrate into total chaos. What really bothered him though was the quality of the steel laminate in the Saladins’ armor. It was not supposed to be hard. It was supposed to be tough. And the Sirdar knew what Nemourlon looked and felt like. The stuff sandwiched between the Saladin’s too-brittle steel plates was suspiciously similar to fiberglass.
But…one does not look a gift horse in the mouth. At least the Levantine ‘advisers’ were back and were contributing something. The Sirdar sighed. He had inserted his own man into the Haven Militia and that deraciné Cornishman’s reports had been as infrequent as they were inconsistent. Somehow Hunnicutt had made what appeared to be one correct move by getting himself enlisted into Falkenberg’s elite Forty-second, which had to be a step in the right direction. However, what little information he transmitted was usually useless or out-of-date. Maybe it was time to send Ian Hunnicutt one of his wife’s fingers.
Ian’s last message had been terse and to the point: They know about your tanks.
The only surprising thing about that was that Hunnicutt knew about those tanks. The CoDominium forces had a cruiser in orbit; they had spy satellites; and the CD most probably had a few informants inside the Mahdi’s ranks just as the Sirdar did in theirs.
The question was, what did they know about the tanks? That they were inferior? Useless?
Sirdar Idris thought fondly of an ancient European campaign in which a man as erratically fanatical as this Mahdi had drilled an army with plywood and cardboard armor while his factories geared up and turned out the real thing. When Hitler rolled into Poland the defending cavalry had charged with sabers and learned to their despair that the tanks they faced were not cardboard.
He considered. It would only work once. Might not work at all if Falkenberg’s men believed their instruments instead of their eyes. But if he pulled it off right the Militia and maybe those hellacious Gurkhas could be disposed of, leaving him only the Forty-second to deal with. If only he had some air cover…
“Ya Sirdar!” the guard outside his tent called, and an instant later escorted in a ragged and seemingly never-bathed Bedu with a nose by which he could have been hung.
“They come,” the Bedu said.
“Many?”
“More than I have ever seen before.”
From a hyperbolic culture where a dozen became a multitude and a hundred transmuted into millions, this flat statement was doubly alarming.
Within another hour reports of multitudes, throngs, and godzillions came pouring in, leading the Sirdar to conclude that Colonel Falkenberg was finally making his move.
The Sirdar waited with growing impatience while the Mahdi harangued his troops into a holy f
renzy which would dissipate long before the shock of battle since the Sirdar had no intention of being bottled up in this rapidly narrowing valley behind Wadi el Kaid. Finally the Anointed One ran out of steam and the Sirdar got his point moving.
Within two hours they had advanced halfway down the waterless Nahr el-Owwahl toward its confluence with the Isis. The alluvial plain at this point was boundless dikaka and so nearly flat as to offer little cover apart from an occasional wire-weed or knee-high bush. Digging in would be just as hard for the off-worlders as for the Mahdi’s men.
The men squatted motionless in white robes to blend in with the light snow cover. Ahead of them the line of cardboard and plywood tanks lined up. Due to the hardness of the ground they were not dug in either. It was the intention to charge at the first sight of the enemy.
First sight, unfortunately, was of a small drone helicopter that buzzed like an angry bee and skittered about the sky too erratically for ground fire to hit it. And the drone was not worth the expenditure of one of their precious SAMs.
The chopper soared and swooped until its camera had satisfied its curiosity, then swung tightly and headed back toward the Isis, flying at near ground level to slow down irresponsible shooting. As it approached the front line from the rear one of the twelve real tanks scattered among all that cardboard and plywood fakery rotated its turret and began tracking.
In the instant before it happened the Sirdar suddenly knew. Too late, he realized his eagerness to save a SAM was costing him a tank.
It was hard to believe that a tiny drone overloaded with TV pickups and transmitters could also carry enough punch to take out a tank. But the cardboard-camouflaged Saladin did not just catch fire and die. It disappeared in an explosion so violent that a fake tank a hundred meters to the left was flattened and a hundred meters to the right the cardboard and plywood was stripped cleanly from a bona-fide Saladin. From half a klick away the Sirdar’s ears were still ringing.
In the next hour nothing happened. Except in men’s imaginations. Although the Sirdar was a pro and understood psychological warfare as well as any general, he found himself pacing the flinty dikaka under the pavilion of his command post, cursing the dawdling enemy and wanting to get it over with.