by Tom Kratman
Even so, a crowd of weeping women and screaming children, many more than the helicopter should have been carrying, were driven off into the welcoming arms of a reception committee made up of sailors and Imperial Marines. They joined there some thousands of others who had already been lifted from the mainland. A few had been injured, artillery being no respecter of persons or neutrality. These were carried below as they were triaged. Most were expected to live—the others, the expectant ones; expected to die—had been left ashore to die in peace.
The Anshan’s escorts hovered around her and her replenishment ship like guard dogs, the more so with her new cargo.
SSK Meg, one hundred meters below the surface, Bahia de Balboa, Terra Nova
The submarine had moved a bit to keep ahead of the incoming carrier, then slowed to a crawl in order to be sure of approaching the target ships so closely that the carrier would have no chance to make its escape once engaged. It had not broken the surface in any way since Chu had decided his duty lay in attack. Even this far down, the sub’s sonar man could, faintly, make out what he swore were helicopters, many of them, transiting from ship to shore. The crew was tense, without even the privilege of drumming their fingers for relief.
“So the attack is still on, is it,” Chu said softly. “Well, Taurans, your part of it ends in about half an hour. I hope you’ve all had a nice filling lunch.”
Chu couldn’t know, but might have wondered, why the ship had taken from moving in a large box at considerable speed to almost keeping station in a much smaller area at much less speed. Probably the answer he’d have come up with would have been, So we lost ashore, did we? Well, some of you won’t be around to celebrate.
The Meg continued to close.
Northern Slope, Cerro Mina, Balboa Transitway Area, Terra Nova
“C’mon, Segundo a Nadie!” Cruz shouted to his men. “Let’s show the Taurans just what us little brown fuckers can do!”
With the lesson of the fate of the Gorgidas and Amazonas maniples literally before them, Second Tercio attacked with much more care. Its own normally attached artillery battery, 85mm guns, and its own mortars kept Tauran heads down until it had passed the broad avenue with its scores of Amazon and Gorgidas bodies. Machine guns stationed on the friendly side of the street added a steady rattle. Even fired at random, they helped.
Cruz walked forward in the customary position of the cohort sergeant major, behind the mass of the unit. He seemed rather nonchalant as he sauntered confidently across the street and up the slope, stick under one arm except when he used it to point the way to a befuddled trooper. He looked to his right and saw a legionary’s face assume a vicious expression as he stepped over a uniformed woman’s shattered body.
Oh, oh. I don’t like this. A wide-ranging glance told him the rest of the cohort was equally enraged at the slaughter of the women. The men picked up a chant—perhaps from one who had described what happened to the Amazons. They chanted, “Massacre! Massacre!” Up ahead, a rapid fire began to build. The lead elements of the cohort were in contact.
The came an explosion to Cruz’s right front, then another to the left. The tercio’s engineers were blowing lanes in the wire. The volume of fire increased, enough so that Cruz was forced to the ground. He heard a shout; then a dozen more. There was a clash of metal on metal as though a fight with cold steel had broken out, as indeed it had. The firing from Cruz’s immediate front ceased. It was replaced by screams and what Cruz thought might have been pleas for mercy.
Cruz was distracted from the fight ahead by the sound of diesels, hundreds of them, moving along Avenida de la Victoria to his rear. About time, he thought, that First Corps showed up. He couldn’t know, and didn’t much care, that the bulk of the mechanized troops had been mercilessly attacked by the Tauran air forces.
Casualties had been high enough. Time, however, had been the greatest cost. The rumble of diesels and treads continued past, the Corps was on its way to attack the Taurans still fighting at Muddville and Brookings.
Cruz reached the line the Thirty-fifth Commandos had once defended. He didn’t know any of them, of course. On the other hand, he wouldn’t have recognized any even if known, because the leading troops of his battalion had bayoneted them, gutted them, smashed their faces to red pulp. Two or three—it was hard to tell—had no obvious heads attached. Cruz walked on, not shouting encouragement any longer.
He reached an open area and saw a small female Tauran fleeing. A soldier, Cruz thought, though she was actually a Navy clerk attached to TUSF-B. Her helmet was off and blond braids streamed behind her. As she ran the girl kept turning around to see the Balboan who pursued. At length he reached her and, swinging his rifle butt against her head knocked her to the ground. She landed on her back. The butt-stroke had not been hard enough to kill.
The girl was screaming as the bayonet pinned her to the earth. Another Balboan soldier joined the first. He too, stabbed down at the writhing and shrieking girl. Together they shifted their grips on their rifles, picked her up on the ends of their bayonets, lifted her, still crying, screaming, and pleading, tossed her up in the air and caught her again on the points. They tossed her again. On the third toss, the girl made no motion, her formerly frantically waving arms and legs still. The two dropped the corpse and went looking for other Taurans to kill.
Cruz’s eye caught sight of a video camera lying on the ground. He noticed abstractly that the camera said TNN. A face-down body clothed in fatigues lay beside it. A Balboan straddled the body, beating down, again and again, with the butt of his rifle. Two others, also in Tauran battle dress but without insignia, raised their hands in surrender. They were simply shot where they stood. They were shot again where they lay.
All over the top of Cerro Mina, Balboan troops were avenging themselves on the people who had killed “their” women.
Not entirely incongruously, pipers played a stirring tune amidst the massacre. Janier’s old house was soon in flames. Someone—Cruz never knew who—ran to the flagpole and cut the lanyard holding the Tauran flag. It fluttered to the ground.
A petite and very pretty woman, also in fatigues without insignia—but a military contract civilian rather than a reporter—lay on her back and spread her legs before she could be killed by the unusually large legionary sergeant who stood before her. The invitation was plain. The sergeant began to unbuckle his trousers. Cruz shot him because, while massacre was an occasional and unavoidable fact of war, rape was indiscipline. Then, because Centurion School had taught him to expect this sort of thing to happen from time to time, and because he had been trained to ensure that, when it did, there were to be no unfriendly witnesses left alive, Cruz—reluctantly—took aim to shoot the woman. Well…she was in uniform, after all, and had not surrendered to him.
Cruz’s finger began to exert pressure on the trigger. Seeing that he was aiming for her, the petite woman grew wide-eyed and screamed for her life, her hands moving frantically to undo her belt and pull down her fatigue trousers. Cruz’s finger stopped squeezing for a moment, began again and again stopped.
Crap. I can’t just shoot her while she’s looking at me. He walked to where the woman struggled with the confining clothing.
“Keep your clothes on, girl,” he said. “I didn’t shoot that son of a bitch to have you myself.” Cruz reached a hand down for her. “Here, stand up. You’ll be safe now.”
It will be easier for her if it’s a surprise. “Now put your hands up and start walking slowly to the base of the hill,” he commanded.
The woman began to comply. Once she looked back at Cruz, half expecting him to shoot anyway. He gave her a friendly wave. When she was about twenty-five meters away, Cruz raised his F-26 to fire. He had an idea that caused him to lower it.
“Come back here, girl.”
Reluctantly, and very nervously, she did.
“I don’t think there will be many survivors on top of this hill. I also think there’s going to be a court-martial or board of inquiry over this,�
� Cruz announced to her. “At the very least over the swine I had to shoot. What did you see?”
Truthfully, the woman answered that she hadn’t seen much; just some hand-to-hand fighting and the large oaf to whom she had offered herself.
“All right, that may be useful. What’s your name?”
“Lydia. Lydia Frank.”
Cruz looked around him until he spotted a soldier who looked fairly calm. “Corporal Leon! Post!”
A legionary junior noncom ran up and stood at attention in front of Cruz. “Si, Sargento-Major.”
“Take this woman—her name is Miss Frank—down to the tercio POW area. Make sure she sees all the dead Amazonas on the way. Special tag her as a possible witness to what happened up here. If anything happens to her, Corporal Leon, your balls will be my kids’ dog’s breakfast. Do you understand?”
“Si, Sargento-Major!” Leon had no doubts whatsoever that Cruz meant it.
As the woman was led away, she thanked Cruz for the first time for saving her life.
* * *
The officers were all forward. Cruz waited for the slaughter to burn itself out before taking control of currently uncontrollable men. Never give an order you can’t enforce.
Only at the great steel doors that barred the way to the Tunnel did the slaughter atop the hill stop. Except for Cruz’s female POW, none of those caught above ground were taken prisoner. None escaped that hadn’t made their escape long before Second Tercio showed up.
Even as he watched, engineers began affixing four shaped charges to the great steel doors, intending to make holes in them for the gasoline some others were unloading from a light truck sent up from below. They ran det cord from one shaped charge to the next until all were linked.
Another squad was about to take axes to the huge air conditioning unit before their centurion stopped them, shouting, “No, you stupid shits. We want to feed them all the air they can take. Can’t make a fire without oxygen, after all.”
It’s gonna be a hot time in the old town tonight, thought Cruz.
* * *
Private Brickley and Gefreiter Czauderna had taken one look at the building massacre, then ducked into the Tunnel and slammed the doors shut. There was some beating on the door, very faintly heard, for a while, but that had given way to a series of sharper raps which had then given way to silence.
Their commander, Hauptmann David Lang, stood by, wondering, How do I let the Balboans know we’d like to surrender? Do I even have authority to surrender? Do I need any authority? After all, my men really can’t resist anymore.
“Wait here,” he told the two enlisted men. “I’m going to go…”
KaaawhoomFFF!
None of the three really knew what hit them. All that the privates knew was that they felt as if every square inch of their bodies had suddenly and simultaneously been struck by baseball bats. Lang didn’t know that much. He’d had the misfortune of standing precisely were a hot jet from the shaped charge burned through. It burned off his face and eyes at the same time, setting his screams to reverberating down the long, concrete-lined tunnel.
And then they smelled the gasoline. It poured along the down-sloping floors. The privates set off running for below. They didn’t see it when a burning flare was pushed through one of the shaped charge-created holes, soon to be followed by a completely unneeded other.
At that point it became a race between fast flowing, burning gasoline and stunned, staggering, bouncing off the walls while trying to outrace it privates.
The gasoline won the race. It was never really a contest since blast doors farther on had activated automatically once the shaped charges went off.
Herrera International Airport, Ciudad Balboa, Balboa, Terra Nova
The Gallic Para Brigade was no more, barring only prisoners of war and a few die-hards being flushed out like rats. Split from north to south, artillery overrun, under pressure from all sides, the men of the brigade had—mostly on their own—surrendered.
When the men of the Eleventh Tercio retook the airport terminal, they spread the word that all of the cadet defenders appeared to have been killed. It was only the timely intervention of the tercio commander—and his fully sincere threats of summary execution—that kept his soldiers from lining up their hundreds, rather thousands, of prisoners and shooting them.
So reluctantly, the paratroopers were spared. In a short time they had been separated into eight groups. The seven groups of the hale were marched west to temporary captivity. At the Balboan legate’s command, the wounded Taurans—and there were many of these—were treated equally with his own by his scanty medical resources.
Unfortunately, it was at the time when the POWs were at their greatest density, formed in a long, thick and winding column, that a Gallic Air Force relief mission flew overhead.
Unknown Hurricane Fighter-bomber, over Herrera International Airport, Balboa, Terra Nova
The new pilot—a senior lieutenant fresh out of flight school—was frankly terrified. Pulled from his warm bed and warmer Cienfuegan bedmate, filled to the brim with coffee, scarcely briefed on his mission and superficially briefed on the threat, he had been nervous since well before take-off. Even the in-flight refueling he had done over the Shimmering Sea had been sloppy.
Scared or not, the kid intended to go in. His mission commander’s chatter kept him informed as the threat materialized below. Christ! Training was never like this! the kid thought as flak began to blossom around his plane. He forced down bile and pushed his stick slightly forward.
There they were, the bastards. The kid saw a column of soldiers. At least he assumed they were soldiers, though he couldn’t possibly have seen any weapons. He bore in.
Shit! Shit! His warning buzzer had sounded. Some SOB had a radar lock on him. Where are the fuckin’ EW folks when you want them? he asked of no one. He continued on.
“Missiles!” came over his radio. A sixth sense told that one, maybe more, were meant for him. But he was brave. In the last fraction of a second of life remaining to him he made a final minor correction to his aircraft and released his bombs…all of them.
His instructors would have found no fault with his aim.
* * *
The Eleventh Tercio commander promptly threw up when he was driven to the scene. More than two hundred and fifty Tauran POWs, and nearly thirty of his own men, were shredded beyond recognition. They were shredded beyond recognition as human beings let alone as individuals. In a tree hung an impaled corpse. Balboan? Tauran? Who could say? The uniform had been ripped off by the blast along with all four limbs and the head. The remnants were darkened by bruising and smoke.
Still, nearly half of those in the impact area had survived, even though this had been a perfect saturation attack on perfectly exposed troops. But the survivors were in no fit state to help the wounded.
Chapter Fifty-one
But blood for blood without remorse
I’ve taken at Oulart Hollow
And laid my true love’s clay-cold corpse
Where I full soon may follow
As ’round her grave I wander drear
Noon, night and morning early
With breaking heart when e’er I hear
—Robert Dwyer Joyce, “The Wind That Shakes the Barley”
SSK Megalodon, Mar Furioso, Bahia de Balboa, eighty kiloyards north of the Isla Real, Terra Nova
The submarine moved ahead slowly but steadily. Twice in the last half hour the Tauran ship had changed course slightly. Now, again, they were heading back toward the Meg. In ten minutes, ten at the most, she would pass directly overhead.
At his XO’s expectant look, Chu nodded gravely. Maybe, he thought, I should come up to periscope depth but…no, the Earthpigs are possibly aiding the Taurans and who knows how far down into the water they can see?
“The carrier’s a big whore,” said the skipper. “It’s going to take two solid hits to be sure of sinking her. A cynic, or someone used to Volgan quality control, might say three.
The replenishment ship, though, is dead meat with just one. I’ve only got two control units. So…
“Weapons, set up attacks on the carrier and the replenishment ship. Fish One to WCU One for the carrier. Fish Two to WCU Two for the replenishment ship. Set torpedo speed for slow. Passive search mode. Set up Fish Three and Four for high speed and active-passive search. Assign them to the WCUs as soon as the latter are free.”
“Targets for Three and Four, Skipper?” asked the exec.
“I want the follow ons for a quick attack on the carrier,” replied Chu. “Report when ready.”
“Ready one…ready two, Skipper.”
Chu and the XO stepped up behind the weapons console operators, then shared each a sideways glance. The glances as much as said, Oh, my God this shit is real. We’re firing. We’re going to kill people…a lot of people. Oh, shit.
Came the commands, crisp and clear, “Fire One! Fire Two!” Chu watched the weapons operators, each steering his torpedo into the sonar signature of his target. Chu put his hand on the shoulder of the operator on the second console. “Son,” he said, “be ready to set up on the carrier as soon as you have acquisition with your fish.” The operator nodded. “Yessir.”
CIC, Hengshui, Imperial New Middle Kingdom Navy, Bahia de Balboa, Mar Furioso, Terra Nova