First Citizen

by Thomas T. Thomas

  We flew back to Progreso, set down near the fuel bladders—which by Gran’s orders had been unloaded first—ran another 700 gallons of JP-5 into my ship and rearmed her. Then we took off to give some more grief to that concentration at Dzibil-whatever. I gathered the other four gunships and a dozen skins that were just coming in from the cutters at sea.

  “Column headed this way,” I told them over the radio. “Near Zibblechaltun on your maps.”

  “That’s an historic ruin, Colonel,” one of the pilots protested. “It’s preclassical Mayan architecture.”

  “Right! Also, a bunch of stones with guys behind them trying to kill us. Now, fly!”

  We engaged that column of trucks north of the ruins and moving toward Progreso. About fifty in all this time. If you figured twenty men to a truck, plus heavier armaments than we could airlift, then they had our first wave outnumbered with a force of a thousand, or by about three to one.

  As gunship leader, we burned the first two trucks in one pass. The rest of them circled and scattered in among the trees and stone temples.

  “Skin leader, take them down.” I was committing a large fraction of our available forces to a pitched ground battle against terrible odds. Well, the alternative was to let the Comunistas dig in and bottle us up in Progreso. We would have to stay in those mangrove swamps for ten years.

  The Stompers dropped straight down and unloaded battle-ready troops right into the enemy’s cluster points, while the other gunships zipped around and blew up anything that was not occupied with our boys and girls. Meantime, I got high and diverted every Stomper we had coming in from the cutters. I wanted to put the best part of 1,500 men into Zibble-gesundheit as fast as possible. The war was going to end right there, as far as I was concerned.

  The first of the reinforcements were coming south, high over the trees, like a flotilla of Canada geese, when I got a radio call from Gran in Progreso.

  “Colonel, proceed with a raiding force southwest toward Celestun. Intercept a force en route for one of the oil derricks, Zanja del Norte No. 32 at map coordinates YJ-0016/ZJ-0028. Intercept and interdict. Over.”

  What was this shit about an oil derrick? “But, Gran!” I turned a fast circle in the sky over the ground battle while trying to figure out my response. I had my adrenaline up, telling me to fight, fly, fuck, or die, and Granny wanted me to go off chasing rabbits somewhere to the west. “We are right in the middle of clearing the road—” I started to say.

  “I don’t care how important you think your action is, Billy,” Corbin cut across me. “Those rigs are three-quarters of the reason we’re down here. Now crack on the power and check it out. … Clear.”

  “Yes sir.” I said into a frequency that had already gone dead.

  Not a lot of choice about what happened next. I handed control of the battle over to the number two gunship and tipped our Stomper to the southwest. I took one other guns along as escort.

  The eastern end of the Bay of Campeche, the body of water between the Yucatan Peninsula and the Mexican mainland, was a new oil field. It was richer even than the western end, around Tampico. Some of the rigs were too new to be on my maps. But I found Zanja 32 all right. Three hundred miles offshore, or about ninety minutes by air. It was going to be close on fuel. I hoped they had a stock of JP-5, or even -4 for their service choppers. In a pinch I could burn kerosene, but that was about the limit of my fuel specs.

  We flew northwest to cut across the direct sea line from Progreso, then swung southwest and followed the route of this supposed insurgent force all the way to the map coordinates Gran had given. We found the rig but no boats on the way, not even fishing boats.

  Zanja 32 was a big one, with dual chopper pads and three drill towers. It was no shallow-water walking rig but a permanent tip-and-flood installation. In a hundred years, it would be the center of a coral-reef cayo.

  “Rig Zanja three-two,” I radioed. “California six-four bravo-hotel. Request permission to land.”

  “Si,” came a quiet Spanish voice on that frequency. “Con permiso.” Which should have been my first tip-off. The language of air traffic is always English, even on a Mexican rig in Mexican waters. But I was too worried about fuel, cross winds, and the size of the landing pad to link up little facts like that with the overall situation.

  I had the wheels down and was feeling for the center of the pad when it blew. A wall of lacy orange flame, roiled with black smoke, rose up around the cockpit bubble. The ship jarred and sagged badly to port as one of my engines took in a piece of shrapnel and exploded in a shower of fan blades. Pete and Johnny worked quickly to shut down systems, while I fought to keep the ship upright and disarm the rockets at the same time. For a few seconds the external air filters fought against the heat and smoke, but soon a gray, sour version of the hot death outside seeped into the cabin. Then the bubble itself was melting in dime-sized holes, letting in gouts of flame. Our fingers were still punching off systems when the smoke knocked us out.

  Chapter 13

  Granville James Corbin: A Clean, Well-Lighted War

  The momentum of that first attack took us as far as Merida, the provincial capital, which was our primary objective. Colonel Birdsong was wise to force the enemy’s stand at Dzibilchaltun; we were able to roll them right back to the city so fast they had no time to prepare its defenses. That was vital, because we didn’t have an armored column and a single artillery battery inside the city could have stopped us cold. The extent of my generalship in taking the city was to lay out a simple encircling movement, bringing our ground troops in from the east and west simultaneously in trucks.

  As it was, we had to subdue Merida on a house-to-house basis, clearing and securing each district. Our singular advantage against the enemy was more modern weapons with a higher firing rate than the Communists, with their Soviet-era castoffs, could achieve. In two days of hard fighting, we cleaned them out and drove them south into the bush. The first part of our war was over in 72 hours. It was almost too easy.

  I only regret that the fine ruins of Dzibilchaltun had to suffer. They are—or were—an excellent example of early Mayan architecture and culture. I was deeply disappointed that the enemy forced us to destroy part of the people’s heritage in our advance.

  As we brought the trucks and headquarters vans through this area, I asked the video crews to stop shooting. Because they had been rolling continuously since we had docked at Progreso, this request raised some comment.

  “It would be much better,” I told them, “if we show some of our men at work putting the stones back and washing down the burn marks. We are going to be builders in this land, not destroyers.”

  “Good line, Gran. We’ll use it in the biography. But while we’re here, how about just one clip of you examining the damage and, maybe, shaking your head sadly.”

  “Later, boys. We have work to do.”

  I did let them shoot as we formally entered the city, after its submission. It would have been more dramatic if I had been standing in a tank’s open hatchway. Again, if we’d brought any tanks. Instead, I made my driver slow the jeep down while I stood on the front seat, holding onto the windshield with one hand and waving with the other. We located some sympathetic residents to pose by the roadside, smiling and waving back at me.

  Once we were based in Merida, I found time to make inquiries about Birdsong. The crew of the second ship that had flown out with him to Rig 32 was fully debriefed on what they’d seen.

  “Some sort of boobytrap, sir,” the pilot affirmed. “The colonel touched down on the landing pad and it went up right away.”

  “What do you mean, ‘went up’?”

  “It looked like a carpet of shaped charges. Or maybe a dozen or twenty grenades wired up under the decking. We saw a ball of fire rise around the plane.”

  “And he couldn’t have flown off?” I pressed. “Maybe on the other side, where you wouldn’t have—”

  “No sir,” the pilot and copilot said at once.

  �
��We stayed until the fire burned out,” the pilot, a major named LaCroix, continued. “Took only about twenty seconds, sir. So I don’t think his tanks ruptured. When it cleared, I could see the outline of the Colonel’s ship sunk in among the tangle of support struts, on the derrick’s main deck.”

  “Any signs of movement? Could they be …?”

  “We really couldn’t see, General,” the copilot put in.

  “Excuse me, sir,” LaCroix said, hesitating. “But what is this all about? I mean, why were we diverted to that drilling rig? What did you think we could accomplish?”

  In any regular army, those questions would have been a breach of discipline, and LaCroix knew it. Volunteer units, however, have different standards. Because my soldiers were half-mercenary, I had to lead them with a combination of trust and discipline. If I were to give orders they didn’t understand or agree with, on the strength of my authority as their general and my experience as a soldier—and that last was admittedly pretty slender—then they might respond with either massive desertions or a mutiny. And in neither case would that congressional resolution with my name on it mean damn all. LaCroix deserved an answer.

  “We had prisoners, taken in Progreso,” I said, “who indicated that an expedition had sailed a few hours earlier to capture the oil fields. I wanted Colonel Birdsong to check it out so that we could prepare a plan to stop them.”

  “You’ll pardon me, sir,” LaCroix said after absorbing this, “but it looks as if you fell for a trap. Those prisoners must have been lying. The people on that rig were definitely settled in and they were a lot farther from Progreso, by sea, than a few hours.”

  “You may be right. We’re lucky I didn’t split the force further. As it is, we’ve lost both the oil fields and my second in command.” LaCroix only nodded. I dismissed them both.

  I was set up in the former alcalde’s office. He had a corner suite in the admin buildings that overlooked the main plaza and was air conditioned like a meat locker. The windows were sealed shut with neoprene strips and actually sweated on the outside.

  The square below me was quiet. Two of our three-ton trucks were parked along the south side. We had set up a sandbagged nest for two machine guns on the northeast corner, with a field of fire that covered four of the five streets entering the area. An ancient Mercedes 190D, painted a depressing aqua color, paraded up and down as Merida’s only taxi. It was missing its back window.

  The Communists would certainly try to come back from the bush. In an hour … a day … a week. We could only dig in so far and then we had to be ready to fight for the capital all over again, from the inside.

  How much the local people—the European-descended growers, their modern Mayan and Olmec peons, the Chinese traders, the state oil men—how much these various groups had supported the new Communist regime, or merely tolerated it, I did not know. How tightly organized it was, what kind of party discipline it maintained, I did not know. What kind of cracks might exist among its various bureaus and cadres, and between it and the tribal chiefs and village elders in the area—cracks into which I could insert my weedy toes and begin prying the whole fabric apart. … Again I did not know.

  The California 64th was a fighting unit. In the local people’s lives, we were still the gringo from the north, the “them.” We had only limited liaison with the village structure, just a few ears out along the main roads.

  I called in my intelligence officer, Major Michael Alcott. He claimed to be a great-nephew at several removes from the American author Louisa May Alcott, and I had no reason to doubt it. He was a cheerful young man, with a plumpness that two months at Poway had not melted but only hardened.

  “Yes, sir?” Alcott raised an eyebrow at me, which pulled the whole side of his face up in a smile. I wondered if he practiced that in front of a mirror.

  “We need an approximation of the local situation. Not only where the insurgents are, but when they’ll move, who their friends are, what their resources are.”

  “Already working on that now, General. They burned all their paper files and did a bulk erase on everything in their stationary cybers. Not unexpected. But what they forgot was, the BLX switches in the phone system keep internal billing records. We’ve got every call they made, who to and how long, for the past two months. We’re dumping it all through a pattern-sampler program now. By this evening, we should know who the friends are. That will begin to give you an idea of where the enemy has gone and what they have to work with.”

  “Excellent, Major. What have you got in the field?”

  “I’ve sent our best Spanish speakers out with good-will baskets. Hand tools, mostly, a few biolumes, how-to books, some familiar foods, and a few pickled delicacies for the village elders. Peace Corps stuff that’s all appropriate to a rural setting with rudimentary power and data resources. Nothing political or cross cultural.”

  “What’s their mission? Diplomatic?”

  “Mostly. Show the local authority structure that we’ll support them. That they can work with us. It’s the standard beads-and-blanket number Columbus used.”

  “But no fast results.”

  “Afraid not, sir. If you want a semi-permanent base here, the relationships will take time. Villagers’ time. It would be different if we were just passing through.”

  “Of course.” I kept him standing for a minute more. And after a pause: “Tell me, Major. What are your contacts like in the southwest, down near Campeche?”

  Alcott’s brows came together. “There’s no G.V. unit assigned down there yet. Not that we’ve heard. Technically, you have a temporary charter that carries all the way to the Rio Candelaria.”

  “I know that. But what about an American Express office or a bank branch? And is anybody, um, ‘passing through’?”

  “I’ll get you a name, sir. But it might help if I knew why.”

  “Somebody’s pulling some cute tricks with the eastern oil fields—”

  “I heard about Colonel Birdsong, sir. Very sad.”

  “Yes, well, I want confirmation. This end was clearly a setup, some kind of false trail. My guess is that anyone who knows anything hard is going to be in the south.”

  “Excuse me, sir, but what does ‘confirmation’ mean? Do you want the bodies back?”

  “I want to know what happened, why, and who did it. You get me those answers and we’ll know more about what kind of war we’re fighting. And yes, I want the bodies back.”

  “I’ll get right on it, sir.”

  Alcott left and, within three hours, had a contact name and probable location: Tom Pollock, a major, heading up an intelligence battalion that had splintered off the 29th New York Volunteers, the Irish Rogues, working out of the State of Tabasco. Pollock was now based somewhere along the coast between Champoton and Campeche.

  Pollock? Well, well … Probably just coincidence.

  In a few days, when the situation seemed to be running itself, I mounted a small expedition to go find this Mr. Pollock. We had two Stompers loaded with assault troops as an escort, while Alcott and I rode in a command gunship. We flew south from Campeche, moving in interlocking squares that quartered the forest, searching for some kind of settlement or camp. It took us two days to cover the thirty miles between the two cities this way. At the end of that time, far in the south, we caught a flash of light, a reflection off metal, deep among the trees. There was barely room to set the planes down.

  “Guns ready but safeties on,” I gave the order. “These are friends.”

  We walked forward through the undergrowth, coming to a circle of barracks tents. A circle, not a double line or square, which was the military way we’d learned to pitch tents. It looked more like a native camp than a soldier’s bivouac. No one in sight. No guards. No cooks or orderlies. I was about to suggest we’d found an abandoned site, except Alcott was on one knee by a trash heap. He had his nose into a green-foil ration pack.

  “Hard to say, with the preservatives,” he said, “but I’d guess this was just ope
ned. An hour—maybe two—old. They were still here this morning.”

  “Any idea who ‘they’ are?” I asked. “Is all this stuff American? Or do we see any—”

  “Nothing Russian.” Alcott’s eyes were moving, always moving. “No baskets or blankets that look like the locals … Hello? What’s this?”

  He stood up and went to the corner ribbing on one of the tents. Tied there was something furry and black like a big, short caterpillar or some kind of uncamouflaged jungle animal. A panther’s black fur? He touched it, smoothed it, blew on the hair to test its depth and texture.

  “It’s a scalp.”

  Alcott was fascinated: He did not draw back his hand. One of the men turned away, making gurgling sounds. I could feel my jaw tighten of its own accord.

  “General?” It was the trooper who had been sick. We turned and found two dozen men standing beyond him, in the gap between two of the tents. They wore green fatigues, jungle boots, belts with pouches and knives. They looked like American soldiers, except for a week’s beard growth. And there was something else, in the look of their eyes. A look that mixed deep fear and—and sexual excitement.

  “Who are you?” That came from one slightly apart, a pace in front of the others. Their leader. His blouse had no insignia. He was tall, with curly brown hair and gleaming hazel eyes, but they had the same hooded look as his men’s. That broad forehead, wide mouth—the family resemblance was ringing alarm bells inside my head. This could only be a brother of Gordon Pollock.

  “We are the California Sixty-fourth Air Cavalry,” I answered. “I’m Corbin, commanding.” That seemed to relax them—by about two percent.

  “The Irish Rogues, New York. Major Pollock of the intelligence unit,” the leader said. “What can we do for you boys?” He tried to make it sound both hearty and casual, but his mouth worked as if he was gagging on a fine hair.