by John Ringo
“Well… sir… as part of my, mmm, investment strategy, I have purchased a moving and storage company here.”
Again, McNair went silent, thinking.
“Civilian transportation would do better, Daisy.”
Palacio de las Garzas, Presidential Palace, Panama City, Panama
“I’ve already consulted with your President, Captain… Captains.” Boyd said, from behind Mercedes’ old desk, now much cluttered. “He says he can’t actually remove the SOUTHCOM commander or the ambassador, for domestic political reasons. For the same reason, he can’t make open use of the intel you ‘acquired’ from the Darhel’s AID. He has, however, agreed to withdraw them for consultations and to put hand-picked ‘temporary’ replacements in, with no intention of ever sending the originals back here. SOUTHCOM’s ‘temp’ is already on duty.”
“Do you know who they’ll be?” Goldblum asked.
“Yes,” Boyd answered. “SOUTHCOM’s ‘temp’ is a Marine general named… err… Page. Good man, I’m told.”
“Very good,” Goldblum answered. “I know him. And the ambassador’s temp?”
“Farrand. Former naval officer, I understand, called up for the war but being sent here as an ambassador, not a sailor.”
“That sounds good to me, Mr. Pres… er, Dictator Boyd.”
“Call me Bill,” Boyd insisted. “We don’t want this shit to go to my head.”
“And we don’t want you forgetting for an instant that you are the power in this country,” Suarez corrected from where he stood behind his chief.
“In any case,” Boyd continued, “SOUTHCOM and the ambassador are behind our plans for the coming battle. Would you care to see, Captains? Your ships are going to have a critical part to play.”
“Please?” McNair and Goldblum asked, together.
“Suarez.”
The Magister Equitum led the two Americans over to the same map he had briefed Boyd from. When he had finished, Goldblum whistled.
“You’re both crazy, and so is the new SOUTHCOM if he is buying off on this.”
“What choice do we have?” Suarez asked rhetorically.
“None,” McNair answered. “Not when you look at the issue from the question of logistics and demographics. You’ll need fire support for the mobile infantry battalion and mechanized regiment that are going to cap the bottle along the San Pedro River.”
“Yes,” Boyd agreed, “and there is no way we can get a fire base, not and keep it hidden, where it will do any good on the south end of that cap.” He looked meaningfully at first McNair and then Goldblum.
“Fuck,” Salem’s skipper said.
“Fuck,” McNair agreed, nodding deeply.
“We can do it,” said Goldblum reluctantly. “One of us goes in close and the other stands back and keeps the Posleen off the back of the first one. We’re easily armored enough to resist our own canister.”
“I almost lost my ship in that gulf,” McNair objected, pointing to the Gulf of Montijo.
“Almost,” Boyd echoed. “What can we do to keep you from losing it if you go in there?”
“You mean when I go in.”
“Yes,” Boyd agreed, face absolutely and coldly serious. “When.”
“Another company of Marines, unless some ACS is available. And if you could get some air defense artillery on the west coast of the Peninsula de Azuera, it would help at least on that flank.”
“ACS is not possible,” Suarez insisted. “After consolidation there are only two line companies left of the First of the Five-O-Eighth. And we need those to lead the punch to the Rio San Pedro, help dig in the mech, and then hold the line after it is reached. I can give you a company of Panamanian Cazadores, something like your Rangers, if that will help. Hmmm… how would that help?”
“To repel boarders,” McNair answered simply.
PART IV
Chapter 27
When there’s nowhere we can run to anymore…
— Pat Benatar, “Invincible”
Fort William D. Davis, Panama
Months had passed. Digna had measured the time, for a time, by the passage of flesh from the bones that hung impaled on a stake overlooking the old golf course and the tent city it contained. The birds had stopped coming now, though; there was not a shred of meat left for them on what had once been what some would have called a man. She’d gone back to the calendar.
Digna had few enough men left. Even the boys had been culled by the long, fearful flight over the mountains. She had quite a few women left though, several thousand, and enough men to do some of the more serious heavy lifting.
She had an artillery regiment now, not just a motley collection of lightly armed militia. She also had, and these were new, ninety-six Czech-built versions of the BM-21 multiple rocket launchers to add to the gringo-supplied 105s her women had been given shortly after the trek from Chiriqui. The Czech model had three big advantages. For one thing, they were dirt cheap, even as compared to her old, obsolescent, 85mm guns. At least as important, they each carried an automated extra load for the launch tubes, so that instead of taking ten minutes out from firing to reload it could be done by machine, once anyway, in less than one. Of course, that didn’t help at all after the second volley. But, since the reload mechanism returned to a position both lower and parallel to the ground, instead of high and at an incline like the more usual BM-21, it made it much easier for her women to reload. Despite their lesser upper body strength, with the aid of the reloading mechanism, she was able to get her all-girl crews up to a volley every eight minutes.
Of course, she had driven them like pack mules, abused pack mules at that, to get to that level. She’d driven them until they vomited and fainted. A few she had driven to death. Behind her back they cursed her, even — perhaps especially — those related by blood. She knew they did. She also knew that when they thought of going further than simply damning her to hell, a quick glance at the fleshless corpse on the stake was enough, more than enough, to dissuade them from more.
She was up and about on her own now, bruises long faded away and the little breaks healed. Of course, that was only the physical. Inside she was scarred and she knew it. She might look only eighteen, as long as one kept one’s gaze from her too old and too knowing eyes. Inside though, she was a long, hard century old, that century capped with a beating and multiple — however many, she didn’t know — rapes.
That gave her a cold, hard edge that even her previous experience of battle, childbirth, child death, and the loss of the only man she had ever willingly bedded with had not. She had not yet ordered anyone impaled, or even shot or hanged, for failure to drill until they dropped, but no one doubted that she would at the drop of a hat if she felt the need. And the hat she dropped would likely be her own.
“They would do even better with music,” Digna’s advisor for the BM-21s, Colonel Alexandrov, commented.
Digna, without taking her cold and knowing eyes from the drilling women, asked, “Why do you think so?”
“Human nature,” the Russian answered simply. “Human female nature, especially, Coronel Mirandova. Music makes the work lighter. Music lifts the heart. Music times the motions for smooth flow.”
“I have been partial to American rock since the early 1950s,” Digna admitted. “But I have a hard time seeing it used to time military motions.”
“Almost anything with a beat will do,” Alexandrov responded. “Care to experiment?”
This time Digna did look at the Russian, seeing he had an old style cassette tape held in his fingers. She looked up at the huge but dimly seen speakers mounted to the walls of the post headquarters.
“Sure. Give it a try.”
Santiago, Veraguas, Republic of Panama
The air was full of the plastic and solvent reek of high explosives. It thrummed with the sound of machinery, heavy and light, being used to form defensive weapons some called “illegal.”
Boyd wore a hard hat, civilian white, on his guided tour. The old and
formerly secret landmine plant was back in full operation, he was pleased to see. Not only that, the products they were putting out now were far superior to the crude and primitive things he had once had them assembling here.
He had told the Euros and the International Criminal Court to go straight to hell. Machinery he had purchased from the United States and Italy which, despite having signed the landmine ban, had a lot of the old plastic-forming equipment lying around.
The mines now were better, though: little four-ounce plastic toe-poppers suitable for splitting a Posleen’s leg from claw to spur, Bouncing Betties that would be propelled upwards a meter before detonating to spread a scythe of steel ball bearings over three hundred and sixty degrees, and MONS, very large directional mines built to a Russian design. There was also a model of mine armed or disarmed by radio control; the brainchild of a gringo tracked-vehicle mechanic who had thought long on the problem of how to get across the extensive minefields without leaving passable gaps for the Posleen to get through in the first place. Best of all, the Americans had provided a number — a large number — of their own “Bouncing Barbies,” so called because they would cut one off at the knees. They worked by first bouncing into the air and then creating an infinitely thin “force field” around them. They used a human variant of an Indowy technology, one of the few humans had been able to crack (and that had been by purest mischance). The Barbies would bounce and cut again and again and again until either destroyed or their on-board charges ran out.
Watching a truck being loaded with mines before it was dispatched to reinforce one or another of the strongpoints and defensive lines being constructed, Boyd exclaimed, “Fuck the lawyers!”
“Señor Dictador?” asked the plant manager.
“Fuck ’em all, I say. Fuck all those who think that law they made for us, never what we make for ourselves, is somehow stronger than life.”
“Well… but, of course, señor. Fuck all the lawyers indeed.”
“You know the plan for evacuation?” Boyd queried.
“Yes, we will produce as much as we can using three shifts a day until the aliens begin their next attack. Then we evacuate to the east after burying all the machinery. After we win,” the man sounded more confident than Boyd felt, “we come back and reopen for business.”
“It is critical,” Boyd cautioned, “that the machinery be preserved; we won’t be able to get any more any time soon.”
“I understand that, sir. So do my people.”
“It is also critical that you move out at the first sign of an approaching attack. The roads must be clear for the mechanized divisions to get through the Nata line. If it comes down to it, I need them even more than I need the people who run this plant. If you’re not off the road…”
The manager shivered slightly. “I understand, sir. We will move at the first sign.”
“Very good,” Boyd said, reaching up to squeeze the manager’s shoulder fraternally. “See that you do.”
San Pedro Line, Republic of Panama
Crews of men with shovels supplemented the scarce bulldozers and backhoes excavating the earth and filling the air with its fresh-turned smell as well as with the stink of diesel.
The swarthy, short and stocky Panamanian first sergeant shouted, “Hump it, you scrofulous bastards, hump it!”
Like ants, perhaps even like Posleen, a swarm of Panamanian infantry pulled on ropes dragging a wrecked armored vehicle, a boxy American M-113 in this case, to a position near the forward line. Another group, smaller, pushed the vehicle from the rear.
The purpose of moving the wrecks was disinformation. The Posleen were going to attack and the Panamanians were, by plan, going to run. But not all Posleen were stupid. If the retreat didn’t look enough like a rout, they might grow suspicious. Suspicion, even with a stupid species, might lead to noses being stuck in places they were unwelcome. Hence, the liberal placement of wrecks.
With a final grunt the towing crew strained the burned-out M-113 into a shallowly dug, revetted position. The pusher crew leapt back as the vehicle passed its center of mass, tipped forward and splashed into the mud. The pushers then regrouped and gave the thing a final shove into a realistic position.
Seemingly satisfied, the pusher group then started to walk away, high-fiving hands and slapping backs.
The first sergeant called a halt. Then, with the men standing around in mild confusion, he walked over and inspected the vehicle from all sides, making note of the hole that passed through the right front quarter and out the floor of the hull near the left rear. Hmmmm. Never do. Can’t count on the Posleen not noticing that the berm is unmarked where the missile should have passed through.
Impatiently the first sergeant beckoned over the leader of the pusher group. “Do you see that hole, Sergeant Quijana?” the primero queried, pointing with a short stick.
“Si, Primero.”
“What happens when you line up this entrance hole and the exit hole?” the first asked.
Curiously, the junior sergeant walked over and bent down, trying to line up the two. “Can’t see it, Primero; this dirt’s in the way.”
Suddenly the first sergeant brought his stick down, not lightly, on the head of the stooped-over Quijana, stretching him into the mud.
“You don’t leave until the whole thing looks right,” the first sergeant insisted. “You aren’t finished until this wreck will fool a Posleen into thinking it is fresh.”
The junior sergeant shook his head as if to clear it. For a moment he thought about swinging at the first sergeant as he rose. That notion passed with the remembrance that the first sergeant was the toughest son of a bitch he had ever known and was most unlikely to lose a fight before somebody was dead. And, since the penalty for killing one’s first sergeant was unpleasant indeed…
“I’ll take care of it, Primero. Sorry. Wasn’t thinking.”
The first sergeant leaned over the still shaken junior and said, not unkindly, “Son, you’re not a bad sergeant. But if you want to live long enough to learn to be a good one you’ll also have to learn to look at the details. Now I want you to do two things. The first is to dig out a chunk of the berm and make it look as if a Posleen HVM passed through it before taking out the track. You know what kind of trail they leave?” The junior nodded. “Good. Then I want you to rig the track with a couple of twenty liter cans of mixed gasoline and diesel and some demo, enough to burst the cans and set the fuel alight. Rig it so we can set it off by command or by pulling a cord. It has to look convincing.”
Disco Stelaris, Hotel Marriott Cesar, Panama City, Panama
I’m convinced, thought Connors. This is paradise.
The Stelaris was dark and smoky. Somehow the smoke didn’t bother anyone. Perhaps it was the aroma of…
Women… I’d forgotten how good they smell.
A tall, lithe women, more of a girl really, she was maybe seventeen, writhed on the dance floor in a way that was both tasteful and made a man think…
If only one could hang on. What a helluva ride that would be.
If there was anyplace in Panama City more suited to meeting Panamanian girls of the better class, Connors didn’t know it. The night was still young, though. He sat alone on a wall-mounted bench facing the dance floor, behind a small table. Connors nursed a double scotch over ice while watching slinky girls dance.
Watching the girls is pleasant enough, I suppose, Connors thought. Now if only I could forget…
A sudden flash of light from the lobby leaked in through an open door. Automatically, Connors swiveled his head and eyes toward the light, toward the possible threat.
There was a girl standing there, that much was obvious from the shape, posture and hair. She seemed to be waiting for a moment, perhaps for her eyes to adjust to the dim light of the disco before proceeding. For some reason, despite the well-lit lovelies on the dance floor, Connors kept his eyes on the newcomer. That was why, when she began walking forward, he was the one she made eye contact with.
/> They were the biggest and most perfectly shaped brown eyes Connors had ever seen. His heart skipped a beat. My God, she’s beautiful.
She was, too. Dark blonde hair framed a heart-shaped face with cheekbones just prominent enough, without being too much so. Her lips were full and inviting. Her brown eyes stood out, even in the dim light, against her light skin. For a moment Connors tried to remember the name of the Brazilian Victoria’s Secret model she reminded him of. Never mind. That girl’s eyes are not half so gorgeous as this one’s.
She was standing above him before Connors’ eyes ever left her own. He hadn’t realized how tall she was until she was right next to him.
“May I sit?” she asked, in flawless, only slightly accented English.
“Please, Miss…”
“Marielena,” she answered. “Marielena Rodriguez. Thank you. And you?” she asked, smiling warmly while taking a seat at the table next to Connors.
“Scott Connors,” he answered. “Call me Scott.”
“Pleased to meet you, Scott. How you would say, in Spanish, ‘Mucho gusto.’ ”
“That much Spanish I have, Marielena. Mucho gusto. Which, by the way, pretty much exhausts things.”
It wasn’t much of a joke but the girl laughed lightly anyway. She looked him over more closely. “You are with the grin… American army?”
“Yes,” Connors suppressed a smile at her little almost faux pas. “B Company, First of the Five-O-Eighth.”
She scrunched her eyes, as if trying to remember something. “Ah… that is the… Armored Combat Suit? Is that what you call them? The ACS battalion?”
“Yes, we came back to Panama after all these years.”
“Came back? I remember when that battalion was here. Where have you been?”
“Back to the United States for a while,” Connors answered. “Then off-world, on a planet called Barwhon.”
“You’ve actually been on another planet?” The girl’s eyes grew — though it would have seemed to be impossible — larger and more beautiful still.