The Lotus Eaters cl-3

by Tom Kratman

  Rising to a crouch and aiming over the Phaeton's hood, using it to support his aim, Carrera turned on the other two. These were just now rising from where they'd taken cover at the unexpected shots. Surprised anyone was left from the Phaeton after the RGL had struck it, they fired from the hip. Carrera, conversely, took the time to aim. His metal-shrouded pin sight lined up on the upper torso of one of the gunmen. He stroked the trigger, lightly, and was rewarded by the image of the gunman's chest rippling under the impact. A late round, driven high by muzzle climb, hit the assassin's head, exploding it like an overripe melon.

  Good thing the Pound is low recoil, Carrera thought absently, as his sight traversed to the last remaining assassin. Otherwise, I wouldn't hit shit. Ouch.

  The bullets from the still spraying, and last standing, assassin struck the hood of the Phaeton, as well as the tires. Air rushed even as metal gave way and chips of paint flew.

  Again Carrera's finger stroked the trigger, then twice again in rapid succession. The last assassin fell with satisfying screams of pain.

  Carrera rose to a crouch and duckwalked forward, stopping once to change magazines. He donated another burst each to the two olive skinned gunmen, then turned back to the white one.

  Still looking dazed and confused, the ex-Seal Lion tried to focus his eyes on the uniformed man in front of him.

  "It was just business," Randy Whitley said, in English, as if that explained everything.

  "So is this," Carrera answered, placing the smoking muzzle against Whitley's forehead. He squeezed the trigger again, causing the contract professional's head to disintegrate in a spray of blood and bits of brain and skull.

  The militiaman who had spontaneously fired in Carrera's support ran out with his rifle at port arms. That he looked like a soldier, despite his workingman's clothes, was all that kept Carrera from firing on him as well.

  "Señor, you are bleeding," the militiaman said.

  Carrera ignored that. Pointing to the broken legged gunman laying on the ground, he said, "Guard him, soldier!" Then Carrera ran to the driver's side of the Phaeton to see to Mitchell and his guards. It was not pretty. Flames licked around the guards' bodies, as hair and uniform material added their stench to the smell of cooking pork.

  Carrera's heart sank as his bile rose. "Oh, hell. Ah, shit, Mitch! What am I going to tell your wife and kids?" Carrera looked only once to be sure. Mitchell was dead, the back of his head missing where a bullet had forced his brain out of it. He put a hand on Mitchell's blood stained shirt and began quietly to cry, even as he pulled his friend's corpse away from the fire. The people who had begun to gather now that the shooting was over looked wonderingly at the soldier who stood leaning against the car, head hung in sorrow.

  He stood that way, weeping, for only a few minutes before hurt changed to a cold, inhuman fury. Carrera turned around and walked to the broken legged gunman. By the sub-machine gun lying several meters away, Carrera knew that the militiaman had searched and disarmed the gunman. He told the militiaman "Get me an iron bar or a big stick."

  "Si, Señor, I have a crowbar in my house."

  "Perfect."

  When the militiaman returned with the crowbar, Carrera turned over his Pound SMG, took the crowbar and slapped his left palm several times. He ignored the pain emanating from his injured shoulder. Some pains can overwhelm others. He said to the gunman, "You killed my friend."

  Two swings and the Santandern's knees shattered. Carrera then bent down and, putting the crowbar on the ground, grabbed each leg in turn and twisted it. The gunman arched his back and shrieked. When he tried to bend over to reach his crushed knees, Carrera let him. Then he picked up the crowbar and broke each forearm. Several distinct blows so destroyed the Santandern's arms that his hands flopped uselessly in the breeze. The Santandern fainted. Carrera sent the militiaman for smelling salts.

  While he waited, Carrera lit a cigarette. Two police in a squad car arrived on the scene, followed by an ambulance. The policemen took a fire extinguisher to smother the flames, while one of them hauled out the bodies of the two guards in the back seat. When the ambulance crew went for the Santandern lying motionless on the road, Carrera waived them away. "See what you can do for my men," he said, even though he knew there was nothing that could be done.

  The stretcher bearers looked at Carrera's uniform and insignia of rank. They left the Santandern where he lay.

  The smelling salts not arriving quickly, Carrera borrowed two ampoules from the ambulance. These he crushed and held under the Santandern's nose. The gunman choked and sputtered, then began to moan. The militiaman returned without the salts.

  With a kindly voice, Carrera told the militiaman, "Thank you. It's all right. I don't need them anymore. And thank you, too, for saving my life. That was quick thinking, Private . . . ?"

  "Pitti, Señor. Private Hector. 6th Mechanized Infantry Tercio."

  "Again, thank you, Corporal Pitti," Carrera said. Pitti's eyes widened.

  Once the Santandern was again wide awake and shrieking, Carrera placed himself on the man's left side and methodically broke all of right side ribs, moving each blow up a bit higher than the one before. Some took more than one blow before he felt the rib give way. Then Carrera walked around to the gunman's right side. The militiaman and the police winced with each blow, but could not leave until dismissed. As a practical matter, given who and what Carrera was in Balboa, they couldn't object either. Most of the eyewitnesses left when the first of the gunman's bones was driven through his skin, blood spurting across the asphalt, and he began to scream like a young girl. Once, when the Santandern almost stopped reacting to the pain, Carrera took the crowbar by the hooked end, jammed the other end into the assassin's abdomen, dug around, twisted twice, and pulled. At the sight of the greasy-looking, bluish intestine, the older of the two policemen promptly threw up next to the yellow painted squad car. The Santandern screamed anew, then turned his head to one side and vomited as well. Flies began to settle on the loop of intestine almost as soon as it appeared.

  It took the Santandern almost thirty agonized minutes to die. When Carrera finally grew tired, and became aware once more of the pain in his shoulder, he stood over the Santandern, took a last look as Mitchell, still laying beside the smoldering Phaeton, and brought his crowbar down, again and again, until the man's head was a shapeless lump, brains leaking out onto the roadway for the ants.

  When the beating was done, Carrera walked over to Whitley's body and pulled out his own penis to urinate on the corpse.

  That done, he reclothed himself and turned to the policemen. "See if there's any ID on the Gringo-looking one. Photograph his corpse and print him. Get a blood sample. Then feed them all to the dogs!" he ordered, in a voice that permitted no questioning. Turning, he asked of the ambulance crew, "Could you do something about my shoulder? I think it's broken."

  * * *

  Crouching under a table at a small roadside café about a hundred and fifty meters down the road, Endara witnessed the entire incident, including the beating. He left the scene before he could be questioned by the police. Thereafter, telling his uncle, the rump president, that he was seriously underestimating the nature of the opposition, Endara began to make arrangements to leave Balboa for healthier climes. When he arrived in Santa Josefina, a week later, he claimed to be a political refugee.

  Raul Parilla never found out why his receptionist left for parts unknown following the attempt on Carrera's life. However, she and Endara were often seen together in the nightclubs and restaurants of the capital of Santa Josefina.

  Mitchell was buried with honors in a small part of the Casa Linda grounds Carrera set aside as a cemetery. His wife, Chica, great with child, and Lourdes held each other and wept while the priest went through the ceremony. Carrera just stood with one of his hands clenched behind his back in pain and fury. The other arm was immobilized by the cast that held the shoulder. The Sergeant Major and the rest of Carrera's personal staff made up the pallbearer detail
and firing squad.

  Within three days of Mitchell's murder a diplomatic pouch containing weapons and munitions, along with some fifteen new Embassy personnel, arrived in the Balboan Embassy in Santander. Within a few days of that, three Balboans of the 14th Tercio (Operaciones Especiales) were dead, as were eleven bodyguards of various Cartel members in Belalcázar.

  No drug lords were killed, unfortunately. However, all took to their most suburban palaces for protection. The remaining nine unwounded 14th Tercio men began gathering intelligence on those same palaces. They also, with the replacements for the wounded and dead, undertook some more sanguine operations.

  As the drug war spread to Santander, it waned somewhat in Balboa. Although Carrera's marksmanship and rage had made certain that no useful intelligence would be forthcoming from those who had tried to kill him, there were still the two bombers captured by Alvarez.

  Cut off from support by Endara's desertion, the remaining six Santanderns hid out in a pensión in Balboa City. There they might have remained in safety had not one of them used the word chumbo to indicate his male appendage to a visiting whore, along with instructions as to what he wanted her to do with it. In Balboan slang chumbo meant a black man. In Santander it meant penis.

  Looking for the substantial reward offered for information leading to the capture of the bombers and assassins, the de la Plata-born hooker had recognized the word as one used by the more numerous Santandern hookers in Balboa. She had gone straight to the police after collecting her earnings. In the ensuing firefight, four policemen were hit, three mortally, and all but one of the Santanderns shot to death. That one, after being delivered to Fernandez, had cause to regret not being killed.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Political revolutions fail. It is in their nature. That is to say, a revolution, any revolution, will tend to fail unless it isn't really a revolution at all, but a recognition of a pre-existing fact. To actually change anything profoundly, quickly, and lastingly is simply too hard.

  This does not mean, of course, that the revolutionaries will fail. They may, indeed, take power. They very often manage to do quite well for themselves. Very often, indeed, they manage to do pretty well by their great-great-grandchildren. And yet still the revolution itself will have failed.

  Between Old Earth and New, we have seen dozens of failed revolutions: France, 1789 AD, got rid of its king and nobility well enough . . . and had an emperor and a new nobility within fifteen years. No Marxist revolution, whether Leninist or Tsarist, has managed to last more than about seventy-five Old Earth years. How many peoples of once-colonized states have awakened a few years after their revolutions wishing the colonialists were back? Even here in Balboa, Belisario Carrera's revolution, in the early days, got rid of the Old Earthers, but morphed into a corrupt oligarchy of our own within a couple of generations.

  And the successes? One can count them on the fingers of one hand. And in each case, be it the plebes seceding from the patricians in ancient Rome, the Athenian demes demanding power in return for their service in the fleet, or the American colonists, two factors stand clear: Those revolutions were limited in what they sought to achieve, and they recognized an already established state of facts. Thus, even these examples beg the question of whether they were revolutions at all in anything but name.

  —Jorge y Marqueli Mendoza,

  Historia y Filosofia Moral,

  Legionary Press, Balboa,

  Terra Nova, Copyright AC 468

  Anno Condita 471 Punta de Coco Airfield, Isla Real, Balboa, Terra Nova

  Two Nabakov-21 jet transports awaited the party on the airfield, their engines turning the air over the concrete of the strip into a couple of blotches of wavering haze. Within the haze, surrounded by it, two double lines of sweating Pashtun, along with a dozen Balboan tutors, boarded, along with their families. The Pashtun wore the pixilated desert battledress of the Legion but with turbans atop their heads. The tack for the horses they would pick up in Pashtia. The impedimenta—personal baggage, tentage and supplies—was already aboard and strapped down under netting.

  "Now listen to me carefully," said Carrera to Tribune Cano, wagging a finger a few inches in front of the latter's nose, "I don't care if these people think Hamilcar is Jesus Christ, himself, let alone a reincarnation of Alexander. There will be no bowing and scraping. None."

  Carrera had to use his left index finger; his right arm was still immobilized.

  "Easier to order than to enforce, Duque," said Alena, Cano's Pashtun wife, standing at her husband's side. "He is Iskandr, the avatar of God."

  Carrera smiled then, thinking, Never underestimate the benefits of a classical education.

  "Indeed," he said. "Let us suppose for the moment that that is so. Was Iskandr, the boy, told that he was a god? Did his people do proskynesis? Was he spoiled?"

  Alena's smooth brow wrinkled. "Well . . . no, not so far as we know, anyway. His godhood wasn't made manifest until God himself spoke to him at the place called Siwah."

  "Right. Has this happened, to the best of your knowledge, with Hamilcar, my dear?"

  Wrinkled brow was joined by pursed lips. "Ummm . . . no," she forced out.

  "Does it not then occur to you that that is the way it must happen, that the boy not be treated as a god until God himself decrees it?"

  Brow and lips were then joined by narrowing eyes. "Perhaps."

  Carrera looked from Alena to Cano and back again, while saying, "No perhaps about it. You will not ruin my boy. Though there is something . . . if I could speak with your wife privately, Tribune . . ."

  * * *

  I will not weep, Lourdes ordered herself. I will not; I will not; I will not! I will . . .

  "Mom, stop crying," Hamilcar said. "You're embarrassing me."

  "You don't understand," she sniffed. "You are my son. You are my life. Seeing you go is like having a piece of me cut away." The mother dropped to her knees on the scorching concrete and wrapped her arms around the boy.

  "No, I understand," he whispered. "But you bore all of me in a small part of you. You, on the other hand, from beginning to now, are the only home I've ever known. I am sooo going to miss you, mother."

  "But if you cry anymore you're going to make me cry too . . . and the guards will be upset if I do that."

  * * *

  Hamilcar, seated between Cano and Alena, crawled over Alena's lap to put his face to the window. He wanted one last glimpse of his mother. Yes, Alena was almost a mother to him and had been since they'd first met. Yet a boy could only have one real mother.

  "Iskandr," Alena said, close to the boy's ear (for whatever name his worldly parents had given him, to her he was and only could be Iskandr), "Iskandr, it will be all right. You will like my people . . . your people, as you will like your new home."

  "I know," he answered. "I already do. I always have. It still hurts."

  "I know, my Iskandr," Alena said, reaching up to stroke the boy's hair. "But you will get over it. Your destiny demands it."

  * * *

  As the plane carrying Hamilcar gunned engines and began to taxi down the runway, Lourdes wailed aloud into Carrera's shoulder, "My baby, my baby!"

  He held her tight with one arm, stroking her hair gently with the hand of the other. Weep, Lourdes, weep. I would join you if I could. I can't and so you must cry for the both of us.

  Headquarters, 7th Legion, Gutierrez Caserne, Ciudad Cervantes, Balboa, Terra Nova

  Pigna replaced the telephone back onto the receiver atop his desk. The receiver sat next to a large scale map of Balboa City. On the other side of it was a small portable computer, one of two computers on the desk.

  Being the commander of a reserve unit, Pigna mused, may not be an all day job, but it is an every day job. Worse, it seems like the decisions I get asked for are the most trivial imaginable. I'd rather be commander of a regular tercio than of a legion of reservists.

  On the plus side, though, it leaves me with a lot of free time. And since I have
to do all the detailed planning for this myself . . .

  Pigna returned to the spreadsheet displayed on his computer screen. Using the control device two worlds had called "mouse" he selected a unit from one column, cut it from there, and pasted it beside another column. Thus was Second Cohort, Forty-Seventh Artillery Tercio tasked with securing the Bridge of the Colombias over the Transitway. Beside that entry, Pigna typed, "Self mobile by prime movers and auxiliary engines on the guns from Fort Cameron to the Bridge."

  Pigna turned his attention back to the map. Again, he selected a unit . . .

  Fort Cameron, Balboa, Terra Nova

  They used Samsonov's regiment's conference room. Maps were tacked to walls and spread across the large central table. The chairs were stacked against one wall. Outside, guards were posted just out of earshot. The place had been swept and then swept again for listening devices.

  In theory they were assembled to discuss expansion plans for the Centro de Entrenamiento Nacional. In fact, Carrera's staff and key commanders were there to work out the details for a major hit.

  Carrera was of an age now when healing was slow, hard, and imperfect. His shoulder ached and probably would, at least when the weather changed, for life. This was the opinion of his doctor, at least.

  "The problem, gentlemen," Carrera said, ignoring the pain, "is that I want to hit the bastards hard, but I don't want to alienate Santander when we do. In fact, I really want to pin the whole thing on the Federated States."

  "Neat trick, if you can pull it off," said Dan Kuralski, dubiously. He removed his broad-brimmed hat to scratch as his bald pate. "Frankly, I doubt we can."

  "We can," Carrera insisted. "I've made arrangements for us to host two of the Federates States Army's three Ranger battalions at the right time, along with a small group of aircraft. That's unusual enough to divert eyes to them. Moreover, we'll be keeping them more or less out of the way, and our aircraft, especially helicopters, will make a larger than usual number of sorties in support. Arguably, it will all look like troop movements."