by Tom Kratman
Overhead and at a distance, the gunnery officer of the one supporting Nabakovs modified to the gunship role scanned the ground through his thermal cameras. The gunner's face was lit green by the glow of his screen. To Chapayev, through an interpreter, he reported, "No armed men outside the villa walls. There are three laying down on the strip—"
"Those are dead," Chapayev interrupted.
"I figured that, Tribune. I see your men forming perimeter around the strip—"
"Forget the strip. We control that."
"Fair enough," the gunner agreed. "Besides, those infrared chemical lights your men are placing are making the thing a little confusing.
"The villa's got a dozen men I can see manning the walls. The whole thing's surrounded by bunkers I can't see into, though I can tell you that at least some of them—mostly the corner ones—are manned."
"Give me the numbers of the ones you're sure are manned," Chapayev said. The gunner began calling them off while the Volgan made notes on his sketch of the place. By the time the gunner had finished his report, the first of the main body of troop carrying Nabakovs was reversing thrust on the airstrip, raising a cloud of dirt large and thick enough to blot out the hurtling moons overhead.
* * *
Carrera was in the first main body Nabakov to land. Before beginning his descent, the pilot had peremptorily ordered him back to his seat and to buckle in.
"This is going to suck like you wouldn't believe, Duque," the pilot had shouted back, as Carrera buckled himself in, in the forward-most, starboard-side, seat next to Menshikov. "Would be hard to control it with your body plastered across the windscreen."
Carrera felt a sudden drop as the pilot reduced power to the propellers. Next came a lurching bounce as the first wheel touched down, followed by another. Carrera was forced to his right, and Menshikov against him, as the pilot reversed thrust on the propellers to slow the plane. Whether the pilot screwed up the timing, or a landing wheel had found a soft spot, or the great god, Murphy, had touched the plane with his evil finger, the thing began slewing its tail to the right. That was bad enough, but when Carrera twisted his head to look out the small porthole window he saw through a great cloud of dust that the right side wing seemed to be trying to dig itself into the dirt of the airstrip.
We're going to die, Carrera thought. The wing will dig in; the plane will flip; we'll flip and then slide upside down until we crash into the first one. Then it's fire and death.
Well, with luck we won't survive until the fire.
Goodbye, Lourdes. I'm going to miss you.
* * *
Up in the cockpit the pilot fought frantically with his controls. He managed to get the plane pointed in the right direction, only to discover that he'd overcompensated as the tail began to swing to the left.
Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! We're gonna die. And I can't see shit!
* * *
The moons' light glowed off of the cloud of dust, provided just enough illumination for Chapayev to see the front of the incoming plane, wreathed in dust and twisting left and right as the pilot fought for control.
That's the duque's plane. Samsonov will kill me if it crashes.
* * *
It could have gone either way. As it went, the left side landing wheel hit another soft spot. This was just enough to nudge the plane to an inclination the pilot could deal with. Slightly. Sort of. In the few seconds of proper orientation the plane slowed a little. This gave the pilot a little more control over the wild swinging of the fuselage. A little more control helped him slow the plane a bit more and reduce the oscillation. That gave him . . .
* * *
"I think I shit myself," the pilot said to his copilot.
"No 'think' about it," the copilot answered. "I did shit myself."
Both men, trembling like leaves in a strong wind, peered through the windscreen and the thinning cloud of dust at the first plane to have landed, sitting no more than a dozen meters to their front.
Behind them, the paratroopers and Carrera bustled out of the side door. There wasn't time to fuck with lowering the ramp.
* * *
As his feet his the soft ground, Carrera was met by a pale Chapayev and four civilian clad Balboan Cazadors.
Carrera's first words to the Volgan were, "I don't know if the pilot fucked up or if the airstrip is fucked up. No matter. I want these planes bunched at the other end of the strip, and manually turned around to face where they came from. Now! Before another goddamned Nabakov tries to land!"
Chapter Seventeen
Civilization is not coequal with aesthetics, however many people who consider themselves civilized may tacitly insist that it is a matter of aesthetics and nothing but. Nor must what we like to think of as civilized conduct be universal or eternal. Indeed, there has never been any such civilization except in the sophomoric pipedreams of the willfully ignorant.
Aztec priests cut the living hearts from captives. The Aztecs were highly civilized. Old Rome's Crassus crucified over six thousand rebellious slaves along Rome's Appian Way. Rome, too, was civilized.
On the frontiers of that Old Earth empire, or along those of the Chinese Empire, when facing the barbarians, barbaric conduct was the required norm. Inside those empires, when dealing with their home grown barbarians and criminals, barbaric punishments were the preferred norm.
On our own planet, when faced with the barbarism of fanatical Salafi nomads, those nomads were treated as barbarically as they had treated others.
This is not a flaw of civilization, nor even a feature. It is a necessary pre-condition for the maintenance of civilization. Civilization must meet barbarism and either convert it, destroy it, contain it, or terrorize it into submission or withdrawal. This is so, among other reasons, because barbarism is the natural state of mankind, the state to which man gravitates on his own and has the hardest time rising from.
—Jorge y Marqueli Mendoza,
Historia y Filosofia Moral,
Legionary Press, Balboa,
Terra Nova, Copyright AC 468
Anno Condita 471 Florencia, Santander, Terra Nova
Female mosquitoes buzzed outside the protective net, slamming themselves repeatedly into the gauze, following their instinctive drive to obtain a blood meal for the fertilization of their eggs. Further away, fearful of approaching the camp, antaniae, Terra Nova's genengineered winged reptiles, cooed softly. Mnnbt, mnnbt, mnnbt. Through the torn screen of a glassless window, the diffuse moonlight of Eris and Bellona illuminated the sweat-sheened breasts of a young, sleeping girl.
Comandante Victorio rested his head on one arm, admiring the sleeping form next to him, breasts bare to his gaze in the night's heat and glowing with the moons' light filtering through the windows.
So young, so idealistic, so pretty, thought Victoria. Above all, so easy to convince that even this was for the revolution. He smiled at the remembrance of the first seduction of Elpidia, the sleeping girl.
Victorio had himself been just so naive and idealistic. That, however, had been many years ago. Recruited by FNLS as a university student in Belalcázar, two dozen years before, Victorio had been enthralled by the by then well-established Cienfuegan Revolution, as he had been by the more recent and still tenuous victory for the Cause in Cocibolca, east of Balboa.
At first, before his broader talents were recognized, Victorio had been used as a rabble rouser, leading many student protests. Then, after a period of observation, testing, and review, once it was known that his ideological purity was unquestionable and his leadership ability high, he had been transferred to a field unit of the movement.
Twenty-one years in the bush, Victorio mentally snorted. Twenty-one years and those peasant pigs never rallied to us. Twenty-one wasted years, while the government hunted us like rabbits. Bastards! Using us for little more than training aids for officer cadets. Aiaiai . . . and we had been so close for a while, too.
Victoria tore his eyes from Elpidia's gently rising breasts and lay his own head back
on his thin pillow.
And then the Red Tsar was lynched in Saint Nicholasburg. Soon Cienfuegos could afford no more aid. Annam being cozying up to the imperialists. Cocibolca couldn't hold.
We tried to use drugs to continue to finance the revolution. The cartels fought us, and we lost. Well, almost lost. Too many heroes who, it turned out, could be bought. More ruthlessness than the Army showed; the cartels went after families. Finally, at great cost, we have our own little piece of the trade. And, of course, the odd paid mission from the cartels.
Oh, we still spout talk of revolution, ushering in the rule of the people, all that bullshit. Some of the young ones, like this little thing with her breasts so provocatively exposed, still believe. Not me, not any longer. I am happy with enough to be able to eat regularly for a change, and to have a place to sleep out of the rain. Everything else is just icing.
Victorio rolled over to go to sleep. As he did he heard a commotion from beyond the wall. He listened carefully for a moment. The watch was saying something about airplanes. The guerilla chieftain cursed softly, then arose to investigate. The girl, thus awakened, began to rise, herself, before her lover pushed her back gently to the bed.
"It's probably nothing," he told her. "Rest."
At the leather-hinged door Victorio stopped momentarily to listen. He heard no airplanes, precisely, though there was what he thought might be the sound of an unfamiliar engine. Well, they've probably already landed. They? No, more likely one; these mountain walls do odd things to sounds.
Victorio walked briskly, Volgan-designed rifle held in one hand, to the building that in a regular army would have been called something like the "orderly room."
The FNLS was short on military formality and didn't feel it was much of a failing. The group leader of the guard simply nodded his head in recognition at the jefe and said, "One plane, anyway, landed up at the strip. Its engines have never stopped so we can't tell for sure if more followed."
"The guards?" Victorio asked.
"No answer, but the odds aren't bad they're just doped to the gills . . . or drunk."
The jefe sighed. Yes, those are the odds.
Man the perimeter or grab what leaf and paste we have and run? I think . . . it's early to run, and we'd lose too much if we left the huánuco behind. To the group leader he said, "Send a patrol, half a dozen men, to the airfield. For the rest, hundred percent alert; man the perimeter."
"You think it's serious?"
Victorio shook his head in negation. "No, I think it's probably someone who landed at the wrong strip by mistake. But it could be the police or it could be something else. Hmmm . . . are the mortars still out?"
"Si, jefe."
"Tell them to stand by for my call. We may need their support."
* * *
Technically, the Nabakov gunship was an "ANA-23," rather than an "NA-23." The extra A was for "Attack." It carried, besides one high velocity 40mm automatic cannon, a brace of 23mm Volgan guns and, in its latest configuration, four .50 caliber machine guns in a single quad mount. All fired out the port side. They had a limited traverse controlled from the gunner's station. For greater changes in aiming, the plane had to align itself.
The gunner was actually the crewman with the greatest intelligence collection capability, as he had the main screen to the thermal cameras used in target acquisition and aiming.
As the 15th Company began to move off from the mountain carved airstrip, the gunner called Carrera, now known to be on the ground.
"Duque, we've got major activity down below. I see . . . call it seventy, give or take a few, people running all over the target area. Might be more; it's hard to keep track. They're lining up in groups before moving. I think you've been heard, over."
"Roger. Figures. We had some unforeseen problems on the strip. Does it look like they're trying to evacuate?"
"Negative, Duque," the aerial gunner said.
"Roger. Stand by." Carrera ran forward to Chapayev, Menshikov following close behind. The 14th Cazador Tercio bodyguards kept their position surrounding Carrera.
Through Menshikov, Carrera said to Chapayev, "Tribune, I just heard from the gunship. They know we're here. We knew they might hear us coming in. It's your operation, but my suggestion is to drop the sneaky shit and move like hell onto the objective. I can have the gunship start pounding now."
It took Chapayev perhaps all of five seconds to decide. "Da. Thank you, Duque. We do that."
Chapayev began to shout to his platoons to move out smartly, while his forward observer notified the mortar section to begin working over the villa. Carrera notified the gunship to engage.
"Si, Señor. Solo un' minuto." It was seconds rather than minutes before the sky lit up with the muzzle flash and tracer burn of four .50 caliber heavy machine guns, water cooled, pouring down a stream of lead onto the villa compound. The eighteen hundred-plus rounds per minute were so close together that each shot blended into the next to create a sound like a zipper being pulled closed dangerously fast. Carrera's party joined 15th Company in sprinting through the widely spaced trees for the villa, the whole party guiding on the gunship's tracers.
* * *
The FNLS were hardly a professional force. The patrol ordered out by Victorio was just leaving the main gate to the compound as the point of Chapayev's company reached the edge of the forest surrounding the villa and nearest the gate. The Volgans tended to be literal and, often enough, excessively obedient to their orders. Rather than set up a hasty ambush to catch the patrol in the open, the point element of the 15th company opened fire immediately. They were rewarded with a couple of hits, but no more than that, before the rest of the patrol scurried back inside the compound, frantically closing the gate behind them. Inside, the survivors hid in the shadow of the surrounding wall, fearful of entering into the open where a storm of fire from something on high was drenching the place with a leaden sleet.
* * *
From the headquarters window Comandante Victorio took one look at the stream of tracers coming down from above, then another at the scared-shitless patrol being driven in through the gate, and said to himself, "We're fucked. Those aren't police, less still some flight that got misoriented and landed at the wrong strip. Those are the goddamned gringos."
But do we run or do we fight it out? He tried to envision how the gringos had gotten to him. Jumping? No, the Cienfuegans said you don't parachute onto mountain ranges, generally. They must have landed. Now how many planes could land on that strip at one time? Not that many. I think we're facing equal odds, give or take. Sure, they've got that fucking airplane overhead but that can't stick around forever. It could maybe follow us, though, if we try to get away through the jungle. That's an unsavory prospect. I think we fight it out here, maybe try to get away in the day after the gunship goes away. Or even if it stays, it will have a harder time finding us in the jungle heat. At least that's what the Cienfuegans said. Besides, we have some friends not so very far away.
So if we're going to fight it out . . .
A shell impacting near the headquarters reminded Victorio that he wasn't without some support of his own.
But where to use it. There's a good chance we could take out any planes on the airstrip. That, however, won't do a damned thing to help us here, now.
"Get hold of the mortar platoon on the radio," he said. "Tell them I want fire on the woods nearest the main gate."
* * *
As the Volgan point man reached the edge of the forest that marked the cleared area around the villa, he went to one knee and took cover behind a tree. Chapayev took cover a few meters behind him, using his voice to direct his platoons into assault positions to right and left.
As those men were moving, each heard the odd screech of incoming fire. For many, it was a first. Still, enough of the praporschiki had served in Pashtia and on the borders during the breakup of the Volgan Empire to know. Chapayev and his men went to ground automatically as the first of several mortar shells exploded in the
trees overhead. A Volgan screamed for a medic. As more shells landed the cry for help spread. The Santanderns' mortars were joined by increasing, and increasingly effective, rifle and machine gun fire, as the defenders fought back from their bunkers. Green tracers skipped among the trees.
The paratroopers returned the Santandern fire without noticeable effect. Volgan medics, oblivious to the incoming mortar rounds, ran from position to position, picking up the badly wounded and carrying or dragging them to the rear, where the company's senior medic had set up an ad hoc aid station. Many wounded men refused to be pulled back, shaking off the medics and continuing to return fire.
Chapayev's Forward Observer, or FO, called the 15th Company mortar section to order a cease fire. When, after about two minutes, the incoming rounds failed to stop he knew it wasn't Volgan mortar fire cutting into the company. He ordered a resumption of firing on the compound, then stuck his head around a tree to adjust it. A bullet, flying low, passed through the FO's head, spattering brains over his radio operator, just behind. The RTO pulled the FO's body back to cover, then took his place and continued observing.
Carrera shouted into his radio for the gunship to find and silence the FNLS mortars. Aerial support fire abruptly ceased, even as a more powerful whine from the sky told that the plane was moving off. With the gunship gone, the defender's fire increased.
* * *
Victorio felt his confidence in his chances surge with the first angry, orange-red blossoming of fire in the tree line. That confidence momentarily soared as the fire from overhead cut out.
"Right on," congratulated the guerrilla leader, into the radio. "Keep it up."
Victorio stepped outside, still sheltering as much as possible from the incoming mortar fire, and began pushing his fighters to their positions.
After he had seen the last of his guerillas to the walls and bunkers, Victorio stepped over the inert form of a girl with a rifle. She lay on her back clothed with only a camouflage shirt, and that unbuttoned and in disarray. Her legs were bent at the knees, feet under her, and legs obscenely spread. Victorio closed her legs with a booted foot, but gently. The girl's body was torn by two huge holes from which blood oozed. By the villa's lights, and the moons', he could see she was his partner of the night before. I will mourn you later, my little dear one. He ran to the southeastern bunker, to direct the fighting from there.