by Tom Kratman
"What is it, Alena?" Fernandez asked. "Worried for your brother and your husband?"
"I am," the girl admitted. "But that's not it. I am missing something and I don't have a clue of what."
"Maybe it's only nerves."
"No," Alena insisted. "I know nerves and I know when there's a truth staring at me from nose length away. This is the latter. Why can't I see it?"
To that Fernandez had no answer. He operated off of hard evidence, not the half mystical insights of this Pashtian witch-girl, however damnably effective those insights might sometimes be.
* * *
His father had told him to pack his rucksack—and little Hamilcar was very proud that he'd been issued the very same model the legionaries carried—and to report to Fernandez. He'd packed himself, though his father's driver had taken him to Fernandez's office in the main headquarters building. Gaining entrance was no problem; the troops were used to Ham having the run of the place.
Besides, he knew better than to ever mentiona word of what went on there, not even in the thrice weekly electronic letters his father insisted he send to his mother.
Half carrying and half dragging the rucksack behind him—"Dig your own hole; carry your own roll," his father insisted—Ham stumbled in the direction of Fernandez's voice, saying, "Maybe it's only nerves."
* * *
Alena heard a small sound, something like an oversized mouse scurrying, and looked towards it. A small boy, bowed under the weight of a rucksack bigger than he was, staggered and stumbled towards Fernandez. She started to smile and then looked again at the boy's face. She'd seen that face before . . . somewhere . . .
"Iskander, our Lord," she whispered, before dropping to her knees and then placing her face and palms to the floor.
The Base
Jimenez lay beside a Pashtun Scout bearing a laser designator. He pointed at a stream of tracers rising to the sky. The tracers chased behind a Turbo-Finch, just pulling up and away from a strafing run. Almost they closed the gap before the 'Finch pulled away.
"Bring fire down on that," Jimenez ordered the scout. "Right at the base. Pulverize it."
"Yes, sir," the scout answered, aiming his designator at the target while another man on a radio called the artillery for supporting fires.
Jimenez crouched above the military crest. He was in plain view of hundreds of Salafis on the surrounding hills, but out of their range. For the enemy that were in range, he had the mass of the crest for cover. Even so, bullets from below struck the trees and branches above him steadily, sprinkling him with bits of wood and bark they had chewed off.
Crouching lower still Jimenez moved closer to the crest where the Scouts had set out a perimeter and were battling fiercely to keep the huge numbers of charging and firing Salafis at bay. As he got closer still he went to his belly to crawl forward. A commander has to see the action; not just rely on reports of others to guide him.
He crawled, he lay, he saw, he thought, Holy shit.
The hill sides and valley floor below were crawling with the enemy.
"Good fighting," Masood announced, approvingly, as he flopped down next to Jimenez.
"Maybe too much of a good thing," Jimenez answered with a smile.
* * *
Despite a pretty severe case of nerves, and the incessant shaking of the helicopter, Cruz forced a smile to his face. There was a lot of acting involved in combat leadership and he'd been to some of the best training for actors available. What, after all, was Cazador School except some hundreds of men in utter misery pretending that they liked it?
The helicopter would have been a little bit overstuffed if it had borne, as it was designed to, Taurans or Volgans. For the smaller and slighter Balboans who made up the bulk of the Legion it was possible to cram several more, sometimes many more, troopers than the design had called for.
In this case, with forty-seven men of his own platoon, a two man and one pooch scout dog team, another two forward observers, the one platoon medic, a piper and Majeed, twelve men sat each side of the two helicopters carrying Cruz's platoon, and three more on each of the cargo bays' floors. The dog, tongue lolling, sat in the middle of Cruz's.
Cruz's smile almost disappeared at the helicopter crested the high ridge to the south of the target and began a rapid descent to the valley floor outside the fortress.
I fucking hate elevators.
He had a bad, heart-pounding moment when a stream of tracers passed by, visible from the passenger compartment through the pilots' windscreen. The tracers stopped abruptly mere moments before the IM-71 would have been forced to pass through them. Flying in tight formation going around the fire might have been worse than flying right through it.
Better to lose a couple of men to anti-aircraft fire than all of two birds to a crash.
Again, like an elevator, the chopper stopped descending and pulled up suddenly to gain a little more altitude. Cruz's stomach sank sickeningly. It did so again as the pilot made some turns to bring the bird around to the north side of the target. Then, once again, the chopper rose rapidly.
"Two miinnuutteess," the crew chief announced, holding up two fingers and showing them to the men lining both sides of the compartment. The infantrymen in the back immediately began making last minute adjustments to their load bearing equipment and loricae.
That "two minutes" was all the warning the crew chief would be able to give, Cruz knew, as the aviator turned his complete attention to the machine gun mounted on one side. This he began to fire in long bursts to the left front as the bird climbed up the side of a ridge. A bag caught the crew chief's hot, expended shell casings as they flew out the side of the gun in a steady stream.
Bad sign, Cruz thought. Very damned bad.
* * *
Noorzad had, he thought, no good choices. He'd lost over a third of his men just to the sudden surprise fire when the column of light trucks and buses had opened up. He'd lost some more from the aerial attack and the artillery and mortar bombardment. He thought he might have as many as fifty men left, possibly a few less.
Forget the surrounding ridges and join the attack to free Mustafa's hill? He wondered. No . . . a few more guns there won't help much. Better to stay here and hold the ridges as long as possible, take as many with us as possible.
There was an air defense gun, a twin 23mm job, not far from Noorzad. The crew were dead around it but, in one of those peculiar effects of large explosions, and especially thermobaric ones, the gun itself was still standing and looked fine.
"Come . . . come!" Noorzad shouted to four of his followers. Not looking to see if they followed, he raced on foot to the gun. A quick visual examination showed the gun was loaded. There was a crude metal chair to sit on and what seemed to be a sight. At least there was an assemblage that, lined up with a seated gunner's head, would define a line roughly parallel to the twin barrels.
Noorzad sat down in the chair and confirmed that the projection ahead of him was a gun sight. An experimental press of each of the foot pedals swung the gun left and right. He tugged on the handles and the gun's muzzles raised up. When he pushed them forward the elevation dropped.
This took mere moments. By the time his men joined him Noorzad was lining the sight up on the leading of two approaching helicopters. He thought he knew enough to lead, but he overestimated how much was required. When the firing studs were pressed, the twin cannon spit out their sixty shells in a few seconds. The electronically-fired gun clicked on empty as Noorzad ran out of ammunition. That was just before the helicopter would have crossed the path of the shells.
"Get more!" he shouted to his men. "More shells."
The unfamiliar flexible belts of cannon cartridges, sixty per belt, caused some problem as the men tried to control them and feed them into the ammunition slots. By the time he was ready to fire again, Noorzad saw that the helicopter was on the ground with dozens of armed and armored men spilling out of it and the others that had accompanied it. The dozens became hundreds as more hel
icopters touched down. Crap.
Well . . . if I can't kill enough of the infidel infantry I can kill their helicopter.
* * *
Cruz was, per doctrine, the first man out. He stood at the edge of the rear door cursing and hustling his men off the helicopter, directing their leaders where he wanted them placed. A piper automatically took a position by the centurion's side and began playing the First Tercio's own theme, Boinas Azules Cruzan la Frontera.
"Sergeant Avila," Cruz shouted over the helicopters and the pipes, pointing, "I want your squad there, from ten o'clock to two o'clock." Then he turned his attention back towards the inside of the just-lifting helicopter and saw the left-side wall began to disintegrate in his field of view. The crew chief, still gamely firing his machine gun, was hit by something that exploded, tearing his upper torso from his lower body at the waist and flinging the chief's remains to the right side of the compartment. Cruz had the briefest glimpse of one of the pilots being thrown across the cockpit onto the other.
Smelling aviation fuel and seeing sparks and smoke, Cruz turned to throw himself away from the bird. From behind came a loud whoosh as the fuel caught fire, exploded, and knocked Cruz and the piper, faces first, to the dirt.
* * *
Seeing that someone was at least trying to do something, more men, not all of them Noorzad's, rushed to reinforce the gun position. The column of smoke served as their orientation mark.
Noorzad and his men cheered when the helicopter began first to smoke and then to burst into flame. They saw what Cruz could not. One of the two pilots, trapped by flame behind him, tried to force his way through the strong plexiglas of the windscreen as fire rose all around.
Noorzad would cherish the open-mouthed agony writ on that pilot's face for the rest of his life.
* * *
Cruz and his men were shocked, yes, by the destruction of the helicopter and crew that had bravely brought them in. More than shocked though, they were deeply angered. A red mist descended across the centurion's vision.
"Fix bayonets, you bastards," Cruz called out, as he affixed his own. "Play you son of a bitch," he cursed at the shocked piper.
"Fix bayonets" usually meant a wild screaming charge with blood in your eye. It was not precisely a favored tactic in the Legion but this was a special case, a situation where time was more valuable than lives because it meant lives. The men of the platoon knew that. Even so they looked at their young centurion as if he were insane.
"Fix BAYONETS!" Cruz repeated, as loudly as possible. This time the men knew he was serious. They reached to their belts and, still prone on the ground, pulled out the shiny blades (for the Legion knew that a bayonet was a weapon of terror and that, thus, shinier was better) and attached them to the muzzles of their rifles, jiggling the bayonets to make sure of a secure fix.
"Now . . . you sonsabitches . . . FOLLOW MEEE . . . "
* * *
Looking out the right side window of his Cricket, Carrera saw one of his valuable IM-71s suddenly caught by heavy fire as it tried to lift off after landing its troops. He cursed as the chopper abruptly settled back to earth and began to pour out first smoke, then fire.
His first instinct, born of hate and rage, was to bring a cohort's worth of artillery down on the gun which had just slaughtered his men. He was just starting to pick up a microphone to do that when he saw a rare thing, a remarkable thing. What looked like about fifty men were streaming towards the enemy air defense gun in a single mad rush. Sunlight glinting upward told that those men had their bayonets fixed.
* * *
Racing forward in the lead, Cruz saw the enemy heavy gun fire a brief burst. The passage of the shells created a palpable shock wave around him. No matter, possessed by battle madness he continued his charge, screaming like a demon and firing from the hip.
Nearby, charging forward with fangs bared, the platoon's attached scout dog began to howl: ahwoooo. My pack is the greatest.
A bullet struck one of the glassy metal chest plates of Cruz's lorica and bounced off, singing. With the angle of the strike and of his body, it shocked and slowed him but it didn't stop him.
Wild-eyed Salafis arose from the ground. Some were cut down by the legionaries' fire but others closed. Cruz put two three-round bursts of 6.5mm into the body of one, half emulsifying his target's innards. Wheeling to face another, this one thrusting forward a fixed bayonet, Cruz tapped the enemy rifle aside and lunged to plunge his own bayonet into the enemy's throat. Dropping his rifle to clutch at his wound, eyes rolling up in his head as blood rushed out to spatter on the ground, this Salafi sank to his knees.
Cruz put one booted foot on the Salafi's head and pushed him off of his now red-running bayonet. Again he whirled to face two more charging maniacs. He swung his butt at one and missed, but then stepped forward and reversed the motion to slam the butt into the Salafi's unarmored kidney. That one went down puking with pain. The next one up Cruz shot before spinning to plunge the bayonet into the back of his previous opponent.
"Die, motherfucker," he snarled as the Salafi screamed in agony.
By this time Cruz's men had reached him and joined the fray. The entire hilltop became a mass of lunging, shooting, screaming and dying men. The dog ripped out a Salafi throat, howled again, and bounded off in search of another. Ahwooo; my pack is the greatest. Not far behind the piper's playing added to the furious din.
Here the legionaries' superior training and armor—to say nothing of the pooch's –came to the fore. Even at close range, the Salafis couldn't usually get a bullet to penetrate directly from in front, though a number of the Balboans went down with wounds to face, head, limbs and torso sides. Within a few moments, all the Salafis were down and Cruz's men were finishing off the wounded with butt stroke, burst and bloodied bayonet.
There was no time, in a close fight, for the niceties. And men who had failed to surrender by the time the Legion closed to three hundred meters had forfeited their right to do so.
Breathing deeply, anger still raging within him, the centurion walked deliberately to where a crusty-looking, one-eyed Salafi struggled to load the light cannon that had smashed and burned the helicopter. Seeing the look in Cruz's eye the Cyclops stopped his efforts and began to raise his hands.
"Fuck you, asshole," Cruz said, as he took aim and triggered a burst into the Noorzad's head.
Interlude
4 July, 2206, Cygnus House, Chelsea, London, European Governing Region, Earth
"The Marquis is dead; long live the Marchioness," Lucretia whispered to herself as the last of the lower class investigating officers departed the mansion. The sun was down and an ambulance had long since carted off her late father's cooling corpse.
As she closed the door behind the police, Class Fours and thus very deferential to the new Marchioness, Lucretia sighed, "Oh, Daddy, and you were such a good lay, too." She sighed, and then burst out laughing, dancing on light feet across the black and white tiled floor of the vestibule.
The police had carted off the bulk of the domestic kitchen staff, of course. They would be incarcerated in Amnesty's own dungeons and rigorously questioned by its own interrogators. But . . . who cares? Lowers can be bought for a song. Which is a damned good thing because now, with daddy out of the way, I intend to go through a lot of them.
"Then, too," she said aloud, "perhaps I should buy a commission in the Peace Forces. I've always fancied how I'd look in uniform."
Lucretia walked to her father's desk and pressed a button on the intercom. A face appeared, that of one of the maids, Emily.
"Yes, mum?"
"I feel like celebrating. Whiskey. Ice."
"Yes, mum."
When the maid arrived, not more than five minutes later, Lucretia waited for her to pour and then struck her across the face with her riding crop. "You were too slow."
Weeping, the maid sank to her knees, crying and covering her bruised face with her hands.
"That's better, Emily. I much prefer you in that
position. But . . . I think you would look even better with your face to the floor." Arbeit used her dainty foot to press the maid's head downward.
Lucretia left the girl there, trembling and cowering, and with blood welling from the slash across her face. The new Marchioness liked that, the image, the reality, the trembling fear. She picked up the glass of whiskey and drank deeply.
Lucretia then laughed and started to sing, softly:
"Arise you prisoners of starvation . . . "
Chapter Twenty-four
So farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear,
Farewell remorse; all good to me is lost.
Evil, be thou my good.
Milton, Paradise Lost