by Tom Kratman
The town was off to the east, busy and noisy with preparations.
To the west of the town of Pelirojo, Lieutenant Carsten Christian Clausen—“C-Three,” to his friends—was grease-painted dark enough to blend into pretty much anything but daylight. He’d even dyed his hair black, not trusting fully to the Anglian-issue bush hat cap he’d scrounged to keep the rain off and the mosquito net that critical extra half an inch from his face. And, since his own army’s camouflage pattern was carefully designed to blend in with local conditions approximately as well as a slag heap at the north pole, he and his men wore battle dress they’d had made, at personal expense, by local tailors, from a locally produced camouflage material.
The downside to that, more or less unknown to C-Three and the rest of the Cimbrians, was that the factory that made the camouflage material in their uniforms was a subcontractor to the Legion del Cid. In short, an argument could be made that the Cimbrians were wearing enemy uniforms, or would be, if the war were officially on and the guerillas wearing uniforms.
This was an agricultural area, for the most part. What jungle there was consisted of secondary growth, with scattered patches of true rainforest here and there, the latter having exceptionally dense fringes. It was in one of those dense fringes that C-Three lay, narrowly slitted eyes watching as the crews of four mortars dug up and moved entire plants to provide camouflage.
“A platoon,” C-Three wrote in his notebook, without looking down, adding the location and time and, “160mm, Zioni model, on wheels.”
Satisfied, finally, that no more of the enemy were coming, C-Three scuttled back, snakelike, to rejoin the other six men of his patrol, picked up his pack, and, scanning continuously, moved out for his next reconnaissance objective.
Hamilton, Federated States of Columbia, Terra Nova
As the GaulAir jet touched down on the airstrip beside the river, newly minted Major Jan Campbell wasn’t at all sure how it came to pass that Belisario Endara-Rocaberti was still alive, let alone living in comfort mainly at Federated States’ expense in one of the city’s better suburbs, and under continuous guard.
Certainly the Balboans’ request for extradition should have had the fucker nailed up by now on Cerro Mina. Hmmm . . . can I use that? Maybe . . . maybe if he thinks the asylum the FSC’s given him won’t last. Conversely, maybe if I threaten to have him extradited to the TU. Or what if I offer him asylum, new identity, all that? Hmmm . . . can I offer the swine asylum? The crimes of which Balboa accuses him were crimes initially against us.
Jan took one look at the olive-skinned flunky sent by Rocaberti to the airport to meet her and surmised, cop. She travelled in mufti, totally unofficially, and on a tourist visa. The drive from the airport was made in silence. Whether that was because the flunky knew no English or simply because he’d been instructed not to speak to her, she had no clue. Neither did she much care, however. She’d been to the FSC before, on a short exchange program, but never to the Hamilton area. She enjoyed both the sights of the old city and the pristine countryside beyond.
The driver finally pulled into a tree-lined private driveway, then parked the car by the front door. He held the door open for Jan, then raced to open the front door to the house for her. She entered into a hallway that reminded her, to an extent, of some of the publically accessible stately homes of the Kingdom of Anglia, with a fine slate floor, ornately plastered ceiling, and some fairly decent art—not a whit of it Balboan—hanging from brass rods set into the walls.
The driver led her through the hall, then through a door, down a narrower hall, and finally to an office. After knocking, he announced her, in Spanish. “The Anglian woman is here, sir.”
What a creepy little butterball this one is, she thought, as Belisario Endara-Rocaberti arose to greet her, holding out a plump hand.
“My dear Major,” said Rocaberti, “what a pleasure to meet you.”
Seated, Jan didn’t waste a lot of time. “I need people who can pass as Balboan because they are Balboan, who can travel freely, observe carefully, and make contact discreetly. There are a fair number of Spanish speakers I could use, but this—your little group of exiles—strikes me as much more suitable and more motivated.”
Rocaberti began by starting to list a series a of demands, the first of which was reestablishment of his clan as the paramount clan of the country. He’d gotten to the word “rightful—” when Jan lifted one hand, palm out.
“Get that out of your mind,” she said. “The very most you will ever have, under the very most favorable circumstances, in your native country, would be the right to continue breathing. If war comes again the current regime will be extirpated, true. But there’ll be no pseudo democracy covering for a corrupt oligarchy. The place will be divided up and occupied. There will be no local government.”
The butterball visibly deflated, she saw. “But if you are smart,” she said, “you won’t even try to go back. There are simply too many people who hate your guts. No, I don’t know whether you were behind the murders of those women that led to the last invasion. But enough of your compatriots will think so that your life in Balboa would be measured in hours. You need a better plan.”
“Like what?”
Said she, smiling, “It’s very nice along the northern coast of Gaul this time of year.”
Well, thought Jan, on the drive back to the airport, wasn’t that economical? Of course, the weasel needed a kickback “to support the families of those freedom-loving souls who have gathered around me.” Blah-blah-blah.
And so now I have my sacrificial lambs, nine of them, who will get a minimum of training, some disinformation, and will be sent to Balboa, half to identify the shards of the old organization and half to be caught by Fernandez. They’ll spill their guts, of course; who would not? And that’s fine. Fernandez already has reason to believe the TU is the essence of incompetence. That will fit well with his preconceptions. And having caught and ruined the “organization” from Rocaberti’s crew, he’ll be a lot less inclined to think there’s another one, one that matters.
Time to start tracking down people worth spending some effort on. First stop, Gaul, then Tuscany, then Volga. If necessary I can return here, too.
Also, note to self, check with the Sachsens and see if they have some good ins in Volgoboronexport. It might help to know what the Balboans have bought overseas.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Man is not what he thinks he is; he is what he hides.
—André Malraux
Log Base Alpha (so called), Balboa, Terra Nova
A twenty-foot container sat on its side on rollers, big logs chosen for regularity, just to the north of Tribune Ramirez, who stood in a wide and fairly shallow ditch the direction of which he had set out with a compass. Thick ropes led from the container, southward, framing the tribune on either side. A couple of dozen legionaries, stripped to the waist against the heat and humidity, stood by the ropes. There was a large pile of dirt just eastward, though the pile slowly shrank as legionaries turned the loose spoil into hard packed sandbags. A single tiny female, Cochinese, with almond eyes, stood just out of the ditch, watching.
Troops stood around, some with picks, others with mattocks, most with shovels. They looked down expectantly into the ditch as Tribune Ramirez measured the bottom of the excavated hole carefully.
The common thought was along the lines of let us hope the motherfucker is happy this time.
There were rollers there in the ditch, too, though only a few. Finally, Ramirez stood up. He’d decided, Yep, twelve degrees, close enough and a bit over, which is fine.
“Move her in,” Ramirez ordered. His first centurion gave a series of commands. Immediately, the two gangs of soldiers began tugging on the ropes. Slowly at first, then with speed increasing to a slow walking pace, the container rumbled to the south until it reached its tipping point. At that point the southernmost side began rotating downward, very slowly.
“Halt,” the centurion ordered, once the conta
iner had started to tip.
A sergeant and a couple of men eased it down into the ditch, where it came to rest on a roller.
“Pull!” shouted the centurion, calling off a work chant, setting the men to dragging the thing the last couple of meters forward. It came to rest with its northernmost end about five feet into the earth and the southern end about a foot or a bit less.
“Perfect,” said the tribune. “Cover up the sides and then open her up. Make sure to leave the open space to the sides open, just like the rollers caused below.”
He didn’t feel like explaining that the open space was to allow dirt to displace from a near miss with a bomb or shell.
After a series of sandbags were used to cover the gap, most of the men with the mattocks, picks, and shovels turned to shoveling the spoil around the sides of the container, taking special care to make a smooth, flat support at the northern end.
“Anything else we need to know, Mrs. Siegel?” Ramirez asked.
“No,” the tiny woman answered, “or at least I can’t think of anything. We took a lot of care when we packed these to have everything you and your men might need, to include a field kitchen, with fuel, and dry rations for a month or so.
“Well . . . on second thought, if any or your men are as butterfingered as the Cochinese political prisoners who did the physical packing, I’d have a senior NCO or centurion supervising so they don’t set off anything that’s explosive.
“Otherwise, you should be fine. What number is this one supposed to be?”
Ramirez consulted a spreadsheet, then answered, “12543.”
“Okay,” she said. “I’d make sure that’s the right one, Tribune, but other than that you should be fine. You’ll find a lot of crude lumber inside, which ought to be useful for making your battery a little more comfortable.”
Near Concepción, Carretera InterColombiana, Balboa, Terra Nova
Sergeant Ponce, female, large, and strong, saw the maniple commander, redheaded Tribune Cristina Zamora, point at a hill and heard her say, “It’s perfect. Not only is it perfect, but they’ll be here.” Ponce was a squad leader of combat engineers, who, in this instance, were all female, and all unusually large, and strong.
The hill at which the statuesque redhead pointed was surrounded on three sides by water. It sat, the very edge of it, right at five hundred meters from a three-way intersection of the main coastal highway, the less well-developed road to a small port to the north, and another dirt and gravel road that led inward to a town up in the hills to the south. Overlooked by the hill, a steel bridge crossed the river that surrounded it on three sides.
The centurion for the reinforced platoon agreed, “It looks like a likely spot to me, too.”
Well, duh, thought Ponce.
The centurion, Maria Fuentes, short and cute, said, “I’ll bury a mortar and—what do you think, one hundred and sixty rounds?—about three kilometers that way”—she pointed generally to the tree-clad southwest hills—“and put some caches in about five hundred meters behind us, enough to support a platoon raid on whoever occupies that hill.”
Way optimistic, thought Ponce. Way.
Zamora answered, “No, not a hundred and sixty rounds of mortar. They’d never get a chance to fire it before the counterbattery came in and turned them to paste. Sixty rounds is enough. They can fire that and still get the hell out of the area before the artillery hits them. Though you might bury the other hundred not too far away.”
Ponce thought, Got some digging to do, I suppose.
“All right, sixty,” the centurion agreed. “And two more caches of fifty nearby.”
Ponce went over to the platoon optio, Marta Bugatti. She didn’t say anything, but just stood there until Marta said, “Go get me three of your people and the truck and mount them up. Then we’ll go do some excavating.”
In a less than two minutes the truck sped off bearing three of the sappers and Bugatti.
“Where else have you identified?” Zamora asked.
Ponce stood behind the centurion when she pulled out a map and pointed to four more caches.
“What about mines?” asked Zamora.
Fuentes scratched at her ear and said, “I had an idea. You might not like it. Then again, you might.”
Pretty sure it was my idea, thought Ponce, but if you want to take the blame . . .
“What’s that?” Zamora asked.
“Mines, particularly antiarmor mines, are big, bulky, and noticeable, right?”
“Sure.”
“Detonators aren’t. I’m putting in plastic AT mines, pretty much everywhere, and recording the locations.”
Ponce kept her face blank. Just who is putting in mines? Oh, all right, that’s not entirely fair of me; your grunts are helping.
Fuentes continued, “When we want to arm one, we send out one or two girls in civvies and just uncover the mine, insert and arm the detonator, then cover it again and camouflage it. Nothing’s a mine unless we want it to be. Everything is mined where and when we want it to be.”
Zamora patted Fuentes’s shoulder, and, with a broad smile, said, “See, and I knew there was a reason you’re in charge of a platoon.
“I’ll pass that trick on to the others.”
“There is one thing that bugs me, though,” the centurion said. “Where did all these mines come from? I mean, we did sign that treaty after all.”
Not sure if Zamora knew the background, Ponce answered, “It seems that whoever drafted the silly document hadn’t bothered to ask about what a land mine really was. So . . .while we couldn’t stockpile the mines in advance, legally, instead, Carrera stockpiled millions of empty metal and plastic casings, more millions of pounds of explosive that just happened to be cast in chunks the exact shapes and sizes of those casings. Oh . . . and detonators and bouncing charges, of course. They were all stored separately so they weren’t mines until we put the parts together . . .”
Zamora asked, “Cynical or realistic?”
It wasn’t clear to Ponce who she was asking. In any case, the sapper continued, “The process of assembly takes about thirty seconds or so, each, and can be, and is being, done by little old ladies in tennis shoes in a couple of warehouses near Arraijan. It actually takes longer to record where we put the mines than it does to put them together.”
Sneering, the sapper asked, rhetorically, “Kind of makes you wonder about the minds of people who try to ban certain types of weapons because of aesthetics, doesn’t it? I guess their delicate sensibilities make it just too, too distasteful for them to really try to understand the weapons themselves. So they fail.”
“Yes,” Zamora replied, “and a good thing for us, too.”
Fuentes added, “We’re not just setting them up for harassment and road and area denial. Sergeant Ponce’s putting in some fairly dense fields between places we think we’ll want to attack and places where we can hide. There’ll be paths through; paths we’ll know and the enemy won’t. We hit them; we run; we run right through the mines. If they follow, they’ll regret it.”
“You do that a couple of times,” Zamora commented, “and they’ll probably stop trying to follow.”
“That’s what we thought,” Ponce said. “There are also some other places where we’re putting down just a few mines, along with a bunch of metal fragments or tiny magnets—”
“I know about the ‘Dianas,’ ” Zamora said. “It’ll make clearing those few a real chore, since it’s effectively impossible for a magnetic mine detector to tell the difference between a ‘Diana’ and a real mine.
“Okay, I’m satisfied, Maria. I’m going to go check out First Platoon. The Nguyens will be staying with you for a week or two. Treat them nice. They’ve got experience in this area and a whole bag of tricks.”
BdL Dos Lindas, Mar Furioso, Terra Nova
Up on the flight deck, one of the carrier’s navalized Turbo-finch attack aircraft touched down, bounced, bounced and hooked, then came to a bone-wrenching stop. The ’Finches were
little more than upgraded crop dusters, with a fair payload and a lot of endurance. Though the takeoffs and landings were riskier than with the ship’s Yakamov helicopters, the maintenance load from using them was so much less that they were preferred for anything where they would serve.
There were several sonar-listening stations out on the Isla Real. There was also now a twin set of underwater microphones stretching east and west from the island, listening. Volgan surplus, the system was called “Archangel.” Sadly, these were something less than state of the art.
Additionally, the classis had dropped three lines of sonabuoys, all passive, out in the Mar Furioso. So far, neither the fixed stations nor the sonabuoys had picked up a sign of the four Zhong subs. Neither had they picked up a sign of the presumptively much quieter Imperial Yamatan Navy sub tailing the Zhong. They did get occasional messages via Yamato on the location of the Zhong. That was why Fosa was reasonably certain that they were being provided by a Yamatan submarine trailing the Zhong.
One thing that bugged Fosa, because he didn’t really understand it, was that the Zhong were moving slower than their theoretical capability for effectively silent sailing. Did they know about a Yamatan trailing? Was there some timetable they were supposed to meet but not exceed?