The Rods and the Axe

by Tom Kratman

  “We’re really going to have to put up a tripod and lift it,” said Legate Puercel, like Carrera watching the proceedings.

  “Yeah, I think so too,” Carrera agreed.

  “Have you seen enough, Duque?” Puercel asked.

  “I think so. Well . . . no, there is one other thing . . .”

  “Your old house? Quarters One?” Puercel asked.

  “Was it that obvious?”

  The legate shook his head, doubtfully. “You don’t want to see it. There’s nothing there to see but some charred wood and a few graves for some trixies. Most of the old cantonment area is smashed pretty badly, but I think they put a special effort into your house.”

  Carrera felt a sudden sinking of his heart. That house . . . that house . . . so many good memories in its walls and now . . .

  I wanted to retire there. Shit.

  “I’m sorry, Duque. It’s not even a ruin anymore.”

  “Fuck it,” Carrera said. “Take me to headquarters.”

  Forward Observer Position Twenty-six, Hill 287,

  Isla Real, Balboa, Terra Nova

  “Fuck it!” said Corporal Leon. “Just fuck it! God obviously hates me.”

  The reason for the corporal’s outburst was all around him. As he sat atop the dirt covering his bunker, he was more or less evenly surrounded by a jagged-edged concrete cylinder, blasted off of the island’s solar chimney, and, by fluke, landed around him. In other words, in order to see to do his job, when the time came, he was going to have to leave the safety of his bunker and peer over the top of the cylinder. This was, in every way, likely to be a lot more dangerous than what he’d been faced with before.

  Leon’s radio-telephone operator, a Cochinese-descended private, Private Loi, who had come to Balboa early enough to pick up Spanish well, tsked. “Not nice to take the Lord’s name in vain, Corporal. Not nice at all. Besides, could have been worse. Could have landed on us, and driven the whole bunker underground. Suffocation then. No, no, Corporal, God, as the song goes, loves his faithful young soldiers.”

  Leon, who remembered the terror he’d felt when several hundred tons of concrete had landed almost atop him, was not to be mollified. “I’m a corporal. You’re a private. If I say God hates me . . .”

  “Then he must really love me, Corporal.”

  “Asshole.”

  Wreck MV Sadducee (Zion Registry), Isla Real, Balboa, Terra Nova

  They’d been waiting for a raid like this, one that would produce a hit or, at least, a near enough miss that the skeleton crew aboard the small coastal freighter could scuttle without it being obvious that it was deliberate. They’d gotten that and, before the smoke had cleared, the ship’s keel had settled into the sandy bottom.

  Now a flurry of activity was going on. Small boats were moving to extract the noncritical load the ship had been carrying. As each boat went out, though, it left behind a couple of engineers who set to work making nonobvious modifications to the ship. These ranged from cutting a couple of gashes in the hull, which were obvious but not necessarily suspicious, to building very strong positions inside to take advantage of the gashes, to unpacking and welding to the interior decks sundry crew-served weapons. The engineers also turned the noncritical parts of the ship, and anything that allowed access to the fighting positions, into a nightmarish maze of barbed wire and booby traps.

  As the engineers finished and left, infantry took their place, still under the guise of removing cargo. The engineers had to move on; Sadducee had a sister on the eastern side of the island that needed similar preparations.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Issue in doubt.

  —Major John F. Schoettel, USMC,

  Betio Island (Tarawa),

  20 November 1943

  Xing Zhong Guo Aircraft Carrier Luyang, Mar Furioso, Terra Nova

  The carrier had a light cruiser alongside, the Taizhou. She was the only gunned cruiser in the Zhong navy and, though not packing quite the broadside, in terms of throw weight over time, of the Balboans’ Tadeo Kurita, she still packed some punch of her own, with nine admittedly slow-firing 180mm guns in three triple turrets.

  She even had a modicum of armor, though that was much less than Kurita carried. Still, what she had was better than nothing, lots more than the carriers mounted, and in a platform that, unlike the carriers, could be expended. For these reasons, Admiral Wanyan had ordered it alongside, in order to transfer his flag from the Luyang, which would stay a considerable distance from the enemy fortress, to Taizhou, which would come in close enough for the admiral to see and command the landing.

  The admiral’s staff had transferred over the night before, just after the final issue of orders to the subordinate commanders or, rather, to those subordinate commander who would be involved in the landing. There’d been no need to bring in the Zhong army, as this would be a Marine show.

  As the admiral made his transfer in his own pinnace, he could hear all around, in the distance, the sounds of marine diesels, as the invasion fleet formed up for the landing and moved closer to shore.

  Always a tradeoff, thought Wanyan, between security for the ships supporting the landing force and getting the troops ashore in numbers, quickly enough. And I can’t risk using helicopters for troop landing until we have a secure place to bring them in. It’s not like trying to land on a lightly defended section of coast, where the big threat is the counterattack from elsewhere. Then it’s worthwhile to use helicopter to seal off the beach from reinforcement and to delay the enemy’s response. Here, though? That island is thick with the enemy, and anybody I land deep—to the extent the concept has any meaning at all on an island twenty kilometers by thirteen—will just be a gift to the enemy.

  The Zhong Marines, a part of the army rather than of the navy, were something special. Everyone knew it, not least the Marines themselves. Already it was a considerable honor to be selected for military service among the Zhong, with only ten percent of the young men coming of age every year meeting the army’s strict standards. The Marines, on the other hand, skimmed off only a couple percent of that already highly select crew.

  Tough, strong, brave, well-trained, well-led, patriotic, dedicated . . . the Marines were also well-equipped for the task, with each of the two divisions fielding a regiment each of light amphibious tanks and artillery, a mechanized regiment, three light infantry regiments, a commando battalion, an engineer battalion, an air defense battalion, and a generous slice of headquarters and support troops.

  Indeed, if the Zhong Marine Corps had a serious weakness, it wasn’t internal, but in the odds and ends they’d had to scrape together to transport themselves and the regular corps, and get them to the beaches. For example, the two regiments of light tanks, between them, numbered over two hundred combat vehicles. Did the Zhong Navy have the capability of moving by sea the two hundred light tanks and four hundred or so other armored vehicles contained in their Marine Corps? Clearly. Could they launch two hundred amphibious light tanks and four hundred IFVs into the sea? Not a chance; the total portage capability with floodable decks for launching tanks and infantry carriers was about three hundred and fifty. And that wasn’t accounting for the twelve hundred or so nonarmored vehicles, either.

  They were an armed force used to making do, however, and they worked around their limitations in various ways. Some vehicles were carried on landing craft that would be lowered over the side on davits. In two cases the larger ships carried barges that, even now, crews were assembling to carry some equipment forward. Some were contained in landing ships that would have to beach themselves to let their cargo roll off.

  The problems with the infantry were possibly worse. The eighteen battalions of light infantry and two each of commandos and engineers needed the equivalent of three hundred and fifty-odd landing craft loads, exclusive of extra supplies, and without any of their own vehicles. The latter two categories would roughly quadruple needs even at the Zhong’s generally austere scales of supply and equipment.

>   What did they have? Admiral Wanyan could count on sixteen largish air cushion vehicles and one hundred and seven landing craft suitable for getting a platoon ashore . . . slowly.

  It was factors like those that made amphibious operations the most problematic military operations there were. Just getting ashore was so complex that there was rarely enough time—or justifiable optimism—to plan ahead for what would be done once the force was ashore. Fortunately, for island attacks, that was rarely all that much of a problem. Simply being ashore and surviving usually meant the island was taken.

  This island was not quite of such a small size. Admiral Wanyan expected a certain amount of both maneuver and attrition after establishing his beachheads, to finish the job.

  At least that’s what I told the idiots at the war ministry. Personally, I think my Marines will be able to hold formation in a telephone booth by the time this island falls. That doesn’t matter though; we can always rebuild the Marine Corps. But this island, giving us a stranglehold over the most important waterway on the planet? Worth every drop of blood.

  The Taizhou was a much smaller vessel than the Luyang. One could feel it in the way the ship rocked. Not that the admiral was likely to get seasick, but it was a different sensation. The strange sensation become much more pronounced when Taizhou swung her three triple turrets to starboard and flung the first of many broadsides at Beach Red, just west of the Isla Real’s tadpole’s tail.

  Fixed Turret 177, Isla Real, Balboa, Terra Nova

  De la Mesa popped the hatch and cranked his seat up enough to let his eyes peep over the rim of the cupola. The hatch remained above his head, providing a fair degree of a protection from an overhead burst. When he’d first occupied this position with his three charges, he’d not been able to see the sea for all the trees. Now he could see the sand of the beach, the white-churned surf, and, if he cared to drop back below and check through his commander’s sight, the Zhong formations churning in.

  He could also see the wrecked freighter, the MV Sadducee—well one of them; he’d heard there were two, the other being the MV Nimrod—that had been caught in an air raid and sunk. He’d never been told, but he was pretty sure that that freighter was a lot less abandoned than it had been made to look. If his guess was right . . .

  Poor bastards are going to be walking through the surf on our side of the reef, that, or clustered along the beach facing inland, and they’re going to take it from a flank they don’t expect or from the rear. Jesus, what a slaughter just a squad or two could make from there.

  De la Mesa reached up to adjust the hatch a bit. As he did, he noticed that his right hand was trembling. He remembered something he’d read once in one of the legion-published books that tended to sit in unit libraries. To paraphrase, I’m not trembling like an eager race horse; I’m scared out of my wits.

  The sight of a line of smoke, rising above the dunes, didn’t help his state of nerves in the slightest. Rather, it made them worse. So, for that matter, did the sudden sound of chattering machine guns from all along the beach. That, he believed, was mostly the unmanned, water-cooled machine gun bunkers, firing from a cradle that captured a portion of their recoil energy and converted it into movement left and right by means of a toothed crossbar running between the legs of their tripods. These, he had been told, had about forty minutes’ worth of ammunition, and would keep spitting that out until they ran out, or were destroyed. Though remotely controlled—and I wonder for how many the wires have been cut or the antenna knocked down—these were based on the type of overengineered guns used in the early stages of the Great Global War, supplemented with a semi-automatic cocking mechanism that could clear stoppages. If they killed anyone, it would be a fluke. But they could be counted on to make the enemy nervous and attract an undue portion of his attention.

  Inside, with the hatch down, de la Mesa wouldn’t be able to hear. Still, he hated not being able to see. He dropped his chair down, closing the hatch above, then settled his eyes into the thermal sight.

  My, isn’t that quite the show?

  As far as de la Mesa could see, all across the horizon, a mass of enemy ships, amphibious vehicles, and landing craft crawled across the water. One of the forward landing craft in his field of view apparently hit a nutcracker, a kind of antismall boat mine, that blew the front several meters upward, even as it blew the ramp completely off. Soldiers—well, Marines, I suppose—were flung off into the water in all manner of sprawling and undignified death.

  That was some bad luck, the sergeant thought. We actually don’t have that many nutcrackers out, I understand.

  In the thermal sight, de la Mesa saw what seemed to be thousands of tracers crawling across the horizon. The resolution in the sight wasn’t enough to distinguish water spouts rising from the sea, but he assumed they were there and were probably terrifying the enemy. He did see any number of landing craft that he could have engaged with success, but the orders were not to engage the landing craft until authorized to do so. He didn’t understand why that would be.

  I’m a sergeant. I guess that means I’m also a mushroom; kept in the dark and fed bullshit.

  Then he saw it, the first target that was within his little command’s authority to engage at any time. A tank. De la Mesa hadn’t noticed it at first, perhaps because the hull was mostly submerged, the turret small, and the little that showed was hidden by the waves. Whatever it was, the thing was clear enough now as it crawled up onto the sand, its gun belching flame at targets the gunner probably didn’t know were just unmanned machine guns.

  “Gunner! HEAT! Tank!” They had some sabot ammunition, in case a heavy managed to get ashore. But the turret had much more High Explosive, Antitank, since it would do for both antiarmor and antipersonnel engagements.

  Juan, seated below and on the other side of the turret, echoed the command. The turret slewed slightly, with an almost imperceptible whine. Julio, the loader, not really aware of what was going on outside but much happier doing the job to which de la Mesa had drilled him numb, filled the carousel.

  “Target!” announced Juan.

  “Fire!”

  The turret didn’t rock backward as a tank might have. Still, even though the HEAT rounds were undercharged as compared with the sabot, the whole position shuddered with the recoil. What happened downrange happened too quickly for either de la Mesa or Juan to pick out the individual steps. One second the Zhong light tank was slinking across the sand, hesitantly, as if expecting a mine. The next second after that there appeared a mixed red and black flower blooming on the turret, just left of the gun; the next the turret was flying into the air on a column of flame, spinning over and over like some frying pan in a rather odd juggling act.

  As to the light tank’s crew? Well, probably vaporized.

  “Well done, Juan,” said the sergeant. “Good shooting.”

  The young and not too badly mentally retarded gunner looked away from his sight, giving the sergeant a grateful look.

  “You done good, boy,” de la Mesa added, for emphasis, then, “Gunner! Canister! Infantry!”

  Zhong Light Cruiser Taizhou, Mar Furioso, Terra Nova

  Wanyan stared at the map while staff officers busied themselves with making marks on it that he was pretty sure bore little relation to any detailed reality. What matter that they call off “first wave one hundred percent ashore” when half or more of those are floating face down in the surf? I suppose that’s mostly “ashore,” but it hardly suggests progress.

  There were three beaches targeted for the landing. West of the tadpole’s tail was Beach Red, which was outflanked automatically by the tail. The tail, therefore, was Beach Green, and was, so far, the only place taken that Wanyan was confident of holding. That said, it was taking a fearsome pounding from the enemy’s armored, turreted heavy and concrete-revetted super heavy mortars, farther inland. So far, the number of reported landed were only just keeping ahead of the number of reported dead and medevacs. Still, Green had to be held or Red became an im
possibility.

  Beach Orange was southeast of the tail and, by all reports, a horror story. Listening to the reports from the commanders, or sometimes just their radio-telephone operators, if those were all that remained, was heartbreaking. One conversation in particular stuck with Wanyan. That was where a young private kept apologizing over the radio for interrupting the report by dropping his microphone, but, “I’m sorry . . . I’m so sorry . . . I’m trying . . . really I am . . . but I only have the one finger and thumb on my remaining arm. I’m so sorry . . .”

  Two things in particular bothered Wanyan. One was that forward progress seemed to be held up by a minefield that the engineers simply couldn’t get a handle on. They had both magnetic and radar mine detectors, as good as any on the planet, but they kept alerting on things that just weren’t there. A thousand false positives to an actual mine detection was a common phenomenon, but this was approaching twenty or thirty times that. And when the engineers grew disgusted and tried pushing forward, while ignoring the false positives? Boom. “Medic!”

  The other thing was on the approach to Beach Red. Though there was no flanking fire, and though the edge of the shore had been cleared of the enemy, Marines wading in were still being bowled over like ninepins. Wanyan had developed a suspicion, though, one sufficient to generate orders.

  Wreck MV Sadducee (Zion Registry), Isla Real, Balboa, Terra Nova

  Centurion Alba, Tenth Infantry Tercio, had one platoon with him on the wreck. There’d been more, mostly engineers—coming, going, and occasionally staying for a few days—in the period of time since it had been “wrecked.” In fact, it never had been more than scratched by the Zhong or Taurans. It had been set out, partially unloaded, hoping for a near miss. When it came, that near miss had been used as an excuse to scuttle it. Then the engineers had proceeded to turn it into a little steel fortress, capable of covering the coast to the east and south.