Knox's Irregulars

by J. Wesley Bush

  Warm tears slid down his cheeks and he laughed a broken sort of laugh. It was funny. He had only just learned how to live his life and now it was over.

  After perhaps an hour, the door opened again. Rather than Onegin, Colonel Tsepashin entered, his black campaign coat trailing behind him like a cloak.

  "The Scourge has decided to execute you rather than experiment," Tsepashin said in a voice cold with rage. "There is nothing I can do to change that. But I have the privilege of being your executioner."

  He opened the door. "Come with me, izmenik." Nabil stood, meeting his eyes as he crossed to him. All his fear was gone. He felt pity for Tsepashin, striving so hard for something, something so far from the truth. He thought he had won, but soon Nabil would escape the fowler's net. Soon wicked hands would grasp in vain, for Nabil would be gone.

  He was led out to a courtyard. In patches where the snow had melted, small tufts of grass were growing — once dead, but called back to life by the sun. Overhead, the sun itself was hidden behind thick clouds. He knew it would return.

  An iron hand gripped his neck, pushing Nabil to his knees in the snow. Behind him, Tsepashin's guldor pichok slid from its sheath. He felt the sharp tip of the blade trail down his back. "When this blade enters your heart, you will cease to exist. I am taking away your last hope for immortality, heretic," Tsepashin said gloatingly.

  "Whoever seeks to save his life will lose it. Whoever loses his life shall find it. . ." Nabil murmured, pressing folded hands to his lips.

  "What did you say?" Tsepashin asked, nudging him with the blade. "I want to remember your final words."

  Nabil smiled serenely. "I said I forgive you."

  All was still and calm, Tsepashin's angry shouts a world away from him. The weapon shifted and Nabil knew it would come then. There was no fear — He was waiting for him.

  A flash of pain, and then all was light.

  CHAPTER 20

  A good plan, violently executed now, is

  better than a perfect plan next week.

  —General George S. Patton

  The Quartermaster's monotone droned endlessly in Randal's ears. Though he could easily read the bad news printed on the hardcopy for himself, the man insisted on reading each item aloud.

  "Oil, nil. Wheat flour, nil. Corn meal, nil. One hundred twenty-two kilos dry rice. Thirty cartons shelf-stable milk. Canned goods, nil."

  Pieter lacked Randal's forbearance. "Skip the food part - you're making me hungrier."

  Nonplussed, the Q-master continued his recitation, omitting the rest of the food items. "Lieutenant Lebedev seems to have solved the propellant shortage for now, sir. He's been working on formulating a crude propellant to reload expended shell casings. Two of the ingredients, sulfur and charcoal, were easy to secure. He's had difficulty locating the third, niter. Happily, this seems to be resolved. By boiling down urine, he's been able to crystallize usable quantities of niter." He flipped through a few sheets of the hardcopy. "There is an attached note requesting that you order everyone to save the contents of their bedpans for him, sir."

  Pieter and Randal grinned at each other. Only Lebedev would have tried an experiment like that in the first place.

  The sound of hard-heeled boots striking rock carried across the Tactical Ops Center. "Randy, I need you and Pieter. Q-master, get lost. Take everyone else with you."

  Giving Jeni a dirty look, Randal dismissed the nervous Quartermaster. "Please excuse us. Good work, by the way. And tell Lebedev that we'll leave no bedpan unturned, so to speak."

  Jeni watched impatiently as the Quartermaster gathered the rest of the staff and departed. She motioned Pieter and Randal in close. "Onegin just gave us a new mission. It's ugly." Her eyebrows arched dramatically. "We're going to take out the Abkhenazi High Command. In the Haelbroeck Chateau, no less."

  Randal felt like he'd just heard his own obituary read.

  Pieter's expression was just as shocked. Shifting his stance, he tapped the side of his head. "That's my deaf ear. Say that again, because I know I just misheard you."

  A memory chit appeared in the girl's hand. "A list of our targets is on here. Onegin asked if I thought we could do it. I told him of course we could."

  Pieter boggled at her, spluttering, "Of course you think we can do it, the only thing you ever see of war is on a tridscreen!"

  Afraid Pieter might just take a poke at her and aware that Jeni would probably incapacitate his much-needed lieutenant, Randal stepped in between them. "He has a point, Jeni. I grew up visiting the chateau. It has two hundred fifteen rooms and it's built like a fortress. Even if we got inside, how would we know how to find the targets?"

  A blithe little shrug was her response. Chagrin wasn't an emotion Randal would ever associate with Jeni. "Maybe we should slot the mem chit."

  They slipped the chit into the TOC's primary computer. This was powered by an omnifuel generator, along with the handful of other electronic devices in the command center. The computer functioned in many roles for them — tabulating recon reports, publishing propaganda leaflets, viewing the images collected by Jeni's Kitchen Klatch and a hundred others. It also supported the unit's sole functioning holoprojector.

  The projector was flat and boxy, with a semi-opaque glass top. Jeni keyed up the chit, and the stern visage of an Abkhenazi officer appeared.

  "Field Marshal Mashkhadov, supreme commander of ground forces," came a narrator's voice. It was distorted, electronically masked. The voice gave a bio of the Field Marshal, along with known habits. Next was Vanguard General Assad, with the same sort of details.

  "Cue it up a bit, Jeni. See if there's anything besides a to-do list."

  Dizzyingly, the images blended and flickered as Jeni fast-forwarded the data.

  "Stop, that's good." A figure sat in a high-backed chair, speaking directly into the camera. The data was edited, the figure digitally masked along with his voice. "At the time of your attack, all of your primaries should be found in the Great Hall."

  "Wait." Pieter raised a protesting hand. The image froze. "How can this chap know where they'll be?"

  Jeni's smile was impish. It irritated Randal. It was easy for her to be smug, she wasn't going to try and break into the place. "He's right, Jeni. Do they think I'm some kind of magician? This place is a fortress!"

  "Randy, if you pull this off I promise it'll be the last rabbit you have to pull out of your hat."

  "How do you figure?"

  Casting a glance at the door, Jeni answered in a conspiratorial tone, "Because we're hitting these guys simultaneous with the New Genevan counter-offensive."

  Pieter just stared, gobsmacked. Randal's legs suddenly felt rubbery like after a run. "He told you that?"

  "Uh-huh. That's how he knows where they'll be. With a counter-offensive launched against them, they'll all be sequestered in the command center."

  The three of them fell silent. After so long a struggle, even the possibility of victory was almost too much to process.

  The rest of the mem chit was devoted to overhead recon holos and a listing of the chateau's garrison, which was formidable. "I thought all the satellites were swatted down early on," Pieter said curiously. "These holos look fairly recent."

  "Mesopheric Recon Drones," Jeni explained. "They're very new, very slick. Solar powered with a sensor cross-section the size of a cashew. It's got high-powered optics and a microwave burst transmitter to send back its findings. Virtually unlimited range. I want one."

  Looking over the holo, Randal was relieved to see that, at least superficially, little had changed around the chateau. Built on the banks of the Zolotaya River, the chateau was an eclectic mix of Loire Valley styles ranging from Louis XIII to Henry IV. Just as mongrel were the decorative aspects of the structure, Renaissance frescoes commingling freely with French Classical cornices.

  Though designed to look ancient, Randal knew it was barely forty years old, built by Grandfather Haelbroeck when the venerable patriarch made good at mining. To Randal the
extravagance was all too arriviste. The Knox family was content to live in a modest-sized mansion when not in the Prime Minister's residence.

  For all Pieter's pretensions, the Haelbroecks weren't old money. Rather they'd earned it through work and entrepreneurship. Most of New Geneva saw that as something to be proud of, but Randal knew it always irked his friend.

  The main body of the chateau was built around an open-air courtyard. From this central courtyard rose a freestanding tower, the "Lanternhouse." This was glass-domed, with the largest chandelier Randal had ever seen hanging at the top. One could see it for kilometers. Magnifying the image, Randal could see communications arrays covering the top of the tower. It was perfect for a commo center.

  The front façade of the chateau faced southward. A drawbridge extended from its center to stretch across the demi-moat. Like the moat it crossed, the drawbridge was purely ceremonial — it was permanently affixed to the ground.

  The guest wing of the building extended westward from the main body. It was built atop a mason arch bridge that spanned the river but led to nowhere.

  On the east side, the demi-moat ended just out of view from the road. All remaining space was taken up by an enormous hedge maze. Around back the garden continued, mostly flowerbeds, sculptures and small trees, all in geometric patterns. Randal remembered vegetables being cultivated as well. Some group of monks back on Terra had done the same at an abbey, and Grandfather Haelbroeck had taken a liking to the idea.

  What looked to be a security fence surrounded the chateau; that was a new addition. So were the hover tanks, scout cars and mobile artillery pieces visible in the holo. Parked in the garden out back was a small motor pool, likely skimmers for the staff officers.

  "Jeni, magnify this section here," Pieter said, poking his finger into the holo and disrupting it.

  The view zoomed to the ridgeline overlooking the chateau. That close, the image became a bit grainy, but they could still see details. Randal spotted what Pieter was getting at. "Good thinking. There's nothing more than that observation post up there."

  "Exactly, Kipper. We can drop a double helping of hurt on them from that ridge."

  Steepling fingers and tapping them together, Randal nodded. "You two keep all this under wraps. Pieter, start rounding up platoon leaders. Jeni, please get me a secure channel with the rural wing. They have some hiking to do."

  ***

  The next few days were a flurry of activity at headquarters. Randal felt half-conscious most of the time from hunger and lack of sleep. There was just so much to be done: planning the raid, scouting the site, securing the equipment they would need. Just one aspect of their preparations, slipping rocket launchers and mortars out of the city to the rural wing, consumed hours of planning and organization by itself.

  Worse, the longer they planned, the larger the operation grew. It was his own fault, really. He was the one who first conceived of Operation Jabberwock. The name had seemed appropriate, since they planned to cut off the head of a monster. Ariane had been the only one to get the reference, declaring it "brillig."

  "It's ambitious, Captain Knox, I'll give you that," Sergeant-Major Wheeler had said, scratching at his bristly gray hair and looking over the map again. "If it works it'll be beautiful, but you'll have the devil's time coordinating attacks on twenty sites at once."

  Randal couldn't resist a smile. "I wouldn't have a hard time, Sergeant-Major. . . You would. I'll be at the chateau when all this goes off." Randal tapped a spot on the map well away from the city. "What's your advice: do we expand the raid, or just keep it simple and strike the chateau?"

  The Sergeant-Major took a soggy lump of bark from under his lip, tossing it away. Many were chewing it against hunger; it had a way of fooling the belly. Drumming his fingers on the table, he grunted. "It's a gamble, but it's worth it. The more trouble we cause in the city, the slower they'll be to respond to the raid on the chateau. And hopefully the less relief troops they'll have available to send to the front lines."

  "That's my thinking too. The Abkhenazi are strong, but brittle. If this counter-offensive succeeds, I think they'll fall apart. Anything we can do to make that happen. . ."

  Jeni wandered into the room as he was speaking, squinting to read a small scrap of paper in the dim light. The print looked tiny from what Randal could see. "Don't forget that their command structure is totally centralized," the girl contributed casually as she kept reading. "If you kill the leaders, it'll paralyze their entire army."

  "A NATE report from one of your people?" Randal asked, sliding out a chair for her.

  "Huh-uh. A dead-letter drop from Onegin. . ." she said absently, still trying to decipher it. "Nabil's dead - Tsepashin did the execution himself. Whatever Nabil said to him, it really set off Tsepashin. Onegin says he spent the rest of the day bawling out anyone who looked at him." She read further, grinning at something. "He sent us a list of places to booby-trap. Apparently he cooked up a confession from Nabil full of phony Irregular bases. I love this guy!"

  Randal craned his head to take a look at the list, but Jeni turned her back to him, reading the note like it was a love letter. "Aw, it says he's going to have to go rabbit. Once the Abkhenazi figure out the confession was bogus, his shelf-life is going to be short. He wishes us luck, and says he'll. . ." Her words trailed off and she folded the letter, stuffing it away. "The rest is for me."

  The Sergeant-Major chuckled, sharing a look with Randal. "When you're done mooning, Lieutenant Cho, give me an update on the search for EGAs and wetsuits."

  "We're tracking on that, Sergeant-Major. The Kitchen Klatch has found five dive suits so far, and a half-dozen External Gill Apparatuses."

  Randal folded up the map. "It sounds like we've planned everything we can for tonight. Now all that's left to do is—"

  "—the impossible!" Jeni finished for him brightly.

  CHAPTER 21

  The starting point for the understanding of war

  is the understanding of human nature.

  —S.L.A. Marshal

  Randal dug armored heels into the silty bottom of the riverbed. He and the other three in powered armor — Ariane, Lebedev, and Mayor Jowett — were each tethered to two or three divers in wetsuits wearing encrypted headsets. It had taken them two hours to get in position, entering the water far up-river and then making slow progress to the chateau.

  While Mayor Jowett huddled with them under the river, the other members of the Burnley Gap militia augmented the Irregulars on the ridgeline overlooking the chateau.

  They were just one of a score of rural militia cells taking part in Operation Jabberwock. In addition to the raid on the chateau, almost two dozen strikes were simultaneously taking place on key Abkhenazi transport, commo, and supply points.

  They'd crossed H-hour about thirty minutes before entering the water. Prior to submerging, he had noticed smoke plumes in the direction of the city. Unless the unnatural glow was a product of wishful thinking, his people were already causing trouble for the enemy.

  He was growing impatient with the wait. It was pitch black under the ice. Even on thermal all that registered was the even blue of frozen rock and water, broken only by the orange of the divers. The suit's sensors mapped the surroundings, overlaying green contour lines atop the monotonous blue.

  They were sheltered under one of the enormous mason arches supporting the west wing of the chateau. There the river widened and shallowed; Randal could nearly touch the surface. Water conducted sound better than air and when the diversionary force on the ridgeline started shooting, his audio pickups had no problem catching it.

  His comset squelched three times, banishing stray thoughts. The forward observer had decided the garrison was distracted and had signaled for Randal to move. Theoretically, it meant the way up topside was clear. "We're GO! Move out," he called to the others.

  Extending climbing spikes, he slammed one into a bridge support and began to climb. Shortly, he broke the brittle surface of the ice. A quick visual
scan revealed no one waiting to pounce on them. At his side the other three armored bodies surfaced.

  Giving a tug on the rope around his waist, he ensured it was still secure. Then as quickly as possible he scaled the structure. Though the sound of the spikes driving into stone was damningly loud in his ears, he knew the din of incoming rocket and mortar fire more than compensated. He felt tension on the rope; the first of his three passengers was free of the water's grip.

  He crabwalked his climb to avoid a wide picture window above him. Then he passed the first floor. Glancing below, he saw Shin and two other Headhunters swinging freely, attached by carabineers to the mountaineering rope.

  Still no one was wise to them as he passed the second floor. The Abkhenazi were likely more concerned with what was shooting at them from outside the walls than the slim probability of infiltrators.

  Ariane and Lebedev were keeping up well, but the mayor lagged. The motions of his early-model armor were sluggish and awkward. Randal would never have brought him if the assault team hadn't severely needed beefing up. He imagined Pieter's complaints as the ancient suit jerkily hauled him up the wall, banging him into the rough stone.

  The roof was only a few meters past the third floor. He grabbed a piece of cornice molding and started to pull himself on to the roof. His heart skipped as the plaster fleur-de-lis broke off in his hand. He hurriedly jabbed a spike into the wall and pulled himself up onto the roof — a copper-coated hump long oxidized green by the elements. Making some slack in the rope, he looped it around a gargoyle spout and hauled up his passengers.