by Tom Kratman
Man, that is one cool son of a bitch of a corporal, thought the dragoon who’d asked the question.
With the Tauran fire that had pinned them suddenly cut off, the Balboan platoon should have rushed to their feet and across the street. But, with the platoon leader down, no one gave the command. Every man knew what they should do, but no one wanted to be the first up and the first to draw more fire.
Porras, not knowing why no one gave the command to rush, decided that it was up to him. Screaming “Follow me!” he lurched to his feet and began to run to the shelter of the far side. The Balboans followed, Cruz and the platoon sergeant kicking the slower ones into motion to support their officer.
Reaching the far side first, Porras flung himself to the ground. Frantically, he looked to the Gallic IFV that had fired upon his platoon. A few Tauran soldiers huddled behind its sheltering bulk, the flames of the track casting strange shadows on the ground. Porras did not hesitate. The footbeats of his soldiers echoing in his ears, he aimed and fired, the F-26 rifle vibrating against his shoulder. The Taurans fell in a heap. Porras did not release the trigger until his entire magazine of ninety-three rounds had been emptied.
Naturally, some wounded were killed as well. It was impossible to distinguish the hale from the hurt. The unconscious but still breathing dragoon the corporal had saved, for example, suddenly spouted many more holes to allow his lungs to draw air. That would have killed him, eventually, if blood loss and damage to his organs had not.
Quarters 20, Family Housing, Guerrero Road and Firth Street, Fuerte Guerrero, Balboa, Terra Nova
Back in the day, under Federated States ownership, then Fort Guerrero had had a number of really very nice, spacious, attractive, and solid-as-a-rock family quarters for officers, mostly senior ones, and noncoms, all senior ones. Somewhat like Imperial Range, these had been split between Balboa and the FSC with the Tauran Union taking over those that the FSC had retained, under their mandate from the World League.
The housing areas sometimes represented intelligence sieves, for both sides, as wives gossiped across political lines and men engaged in figurative cock-measuring contests, generally in support of political lines. Sergeant Major Cruz, for example, had his family in one of the larger duplexes, while he had Scarface Arredondo in the other half of the duplex. On the north of those two, however, were a Major Michael (“Mad Mike”) Tipton, Anglian Army. To the south was an Italian family, the del Cols.
Not particularly surprisingly, the soldiers—cock-measuring contests notwithstanding—got along famously well, as soldiers will, while the wives, in those three buildings and the other eighty or so on the installation set aside for families, had a pretty nice informal club going, watching each other’s kids, trading recipes, sharing maids, and just generally doing what soldiers’ wives did best, being good women.
In Quarters Twenty, however, Major Tipton—Anglian Army, seconded to the TUSF-B—awoke to the twin sounds of his wife screaming hysterically and the steady drum beat, impossibly loud, coming from the parade field just in front of his house. Tipton went to investigate, then came back to his wife saying, “There’s a big fucking artillery battery on the field! They’re shooting like crazy!”
The hysterical screaming converted into a single, amazingly drawn-out shriek, that rose and rose until Tipton grabbed his wife, shook her vigorously, and said, “Honey, shut the fuck up and let me think.”
Tipton tried frantically to think, but the steady, “Cañon! Fuego!” followed by kaboom after gut-wrenching kaboom made that an exercise in futility. “Shit! Shit!”
He did have one good thought though. “Honey, grab the kids and head toward the water. There should be some dead space down there. Just do it! Now!” Coming partially to her senses, Tipton’s wife, Judy, got out of bed naked.
I wish I had a couple of guns, thought the major, but nooo, the wife wouldn’t let anything so evil into her house.
The doorbell rang, barely heard above the pounding of the nearby guns. Tipton answered. It was their next neighbor over, Caridad Cruz, carrying a whimpering baby in her arms, a Balboan chaplain, and four armed men. Though Tipton didn’t know the chaplain by sight, he could see by the man’s collar, with its warrant officer’s insignia on one side of his lapels and a silver cross on the other. Looking past the chaplain, Mrs. Cruz, and the four armed men, Tipton saw several dozen more soldiers standing in the street.
Looking past Tipton, on the other hand, the chaplain saw a buck naked Judy Tipton standing in the middle of the foyer, in obvious shock. Caridad bustled past warrant officer and major, then took control of the naked wife, turning her and leading her to her bedroom to, “For God’s sake, Judy, get some clothing on!”
“Excuse me, señor,” said the chaplain. “I have been detailed to go to each residence here and advise the occupants that portions of the legion have been—rather, are—engaged in battle in response to Tauran incursions upon Balboan soil. The legion regrets and apologizes for any inconvenience or fright this may have caused you or your family. Mrs. Cruz has volunteered her place as a safe house for you and yours. Please go with her and stay indoors with your family until the situation is resolved. These men will guard her house and the RSMs. Be advised, too, that operations are ongoing in this area as well. We cannot guarantee your safety in the open.”
Tipton, nonplussed, merely said: “Thank you . . . uh, Father.” He closed the door as the priest turned to leave. The four soldiers waited at the door until Tipton, his now dressed wife and their children, and Cara Cruz, came out. Then they escorted them to the Cruz residence before posting themselves around the house.
“Where’s Ricardo?” asked Judy Tipton, though she was pretty sure she knew the answer.
“He’s out there,” Cara answered. Then she began to shake.
CHAPTER THIRTY
A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee.
—Psalm 91:7, King James Version
Carretera Gallardo, Balboa Transitway Area, Balboa, Terra Nova
The northern tip of Brookings Field wasn’t actually visible from the highway, as Campbell and Hendryksen sped by it. What was visible was the brace of Sachsen Luftwaffe Cyclone fighter-bombers, taxiing to the southern takeoff point. Thirty-two seconds after the first of those Cyclones reached the spot, it was deluged with artillery fire—or possibly heavy mortars . . . or both—coming from somewhere inside the city. Neither plane nor crew had a chance, as shrapnel tore both men and their plane to shreds, while the mix of high explosive and white phosphorus set off the several tons of ordnance slung underneath the plane. It was that, the secondary explosions, that both destroyed the second Cyclone and tore the runway at the end into smoking, jagged ruin. All over the base, airmen and security personnel were wounded by shattering windows.
“Holy fuck!” said Campbell, shuddering at the explosions. Even at a distance of nearly a mile, the concussion from the blasts was staggering. It staggered Hendryksen, who barely managed to keep their vehicle on the asphalt.
What was also visible was a mass of tracers, arcing over Cerro Mina in a madman’s conception of a fiery waterfall in reverse, as the bullets struck metal or asphalt or concrete, then either ricocheted upwards or split off their tracer elements to fly alone toward the heavens.
“Take the back road,” Campbell shouted. She needn’t have. For one thing, between damage to his eardrums from the Brookings blasts, and the roar of the vehicle engine, Hendryksen wasn’t hearing much of anything. More importantly, however, he lacked a death wish. Anything heading toward Avenida Ascanio Arosemena—or its continuation, Avenida de la Santa Maria—needed either a death wish or steel-hard discipline. That many tracers, careening across the sky at random, suggested a staggering amount of aimed fire below them.
At the back gate to Cerro Mina they found an MP quivering behind sandbags laid around the base of the guard shack. The policeman seemed in shock. When asked to move the barrier gate, he couldn’t articul
ate and answer beyond some hysterical shaking of his head. Campbell had to get out, herself, to move the gate. Then she and Hendryksen stormed their vehicle through . . . to be met by barely aimed fire coming from the tree line to the west. Neither was hit, but the 6.5mm bullets shredded the front tires of their vehicle in an instant, dropping the steel rims to the asphalt as they shed the scraps of rubber that had once been tires. There was no controlling the vehicle then. Despite Hendryksen’s best efforts the car skidded off the side, slid into and then out of a drainage ditch, slammed into a thick tree and came to a halt in a cloud of steam from the ruptured radiator. Shards of safety glass from the shattered windshield covered the two Taurans, the hood, and was scattered all over the ditch and jungle. Headlight glass, too, was gone. The lights, one after the other, gave a defiant glow and then died out.
“Oh, my tits,” groaned Campbell. The seat and shoulder belts had cut into her “girls.” Then she looked left—Why the fuck did they have to go with Federated States rules for driving and car design? Oh, yes, I remember, they built this place—and saw Hendryksen slumped over the wheel, blood oozing from a deep gash on his head. He seemed more stunned than unconscious. At least, his eyes were open.
The side where they’d come to rest was a bit low, relative to the ground from which the fire had come. Bullets chipped the trees overhead, cut branches, and sent down showers of bark.
Campbell shuddered from the close call, then reached over to unbuckle Hendryksen.
Under the circumstances he couldn’t resist saying, “You have no idea how often I’ve wanted to get you into very much this very position.”
“Ya dirty bastard,” she answered, “undo your own belt.”
“And I see you’re getting into the precise spirit I had in mind . . .”
“Ah, shut up, ya pervert.” She finished undoing the seat belt, then pulled him behind her as she scooted back out of the vehicle. She got her feet to the ground, then continued pulling him out, easing him to the dirt until he could recover.
She leaned back into the vehicle to retrieve her submachine gun and the Cimbrian’s, along with a broad flat pouch holding six magazines. She should have been wearing it, she knew, but, outside of her chest, she was a little girl and the damned, bloody thing didn’t fit. As she was pulling back, she became aware of an enemy soldier, barely visible in the dank jungle, what with his pixelated tiger stripes blending in so well. The legionary had possibly been blinded by the lights before they died. She wasn’t taking any chances. At a range of maybe twenty feet she opened fire.
The first four bullets either missed or, impacting on the legionary’s armor, failed to penetrate. The fifth passed through his neck, blowing out a large chunk of meat and letting his life’s blood gush out in a fountain.
The volume of return fire was, in Campbell’s experience, simply amazing.
Never saw them fire so lavishly when I was with them . . . and they fired pretty lavishly compared to most, then.
She’d have been deader than chivalry but for the cover of the auto and the lip of the drainage ditch.
“Can ye walk yet?” she asked Hendryksen. If he’d been more alert and thought about it, he’d probably have realized that her starting to drop back to the accent of her youth was not a good sign.
“Get me to my fucking feet and I can run.”
She did, then started to help him up the side of the ditch. Big mistake, way big; the area immediately around where the crown of his head first made its appearance took about two hundred rounds from half a dozen or more sources, in a fraction of a second.
“Holy shit. Forget escape that way,” he said. “Follow the ditch.”
She followed his advice, but it only worked for a while. As drainage ditches sometimes do, this one bent. And the bend was covered by enemy fire.
She returned the fire, though the enemy probably had better vision of her area than she did of his. This time, as she spoke, Hendryksen did see the change in accent as a bad sign. “See youse Spanish sodomites, you”—the soliloquy was interrupted by several short bursts of fire—“wee baldy cunt, just you shaw yir heid wan mair time—there y’go, fuckin huv some a that—heh, Hendryksen, see’s anither mag over, wid ye—right, they’re a shoat tae shite, fuck, ah broke a fuckin’ nail, youse fuckin Latin bastards . . .”
What made the whole thing really horrifying is that it was all said in the kind of tone of voice a normal person might use in asking a waiter at a restaurant for a glass of water.
But the fire was definitely coming closer, driving Campbell and Hendryksen more and more behind cover. It was only a matter of time before whoever it was shooting at them was in a position to donate a grenade.
In anticipation of that grenade, or some other manner of grisly death, Hendryksen, not normally among the most spiritually driven of men, began making the sign of the cross on the theory, At this point it can’t hurt and might just help. He was at the “filioque” when, from off to their right there came a very long burst of fire—from weapons that weren’t designed to spit out eighteen hundred rounds a minute—and that, for a change, didn’t impact around them.
“It’s the cavalry,” Jan said, “and aboot fuckin’ tahm.”
Combat in cities and jungles tends to be rather short ranged, anyway. Night only makes this more pronounced and common. The relief that came to Campbell’s and Hendryksen’s rescue had, in fact, emerged from the entrance to the Tunnel, which was a scant two hundred meters from the scene of the action. A few hundred feet below, and a good distance inward, Janier fretted some more.
Will that South Colombian bastard understand the whole point of the exercise or will he, as usual overreact? I should have worked this out in advance, the limited provocation once I was overruled, the counterattack, the letter written in blood to the politicos back in Taurus . . .
Janier’s headquarters was a riot of confused activity. Reports—often contradictory ones—flowed in all directions, to include into little muddy eddies of disinformation that led nowhere. So far the only positive steps taken had been to recall the staff, to order the engaged company to withdraw if possible, to tell the aviators to get something into the air, and to order the rest of the dragoons to roll to relieve the company.
Janier heard over the loudspeaker the sobbing report from Brookings about what had happened to the two planes they’d tried to send up, and what that had done to the base and its personnel. He was about to order Arnold Air Force Base to fill in for Brookings when he looked at the map and realized, No, no point. There’s a regiment’s worth of artillery in the town east of Arnold, Santa Cruz. They’ll just blast the base if we try to lift anything.
“Sir?” It was the AdC, Malcoeur, holding up an old-fashioned black telephone receiver, actually a relic of when the FSC had ruled here. “Sir, it’s the Balboans . . . the chief . . . Duque . . . or whatever he calls himself. He wants to talk with you. He says it’s very important.”
Oh, I imagine it is. Janier took the phone from his aide and covered the mouthpiece with his hand. Note to self, remember to put on the right show for the audience. Wonder if Carrera’s thinking the same thing? Likely he is, so don’t take anything he says too personally.
“Has there been any word of what the rest of the legion is doing?”
“Moving to dispersal areas, sir. They’re taking no aggressive moves, barring a couple of artillery strikes anyplace we’ve tried to escalate or made some move in that direction.”
Janier nodded understanding, then took his hand from over the mouthpiece, placing the phone to his ear.
“Janier.”
Carrera’s voice was strained as he said, “It would appear that some fighting has broken out between elements of our forces.”
“Are you implying that you didn’t order this?”
“No . . . no, I ordered it.”
“In heaven’s name, why?” Because you understand the issues, I suspect.
“Because,” Carrera answered, “the people in Taurus are most likel
y under the illusion that the legion of today would be the walk-over everyone thinks it was when the Federated States invaded. I hope to prove differently. Of course, if we cannot, at the kinds of force levels committed, then I will know we cannot win. In that case I will step down and surrender myself to the Tauran Union.
“Of course, that depends on the levels of force involved. If you throw in everything, and I throw in everything, you will lose but it won’t prove much since you have only about one division here while I have the equivalent of six and change within striking range.”
Janier, suspecting the possibility that his words were being monitored and possibly recorded, said, disingenuously, “I don’t understand. You have your entire force mobilized, but only one group is fighting. That makes no sense.”
“Yes it does. Think. If one of my battalions can take on one of your battalions in a great, bloody skirmish, then you can tell your political masters that we’re too tough a nut to crack. And then you’ll be believed. And the rest of my tercios won’t have to fight.”
Janier didn’t answer for a moment, pausing for dramatic effect on those presumptive listeners and reviewers. “A blood sacrifice? You’re offering up some of your troops as a blood sacrifice?”
Carrera sighed. “That’s about it. And it can stay at that level, too. If you don’t send any more troops into the fight than your mechanized battalion, I will not reinforce Second Cohort Second Tercio, beyond their normal supporting artillery.”