by Tom Kratman
Fifty miles away from the desperate little battle, three helicopters, two gunships and one troop carrier made their tortuous way across and above the jungle. The helicopters dipped into little valleys—had the crews not been inured to the constant roller-coastering they might well have thrown up—and barely scraped over the treetops.
The crews of all three helicopters heard frantic cries for help from the commandos they were racing to rescue. They were treated, if that’s the right word, to a blow-by-blow description of the unequal fight.
“Romeo Five-three, this is Charlie Two-seven. You’ve got to help us now.”
“Five-three, Two-seven. There’s no way we can make it to the PZ—” The call cut off temporarily as a nearby mortar explosion forced the radio operator’s head down. “. . . we’re taking heavy fire; mortar fire. We are stuck. Come in soonest with full firepower.”
“Five-three, Two-seven. The lieutenant is down . . . crap, he’s dead. Took one right through the head. Shit! Five-three, you’ve got to get us out now!”
A new voice spoke. It was still Tauran. “This is Two-seven! I say again, Charlie Two-seven. We’re taking heavy direct fire from at least four armored vehicles! They’re chewing us . . . the adjudant’s down . . .”
That was the last transmission heard from Charlie Two-seven by Romeo Five-three.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Just because something isn’t a lie does not mean that it isn’t deceptive. A liar knows that he is a liar, but one who speaks mere portions of truth in order to deceive is a craftsman of destruction.
—Criss Jami
La Chorrera Military Academy, Balboa, Terra Nova
Although using teenagers as soldiers has its disadvantages, there are equally weighty advantages. For one thing, they are extremely easily led. For another, they are so naturally far below adults on the social scale that they don’t ask too many questions of their adult leaders; they obey. For a third, they tend to be somewhat unrealistically enthusiastic and idealistic.
That idealism counts for much. Though it is an element of received wisdom that causes count for nothing, and that soldiers fight only for their comrades, this is, at best, a half-truth and, like other half-truths, is wholly misleading. For the cost of battle is blood: wounded, crippled, and dead friends. Those costs weigh. Eventually they can weigh so heavily that the soldiers stop fighting altogether. Why fight, after all, when it involves such loss and pain? Why fight for your comrades when you can knock them over the heads and hide them from friend and enemy?
This is where causes and ideals come in. They justify, at least in part, that pain and those losses. They are usually not infinite in their strength and reach, but they need not be. They need only last, or to cause those who adhere to them to last, just a few days, a few hours, sometimes just a few minutes, longer than their adversaries.
Only Suarez and a few of his key staff knew the real reason the Corps was out maneuvering through the godforsaken jungle.
Approximately nine hundred young, idealistic, and enthusiastic cadets, with their adult instructors, sat waiting for parts of Second and Fifth Legions, plus Thirteenth Brigade, Twenty-second Combat Support Legion—in other words the bulk of Second Corps’ regular and reserve echelons—to sweep by on their maneuvers toward, but not into, the Transitway Area. The adults supervising the cadets put on a good show, whatever their fears. The young boys sat essentially without fear.
Places would be left by Second Corps, several large holes on the ground with neither troops nor heavy equipment. Into this space the cadet cohort would fit. Indeed, it would fit and be lost to outside observers among the thirteen thousand other mobilized troops of Second Corps.
The Corps would sweep forward, also picking up the cadets from the Arraijan Military Academy on the way—a different set of spaces was to be left for them—until it reached the old Transitway borders. At the same time, it was expected, if there were Taurans on the ground looking, that the mass of Second Corps would probably drive them out of eyeshot until the cadets had hidden.
Until they disappeared into underground hides, warehouses, housing developments, and whatever else had been prepared for them—which included at least one sewer—the cadets and their instructors, perhaps twenty-one hundred officers, warrants, noncoms, and boys, from both schools combined, would blend well with—indeed they would be indistinguishable from—the mobilized soldiers of the Second Corps.
Then, once the boys and their cadres were well hidden, and the Taurans in an absolute panic over the suddenly materialized threat, the men of Second Corps would go home on trucks and on foot, leaving the Tauran Union Security Force-Balboa none the wiser and feeling much more secure.
Aleksandr Sitnikov, one time officer in His Marxist Majesty’s Fifth Guards Motorized Rifle Regiment, had joined Suarez’s party early, along with the former’s small staff, then marched along with them for the duration. Well over fifty, now, Sitnikov still didn’t look a lot older, nor much different, than he had when he’d first come to the legion as a contract instructor on armored fighting vehicles and armored warfare. Balding then, he was almost totally bald now. Other than that, though, he could still pass for a man of about forty or even a bit less. His fierce regimen of physical fitness training probably accounted for some of that. More was to be found in his boyish, good-natured smile.
At a construction site not far from the border, Sitnikov and Suarez shook hands. “We’re counting on you, you Volgan bastard,” said the latter.
“The boys won’t let you down,” Sitnikov assured the Balboan.
“I’m sure they won’t,” Suarez agreed, “and I shall offer a special prayer that fate doesn’t let them down.”
Military Academy Sergento Juan Malvegui, Puerto Lindo, Balboa, Terra Nova
Cristobal was the touchiest province to move the cadets around in. Road nets were few, land very constricted by the Shimmering Sea and the lake that formed such a large chunk of the Transitway. Moreover, a substantial number of cadets had to be infiltrated to Clay Dairy Farm—right into the middle of territory that was jointly controlled. Only the density of the jungle and the secondary importance of the area stood on Balboa’s side.
Carrera had been almost ready to change the plans for the Puerto Lindo cadets, to let them fight with their own small arms and the heavier equipment that had been stashed in the nearby Sabanita Maintenance Facility, even though it was not in an ideal position for their mission.
In the end, it was the possibility that he was ready to change his plans to save his boy that forced him to force himself to leave them alone, except for asking Muñoz-Infantes, at Fort William, to change his plans and dispositions, to put on a more aggressive display with his battalion of Castilians than Carrera had originally asked for.
Ham and the other eighteen hundred cadets were awakened—at least the few who had been able to find some sleep had been awakened; Hamilcar Carrera was not among them—at “Zero Dark Hundred” by the cadre who had already been up for an hour by then, barring only the few who had been able to snatch an hour or two’s sleep. An hour later, an hour before sunrise, the entire Puerto Lindo corps of cadets, with their leaders, over twenty-one hundred strong, assembled on the glacis of the old fort. The cadres, a mix of Volgans and Balboans, carried pistols only. The cadets carried a mix of baseball bats, bunk adapters, unfolded entrenching tools, ace handles, and a hefty number of homemade clubs, courtesy of the trees near the academy. Each cadet maniple, further, provided a four-man team bearing signs like “Balboa es Soberana en la Area del Transitway,” “Taurans out of our Country,” or something in the same general spirit.
After receiving the report, Chapayev, commandant of the school, ordered, “Right . . . face. Forward . . . MARCH!” and the entire twenty-one-hundred-strong corps, uniformed and carrying their normal field packs, marched out the main gate of the school, past the memorial to the heroic sergeant who was, uniquely, their namesake, around the beautiful bay, through the ramshackle town, past the neater ship
yard, and down the road to Cristobal, about twenty miles away.
Pipes and drums from the school’s band alternated their positions in the column to give every maniple a fair ration of resounding bang-bang-bang and cats-locked-in-a-death-struggle. When the band rested, the boys picked up on their own with a medley of patriotic songs.
The latest census said that on the order of sixty thousand people lived on or near the roadway between Puerto Lindo and Cristobal. At least eighteen thousand of those joined the cadets. Schools emptied out. Businesses closed. A group of Santandern hookers from a brothel in Sagrada Incarnación left work early, and without anybody even having to pay the Balboan bartender to let them go.
At the same time, Jimenez had sent two tercios, which was to say, at this mobilization level about two cohorts, uniformed and fully armed, to march, one of them, on Fort Melia, and the other to begin blowing up rubber boats on the eastern face of Cristobal, the one facing the Tauran-held Fort Tecumseh, across the bay.
Jimenez, sitting in his Fourth Corps headquarters in Cristobal, just imagined the panic in the Tunnel, the existence of which was by no means secret, as a dozen or more battalions, at both ends of the Transitway, converged on their mandate borders before pulling back. In the case of the Castilians, under Muñoz-Infantes, there was no pulling back beyond borders; they were already inside, and in a de facto state of mutiny, within the Transitway borders.
Contemplating the Taurans’ panic, Jimenez thought, And they’re likely to notice a thousand kids disappearing in all that? I really don’t think so.
Ham, now a second in command of a platoon of cadets, was footsore and tired by the time the column reached the fifty-seven buses parked in half a dozen spread-out splotches just before the split in the roadway that led, one way to Cristobal, the other past the town of Magdalena, then toward Forts Williams and Melia. Between cadets, legionaries, civilians, and, of course, the couple of dozen Santandern hookers, there were probably forty thousand people milling about. In that crowd, Ham took the half of the platoon that was his responsibility, ducked into a bus, changed clothing rapidly—a tough thing while lying flat on one’s back on the narrow, dirty rubber mats of the bus’s floor—and emerged into the crowd into which the boys now blended much, much better.
By this time, Ham’s half of the platoon included all five of the Pashtian boys that had been sent to school with him. Carrera wanted the boy to learn, yes, and wasn’t going to shelter him from the risks he needed to run if he were to lead others. But he wasn’t a fool either and fully intended that his son, heir, and—with luck—replacement would have every possible chance to survive, even if it cost a few Pashtian boys.
“Where to now, Sergeant?” one of the younger cadets asked Ham, as a half a load of still younger and still uniformed cadets piled onto the vacated bus.
“It’s a place they used to call ‘Clay Dairy Farm.’ No cows there anymore, only some houses and some small warehouses . . . that sort of thing. Just follow me. And don’t march; mill.” He led them back in the direction from which they’d come along Avenida Scott, then north along a side road that led to a small housing development on one side, and to a temporary storage yard on the other. The yard was guarded by a uniformed civilian, bearing only a shotgun. There was a Volgan warrant officer there, though, named Ustinov, to convince the guard to let the boys into the wired-in compound. Ustinov was designated as maniple commander for the coming battle.
Ham didn’t know, but he was pretty sure that Ustinov’s next mission would be to disarm the guard and disappear him for a while. As it turned out, he was wrong. The guard position was another one of those veteran-only jobs. The guard would stay there, guarding the boys now more than other people’s property, until the fighting began.
The other part of Ham’s platoon, under his seventeen-year-old boss, Cadet Signifer Delgado, arrived an hour and a half later, Delgado’s group having instructions to mill around a bit more indirectly. By the time they arrived, Ham, his boys, and Ustinov had the partitions between certain theoretically rentable compartments opened, several dozen F-26 rifles out, ammunition for those and two rocket grenade launchers broken down and ready for issue, along with hand grenades, signal grenades, smoke grenades, radios, night vision, batteries, first aid and other medical equipment, and whatever else a platoon of infantry might need.
And then they turned on the radio and waited for the code phrase. They had to turn the radio’s volume up very high, since the daily rain, once it commenced to pound the tin roof, made hearing normal sounds all but impossible.
Among the other organizations at the academy were several clubs that catered to the cadets’ aspirations for branch assignments, when they enlisted. The legion paid serious attention to those clubs and aspirations, too. After all, why pay to train some man to do X who has already been trained as a boy to do Y? The clubs included, among others, the Cazador club, which was nowhere near as difficult as Escuela de Cazadores, a close cognate of Federated States Army Ranger School. Mostly the Cazador Club taught techniques and engaged in some very limited character-building and toughening exercises. Then there was the Artillery Club, a number of the members of which were currently falling in on half a dozen containerized 85mm guns with all the accouterments and ammunition. The Medical Club had mostly split up to provide platoon medics, though a dozen or so stayed with the school’s two doctors, in a couple of hotel rooms not far from the presumptive scene of the action.
Then there were clubs for air defense artillery, combat engineers, and armor, light and heavy. All of those went to the Sabanita Maintenance Facility, where ammunition and equipment awaited them. This included fourteen Ocelots in their configuration as assault guns. So who was to notice that a facility dedicating to fixing, among other things, Ocelots, happened to have some extra Ocelots that only looked like they needed fixing?
Isla Darien, Balboa Transitway Area, Balboa, Terra Nova
Pililak sat under a tree, rain pouring on her, even so, arms wrapped around her folded knees. She rocked back and forth, weeping. Sometimes she looked up with eyes full of fright like a rabbit on a fox’s menu. Her face was swollen almost beyond recognition. This wasn’t from the tears, but from the hordes of vicious mosquitoes who had acquired and then endlessly satisfied a new found love of Pashtian cuisine. And where was her mosquito net? Somewhere at the bottom of the lake, she supposed.
Her back was in shreds, she knew from touch. She didn’t want to even think about what it looked like.
The thought, My lord will never want me now, not with the ruin I’ve become, gave birth to a renewed bout of heartbroken weeping.
She had nothing of her own anymore; all she’d been able to save was her lord’s rifle, and that needed a cleaning she no longer had the equipment for. Saving the rifle had very nearly cost her her life, but she’d far rather have died than lost Iskandr’s arms.
And how had she lost her carefully pilfered equipment and almost lost her lord’s rifle and her own life?
She’d stepped off of the muddy bank, into the murky water, with trepidation more than matched by determination. Courage, Pililak, she’d thought. Be like your namesake, small, perhaps, but strong and fearless. Her air mattress she’d placed partly in the water, with one end resting lightly on the bank to hold it in place for a moment. It had been little problem to put her now much lighter pack on the air mattress, nor to get herself and Ham’s rifle aboard as well. She’d pushed off from the bank, then paddled—that the water was still helped here, enormously—to turn around and place her head toward the opposite bank, or where her compass told her the opposite bank must be.
Then, using arms alone, she’d paddled for all she was worth. She couldn’t see a damned thing but falling rain and her compass, nor hear a damned thing but the rain.
She was almost exactly halfway across when the merchant ship, suddenly, with no warning, loomed out of the rain, towering impossibly high and moving faster than she could hope to paddle out of its way. Even though she couldn’t, s
till she tried. The ship struck her, spinning her air mattress so that both compass and pack flipped off to disappear into the light brown water. Barnacles scrapped it and her, ripping both open. A long spasm of pure agony shot up her back and down her legs as the wandering crustaceans shredded her flesh. She barely managed to hang on to the rifle, and that took both hands, with her feet kicking desperately to keep her nose above water.
It was actually the barnacles that saved her life for the nonce. Entangled in her clothing and digging deeply into her skin, they, along with her kicking, and the forward drag of the ship, held her aloft for perhaps twenty or thirty life-saving seconds. This enabled her to get the rifle’s sling over one shoulder and across her chest, freeing her hands in the process.
At the time, she understood none of this. In a panic, whatever positives she did were matters of automatic response coupled with sheer luck.
The resistance of the water tore her away from the barnacles, leaving bits of flesh behind, as well as a red train from the hull to her back. Still in full flight mode, she began to swim frantically to get away from the ship. Its passage, though, caused drag, that pulled her backwards, cancelling out her frenzied paddling. Indeed, more than once the drag and the induced current in the water spun her around so that she found herself swimming toward the dark and menacing bulk passing by.
The worst moment, though, came when the ship had just about passed her. That was when the inward-running trace of the stern caused the water to pull her strongly into the center line . . . the center line where the propellers churned the water and would have readily churned the girl.
Screaming aloud, “My Lord, Iskandr! Give me strength!” she found strength. Though Hamilcar, called “Iskandr,” by some, didn’t give it to her; her faith did. Still, it was close, and before she broke free of the tug of the ship, she felt the wash of the propellers, massaging her legs and beckoning.