The Living Will Envy The Dead

by Nuttall, Christopher

  “When we blow retreat, we break out, armoured vehicles in the lead,” Dutch said, unwillingly. The armoured vehicles, after all, were hardly Abrams tanks or Bradley fighting vehicles, but technicals. We’d armoured them as well as we could, but if the enemy had antitank weapons, they’d burn through them like a knife through butter. “We pull out as many people as we can and blow up the defences as we retreat and hope.”

  It sounded like a disaster waiting to happen, I knew, but what other choice was there?

  “Sounds like a plan,” Mac said, dryly. “We’re all going to die, aren’t we?”

  “Probably,” I agreed. “I wonder if…”

  My radio buzzed once. “Boss, this is your friendly eye-in-the-sky,” Biggles’ said, his voice coming through a haze of static. We hadn’t managed to convince him to use anything like proper radio protocols. It hardly mattered at the moment. We only had one plane so far – although the engineers thought that two more of the older planes could be repaired, given time – and he was the only active pilot. “I think you’re going to have company coming in the next half hour.”

  Dutch nodded, listening to his own radio. “The spotters confirm,” he said, grimly. “They’re on the march. They’ll be here soon enough.”

  “Sound the alarm,” I ordered, quickly. I trusted Dutch to get the soldiers into position while I took a look at the opposition. We’d erected a watchtower on the edge of the estate and Mac and I scrambled up to peer in the direction of Summersville. “Shit.”

  The Warriors looked to be coming in a never-ending stream of men – and yes, they were all men. I knew, logically, that they couldn’t have infinite manpower, but somehow it was hard to convince myself of that while I was looking at them. Some rode horses, some rode a handful of vehicles, but most of them were marching in something reassembling a standard march. My old Drill Instructor would have lost his cool completely if we had marched like that, although honesty compelled me to admit that our army wouldn’t have marched in a much better order. We hadn’t drilled that much in the formalities, even if they did help to improve discipline.

  “Look at that truck,” Mac said, peering through his own binoculars. I followed his gaze and frowned. The vehicle had started life as a fairly basic truck, as far as I could tell, but someone had…no, I realised; I had been wrong. The vehicle had started life as a police van, one designed to serve for extreme riot control, armed with water cannons and tear gas launchers, with perhaps nastier weapons held in reserve. Someone – one of the Warriors, I suspected – had added extra defences, in the form of portable man-carried riot shields, emplaced around the vehicle. Somehow, I was sure that the non-lethal weapons had been replaced by something more deadly. It wasn't a tank, but it was deadly enough to be a pain in the ass.

  Mac took it as a personal challenge. “You want to use a Javelin on that thing, Ed?”

  “Not yet,” I said, watching as the Warriors deployed. They probably thought that they were out of range and, for most of the soldiers, they would have been right. Patty and Stacy could probably have shot several of them before they finished getting their forces organised and began the attack. “I wonder if…”

  One of the Warriors kicked his horse and cantered forwards, towards the outermost defence line. I watched, mildly concerned about the minefield in front of the poor creature – I meant the horse, of course. I had never really liked horses, but my heart went out to the animal as it came closer. It would have probably been happier munching grass somewhere west of here, not carrying a messenger wearing a silly outfit. It was almost as if he wanted to be targeted by the snipers.

  My radio buzzed. “Sir,” Patty said, “should we shoot him?”

  “Not yet,” I said, calmly. Morbidly, I was wondering what would happen when they hit the minefield. “Just wait for a moment and see what happens.”

  The horse stopped and the messenger pulled a megaphone from one of the saddlebags. I felt my brow furrow as I took in his position. He was only a bare metre from the minefield. Had someone told him its rough location?

  “YOU ARE ORDERED TO SURRENDER,” he shouted, through the megaphone. It was almost like the voice of God himself, a thought that had probably not occurred to him. I couldn’t even tell if it was the same person I had met before, but they definitely shared the same supercilious air. “IF YOU SURRENDER, YOU WILL NOT BE HARMED!”

  My men shouted back a series of rude suggestions about his offer, some of them quite imaginative. I had a better idea for a response.

  “Patty,” I said, keying my radio,” shoot him.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Ludendorff: The English soldiers fight like lions.

  Hoffmann: True. But don't we know that they are lions led by donkeys.

  -German Generals Erich Ludendorff and Max Hoffmann, 1917

  The messenger crumpled off the horse and fell to the ground, his head striking the ground at an unnatural angle. It was quite pointless. He had died the second the bullet had passed through his temple and blown his brains out. I’d half-hoped that his head would explode like a watermelon hit by a hammer, but it’s not that easy to blow a person’s brains to bits, no matter what they show in the movies. Realism takes a back seat to drama every day.

  “Direct hit,” Mac exulted. “We got the bastard!”

  I smiled, but watched the Warriors carefully. It would be wonderful if they just turned and fled, but somehow I doubted that they would make that mistake, not when there were dozens of other priests – or whatever they called them; I just thought of them as priests – in their army. They seemed to be shifting nervously, barking orders even as they scrambled off their horses or motorbikes, and I winced as I realised that some of them were using radios. The Warriors of the Lord might look ramshackle – hell, we looked ramshackle – but their leaders were incompetent. They were just in a position where they had to attack us directly to break through and hit the rest of the Principle Towns.

  What would I do, I wondered, if I was in their position. I certainly wouldn’t attack directly unless I had no other choice. I’d try to lay siege to the FOB, or use heavy weapons to blast the defenders from a distance, not when the costs of a direct assault would be too high. The Warriors…how many heavy weapons did they have, anyway? I peered down at their seething ranks and saw nothing bigger than an assault rifle, although some of them were clearly carrying grenades and improvised explosive charges. Some of the gang-bangers on the streets, before the war, had had quite a line in improvised weapons. The Warriors of the Lord, with all the resources of an entire congregation of fanatical believers, could have purchased almost anything. Hell, given enough time, they could even have produced poison gas. We were looking at the possibility ourselves.

  “Here they come,” Mac said. He’d sensed it before I had; the quick shifting tremors that marked a group of soldiers preparing to attack, when harmless civilians transformed themselves into deadly insurgents. “Ed…”

  I keyed my radio. “Patty, Stacy, fire at will,” I ordered. I couldn’t help myself. “If you can’t find Will, fire at the enemy.”

  The Warriors charged at us, howling blasphemous shouts and threats as they raced towards us, the lead Warriors firing as they came. Dutch didn’t wait for my order. As soon as the Warriors entered range, he gave the order to open fire and Warriors started to fall. Given the nature of the weapons we were employing, them being in range of us meant, almost certainly, that we were in their range, but most of our people were dug in, protected from the hail of bullets. I saw Warriors dying as our bullets slashed into their bodies, some falling to the ground, others being pushed forward by the momentum of their advance, shielding their comrades with their dying bodies. I would have admired their discipline, perhaps, if I had felt it was real discipline, rather than the unthinking rage of the mob. The ones at the rear were pushing the ones at the front forward to die.

  Mac evidently had the same thought. “Poor bastards,” he breathed. “They don’t stand a chance.”

&n
bsp; I wasn’t sure that I agreed. No, that was a lie. Looking at them, I definitely didn’t agree. I had felt sorry for some of the insurgents in Iraq, some of the ones who had been forced to fight us at gunpoint, but the Warriors didn’t look as if someone was driving them to the battle with cattle prods. They looked consumed by their rage and religious fervour, their eyes bright with madness – and perhaps a few illegal drugs – as they swept towards us. They had once been American citizens, perhaps bankers, perhaps lawyers, perhaps even fast food waiters, but now…they were monsters. I looked into their eyes, through my binoculars, and I believed every horrible tale that had come out of their advance. They no longer had any sense of right or wrong.

  “They’re going to hit the mines soon,” I said, and thought rapidly before lifting my radio. “Dutch, keep the special mines back. We’re going to need them later.”

  The Warriors ran over the minefield and kept coming; there was a distance absence of explosions. I smiled, not put out in the least, as they kept coming. We had improved the minefield, even if we had had to improvise most of the mines, in the days since the gang-bangers had attacked Ingalls. The Warriors might have been warned of the minefield’s existence, but as it failed to explode, they grew more confident and pushed onwards. I watched, smiling tightly, as the lead Warriors reached the final mine…

  There’s an odd belief that minefields are illegal and shouldn’t be used in warfare. The people who believe that, and press for minefields being banned from war, mean well; mines are a horrific weapon, one that lingers for years after the war. (Afghanistan is still trying to clear mines from the Russian invasion, let alone the insurgency against the Coalition forces attempting to defeat the Taliban.) They’re also fools. Given the situation we faced – which has been faced by thousands upon thousands of soldiers throughout history – did they really think that I would accept unnecessary casualties just to make them feel good about themselves? I didn’t have any intention of losing more men than I had to, whatever a dead former English princess had thought, and we’d used our imaginations in making the first minefield as deadly as possible.

  We’d rigged it so that it wouldn’t explode until the final mines had been reached, by which time dozens, perhaps hundreds, of Warriors would be on the mines when it exploded. It was a chancy experiment – we didn’t have the perfect weapons manufactured in a military laboratory, but improvised ones constructed in a tearing hurry, always a bad sign – but it worked. The final mines were reached and they all detonated with a terrifying explosion. The Warriors on the minefield were caught in the blast, their legs disintegrating into bloody chunks as they fell to the ground, most of them still alive and screaming in pain. Perhaps, I hoped, it had shocked them out of their fanatical belief in victory.

  The interesting thing about mines – which adds, I should admit, to their horror – is that they don’t always kill attackers. Oh, some are always lethal to the poor bastard who steps on them – and some are designed to make the lives of the tankers miserable, rather than the poor dumb infantry – but many of the lighter weapons are designed to inflict horrible injuries, without killing the victim. You’ve probably seen the pictures from Cause of the Week Nation, the poor legless girl, or ex-soldier crawling in the gutter; they may – there’s no guarantee that the reported incident is what actually happened – have had a close encounter with an antipersonnel mine. They hadn’t been killed outright, but badly maimed.

  Why? An army that doesn’t care, even slightly, for its wounded is an army that is going to have a serious morale problem. Soldiers can face death bravely, but the prospect of being horrifyingly maimed is far worse, even for me. The army would have to take the wounded back to their medics, if they had medics, and do what they could for them, while the unwounded men would see the wounded victims and lose all heart for the battle. Parading some of the wounded ex-insurgents from Iraq in communities that could have gone either way hadn’t been an American idea, but it had been surprisingly effective. But then, most of the Iraqis who had been killed hadn’t been hardcore insurgents, just desperate young men out to make what money they could.

  “They’re not breaking,” Mac said, grimly. I watched in disbelief as the Warriors charged over the bodies of their moaning comrades and kept coming, bringing their heavier weapons to bear on our positions. They shouldn’t have been able to keep coming, not after that, but as far as I could tell, they hadn’t even hesitated. Their minds were just as cracked up as the Zombies, I realised with a thrill of horror; their comrades, and their pain and suffering, no longer existed in their world. They were probably ensuring their deaths by leaving them to bleed out and die, but they didn’t care. They just wanted to get to us. “Ed, we’ll have to use the machine guns on them.”

  I keyed my radio. “Section Four” – the machine gunners – “prepare to open fire on my command.”

  The problem with machine guns is that you can shoot them dry very quickly. Any normal pre-war FOB, or patrol base, would have had – quite literally – millions of rounds in stock for use. We didn’t have anything like enough rounds for the machine guns, so I’d given orders to hold them back as long as possible, just in case they weren't going to be needed. This was turning into one of those situations where you needed a fire hose-like stream of bullets to stop the enemy, which was fine by me…as long as the bullets held out. If they didn’t hold out, we would be in serious trouble when the Warriors broke through.

  “They’re coming,” Mac said. I nodded. The machine guns would hit them before they hit the second minefield. If we were lucky, they might even convince them to break off, but I was starting to suspect that the battle was going to be won by the side that killed the other side off first. How many fanatics did the Warriors have, after all, and how many could they spend? “Ed…”

  “Yeah,” I said, feeling cold horror spreading through my soul. I keyed my radio. “Section Four, fire at will.”

  The chattering of the machine guns almost deafened me, but the effect on the Warriors in the lead was nothing short of spectacular. A standard machine gun pumps out hundreds of rounds a minute and each of the Warriors was hit by dozens of bullets, most of which went through their flesh, came out the other side, and ran into the next line of Warriors. Some of their bodies literally disintegrated, sending other Warriors tumbling to the ground, tripping over their former comrades, creating a domino effect that brought others down. It reminded me, chillingly, of a tale told by an Iraqi officer I’d met once, who’d been on a visit to Mecca during one of the riots. The crowd had stumbled over one another and dozens had been crushed to death as they collapsed to the ground. I wondered, briefly, what had happened to him. He’d had grand plans to invade Saudi Arabia one day and recover the Holy City. He might even have had a chance to do just that in the chaos caused by the Final War.

  “They’re stumbling back,” Mac announced, with delight. For the first time, we saw the Warriors hesitate, their line wavering backwards and forwards as the machine guns played their deadly trade. They fell out of line, seeking what cover they could, a handful even breaking down and weeping. They’d been shocked out of their trance, I realised, even though we couldn’t risk trying to take them prisoner. They’d be lucky if they managed to crawl out of the battlefield before the warriors regrouped. Their former comrades would probably treat them as heretics. “Ed, we can break them…”

  “Maybe,” I said, unconvinced. The fire they were directing at us was unabated. We hadn’t taken many casualties, but we’d certainly lost a handful of men…and we couldn’t afford to lose many of them. The mines might have been more effective than I had dared to hope, but the outer minefield had been expended and we couldn’t hope to replace it while under enemy fire. I had considered sending a team out to do what they could, but it would have been suicidal. The Warrior snipers might not have been as good as Patty or Stacy, but they were enthusiastic. “Here they come again…”

  They appeared out of the haze like black ninjas, wearing poser outfits that
made me smile…and carrying long tubes that wiped the smile off my face. A basic mortar can be set up and used easily by two men – hell, there are some mortars that can be used by a man operating on his own – and they provided considerable firepower to the attackers. Patty and Stacy acted without orders – good girls – and shot down four of the enemy mortar team before they got into position, but once they were in position, they were effectively safe. A withering hail of fire swept our positions whenever we tried to slip someone down to deal with them.

  “Get our own mortars up,” I snapped, into the radio. We’d pre-registered them to engage the Warriors when the terrain funnelled them into a killing zone, but we didn’t have any other weapons that could engage their mortars. I would have loved a radar system that could have tracked the shells and a long-range multi-barrelled artillery weapon, but we didn’t have any of them. It wouldn’t have been that useful. We knew where the Warriors were, after all, but we didn’t have a weapon that could hit them, apart from our own mortars.

  The dull CRUMP, CRUMP, CRUMP of the mortars issued out over the battlefield as they launched the first shells into our position. They didn’t have any idea of just what to shoot at, I saw with some relief, and there was a distantly random tinge to their firing, but sooner or later they would hit something through sheer luck. Some of our positions might have been able to survive a direct hit, but most of them weren't that well prepared. One of the shells came down in the middle of a small lake the original owner had used as a fishpond – and we had promptly turned into a R&R facility – and sent water flying everywhere, another came down on top of a reserve position. Given time, and luck, they’d take us apart.