Robert Frezza - [Colonial War 01]

by A Small Colonial War (epub)

  If the Variag did implement it, Chiharu Yoshida would play a major role. Haerkoennen glanced through the open doorway of Yoshida’s temporary quarters.

  Yoshida was nestled behind the low table, holding the stroke brush, the tsuketate-fude at arm’s length, waiting patiently for his heart to quiet, glistening sumi poised in the ink stone. Familiar both with Japanese culture and art forms, Haerkoennen watched entranced.

  Yoshida practiced brush strokes daily. Today, it was simple hiragana, to ease the mind.

  Tingrin was off to Henke’s island in a matter of hours. The Variag wanted someone to whip his prisoners and their warders into line. It would not do either for the more militant Boers to push the rest into cabals or for the former artillerymen to brutalize their charges. His talents would not be wasted.

  Haerkoennen watched as, first with the hard, then with the soft of the brush, Yoshida attacked the stark white of the paper, impressing it with his boldness and infusing it with his temper. The inscription that he was copying out was banal—to Haerkoennen illegible—which had nothing to do whatever with the intrinsic merit of the exercise.

  Haericoennen understood Japanese very well. He did not speak it. In Haerkoennen’s view, foreigners who spoke Japanese ended up mouthing polite, homogenized phrases of deference and solicitude bearing no relationship to the feelings underlying the words. It was strange the Japanese didn’t get along better with the Boers; both were products of closed societies, sheltered and contained. He stepped aside from the open door before Yoshida noticed his presence.

  Tingrin’s outburst in front of Vereshchagin had been uncharacteristic, not Japanese. In Haerkoennen’s opinion, his cathartic reaction to Matti Haijalo’s studied brutality might eventually right his shattered imbalance.

  And if it didn’t, well, there was a war on.

  Yoshida completed his flowing lunge with grace and force. He exhaled heavily. He then looked to the result.

  The left-hand ro was vague, uncertain. Flawed. Yoshida picked up the sheet, divided it into two equal parts with a single motion and consigned the halves to a growing pile of wasted efforts. Another sheet was gone from his dwindling stock. By that much was he diminished.

  The sensei cleaned and replaced his brushes; from his eyes the glow faded, and once more Chiharu Yoshida paused to consider the cares of the world that had thrust themselves upon him.

  COLDEWE LOOKED AROUND, HALF EXPECTING TO SEE THE LIT-tle Bruwer. “Kasha, you see Raul and Berry anywhere?”

  Bruwer had reverted, taking her meals at irregular intervals and hiding like a mouse in Shimazu’s office.

  “No,” Kasha said glumly. “You know what’s with those two?”

  Coldewe shook his head. Security was bleeding tight any time Kasha didn’t know what was going on.

  “What’s the word on the sneak?” he asked.

  Kasha shook her hair free. “He was at the port when the port got it.”

  Coldewe grunted. It wouldn’t be easy to find somebody as loyally dishonest as Grigorenko. “We’re pulling in the surveillance teams in an hour, and they’re going to be hungry.”

  “No problem.”

  “You see Bruwer?”

  Kasha shook her head in an emphatic, semispastic manner.

  As far as Coldewe knew, Bruwer hadn’t spoken to Sanmartin for several days, not since seeing the townspeople of Johannesburg sweeping up their sons and lovers—occasionally their wives and daughters—from the streets. A few of them had spit at her, one had thrown a stone and hit her on the arm.

  Two strong and silent types, Coldewe thought to himself venomously. Sanmartin had forgotten what little he’d learned about being a human being, and Bruwer hadn’t learned enough to forget. He allowed Kasha to shove a cup of tea in his hands. The warmth from the tea seeped into his body, but it didn’t erase the chill. When he stomped into quarters, the weariness of the night and the long morning still clung to his body like a shroud. He leaned against the doorframe.

  “Hello, Hans. Luck?” Sanmartin asked. He moved to one side of the room and rested the palm of one hand on the wall as high as he could reach.

  “I have twelve teams covering twenty-four farms and villages. Maybe tomorrow we’ll pick the right twenty-four.”

  “No. Bring them in. We’ll need them rested,” was Sanmartin’s clipped contribution as he walked back to the other wall.

  Coldewe didn’t ask and didn’t argue. Sanmartin spared him a look. “You get some rest, too. You look like you were walking all night. ’ ’

  “I was. I will. What about you?”

  Sanmartin didn’t answer. A chess game was set up on a low table. White was partway through a variation on the Max Lange Attack: old, perilous, still one of the most complicated openings in chess. Coldewe palmed a fallen knight, then set it aside and lay down on his hammock.

  “This is where you are,” a feminine voice said.

  Coldewe made an effort to open his eyes. Bruwer was another one aligned on an edge. “I’m sorry about your stepbrother.” She ignored him. “I asked Kasha to show me in,” she said, to which of them was not clear. She sat down gingerly in the room’s only chair, saying nothing. Sanmartin continued his minute inspection of the cracks in the wall.

  Coldewe sat up and folded his arms. “Ail right, both of you, I don’t care anymore whether you drive each other crazy, but you’re starting to make me nervous. I’ll referee if you like.” Sanmartin turned his head.

  “So what happens, now? Have you a Latin saying for it?” Bruwer asked him sharply.

  “Homi homini lupus. ” It was from Plutarch. Man is a wolf toward man. “You don’t understand, do you? We kill a few more, and a few more after that. It’s gangrene. If we don’t cauterize it, it’ll spread. I wish we’d gotten a thousand more, that might have set a few people thinking. Lord of heaven, some of the silly toads out there probably think they won a victory.” “But you cannot win either!”

  “We’ll call it a victory. Bet?” he said evenly.

  “No, you are serious. You are hiding something,” she said, studying his face.

  “Yes. And I’m not the only one. What do you think this is? Some kind of silly game out of Hans’s romances?”

  She was close enough in the narrow room to hit him. She rolled her fist and struck him hard across the side of the face.

  His head snapped. Then looking at her, he deliberately took the emotion from his voice. “You’ll hurt your hand like that. If you want to do it, do it right. Use a piece of pipe.” He walked away. As she angrily turned to follow, Coldewe materialized beside her and grasped her wrist firmly. She attempted to wrench it free and was surprised by the strength in his frail shoulders.

  “You don’t understand. He’s right about that, anyway. Try gulping air, you look like you’re going to pop.”

  She sighed. The anger drained out of her. “He is so changed. Is it because of Rudi and Major Rettaglia?”

  “What do you mean changed?” Coldewe asked, taken aback.

  She struggled for words and looked to the floor in embarrassment.

  Coldewe tilted her chin up so he could look at her.1 ‘I actually think I understand. Circumstances have changed. He’s no different. Not since he arrived, not in what counts. Not yet.” He looked into her blue, blue eyes. “You don’t think the Variag gave him a company because he won a spelling prize? His mother taught him what little he knows; she was a professor before she got listed. She gave him a transit ticket on his birthday and went out to the Plaza Federale to talk herself into a twenty year sentence. If she hadn’t made him join up, they’d probably be in the same cell. His father you know about.”

  She nodded her head mutely.

  “He doesn’t start off thinking the universe is friendly, and he doesn’t start off thinking the universe is fair. Since then, the Variag’s had him.” Coldewe thought for a minute.

  “You’ve met the Variag. He’s kind and gentle, but ask Kasha how this battalion cleaned NovySibor. Reds and Whites, kinsmen and coun
trymen once removed, they couldn’t stand each other, and this battalion got the job after Ishizu lost more men in the cross fire than he was prepared to tolerate.

  “He had them identify each other’s fanatics and sent the Iceman on a ratissage. The Iceman culled fifty agitators aside and lined them up on the walls, two by two. They got buried with military honors, their families got transported, and the survivors got an appreciation for what constitutes acceptable behavior. ” He released her arm to leave behind finger-width marks of red.

  “They were averaging two or three a day on their own. The Variag was a little more selective about it. Raul and I haven’t been around as long, but we both did things on Ashcroft that

  weren’t exactly friendly. That’s what they send us out for. We finish wars other people start. Your boyfriend knows that. He doesn’t need you to tell him. I don’t think he likes it much.” She hung her head. “In the villages, wives are pushing their husbands out the doors to fight.”

  “Yesterday, he got a call from Albert Beyers’s wife, who is probably the only woman on the planet with a half gram of sense. Her son wanted to join up, and she told Raul to come pack him up and salt him away until the idiots stop playing with people’s lives.”

  He gestured toward the departed Raul. “Consider it a compliment that you’re the only one he likes enough to lash out at. I’ll talk manners into him. Maybe some sense, too. But if you’re still collecting Latin quotes, he’s got a favorite that he used to use on Ashcroft all the time, mutatis mutandis."

  “Necessary changes having been made,” she translated.

  It was said that there was once a particularly gentle Viking who was known as “the children’s man” because he would not impale captive children on the point of his spear, as was the custom among his companions.

  Friday(13)

  “MATTI, IF WE NEED TO LAY OUR HANDS ON SOME QUALITY

  electronics, where would we go?” Vereshchagin asked as he waited for the remainder of his senior officers to appear.

  "Anything that Koryagin doesn’t have squirreled away is down at Complex if it exists at all. Lord of heaven knows, we stole enough, Yuri and I. Why?”

  “You might call it curiosity.”

  “Curiosity, say you. Are you going to tell me what you and Raul are about? You’ve been quiet for three entire days. Raul has been bustling about like a busy little bee, and it didn’t take him and Beregov flitting off to Complex to tell me that there’s some strange scent in the breeze.”

  “Patience is occasionally a virtue, Matti.’

  “I know. I play my lines better when I haven’t read the script. I assume you know that the cowboys are in trouble down south. Some sort of fungal infestation is ripping through their wheat. It looks like it could be native, but—”

  “The timing is suspiciously apt.” The Boers could grow no wheat, only glutenized sorghum and millet.

  “Correct.” Haijalo’s frown deepened. “I hear Yuri’s footsteps, is it that time already?”

  The echo of the slight hobble in the battalion sergeant’s tread was distinct. Lassotovich’s hard-luck team had missed return, and Malinov looked older than his years.

  “Yes, Matti. I think that it is time,” Vereshchagin replied. After he had them assembled, Vereshchagin examined the G Company commander and Ebyl’s representative before turning his attention. “Have you something, Raul?” he asked formally.

  “We have three camps located. We can hit them tonight. Not before.”

  The look on Haijalo’s face at the appearance of this rabbit was priceless. Ebyl’s man, a sleepy-faced lieutenant named Ohlrogge, glanced up from the table with sharp interest.

  Sanmartin looked at the other faces around the table and selected Matti for a foil. “Matti, do you remember all those innocent little Afrikaners I let go?”

  “At the time, I thought your circuits were warped. Out of forty of the little toads, forty are out there shooting at us by now. Myself, I’m a little tired of hearing ‘We’re just poor little Dutch boys.’ ”

  Sanmartin smiled, a thin, cold wraith of a smile. “Twenty-seven of them anyway, we picked up the rest with apologies. The twenty-seven may be out shooting at us, but we sent them out in the big, wide world with transponders in their fundaments. I triggered them three hours ago. We won’t be able to pull the same trick twice, but we may not have to. For myself, I've logged in an excursion to Krugersdorp.”

  Haijalo studied his face. “Rettaglia was right,” he said finally. “There is an underhanded side to you. Have we had a better offer today, Anton?”

  “Not that I recall,” Vereshchagin said guilelessly. He looked around the room. “Elandslaagte Farm for you, Paul. You may have number twenty-six Gurkha platoon and you may have the aircraft first. Nelspruit for Piotr. Ebyl has two companies within striking distance; they are yours and the Gurkha provisional platoon as well. Raul may have number twenty-seven platoon. The recon and the engineers will be divided among you. The rest of the Gurkhas will go to local security. Mask and quarantine. Matti, please remain behind,” he declared firmly, and no one asked him why. After a moment, he asked, “Well, gentlemen, what are we waiting upon?” with a hint of his old vivacity.

  Sanmartin stood up from his chair. This one was going to be different, Hans had said. This time, the good guys would win.

  “Did I play up too much?” Haijalo asked after the room had cleared.

  “No, you did just right, Matti,” Vereshchagin said wistfully. The games we play to make soldiers of them, he thought. The ones that live, he amended. “Matti, the commander of G Company is eager, but sadly lacking in experience. I shall need you to quietly take a hand to keep him healthy and occupied.”

  “Raul?”

  “Is growing up. He will have Lev along. I think that we shall let him manage on his own.”

  By the time Sanmartin returned to Jo’burg, Ajax had done three timed passes over Krugersdorp and the surrounding forest and broken the pictures down into half-meter stills. Yevtushenko and Beregov had them out of the cannister and neatly on the floor for examination with a magnifier, examining them on their knees. Yevtushenko brought four teams from the recon platoon.

  “You didn’t waste time,” he commented, elbowing his way in to peer at pictures of the church.

  Krugersdorp was the smallest of the three targets. Although difficult to access, the town consisted of a bare four dozen buildings. The Boers inside the town would be concentrated without the breathing room necessary for a successful defense.

  “They’re inside, all right. In the village,” Beregov said flady. He pointed to one of the offending stills. “If this isn’t a bunker, I’ll buy it and deed it to my grandchildren.”

  “Lev?”

  “Too many people floating through. Look at the foot traffic up to the warehouses along the northeast rim. Barracks. Maybe a few people in the forest where we’re getting a dappling effect, ’ ’ Yevtushenko replied judiciously.

  ‘‘What about bunkers?”

  “I see one at either end. Three more covering the road. There’s dead foliage covering them, with traces of plastic netting showing on the infrared shots.”

  Sanmartin stood and stretched. “Berry, I think we have the makings of a plan.”

  THE SUN WAS FALLING, WHICH MADE IT AN UNUSUAL HOUR FOR

  an exchange of views. Vereshchagin’s two guests were clearly somewhat ill at ease.

  Nadine Joh had survived her sister. James McClausland, “Little Jim,” had stepped into his father’s place. Between them, they could speak for as many of the ranchers as mattered.

  Vereshchagin invited them to sit. “I am prepared to tell you that efforts are in progress to end the conflict with the Afrikaners. In order to ensure a genuine peace, I require your assistance in restraining your colleagues and their followers.”

  This statement was dearly not one Little Jim had expected. “What are you, some creeping Boer-lover? There isn’t a family that doesn’t have its dead. They killed my father! Th
ey killed a couple thousand Imps! They’re out there laughing with guns in their fists, and you talk about making peace?”

  Nadine Joh smiled a worldly, cynical smile that her mouth hid. Vereshchagin blinked his eyes.

  “It is rather trite to so state, but killing a few thousand more Boers will not return your father. We have bled the Boers rather badly, and we will do so again. However, your cooperation, although helpful, is not essential.

  "You might be interested to learn that the USS director moved about a great deal without an adequate explanation for his movements. This was coupled with a slight shortfall in his company’s ammunition stocks which he apparently did not expect us to monitor. I had him shot fifteen minutes ago.”

  Young McClausland, scion of a great house, had no idea what that meant. Nadine Joh did. Yugo Thge had continued to believe almost up to the moment he was strapped in his chair that it was merely a matter of working out the proper arrangement. He had died very badly.

  “I dislike having people maneuver behind my back,” Vereshchagin continued. “I am not disposed to wage a genocidal struggle against the Afrikaner nation. I am concerned with channeling energies into positive paths. Do we understand one another?”

  Vereshchagin left young McClausland to the Joh’s tender ministrations and turned his back on the cowboy country to concern himself with more immediate problems.

  WHEN DARKNESS FELL, THEY MOVED OUT SILENTLY IN SINGLE file. It was an easy three-kilometer walk to where the tilt-props would be waiting to carry them further.

  Sanmartin had his three rifle platoons plus a recon section. Coldewe and Okladnikov, the other arm on the pincers, would rendezvous with the armor, an engineer team, three mortars, the fourth recon team, and the Gurkhas.

  Beregov had been left behind with the fourth mortar, still more of Higuchi’s orphans, and a fair percentage of the heavy weapons that had stuck to Matti Haijalo’s fingers. His task was to maintain the illusion that C for Chiba was where it was supposed to be for the benefit of any toads in the bushes.