Robert Frezza - [Colonial War 01]

by A Small Colonial War (epub)

  Wheels had been set into motion, to grind swiftly and exceedingly fine. Nocturnal activities were occurring on a massive scale. After the big birds lifted Sanmartin off, they would go back to pick up the Iceman. The Gurkha provisional platoon would spearhead the Iceman’s assault. Radiation sickness was beginning to consolidate its grip on them. They didn’t walk well, but they were very, very angry. Ebyl’s companies moving north along the Red River Road from Chalkton were the hammer that would smash the laigest of the three laagere against Kolomeitsev’s anvil. The third objective was the Hangman’s. Ground-attack aircraft and copters would fly off just before contact was made.

  It was about 25°C, but it felt cold to Sanmartin. It was better to think about the approach march.

  The tilt would ground eleven kay out. From the stereoscopic photos Ajax had transmitted, parallel to the Paarl River the fem-trees at ridge-level were thirty meters high; that was almost as good as a road on a planet that did not have Earth’s woody vines and shrubs.

  Once off the ridge, Sanmartin and No. 11 would let themselves in through the back door quietly, liberally equipped with unauthorized silencers. Karaev’s platoon would provide flank support until they were actually inside. They would then seize an isolated group of four houses and seal off the northeast end of town. Gavrilov and No. 10 would be the stopper, spread to fire up anyone breaking out toward the mines.

  When the back door was taken care of, Hans and Sergei Okladnikov would beat down the front.

  Based on the tracking from Ajax, the Boers were wandering from the village up into the forest the villagers had planted almost casually. Sanmartin hoped that they were equally casual about answering the doorbell. If they weren’t, Yevtushenko might have occasion for a little knife work.

  It was the sort of harebrained scheme that might actually work. He had said as much to Hanna.

  That had been the hardest task, sitting down and telling Hanna what he had done, what he was about to do. He remembered leaving her, sitting on her bolstered bed, looking into the wall with her hands squeezed together.

  Abruptly the tilt-prop set down.

  Moving silently, left around the first tree and right around the second, Sanmartin’s column crept through, trusting to night goggles. Entombed as they were in utter blackness, even starlight magnification was useless, and only the black wands they carried gave illumination, painting the night in vivid burgundy red.

  In front, Yevtushenko paused ritually every ten meters to check his compass bearings with a quick flip of his wrist. Although he had a feel for the slope of the terrain, he didn’t depend upon that alone to navigate. Padding softly through the night with a step that never altered, he counted his steps in his mind so that he knew exactly how far he had come.

  The virgin ridges were crested by true, double-canopied rain forest, a silent, magnificent cathedral of somber black and green. The thick pillars of the trees flowed up into the sky like green spikes. Running streams of water ran down scaled trunks spread to cut off the starlight twenty and twenty-five meters over their heads. A second roof formed at ten meters where a different species of fern tree topped out.

  Jan Snyman walked with Muslar’s No. 11 platoon, as a medic’s aide to Mario Vincente. “Who picked this route?” he asked the man who came up next to him in a whisper. “He has a taste for shit.”

  “Idon’t know,” Sanmartin answered, more or less inaudibly, “but we ought to shoot him.” Scandalized, Vincente hissed “Sjuut! No noise.” Sanmartin clapped a startled Jan Snyman softly on the back and moved up in the column.

  HAERKOENNEN LOOKED UP FROM THE COM. “MAJOR KOLOMEIT-

  sev thinks he may have lost the benefit of surprise. He requests instructions.”

  “Tell him to use his best judgement, Timo,” Vereshchagin directed inexorably.

  Haerkoennen held his hand over the mike. “Sir, I am certain he will continue his mission as planned if I say this. Why risk the casualties?”

  “Timo, it will cost us less in the long run if they remember that they were beaten this night rather than tricked into surrender or defeated by a germ.”

  For nine hours, twenty-seven men with transponders had been silently spreading the disease that would fragment the Boer armies, but it would be best if their sons remembered the plague as a mercy that spared the Volk further evidence of the Imperials’ wrath.

  “A few thousand men,” he added, including Ebyl’s battalion and the others, “cannot control a world, even this one. The leaders on the other side recognize this. In adversity, it is their strength. What they do not realize is that we can reshape the situation to make it possible for us to control it.”

  Haerkoennen nodded, satisfied, and began to deliver crisp instructions to the Iceman.

  On the outskirts of Nelspruit, the hour struck. A swarm of little men, angry and sick, scrambled out of the forest screaming “Ayo Gurkhali.” Five of them went down, a man named Ale, a Pun, and three Thapas. Then the rest were among the startled Boers of the Bethlehem kommando, who had dug themselves into a shallow position like pigs in a sty for companionship.

  The Bethlehem men who bolted were the lucky ones. The others learned about the downward-curving Gurkha kukris. Jankowskie’s No. 1 platoon left Higuchi’s orphans to finish the men of Bethlehem and passed through.

  At that hour in Johannesburg, Hanna Bruwer rose up and changed her clothing, putting a gray pullover and dark trousers on her body, sturdy shoes on her feet. Passing through the silent structure, she left by the door and made her way to the southeast outpost, waving to the two little Gurkhas manning it. As they had strict orders not to fire on her under any circumstances, they waved back. Threading her way down a hidden path through the wheat, she guided her feet toward the silent, deserted streets.

  She paused at No. 27 Viljoenstraat, thinking about what Raul Sanmartin had said. Perhaps it was foolish to allow him to be so close that he could hurt her, but there it was. He had said that just as there was a balance in nature, there was a political balance in men that could not be tipped too far, too fast, without incalculable consequences. This was true.

  He had told her what he had planned. He had also told her personal things with the thought that he would not come back.

  He had left, she remembered, weighted by implements of his trade, having pushed into her unwilling hands as much trust as he could fairly give her and perhaps a little more.

  She rapped on the door very softly. Inside, there was the faint glow of a light, but nothing more.

  “It is only I, there is no one else,” she said in Afrikaans in a muted voice. “It is safe for you to open.”

  The glow of the light disappeared. Albert Beyers opened the door with a hard look on his face. “Come in quickly,” he replied in the same language. When the door had closed behind her, he bolted it and chanced making a light. Behind him was his wife, holding a heavy stone rolling pin in her hands.

  “Have you no sense?” Beyers demanded in a harsh whisper.

  "What possessed you? Do you not remember there is a curfew? ’ ’ “Hush, Albert,” his wife replied more calmly. She craned her neck forward a few centimeters. “You are the Bruwer girl, I recognize you now. You must pardon my eyesight. I must have lenses inserted and have not troubled to do so. What is it?” “Heer burgemeester, I have a task for you,” Bruwer said as she seated herself heavily and began massaging her calves, the tensions of the last week weighting her voice oppressively.

  Beyers’s wife made as if to leave. “No, you stay!” Bruwer said. “This concerns you as well.”

  She began to explain.

  SHUFFLING THEIR FEET THROUGH A RUDE PARODY OF A SENTRY

  round, bored sentries stood outside a rude parody of a bunker close by the forest edge of Krugersdorp. Above them rose the spine of the southernmost ridge, sheltering the vale where Krugersdorp lay. Although a sentry round was more appropriate to guarding a post office than to manning an outpost, it passed the time and made the young miners feel military.

>   As the two of them came together, there was a series of small sounds in the brush ten meters away, and they spun away from one another to flop on the ground like drunken marionettes.

  One man sitting outside the bunker to escape the heat climbed the top step without his weapon, his face wreathed in anxiety. As his body straightened, a thin, whirling splinter of plastic caught him squarely in the chest. He toppled back.

  Two shadowy forms emerged from the forest cover at a dead run. As the first reached the step, his feet came out from under him on a wet spot, and he desperately maintained his balance long enough to empty his magazine through the open doorway before crashing to the bottom.

  The clicking of the bolt was echoed by duller thuds as the rounds sprayed around and off the inside walls. Yevtushenko regained his feet with infinite care; two of the escaping rounds had passed back out the door close by his head. Shining his light within, he saw three huddled figures. He removed his knife from where it stuck out of the corpse between his legs, and he passed within momentarily.

  Coming out, he saw Thomas standing at the top of the steps with the silliest grin on his pinched face. Without any trace of an expression, Yevtushenko loaded another magazine. He wiped the blood off his knife on a dead Afrikaner’s trouser leg.

  Sanmartin moved out from cover to join them. “Well, we’re here,” he said softly. Yevtushenko nodded.

  Sanmartin looked up toward the thin spire of the church tower looming over them, shrouded in the darkness, before looking back to Yevtushenko.

  “Lev, as the hedgehog said to his wife, let’s go easy.”

  OKLADNIKOV CURSED FREELY. THE DRONE OF THE TRANSPORT’S engines muted his comments.

  When the light attack went in by air, most of the time the big transports could find themselves a nice, clear patch to settle on so that he could drive his vehicles off like a gentleman with his cuffs buttoned, but “most of the time” was like egg roll. Egg roll yesterday, egg roll tomorrow, but never egg roll today. Everything in the vicinity of the designated landing zone that wasn’t swamp was either hot and bothered or forested over. Coldewe’s Gurkhas and even the mortars and slicks could move between the trees, but the only good place for the Cadillacs to insert was right in the middle of the river.

  Okladnikov felt his stomach part company with the rest of his insides as the transport abruptly lost altitude. Squandering his store of maledictions freely, he worked his way through the generation of Boers immediately preceding the one that had settled Suid-Afrika in a flat monotone as the tail opened out and the ring chute deployed.

  He was still cursing when the ring chute opened and dragged his Cadillac out the rear of the aircraft, to plop it into the pond from an altitude of two meters.

  The armored car bobbed up and down, more or less gently. Okladnikov concluded his litany in a harsh whisper as he released the catch that held the chute to the vehicle. A small wave washed over the vehicle’s hull as the next Cadillac came down, the second transport roaring overhead with a scant four-meter clearance. Okladnikov grinned as he began to loosen the straps that held him in place. If he pulled a Prigal and the engine didn’t catch, he’d drift halfway out to sea.

  He shoved his head out the hatch. Coldewe was waiting on the embankment.

  “Hey, Sergei. The road looks all right. Zerebtsov’s boys took out the picket. ”

  The logging road was crooked as grandmother’s snake and

  probably mined. As for the picket, the Boers had the theory down but their execution left a lot to be desired. The computer on Ajax had tracked vehicles all over the planet, and even after the ban on traffic had gone into effect, they’d continued driving reliefs out to spare the little lads’ feet. The last time through, a Hummingbird had been along to watch where everyone got out.

  “Anybody hurt dropping?”

  Coldewe grinned white against the darkness. "One and a half casualties.”

  Okladnikov gave him a hurt look. “How do you get half a casualty?”

  “Salchow dropped in the top canopy and lost his rope. Zerebtsov’s boys are too busy giggling to get him down.”

  Okladnikov guffawed as he shepherded his wet vehicles ashore. The Gurkhas climbed aboard, and they started down the trail in close formation. In front, the little utility vehicle heading the column dipped and yawed. Occasionally, the engineer in the passenger seat would look up from his equipment and heave a handful of flour over the side to mark anomalies for the trailing vehicles. Where the roadbed wasn’t firm, the blower in front kicked up a small cloud of dust.

  “Think they’ll know we’re coming?” Okladnikov asked of Coldewe.

  While Coldewe was considering a reply, the driver of the utility vehicle veered right and then suddenly widened his swerve. The stream of particles from the blower touched off the mine; the counter in the mine held up under the ion bombardment just long enough to trigger the explosion almost under the front wheels. The vehicle flipped neatly on its side and skidded away as about three meters of the roadbed disappeared, the explosion shredding the silence. The engineer rolled over and sat up clutching his shoulder from where he had been flung; the blood belonged to the deceased driver. The shattered wheel spun badly, trailing strings of melted plastic.

  Coldewe replied, “They just might.”

  Six kilometers away, Hendrik Pienaar awoke and found that he was unable to return to sleep. He scratched his gray beard moodily and put his boots on, pausing to ruminate.

  Sometimes a feeling was worth more than a thousand textbooks of military tactics. He had such a feeling, but it refused to place itself in words. It was a feeling he could not remember experiencing since the missile boat had pulled him off the beach at Hoedjes Bay in the final days.

  * * *

  THOMAS MOVED UP TO THE FIRST OF THE CONCRETE STRUCTURES and glanced up at the walls. A handful of small windows broke up the creamy surface at ground level. They were closed.

  “Praise be for air conditioning,” he whispered under his breath. He shined his black light in the window and saw long rows of bunk beds.

  “Three and three,” Thomas whispered inaudibly. Looking around the side, he saw Yevtushenko test the door. Satisfied, Yevtushenko took a small tube of glue from his pouch and squirted it in the lock mechanism. He nodded to Thomas, his profile rendered grotesque by the mottled outline of his mask.

  Holstering his submachine gun and flipping the black light into his pouch, Thomas removed instead a suction cup that he attached to the window and tested for a secure fit. Then he unsheathed his cutting bar and slashed a rude diamond in the glass around the suction cup. Sheathing the cutting bar, he held the suction cup and rapped the diamond with the back of his gloved hand. It came away, and he set it aside.

  Then he reached up to his harness and felt among his stock-in-trade for the smooth shape of a plastic-cased chem grenade. Removing the safety pin, he counted to three, stuck his arm in the hole, and lobbed the grenade in the center of the room, where it bounced under a bunk and exploded with a soft pop.

  Yevtushenko calmly handed him four strips of tape slashed from the roll he carried in his pouch. Inattentive to the men dying inside, Thomas carefully taped over the hole in the window. He then cut a small piece of his own tape to cover a small cut in his sleeve made by the knife-edged glass.

  He rejoined Yevtushenko at the next of the barnlike concrete structures where two other team members were already at work. Another team was hard at work on the other row.

  Inside, Hendrik Pienaar wondered what it was that his senses were telling him as he flexed and unflexed his stiffened muscles. It might be that they were saying that he was an old man, he thought sourly.

  Suddenly, in the big room next to his own, Pienaar heard a pop and a slight hissing sound. Without a thought in his head, his body took him through the window at his bedside, rifle in hand. Rolling, he straightened up to hear a clicking sound and fired by instinct a short burst at a crouching blur of a figure.

  The dull roar of the rifle shots t
hat killed Yevtushenko were the first intimation Krugersdorp had that it was under attack.

  ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF KRUGERSDORP, ANOTHER OF YEVTU-

  shenko’s men, Zerebtsov, was mildly surprised that the Boers camped in the forest had no prepared positions and only a few sentinels. Better still, the ones they had were making themselves obtrusive.

  There were perhaps a hundred fifty or a hundred seventy-five of them, possibly two small kommandos. Someone in the circle of tents had spent a few opportune minutes trying to start up a balky truck, allowing Okladnikov’s slicks to position themselves.

  Setting aside his night glasses, he wriggled back to sketch out a quick map for the slicks. Salchow made one intelligent, if inappropriate, observation. “Why shoot them up? Why not just drop the artillery?”

  His corporal looked at him as if half a night in a tree had addled his wits. “Those are mortars, not prayer wheels. These dumb Boers are scattered over half the forest and every last one is lying down. You want ants, you stir diem with a stick first. His quick ears detected something that sounded like faint rifle fire. “I think we better get moving,” he said, even before his radio began spitting out its message.

  SACKED OUT ON A CHURCH PEW, DANNY MEAGHER SAT UPRIGHT,

  recognizing the same sound. He kicked over the bunk nearest him, dumping its startled occupants on the floor.

  “Get up! Move, move, move, if you want Christmas to come!” He grabbed one man by the shoulder. “Don’t bother with your clothes. Get up in the bell tower and ring it loud.” He draped his webbing over his body in a well-practiced motion and snatched up a weapon to fling it at its owner, who was contemplating Meagher’s madness from the safety of his coverlet.

  He bent to lace his boots and looked up to find Pat staring back at him remorselessly, readied for battle with an ease that was bom and not taught.