A Pillar of Fire by Night

by Tom Kratman

  Fernandez let the thought die. Best I remember that just because I think somebody is wicked, wrong, evil, a traitor, a swine . . . that doesn’t mean he thinks he’s any of those things, or is any less dedicated to his cause than I am to mine. If there weren’t . . .

  The thought was interrupted by a long and heartrending shriek of utter agony.

  Ah, that sounds like the young captive.

  Fernandez turned his wheelchair toward the interrogation chamber, using the small stick on the right arm to direct it forward. What I can order Mahamda to do I can make myself watch.

  The boy—and he was just a boy, no more than eighteen—hung by his wrists from a rope running through a hook overhead. His wrists were behind him. His shoulders strained near to dislocating. Mere inches below his outstretched toes, his feet twitched and danced to find purchase on the floor. Tears ran down his face, while snot poured from his nose. The three streams joined somewhere below his lower lip, the mix dripping from his chin onto the floor.

  The thing is, boy, thought Mahamda, that this is the light stuff. It can get a lot worse, and will, unless your story and the stories of the others come to match.

  Mahamda barely glanced over as Fernandez silently rolled in on his powered chair. The chief didn’t often come to watch and, when he did, Mahamda was fairly sure it was to punish himself for the punishment he had inflicted.

  Reaching out one hand to grasp the boy by the hair, Mahamda visually signaled an assistant to let the rope down a bit, enough for the boy’s toes and the balls of his feet to rest on the floor. It wasn’t entirely unprecedented when the boy’s sobbing increased at even that much relief from the pain.

  Pulling back on the prisoner’s hair, thus raising his face, Mahamda said, not ungently, “It can only get worse from here, Sancho. You’ve had the tour. You know what awaits you. Why don’t you tell me the truth? You know you will eventually.”

  Mahamda, naturally, had no particular moral issues with lying to the people he tortured, especially if the lie might reduce the amount of torture he had to apply, which reduced the risk one of them might die before spilling his guts.

  “The others,” he said, “have broken, boy. Whether from having their nuts squeezed in a vise or a blowtorch applied to their feet; whether from the dental drilling or the rack or Skevington’s Daughter; they’ve all broken. Still their pain goes on because you won’t tell me the truth.” The warrant seemed most distressed at this, for all one could tell from his voice.

  “You want their pain to stop, don’t you, Sancho? Sure, you’re young and healthy, you can take it for a while longer. But old Pedrarias? He’s just this side of death from the pain.”

  In fact, Emilio Pedrarias had died under interrogation, but no sense letting the boy know that.

  Mahamda let the boy’s hair go, then signaled with his chin for his assistant to turn the wheel to raise him off the floor again. The screaming resumed, with new intensity.

  “We’ll leave Sancho here to think a while, especially to think on what his comrades are enduring because he refuses to speak the truth.”

  As Mahamda left the chamber to confer with Fernandez, he said to his assistant, “Don’t pull on his legs yet or start the raise and drop routine.”

  Outside the torture chamber, shaking his head, the Sumeri warrant said, “Sayyidi, I’ve been in this business a long time. I honestly don’t think the poor shit knows anything beyond what he’s said.”

  “So why are you continuing?” Fernandez asked. “Piping the sounds into someone else’s cell?”

  “Yes, sir, with a ten-second delay. Sometimes it helps. And, besides, I could be wrong; he just might know something significant.”

  “Any insights from the others?”

  The Sumeri shook his head, saying, “Nothing beyond what I’ve already sent you.”

  “Any chance it’s all a fake,” asked Fernandez, “or a mere distraction?”

  “No way for me to be sure,” admitted the warrant officer, “but I am sure that they don’t think so. People do not put up . . . well . . . unless their name is Layla Arguello, of course . . . anyway, people do not put up with what these men have put up with unless they believe it’s for a purpose they consider among the highest. I think we have to take them at face value, as the enemy’s main effort in trying to restore their old intelligence network here.

  “And if it’s obvious and we crippled it quickly? Well . . . sir . . . it’s not like the Tauran Union has proven to be all that competent to date.”

  “They’re invading pretty competently,” Fernandez countered.

  “That’s operations,” the warrant said, “not intel. In intelligence matters they’ve been pretty poor so far.”

  “Point,” conceded the crippled legate. “Unless we don’t catch the somewhere between none and five infiltrators still at large. In that case, they may prove competent enough.”

  “Point,” agreed the Sumeri.

  South of the Parilla Line

  The battery commander decided to walk point himself. He had no one more qualified, at hand, in any case. It was a function of having a largely citizen-soldier army—technical expertise tended to be thin and narrowly focused at the top.

  Tribune Alfonso Ramirez had only two officers in his battery, himself and his exec, the latter back with the rest in so-called “Log Base Alpha.” All but one of the centurions were back there, too, with the sixteen shipping containers and eight guns the battery had dug in under the jungle canopy.

  The other three guns, the three the battery had held before the first Tauran invasion, were out here, likewise dug in, along with just enough men to minimally man them, a tiny cell from the fire direction center, and a quantity of ammunition well over what they were likely to need. The ammunition was actually dug in better than the guns were, with the fuses stored separately and dug in better still.

  Unlike back at Log Base Alpha, there was no overhead cover for the guns here. All they had were the radar scattering camouflage screens, simple pits, a few fighting positions, and some crawl trenches. Even the fire direction center wasn’t properly built, though the logs overhead might be adequate to shrug off cluster munitions and their small bomblets. And there were some small personnel scrapings in the sides of the gun pits, which might or might not have served well enough to the same purpose.

  The detachment’s greatest and best defense, though, as the battery commander ruefully admitted, was that they hadn’t fired a round, simply because no one had asked.

  And now, with reports of Tauran fingers closing in around the detachment, it was time to go, without even that one shot of defiance having been fired.

  “Sucks, boys,” Ramirez admitted to the one junior centurion and eighteen enlisted men with him, “but there you have it. I’ve asked permission already, which was granted. It’s time to go. Or will be in an hour, when Second Infantry is in position.

  “Centurion Avilar?”

  “Sir.” The junior centurion was on the tall side, taller than his commander, in any case, and of a medium brown complexion. A nose broader and lips fuller than the national norm for mestizas told of somewhat more mixed ancestry than most. He was probably the second-best centurion in the battery, after Top, which was why Ramirez had him along on this detached mission.

  “I’ll take point. You take tail. Make sure to take the sights with you and to bury the breechblocks.”

  The centurion nodded, sadly, then called off three names. “You rats will leave last, in order of march, with me. Get the shovels and dig out a small pit, fifty meters west of gun three, half a meter deep.”

  “Si, Centurio.”

  Turning back to his commander, Avilar asked, “What about the radio the Fifty-second Tercio left with us, sir? I know what they said, but . . .”

  “They said ‘leave it,’ so leave it,” answered Ramirez.

  Avilar was inclined to argue, but it might be one of those close-hold, hush-hush, dumb-assed officer things, so, Maybe better not. The tribune usually
knows what he’s talking about.

  Avilar gave a thumbs up to Ramirez. From a civilian or a private it would have meant little. From a centurion it meant, “All personnel present or accounted for. All weapons accounted for. All personal gear packed and on the troops’ backs. All non-firearm serial number items present and accounted for and on the troops’ backs. All radios but one are on the troops backs. Field phones and their wire is collected and on the troops’ backs. I have the sights. The men have sufficient food and water for the trip, and are healthy enough for it. They’re camouflaged to standard. Loads are more or less evenly distributed, allowing for different levels of fitness. The gas is drained from the tanks for the auxiliary propulsion units of the guns. Etc. Etc. Yes, that, too. Etc. And that. Etc. Trust me on this, Boss; I took care of it. We can go on your order.”

  Saves so much time, thought the tribune, when you can just count on the routine shit getting done routinely.

  He raised the flaps of his lorica, his legionary issue silk and liquid metal body armor, and ran the zipper down the bottom without quite undoing it. The thing was miserably hot just sitting there; doing any kind of labor in one was right out. But we’ll have to, just to get home.

  Then he turned north, consulted his compass, and said, over his left shoulder, “Follow me.”

  All around, a rising noise in the jungle gave Ramirez the sense—correct, as it turned out—that most or all of the detachments that had been posted forward of the Parilla Line were likewise pulling out and heading north to shelter.

  Then came the warning shout from Avilar, the ferocious scream of the incoming Tauran jet, and the pummeling impact of rockets on the old position.

  “Twelve o’clock!” the tribune shouted. “Two hundred meters.”

  As Ramirez turned his eyes forward and began to sprint, he saw that Avilar and three gunners had already passed him by.

  Within the first mile, every eye in Ramirez’s small detachment was scanning through the small gaps in the thickly interwoven jungle canopy overhead, every ear straining to hear through the muffling tree cover the harpy’s shriek of incoming bombers. A mile after that they found the smoking, cooked remains of what was probably an infantry squad, dismembered, burned, with a naked, blackened, armless torso impaled on the ragged stump of a tree branch, overhead. The torso dripped blood down the stout, bomb-sharpened stump of the tree branch on which it hung. Half a mile further, the party went to ground at a crescendo of small-arms fire, coming from ahead.

  Even the normally phlegmatic Avilar exclaimed, “Fuck!” at that.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “War is a natural condition of the State, which was organized in order to be an effective instrument of violence on behalf of society. Wars are like deaths, which, while they can be postponed, will come when they will come and cannot be finally avoided.”

  —Philip Bobbett,

  The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History

  Above Landing Zone/Drop Zone Pandion,

  Cristobal Province, Balboa

  “. . . .three thousand . . . four thousand . . . oompf!”

  The opening shock wasn’t bad, actually, as such things go. At least my balls weren’t busted, thought Sergeant Werner Verboom of Thirteenth Company, Royal Haarlem Commandotroepen, as he looked up to check his parachute. That’s sort of the definition of not-bad, at least when we have a fully deployed chute, like this one.

  Above, the fourth of the six thundering Hacienda-121 transport aircraft that had brought in Thirteenth Company began disgorging its two dozen jumpers, the men more or less pouring off the load ramp in a human flood. Yes, it was more dangerous to jump that way, but not as dangerous as it would have been to be caught in the aircraft if intelligence had proven wrong and the Balboans able to engage it with something moderately heavy.

  Distantly seen and completely unheard, four miles away, another half dozen of the two-engine, propeller-driven aircraft were in the process of dropping Verboom’s sister company, the Fourteenth, plus battalion headquarters, to LZ / DZ Teratorn.

  A smoke pot burned at one end of the drop zone, set up by the pathfinders or maybe the airmobile brigade, as an aid to the reinforcing jumpers. Verboom, floating down from about four hundred and fifty feet up, with a fully deployed parachute, saw the smoke rising. He knew from the twisting of the smoke trail that there were erratic ground winds down below. He could live with that, since the rising of the smoke said they weren’t especially strong winds.

  The tracers, however, skipping madly across the drop zone, had come as something of a surprise to the sergeant. Between them, trying—not entirely successfully—to control the oscillation of his parachute, and twisting his head to try to keep eyes on his men, however little good that might do, the beefy non-com was too busy to be afraid. He did take time to release his rucksack to hang on a strap below, then did the same with his weapons case, which slid down the same strap to rest on the rucksack. This cut down on the weight he had to land with even as it tended to stabilize a bit against oscillation. There was more in the weapons case than just his own rifle.

  Silly of me to be surprised, really, thought Verboom, drifting down just that much faster than most of the men of the company. I mean, I’ve seen tracers in the day. I’ve seen them lots of times, hundreds of times. Can’t see them from the side, of course, but they’re obvious enough when you’re behind a machine gun firing four by one.

  That it may have been silly didn’t stop the sergeant’s lungs from acting like bellows. He wasn’t terrified—nothing like that, of course; the Haarlemer Commandos were, like the Marines and unlike the rest of the Haarlemer Army—quite elite, with perhaps the odd and occasional individual exception. Still, even a very elite body has its own ways of preparing for danger. Among those is stocking up on oxygen.

  Verboom didn’t see any tracers as a long flurry of machine-gun fire passed him by. He didn’t think the gunner down below had been aiming for him; the area through which the bullets passed had remained steady as Verboom fell. He suspected that the gunner had simply fired below a paratrooper and waited for his target to descend into his cone of fire. This suspicion was confirmed with a scream, quickly cut short, that arose over the crackcrackcracking of a long burst of machine-gun fire.

  The sergeant twisted his head again and saw a limp body, hanging from a chute, toes pointed down and arms swaying low and free. The body wasn’t close enough to see blood, but the way it hung so limp said to the sergeant, Dead. Never saw that before. Never . . .

  Never mind. Business first.

  With the ground closing fast, Verboom automatically tugged at the toggles to try to face into the wind. His parachute, however, was not really very steerable, no matter what the advertising said. Moreover, the unpredictability of the breeze worked against him. In short, his efforts did him little good. Then again, as he got closer to the ground and the tracers, they tended to occupy more and more of his thoughts.

  But I never saw them on a jump before. No one ever thought to have somebody shoot across the drop zone as we came in.

  Let’s hope the men take it well, what with not being mentally prepared for it. Of course, hope is not a plan.

  And . . . oh, shit . . . left rear . . . ooof.

  The commando hit the ground, chin tucked and knees bent, about as well as could be expected. This is to say, he hit a lot harder than he wanted to and a lot more awkwardly that he’d hoped to.

  “But any one you can walk away from,” the sergeant muttered, after he took mental inventory of his aches, sprains, and bruises.

  Rolling to his back, Verboom slapped the release on his chest, freeing himself from the ’chute. A bullet cracked loud overhead.

  Not all that much overhead, either. They told us this DZ was secure, the lying fucks.

  Around him, the rest of the company began to assemble on the woodline to the west, the men sprinting as soon as they doffed their parachute harnesses. Not all sprinted, however; the two commandos, hit while descending, h
it the ground like the sacks full of dead meat they were.

  What really bothers me here is that these guys were our allies. Surely someone could have found a way to let us and the Balboans get together in peace, love, and harmony to kill somebody else. What else do we pay the bureaucrats of the Tauran Union for, anyway?

  Moving toward the rally point, Verboom came upon one of the company’s lesser lights, Private van der Wege, hiding in the low depression, weeping and shivering. Even elite units sometimes acquire the odd shithead.

  Reaching down, Verboom grabbed van der Wege by the back of his harness and bodily lifted him to his feet. Then, with a kick and a curse—“Move, you fucking coward!”—Verboom drove the boy bodily forward.

  Above Landing Zone / Drop Zone Teratorn,

  Cristobal Province, Balboa

  Hauptmann Nadja Felton, Sachsen Luftstreitkräfte, turned her Hacienda-121 to the southeast, even as she pulled back on the yoke to bring the plane up to dropping altitude. Behind her, in their turn, five other planes of her squadron followed, one after the other.

  Tall, slender, blonde, and with a seriousness that even her bright smile and healthy looks didn’t quite hide, Felton was a recalled reservist. She wasn’t especially happy about the recall, since it involved a massive cut in pay from what she was used to in her normal job, which was piloting for a civilian cargo aviation firm.

  As such, Felton was used to flying much bigger and more ungainly aircraft. Unlike those, with the Hacienda she could actually feel the stomping of the cargo as they stood up, hooked up, and shuffled to the ramp.