A Pillar of Fire by Night

by Tom Kratman

  And that’s still plausible, but I still don’t quite believe it. Call that one a “neutral indicator.”

  Every private, non-com, and officer we’ve captured also tells us the same story; that higher headquarters, in this case Carrera, himself, didn’t seem to believe we’d actually have the balls to land. That’s more than plausible; up until the first helicopters took off to secure the drop zones, I had my doubts we’d be allowed to land on the ground, too. I wonder if it was the death of one of the high Kosmos, Lady Ashworth—or, as our limey friends called her, Ashworthless—that persuaded the TU and our national governments to support the attack. After all, “people so insane as to kill important colleagues of the cosmopolitan progressive movement must be put down like the mad dogs they are” . . . or so I imagine the conversation to have gone.

  So, okay, maybe that accounts for the lack of proper focus and direction on the ground. Best evidence we have, actually. Call that one point for the proposition that this is not a huge fucking trap. That’s not a lot to risk an army on, indeed, to risk several armies on.

  The artillery picked up again to the west, to be matched by a diminution in the east. This time Janier got hands over his ears in time for the gut-rattling passage of the jets.

  So, it hinges on this; in which direction does that line the prisoners call “the Parilla Line” actually face. If it faces, even mostly, towards the Mar Furioso, I’m sold, we continue the buildup, clear out Cristobal, and eventually attack north. If it faces mostly south then it’s not a misoriented defense line; it’s a sally port cum bridgehead for something I don’t want to deal with. In that case, I’m going to ask to pull out while we can. Well . . . at least I’ll think about asking. I might just do it, instead, on my own hook.

  But I must know which it is. And for that, we must attack—at least a local and limited attack—to see what kind of reception we get and what is actually there.

  Assembly Area, Thirteenth Company,

  Royal Haarlem Commandotroepen

  Sergeant Werner Verboom felt mildly encouraged by the artillery and air preparation going in before the attack. Rehearsals for the attack were done, and the men were waiting in loose little knots for the order to move out. He took the opportunity to talk things up to the troops, though, perhaps a very little bit more than circumstances called for.

  “There’s not going to be much left there,” Werner reminded the men of his squad, “and those will be shaking from the shelling. That doesn’t mean we can slack off. There’s going to be a period of time—and the trees will make it longer than it might otherwise be—when the artillery will lift and we’ll be on our own; us, the machine guns and anti-tank weapons, and the company heavy weapons. Though don’t expect sixty-millimeter mortars to do much.

  “So, speed is going to be the thing. When we get to within four hundred meters the guns will, half of them, shift off and change from high explosive shell to white phosphorus. The others will go stay on target, but they’ll be firing pure delay fuse until we get within a hundred and fifty meters when they’ll—”

  “Sergeant Verboom?” came the bellow from the platoon sergeant.

  “Ready.”

  “Move ’em out.”

  “Roger.”

  Werner turned to his senior corporal, Coevorden, making a forward slash with his left hand, in the direction of advance. The corporal, a little paler than normal, said not a word but began to move, his fire team falling in to either side of him. Werner, himself, followed behind the fire team leader at a distance of perhaps ten meters. The other team leader, short a man, formed a wedge on himself and followed Verboom. That team would have been even shorter, had not the corporal in charge dragged van der Wege out from the bushes in which he’d hidden himself and forced the slimy rat into formation.

  The platoon leader, Lieutenant Kranz, along with one radio telephone operator and one of the machine gun crews, took position behind Verboom’s second team. The rest of the platoon followed along from there with the platoon sergeant taking up the rear. The other two rifle platoons of Thirteenth Company formed up further back, so that the point of each defined a company wedge. Further to the rear came the other two companies of the battalion, along with the headquarters and the various support platoons. Only the heavy mortars were staying where they were, since they could already range about four kilometers past the objective.

  The mortars weren’t firing yet, either. It had proven much tougher to get a load of ammunition to them than it had to the artillery, further back. They’d save what they had until it was needed.

  Some, apparently, was needed pretty quickly; Werner heard the distinct sound of one hundred and twenty-millimeter mortars opening up to the right and behind, maybe fifteen hundred meters in each direction. Small arms fire had kicked in, too, but only to the right. It was distant and faint, but he could make out the very distinctive cloth-ripping sound of Balboan F- and M-26 rifles and light machine guns.

  About a kilometer and a half to the other side, another company of Haarlemers likewise walked forward, likewise with the rest of their battalion following along.

  As a reconnaissance in force goes, this seems sufficiently heavy on the “force” part.

  The rumble of artillery grew steadily, not only because they were closing on the objective, but, so Verboom thought, also because the artillery seemed to have picked up the pace, delivery of shell-wise. However, the sound of the explosions changed, too.

  We must be within about four hundred meters, he thought. Those shells are on delay. Indeed, to prove the point Verboom saw through a recently created break in the vegetation overhead—jets, I suppose—and to the south a great plume of dirt and rocks rising to the sky. In seeming response, the trees about two hundred meters to the left were suddenly denuded of foliage as a Balboan bombardment—Werner thought he could count a dozen or so distinct explosions—detonated among them, rather than bursting through.

  “Haul ass!” shouted Lieutenant Kranz. “Two hundred and fifty meters, then take up a support position!”

  Bella Vista, Balboa

  And there’s an indicator to mark down on the side of the “we out-thought the enemy” ledger, Janier mused. If the artillery we captured were only a show, a bit of bait, they’d be pounding the shit out of our men all the up to the Parilla Line. They’re not; the little bit of indirect fire they’re throwing out is scattered, thin, and not very effective. Moreover, the counterbattery people are not only silencing it quickly, but they tell me it’s only mortars. So maybe, just maybe . . .

  Janier had a sudden thought. Pulling his communicator from a side packet, he called Wallenstein. She answered immediately, “Yes, Bertrand?”

  Does the blonde bitch never sleep or is this as important to her as it is to me?

  “Marguerite, I won’t ask what you’re still doing awake, but since you are awake what are you seeing on the ground?”

  “Nothing much,” she replied. “We’ve had to pull our skimmers back to protect them from your attack. But where they are, they can see in a few places increased medical activity, ambulances and such.”

  “No holes appearing suddenly in the jungle canopy?” Janier asked.

  “Only the ones we watched your jets and artillery make.”

  “Troop movements? Armored vehicles?”

  “We couldn’t hope to pick up soldiers on foot,” she replied. “The whole area is practically a beacon of refined metal and electronic activity. But none of the serious metal is moving, no. We’d pick that up, we think, for all the deception Carrera has put in front of us.”

  “You mean you can’t tell the difference between forty tons of warmed-up scrap metal and forty tons of tank until one of them moves?”

  “Yes. And, tell you the truth, we probably can’t always tell then. But if we got enough metal moving, a thousand tons or so, say, we’d see and know that. And there isn’t any.”

  “Any electronic intercepts?” he asked. “We’ve been getting nothing that made any sense, other
than a request for a short truce on humanitarian grounds. My staff thinks it’s because they’re using nothing but landline.”

  “Same and same.”

  “It’s not suspicious, is it, Marguerite? Everything is exactly as it should appear? And I am just being paranoid?”

  “I don’t think actual paranoia is possible when dealing with the Balboans,” the High Admiral returned, or, at least, when dealing with their commander. “But, yes, this time it still looks like you outfoxed them.”

  “It is looking that way; even I am forced to agree. Let’s see what our reconnaissance shows up.”

  Parilla Line.

  Verboom’s point man, Corporal Coevorden, found the first wire the hard way. Running at a breakneck pace, his left shin hit it about 12 inches above the left foot. He tripped and went flying forward, landing on a crisscrossed patch of single strand wire and bolshiberries that held him, a bit torn and bleeding, about a foot over the ground.

  “Tanglefoot,” Verboom shouted. “Alpha Team, cut through to your corporal and recover him. Bravo Team, bayonets as wire cutters and follow me!”

  While Verboom was doing the only thing there was to do, clear the obstacle to his front and recover his man, Lieutenant Kranz moved to the edge of the wire, directing the other two squads of the platoon to the left and right to provide overwatch to the breaching party. With the platoon leader came the forward observer. Kranz put him to artillery work. Looking between the trees he saw the beginning of a rise about a hundred and fifty meters to the front.

  Pointing to the rise, he said, “I need smoke between us and that.” The FO went prone, looked up, and immediately got to work on his digital device, punching in the shell and fuse combination he wanted and the to and from grids for the screen.

  “Hurry the hell up,” Kranz demanded.

  “The mission’s in, sir,” the observer said, “but lots of people are calling for fire right now we got a few . . . oh, wait . . . we’ve got a ‘shot, out,’ sir, and a splash in twenty-eight seconds.”

  “Twenty-eight seconds is a long time to . . .”

  Kranz never finished his sentence. His head simply exploded from the impact of one or more bullets in a very short space of time. The cloth-ripping crackcrackcrack that followed suggested it was more than one that hit him.

  Kranz’s brains and blood scattered over the observer, dotting his uniform, face, hands, and digital fire-control device with little bits of sticky red organic matter. The FO screamed like a little girl confronted with ultimate horror, before beginning an uncontrollable bodily tremor. The scream was loud enough for the point of the platoon to hear it.

  Even with the FO out of commission, hopefully temporarily, the smoke shells began to fall and blossom, white phosphorus at first, followed by shells containing a mix of hexachloroethane and zinc oxide. Somewhere ahead an enemy soldier screamed more horribly than had the observer, a long, continuous shriek that never lost its volume for longer than it would take a man to suck in another breath. A fragment or several of white phosphorus, the fire that is almost impossible to put out, had probably landed on his skin. The scream went on and on.

  Jesus, thought Verboom, leading the way through the wire one strand of tanglefoot or one bolshiberry vine at a time, would somebody put that poor, sorry bastard out of his misery? He also had to remind himself that only the fruit of the bolshiberries—green on the outside, red on the inside—was poisonous.

  Snip, twang, snip, twang, and then, suddenly and unexpectedly, Verboom realized there was no more tanglefoot, or none he could see, ahead of him. Separating them, he resheathed his bayonet into its scabbard, then slid the whole into the oval of nylon webbing that held it to his belt. His next thought was mines. Maybe mines. The thought was pushed aside as another small salvo of Balboan mortar shells impacted in the trees behind him.

  “There might be mines,” he muttered, “but I know the indirect fire is there and getting closer. I’ll go with the threat I know about.”

  Still, there were mines and then there were mines. The most dangerous—whether fixed directional or bouncing—were likely to be on trip wires. From a cargo pocket Verboom grabbed a can of aerosol string and aimed it directly to his front. A short burst of the stuff shot out maybe ten feet, but then hung on the grass well above where a tripwire was likely to be found.

  What the fuck was I thinking? Of course, it’s not likely to do much good there.

  Resigned to the risk, Werner cradled his rifle in the crook of both elbows and then began a very slow and deliberate crawl forward. The occasional Balboan shell landing behind tended to force him to speed up, unwisely. It took a major act of will to keep his advance to something that allowed him at least a fighting chance to see and sense mines, tripwires, and other kinds of traps. The fact that he didn’t run into any made this harder still.

  Crawling in the tropic heat was hard and sweaty work. While taking a reluctant break to catch his breath, Verboom looked behind him. One fire team seemed close on his tail, but he couldn’t see the other one. He risked a shout out, “Where the hell is Alpha Team?”

  “They dragged Corporal Coevorden to the rear. My crawling shit van der Wege joined them.”

  Dumb shits; he couldn’t have been that badly hurt. Deal with them later, because I can’t deal with them now.

  “Okay; let’s move out again.”

  Ahead, the formerly screaming Balboan seemed to have settled on a heart-wrenching, “Por favor . . . por favor . . . por favor . . .” It sounded to Verboom to be just what it was, please . . . .please . . . please . . .

  Poor bastard, he thought once again. For reasons he wasn’t even aware of he aimed himself at the repetitive plea, half his squad, he assumed, still following. Ahead, the artillery had stopped landing. Whether this was because the FO was in control of himself again, or the guns had bigger and better tasks, or because they’d simply run out of ammunition, Verboom couldn’t guess. It didn’t really matter anyway, since the smoke hung around still, blocking unaided sight between Verboom and the ridge that was the day’s objective. Occasional burst of fire lanced out from the dense cloud, but whether it was aimed via a thermal sight or just random shooting, Verboom couldn’t tell.

  Slithering forward, still, Verboom came to his first shell hole. Though it hadn’t rained in the last twelve hours or so, the bottom of the crater was rapidly turning to mud. He decided to wait there briefly—it’s as safe as anywhere—and let his squad, what there was of it, join him.

  The hole was large enough to accommodate Verboom and his short fireteam in fair safety. However, Coevorden and his entire team also showed up and began to slither into the muck.

  “I thought they carried you to the rear,” Verboom said.

  “Maybe a hundred yards,” Coevorden replied. His eyes seemed to lack a degree of focus. “That’s how long it took me to recover from hitting my head—well, recover enough; it’s still ringing and swimming—and get them to turn around. It took a little longer to get that piece of dog shit, van der Wege, moving forward again.”

  Another Balboan shell, probably in the eighty-two-millimeter range, buried itself in the dirt fifty or sixty meters away. The resultant plume of flying rocks and dirt not only pelted the squad but reminded Verboom of why they had to keep pushing on.

  “Please . . . please . . . please . . .”

  Balboan fire again lashed out: Crackcrackcrackcrackcrackcrack.

  Another body appeared at the edge of the crater. The platoon sergeant, van Beek, peered down at them. “Lieutenant Kranz bought it,” van Beek announced. “Must had been instantaneous. The FO’s gone sort of catatonic; he was looking right at the lieutenant when his head exploded. The radio operator for the observer is handling our calls for fire. You have no idea how lucky you are, by the way. The radioman stopped the artillery from dropping a package of white phosphorus approximately on your heads.”

  Van Beek looked directly at Verboom. “I’ve got the rest of the platoon behind me. Company commander is somewhe
re back there, too. Move due south by bounds. I’ll keep as tight on your tail as I can. Got it?”

  “Yes, Sergeant,” Verboom said.

  “Good. Now move out.”

  “Right. Coevorden, overwatch. Bravo Team, let’s go.”

  Moving from prone to a low crouch, Verboom could see that there were likely enough craters, at least as far as the still-hanging curtain of smoke, for them to leap from one to the next with minimal exposure to fire.

  “Come on!”

  Bravo Team followed close on Verboom’s heels, and still bunched in a tight little knot. Doctrine—anyone’s doctrine—often overlooked practicalities. In this case, as a practical matter, spread out would have taken time and risked greater exposure, while sticking together got them to the next hole rather quickly. All dived in.

  “Get up on the lip,” Verboom ordered. “Overwatch.” He turned to direct his voice in the direction from which they’d come, shouting, “Coevorden! Go!”

  Crackcrackcrackcrackcrackcrackcrackcrackcrack.

  Estado Mayor, Sub camp C, Ciudad Balboa, Balboa

  “No fucking artillery,” Carrera insisted, waving a glass of whiskey with his left hand.

  “Those men are being butchered up there, Duque,” the chief of staff insisted. “They need something to get the Tauran guns off their backs.”

  “No. Fucking. Artillery. They’ve got mortars; they can use those.”

  “Mortars won’t reach for the counterbattery work they need.”

  “End of discussion; no fucking artillery support.”

  “But . . .”

  Carrera’s eyes flashed in a fair imitation of psychosis. “MPs? Military Police! Put this man under arrest and bring him to Legate Fernandez.”