A Pillar of Fire by Night

by Tom Kratman

  “I’ll see to it, sir.”

  “Also, see if there isn’t some way for us to get some air defense balloons airborne. Yes, yes, I know; all balloons are being used around the cities of the Tauran Union, lest the ever so-evil Balboans bombard us with money again.”

  Malcoeur had to grin at that one. In retaliation for Tauran bombing of their homeland, the Balboans had struck back with very hard to detect, low speed drones. One of these, slamming through a window at headquarters, had done for Elizabeth Ashworth, the worse than useless TU defense minister. Another had dumped several million in mixed real and counterfeit currency on a well-attended soccer game, the resulting riot having caused the death of about as many Tauran civilians, soccer hooligans in the main, as the Tauran bombing had in Balboan. The Tauran Union’s various militaries had thought extremely well of both events, and one Anglian regiment had officially added to its list of mess night toasts, “the missile that had rid us of ‘she’s-no-Lady Ashworthless’.”

  Almost everyone military and not directly impacted by the drone attack grinned about the soccer game. Janier was one of a very few exceptions. They’re not just hitting back and making us look and feel stupid; they’re also demonstrating the ability to hit a target in the TU with considerable precision. In itself, this would hardly matter, but there is a strong suspicion in the intelligence community that the Balboans have nuclear weapons. I don’t know where they’d have gotten them, but the world is a wicked place. So maybe they’re also letting us know, in somewhat uncertain terms, that we cannot nuke them without being nuked in return.

  “There is one other thing, sir, but I don’t know what to make of it. We’ve received a report, whether from one of Major Campbell’s people or more routine channels, that Duque Carrera is beginning to lose his composure, his judgment, and the respect of his subordinates.”

  Janier sighed. “A lot of things, son, that I once thought impossible seem to be coming true.”

  South of the Parilla Line, Balboa

  No rest for the wicked, thought Werner Verboom. At the moment, the sergeant was overlooking a mostly dry draw—that’s not going to last long—with his reconstituted squad stretched to either side of him in a V. Verboom laid down the device he’d been holding in his right hand and flicked fingers to shoo away a mosquito, persistently buzzing by his ear. Although they were most annoying, and even potentially dangerous, his views on his unwelcome buzzing company could be summed up as, Still beats the shit out of trying to fight our way into their lines without anything like enough preparation again. And it’s miles better than trying to fight our way out again.

  Verboom automatically recovered the device as soon as the mosquito had moved off. He held the device’s twin, a small, cheap, disposable detonator for a directional anti-personnel mine, in his left hand. He really didn’t think that the spot his acting commander had chosen for him was a very good spot for an ambush. On the other hand, as Lieutenant Jansen had pointed out, “No place that the enemy is unlikely to show up is a good place for an ambush. Anyplace the enemy is likely to show up is a good place for an ambush. That draw will channelize people trying to escape from our lodgment or patrolling from their lines. That makes it a good spot. So quit sniveling, Sergeant, and go.”

  I suppose he had a point, thought Verboom, and if they’d given me the five mines and the det cord I’d asked for . . .

  Mentally, the sergeant sighed.

  Well, I suppose that they’re still having trouble getting supplies ashore. Or maybe it’s trouble sorting out what they’ve brought in. Whatever it might be, two is not enough to cover this draw very well. Five maybe wouldn’t be enough. Needs must, though. And it still beats trying another attack before they’ve unloaded enough artillery ammunition to rearrange this part of the country.

  Thinking of the attack, the “reconnaissance in force” in which Thirteenth Company, Royal Haarlem Commandotroepen, had participated, Verboom still couldn’t figure out the whys of it. Sure, it had been costly for Balboa, but probably not as costly, as a fraction of available force, as it had been for the TU.

  It had been a bit of a shock, really, after the easy initial landing and fairly easy initial assault. But then they’d stymied, after which, the enemy infantry, too, had seemed to come from almost everywhere. It’s almost as if the bastards let us get in just as much as they wanted us in. We might have whipped them when they were on a not very well-planned defensive, but give the fuckers their due, when they attack you know you’re under attack.

  Verboom gave a little unwilling shiver in remembrance. Maybe they’d gotten more Balboans than the Balboans had gotten Haarlemers—And maybe not, either—but there was no doubt who’d ended up in possession of the contested turf.

  No doubt who’s still in muddy scraping, either. Got to give them credit, too, though, for sending someone to arrange to give us our bodies back . . . and the worst of our wounded.

  The thought of the dead gave Verboom another involuntary shiver.

  Completely unbothered by his shivering, the mosquitoes still landed for their feast on Verboom. They also quite ignored the insect repellent with which he’d doused himself. The repellent was some new stuff, without much smell to it to a human’s sense of smell. If the bugs smelled it at all it was tolerably hard to notice.

  Again dropping his clacker and flicking his fingers at one particularly bothersome pest, Verboom noticed the smell of explosive, a very distinctive solvent-like aroma, clinging to his fingers from handling the two directional mines he’d set out.

  Hmmm . . . I wonder if they’re attracted by that? Something’s got them riled up, sure as hell. I wonder if the Balboans—he cast his eyes northward, in the general direction of the enemy defensive line—have figured out some way to make them worse, too. Wouldn’t surprise me a bit.

  Lying in the mostly quiet ambush position, course du jour at Chez Buggy, and with the cry of the antaniae—mnnbt, mnnbt, mnnbt—sounding in the distance, Verboom thought, It’s a defensive line, a deep and strong defensive line. Okay, we always knew that. But who the hell puts a defensive line on the wrong side of the river, and why? Makes no sense. Makes as much sense, anyway, as laying out in the . . . oh, oh . . .

  Sergeant Sais wasn’t aware of the first warning, the absence of close animal sounds, until he got the second, a brief whiff in the shifting breeze of something like solvent. It couldn’t have been natural, but it still took half a second for him to recognize what it came from.

  Automatically, Sais began to raise his F-26 rifle. “Fuck . . .”

  If he were going to say anything else, the words were lost in the twin explosions that shattered the evening stillness. In that instant, time seemed to slow down to a crawl.

  Sais felt a half dozen or so small impacts on his unarmored legs, two more on his left arm, and one in his neck. Some numbers, too, seemed to hit the plates of his lorica, the Legion’s silk and liquid metal armor, while still others he thought he felt burying themselves in the silk.

  Pain wasn’t instantaneous, neither after seeing the explosions nor even feeling the impact of those fifteen or so pellets. Before pain came shock, then rage. Only after that, did Sais begin to feel the burning of the hot bits of metal buried in his flesh. He never really did notice the blood that began to leak from his wounds.

  The rifle’s safety was already off. Indeed, it hadn’t been on since about the time they heard the first word of enemy parachutists. At the first stroke of the trigger, it began to spit out 6.5 mm full metal jacket. That fire was answered by at least one machine gun and seven or eight rifles.

  As he had been trained, Sais’ first instinct was to charge the ambush, screaming and firing like a maniac. He could scream, and did. He could fire, and the F-26 spat out its nearly two thousand rounds a minute. Charge he could not do. When he turned to assault the fire-spitting line to his left, his legs simply gave way under him, tumbling him into the moist earth below. It was that fall that, at least for the nonce, spared his life by dropping him belo
w the enemy’s line of sight. Something tore his night vision goggles from his face as he fell.

  Espinal, on the other hand, had been saved from major perforation by the fact that his sergeant’s body had stopped all the pellets that might have hit him. He’d been trained, too, to assault the near ambush. He did so, unintentionally leaving Sais behind. He was out of the kill zone, unhit, in a matter of about two seconds or perhaps a bit less. If he’d hit any of the ambushers in his wild firing charge, he didn’t know about it.

  But where’s my sergeant? the boy wondered, once he’d gone about seventy meters past the ambush and found a tree to hide behind. In a lull in the firing, Espinal heard foreign voices, Taurans, shouting something harsh and guttural. Then he heard his own name, weak and indistinct, but clearly in Sais’ voice, followed by a few bursts of fire, accompanied by one of the Taurans screaming.

  For a few moments—long moments, to be sure—Sais lay stunned, face down in the dirt, while tracers streaked just barely overhead, impacting the banks of the draw to either side of him. He was far more emotionally aware of them, of their flashing and cracking and dull thudding into the dirt, than he was intellectually.

  It was the pain, especially the pain from the wound in his neck, that brought him around to a more acutely intellectual sense of, Jesus Christ; they’re trying to kill me!

  “Espinal!” shouted the sergeant, as he took what passed for aim in the night. His point of aim was a series of flashes, about seventy meters to the front. He pressed the trigger twice in rapid succession, causing the rifle to spit out at least nine or maybe as many as a dozen bullets. He must have hit something, because one of them screamed.

  “I’m here, Sergeant,” the boy shouted back. “I’m coming back for you. Hold on!”

  “NO!” That was distinct and didn’t sound especially weak. Neither did the ripped-cloth bursts that followed. “Just shut up, boy, and run for it. Let them know we accomplished our mission, and the issues with that. Now go.”

  “But . . .”

  “Goddammit, private, go!”

  Estado Mayor, Sub camp C, Ciudad Balboa, Balboa

  A profoundly nervous Jamey Soult knocked on the door to Carrera’s suite in the sub-camp.

  “Come in,” came the answer.

  This was a relief. Given his mood, I wasn’t sure he’d be willing to see his wife, let alone me.

  “You okay, Boss?” Soult asked, padding in on quiet feet and shutting the door behind him. Carrera sat in a comfortable reading chair, staring at an old-fashioned paper map and a clipboard with some papers—reports, I suppose—attached to it. He looked up at Soult, directly, a questioning expression on his face.

  I expected him to be half drunk but . . . well . . . if he’s had anything to drink it’s tolerably hard to tell. Soult looked down at a table sitting just to the right of the entrance. A full glass of whiskey sat there, still. He didn’t drink any of it, as far as I can tell.

  “No, Jamey, I didn’t have any more than a sip to cover my breath in case anyone got close enough.”

  “But the glass, Legate Kuralski, the refusal of artillery support. Boss, you and I both know we’ve got more guns dug in and ready than . . .”

  “Don’t say that out of this room. Don’t even think it. In fact, when you leave here I want you to look like a mix of disgusted and hopeless.”

  “But . . . why? I don’t understand.”

  “It’s Fernandez’s idea. He says there are still enemy informers, spies, in plain language, among us. He insists there’s no way he got them all, even though he thinks he’s rounded up the bulk of them. So we’re making use of them, or him, or her, or however many. Movement is tightly controlled, so no one is likely to see what Logistics Base Alpha really is. Rumors, though, somehow always pass unimpeded. I’ve been setting up a rumor mill that I am demoralized, lost, depressed, and rapidly climbing into a bottle. Fair chance—no, a better than fair chance—that my opposite number on the other side will hear of this within, oh, call it two days, at the outside.”

  Carrera passed Soult the clipboard. “Only four people in the world I ever trusted completely, Jamey; my late wife, Linda, Lourdes, Mitchell, and you. Read it.”

  Soult read. It was a compendium of reports from stay-behinds in the occupied area. Fully a third of them said, “Last report for a while.” Another third said “negative report.”

  “Why, ‘last report,’ Boss? And where did they come from, and how?”

  “In some cases, because a group of Taurans are sitting on top of their hideouts so they couldn’t risk coming out. Some came by directional radio, rather, radio with a directional antenna. Some came by radio lifted by a balloon and floating, this time of year, out to sea. A few came by carrier pigeon, too. Yes, really.

  “Turn the page.”

  Soult complied, then asked, “And this is?”

  “It’s a report of estimated tonnage landed at Puerto Lindo.” Carrera smiled broadly then. “They’re sending not everything they can spare, but everything they have. Fernandez’s tame Druze, Khalid, along with the other men we have there, is going to have a fine time in the TU, very, very soon.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “We are the worm in the wood!

  “We are the rot at the root!

  “We are the taint in the blood!

  “We are the thorn in the foot!”

  —Kipling, A Pict Song

  Moseal Fluss, near Treverorum, Sachsen

  The Tauran Union, Khalid the Druze, decided, has two big problems stemming from one bigger one. The two problems are that it not only has no defense in depth, but it has no defense on its extremities, either. That, of course, is because of the bigger problem, the people running the place.

  What spurred the thought were the dozen packages of rifles and rocket launchers, mines and machine guns, grenades and demolitions, plus a fair load of ammunition, that he and two of his devout Moslem assistants, Maytham and Bandar, had brought up the river network without anything resembling hindrance, to a place near this city located near the border between Sachsen and Gaul. Where the arms had actually come from, Khalid didn’t know and didn’t want to know. He suspected a factory somewhere in the Volgan Republic was turning out lower receivers without serial numbers at Fernandez’s or Carrera’s behest. For that matter, who knows; maybe our side owns the factory. Though I don’t know why we would, since we developed our own family of small arms. Maybe Carrera and Fernandez think that far ahead. I’ll have to ask someday, Allah permitting.

  Under the declining sun, their boat, a small yacht, passed picturesque towns, banks covered with vines, church towers, and centuries-old ivy-encrusted stone fortifications. Nobody stopped them. Nobody questioned them.

  I suppose they’re afraid that if they were stopping boats and questioning people, they’d find out how many illegal immigrants were coming in. Worse, they might actually find some illegal immigrants and then have to escort them to the nearest refugee acceptance center. That, of course, would never do. And turning them away? Unthinkable!

  Ordinarily, the Druze were pretty much a live and let live people and faith. Moreover, they tended to a fierce loyalty to their homelands. That loyalty, however, was not likely to survive damage done to the Druze in those homelands. Moreover, since Islam considered the Druze to be irredeemable heretics, that kind of eventual damage was a given. To combat that, the Druze tended to hide who and what they were except among their own.

  Khalid didn’t let even the mildest trace of these thoughts appear on his face. Rather, he kept them off the face he currently wore. He’d had so much reconstructive work done in the legion medical facilities that he wasn’t quite sure what he used to look like, anymore.

  The plastic surgery, though, wasn’t the reason for the blank face. Rather, he, as a good Druze who had had a goodly chunk of his family murdered by a Moslem-planted terrorist bomb, many years before, in Sumer, thoroughly detested Moslems and Islam, even while manipulating them to do the will of his adopted country.r />
  Oh, sure, I’ll make exceptions for the odd decent one, but I wouldn’t lift a finger to save those few if by not lifting it I could get rid of all the rest. And these two fanatical minions I’ll use like cheap whores and toss aside when and if they become inconvenient.

  Savoring that happy thought for a while, Khalid almost missed the lighthouse that was his checkpoint for a turn into a tributary of the Moseal, the Konzer Fluss. Bandar had to point it out to him, even while Maytham was already bringing the wheel over in that direction.

  Khalid made a hand motion, the universal palm down and parallel to the ground or water pumping that said, “lower the volume” or “slow it down,” context depending. Maytham immediately grasped and pulled back on the boat’s throttle.

  From a pocket Khalid pulled out a small notebook containing the calculations that would put him in precisely the right spot, at precisely the right levels of darkness, to dump his cargo overboard to where some of the more devout members of a local mosque would recover it.

  He turned to the last fading embers of sun, checked position against the lighthouse and decided, Should be just about right on time.

  To Bandar, he said, “Start inflating the floats for the first four packages. Stand by to help me with the tank after that.”

  Less than half a minute later, there came the sound of rushing air as Bandar filled the first of eight flotation devices for the first two packages for this delivery. When he was done he informed Khalid, who simply nodded in the gathering gloom.

  Looking ahead off the starboard bow, Khalid saw a van parked by a small civil park with boat ramp, a half dozen men and a couple of women in burkas standing around. They were the only ones there; any Sachsens who might have wanted to enjoy the park in the evening having scurried off to avoid the Moslem presence and the implied, and usually overstated, threat. Khalid put on a set of night vision goggles, turned them on, and then pulled out a throwaway cell phone. He lifted the goggles, fiddled a bit, then dialed a pre-set number. Pulling the goggles back into position he was gratified to see someone ashore answer his call. He couldn’t see it, but he could hear that the van had coughed to life. He could also see a couple of the men waiting there stripped to their shorts and dive into the water, one of them with a rope wrapped round his waist.