A Pillar of Fire by Night

by Tom Kratman

  Khalid ordered Maytham to close on the park, then said to Bandar, “Okay, let’s get the cargo over the side.”

  Taking opposite sides of a large package, two crates, tied together and the whole assembly wrapped up in a plastic tarp, sealed with duct tape, Khalid and Bandar lifted it and began to carry it to the side. The two dozen firearms inside, one sniper rifle, one general-purpose machine gun, two light machine guns and twenty rifles, weighed a bit over two hundred and forty pounds. There wasn’t enough air trapped inside to float that much weight, which is where the four flotation devices, each of about six cubic feet, came in.

  Waddling sideways, Khalid and Bandar got the package to the boat’s gunwales. With an effort they heaved it over, a thin but strong line running out from the ship behind it.

  “Okay, ammunition now,” Khalid said. When they went to that package, it could be seen that the line ran from it to the previous package.

  With four connected packages in the water, the swimmers had no hope of actually moving the things by their own power. Instead, while the boat still dragged the packages behind it, they got their own stout rope around the one nearest the boat.

  “We’ve got it,” a swimmer called to Khalid, as loudly as he dared.

  “Cut the line, Bandar.”

  Two more drops, two more armed mosques, and we’re done with this section of Sachsen.

  Though I wonder still what part this plays in the grand plan. That there is a grand plan, of course, and that all this is part of it, I have no doubt.

  “Ahead slow, Maytham,” Khalid said. “I don’t trust the waters of any river.”

  MV ALTA (Cochinese Registry), Puerto Rodil, Bolognesia del Sol

  The smell of the sea, which is to say the smell of rotting vegetation, fish, and the occasional dead bird, where sea met land, was strong here.

  The interior of the ship was hot, dull, and a generally unenviable place to live. Music was mostly forbidden. Competitive team physical games were forbidden. And time on deck was tightly rationed for everybody except Hamilcar, who wasn’t allowed on deck at all.

  “No, Ham,” Terry the Torch Johnson had insisted, “You look enough like a mix of your father and mother, who are both rather well-known faces, these days, that we can’t risk someone getting a shot of your face and doing computer analysis of it. So, you, my boy, will stay below, even at sea.”

  It was especially galling insofar as his best wife, Pililak, or Ant, was back home in Balboa. Everyone had been a little surprised that she, who had crossed the country at considerable risk to find her Hamilcar, had allowed herself to be left behind. Alena the witch explained it perfectly, “She would surely prefer to be here with her god, Iskandr, but her duty is to give birth to Iskandr’s firstborn. And Pililak the Chosen is a girl of staunch duty.”

  I imagine that, hot as this ship is, with Ant here I’d be roasting in bed with her. Can you give yourself heatstroke from screwing? Maybe best not to have the chance of finding out.

  The ship’s heat came from the problem of dumping excess heat without being noticed. They didn’t know what the United Earth Peace Fleet could sense, hence had to presume that it could possibly see a trail of unusual temperature left behind a ship, either in the air or in the water, if that ship were dumping an unusual level of excess heat. Pushing two thousand men was likely to create that much, the more so if it were pumped into the air and water. Music, games, and anything noisy had to be curtailed lest somebody’s submarines or surface sonar or permanent underwater battery of microphones pick up the sound and get suspicious. There was a small area that had been specially soundproofed at the Cochin naval yard where the ship had been converted, but that area was only twenty by twenty feet, and two decks deep. Eight hundred square feet of recreation area worked out to something less than one half of a square foot per man aboard. Subtract for the books and the recreation center was preposterously tiny. On the other hand, it was just peachy for a command post to plan an attack.

  The heat was less oppressive when at sea, when certain vents could be opened to allow at least a fresh breeze to circulate through the ship. Even then, though, the passengers and crew had to be quiet as church mice when outside of the rec center. And the breeze wasn’t generally enough to make up for the lack of air conditioning; it merely turned Hell into Purgatory.

  Though he couldn’t go on deck, Ham did cheat a bit. He was allowed up on the deck below the bridge and there, standing at a porthole, he fiddled with the venetian blind, a cheap plastic thing, to watch what was going on topside.

  What he saw was what he had seen at the previous ports visited, young men—well, boys, really—unloading humanitarian supplies for hundreds of thousands of Balboa’s displaced children from the ship to waiting trucks on the long pier. He didn’t bother counting them, but knew from previous practice that anywhere from perhaps twenty-five to as many as one hundred and twenty of the boys, plus one or two dozen men, would not leave the ship, but would, instead, disappear into its sweltering bowels where bunks, uniforms, and arms awaited. Ham was pretty sure he recognized a couple of them from the Cazador Club at his previous military school, Academia Militar Sergento Juan Malvegui, near Cristobal.

  The old man sometimes speaks and acts as if I am his peer or, at least potential peer. I have my doubts. I know I can plan small things, and sometimes have a good idea that ought to be obvious to just about anyone, but I cannot quite see myself planning ten or more years out—who knows when he began?—to prepare a clandestine amphibious assault ship, and special light infantry clubs in a half dozen military schools to man that ship, plus refugee camps to hide the boys until needed, plus a hidden reserve of helicopter and hovercraft pilots . . . and those are just a few of the high points.

  Other things, even Alena the witch can’t guess at. But I remember Legate Fernandez bringing the old man a black box, some kind of electronic control or computer for something, and the excitement that caused. Then, too, I know that he didn’t put to death the Earthpigs’ high admiral, but has him and one of the other Earthpigs prisoner somewhere.

  What I don’t know, and what even Alena the witch doesn’t know, is what all those things have to do with our target.

  Assembly Area Maria, Santa Josefina,

  not far from Hephaestos, Balboa

  Scales change in the jungle, scales not only of distance but of time. Everything is slower, everything more compact. This was as true of the base built near the border between Balboa and Santa Josefina as it was anywhere else. This was mostly because, while little but large trees grew at ground level, those trees were indeed large, as well as thick, and tended to cut off the observer’s view relatively quickly. Thus, for example, the base the Tercio la Virgen dug for themselves not too far from the border was only about three kilometers across. The defenses were, however, quite dense.

  The base wasn’t really about defense though; indeed, the defenses, as compared to those further west, were rather rudimentary. Rather, it was about attack or, more specifically, providing support for an attack.

  There was nothing in the way of Tauran ground forces nearby. There was a small airport, with a runway just slightly over the minimum for the Tauran Hurricanes based in the country. That airport, the Aeropuerto Jaba, however, was almost never used by the Taurans. This did not mean, of course, that they could tolerate its possession in enemy hands.

  There was more than the airport to make the place special, too; not long after the Great Global War, about six hundred Tuscans had migrated to the area to make a living in agriculture. Their influence still held true in several key particulars; the children spoke like La Platans, which is to say Spanish with a deep Tuscan accent; their culture remained Tuscan, and they were one of the few groups in the country who, by and large, supported the Tauran Union’s presence.

  “So, we’re going to teach them a sharp fucking lesson,” announced the tercio commander, Legate Jesus Villalobos. “We’re also going to teach the Taurans a sharp fucking lesson while we’re at it.�
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  Villalobos’ command group, down to the maniples, stood around a sand table built in the dirt just outside of his dug-in headquarters.

  “This,” Villalobos said, using a stick to point to the town and the airfield, “is the physical objective, San Jaba. Note the highway, Highway 126, that connects the town and its airport with the capital to the east and the road to Balboa to the north. San Jaba doesn’t really matter to us; it’s just bait. What does matter to us are the Tauran forces here”—he pointed to the battalion facing Balboa across the Rio Naranja—“and here, near the capital. We want to kill a couple of hundred of each. That, the destruction of their reserves, is our actual objective.

  “How? The short version is that we’re going to send out the First Cazador Maniple to screen Highway 126, plus the feeder roads and trails. Cazador commander?”

  “Here, sir,” answered Tribune Madrigal, commanding one of the two Cazador maniples in the tercio.

  “That’s harder than it sounds. Consult your map; there are a lot of feeder roads and trails. Also, you are not to be seen while occupying your screen line, and you are not to let the civilians escape. I want you to carry enough mines to make use of the roads risky and iffy. Lastly, you need to cut the phone lines and disable any cell towers that service the area. And you are not to be seen, doing it. Clear enough?”

  Madrigal raised a single eyebrow. “Clear, sir.” But bitching hard to pull off. “When can I leave?”

  “Twenty-three hundred hours, tonight, which is about twenty minutes after the first moonrise. I think you’ll probably need a little illumination, even though it has its risks. Also, all of you, note that we’re out of Balboa now, so the Global Locating System should be functioning reasonably well if you need it.”

  Madrigal nodded, thinking, Okay, that sounds a little better.

  Villalobos continued, “First Infantry Cohort?”

  “Here, sir.”

  “For you, job one is surround the town and take the populace prisoner. Job two is turn them over to the service support battalion, which will be rolling into San Jaba right behind you. Job three is move east, but behind the Cazadores’ screen line, and set up a very large ambush.”

  “Then kill the Taurans when they roll into it?”

  “Correct,” answered the legate. “I want maximum feasible loss of life here. I want a roach motel, where the Taurans check in, but they don’t check out.”

  “Got it,” answered the cohort commander, looking down to peer intently at his acetated paper map.

  “Third Cohort, your job is similar, but you’re skipping the town entirely and moving directly to set up an ambush just south of the town of Agua Dulce, either side of Highway 126.”

  “Both infantry cohorts can move out of the base area not earlier than midnight. Also note that each of you will have a river behind you, with a bridge. I want the bridges wired for sound, with a demo guard in place, just in case things turn against us and we have to scurry.”

  “Now . . . artillery?”

  Container Twenty-one, Beloretsk, Volgan Republic

  Eighteen long-range bombardment Condors, and the crews to maintain and launch them, had been parachuted into Volga from the ramp of the militarized airship Casamara. To everyone’s surprise, the container’s parachutes had all worked flawlessly. Previously, everyone aboard the airship or watching from the ground or sea had felt the anguish of watching a critically needed container full of war materials plunge into the Shimmering Sea, not far from the small port of Mataca, Santa Josefina.

  They’d been met by an odd character with an odd walk, the walk being the result of having lost both legs on a raid in Santander, the legs having been replaced by high-end prosthetics. The character, Anton Pavlov, and no relation to the Volgan aviation officer, also called “Pavlov,” was a warrant officer, one who had been medically retired as a sergeant, but then elevated, sent home, and remaining on the clandestine strength of Fernandez’s organization. He’d seen to it that the eighteen Condors and the ground crews were loaded on trucks and scattered into rented barns and warehouses across some forty thousand miles of territory. None of them but Pavlov actually knew where all the Condors had been stashed. Moreover, the crews had been split up into three groups, such that the loss of one would not interfere with the continuing program of launches to sting the Tauran Union into helpless fury.

  None of them, not even Pavlov, knew how many launch sites there were. None even knew how many of the Condors had been manufactured, let alone the number of drone versions.

  Number Twenty-one of this package, however, they knew everything about. It sat, fueled and armed, just outside a barn on a former collective farm, now gone pretty much to seed.

  “What’s the load on this one, Vera?” Sergeant (retired) Pavlov asked of Sergeant Dzhugashvili. He spoke Russian, which Vera had learned in the home from her parents, even though she considered Spanish her first language.

  “Five-minute bomb,” she answered, simply.

  “I love those,” he said.

  “We all do. They don’t hurt anybody . . . well . . . hardly anybody, but they hurt the enemy, bad.”

  “What’s the target for today?”

  “More like the target for this week,” she answered. “We don’t really have that many drones.”

  “Oh, yes, I know. I got them all moved, remember?”

  “Yeah, sorry; anyway, this one is for Lumiere, the Capital of Gaul. City Hall, actually.”

  “Oooo, that’s going to piss them off.”

  Tauran Defense Agency Headquarters, Lumière, Gaul, Terra Nova

  Campbell ignored the sirens that filled the air around the headquarters. After all, the anti-aircraft guns they dug out of storage haven’t kicked in yet, nor even the machine guns. Not that they’ll hit anything, of course. Instead, she scanned the extensive reports given her by the Volgan, Vladimir; the sheer scale of the purchases, and the sheer age, in both senses, of some of them, took her aback.

  “Does anybody really start planning and getting ready for a war that far out?” she muttered.

  “Quoi?” asked Captain Turenge, absently, as she worked on a report to Janier on the subject of interallied cooperation within the Tauran Defense Agency and the lack thereof.

  “It’s the defense purchases made by the enemy, Captain. They were always several steps ahead of any reasonable need. Some of it wasn’t obvious at the time, of course, because they made purchases but didn’t bring all their ‘shopping bags’ home with them. Hmmm . . . wait a second and let me show you what I mean.”

  Jan fiddled with her desktop computer, one that could only access and be accessed by the files and computers in the headquarters itself. There were other computers within the headquarters that could reach out to the global net, but those were completely disconnected from the internal net she was using.

  “Come, let me show you,” Jan said, gesturing with her fingers.

  Turenge walked over and bent slightly at the waist to rest her hands on Jan’s desk, also bringing her face lower to see the screen.

  “No, no, pull up a chair.”

  Jan waited until the captain had, and was seated next to her.

  Jan entered a query. The screen almost instantly showed a Volgan helicopter, in civilian markings, lifting a slung pallet, somewhere over what looked to be very dense jungle.

  “That,” Campbell said, “is a helicopter of SHEBSA, the Servicio Helicoptores Balboenses, Sociedad Anonima, which is to say, ‘Balboan Helicopter Services, Incorporated.’ It was always part of their hidden reserve and we knew about it almost from the beginning, too.

  “But here’s where it gets weird. SHEBSA only had so many helicopters until the war began. They doubled their numbers almost overnight. Where did the helicopters to double their numbers come from?”

  Jan pointed an oval-shaped, red painted nail at a paragraph on a particular page of Vladimir’s report. “They bought them back in ’63 and ’64 and have been storing them, probably in nitrogen and shrin
k wrap, ever since.”

  “That is foresight,” the captain agreed.

  “That’s not exactly right,” Campbell corrected, “Foresight is when you get ready for what might happen at someone else’s initiative or by chance or fate. ‘Planning,’ on the other hand, is what you call it when you are getting ready for something at your own behest.”

  Turenge shrugged off the correction. “I think,” she said, “that even if the general ’ad ’opes for peace, you and I already knew this Carrera person intended war all along.”

  “Not just intended to fight a war,” Jan said. “He intended and prepared to win it.”

  Jan’s eyes glanced over the several thick files given her in Saint Nicholasberg. “Are you about done with your report on ‘interspecies cooperation and amity’?” That was their internal code phrase for physical intimidation of the otherwise uncooperative.

  “Very close to done, oui.”

  “Okay, finish it up and then you and I are going to split the files, then do some math, read some intel reports old and new, and try to figure out just what our armies are facing based on what the Volgans gave me and what we think we already know. We need a solid case because, since Janier’s swung over to the belief that he really did sucker the enemy, this time, he may be a hard sell.”