A Pillar of Fire by Night

by Tom Kratman

  She flipped a page on the folder in front of her. “The law is settled, Your Honors, with the entirety of United Earth, and the overwhelming majority of nations on Terra Nova having agreed to the ancient codicil to the law of land warfare, Protocol Additional One to Geneva Convention Four, concerning wars of an international character, must be considered customary law of war. As such, it is binding upon all states and parties to such conflicts.”

  Kipping looked up from the paper to gauge the faces of the bank of judges. Ah, good; with me so far.

  “Of course, there was no question that it is binding upon the Tauran Union forces in Santa Josefina, as every armed force there aligned against the freedom fighters is from the Tauran Union. Let there, therefore, be no claim that either the Protocol is non-binding nor that this court lacks jurisdiction.

  “To the particulars. Per paragraph fifty-one, section three, civilians remain civilians, for all and any times they are not actively engaged in hostilities. As civilians, they are entitled to all the protections of civilians caught in a war zone. Per paragraph seventy-five, section three, those persons being held are entitled to be informed of the charges against them, to a speedy trial, or to be released post-haste . . .”

  Assembly Area Maria, Santa Josefina,

  not far from Hephaestos, Balboa

  It had been a bad few weeks for the Tercio la Virgen. With so many better armed Tauran units freed up from nonsense missions and with their rear areas secure for a change, it had been all Villalobos could do to escape with his regiment and some of their new recruits. Casualties on the long rout back to their base had been non-trivial.

  Fucking Taurans can do okay when they’re given half a chance, can’t they? thought Villalobos, huddling in about as deep a shelter as his men had been able to dig before moving on San Jaba. The ground shook and rocked with the impact of aerially delivered Tauran bombs, even as dirt and sand filtered down between the logs used for the overhead cover.

  The falling clods and clouds reminded Villalobos, not that he needed reminding, that, God, getting killed is one thing, but please don’t let me get buried alive down here. I’m not afraid of much but I am so afraid of that.

  Sometimes, particular near misses had set not just some of the other denizens of the shelter, but Villalobos, himself, to vomiting. The place reeked or, rather, It would reek except we’ve been hiding here long enough to get used to it. We’ve been—hey, what was that?

  What “that” was took Villalobos long minutes to recognize. When he did he turned to a private, ghastly pale even in the dim artificial light, and asked, “When’s the last time we didn’t hear at least a plane overhead?”

  For the first time, also, in several days, an antania stuck its head out of its nest to cry out, mnnbt, mnnbt, mnnbt.

  “Been a couple of days, sir,” gulped the private.

  “Yeah . . . at least a couple of days. Hold the fort here; I’m heading to the command post.”

  Stepping over men still lying prone or sitting against the bunker walls, Villalobos made his way to the entrance, a zigzagging cutout through the earth itself. Hesitantly, ready to race back inside should he hear another attacking aircraft or falling bomb, he stuck his head out into daylight. Indeed, it was an unusual degree of daylight for this spot because so many trees had been bombed to splinters and so much damage done to the thick canopy that had been overhead.

  He looked up and saw a good deal of sunlight peeking through the gaps in the trees. The whole area reeked with the smell of explosives, the fumes of which, Come to think of it, are not all that safe to breathe. Villalobos put on his gas mask and continued outside.

  His operations officer had been killed in the long retreat so he’d promoted Tribune Madrigal into the position. It was an easy pick since most of Madrigal’s maniple of Cazadores had also been lost covering the retreat.

  That same tribune met him at the top of the entranceway. Somehow, he was enduring the fumes from the bombing without his mask.

  “Sir,” he said, “you’re not going to believe this, but the Tauran Union’s Global Court of Justice has issued two injunctions. They’re forbidden from bombing the rain forest”—Madrigal looked up and scanned for a bit—“or whatever’s left of it. And they have to release our people they’ve been holding.”

  “Holy shit.” Villalobos paused briefly, then said, “You know, Madrigal, it’s things like this that really complicate the case for atheism.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “The secret of all victory lies in the organization of the non-obvious.”

  —Marcus Aurelius

  Field Tactical Operation Center, Task Force Jesuit

  “You know something, Stefano?” Marciano said to del Collea.

  “What’s that, sir?” asked del Collea, as he poured over his map, looking for a place to make a stand, at least for a while.

  “Weeks like this complicate the issue of religious faith enormously.”

  “Yes, sir,” del Collea agreed, without really having heard a word. “Sir, I think we can gain at least a day or two, or probably even three, on our retreat by taking up a line running from Cerro Presinger, northeast for about fifteen kilometers, then curving around, following the river, above Zeledón. We can refuse outright flank for a good distance.” With a couple of invisible ovals, del Collea also showed the prospective battle positions—defensive positions, in fact and practice—the battalions would take up.

  “Let me see,” Marciano said, unconsciously straining his neck to look over del Collea’s shoulder. The junior officer twisted his body to bring the map around, then used a sharp piece of plastic, the cap for a pen, to show the trace he had in mind.

  Marciano whistled, softly. “That’s a long line to try to hold with what amounts to a reinforced brigade, Stefano.”

  “We’ve discussed it before, sir, months ago. It’s the last position we can hold that covers both the main highway to the capital and the branch that runs to the coast and then to the port. I’d say we should stay here as long as we can—forever, if we could—but, of course, the guerillas will feel us out within a few days and within a couple of days after that they’ll be probing into the gap between Cerro Presinger and the town.

  “Risky? Sir, we’re so fucked if we don’t take chances that they’d have to come up with a whole new way of saying it; ‘fucked’ just wouldn’t be strong enough anymore.”

  Marciano was plainly thinking about the risks. “They can still use the coastal road, Highway 43, from Balboa, you know, Stefano.”

  “Yes, sir, but they have three problems with that. The first one is that not one fucking meter of that road is through the ever-so-important rain forest, so we can bomb the shit out of them if they try. The second is that if they do try to use it in any substantial way they’re risking being outflanked or defeated in detail. The third is that we can get the Zhong to send a couple of destroyers to make using the coastal road an iffy proposition, too. And, sir, those Zhong destroyers include some old three-turret jobs with half a dozen five-inch guns. They can’t stop the guerillas from using the road, but they can make it painful if they do.”

  “I’m surprised the Zhong have any ships to spare after the beating their navy took from the Balboans.”

  “These are ex-Federated States ships, sir, given to Ming Zhong Guo during the Great Global War. They were as fast then as anything steaming, and as fast, or faster, as most destroyers now. But they’re old and tired. Engines worn, aching for a refit. In any event, they needed a minor refit before they could put to sea,” said del Collea. “They weren’t there for the ass whipping. And they’ll be along in a couple of days.”

  “Ummm . . . I may not want to know the answer to this, but how did you arrange for a couple of Zhong destroyers?”

  “Esmeralda, sir. She felt so bad about her little bout of irrationality with that prisoner that she begged for some way to make it up to us. As it turns out, the Zhong Empress is the High Admiral’s lover, so our Esma asked the High Admiral
who asked the Empress. Sir, that little brown beauty is worth her weight in gold, you know?”

  Marciano rather agreed, but couldn’t quite say so since the girl was, after all, a murderess.

  “And better,” continued del Collea, “since the Zhong ships need never touch land, this remains a Tauran Union mission.”

  “Okay, we’ll do this,” agreed Marciano, “but with two modifications. One is—I don’t care much where they come from but get me half a dozen Mandarin speakers. If necessary recruit them locally. They get attached to a platoon of Commandos and outpost the road to call in fire from the destroyers. Secondly, take one company from the battalion around Cerro Presinger and put it to block Highway 43, here”—Marciano took del Collea’s bit of plastic to point—“at the bridge over the Rio Bravo, near the intersection with Highway 342. In effect, there’ll be four companies on the line around Zeledón, with one company in reserve. Lastly, send the rest of the commandos to patrol the gap between our forces at Zeledón and Cerro Presinger.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll make it happen.”

  “One other thing, Stefano; get a deep recon team to look at their base near Jaba. I know we can’t attack it but, precisely because of that, I expect interesting things to happen there.”

  Sethlans, Santa Josefina

  Tauran aircraft circled overhead, less like scavenging vultures than like hungry raptors, looking for an easy snack.

  Villalobos had, to his regret, learned the hard way that injunctions from some Kosmo human rights or environmentalist court were always going to be as narrowly interpreted as possible by the typically anti-Kosmo military. In this case, if they couldn’t bomb near the ever-so-blessed rain forest they would double up their efforts on anything they could see that wasn’t in the rain forest. Unfortunately, there was barely a trace of jungle within ten kilometers to either side of Highway 1.

  Villalobos shivered still when he remembered one of his maniples—he was slightly ashamed of his own sense of relief that it was mostly composed of fairly new recruits—approaching the town of Ojochal, north of the Rio Particular. The boys had been overconfident, gesturing, pointing, and laughing at the Tauran aircraft overhead.

  Hmmm . . . possibly the very same aircraft up there now.

  Back there, by Ojochal, and without much in the way of warning, the aircraft had dived. La Virgen’s man-portable air defense missiles had tried to help as they could, but the amount of sophistication that could be backpacked was limited, while the defensive measures that were usually crammed into a fifty million drachma fighter were vast. Villalobos had seen his missiles distracted by flares and fooled by chaff. What less visible measures the Taurans had used he didn’t know, but he was pretty sure there had been some. So far as he knew, none had even done enough damage to temporarily ground a plane or draw the interest of a mechanic.

  On the other hand, what they’d done to his men! First, several of the Tauran fighter-bombers had dived toward the ground and then pulled up, releasing bombs on the upward leg to lob them at some considerable distance and with a fearsome degree of accuracy. They’d landed, perhaps a dozen five hundred and fifty pounders, all around and through the maniple’s dispersed formation. Casualties had been horrific.

  Worse, in some ways, was something Villalobos never expected to see; under the weight of that attack his men had broken and run for the river to the south. That was when he discovered that Jellied fucking incendiaries float pretty damned well on water.

  Charred bodies from that had not only lined the riverbank, they floated, poor shrunken fetal obscenities, downstream to horrify still more of his men.

  Again, Villalobos shivered at the remembered image of the waves of liquid fire rolling over his helpless men, turning them into shrieking torches in a bare instant.

  The solution was obvious but not easy. Villalobos had sent most of his men into the jungle to either side of the road, and substantial numbers in small packets into the farm towns along and flanking the road, basically to collect taxes in kind—which was to say in food and dray animals—and move it by civilian conveyance to the troops in the jungle.

  And that makes progress slow, fumed the legate. But what choice do I have? It’s move slow or move at speed to a fiery grave.

  Command Post, Second Cohort, Tercio La Negrita, East of Peliroja, Santa Josefina

  When we hit, thought Ignacio Macera, we’re going to have to move fast, strike hard, and take our lumps to get prisoners. That’s our best defense, at this point, from a pasting from the air once we get out of the jungle.

  Though Tercio la Negrita had been driven out of the town before, they’d never really been driven out of the area. Little by little, they’d dug in around it, consolidating for an eventual siege. Worse, from the Tauran point of view, they also had positions built well to the east to interfere with any attempted relief of the town or to prevent the escape of its defenders.

  Worse, perhaps, than that, was that Salas, like Villalobos on the other side of the mountainous central spine of the country, had been recruiting busily for quite some time. He’d had maybe forty-five hundred men to begin with, of which slightly under twelve hundred had been lost to death, wounds, or disease, but which had been more than made up for by the roughly seven thousand Santa Josefinans who had found their way to the tercio colors. Tercio la Negrita was a light infantry division in all but name.

  Of course, the defenders had by and large made good their losses, too, and had likewise been busy fortifying the edges of the town.

  And in some ways, thought Tribune Macera, lying in the muck while looking at the defenses through binoculars, they have built even better than we did. But, then, they’d have to. You need a pretty stout bit of overhead cover to stand up to a direct hit by a one-hundred-and-sixty-millimeter mortar. Or a dozen of them.

  Macera had begun the campaign commanding the maniple that had seized the port town of Matama and secured the smallish freighter that had brought the unit’s arms. Now, vice his former cohort commander, killed in action, he found himself not only commanding the cohort, but a much-expanded cohort, where the maniples were short cohorts, themselves. He was still a tribune, but promotion to junior legate was just a matter of time.

  Not a lot of the Taurans to see, mused Macera. No surprise there, it’s not very likely they didn’t know we were coming. I’d be behind cover, too.

  He scanned the binoculars across about one hundred and twenty degrees, catching the occasional glimpse of a crawling soldier or the flash of a bayonet.

  Macera had a new RTO, a bright high schooler from the area, fifteen, black as sin, with blindingly pearl-white teeth, and willing to do anything to get the foreigners out of his country. “Sir,” said the civilian-clad boy, bearing both a field telephone, and the somewhat improbable name of Billy, “Legate Salas.”

  “Thanks, Billy.” Macera took the microphone and reported, “My second and third maniples say they’re ready. My mortars and the ones you shunted me from third cohort are ready. We’re ready, Boss.”

  Legate Salas’ voice came from the handset. “I can’t promise you we can silence their artillery. But it’s only one battery, we’re pretty sure. Those captured long-range mortars from Gaul are probably in position to range the Tauran artillery once it opens up. And I’ve got Cazadores spread across the jungle where the Tauran gunners, again probably, are, ready to lunge at them, too, as soon as they hear it. It’ll be anything from twenty minutes to an hour before they can put them under direct fire, though.

  “So, order your attack, Tribune, and God go with you.”

  “Roger.” Macera handed that handset back to Billy and asked for the radio. When he had it, he gave the orders to begin. He also repeated Salas’ “God go with you.”

  As far away as he was, and even above the booms of outgoing shells, Macera could hear the cry—the French version of “Incoming!”—echoing from the town. He couldn’t see the outgoing barrage, though he heard it, what with arose from more than two dozen throats as the jungle
surrounding the town erupted with the fire of no less than eleven one hundred and sixty-millimeter mortars, fourteen one-twenties, and twenty-six eighty-one-millimeter jobs. They all fired from positions dug in and otherwise prepared over the preceding weeks. Security to build those position had come from dozens of small skirmishes between hostile Gallic and Santa Josefinan patrols that had gradually made patrolling too dangerous for the Gauls inside the town. The Gauls had rarely lost such a skirmish, mind, but the cost of keeping it up was deemed politically unsupportable back home.

  Worse, under the guise of harassing them or baiting them out to fight, a number of mortar fire missions had been preregistered by one gun of a platoon or section, which meant that when all guns were in position and laid for a parallel sheaf, all the shells would presumptively hit somewhere between pretty close and right on.

  Thus, Macera watched as, one after another, seven Gaul bunkers exploded in flame and fury. Looking past those, he saw the Gauls’ mess hall go up in smoke. That’s got to hurt.

  For the buildings in the way, Macera couldn’t see one particularly important target from his vantage point, but he could see clouds of smoke rising from the behind the building that blocked view of the town’s central park, the place where the Gaul infantry battalion had put its platoon of heavy mortars. The smoke was not just the thin black of the high explosive in most of the shells, but the thick white clouds from white phosphorus. The two landed together in what soldiers on another world, at another time, called “shake and bake.”

  There were almost always vehicles near a mortar platoon, of course, and Macera did see what looked like a light truck flying end over end above the skyline of the town. It trailed a spiral of flame as it flew.