A Pillar of Fire by Night

by Tom Kratman

  Part of the area under attack was the container port. He wasn’t surprised that progress there was slim; the lovely ecossaise, Major Campbell, had apprised him of her suspicions that a truly vast number of shipping containers formed the basis of prefabricated fortifications. Indeed, in a few cases, so it was reported, the locals hadn’t been content with mere sandbags but had shipping in entire bunkers in the form of containers, complete with cast concrete innards, with a degree of standoff that defeated both shaped charged and plastic explosives, plus communications links and air filtration systems.

  Which, I confess, does make me wonder about what we are going to find in that now untouchable rain forest when we break through to it . . . after we take this port . . . assuming, of course. Speaking—or thinking—of which, Campbell has not been able to find out who was paying for the suit that suspended our ability to bomb. It hardly matters, though, if she gets a confession; we all know who was behind it. What a marvelously unprincipled man is our foe, able to look like the most upstanding soldier in ten thousand years, while secretly so sneaky and underhanded that . . . well . . . I doff my hat to him.

  But, on the other hand, if Campbell is right about the containers, and apparently, she is—Janier watched a brace of them slice one of his squads to ribbons in a street below—then why should he care about them being bombed? The bombing’s just not that effective, given how the global locating system has been thoroughly trashed here. So why should he want to release our planes from bombing one thing, that wasn’t all that effective, so we can provide better close air support where we need it?

  Unless, of course, the bombing was all that effective, but when has that ever happened?

  Janier considered something he hadn’t before. Or what if the purpose was to sever any ties between the soldiery of the Tauran Union and the bureaucrats who run it and the lawyers and judges who tend to run them? That effect, I am sure it has had, but I don’t see how it will make any difference.

  Then, too, if he’s the wreck of a man that’s been reported to me, he’s not thinking about long-term effects or moral suasion or anything. He’s not thinking at all. It’s possible, I suppose, that this is all unfolding according to an old plan, now sadly out of date. Or even . . .

  The general’s thoughts were interrupted by a vibrating in the left cargo pocket of his field trousers. Excusing himself, he followed the zigzag of the trench until he could be sure of at least some privacy. Taking the device from his pocket he said, “Yes, Marguerite?”

  “It’s Khan, General. High Admiral Wallenstein is touring and inspecting the fleet. She said I was to apprise you of anything interesting that popped up.”

  “I’m all ears.” Janier smiled at his joke; though a handsome enough man, his ears were probably his most notable feature. They were quite large.

  “Very good, General.” Khan said. “Item one is that some of the Balboan Fifth Mountain Tercio is within striking distance of General Marciano’s left flank in Santa Josefina. He has nothing to shore it up with and will be outnumbered to a truly ridiculous degree, in general. I think you can expect the capital to fall within a few days, a week at the most.”

  “Small change,” said Janier, who had, over the months, grown tired of Marciano’s ceaseless demands for more troops. “What else?”

  “There was one other thing,” Khan said, “but I am not sure what to make of it. It seems that your opponent, in person, visited Santa Josefina recently. We have no idea why he did so, though if pressed I would offer that it was possibly a combination of morale raising visit and coordination of orders session. I would . . .”

  Janier’s heart fell. “He what?”

  “He seems to have visited Santa Josefina and quite recently.”

  “Oh . . . oh, shit.” Janier’s voice sounded more strained than the word would suggest. “Khan, give me your professional opinion. I’ve been operating to a considerable extent on the belief that our great foe, great in all senses, had collapsed, morally, intellectually, and emotionally, and that every weakness we were seeing was because he had lost his grip. But a man doesn’t make a very risky visit to some troops operating as guerillas in a very hostile place when he has lost his grip, does he?”

  “I suppose not, General.”

  “No, I suppose not. I’ll get back with you later.”

  Janier turned back in the direction from which he’d come and shouted, at the very top of his lungs, “Malcoeur! Malceour! I want the G2 and G3—no, the entire staff - to meet me at the forward command post within ninety minutes! And get D’Espérey up there, too!”

  The forward command post had been established in what had once been the Magdalena community center, a place offering at least roof and walls, though the roof was charred and the walls rather the worse for wear.

  The staff took one look at Janier’s face, full of worry approaching terror, and felt their blood pressures begin to rise.

  The general wasted no time. Turning to his intelligence officer, he asked directly, “How much of our estimate of enemy intentions and capabilities was based on information that their commander was in a state of collapse?”

  The second in command answered, “But he is, sir. From deserters, from intercepted radio traffic, he is a man who has climbed into a bottle and whose personal conduct has demoralized his own army. There is no . . .”

  “Can it,” Janier said. “I think we’ve been fed a line.”

  “Sir?”

  “He’s gone to Santa Josefina and returned, and recently. I don’t know what he was doing there, but whatever it was, it was not acting like a demoralized drunk. He was there for business. Moreover, that business appears to be about to result in the complete collapse of our forces in Santa Josefina. What’s that tell you?”

  “That he . . . oh. Oh, fuck. And we’re . . .”

  Janier completed the sentence. “We’re neither postured nor dug in for what’s coming. Have you read the reports, the analysis done by Major Campbell?”

  “Yes, of course, sir. She’s a bit pessimistic but . . .”

  “Shut up. Now what kind of artillery train does she say Carrera has.”

  Whatever his failings might have been, the second in command’s memory was fine. His bureaucratic instincts were better still; he had the estimate with him. Opening his tablet, he began to read off, “Well . . . between six and seven hundred eighty-one and eighty-two-millimeter mortars . . . between five and six hundred one-hundred-and-twenty-millimeter mortars . . . one-sixties . . . Volgan-type, maybe two hundred or so, less the number we’ve destroyed here . . .”

  “Speaking of destroyed and captured, how many eighty-five millimeter and one-hundred-and-twenty-two-millimeter guns did we overrun here?”

  “That’s a little more obscure, but I think maybe a couple of hundred.”

  “Do not subtract them from your estimates or Campbell’s. They were bait. Continue.”

  “Yes, sir. You know the Balboans have been manufacturing most of their own mortars for some time. Those figures may not be reliable. As for artillery, she believed they have between fourteen and sixteen hundred guns from eighty-five to one-eighty millimeter and two-hundred-and-three millimeter. Only a few battalions’ worth of the latter two types, though.

  “Multiple rocket launchers were tougher. They might have as many as one hundred and twenty of the huge ones the Volgan make. Of the more usual ones, the one-twenty-two millimeter, forty-barreled jobs, between four hundred and fifty and five hundred and fifty.”

  “So that’s what, three thousand, four hundred guns, cannon, and rocket launchers?” Janier asked.

  “About that, sir.”

  “Now tell me, what is the frontage we’re facing between the lakes here, along the Parilla Line?”

  “It’s quite compact, sir, about eighteen kilometers.”

  “I make it at about that, too,” Janier agreed. “Now, did you know that our enemy is a great student of the Volgan way of making war, at least for certain areas where the Volgans were actual
ly quite good, and the class of the world for an industrially based, citizen-soldier army?”

  “I hadn’t, sir. It’s interesting, of course, but—”

  Janier cut his response off. “You’ve studied the old Volgan ways, haven’t you?”

  “Yes, sir, of course.”

  “Ah, excellent. Now tell me, what is the standard Volgan density of guns, mortars, and rocket launchers on an area of front they intend to break through?”

  “About two . . .” The intelligence officer suddenly did the math in his head. As he did, his face turned a ghastly pale. “Oh, dear God. That’s what they’ve got. They’ve got the ability to blast about four hundred square kilometers with what amounts to nuclear levels of destruction over the space of a few hours. Oh . . . oh, Jesus. What are we going to do?”

  D’Espérey interrupted before Janier could answer, exclaiming, “It’s worse than that, sir! There are areas bounded by the lakes, the defense line, and the Shimmering Sea that they’ll know we can’t occupy because they’re water.”

  “Yessss,” Janier nodded. “In other words, that son of a bitch built an entire army around the bait of that port, and assembled an artillery train to blast an invading army to bits in the area it would occupy to take that port.

  “Gentlemen, when they speak of the ‘tyranny of logistics,’ the pundits usually just mean the limits logistics impose upon you. There’s another meaning though; the tyranny is also the predictability logistics imposes upon you. That’s how the enemy knew the Zhong would have to take the island. That’s how they knew to place a half-million-person refugee camp astride the road and infiltrate it with guerillas. And that’s how they knew we had to come here. There’s nothing magic to it; it’s just competent reading of the logistic possibilities and limitations.”

  “Now here’s what we’re going to do and what we’re not going to do. In the first place, we’re not going to panic. In fact, we’re going to congratulate ourselves that, for once, somebody—and in this case, I think the praise goes to Major Campbell—anyway, somebody predicted that bastard’s trick before he could pull it off.

  “We’re also not going to surrender. We’re not going to evacuate, either. We couldn’t hope to get more than a middling fraction of our troops out before Carrera initiates his attack. Even if we were successful in that, the loss of combat power and support would ensure the destruction of the last three-quarters of our force here.”

  Smiling inwardly, Janier’s aide de camp, Malcoeur, thought, And this is why I’ve followed you all these years, General, even when you were treating me like shit. An asshole you can certainly be, but when you’re at your best, you’re magnificent.

  Janier continued, without a clue to his aide’s thoughts, “That’s important, by the way. We cannot tip him off that we know.”

  “So much for what we’re not going to do. Here’s what we are going to do. One, we’re going to thin the line of the front—we already have, facing the Parilla Line. Two, we’re going to keep up the attack to clear Cristobal, but at about a quarter of the intensity we have been. Three, we’re going to dig in like moles beginning about two kilometers behind our current front lines . . . special attention, by the way, to ensuring our own artillery survives the pounding. There’s going to be a window when his infantry will emerge from their shelters—did I fail to mention that that is what that Parilla Line actually is? Where it fits into this? I could kick myself for not seeing it sooner. It’s a set of protected assembly areas for an attack . . . anyway, their infantry will emerge from those fortifications and we can hurt them, maybe enough to hang on.”

  The Three put his hand up.

  “Yes?”

  “Their patrolling will discover that we’ve thinned the lines. I mean, any offensive is going to be preceded by recon. Once they discover that . . .”

  For the first time since calling the meeting, Janier smiled. “No, they won’t. They think they’re playing one game, a huge ambush. They won’t want to tip us off that it’s coming. Hence, little or no recon. Hence, they won’t know that the game has changed . . .”

  Campo de los Sapos, Cristobal, Balboa

  Smoke from burning buildings was everywhere, thick in the air. Ashes and embers rolled above the street or fluttered in the air past Verboom’s eyes. There was firing everywhere, too; it never seemed to end in this place.

  Verboom, along with a tightly grouped cluster of his men, waited to cross a street to their front. Bodies littering that street said that doing so could well be one of those bad ideas. None of the bodies were his men, but he’d left a dozen in the buildings and streets behind what remained of his platoon, some twenty-three men, including himself, with a pair of machine guns and one remaining recoilless.

  Well . . . not twenty-three men; twenty-two, plus van der Wege.

  Losses? There were two things true of city fighting; it used up ammunition like water and spent men like loose change.

  There were also a number of counterintuitive issues that came up in city fighting. One was that, when fighting in cities, throwing smoke to cover crossing the street was only a warning for the enemy to start firing everything available into the smoke. Given the relative frequency of hard surfaces—walls and streets—the ricochets also tended to make that fire much more dangerous. Another, similar problem, was that when crossing the street, sending over one man at a time just meant that a single enemy rifleman, warned by the first crosser, could wait and pop every subsequent man until the crossers figured out what a bad idea this was. The figuring out usually left one man, stuck in enemy territory, alone, scared shitless, and ripe for surrender.

  Instead, the way a group, usually a squad, sometimes a platoon, crossed a street was en masse, with no other concern than to get across quickly; no preparatory suppressive fire, no extraneous commands, no smoke, just, “GO!”

  Verboom, Haarlemer Commander, and still a platoon leader since the loss of both his officer and his previous platoon sergeant, was just about to give that command and to lead the way across. It always took some self-psyching up because, playing the odds, which is what the technique was, also included the possibility of the dice falling against you. Since he’d managed to get his men across eleven times now, he figured the odds were getting very long against him and them.

  Okay . . . yeah . . . okay . . . right . . . get ready . . . .oh, man . . . why do I get the shakes every time we do this . . . right . . . never mind . . . get ready . . . get ready . . . DON’T shit yourself . . .

  “Sergeant Verboom?”

  The voice—he recognized it as his radioman—was instant relief to Verboom; if he was wanted on the radio he had a valid excuse not to make the mass rush across the street. Which means we may get to live an extra five minutes.

  Turning around, Verboom took the radio’s handset. It was his company commander, who was probably only a couple of buildings away.

  “Stand down, stand by, and wait for orders, Verboom. I don’t have any more than that.”

  “Wilco.” And bless you and anybody else who was responsible for stopping us before it was too late.

  With arm gestures and more forceful pushes and prods, the sergeant got his men away from the shattered window openings and the door they had been prepared to charge through just a moment before.

  They’d only been in the building for a short time, thus had never properly cleared it. Verboom directed, “Since we might be staying here for a while, First Squad, clear the basement for tunnels; you know the drill. Second, get upstairs and look for mouse holes. Third and weapons, here facing southeast, but Third, send a team to the rear in case the bastards come up out of the sewer system again. And watch out for booby traps; remember how de Haan had his balls blown off . . .”

  Centurion William Ruiz-Jones, Ninety-Fourth Engineer Tercio, held a tiny chemical light over a sketch of this portion of the city’s sewer system. It wasn’t so much that batteries had gotten a little scarce, though they had, as that a flashlight, even with a filter, was just too brigh
t down in this shit-reeking hell.

  Olfactory fatigue hadn’t quite set in yet, since Ruiz led his platoon of sappers down into the muck. And, just imagine, with almost the entire civilian population evacuated, the sewers are cleaner than they’ve ever been. I can only wonder how bad it was before the war started.

  But, at that, shit and piss or not, it’s probably still no worse than the stink of unburied rotting bodies up above.

  It was, except for the tiny chemical light, pitch black down in this place. The men kept together by holding the combat harness of the man to their front. In Ruiz’s case, he kept direction through pace count and his sketch.

  Pity I don’t have a working set of night-vision goggles, but we just exhausted the batteries for those. Supposedly someone in one of the maintenance tercios is working on either using different batteries in homemade cases or gutting and refilling the worn-out ones we have. Funny how it’s always the little things that get you.

  He’d stopped keeping up the pace count while mentally bitching at fate. He started again—one-o-five . . . one-o-six . . . and left here . . . yeah . . . there’s the branch line . . . one . . . two . . . three . . .

  At “fifteen,” Ruiz stopped again. It wasn’t for purposes of complaining, nor even of navigation. He was simply listening for any sound of enemy in the tunnel, as well as of fighting overhead. He took the chemlight between his teeth and stuck the sketch in his pocket. Then flicked on the night-vision scope on his rifle and raised it to his shoulder. Go figure, incompatible batteries with the goggles. Somebody wasn’t thinking the day they bought one or the other.

  The scope was a thermal. Unlike light-amplifying scopes it needed no light at all. Instead, it picked up heat or, better said, differences in heat. The thermal scope, however, did give off visible light; otherwise the user wouldn’t be able to see anything. Indeed, it could illuminate the face of the viewer. There was a flexible rubber eye guard which both shielded the eye from recoil and cut off light until it was pressed forward, snug against the eye. As Ruiz pressed his eye into it, creating a seal, it folded forward, moving out of the way the piece of rubber that prevented the escape of light. He scanned back and forth and was relieved that, Thank God there’s nobody down here. If any of us shoot we’re all fucking deaf.