A Pillar of Fire by Night

by Tom Kratman

  Shortly after that, while ascending the sandbag steps that led up and out, a troop of monkeys scampered by on the ground. Pierantoni stopped again, listening. No, that’s not that unusual around here either.

  Pierantoni turned completely around then, scanning the slope of the mountain. At first, he saw nothing but thin vegetation and some more monkeys. Then he spotted them, what looked to be a squad of men, at least the orange blurs of what was probably a squad, moving hunched over under heavy packs, maybe five hundred meters away.

  Now, that’s unusual.

  Pierantoni crouched and walked briskly to the central position of the squad, second squad, in front of him. Making sure the squad leader was awake, he said, “Enemy coming. Go make sure third squad is up; I’ll handle first.”

  Halfway to first squad, Pierantoni met the squad leader who said, “I was just coming to tell you . . .”

  The senior cut him off. “Company? I know. Get back to your squad and stand . . .”

  Pierantoni’s orders were interrupted by a rising flurry of fire, with tracers drawing lines in the sky and across retinae, off to the northwest.

  The maniple commander had control of all three one-twenty platoons for now. There really weren’t that many shells for what were voracious consumers of ammunition. He had enough ammunition allocated to suppress the objective and the lesser prominences to his right, but nothing like enough to destroy the enemy on all of them. It wasn’t that ammunition wasn’t available; there were more than twenty thousand shells still sitting back near Hephaestos. It was that not all that much could be ported; mountain warfare had always required a certain miser’s touch where ammunition was concerned. This, too, tended to drive the use of direct lay, where possible.

  The other maniple, now apparently engaged, could have asked for support from the mortars. When asked by the mortars themselves, though, the forward observers had said, “Forget it; we’re in amongst them already.”

  “Okay,” ordered Martinez’s and Morgenthaler’s commander, Tribune Chacón, “surprise, if we ever had it, is blown. Hunker down for a bit.”

  That command came just about in time because Pierantoni’s platoon, having targets and seeing that battle had commenced, opened up of their own accord. Tracers skipped through spaces that had been occupied by men seconds before. Even then, a couple of Balboan mountaineers were hit.

  Chacón then called the mortars for some high explosive. That came in, within a minute and ten seconds, but had surprisingly little effect. “Right. Switch to delay.”

  A one-twenty shell hit directly on the roof of Pierantoni’s bunker. The fuse, set on “super quick,” which was to say point detonating, passed through sod set up as camouflage and hit the rock burster layer beneath. At that it went off, shattering the rock it hit and blowing most of the others in the burster layer in every direction but down. The dirt below the rocks compressed, and the logs beneath that shuddered and groaned.

  For all that, Pierantoni was fairly unimpressed. Yes, they were gut-rattling. Yes, that was unpleasant. Yes, my ear . . . “What did you say?”

  On the whole, though, they did little actual physical damage. Somebody took a small piece of a fragment that drew a red line across his nose before bouncing off his cheekbone. Another screamed, “My eye! My eye!” before falling to the base of his fighting position, clawing at his face. But those didn’t really interrupt the integrity of Pierantoni’s defense.

  “Besides,” as he told his third squad leader before a shell cut the wire, “down in our holes we’re safe. If we try to pull out, those things will cut us to ribbons. So, we stay as long as we can.”

  That estimate changed when he saw a fighting position to his left front collapse even as a huge column of dirt and rocks were tossed into the air. He tried to do an estimate of what was coming in his head. The short version of that was, They won’t get a majority of my positions or my men. What they will get is uncovered holes in the defense they can infiltrate through. Time to leave, incoming or not. Besides, delay is a lot less dangerous to men in the open than superquick is.

  There was a pyrotechnic signal for a withdrawal, in this case a green star cluster. But any pyrotechnic signal, any signal at all, under the circumstances, was likely to mean only one thing which would be instantly clear to the enemy: begin the assault now.

  Instead of reaching for the star cluster, Pierantoni called all his squads. Only first and second answered. “Thin the line, pull out, assemble at the rally point to the southeast.”

  He gave much the same order to Boneli, then left the bunker and cut left to third squad. With the enemy firing on delay it was almost safe to do so.

  Almost, however, wasn’t quite the same as completely. Pierantoni stuck his head into the rearward entrance to third squad leader’s fighting position and shouted, “Get the fuck out now! Get to the rally point!” Nothing happened. He had to physically reach out, grab, and shake the squad leader to get his attention. Once he had that he repeated the order. Then he got to his knees again to stand and move further left.

  At that time a shell landed almost exactly between Pierantoni and the fighting position. Like the other more recent ones, it penetrated into the earth before detonating. He had the visual impression of a wall of dirt and rock closing in on the two men inside the bunker, while tossing their overhead cover forward and up. For himself, the ground suddenly lurched upward with force enough to break both shins and hurl him into the air. He flew, conscious and screaming with pain, the lower halves of his shattered shins spinning, until he arced down to the ground. There he rolled downhill. The rolling twisted his already broken bones, turning them into internal blenders for the flesh and nerves of his lower legs. Mercifully, sometime in the process, he passed out.

  All night the skilled engineers worked, aided by the artillerymen themselves, and an infantry maniple that provided both security and scut labor.

  In an ideal circumstance, they’d have driven tunnels to the forward face of the ridge from its rear. There wasn’t nearly time for that. Instead, they used shaped charges to blow narrow holes up to nine feet into the ridge’s forward slope. This was tricky, as the stands for the shaped charges were designed to provide standoff but also to work only in the vertical plane. Getting them to fire almost horizontally into the ridge required a little thought and some scavenged logs. When the holes had been punched into the ridge, forty-pound cratering charges were prepared for detonation and then pushed into the holes. This gave a very suboptimal crater. In general, the process had to be repeated with the shaped charges and somewhat smaller cratering charges, all supplemented by a good deal of sweaty pick and shovel work. The sun came up before they were finished, which required the engineers and sappers to lay off and blend back into the ever-so-blessed rain forest until evening. That whole next day the infantry concentrated on making the defenders’ lives miserable.

  Morgenthaler heard a low and pitiful moan, coming from down the slope. Without asking for permission—he really wasn’t that kind of soldier—he went to investigate.

  What he found was a body in a camouflage uniform, half covered with dirt and rocks, and with the legs bent at angle that made him nauseous. He wasn’t at all sure the body was even alive until he heard the moaning again. He walked around and began brushing rocks and dirt away from the head.

  One eye opened up and said something in Italian. It was one word every speaker of a romance language was likely to be able to understand from any other. Morgenthaler took out his canteen and tried to place it to the victim’s mouth, but the angle was all wrong, letting the water dribble wastefully to the ground. He tried a different tack, which was to pour some into his cupped palm and hold that out by the poor crippled bastard’s mouth. It was demeaning, he supposed, but it worked.

  The next three words were also easily translatable. “Grazi . . . molto dolore . . . aiutami.”

  “The accent’s funny, friend,” said Morgenthaler, “but I understand.” He handed over his canteen, saying, “Here, t
ake this and do your best with it while I go for help.”

  “Grazi . . . grazi.”

  Patting the Tuscan reassuringly, Morgenthaler set off in search of the company medics. They weren’t quite sure what to do. Evacuation was next to impossible from this place and they had their hands full with their own wounded. Moreover, they were part-time citizen soldiers, militia, not all that well schooled in what might be called “the niceties of the law of war.” They could, after all, just ignore the man and let him die in his own time.

  “Fuck that shit,” said Tribune Chacón, who was better versed in those niceties. “He’s just a regular guy, from a regular formation, doing a job not a lot different from us. Go get him. If he dies it won’t be because we failed in our duties as either soldiers or human beings.”

  The niceties of the laws of war did not require that an enemy be allowed to escape to fight again. Once the mountain gun platoon was dug in near Glacier Mountain, and another platoon similarly dug in on Cerro Irbet, they commenced a bombardment of the defenses around Cerro Noroeste, which was, despite the name, actually almost due north of Cerro Presinger. At the same time, under that covering fire, the one previously uncommitted maniple began its ascent up the north side of Cerro Noroeste, even while the mortars began to drop rounds to the south of the peak. The mortars let up after a time, the objective was to show that they could block retreat at will.

  The Tuscans here were not wimps. Chacón sauntered over to watch the fun. The mountain guns didn’t fire fast and the procedure was, to the tribune’s eye, a little odd. He asked about it.

  “It’s because we’re firing direct lay and haven’t laid in a parallel sheaf, sir,” said one of the gun crews between shots. “Ordinarily, artillerymen estimate the range and then set their elevation and charge. Oh, and deflection, too, of course. It works because, with the same data, all the guns at pointing at the same point on the ground only offset for their position within the battery.

  “Doesn’t work for us when we’re set up like this. Oh, sure, we estimate the range and set our sights for that. But range estimation in this kind of terrain is tricky. And our laser range finder’s been on order for, like, years. So, when we fire with our ‘base gun,’ it’s called, it’s almost meaningless to the other guns. So, we aim the sight at the burst—first round’s usually a miss—and then move the gun so the sights are back on target. Then we fire again. Sometimes takes two or three shots, you know, sir?

  “Once we have a hit, we don’t do anything but level the sight. Then we look at the elevation, and get the right range and charge from the charts that have that. We give that range to the other guns, and then we all have target practice.

  “Figure it must be pure hell in the receiving end.”

  “Yeah, I figure,” agreed Chacon. He watched the guns do their thing for a couple of bunkers: “Fire!” Boom. Rattle. Boom. “Adjust the sight . . . reload . . . fire!” Boom . . . rattle . . . boom. “Target!”

  Kinda pretty, really, thought Chacón, watching the point of impact transform into a black, red, and orange flower. Course, not so pretty on the receiving end.

  A well-built fighting position could take a lot. It couldn’t take four seventy-five-millimeter guns pounding, pounding, pounding until a shell burst through. Chacon figured one must have gotten through, because the roof lifted and fire and smoke shot from the firing ports.

  Good men, never even tried to surrender or pull out. On the other hand, I wonder if, by the time their position’s almost wrecked, they aren’t so stunned silly they can’t even think, let alone think about surrender or retreat.

  In any case, the Tuscan Ligurini held on well past normal human endurance. Finally, with more than half their men down and well over half their fighting positions smashed, with machine guns ripping air and ground all around them, with the Balboans reaching grenade throwing distance—because another nice feature of direct lay was that it was very safe to maneuver friendly troops very close to it—with their barbed wire chopped up and scattered, only then did their company commander, from what amounted to his deathbed, give the order to surrender.

  Perhaps they’d had to spend a day or so fighting off guerillas around their base, but it was only then that the first Tauran aircraft came in. They circled for a while, dodging a couple of missiles thrown their way. They never did attack.

  Chacón theorized, aloud, “They can’t go after the guns, because though at the edge of the rainforest that means they’re still in the rainforest. They can’t attack the men on top of Cerro Noroeste because they’re probably not sure who owns it, in the first place, but have to figure there are prisoners there, if we own it, in the second. And there aren’t any other good targets around.”

  He added, finally. “The blessed fucking rain forest; if those dumb shits had to live in it, fight it back every day to eke out a living, I wonder if they’d be so enthusiastic to keep it untouched. Not that I’m exactly bitching, mind you.”

  “Who do I pull out of the line to block this hole?” asked Marciano. “I already know I don’t have enough to counterattack to re-establish the line where it was.”

  Rall, the Sachsen colonel, shook his head. “There’s nobody, sir. The two regiments we were already dealing with are pressing hard all along the front. Yes, they’re paying a higher price in blood than we are, but there’s a reason for that, a reason they’re willing to pay that.”

  “In two days,” said del Collea, “or three at the outside, that regiment—let’s not pretend it’s anything but the Balboan Fifth Mountain—or a goodly chunk of it, acting under official orders—is going to pop out of the jungle and cut our road to the capital. They’ll be dropping mortars on our head a day before that.”

  Marciano pursed his lips, looked at the map, looked down, then back at the map. He cocked his head and raised one quizzical eyebrow.

  “Ever read Xenophon, gentlemen? The Anabasis?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Rall.

  “You assigned it to me when I was a lieutenant,” said del Collea, with a genuine grin.

  “Good,” said Marciano. “I hope the lessons took.”

  “Sir?”

  “We’ve done all we can here. We’re bugging out; there’s no place left for us to make a stand in front of the capital. We cannot make a stand at the capital. But there is still a place we can make a stand, maybe even save something from this goat fuck. We’ll take the government with us as we go, along with any civilians or police who want to join us as well. But we’re going to the last place we can make a stand.” Marciano leaned over and tapped the map at the place where the Mar Furioso and Santa Josefina’s border with Córdoba joined to form a narrow place, maybe fifteen miles across, with a huge lake to anchor one flank, a huge ocean for the other, a small but adequate bay for shipping, and adequate road net, and heavily settled and farmed enough that the rain forest would not impose much in the way of restrictive fire measures.

  “Something we’ve always had, gentlemen, but have rarely been able to make much use of, is the ability to move faster than the enemy. But this time tomorrow I want the entire task force on the road or in the air, and legging it trippingly for that.”

  “We’ll have to give up any semblance of our own air force,” Rall observed.

  Marciano disagreed. “Not exactly. We’ll have to give up some responsiveness, but we’ll also give up the need to secure their bases when we send them to Cienfuegos.”

  “Good point, sir.”

  “Okay,” said Marciano, “enough chatting. I want to brief orders this evening just after dark. Make it happen.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  “If there is one attitude more dangerous than to assume that a future war will be just like the last one, it is to imagine that it will be so utterly different we can afford to ignore all the lessons of the last one.”

  —John C. Slessor, Air Power and Armies

  Tauran Union Expeditionary Force Headquarters,

  Academia Sergento Juan Malvegui (Under New
Management), Puerto Lindo, Balboa

  The old Balboan military academy, overlooking the port, besides serving as a headquarters for Janier’s expeditionary force, also served as a casualty collection point cum medical clearing station, as well as a convenient spot to evacuate the badly wounded to the hospital ship thirty or so miles out to sea.

  Down the coastal road, in a plainly marked ambulance, Werner Verboom was carried in a state of pain barely held in check by the drugs he’d been given. Besides having lost quite a bit of blood, the bones in his heel and leg were in a bad enough state that a just-this-side of uncontrollable infection was possible. If the infection wasn’t contained and defeated, that leg, below the knee, would have to come off. And no one would listen to him when he said, “If it gets that bad, just kill me.”

  The road on which Verboom’s ambulance rattled, the road from Cristobal to Puerto Lindo, had, over the centuries, gone from a mule trail to widened dirt to gravel to cobblestoned to corruption-afflicted asphalt to potholes interspersed with bumps and boulders to, finally, under the legions, a fairly decent two-lane highway. It had taken some damage in the fighting and been subject to considerable wear in the logistic effort, but, precisely because it was so important, Janier’s engineers had kept it in pretty fair order, even making a few improvements here and there.

  On the whole, the road wasn’t considered safe to drive without escort. Indios from the deep jungle to the west, formed into Carrera’s Forty-fourth Tercio, regularly ambushed logistic columns and lone couriers. The Indians, descended from and still calling themselves “Chocoes,” had little but rifles and some machine guns, and those of older, simpler design. They wore not much but loincloths in legionary pattern camouflage or, sometimes a shirt. Rank was painted on as often as not. But not once had a patrol trying to clear the road found the Indios unless they’d wanted to be found. Not once had they been made to pay the price of an ambush if they’d had so much as twenty seconds to blend into the jungle.