A Pillar of Fire by Night

by Tom Kratman

  His eyes sought the light he’d have expected to come from the town, as in former days of peace. There was a little bit of ambient, reflecting upward, but with the country’s electrical system mostly out of order, what little light there was came strictly from candles, kerosene lamps, wood fires, and the buildings the Taurans had wired to their own generators for their own convenience.

  Even those disappeared as the maniple moved to interpose a block of trees and a low, perhaps sixty-meter, hill mass between itself and the town.

  Cheatham couldn’t see it or hear it, but it was about that time that the mortar section of the maniple weapons platoon cut left to go around and then ascend the far slope of an amazingly regular oblong ridge to the left. The anti-tank section, meanwhile, cut right to ascend the lesser hill mass. From there it could enfilade a large piece of the Tauran berm with its Volgan Impaler rocket launchers.

  The Impaler was an odd piece, and arguments raged regularly over whether it was better classified as a rocket launcher or a recoilless musket, since it was smoothbore but burned out its rocket before the warhead ever left the tube. What couldn’t be argued was that it wasn’t quite as effective as the Tuscan equivalent that the Legion had also considered and rejected over costs. Still, with its tripod and competent, albeit not “brilliant,” sight, the Impaler could range with considerable accuracy out as far as eight hundred meters and do more damage at that range than the Tuscan piece could. Moreover, though the official maximum effective range was eight hundred meters, with a touch of elevation on the tube the round would sail considerably further than that and make a most satisfying boom at the far end of its flight; it just wasn’t that accurate at maximum range. On the other hand, four of them, firing thermobaric rounds at a section of trench, even at fifteen hundred meters, were still likely to make anyone in that section hightail it for safer pastures.

  Cheatham caught sight of a light again, off to his right, as the platoon cleared the lesser hill mass. They went about two hundred meters past it, in fact, before Lee directed him to turn ninety degrees to his right, heading straight for the town about six hundred meters to the northeast.

  Cheatham found himself surprisingly calm, considering this would be only the second real battle of his life. He attributed it to, Well, it isn’t like we haven’t been rehearsing this attack for months, after all.

  That calm disappeared in an instant when a machine gun somewhere off to the left sent a blizzard of brightly burning tracers—boomboomboomboombomboomboom, crackcrackcrackcrackcrackcrackcrack—through the general area of Lee’s platoon.

  Okay, okay . . . calm down . . . nobody screaming . . . not even for a medic . . . so nobody hit . . . okay, okay . . . maybe somebody hit, but if so, unconscious or dead. Now what?

  The whole platoon went to ground, suddenly leaving every man alone with his own terrors.

  Cheatham heard Centurion Lee shouting to the weapons squad. Pretty quickly, return fire lashed out at the Gauls’ machine gun. Next thing Paul knew, Lee was hauling him up by his combat harness, shouting, “Get you and your men off your asses and maneuver to the wire, goddammit! Base of fire for the bangalore bearers. Now go, go, go!”

  Off in the distance, Cheatham heard the faint pops of his own maniple’s mortars, as well as the more distant but more authoritative clang of the two cohorts’ dozen one-twenties, further back. From behind—Shit, I forgot about those for a minute—the double whammy of the Impalers kicked in, with a concussive blast behind and a larger one to the front.

  Nothing like some friendly fire support to brighten your day.

  “What the fuck are you waiting for, Cheatham, a gilded and engraved invitation from the Duque himself?”

  “No, Centurion. Sorry, Centurion. Second squad, off your bellies and race to the wire!”

  There’s a place to move slowly, by individual and team bounds. There’s also a place to move as fast as you can with whatever you can. In this case, that latter was the best choice, to move and gain the most advantage that could be squeezed out of what surprise there was. Second squad fairly bolted to the outer wire that surrounded the Gaul-held town. On the way, Cheatham heard one scream that sounded altogether too much like the leader of his A team. And then he was at the wire.

  It’s just protective wire, Cheatham thought, not tactical at all.

  That was a huge relief, since it meant the men would not be lying down in some machine gun’s preregistered beaten zone, as would have been implied by wire jutting out at angles from the berm.

  “Clark, left, suppressive fire. A team, come to me, right. Same deal. And get some smoke on the berm,”

  In a few moments, cylindrical grenades arced out, trailing dense but narrow streamers of smoke. They either reached the berm or got very near it, where the smoke that poured from them began to obscure the berm from his soldiers, And hopefully my boys from the Gauls.

  Someone apparently called for illumination from the heavy mortars. With an odd pop, then a rattle accompanied by an eerie whoosh, a bright light suddenly hung high over the town. Three more followed, in quick succession.

  Close call, thought Cheatham, using illumination, but doctrine says that when they have more night vision than you do, fight in the light.

  In a moment, he was joined by Lee, who said, “So you can move when you want to, after all.”

  The centurion then ignored him as the first of the bangalore bearers reached the wire. That mountaineer dropped to prone, dropping from his shoulder two tubes, one of which bounced when it hit the ground.

  “Just like in the rehearsals, numbnuts,” said Lee, in what passed for encouragement among the centurion class. The soldier duly stuck the other tube into the one that had bounced, or, rather, into a smaller cylinder which held them together. These he fed, empty and bouncy one first, under the wire.

  “Okay, get the fuck out of here. Next!”

  Huffing and puffing, another soldier slammed himself down next to the centurion. He attached first one and then another tubular section to the first assembly, and pushed them forward.

  Thought Centurion Lee, It can give one a warm and fuzzy feeling, when doing this shit, to know that if the hollow-front piece hits a mine or booby trap it won’t send a sympathetic hundred-pound detonation down to your hands and next to your head.

  Taurans now manning the berm—it must have been entrenched and probably revetted, with an entrance on the town side—returned fire blindly through the smoke. There were screams coming from both sides now, even as bullets whipped back and forth, though whether they were screams of anger or pain or fear none but the individual screamer could really say.

  “Next!”

  A charging soldier, Lee wasn’t sure who it was, suddenly spun like a top and sank to the ground. His shoulder-borne tubes went flying. Lee raced for them, even as he called out, “Next!” Then the two of them, Lee and the next bearer, got in each other’s way while trying desperately to fit two at once.

  “For fuck’s sake, Private, back off and wait!”

  “But, Centurion, you said—”

  “Just wait, goddammit!”

  By the time twelve-meter-and-a-half-long sections had been joined, plus the dummy on the front, no further progress was possible; the thing was just too heavy for two men to move against its weight and friction. At that point Lee gave the order to clear out—more specifically, “Fire in the hole! Fire in the hole! Fire in the hole!” even though there was no hole—and pulled the ring on the friction igniter before joining the men scurrying for such safety as a little distance might give. The explosion that followed was awe-inspiring, picking the men up and slamming their chests to the ground with almost stunning force. The force increased with sympathetic detonations from the booby traps. Little bits of wire and other metal pattered down from the sky, generally without enough mass or velocity to hurt anyone. A few larger pieces might have caused injuries, but fortunately landed on open ground out to the flanks. At about the same time, there were further explosions all around t
he town’s perimeter as other platoons blasted their way through the wire and booby traps.

  The second thrust into the wire was worse than the first. For one thing, the Gauls were fully alert now, and pouring fire as best they could into the smoke concealing the breaches. Roughly a third of the men trying to reach Lee with bangalore sections didn’t make it unscathed. Lee himself was safe enough; he was so deep into the enemy obstacle that the angle of the top of the berm—essentially parallel to the ground—meant that any Gauls foolhardy or brave enough to venture out to try to pick off a target past the protective wire were easy meat for the machine guns on the closer in hills, the riflemen and light machine gunners on the ground, and the Impalers and mountain guns firing from the ridges.

  Even with those in support, prayers floated heavenward, sometimes aloud but more often silent. Cheatham thought, over and over, Jesus, this is Hell; Jesus this is Hell; Jesus this is Hell . . . even as he swept the edge of the berm with his F-26.

  In time, though, enough beavers gnawing will work their way through the stoutest trees. Lee pulled a small ring and stood. Running to the south he screamed, “Fire in the hole! Fire in the . . .” At that point a Gaul, very brave or very lucky or, more probable, both, stitched the centurion up his right side, from calf to hip to lower right side of his torso. Stifling a scream, Lee fell forward, plowing the bullet-swept ground with his nose and chin. Arms and legs flailed, still trying to move away.

  Cheatham saw his leader fall. Ordering his squad to bugger off, he raced through tracers and menacing-sounding cracks to the downed centurion. Cheatham passed the first gap in the wire, then crouched very low to let the fire pass overhead. Lee was still struggling, however feebly, when the sergeant reached him. Without a word, Cheatham passed his rifle to his left hand and with his right grabbed the back strap of Lee’s harness. He didn’t try to lift him far, but rather used him like a kind of sled, holding his flopping head and shoulders up while dragging the lower torso and legs across the explosively packed ground. Back through the gap in the wire they went. A machine gun behind and to their left churned the dirt around them, sending little earthen geysers spouting upward. Paul thought something tugged at his leg but kept on dragging.

  “Get down!” Lee shouted, as best he could. “Get down before—!”

  Cheatham dropped the load and flopped down ahead of the centurion. It wasn’t quite in time. The explosion, about two hundred pounds of a mixture of TNT and RDX, with a trace of paraffin, was at this range just shy of deadly. The two men were not just picked up and slammed to the ground. Rather, they were effectively clubbed over every square inch of their bodies. Prone, Lee was pushed a few meters away. Not quite prone, Cheatham was flung end over end for about twenty meters.

  On the plus side, Cheatham was perfectly relaxed when he hit the ground, largely because he was totally unconscious. He was also, of course, oblivious to Clarke screaming like a banshee and taking the lead until the Optio could get forward. Neither did he see the rest of the platoon, such as still stood, charge through the new gap to ascend the berm, drop into the Gallic trench, and hammer, beat, stab, and slash their way forward. He was still there, oblivious and hovering between life and death, when the allied battalion under Ugarte stormed through the weakened spot in the Gallic perimeter, and forced their way into the main part of the town.

  He also didn’t know about it when the first Tauran air support showed up.

  Since the outlying areas of the country, the occupied areas, didn’t have the air defense umbrella or vertical launch fighters to make using the conveyor system an exercise in humiliation, the aircraft carriers and the fields for the land-based aircraft in Cienfuegos had been able to respond without wasteful and time-consuming aerial assembly of large strike packages. Asked for twenty-four sorties here, they could get those sorties in the air in a matter of minutes. Asked for a bombing mission there, they could have the aircraft over that part of Balboa in anything from ten minutes, for a carrier-based strike, to an hour and ten from Cienfuegos.

  Those requests, and others just like them, had been coming in with panic-stricken regularity since the previous evening. It was, no doubt, a measure of the Balboans inability to coordinate the series of attacks to take place at the same time that allowed the packages to be sent out so efficiently, though, it had to be admitted, the Court’s rulings made that theoretical efficiency considerably less useful than it might have been over most of the country.

  It was early morning, with just the hint of the sun peeking over the horizon. Half the town below was swathed in smoke and flame. A goodly chunk of the rest had already been burned to a cinder.

  Squadron Commander Richard Halpence was in the air, just outside of light missile range, circling over the town and fuming at his impotence. Below, the Gauls still holed up in one corner of the town begged for help as the Balboans closed in around them. They were, Halpence gathered, a somewhat motley crew of gendarmes, engineers, mortarmen, supply and transport weasels, and God alone knew what else. What those men asking for help didn’t understand, and Halpence could only surmise, was that not only was the town still fairly full of civilians, but that something like a thousand prisoners were now in Balboan hands. Under the circumstances, they were surely not very far yet from the men who had captured them, which was also to say not very far from where the huddling Gauls wanted bombs dropped and rockets fired.

  “And I can’t,” Halpence told the men below though a relay. “I’m sorry, but I can’t.” And that you’re too panic-stricken to give me proper coordinates doesn’t help, either.

  There were hundreds of sorties in the air, a panicked response to what appeared to be a do-or-die offensive all across the occupied parts of the country. Certainly, reports from the ground were that the Balboans were attacking without regard to losses, and had found success at at least a substantial number, maybe even a majority, of their objectives. There were even reports of them using their women in places and in large numbers, though Halpence discounted most of that. Who wastes perfectly functional women, after all? Madmen? Queers? Rich feminists who know it won’t be their daughters slaughtered?

  Halpence was constrained by the courts. The Zhong, in their area, suffered no such restrictions. They lashed at their tormentors mercilessly. They also had few enough aircraft that the lashing they could deliver was highly limited. The squadron commander suspected that some Tauran aircraft had used the excuse of the Zhong to drop their loads on the enemy, even in the rainforest. He couldn’t prove that, however, and had no interest in gathering evidence.

  And I’ll drop mine, too, if I get the slightest excuse and opening. In the interim, at least while I’m here there are limits on the fire support they can use.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  “Amateurs study tactics. Amateurs also study logistics. But war is that art and science that subsumes all other arts and sciences, hence real professionals study everything.”

  —Some Hack Science Fiction Writer,

  Early 21st century

  Cayuga Field, Cienfuegos

  A few aircraft had been lost—at least one to an extremely surprised pilot’s ejection seat malfunction—but only a few. The Balboans had certainly tried to do more, but anyplace very far outside of their dense air defense umbrella between the capital and the Parilla Line, they just couldn’t.

  Still, over a period of about twenty-four hours, the Tauran air forces based at sea and on Cienfuegos had sent out about fifteen hundred sorties, lasting an average of just under four hours each. That roughly fifty-nine hundred hours was bad enough, representing a bit over one hundred thousand extra maintenance hours among already overstretched crews. At least that was the optimistic estimate. Cynical crew chiefs often doubled and trebled those figures, partly based on cynicism and partly on the knowledge that not all repairs can happen simultaneously, that sometimes, even often, there had to be a linear sequence of repairs that slowed things down considerably. Moreover, getting planes back into the air required a certain,
and rarely small, number of maintenance man-hours, as well, both for pre-flight checks and repairs that the pre-flights often showed being needed.

  Worse; the supply of spares immediately on hand wasn’t quite up to the demand. Still worse was that facilities available for maintenance, from shelter from the rain to engine test sets, were also badly overtasked, and that among a group of senior officers who answered to more than a dozen different chains of command, were in the main egomaniacs, all terribly skillful as bureaucratic infighters, and generally disinclined to cooperate.

  Moreover, even at sea, the Gallic and Anglian aircraft carriers were undercrewed by design, and gave barely enough hull space to spares and fuels for much less intensive operations than they’d just conducted.

  Most of this, the various air chiefs were willing to admit to Janier, when he flew to a muggy and hot combined meeting at Cayuga Field to explain to them that simple soldierly morality demanded that they ignore the Court’s order in the difficult days soon to be coming.

  An enlisted man, basically responsible for making and passing out the coffee, overheard this and resolved to let the media know the Expeditionary Force commander was inciting illegal action.

  “It’s very simple, gentlemen,” the Gaul said; “I am facing a counterattack in our area of operations that will, I believe, drench us in fire at essentially nuclear levels. My own guns are not, and will not soon be—indeed, most of them cannot be—adequately dug in. Theirs are. I do not have enough artillery ammunition ashore now, and may never have, to win the counterbattery battle my gunners will have to fight. I am outnumbered about three or four to one in guns”—this was something of an exaggeration, as he was counting Balboan mortars but not his own—“and more than that in throw weight. My only chance is if you ignore the ruling from the Global Court of Justice and bomb the ever-loving shit out of the rain forest.”