by Tom Kratman
Battle Position H-14, South of the Parilla Line
In legion doctrine, there were four densities of shelling, which also tied in to the scheme of maneuver. In the present case, Density One included—along with headquarters, communications nodes, and artillery and mortar positions, as well as known and strongly suspected defensive positions that might impede the advance—the five axes of advance into the Tauran depths. These got a double dose of fire, except in those areas where the Volcanos were expected to give an effectively infinite dose of fire. Density two was almost everything else not expressly identified as a Density One target area. Density Three, in this case, were areas the outside of density one, which the pieces firing into Density One would shift to as the troops passed up the corridors smashed by Density One fires. Density Four was everything else, the once over lightly. From the point of view of those in Density Four, it wasn’t all that light, really.
Private den Haag was of 14th Commando Troop, with which group Thirteenth Troop had, owing to casualties between them, been consolidated into a somewhat above-normal strength company. Sharing a fighting position with the disreputable and despicable coward, van der Wege, den Haag had the misfortunate of being in a unit along one of the five corridors through which the legions intended to pass, and that about two kilometers from the enemy’s so-called Parilla Line.
He knew about the Parilla Line, but didn’t know about Density One. Indeed, he had no real frame of reference outside his own, once the barrage commenced.
It commenced with what seemed to be a mix of one-twenty mortars and eighty-ones or eighty-twos. Bigger than sixties, anyway, but not as big as a one-twenty. The first shells went off overhead, amid the trees. Blowing down shredded leaves, branches, and twigs.
Den Haag was not, initially, all that impressed. His position, after all, was built to standard and then some. He had good overhead cover, due to the general’s commendable interpretation of the Global Court of Justice’s rain forest injunction; that, and liberal use of his own shovel. It will pass soon enough.
But it didn’t pass. Every fifteen seconds, it seemed—and den Haag consulted his watch once to check it—yes, four times in this last minute—a shell came in close enough that he could feel it, felt it as at least a slap against his face.
That was tolerable, if not to be enjoyed, but then one landed—so he guessed—four or five meters away. The limits of the firing ports to the fighting position attenuated or deflected the blast, to a degree, but damn, that hurt.
It didn’t get bad though until van der Wege folded his arms around himself, and began to rock back and forth, weeping like a raped woman, while sitting down in the muck of the hole. That began right after one probably heavier shell—a one-twenty, and likely on a delay fuse—sank itself into the dirt, rock, and sandbags overhead before detonating. The shell’s three pounds of high explosive mostly cleared off the overhead cover, except for the logs. However, partially tamped by the dirt and rocks, it managed to crack a couple of those, though not enough to drive them into the hole.
Den Haag could hear van der Wege’s little girl scream even over the blast and even through the hands he’d cupped over his ears.
And it wouldn’t end. My God will it never end? With each new shell, and they still kept coming in closer enough to frighten four or five times a minute, van der Wege set up a new and improved form of keening.
After a period of time—he could not even guess how long it was, so much had time been dilated by terror—den Haag noticed his own hands had begun to shake uncontrollably. With one of those shaking hands, he took the flashlight from his combat harness and turned the trembling light on to van der Wege, who had unaccountably gone silent. The light shone on eyes wide open and filled with terror and madness. Van der Wege had his own rifle’s muzzle in his mouth, but his hands kept going to the trigger and falling away.
A coward, just like always, den Haag sneered.
Steeling himself to a determined calm, for a moment at least, den Haag reached over, put his own finger on the trigger, and depressed it, saying. “Good riddance, you cowardly motherfucker!”
But still the barrage went on. The trembling picked up again, quickly, as well.
Forward Command Post, Fourth Corps, Cristobal, Balboa
Jimenez, Samsonov—“Who is getting too old for this shit!”—and Qabaash, accompanied, as always, by the faithful Sarita Asilo, on radio, wound their way through trenches and tunnels. Sound was all around them, for now, finally, “at last,” Jimenez authorized his corps and legionary artillery to open up without regard to anything but pounding the Taurans. The city was—rather, its ruins were—lit up with tongues of flame reaching for the clouds, even as impacts all around, except out to sea, cast a flickering light over the ruins. The effect, was, on the whole, bizarre to the point of sickening.
Asilo looked a little ill but, brave girl, hid how she felt pretty well. This was her hometown and, while it wasn’t much, so many memories were tied up in it . . .
I just want to cry. But I won’t.
At the covered and camouflaged post—camouflaged, as what else but another ruin? This camouflage job had been done by the Taurans to Balboan benefit—Jimenez pointed out what he wanted done to Qabaash and Samsonov. Pointing toward the wrecks of Campo de los Sapos and Magdalena, he repeated what had been thoroughly briefed in an order, days before.
“Achmed,” he said to the Sumeri, while pointing to show what he meant, “I want you and the Forty-third”—the Forty-third Tercio was also a brigade in the Sumeri Presidential Guard, on loan, so to speak—“to liberate both towns and then dig in and prepare for relief from the armored corps.”
Qabaash nodded his head, deeply and seriously. Then smiling, he added, “It will be good to see Sancho Panzer again.”
“Especially good this day, old friend, especially good for all of us. Now, Samsonov; Arturo Killum’s tercio, over by Fort Tecumseh, is probably about at the breaking point by now. They’ve been on their own and pressed hard since this invasion began. Facing the better part of a division of Anglians and Sachsens for as long as they have . . . well . . . I am not surprised. Relieve them. Drive the Taurans back.”
“With one regiment?” Samsonov had voiced his doubts before.
“Not just one regiment, not just one tercio,” Jimenez corrected. “Attack with the Red Tsar’s Three-fifty-first Guards. I am sure they can do the job.”
Samsonov, too, smiled; it was a nice touch from Jimenez, to have remembered, even though the tercio was more Balboan than anything now.
“Well . . . maybe,” he said. “It would help if . . .”
“You will have absolute control over the Seventy-sixth Artillery and Sixty-fourth Heavy Mortar Tercios, as soon as you are ready to cross the line of departure. And, gentlemen, you attack at dawn. To your regiments.”
Saluting, the Russian and the Arab went back the way they’d come, to the cellars and tunnels, the sangars and bunkers, and the crumbling ruins where they’d left their units.
Once they were gone, Sarita Asilo, still under her radio, admitted, “Sir, you told me the Duque would come for us; that he wouldn’t forget us just because we were poor and black. I doubted it. I doubted him and I doubted you for believing in him, both. I was wrong and I am so sorry.”
“Tell you the truth, Sarita, I was beginning to believe the rumors about him breaking down, so I had my doubts, too. And I was wrong. If I ever have the chance to apologize to him, I’ll be sure to add your name to the list of people who doubted.”
Her eyes went wide as her hand flew to her mouth. “You wouldn’t tell him . . .”
“Yes, yes; I surely will, and, now that I think about it, a good time to do so would be when I arrange for him and Lourdes to invite us over for dinner.”
“Us?” she asked, incredulously.
“Well . . . once the war’s over—and we are going to win big—I’m planning on retiring; maybe go into politics. So we can at least discuss a possible us, no?”
&nb
sp; To that she had no words. Glancing around to make sure there was no one else nearby, she threw her arms around Jimenez and buried a tear-covered face against his lorica.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” he said, reaching to stroke her hair.
She nodded, then sniffed. “Once the war’s over . . . because . . . you know . . . it just . . . wouldn’t be . . . appropriate . . .”
Academia Sergento Juan Malvegui,
Puerto Lindo, Cristobal Province, Balboa
It was death to go above. Even so, Janier went as far as a loggia that looked out upon the parade field and the smoking remnants of two batteries of self-propelled one-five-fives. The guns burned merrily. Since a good deal of the armor was aluminum, quite a bit of it had caught fire, too. The bright spark from burning aluminum was painful to look at, partly because of its own intensity and partly for the scene of horror it illuminated.
Ambulances and medics scurried about under fire, looking for wounded. Artillery, though, was no respecter of a red cross; in Janier’s view a rocket landed atop a tracked ambulance and simply disintegrated it and its crew. Screaming was everywhere, both from incoming rockets and people burnt or bleeding or simply scared out of their wits.
He saw what he thought was a girl—the soldier was small, in any case—trying to drag a big artilleryman to safety. They were caught in a storm of the improved conventional munitions that amounted to so many sixty-millimeter mortar shells mixed in with much larger number of much smaller ones similar to those of the TU. When the smoke cleared, Janier couldn’t make out the bodies.
He shook his head and let his chin fall to his chest. There will never be enough historians and citation writers to do justice to my soldiers.
He forced himself to something like his normal arrogant carriage, then strode into the depth of the building that served as his headquarters.
“What is wrong with us?” he demanded of his chief gunner, Lavalle.
“We are simply outclassed,” said that general, shoulders slumping. “We are also—I am also—outthought and outfought.”
Janier shook the man by those slumped shoulders. “You don’t get off that easily, you son of a bitch. Tell me what is happening and why!”
“Their guns are well dug in; ours are not dug in as well, for the most part, and could not be. They’ve got so many they can generally afford to put in even overhead cover for theirs and still cover everything. But to fight the counterbattery battle, having many fewer guns, we had to be able to traverse widely. No overhead cover for any of our’s but some of the self-propelled we’re saving for the attack. They have some equipment better than ours; we have nothing to match their three-hundred-millimeter rocket launchers and we have no cannon greater than one-five-five. They have numbers, massive numbers.”
As Janier let the man’s shoulders go, he slumped again, a complete and utter failure and disgrace in his own heart.
Another artilleryman in the headquarters, a lieutenant colonel, piped in in defense of his own general, “Sir, our counterbattery radar simply cannot make out a valid target grid with all the sheer shit flying around.”
“They were able to!” Janier shouted. “Why could they, with their two-generation’ old equipment, find our guns and ourselves not find theirs with the best and most modern in the world?”
“It was,” answered Lavalle, “that we only threw out a comparative few shells in the counterpreparatory bombardment, a couple of thousand over six or seven minutes. They saw those; those few were not enough to overwhelm their radars. Then they did the calculations and fired. When they fired, though, within minutes they were firing everything and we, our systems, were overwhelmed.”
“Sir, there is something interesting,” said the artillery colonel, desperate to relieve the crushing moral pressure on his chief. “When we figured we could not get useful targeting data we started looking for useful data on the ground. Let me show you on the map.”
Janier walked to the display the colonel indicated.
The colonel picked up a laser pointer and began to paint a picture. Circling a long tendril, one of six, he said, “We tracked the impacts on the ground. We can’t tell much about shell weight, except for the longest ranged ones where we can make an educated guess. But we are seeing approximately twice the effort along these six corridors,” the laser bounced from one to the other. “Left to a guess, I think those represent points they intend to break through and follow through on.”
“I don’t see another reason for it, no,” Janier agreed.
“We’ve also tabulated that against units that have gone completely dark; no one is answering or, rather, no one is answering who isn’t also gibbering. The correlation is very close.”
“What kind of shape is our own artillery in?” Janier asked.
“We’ve lost almost everything we’ve used in the counterprep,” the colonel replied. “That’s about forty percent of our artillery train. A lot of it isn’t destruction but neutralization; the crews are scared silly, certain key equipment was destroyed of damaged, key positions are temporarily unfilled. Give it a couple of days, maybe even a day, and three quarters of it will be back in business.”
Janier shuddered. He had been counting on using superior gunners and systems to gain an edge on Carrera. So much for that fucking theory.
“Should we move the rest?” he asked the colonel.
Lavalle answered, from behind. “No point, other than those corridors that are getting hit especially hard, they’re pounding everything pretty much equally. The guns are safer in their holes than they would be behind trucks in the open. And besides, the fuckers have used scatterable mines on the roads.”
Janier sneered. “And we, of course, don’t have any of those because our masters think they’re too icky.”
“It’s ‘for the children,’” the colonel said, joining Janier’s sneer.
Biting his lower lip, Janier nodded twice, then shook his head slowly from side to side, while keeping his eyes on the map.
“You know,” he observed, “of those six corridors, four go through the jungle. The other two are really the same, the two parallel highways from the capital to Cristobal. Even if they manage to stun silly every rifleman and machine gunner in those corridors, they’re also turning the ground soft, knocking branches down . . . their progress isn’t going to be quick; ten kilometers a day, maybe twenty if they really push it and take risks.”
“I think we can count on that,” said the colonel.
Janier agreed, then added, “So even if they begin their attack at dawn, it’s tomorrow evening before they reach the sea.”
“By those jungle routes, yes,” said Lavalle. “But the highways . . .”
“They’re going to move fast and be up our asses on those highways.”
“We need to drop the bridges over the river north of the Parilla Line,” said Lavalle. “I have no good way to do it. Honestly, I have no way to do it.”
“The bridges and the highways . . .” Janier called for his operations officer. When he arrived, the general asked, “First off, how is that Sachsen armored brigade doing under the shelling?”
“They’re in good shape, actually,” Ops reported. “The shelters we built for their vehicles have pretty much stymied the enemy artillery. They’ve lost less than ten percent in men and equipment, in any case, and some of that will return to duty within twenty-four hours.”
So, I have the means. With Panzers and Panzer Grenadiers, I’ll match the Sachsen against anyone. So where . . .
Janier had been around long enough to have a pretty good eye for terrain. His finger tapped the map five times by the twin highways, Janier saying at each tap, “This is key . . . this is key . . . this is key . . . this is key . . . and this is key. Prepare the orders; I want the Sachsens to occupy this terrain and defend it to the death. They can expect two armored divisions, if Major Campbell is to be believed. Still they must hold. Add to them”—Janier cocked his head, thinking—“add to them the entire Thirty-firs
t demi-brigade of our legion. Those cutthroats are half Sachsen anyway; I am sure they’ll work fine together. Got it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now, Lavalle?”
The artillery general stiffened, sure that the next words would mean his dismissal and disgrace. Thus, he was surprised when Janier said, “We’ve made mistakes, both of us. I have less excuse than you because the enemy has already humiliated me at least twice. Let’s say no more about that and get on with the job ahead.”
Lavalle almost wilted with relief, thinking, Now here is a commander a man can follow.
“Yes, sir.”
“Job one, therefore, is to get our losses made good. Job two is to preserve what we have for our own counterattack.” Here Janier raised his voice so the entire staff could hear. “The enemy is shooting his last arrow. After this he has no more in his quiver. And then, my friends, we kick his little brown ass.
“Now, as for those bridges—Air, get over here!”
Another officer trotted over, this one an Anglian air marshal, the equivalent of a ground forces major general.
“These bridges,” Janier flicked his finger at the map twice, “here and here; they need to come down.”
“We’ve dropped them each at least twice over the course of the campaign,” said the Anglian. “The Balboans just fixed them again each time. And the cost of getting through was very high.”
Janier sighed; There are some things it is very hard to get through the skull of some pilots. He asked, gently enough, “Did the Balboans fix them instantly?”
“Well, no, it took them a couple of days, each time.”
Still gentle, “A couple of days is all I need.”
