A Pillar of Fire by Night

by Tom Kratman

  “So grab a canteen and a ration if you have one; we leave in five minutes.”

  That Frog general, thought Sais, is a brave man. If I make it, I am going to put him in for the Cruz de Coraje. Though he’d been prepared to die rather than reveal the secret, on the whole Sais was happy enough to have a chance at life.

  Battle Position H-14, South of the Parilla Line

  The Cazadores had bypassed everything they could possibly bypass, this battle position included. It was up to Velasquez’s and Cruz’s Second Cohort to clear the resistance bypassed. Already the other two cohorts had committed to clearing out the shoulders of the corridor; there was extensive firing from behind, though most of it, to Cruz, sounded like it came from an F- or M-26. The corridor had also been opened another two kilometers into the Tauran rear, while the eighty-five-millimeter guns had, for the most part, ceased fire, backed out of their shipping containers, after some shoveling and sandbag tossing, and were displacing forward. There was still plenty of steel going overhead, but the bulk of it was heavier stuff, striking further back.

  One of the maniples of Second Cohort assaulted across the battle position, mostly walking while firing from the hip. The return fire . . . Well, Cruz thought, it’s just ineffective, flying high, badly aimed, something. And there’s not much of it.

  A few white flags appeared, which caused the cohort’s fire to slacken. From the moonscape the artillery had made of the ground, emerged pale shadows of trembling, twitching, simulacra of human beings. They held their hands out, some of them, as if begging. A few, Cruz saw, just shook their heads. One man screamed, for no obvious and timely reason, which set half a dozen more to screaming.

  One kept repeating over and over, “den Haag . . . den Haag . . . den Haag.”

  Sergeant Major Cruz looked up and thought, You know, God; I am ashamed. You really shouldn’t let us do things like this to human beings.

  Some of the Taurans spoke a language surprisingly similar sounding to English, which Cruz more or less understood. It wasn’t English, though, and he could only make out the faintly scented trail of a word here and there, something that seemed familiar but lacked context and meaning.

  Then he noticed one of the Taurans trying to treat another’s wounds. This, at least, I know how to deal with. Radioing Velasquez he said, “Sir, we’ve got a bunch of prisoners and a lot of Tauran wounded. We need to start evacuating the ones who can move and treating the ones who can’t.”

  “Yeah,” answered the legate, “it’s not much different further ahead. Men can only take so much, and these poor bastards got more than their share. You’re authorized to detach from that maniple one squad as guards and to tell the cohort medical platoon to meet you and get to work. Velasquez, out.”

  Between the Parilla Line and Madrigal, Balboa

  Aaron Brown was a diminutive black tanker, originally from the Federated States Army but for decades now a part of the Legion del Cid. He’d trained and commanded the heavy battalion during the invasion of Sumer. He’d led what amounted to a heavy legion in Pashtia.

  Now he had a corps, composed of his own former command of First Armored Legion, plus Sitnikov’s Sixth Cadet Armored, composed of a sprinkling of officers from the military schools, plus a goodly chunk of the schools’ cadet bodies, as well, along with Young Scouts, retirees, and a number of secondments from other units. The average age of the Sixth was under sixteen, and really closer to fifteen. There were combatants in the legions as young as twelve, as young as nine if one counted part-time guerillas. That’s part of how a country with a population of about three million mobilized an army of almost four hundred thousand, the other parts being extensive use of women and old folks, and the disabled, plus the addition of several divisions worth of foreign auxiliaries, and complete shutdown of the economy for the period of the campaign, coupled with stockpiling of all necessities beforehand.

  And that four hundred thousand, nearabouts, also didn’t include perhaps as many as a couple of hundred thousand part-time guerillas, making life miserable for the Zhong.

  Though without doubt it set Cosmopolitan Progressives, or Kosmos, running for their fainting couches on a global scale, in fact, during the previous invasion, the cadets had more than shown their worth. As a military force not anticipated hence not accounted for on Tauran Union orders of battle for the legions, they had been instrumental in defeating the invasion by a combination of ambush, surprise attack, and simply buying time for the adult reserve forces to mobilize. The Taurans still lacked a good understanding of the cadet component of the legions, since there was also a massive cadet organization outside of the military schools.

  Brown’s corps also normally contained the Tenth Artillery legion, which was now fighting the battle more or less independently but would partially revert to corps control soon, and the Twenty-first Combat Support Brigade, containing tercios of armored cavalry (Twenty-fourth), engineers (Ninety-first), and air defense (One hundred and first).

  Carrera had long since dubbed the commander of the legions’ armor contingent, whatever size that might be, “Sancho Panzer.” Brown had held the title continuously since and, indeed, answered the radio and signed official correspondence as “Sancho Panzer.”

  To this, Carrera responded, “Sancho! My armor!”

  Brown answered, “I’ve got a tercio and a half to two tercios of each legion across the river, plus some few maniples from the Twenty-first Combat Support Brigade. The rest, and all the artillery, is on the other side waiting for their chance. Shall I attack?”

  There was no hesitation on Carrera’s part. “Yes, shortly. I’m going to order the special prep, and when you see that go, go in. Let me know if and when you meet serious resistance; sometimes we may be able to fix that for you. Otherwise, Tenth Legion, minus a bit, is back under your corps’ control.”

  “A bit?” Brown queried.

  “I’m keeping the heavy rocket launchers and a single battalion of one-eighties, plus the two-o-threes. The rest is yours, again. Break through to the sea.”

  “Roger, waiting for the special prep.”

  Brown knew his Jaguar IIs and Pumas—Volgan tanks renamed by the legions, with a few modifications from Obras Zorilleras and Zion—were outmatched, tank for tank, by the Taurans.

  But, Hell, I’m not facing more than one hundred—max one hundred and fifty—Taurans tanks, while my corps can field better than five hundred Jaguars, plus a hundred or more SPATHAs of our own. And then there are a couple of hundred more SPATHAs in the infantry legions, and we both have a swarm of Ocelots. And then the boss suggests he has a trick for the Taurans. I suspect it’s going to be a doozy.

  In any case, I like our chances just fine.

  The SPATHAs, Self Propelled, Anti-Tank, Heavy Armor, were former obsolescent tanks, the turrets of which had been removed and emplaced atop fixed concrete positions, mostly on the Isla Real in the Mar Furioso, though a number also faced to the northeast, where the plain raised up to the mountains. The hulls had then had a casemate built up on them, with a worn out one-hundred-and-fifty-millimeter gun mounted, the gun having been bored out to one hundred and sixty. They also had enough composite armor slapped on the front to stop even the Tauran tank cannon from penetrating.

  The gun fired charges weighing forty pounds. These were plastic explosive, sometimes called “HESH.” They had surprising accuracy up to a range of about twelve hundred meters.

  The effect of that much plastic explosive, in close contact with and self-conforming to a target tank, tended toward the near catastrophic, with turrets being deranged, main guns bent or even blown off, optics smashed beyond hope of repair, radio antennas disintegrated, and even machine guns detached and launched into their own tanks at great velocity and with terrible effects on the crew. They were pretty much a brute force solution to a brute force problem.

  The other thing about the SPATHA was that, while Jaguars, with their one-twenty-fives of fifty-one calibers, often had trouble maneuvering between the trees,
the SPATHA’s stubby little gun offered no such problem.

  Vicinity Volcano Number Nine

  Past the lightly hit area, down the hill where the barrage had been fierce, there were a number of light vehicles and a few trucks that still flickered and smoked from the barrage. There were bodies, more than a few, scattered on the ground or half incinerated behind drivers’ wheels.

  “We need to hurry,” Sais told the senior sergeant in charge. “Don’t ask me any questions but we, all of us, need to hurry. The barrage is lifting, that means we can find shelter almost anywhere, but we need to fucking hurry!”

  “You’ll just want to escape,” the Tauran sergeant insisted.

  “I want to escape something, goddammit, but not you. Look, let me ask the prisoners for their parole.”

  That was problematic for the Tauran sergeant, too, but the Balboan seemed so sincere. He clearly wanted to get away from something.

  “Major Malcoeur,” the sergeant shouted, “could you come here please? Quickly, please, sir?”

  “I understand Spanish,” the Tauran said. “If you tell them to escape I’ll shoot you where you stand.”

  “Fair enough. But no time to wait. Now . . . let me see . . . I’ll stand on that wreck there.” Sais pointed at a four-passenger light vehicle, the tires blown out and four bodies inside, slumped over in death, still oozing blood from multiple jagged tears and punctures.

  Jumping atop the back, he did his best to keep his feet from inflicting a sacrilege on the Tauran dead. “Listen to me,” he shouted to the prisoners. “Listen to me and gather around. Hurry, there isn’t much time.” He waiting until the troops formed a loose three-quarter ring of maybe as many as five hundred. “Okay, quiet. There is a huge bomb, a kind of mine, about to go off on that hill. The destructive radius will be immense, almost nuclear.”

  He looked to see if the Tauran really did understand. The wide-eyed, gap-mouthed, shocked expression on his face said he did. “We need to give our parole to the sergeant here that we will not try to escape. Repeat after me, ‘I give my parole.’”

  He waited a couple of seconds while the men muttered this, some with obvious reluctance. After they’d finished, the Tauran sergeant gave some orders in a language Sais didn’t understand, and began to run back whence they’d come.

  “What are you doing?” Sais called after the Tauran.

  Over his shoulder the sergeant answered, “You have your duty; I have mine. I have to warn our men atop that hill. My man knows what’s going on. He’ll inform the major. Form your men up and start to run.”

  “What’s your name?” Sais asked.

  “Constantinescu, Alexander. Why?”

  “Just to remember.” So I can put you in for a CC, too.

  Constaninescu met Janier about halfway back up the slope. Breathlessly, the sergeant cried out, “General, for the love of God, run. There’s a bomb . . .”

  Janier directed his driver to take him to the sergeant. “What was that?” he asked.

  “No . . . time . . . Balboan . . . warned me . . . bomb . . . really big fucking bomb . . .” He pointed up toward the now empty housing area and POW camp.

  “So that was the next trick,” Janier muttered. “Of course, that son of a bitch can read a map, too.” To Constantinescu he said, “Look, you go take charge of those prisoners again, I’ll warn . . .”

  Before he could finish the sentence, they heard an incredible roar, an unparalleled blast coming from the south. It was accompanied by a bright flash, itself followed by a massive rising mushroom cloud. Mesmerized by the rising cloud, they were stunned by a much larger and more powerful, but only because closer, blast. The flash from that left spots on their eyes.

  “Take cover,” the general shouted. The sergeant did so instantly, but the driver was still stunned. Janier jumped over the man and physically hauled him from the driver’s seat. The vehicle began to drift forward on its own, unattended, while the general threw the young driver to the ground before joining him. Then they, all three, heard the freight train rattle of an incoming heavy shell. It stood out particularly in the lull of the bombardment.

  “A bomb?” Janier wondered, “Or was it the nukes Wallenstein warned me about after all?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  “The blast kill mechanism against living targets is unique—and unpleasant . . . What kills is the pressure wave, and more importantly, the subsequent rarefaction vacuum, which ruptures the lungs . . . If the fuel deflagrates but does not detonate, victims will be severely burned and will probably also inhale the burning fuel. Since the most common FAE fuels, ethylene oxide and propylene oxide, are highly toxic, undetonated FAE should prove as lethal to personnel caught within the cloud as most chemical agents.”

  —Defense Intelligence Agency,

  Fuel Air and Enhanced Blast Explosive Technology, Foreign

  (Quoted by Human Rights Watch, February 1, 2000)

  Volcano Number Nine

  There were thirteen Volcanos emplaced between the Parilla Line and Cristobal. Five of these were at four of the termini of the especially heavily blasted corridors, such as the one Cruz, Velazquez, and Second of the Second moved along. The other eight were emplaced in extremely likely battle positions along and between the twin highways that led from Ciudad Balboa to Cristobal.

  The Volcanos, themselves, were nothing more than ridiculously large thermobaric bombs. Indeed, they were several times larger, although not several times more effective, as any ever dropped by an aircraft either on Terra Nova or on Old Earth. They could be larger, since they didn’t need to fit inside of, nor be light enough to be carried by an aircraft.

  Apart from size, the differences were mostly a matter of taste. There was, for example, a fairly large component of powdered magnesium, both for the flash and to ensure more complete detonation. Moreover, while thermobarics derived a lot of their efficiency from using the oxygen in the area where they detonated, in the case of a Volcano there was so much fuel that the oxygen in the air would have been exhausted before—long before—detonation was complete. Hence, they also had internal oxygen tanks, rigged to be split by shaped explosives, to help feed the blast.

  The real problems were always timely detonation and avoidance of discovery. For the latter, they were put in underground, generally as part of a building project and always empty of fuel. The fueling had taken place in the lull between the two Tauran invasions and always in the context of some other, nearby operation.

  Detonation was the bigger problem. Radio required antennas, which the Volcanos had, generally at some distance from the mines and connected by buried wire. These, however, were somewhat unlikely to survive the preliminary bombardment Carrera had been planning since Pashtia. A time fuse would have demanded precision of time in the execution of the counteroffensive, when circumstances could never be predicted with that kind of accuracy.

  The solution Obras Zorilleras had come up with was rather ingenious. There would be, and were, timers, but they were only set to turn on and sensitize seismic detectors, and only for short periods of time every other day. A near miss would not set off the mines at any other time, and even a near miss would have to be within a certain distance, have the fuse set on delay, which multiplied the power of the blast by effectively tamping it with the earth it had dug through, and carry a certain amount of high explosive. This was all somewhat variable, as a larger delayed blast, further away, could set off the bomb. But even that was only if the bomb’s seismic detector was activated, which was only the case for about one half of one percent of the time, roughly fifteen minutes every two days.

  At those times, forty pounds of TNT, buried within sixty meters, was enough for detonation.

  There were only twelve two-hundred-and-three-millimeter guns in legionary service. These were self-propelled Volgan pieces that had been ensured to have new, rigidly tested and carefully registered barrels. The twelve were part of the special bombardment maniple of Tenth Legion. They had specially trained and selected crews
, and were issued ammunition carefully made, weighed, and measured to have the minimum possible Circular Error Probable, or CEP. Those twelve had not taken part in the preparatory bombardment, lest Tauran counterbattery been able to get through. They were too important to risk on that.

  As the main bombardment ended, and with considerable confidence that neither Tauran air nor counterbattery were going to find them, the crews had set to driving the guns out of their shelters, settling them into their emplacements, and then setting them on the correct deflections and elevations, which measures had long since been calculated and updated for the morning’s meteorological message.

  After that, it was just waiting for the command, “Fire!”

  Artillery shells, so far at least, have not yet been proven to be capable of pride. Had this one been capable, it would have practically burst its fuse out of the fuse well and split the steel of its sides with sheer pride. Not only was it a special shell, super carefully manufactured, but it was on a mission to save its country, and the crew that had cared for it since being taken from the womb of the ammo bunker.