Watching her husband pick at his dinner, Bruwer leaned on his shoulder and whispered, “You are as nervous as the kitten. You are not planning to work are you?”
Sanmartin squirmed impotently. “We have a night exercise planned.”
“Raul, how could you? It is Christmas and raining, and after last night’s festivities* half of your battalion must be hung over. Is this Piotr’s idea?”
Her husband nodded. Apart from his normal concerns, the Iceman wanted to soak up some extra energy so his men wouldn’t be tempted to spend the week in bars looking for blacklegs to beat up.
Bruwer sighed. “All right. Wait until Hendricka is into bed.” Making sure that no one else was paying attention to them, she asked quietly, “The murder yesterday—there will be more, won’t there?”
“We’re still working on it,” her husband said.
SUPERIOR PRIVATE JAN DE BEERS PEERED ANXIOUSLY INTO THE
gloom. Although his eyes saw nothing, his ears and instincts told him that something was moving in the forest. Eighty-four seconds later, he was “dead.”
He sat down in the mud and stared at the tiny red spots on bis uniform that represented simulated bullet holes, making him a simulated corpse. “Shit,” he said, with true feeling.
Unfortunately, the C Company troopers who had taken De Beers out were very good—friends of his, in fact—and with De Beers taken down quickly and quietly, they would roll up No. 1 platoon like limp rope. Intercompany maneuvers were fiercely contested. “Dead,” De Beers had the unpleasant feeling that he was going to be very unpopular with his messmates in very short order.
A few moments later, his worst fears were realized when Section Sergeant Kirill Orlov sat down beside him and took off his mask. Orlov’s back and right side were neatly dotted with spots that were almost as red as Orlov’s cheeks.
“Hello, Jan. Did you perhaps hear those street-sweepers of Coldewe’s before they blew you away?” Orlov asked pleasantly. “Or were you blind and deaf?”
“Blind and dumb,” De Beers admitted. “It was de Kantzow’s section. I see what they did, now. While one of them kept my attention, Yelenov snuck up behind me and shot me up with a silenced submachine gun. I thought something was out there, but the Hangman said that the woods there were out of bounds.”
“Jan, you are the dumbest soldier alive—excuse me, the dumbest soldier dead. Yes, the Hangman said the forest there is out of bounds. And I remember personally telling you that the Hangman lies to make these exercises interesting.” Orlov wailed, “Oh, why did I ever become a sergeant? I must have been drunk and rolling on the ground! What a thimble-wit, I was!”
No one was as lavish with praise as Kirill Orlov—when things went right. Orlov was equally communicative when things did not. “Do you know how many months it’s going to be before DeKe de Kantzow and Beregov let me live this down?” he asked rhetorically.
“Months and months and months.” A glimmering of the future touched De Beers. “And every time they remind you, you are going to remind me.”
“True,” Orlov said glumly.
As Karl von Clausewitz once observed, given the enormous friction in war, even the mediocre is an accomplishment; and De Beers was feeling decidedly mediocre.
Settling back against a fern tree to wait for the exercise to end, he let his mind wander. “Isn’t it kind of spooky out here?
What would you do if Frankenstein’s monster came crashing ilirough the thickets?”
“Thinking dumb thoughts like that, no wonder Filthy DeKe can sneak up on you. Frankenstein’s monster? I saw that movie. We got a guy just like that in number two platoon. He’s not so tough.”
De Beers decided it might be safer not to tell Orlov that his attention had been diverted by low moans and the soft rattle of chains in the underbrush.
The l/35th Rifle Battalion’s three rifle companies had different personalities. A Company, molded by the Iceman, had always been known for dour, frightening efficiency; B Company lor modest competence; and C Company for its efficient and resolute insanity. No one ever tried to explain why.
Vereshchagin, Haijalo, and Sanmartin monitored the progress of the exercise from a distance. “Nasty little firefight,” Haijalo commented. “Hans is getting as sneaky as Raul.”
“Sneakier,” Sanmartin rejoined.
“Did you see Yuri Malinov last night?” Vereshchagin asked Haijalo.
“Our esteemed battalion sergeant sends you his compliments and wishes to know whether he can shoot Superior Private Prigal.”
“What, may I ask, did Prigal do this time?” Vereshchagin inquired with the faintest hint of a smile.
“Our dear superior private got his hands on an old fuel-alcohol storage tank and somehow conceived of the notion that he should go into the business of making Christmas cheer. Unfortunately, in fixing up the tank, he wielded his torch with more zeal than skill, and nothing came out the other end.”
Superior Private Prigal drove an armored car in the Hangman’s light attack company. In the two seven-year enlistments of his checkered military career, Prigal had been promoted ten times from the rank of recruit private to the rank of superior private, and had been reduced in rank nine times. Mostly, this was for doing things that no one with half a brain would do, but occasionally it was for doing things that no one with half a brain would conceive of doing.
While Prigal’s platoon leader, Lieutenant Muravyov, considered him to be his personal cross to bear through life, the Hangman was able to focus the concentration of his other soldiers to an extraordinary degree by asking erring troopers whether they were paying Prigal for lessons. Most people suspected—with some degree of truth—that Henke kept Prigal around for the sheer joy of seeing what would happen with him next. It was also true that in combat on at least two occasions, Prigal had done exactly the right thing for absolutely wrong reasons.
Vereshchagin closed his eyes. “Let me guess. While Prigal was trying to figure out why nothing was coming out the other end, the tank blew up.”
“You apparently know more physics than Prigal does. Amazingly, he is absolutely fine, except that he has no eyebrows left,” Haijalo concluded.
“Please tell the battalion sergeant that he cannot shoot Recruit Private Prigal unless Prigal tries to do this again, in which case, he has my blessing. Did Yuri have anything else to say?” “He asked me to pass along a short private message to the effect that the chizhiks are back.”
Vereshchagin laughed very softly. A chizhik was a bureaucrat in uniform. Matti had been telling non-Russian speakers for years that it was the worst swearword that Battalion Sergeant Malinov knew, and it very likely was. Then his mouth tightened, and he asked quietly, “What did the oncologist say?” Haijalo frowned. “The same as the other one. With chemotherapy, cell replacement, and radiation treatment, he gives Yuri twelve months, no more than that.”
“How did Yuri take this?” Vereshchagin asked. Sanmartin looked away.
“The same as the last time. Yuri told him politely that he would die when he was good and ready, and not before. That will be about four minutes after I certify that he is no longer fit for duty.” Pain suffused Harjalo’s face. “Anton, Yuri taught me how to soldier and knows more about being one than God does. How do I tell him to pack it in and die quietly because he can’t do the job anymore?”
“You cannot say this to him, Matti, and I cannot, either. I have done many unpleasant things, and I have reached the point where there are a few things which I will not do.” Vereshchagin had one ear to the radio and commented, “Piotr is giving Meagher’s platoon a drubbing now. What do you think about the ARM?”
“Aksu, Raul, Piotr, and I all agree that they’re up to something—Piotr says that the little children among them want to stretch their egos. But there won’t be any trouble from the ones in the forest—they’re hungry and pretty thoroughly dis-couraged. I expect the ones in the towns to try their hand at provoking Admiral Horii.”
“Yes, it will be a race to
see whether we can neutralize them before they can effect enough senseless acts of violence to provoke Admiral Horii to counter with senseless acts of repression. Please reiterate to Piotr that he should try to keep the ones he can capture alive, if practicable.”
Haijalo nodded, aware that the Iceman took such requests philosophically. Although Kolomeitsev truly believed that it was a waste of effort to take certain types of people prisoner— student terrorists in particular—he was used to Vereshchagin’s whims in this regard.
Vereshchagin looked at his wrist mount. “In the meanwhile, I must return to adorning Admiral Horii’s headquarters. Let me know how things turn out here.”
Haijalo nodded again. “I’ll ask Hans to pick out some good books to read, if you like.”
“Thank you, Matti, but it might be a little ostentatious for me to loll about Admiral Horii’s headquarters reading books at this juncture.”
“You realize that, theoretically, there’s a danger that the ARM boys huddled out there in their soggy little tents may try to mix it up with us while we’re shooting each other up with blank ammunition. What do you plan on telling the admiral?” “To be candid,” Vereshchagin confessed, “I had not planned on burdening him with the matter,”
HARJALO DECLARED A HALT TO THE EXERCISE NINE HOURS LATER
after the two companies had pretty well taken each other apart. On his way back, Sanmartin stopped by the C Company casern outside Johannesburg.
In C Company’s mess, the cook, “Kasha” Vladimirovna, as round as she was tall, interrupted her mealtime choreography to greet him. Refusing to accept no as an answer from him, she sat him down a few feet away from where Letsukov was playing piano, placing a full plate in one of his hands and a cup of tea—which he loathed—in the other. Then, smiling, she took the tea and flipped it into a potted plant so he wouldn’t have to wait until her back was turned.
Letsukov was playing what he called “ship” music, Beethoven’s Eroica, which assault transport captains often played during landing operations. Suid-Afrika was the third planet his piano had been shipped to, carefully crated and consigned as medical supplies.
This week’s sign in the mess read “No Peddlers or Cats.” Sanmartin grinned. Not much had changed since he had given up command of C Company.
As he watched the troopers eat, he could pick out the Russians by the way they held their black bread—nibbling at it, to make it last longer. The eldest among them had been children during the uchikowashi after the crack-up, when a slice of bread with fillers was dinner and a second slice was supper. Time dilation had cut these men adrift as the battalion moved from colonial world to colonial world. In their thirties, mostly, they remembered an Earth that only older people on Earth still recalled. They remembered what it was like to starve, and they knew what their bread cost them.
After Sanmartin mangled Kasha’s excellent food to make it look as though he had eaten, Coldewe and Isaac Wanjau, the tall and very black No. 10 platoon sergeant, came over to join him.
“Hans—Matti asked me to stop by and congratulate your people. You gave Piotr a good workout.”
Coldewe laughed. “I thought we had him good, although I’ll bet Piotr thought the same thing. Anyway, you’re just in time!” He rubbed his hands together briskly. “We got together and voted to have a poetry contest.”
Despite possessing intimate knowledge both of C Company and of Hans Coldewe’s proclivities, Sanmartin twitched and pushed his plate away. “A poetry contest?”
C Company had cheerfully assisted in faunal surveys, attended presentations on marine biology en masse, and—more improbably-—produced an opera in conjunction with a civic group in Johannesburg. Even so, a public poetry contest was a trifle eccentric, even by C Company’s standards.
Isaac Wanjau shrugged elaborately. “Captain Hans thought we ought to get it in before the staff vertushkas think up things for us to do,” he said, resolving the question “when” rather than “why.”
Sanmartin found himself grinning. A vertushka was a talkative, flighty woman, and Isaac Wanjau, recruited from the rebels that Vereshchagin’s battalion had shot at on Ashcroft, was an improbable source for the Russian-Finnish slang that the Afrikaner recruits copied from him. He thought aloud, “Hans is probably right about that. I expect we’ll have to make a show of stepping up activity against the ARM.”
Wanjau nodded thoughtfully. “Less time in garrison for us.” “And high time,” Kasha said boisterously, eavesdropping shamelessly. “You know what they say, in garrison women can do everything, and men can do the rest.”
Wanjau winked. “Which is mostly not to offend the cook.” Sanmartin returned to the subject at hand. “A poetry con-Icst? Hans, I’m almost afraid to ask what you’ve been reading this week.”
Coldewe loved literature even more than he loved practical jokes. “Don Quixote by Cervantes,” he said with a sniff and a patronizing air, “which of course has nothing to do with why we chose to hold a poetry contest.”
“Right, and Sir Walter Scott had nothing to do with the joust you tried to talk us into. Cervantes—didn’t he also write Jurgen?”
“No, that was Cabell, not Cervantes.”
“Good. When you started quoting Jurgen on women, I thought your girlfriend was going to give you a black eye.” “My former girlfriend,” Coldewe corrected, “and she did give me a black eye, although it had nothing to do with Jurgen. You liked Elise, didn’t you?”
“I thought she was nice, but not as nice as Marta. What’s Don Quixote about?” Sanmartin asked, knowing that Coldewe was prepared to volunteer the information anyway. “Is this another Western?”
“No, no. Don Quixote is a timeless tale, a biting, bitter satire showing that only fools and madmen continue to believe in outmoded concepts like chivalry and nobility of spirit.” “Fools and madmen,” Isaac Wanjau said. “That describes us pretty well.”
As the senior officer present, Sanmartin got to pick the theme for the poetry contest and chose “fools and madmen.” That gave an edge to Lieutenant Danny Meagher, the No. 11 platoon leader. A former mercenary, Meagher was Irish to his very soul and claimed that this gave him a special affinity for poetry, fools, and madmen. Meagher and Lance-Corporal Tulya Pollezheyev from No. 10 platoon battled it out and were declared joint winners by acclamation.
As he made his way home, Sanmartin reflected that it had been an interesting evening, even by C Company’s standards.
Wednesday(310)
IN THE EARLY MORNING HOURS, THE DRIVER OF A BATTERED SEDAN
cruising the streets of Johannesburg spotted two blacklegs on a routine foot patrol. He nudged his passenger, who reached underneath the seat and pulled out an assault rifle.
As the car slowed to a crawl, the gunner released the safety. Pointing the rifle out the open passenger window with the weapon’s receiver resting against his cheek, he took aim at the unsuspecting security policemen and carefully squeezed the trigger, which caused the weapon’s entire forty-round magazine of caseless 5mm ammunition to explode.
The explosion ripped away the gunner’s hands and lower jaw. After passing through the gunner’s throat, one fragment of the plastic magazine lodged itself in the driver’s skull just below the temporal bone. The driver died without ever regaining consciousness. The gunner was considerably less fortunate. Some of the less lurid photos made the early editions of the news.
Terblanche convened an emergency telephone meeting of the ARM’s executive. Unfortunately, the ARM’s administrative arrangements left something to be desired, and no one was quite sure what ammunition cache that particular magazine had come from. The executive suspected—correctly—that it was not the only magazine they possessed that Vereshchagin’s people had arranged to doctor.
With the increasingly obtrusive presence of plainclothes policemen, presumably augmented by members of Vereshchagin’s recon platoon, street assassinations were suspended, indefinitely.
Thursday(310)
WHEN CAPTAIN YANAG
ITA ARRIVED AT THE JOHANNESBURG
staatsamp—improbably nicknamed Fort Zindemeuf—in the city’s Vryheidsplein to meet with Hanna Bruwer, he was surprised to find himself directed to a small pistol range in the basement.
Venturing down, Horii’s intelligence officer shook hands with her hesitantly. “I am somewhat ... surprised to find you here.”
Bruwer walked him to the firing line. “I find shooting relaxing. It forces me to concentrate and relieves stress. Also, very few of my colleagues will seek me out to discuss the sordid details of our business when they know that I have a pistol in my hand. Don’t bother with hearing protection—I am using a silencer.”
Bruwer was firing at silhouette targets. Yanagita peered at the tight grouping of shots in the target’s breast. “You are an excellent shot. I am quite impressed. Did your husband teach you how to shoot?”
“I insisted.” She smiled, reminiscing. “It is actually a humorous story. When I first came to work for Lieutenant-Colonel Vereshchagin’s battalion, Raul lent me a pistol, to protect myself I assumed. After I carried it for two months, he mentioned that it was not loaded. He has been wounded twice that I know of, but I am not sure that he ever came closer to death than he did at that moment.” She looked at Yanagita. “If Admiral Horii sent you to find out what my price was, please tell him that I am completely unreasonable—my husband assures me of this from time to time.”
Yanagita said hastily, “Ah, no, Madam Speaker. Admiral Horii sent me to convey to you his regret over Colonel Sumi’s overzealous and unseemly behavior. The admiral was deeply distressed when he heard.”
Robert Frezza - [Colonial War 02] Page 6
