Robert Frezza - [Colonial War 02]

by Fire in a Faraway Place (epub)

  “It’s so the people in the choppers can keep the formations tight,” Sversky responded. “They must think we’re a bunch of savages. You initiate.”

  When the lead elements of the Manchurians were no more than sixty meters away, Kiritinitis keyed his wrist mount and whispered, “Bee point Akita. Break. Kiritinitis here. Fire on my signal. They’re setting up an artillery counterbattery radar in the middle of the LZ. That needs to go—Toivo, you take it. Flak launchers, go for the overwatch choppers—first section number seven, southeast; second section number seven, southwest; second section number six, northeast. Cadillacs, take the transports. Everyone, hit the people in your sectors. Everyone set?”

  As No. 7, the second of No. 6, the mortarmen, and the Cadillacs acknowledged, Kiritinitis quietly released the safety on his weapon and privately intoned the infantryman’s prayer: “Call us, Lord, but not just yet.” When the eight tilt-rotors of the Manchurian second wave slid into position, Kiritinitis whispered into his wrist mount, “Number seven and attachments, fire!”

  Three surface-to-air rockets leaped out to pull down three of the four overwatch helicopters at almost point-blank range. The fourth hesitated a few fatal seconds before beginning a firing pass that killed a launcher crew and three riflemen; two more surface-to-air rockets struck it almost simultaneously and ripped it apart.

  A few meters from Kiritinitis, the first section eighty-eight roared, obliterating the Manchurians’ counterbattery radar, while machine gun and s-mortar fire shot the Manchurian platoons to pieces. In the space of forty seconds, sixteen 105mm shells from the B Company mortars landed inside the Manchurian perimeter.

  With most of their troops still aboard, the second wave of transports frantically tried to gain altitude. From a knoll two kilometers off, 30mm and 90mm rounds from a pair of lurking Cadillacs tore into them. Four of them crashed and a fifth spun away trailing smoke; the rest scattered wildly.

  The Manchurian officers overhead shouted out conflicting orders as the deadly ambush took its toll. Unnoticed through the wisps of colored smoke, a fifty-meter gap had opened up where every Manchurian in two sections had been killed or wounded.

  Spotting the gap, Kiritinitis called Sversky. “Bee point one. Break. Kiritinitis here. I can move a section inside the Manchurian perimeter and clean them up.”

  “Do it! Five minutes,” Sversky ordered.

  Six kilometers away, his company sergeant was vainly trying to reach him through the intensified jamming to relay a message from Vereshchagin.

  “I can’t reach them,” Rodale told Haijalo with pain and frustration in his voice. “I sent a vehicle.”

  “Tell him to get everybody out,” Haijalo said with deadly intensity, knowing that by the time Rodale got to Sversky, it would be too late. “Admiral Horii smelled a rat in the arras, and the warships are going to be over your head any minute now. Harjalo out.” He put his hand over the transmitter and looked at Vereshchagin. “Here’s where we pay for bad habits.”

  “Indeed,” Vereshchagin murmured.

  The moment that B Company’s mortars fell silent, Kiritinitis pushed his first section through the gap in the Manchurian perimeter. Skillfully using the dead ground, they moved into the center and shot up the Manchurian command group. Seconds later, one of the remaining flak launchers shot down the Sparrow with the Manchurian battalion commander. As first section began crawling away, the surviving Manchurians around the edges of the perimeter began shooting through the center and into each other.

  Retribution came ten minutes later from the sky. Angry, buzzing helicopters flattened the top of the hill from which the Cadillacs had sprung their ambush, and the warships in the upper atmosphere began their approach. Moving in, two corvettes plastered No. 7 platoon’s tree line to a depth of five hundred meters, methodically concentrating on each individual firing position. From fifty kilometers away, long-range artilleiy from the Johannesburg casern pounded the mortar positions that the warships had spotted, wiping out two of Sversky’s mortar crews.

  As the forest around them sizzled, most of No. 7 platoon died. Kiritinitis led the survivors away.

  To the south, Lieutenant-Colonel Okuda’s Ninth Light Attack Battalion pushed north to interdict the farm roads and seal off B Company’s retreat, while Sparrow reconnaissance aircraft and Hummingbird drones combed the area. When the Manchurian soldiers at LZ Gifu Chiba finally knocked out the last of Pihkala’s remote-controlled machine guns, Sumi diverted the remaining transports there, and Manchurian Company D for Date belatedly took up the chase.

  One Imperial Hummingbird spotted the third section of Sversky’s No. 5 platoon escaping through the forest. Moments later, a flight of Shiden ground-attack aircraft converged and loosed a flock of small seeker missiles that homed in on individual soldiers. In seconds, fourteen of sixteen men were killed or wounded.

  As B Company continued its retreat, Sparrows from Thomas’s recon platoon slipped in and out of the cloud cover, bringing away the seriously wounded. Alert to the danger posed by the Ninth Light Attack Battalion, Sversky set up a road block with the sixteen men of the first section of No. 6, which stopped them cold for two hours with a loss of four vehicles. Sversky and the first section of No. 6 died to a man.

  As afternoon lengthened into evening, Manchurian Company D for Date slogged through the swamps trying to reestablish contact. Private One-Eye Wong panted and wished he were light-years away as he listened to Lieutenant Akamine mumble orders. Exhausted, Wong had already thrown away most of the jewelry he had taken from Johannesburgers.

  “Only a little faither ... a little faster ... and we cut them off and destroy them,” Akamine told his tired soldiers. “Remember, ‘the nimble foot gets there first.’ ”

  Wong hoped Pig-Snout was right.

  The forest frightened him. Already, two men had been shot by snipers, a dozen more, including his tentmate, Duck-Face Gu, had fallen out with heatstroke—and the amphtiles he had heard so much about were waiting.

  As they reached a clearing, Wong suddenly heard the whine of s-mortar rounds exploding, and the men ahead of him began dropping. Akamine stood speechless.

  “Dig in!” Wong heard Sergeant Ma shout frantically.

  Wong immediately ripped off his entrenching tool and began scooping away soil. A few centimeters down, he struck water and immediately understood why the enemy had waited to ambush them. He said something in Mandarin that any soldier would have recognized. Presently he died, the last casualty of a bitter day, without even the consolation of having Lieutenant Akamine precede him.

  Later that evening, one of his mates remembered what Sergeant Ma said about finding some souvenirs for their old sergeant and left a badly burned boot beside Ma’s rucksack. A blackened foot was still inside.

  NURSING A WOUNDED THUMB AND A SPRAINED SHOULDER, PER

  Kiritinitis brought out what was left of B Company. About half of them made it to the safety of the mountains, including three of sixteen flak gunners. They brought out their wounded. They left behind most of their dead.

  Haijalo, Vereshchagin, and Battalion Sergeant Yuri Malinov listened in silence as B Company’s survivors reached their checkpoints and reported in through the jamming.

  Radiation and chemotherapy had cost Malinov his hair and thinned him terribly. Malinov knew most of the men in B Company well, and Company Sergeant Rodale best of all. “I hope Rodale makes it. I lent him money,” he said.

  Vereshchagin knew that Malinov had little use for the money he was paid and probably would have hit Rodale if he had tried to repay the loan.

  “Another victory like this will ruin us,” Haijalo said.

  A few moments later, Paul Henke approached. Henke’s company had lost the two Cadillacs and the two slicks attached to B Company.

  “Paul, what are you doing here?” Haijalo asked.

  The Hangman’s voice was calm and his face was perfectly impassive, but Vereshchagin was astonished to see streams of tears running down his cheeks.

 
“We must train new crews,” the Hangman said, oblivious to the drops of water dripping down the front of his uniform.

  ADMIRAL HORII HELD A POSTMORTEM AROUND MIDNIGHT, WAVING

  his officers to their seats. “Colonel Uno, what have you learned from today’s operations,” he asked, clearly enjoying Colonel Sumi’s discomfiture.

  “It was like fighting a cloud,” Uno grumbled.

  Officially, the Manchurian regiment had recorded in their war diary that they lost “more than a slight number of men, but less than a considerable number, the number falling within the normal range of fluctuation for a difficult attacking operation so that it does not represent a setback.”

  Uno gestured to Captain Aoyama, the commander of the Manchurian engineer company.

  “I have something to bring to the admiral’s attention.” Aoyama held up an object that looked like two small wheels pasted together and balanced it delicately on the end of one finger. “We have taken a number of these from the bodies of rebel soldiers. Each one weighs approximately one and a half kilograms and has a tiny alcohol-fueled motor as you see.”

  “What is it?” Sumi asked.

  “It unfolds into a bicycle,” Aoyama said, demonstrating.

  “Amazing,” Admiral Horii said. “So much strength and so little weight. What is it made out of?”

  “A fine wire matrix of nickel-chrome-molybdenum steel latticed with a ceramic-metal composite,” Aoyama replied. When his audience manifested incomprehension, he added, “It appears to be virtually identical with the armor on the Type 97 armored car.”

  Colonel Sumi exploded. “This is impossible! You must be mistaken. The composition of Type 97 armor is secure information!”

  “I deeply regret bringing this information to your attention,” Aoyama stated with the faintest hint of malice.

  “No, you were entirely correct to do so,” Admiral Horii said. He asked, “Could the material have been scavenged from destroyed armored cars?”

  “I am unwilling to make a pronouncement on so weighty a matter without much more evidence,” Aoyama said, “but the data accumulated would appear to indicate that Colonel Vereshchagin has established a production line. It would be important to learn if he has received assistance from Complex personnel, but this would appear to be a security matter.” “The uninhabited portions of Suid-Afrika are largely trackless. The movement of vehicles is significantly restricted in many areas. Possession of such bicycles would give Colonel Vereshchagin’s foot soldiers a significant advantage in mobility,” Horii conceded.

  Sumi objected, “This is nothing new. Japanese soldiers used bicycles to advantage during the South Seas campaigns of the Great Pacific War, and possession of such toys will not make up for the absence of Japanese spirit.”

  “Yes, of course,” Admiral Horii said. “However, this does not mean that we should ignore this accomplishment. We will have to adjust our aerial tactics to compensate for this increased mobility of his men. The remotely operated machine guns were quite ingenious. I wonder whether Vereshchagin has other surprises in store for us. Captain Yanagita?”

  “The soldiers we encountered were from the enemy’s Beppu Company, which was destroyed in the engagement. Unfortunately, we were only able to capture one soldier alive and were not able to obtain very much useful information from him before he succumbed to his wounds. However, from the paths of retreat taken by the survivors of that company, we now have a general idea where the rest of Vereshchagin’s battalion is concentrated.” Yanagita tapped his map for emphasis. “This is extremely important information.”

  Admiral Horii smiled very faintly.

  At the end of the meeting, Colonel Sumi sought out Admiral Horii. With only a trace of his customary arrogance, Sumi said, “Honored Admiral, my security police are prepared to launch simultaneous attacks on the two mines and the ocean tap. My officers believe that they can take these objectives without substantial risk.”

  Sumi’s initiation into infantry operations had not humbled him, and Horii studied him, wondering whether Sumi was consciously or unconsciously grasping at moonbeams in an effort to cleanse the stain placed on his reputation.

  “Colonel Sumi, I decline to authorize this. The men that Vereshchagin left at these three points have clearly indicated that they will die rather than yield them.”

  “It is my belief that foreigners boast a great deal but lack the necessary resolve,” Sumi said stiffly. “My officers have prepared excellent plans which will undoubtedly result in swift and decisive success.”

  “And if you have failed to correctly gauge the military spirit these men possess, Colonel Sumi, the likely outcome of such an operation will be the destruction of these facilities. Does Matsudaira-san desire to run such a risk?” Horii said irritably. He had reviewed the preliminary reports emanating from the Manchurian regiment. With a lifetime’s worth of experience, he understood the grim reality conveyed by the vague, flowery phrases the Manchurians’ officers had used. He suspected that Sumi did not.

  “I have discussed this with Planetary Director Matsudaira. He wishes to take this risk.”

  Like most other major Japanese companies, USS had a longstanding arrangement with the government to send its annual intake of young university graduates through military basic training to instill the proper corporate discipline in them. This had the unfortunate effect of convincing many salarymen that their brief exposure to military life made them experts on military matters.

  For twenty-five years, Matsudaira had taken inordinate pride in being the honor graduate of his basic-training company, and Admiral Horii had akeady divined that Matsudaira felt himself fully qualified to present him with strategic and tactical advice. Admiral Horii, of course, rarely solicited advice from recruit privates, which is what Matsudaira’s experience qualified him to be.

  “I earnestly hope that Matsudaira-san comprehends that a military operation is less predictable than a tea ceremony,” Horii said casually, conveying a subtle double insult: As a civilian Matsudaira could not be expected to comprehend military operations, and as an adopted parvenu he could not be expected to comprehend the way of tea. “I will authorize an assault on one of the occupied mines. If this operation is successful, we can discuss further operations. If Vereshchagin’s men unexpectedly display spirit, the destruction of one mine will not distress us nearly as much as the destruction of the ocean tap, so it is much more prudent to do things this way, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, Admiral.” Sumi saluted and left.

  Sunday(316)

  SUMI’S BLACKLEGS OPENED THE ASSAULT ON THE CALVINIA MINE

  fay forcing mine employees to use the only functioning tunneling machine on the planet to drill a new shaft into the base of the mountain that the mine lay under.

  Deep underneath the surface, Superior Private Dirkie Rousseaux watched the needle jump on his seismic meter. Before joining up, Rousseaux had worked two seasons in the mines. “Wake up, Section Sergeant. They’re digging a hole.” “Mother Elena” Yelenov, rolled over and rubbed the sleep from his eyes. “We must have missed a tunneler.”

  “It looks like they’re trying to connect up with passage B. It’s only about a hundred meters from the surface in spots,” Rousseaux explained.

  “Miinalainen is up there.” Yelenov touched his wrist mount. “Nine point two Akita. Break. Yelenov here. Juko, they are drilling a tunnel to connect up with passage B at .. .” He looked over at the map of the mine that Rousseaux was holding up. .. somewhere between Beppu 3535 and Beppu 3545. Put out a camera and two or three directional mines, and then get down here. Everyone else, just get down here. Yelenov out.” After listening for every one of his men to acknowledge, Yelenov turned back to Rousseaux. ‘Time to go, Dirkie.”

  THREE HOURS LATER, MAJOR NISHIYAMA TURNED TO COLONEL

  Sumi. “We are prepared to proceed, honored Colonel.” Nishiyama tried but failed to hide the trepidation in his voice.

  Sumi grunted, “Proceed, Major.” He looked at Nishi
yama coldly. “To ensure success, make certain that you are the first one into the mine.”

  Nishiyama nodded. Before issuing his final orders, he left a lock of hair with his executive officer. Moments later, his blacklegs flooded the mine with gas and a swarm of small seeker missiles and then entered at two points, the main entrance and the newly cut tunnel, pushing mine employees ahead of them.

  If the situation had required it, Yelenov would have ordered his men to shoot down the mine employees to get at the blacklegs. Since Yelenov wasn’t planning to stay, he didn’t bother. Untroubled by the gas and the seeker missiles filtering through the upper levels, he triggered the remotely operated machine gun on the ceiling near the entrance for a few seconds’ worth

  of unobstructed shooting, then touched off one of the directional mines as soon as the employees ducked clear. The results were mildly gratifying.

  After flipping the central fuse, Yelenov led his seven men sideways out the mine’s narrow “back door,” a thin passage cut a few days previously that led to a brush-choked ravine on the far side of the mountain. Ten minutes later, charges strapped to every support pillar in the mine’s lower levels exploded, collapsing the ceiling and filling the mine’s galleries with rabble.

  The blacklegs only suffered a handful of casualties. One of the dead, however, was Major Nishiyama.

  As they crouched in the ravine, Rousseaux whispered to Yelenov, “I still don’t understand, Section Sergeant.”

  “Ah, Dirkie, lad. The Imps think that we blew ourselves to frosty hell a minute ago. If the boys holding the ocean tap were attacked, they would have to blow themselves and the tap to frosty hell, which neither the Variag nor the Imps want to see. This way, the Imps know that they can’t attack the ocean tap. Everybody’s happy, if you understand what I am saying.” “Yes, Section Sergeant,” Rousseaux said unconvincingly. “Good lad. Now be quiet until dark. It’s a long ride back.” Already beginning to doze off, Miinalainen commented, “On these putt-putt cycles, it’s going to feel like the Tour de France.”