Robert Frezza - [Colonial War 02]

by Fire in a Faraway Place (epub)

  “Are our backup files corrupt?”

  “There is a distinct possibility that many of them have been contaminated as well,” Yanagita admitted.

  “So—Vereshchagin possesses more accurate information about our forces than we do.”

  “Our technicians have uncovered the enemy program, honored Admiral. Even as we speak, they are eliminating it from the system!”

  “You fool,” Horii hissed.

  “Admiral?”

  “Pick up the telephone and call them. Immediately.”

  The intelligence officer did as he was bade. A moment later, his face turned ashen. He held his hand over the receiver. “Admiral, every data base has been erased.”

  “Quite predictable, I assure you,” Horii said coldly. “Please deal with the situation. And Yanagita—please be exceedingly careful with the backup data, given the skill that Colonel Vereshchagin’s personnel have thus far displayed.”

  The young officer saluted and bowed, twice. He left the room visibly shaken.

  When the door closed, Horii turned to his aide, Captain Watanabe. “There was a Greek legend of a wooden horse, and we appear to have taken one in. Shall we talk of poetry?”

  A few moments later, the telephone rang. Watanabe answered it. He turned to Horii. “Admiral, the Third Manchurian Battalion reports that their mine fields appear to have activated themselves and cannot be disarmed. They have incurred two casualties.” Horii’s mouth gaped. “It never occurred to me. How utterly ingenuous! What an exquisite touch.”

  His aide stared, uncomprehending.

  “When we uncovered Colonel Vereshchagin’s virus, it activated our mine fields at the same time it erased our data. Colonel Vereshchagin has able programmers. Please inform Colonel Sumi that he is to discontinue his efforts to bring in Afrikaner notables and refrain from initiating other operations. Inform Captain Yanagita that within the hour I wish to know what other damage this virus may have caused. Then see that I am not disturbed.”

  Seeing the look in Horii’s eyes, Watanabe hastened to obey.

  Thursday(316)

  OPERATING IN THE VICINITY OF JOHANNESBURG, SUBLIEUTENANT JAN

  Snyman’s platoon executed a textbook daylight ambush on a Manchurian convoy that no one on Horii’s staff had thought to reschedule. In slightly less than five minutes, they destroyed a dozen trucks and most of the light attack platoon escorting them.

  When an elaborate search and sensor scan of the area failed to uncover Snyman’s men, Colonel Sumi ordered the Manchurians to bum the ten houses closest to the ambush site.

  Horii remained in seclusion while his forces marked time. Meals left outside his door remained untouched. At dusk, Horii’s staff sent Watanabe to remonstrate with him.

  Entering the room timidly, Watanabe found Horii seated cross-legged, lost in reflection. After a few moments, Horii noticed his presence.

  “Oh, it is you, Watanabe. Come sit.”

  “Honored Admiral, your loyal staff wishes—”

  “I said sit, Watanabe. I did not say talk.”

  Watanabe sat. Finally, Horii deigned to speak. “The movements of large numbers of men are easy to predict, but the thoughts of one man are not. Vereshchagin is not given to quixotic gestures. He strikes shrewd blows that appear aimless. He must have prepared a plan that would allow him to succeed. I cannot, however, think of such a plan.” He cocked his head. “What has Sumi done in my absence?”

  “Colonel Sumi has obeyed your order to refrain from initiating new operations. He has attempted to make contact with members of the New Auspices party.”

  “The Imperial-lovers. What of it?”

  “He regrets that his efforts have met with less success than one might otherwise hope. It appears that Vereshchagin has circulated details of the payments he made to the party’s leaders. Neighbors of party members have induced most of them to renounce the party. Only a few members have taken refuge in our caserns. While Colonel Sumi plans to use them as penetration agents, he concedes that Vereshchagin will easily counter this move.”

  Horii grunted. “They are useless. How ironic that the only purpose the party served was to identify and neutralize potential Imperial agents.” He again lost himself in thought.

  Watanabe took a deep breath. “Honored Admiral, perhaps Lieutenant-Colonel Vereshchagin planned this result.”

  “Hmm? That is a disquieting notion.”

  “Consider, honored Admiral, that he continued to fund the party long after its uselessness was manifest,” Watanabe said doggedly.

  “Possibly. Possibly. I wonder when Vereshchagin first conceived this mutiny of his?’ Horii mused, stroking his chin. “I wonder if he has somehow become aware of conditions on Earth.”

  “He might also have heard about the incident on Esdraelon. His battalion has numerous ties to that planet.”

  “It is just possible that Vereshchagin has been maturing a plan in secret for a lengthy period of time. Even so, how does he expect to win?” Horii thought for a moment and then gasped. “I wonder—it is just possible.”

  “What is it, sir?” Watanabe asked, agitated.

  “Have Captain Yanagita report to me at once. I wish to know whether it is possible that any corvettes survived the destruction of the frigate Graf Spee.”

  Hours later, Yanagita found the answer in records of personnel returned to Earth on USS freighters and brought it to Horii.

  “Honored Admiral, it appears that one corvette survived, the corvette Ajax,'1' Yanagita said stiffly with one eye on Colonel Sumi.

  “Where is it?” Horii asked, then waved his hand diffidently. “It does not matter. It could be hiding anywhere in the system.” “But honored Admiral, where would he find a crew?” Yanagita exclaimed.

  “The corvette is not in orbit. Therefore, he has managed to train men capable of moving it out of orbit. Observe, Yanagita, how carefully Lieutenant-Colonel Vereshchagin plans. It is an exquisite plan he has composed, neh?”

  “I deeply regret my inability to comprehend.” Yanagita bowed low. “I am ashamed by my unwoithiness.”

  “I would not expect you to understand,” Horii said, enjoying Yanagita and Sumi’s disquiet. “In his career, Lieutenant-Colonel Vereshchagin has shown a proclivity for swift, decisive action. He has a corvette, but even with the element of surprise, a corvette cannot hope to successfully engage three corvettes and a frigate. Even if the Afrikaners have provided him with nuclear weapons, Vereshchagin does not have a delivery system capable of striking a warship. How then can he hope to meet with success?”

  Yanagita looked at Sumi helplessly.

  “If our warships spotted an enemy corvette, what would they do? They would group together for mutual support and then attack. You will observe, Yanagita, that some of the attacks that Afrikaners made during the rebellion were suicidal in nature. I assume Vereshchagin could find other such Afrikaners.” “Divine wind!” Yanagita mouthed, awestruck.

  “Precisely. Unfortunately, Lieutenant-Colonel Vereshchagin erred in leaving soldiers behind at two mines and the ocean tap, allowing me to discern the details of his plan.” Horii paced the floor.

  “When our warships mass to subject Vereshchagin’s corvette to superior firepower, it will ram the frigate Maya, with its fusion bottle cycled to critical mass and presumably w'ith one or more small atomic weapons fused to detonate. The resulting explosion would eliminate all of our warships, a suitable application of Chaos Theory, wouldn’t you think, Yanagita?”

  “But we would still have a superiority in ground forces,” Yanagita protested.

  “How unfortunate for Lieutenant-Colonel Vereshchagin that you are not his opponent, Yanagita,” Horii said, baiting his unfortunate subordinate. “Vereshchagin has carefully hoarded aircraft and has attacked our aircraft at every opportunity. His strategy has been to encourage us to disperse our forces chasing phantoms so that when his corvette strikes, his aircraft can suddenly seize command of the air. With command of the air and the positions of our scattere
d forces known, Vereshchagin would be in a position to defeat us in detail. Recognizing his stratagem, we will of course take actions to counter it. Nevertheless, his plan is quite brilliant.”

  “How will we do this, honored Admiral?” Yanagita asked meekly.

  “The volume of space where Vereshchagin’s corvette can hide is too vast for us to seek it out without leaving our own forces open to attack from space. I will, of course, issue orders to ensure that our warships maintain distance from each other and are prepared to destroy the intruder when it appears. As for Vereshchagin, we can easily forestall him by finding his hidden headquarters swiftly and crushing him.”

  “I understand, honored Admiral,” Yanagita said, bowing. “See that you do, Yanagita. Work with Colonel Sumi’s security forces. I wish to have Vereshchagin found,” Horii said. “You are dismissed.”

  Bowing low, Yanagita hurried off.

  “Colonel Sumi,” Horii said.

  Sumi spoke for the first time. “Yes, honored Admiral.” “When you are fighting, and there are obstructions so that it is difficult to cut your opponent, you must stab liim at his heart with the necessary spirit,” Horii observed. “Lieutenant-Colonel Vereshchagin has purposefully taken up a position in which I find it difficult to cut at him. I need information. You wished to take hostages. Begin doing so, three or four hundred, men and women at random. No more than one from any single family.” Sumi swallowed the implied rebuke. “I will have the hostages interrogated as soon as they are brought in, honored Admiral. Anything that they know, I will know.”

  Horii waved a cautionary finger. “I appreciate your zeal, Colonel, but I have a different thought. Please do not interrogate the hostages. Instead, please stress personally to each of your officers and men that I wish them treated with extreme politeness.”

  Horii went on to explain his thought, and the frown on Sumi’s face turned to delight.

  By midnight, Sumi’s blacklegs had pulled in several hundred hostages. He began posting their names in lists of fifty.

  Friday(316)

  HANNA BRUWER SEARCHED HER HUSBAND’S FACE. STRAIN AND

  lack of sleep had etched itself into lines. “Something is very wrong,” she said, reading him accurately. “What is it?” “Admiral Horii found the worm we embedded in his computer yesterday.”

  “The worm?”

  “We knew that Horii would want to copy our data bases, so we buried a surprise inside—it was Timo Haerkoennen’s idea. Heaven knows why Timo stays with us considering the money he could make on the outside. I asked him once. He says he likes the food.”

  Sanmartin shoved his hands into his pockets in an unmilitary fashion. “Horii is showing himself to be a very good chess player. He’s going to chip away at our pawns while he waits for us to make a mistake. And if we do, we die.” He grinned mirthlessly. “I was hoping that we could coax him into running an operation before he got his systems scrubbed out—we could have really screwed with his tactical radios—but he’s patient. I’m beginning to think that we ought to try and kill him, but if we do, Sumi takes over, and I’m sure he’d do a Nanking.” Bruwer shook her head to indicate that she did not understand. “What is a ‘Nanking’?”

  “Sumi would send a battalion or two into Pretoria and Jo’burg to rape and murder in the hope that we’ll either get ourselves slaughtered trying to stop him, or surrender and get ourselves shot.”

  Bruwer shut her eyes. “What kind of man is he?”

  “A fanatic. A nasty one. Truth is, if Horii thought for a moment that the trick would work against Anton, he’d do it, too. The difference between Horii and Sumi is that Sumi would try it even if he didn’t think it would work.” He shrugged. “Horii’s soldiers are inexperienced right now, but the ones who live long enough are going to get very good very quickly. If we can hang on for a few weeks, we have a few things to try, and if they work, we win. If they don’t, we get to see who runs out of soldiers first.”

  “Attrition.”

  “Attrition. We’ve got to be ready for a long war.” He began speaking to himself. “If you’re not the Iceman, or the crazies in number two platoon who don’t understand complicated concepts like fear, you say, ‘All of my friends are going to die.’ And you want to stay to keep them alive until you realize that death is random and that you’re going to die, too, sooner or later. Then you get careless.”

  She touched his arm. “What happened this morning, Raul?” “A skirmish. Maya found a section of one of the reserve platoons. Horii’s ships destroyed a half-kilometer’s worth of forest to get them. Someone made a mistake, I suppose. Or maybe Horii’s intelligence people put enough puzzle pieces together.” “Who was it?” Bruwer asked, understanding.

  “Two retirees from C Company who came back for one war too many. Plus one of my former students.”

  “Why do we human beings do such things to each other? What kind of responsibility must the people who steal young lives bear? I cannot think about such things without thinking about God, and God commanded us to love.”

  Sanmartin made an effort to turn it into a joke. “As Hans would say, ‘Four things greater than all things are, women and horses and power and war.’ ”

  A furrow appeared between Bruwer’s brows. “Hans has never seen a horse in his life.”

  “I know. And he hasn’t done very well with women,” Sanmartin said, which struck him for the moment as the funniest thing and he began laughing hollowly. “Anyway,” he finished, “it’s going to get worse from here on out.”

  “Why?” she asked, suddenly frightened and suspicious. “Sumi’s blacklegs began taking hostages last night. No rhyme or reason to it. He’s putting up lists of fifty names of people he intends to execute in a week. To get a name off the list, someone has to give Imperial Intelligence a piece of useful information that checks out. Then, of course, Sumi takes a name off and puts someone else’s name on instead. Nasty little idea. I wonder who dreamed it up.”

  “Fifty people each day? My God.”

  “The question is which fifty people. People are already beginning to bend over backward to ransom their family members off those lists. If enough of them bend, the names on those lists are going to start turning over several times a day, and eventually Horii is going to be able to put together enough seemingly unimportant scraps to massacre us.” Sanmartin frowned. “I talked to Albert. He’s prepared to prosecute anyone who gives out information, although I doubt whether Admiral Horii will be considerate enough to tell Albert who to prosecute.” “How do we tell frightened people that they cannot try to save their own family members?”

  “Particularly when Admiral Horii’s people will very likely take pains to reassure them that the information they provide is harmless. Maybe we can’t, but enough tiny clues—what we bought, who did some of the work, the names of our soldiers—and Horii will fry us.”

  Sanmartin grasped his wife’s hand tightly. “I can tell you what we tell every recruit, which is that military operations require maskirovka, deception, to succeed. A campaign of deception has to be ubeditel’nyi and pravopodobnyi, persuasive and plausible—something the enemy is predisposed to believe. And it has to be rasnoobraznye, varied, so that every conduit carries the enemy the same message. And finally, it has to have nepreryvnost, continuity, and svoevremennost, timeliness, so that it climaxes at the appropriate moment. We’re not ready. We’re badly outnumbered and badly outgunned, and I can already feel our mask starting to slip.”

  “You are afraid that these lists will kill us,” she said, reading him. “How do we stop this?”

  “I don’t know. Neither does Albert, and neither does Anton. We’ll take reprisals, but Horii knows that we’ll run out of Japanese employees of USS long before he runs out of Afrikaners.” He released her wrist before his fingers left marks. “I don’t know.”

  ONE NAME ON THE FIRST LIST BELONGED TO ASSEMBLYMAN MARTIN

  Hatting’s press secretary, Niccoline De Klerk, who was also his mistress. Hatting was one of the ne
w assemblymen who had not been evacuated, largely because no one could locate him the night that Sumi attempted to arrest Beyers.

  After struggling with his conscience for several hours, Hatting called in and spoke with a very agreeable intelligence sergeant for several minutes, providing the man with a fictitious name. Hatting was just congratulating himself on getting Niccoline off the list in return for information of no value when

  Captain Yanagita and several blacklegs appeared at the door of the house where he was hiding.

  “Heer Hatting, may I come in?” Yanagita said ingratiatingly. “How did you find me?” Hatting croaked.

  “Yesterday, we built up a nice little voice library from the television station’s file tapes. When the computer told us that it was you, we traced your call. Admiral Horii has listened to several of your speeches.”

  The latter comment was a polite lie, but Yanagita was confident that Admiral Horii would convert it into truth by the time he returned. He patted Hatting on the shoulder. “Admiral Horii is looking forward to meeting with you.”

  Numbly, Hatting allowed himself to be led away.

  By nightfall, after speaking with Horii and with Niccoline De Klerk, Hatting had allowed himself to be persuaded to become president of an Imperial “Republic of Suid-Afrika.” As Horii had repeatedly assured him, it was best for his people if someone was prepared to accept the inevitable.

  In his first television address, “President” Hatting laid stress on the benefits of a “homogeneous cultural and racial heritage” that both Afrikaners and Japanese enjoyed.

  Saturday(316)

  IN THE COURSE OF THE AFTERNOON, ONE DESPERATE MOTHER COM-

  promised a member of Vereshchagin’s reserve reconnaissance platoon, and a schoolteacher identified a bunker complex near Johannesburg. Although guilt-stricken, the teacher contacted the wife of a member of one of the reserve platoons to keep anyone from using it.