Robert Frezza - [Colonial War 02]

by Fire in a Faraway Place (epub)

  “Yes, honored Admiral.”

  “Then we should attack immediately.”

  For a moment, his officers sat stunned except for Horii’s logisticians who had been tipped off to begin preparations. Then Sumi rose and led them in shouting “Banzai!”

  Horii alone remained seated. When the room quieted, he said, “That sly fox Vereshchagin will throw out a rear guard and disappear quickly if he discovers that we are on to him, so the best chance for success is to deploy overwhelming force.” Lieutenant-Colonel Okuda, the commander of the Ninth Light Attack Battalion, stood up. “Honored Admiral, I respectfully request the honor of leading for my battalion. With native guides, we could cross the backbone of the Drakensberg mountains in a matter of hours.”

  Horii nodded. Even if Vereshchagin had scouts in the area and attempted an ambush, with warships in support, Okuda would have more than enough firepower to fight his way through. He looked at Colonel Uno. “When Lieutenant-Colonel Okuda reaches the Oranje River, we will airlift the Manchurian engineer company to assist him in crossing if you consider Captain Aoyama’s successor to be equal to this task.” Aoyama had been accidentally shot by a nervous sentry. Fighting an unseen, aggressive foe wearing essentially the same uniform, Horii’s troops were averaging one “own goal” a day. Thus far, only abysmal marksmanship had kept the toll from rising more quickly.

  “Yes, honored Admiral,” Uno replied.

  “Finally, as soon as Lieutenant-Colonel Okuda pinpoints Vereshchagin’s location, we will establish airheads and land the Lifeguards Battalion to reinforce him. To initiate this operation, we will launch air strikes at the men located through the untiring efforts of our efficient communications personnel,” Horii directed. “Please prepare the necessary orders.”

  Captain Yanagita was chosen to compose the message accompanying the attack order, which concluded, “Exalt the glorious tradition, transmit glory to posterity.”

  Noting that the stream of information from relatives of hostages had begun to dry up, Admiral Horii judged that the hostage policy had served its purposes. After executing a final group of fifty hostages, he directed Sumi to discontinue taking hostages and to release the remaining ones he had gathered.

  Monday(318)

  “will NOT COLONEL VERESHCHAGIN HEAR YOU WHEN YOU USE THE

  voice box? He has many ears,” Jules Afanou asked Captain Itaya.

  Itaya, the commander of Lieutenant-Colonel Okuda’s Akita Company, smiled at the old man’s naivete. “It is almost impossible to detect short-range radio transmissions from one vehicle to another. These Vereshchagin will not hear. We are maintaining radio silence on all longer-ranged transmissions.”

  “Ah, I see! The sons of Dai Nippon are very wise in the ways of war,” Afanou said.

  Itaya had protested sharing his armored car with “a jungle bunny.” Ironically, the sect leader had violently objected to the

  “mechanical” smell inside the vehicle, and it had taken all of Captain Yanagita’s charm to persuade him to get inside.

  A message came in from Itaya’s lead vehicle. “Armored car Taiko here. Honored Captain, another large tree has fallen, blocking the road.”

  “Captain Itaya here. Can you move it aside?”

  “Please excuse, honored Captain, but it is even larger than the last one. It is easily a meter and a half in diameter.” There was awe in the voice of the lieutenant commanding the armored car.

  Next to Itaya, Afanou nodded. “It happens as God wills. The biggest trees have shallow roots and often fall. It will be several hours’ work for men with axes.”

  “Acknowledged. Itaya out,” Itaya said crisply. He thumbed his radio. “Engineers point three. Break. Itaya here. There is another fallen tree blocking the trail. Please clear the way. Itaya out.”

  “We are delayed again. The forest fights for Vereshchagin,” Afanou said.

  “It fights weakly,” Itaya said, smiling. “Command point one. Break. Itaya here. Honored Battalion Commander, we are temporarily halted by yet another obstacle in the road. My engineers will clear it in a matter of moments. I recommend that we adopt a herringbone defensive formation in the unlikely event we are attacked.”

  Lieutenant-Colonel Okuda issued the necessary orders, and each vehicle in the column turned slightly to face left or right. They sat there with their engines idling in the heart of the forest until the engineers were able to cut through the huge tree with their power saws.

  Moving past the break, Itaya noted, “We are behind schedule, but not excessively so. These paths through the jungle are like a maze.”

  “We make them to follow the slope of the land, not for visitors,” Afanou said.

  “Our armored cars will make quick work of them.”

  “Heer Yanagita suggested to your admiral that you should give me a radio and have me signal when I got close to Vereshchagin’s lair. I told them that it would take many days for me to walk there, and that Vereshchagin’s men would surely stop me and question me along the path,” Afanou declared candidly.

  “What a silly idea,” Itaya said, smiling.

  Even as they were speaking, a well-organized strike by all four Imperial warships and more than twenty aircraft struck the forests of the upper Vaal and upper Oranje valleys, killing or wounding more than one hundred and fifty amphtiles wearing telemetry collars fashioned from condemned military radios.

  THE FRIGATE MAYA HAD MADE ONLY ONE MISTAKE THAT SAN-

  martin could see. It was a minor one, and perhaps a predictable one.

  Frigates are uncomfortable to live in during extended operations, and corvettes are even less pleasant. Maya's commander had arranged for shuttles coming up to the freighters to dock with Maya and let off fresh food before continuing on.

  With Admiral Horii ready to make another push, it was natural, almost foreordained, that his intendance officers would want to top off their ammunition stocks—especially since several of them had less ammunition on hand than their computers had reported a week ago—and it had been over a week since Maya had taken on a food consignment.

  It was a very thin thread on which to hang lives, and possibly the fate of Suid-Afrika. Still, nobody in their right mind would expect someone to step out of a hole in the ground and hijack a shuttle in broad daylight without anyone noticing. Or at least that’s what Sanmartin hoped.

  As he waited with his knees pressed against his chest in the crawlway underneath the runway, Thomas tapped him on the shoulder and whispered, “They’re loading crates of eggs!”

  Thomas’s men had thoughtfully strung a landline through the crawlway. Sanmartin picked up the phone on the end of it. “Sanmartin here. We’re going in. Tell Matti to tell Detlef. Sanmartin out.”

  As the ground crew began to leave, rendered almost invisible by a slight dip in the ground, Thomas began crawling stealthily toward the shuttle. The shuttle began test-firing her engines as he reached the runway’s edge. Creeping up under the wing-root, Thomas jammed a long-bladed knife in the space behind the shuttle’s left quadruple landing gear.

  The shuttles the Imperial Navy used were a proven design, but they had a few flaws, including a tendency to suck branches and other small debris up under the wheel wells during landings, which the ground crew was supposed to clear.

  Two minutes into the takeoff sequence, Thomas’s knife would show up on the preflight check-down as a minor mal-

  function. At that point, the pilot could either shut down the engines, abort the takeoff, and bring the maintenance crew out—or he could curse out the ground crew and send his crew chief to clear what was probably a loose branch.

  Sanmartin was betting on the latter. It was the only way to get on board without causing a commotion by shooting the place up.

  “If they cut the engines, we run like hell,” Thomas repeated to himself as he leaned against the landing strut with a silenced submachine gun across his knees. Shielded from the tower by the shuttle’s bulk, he waited to see if the door would open.

&nbs
p; Two minutes passed. Sanmartin listened for the engines to shut down. If they did, Thomas had, at most, twelve seconds to grab his knife and get underground.

  Suddenly, the shuttle’s crew door opened, and the crew chief pushed down the ladder. Before he could take his first step, Thomas put six rounds in his chest with a double tap on the trigger of his silenced submachine gun.

  Partly obscured by the dust from the engines, Sanmartin came out of his hole at a dead run, followed by three teams from Thomas’s recon platoon and helicopter pilot Ivan Tsukemik, who swore he could fly anything and would have an opportunity to prove it. Once inside, two of Thomas’s teams went aft to clear out any passengers in the seats in the upper cabin while the third went forward with Thomas and Sanmartin to take out the crew.

  A moment later, Thomas came back to the door and waved, and six specialists emerged from the ground and clambered on board, including Platoon Sergeant Liu from No. 15, who knew less about shuttles than he knew about playing a fiddle but whose Mandarin and Japanese were flawless. The last man carried a bucket of white sand that he carefully sprinkled over the crew chief’s blood.

  The ladder came up. The shuttle took off on schedule, on a hope and a prayer, and a message went out to Ajax.

  CAPTAIN ITAYA’s RADIO CRACKLED. “ARMORED CAR TAIKO HERE.

  Sir, we have reached a fork in the trail. Both paths run roughly northwest. Which way should we take, the left or the right?”

  Itaya looked at Afanou who said, “Your directions mean little to me. We must go and see, and I will tell you.”

  “Captain Itaya here. I will personally reconnoiter the paths ahead. Itaya out. Command point one. Break. Itaya here. Hon-

  ored Battalion Commander, please halt the column for a few moments so that we can check our course. Itaya out.”

  The armored car moved to where the trail forked. As the vehicle slowed, Itaya looked up as Afanou reached to open the hatch.

  “Your vision screen is a wonder of God, honored Captain, but it means nothing to these old eyes. I must get out and see.” Sprightly as a monkey, the old man slid out the hatch and down to the ground.

  Itaya followed. “I think—” he began to say as a burst of silenced submachine gun fire from the side of the road took him in the throat and Afanou literally disappeared into the undergrowth.

  Several kilometers back down the trail, Miinalainen, perched in a tree, effortlessly hoisted his big 88mm recoilless gun and carefully sighted through a gap in the forest canopy created by a fallen tree. “So many of them, and so few of us,” he murmured, making a very Finnish kind of joke, “how are we ever going to bury them all?”

  Coldewe’s voice crackled over Miinalainen’s radio. “Coldewe here. Hit them!”

  Miinalainen’s first round ripped open a fuel trailer towed by a stubby little amphibian utility vehicle. The trailer erupted in a pillar of fire fifty meters high. Up and down the column, from both sides of the trail, eighty-eight rounds struck fuel trailers and armored cars indiscriminately.

  The Ninth Light Attack Battalion responded with trained precision. Surviving armored cars crashed into the forest on either side and opened up with a torrent of fire. Thirty- and ninety-millimeter rounds ripped into the trees, stripping away the foliage at ground level.

  Ignoring his orders, Miinalainen awkwardly reloaded his eighty-eight and put a second round into the fuel trailer just ahead of the one he had destroyed, sending another five thousand liters of fuel alcohol billowing skyward. Then, unstrapping himself from his tree, he jumped, arms windmilling, shielded by its bulk. Grunting in pain from an awkward landing, he crawled into a hole at its base and pulled a carefully camouflaged steel lid over his head.

  Crouching in the darkness and the water as the Cadillacs continued to tear the heart out of the forest, Miinalainen muttered to himself, “I’m getting too old for this stuff.”

  Passing over the column from above, four Hummingbird re-

  connaissance drones took advantage of the confusion to begin gently touching the armored cars on either side of the road with laser designators. On Coldewe’s further order, Bushchin’s No. 13 platoon rolled its four 160mm mechanized mortars into a clearing and pumped out forty antiarmor rounds—every one that Vereshchagin possessed—over the tops of the fern trees and almost directly down on the embattled Cadillacs, guided by the laser designations. Twenty-five of the Ninth Battalion’s Cadillacs, two of its mechanized mortars, and its last remaining fuel trailer were struck—a few of them more than once—within the space of two minutes.

  Immediate counterbattery fire from the other Ninth Battalion’s mechanized mortars knocked out one of No. 13 platoon’s vehicles and damaged another, which did little to alter the fact that after losing half its fighting vehicles and all its reserve fuel, the Ninth Light Attack Battalion had been wrecked as a fighting unit.

  The rear of the column where the Ninth Battalion’s slicks were concentrated was struck by 105 mm mortar rounds from No. 12 mortar platoon, which damaged five of them. Significantly, the armored infantrymen at the rear of the column heard Mekhlis’s mortars scattering mines on the trail behind them. With the road ahead clearly a death trap and the road behind blocked, Lieutenant-Colonel Okuda found himself in an unenviable position.

  “Base point one. Break. Okuda here. Honored Admiral, our mission has been compromised. I say again, our mission has been compromised. We have been betrayed by our guide and have serious casualties. For these reasons, I do not consider it feasible for us to attain our objective. I request immediate air and naval fire support and further request permission to break out across country and return to Bloemfontein by way of Leiden Pass. I will inform you further after we verify our position.” Looking down at the gauges in front of him, he added, “I also anticipate possible fuel shortages. I request arrangements be made for aerial fuel resupply.”

  Moments later, Miinalainen heard a tree broken by an elec-tromagnetically enhanced 90mm round land on top of his hole with a pounding thud. He repeated to himself, “I really am getting too old for this sort of thing.”

  As Admiral Horii received Okuda’s message, in the next room Afanou’s purported son grabbed the pencil behind his ear—actually a painted rod of tungsten steel with a needle

  point—and flung it into the heart of the guard standing a few meters away. Scooping up the guard’s rifle, he sprayed Admiral Horii’s communications personnel with 5mm caseless rounds.

  As he paused to claw a fresh magazine out of one of the dead guard’s pouches, a wounded staff officer who had fallen behind a desk pulled out his pistol and placed three bullets in his chest. Despite mortal wounds, the man calmly reloaded and shot the staff officer dead. Seconds later, a security squad burst into the room and riddled him.

  Horii entered a few moments later and observed the carnage. “Remarkable,” he said. A thin line of blood crawled across the floor and stopped against his shoe.

  BREAKING A TRAIL THROUGH THE FOREST OF THE UPPER ORANJE

  Valley, Lieutenant-Colonel Okuda again pleaded for air and naval support, and especially for fuel resupply. With the operation’s secrecy already compromised, Horii had no difficulty granting his request, and sweating logistics personnel hastened to send off strike aircraft and two tilt-rotors fitted out as refueling platforms.

  However, the naval support Okuda was expecting was abruptly diverted.

  ONE PROBLEM INHERENT IN SPACE WARFARE THAT DETLEF JANKOW-

  skie recognized as he plotted his approach was that his corvette would have to shed most of her speed and come almost suici-dally close to the Imperial ships in order to make her weapons effective.

  The five-hundred-kilogram precision-guided projectiles that his missile launchers could fire were virtually useless against anything moving at a ship’s speed, while his ground attack laser, although excellent for incendiary work, was relatively ineffective against protected targets. Even Jankowskie’s composite particle—or “chicken seed”—dispenser, which could spew out hundreds of two-
gram pellets charged with fusion energy each second, could only be expected to score a respectable number of hits at close range. Jankowskie’s chances of doing significant damage depended upon his being almost literally yardarm to yardarm.

  The initial problem with fighting a space battle, Jankowskie brooded, seemed to be getting the other side to cooperate. Unfortunately, since the other side had four warships to Jankowskie’s one, that might not be too much of a problem.

  Moments later, he got a signal relayed by the four bored “coconut counters” out in the middle of nowhere. It ended with the plain text message, “Good luck!”

  “Ready, everybody?” Jankowskie inquired. When no one dissented, he tapped Moushegian, whose nickname was “Sniper,” on the knee and told him, “Take her in, Snipe.”

  Using the planet as a huge shield, Ajax swung on a wide elliptic and swooped in from a sunrise direction across the sea toward Akashi continent, picking up speed in the process.

  Her appearance almost caught Admiral Horii’s ships by surprise—almost but not quite.

  By scattering his ships, Horii made it impossible for Ajax to penetrate into the center of his formation and ram Maya, causing a double fusion bottle explosion that would empty a considerable amount of space in every direction. Unfortunately, it left the freighters and transports screening Maya virtually motionless in comparison to Ajax and exceedingly vulnerable.

  The first ship that Jankowskie encountered was the freighter Los Angeles Maru on the sunward point of the diamond around Maya, and Jankowskie barely had to slow. Even though the freighter’s fusion bottle was effectively armored to withstand the enormous internal stresses, she was packed to her beam with fuel and munitions in compartments that were not. She couldn’t move fast, and she couldn’t shoot back.

  Dropping perhaps half his relative speed, Jankowskie came in close and directed a fourteen-second stream of composite particles and two missiles from Ajax's launchers at her. Although both of the missiles missed, nine of the nearly four thousand chicken-seed particles that Jankowskie launched struck, with devastating results when two of them impacted on cases of 210mm artillery rounds.