Robert Frezza - [Colonial War 02]

by Fire in a Faraway Place (epub)

  Cement had flaked off the bunker’s ceiling when Bloemfontein exploded. “That will be us,” Little Jia said.

  Licking his dry lips, Ma studied the pale faces of his men and cautiously approached Lieutenant Akamine. “Honored Lieutenant—•”

  Akamine turned away from the bunker’s vision slit.

  “Perhaps—”

  Akamine read the expression on Ma’s face and backhanded him across the face before he could finish. “Silence! We will die like men, not dogs!” He contemptuously returned to his study of the terrain outside the bunker.

  His cheeks red, Ma looked at each of his section members in turn. Duck-Face Gu took out his billfold and threw a sheaf of bills on the floor.

  Picking up his rifle, Ma calmly shot Akamine three times in the back. His men quickly tied a pair of cotton underpants to a length of pipe and raised it over their bunker. Within minutes, a dozen other bunkers had up white flags.

  The Japanese major directed the men with him to fire on Ma. When they hesitated, he ripped an s-mortar out of one man’s hands and began firing himself. Return fire from an eighty-eight killed him. A full-scale fire fight broke out inside the Manchurian perimeter.

  Twenty minutes later, after the Manchurian battalion sergeant and the last two Japanese officers killed themselves with grenades, the remaining defenders surrendered to Coldewe.

  The lieutenant-colonel commanding the Pretoria garrison quickly recognized what had happened. Assessing his men’s state of mind, he retreated into the armory and blew it up underneath him. De Wette’s men moved swiftly to take possession.

  In Bloemfontein, Matti Haijalo spread his portable map over the wing of his Sparrow and listened as reports come in. Wearing the arm band of the reserve reconnaissance platoon, Mintje Cillie walked up behind him and tapped him on the shoulder. “Ah, Major Haijalo, sir—excuse me, Colonel Haijalo.” She made a clumsy attempt at a salute.

  Harjalo turned his head. “Oh, hello. Cillie, isn’t it? What can I do for you?”

  She held out a little notebook. “Please, sir—may I have your autograph?”

  On his face, Haijalo could feel airborne bits and pieces of the Bloemfontein casern and its defenders drifting down. “Your timing is pretty awful. This isn’t exactly a battle we’ll want to remember.”

  “Please, sir, it’s for my little brother. He’s very keen on football. Please say, ‘To Jan-Pieter.’ ”

  Haijalo usually added himself to the engineer platoon’s roster when they played their annual exhibition matches against the local club sides, and he had scored on the Bloemfontein team two years running. He had the grace to look embarrassed when he took the notebook from her.

  “ADMIRAL, THROUGH SOME DEVILTRY ON THE PART OF

  Vereshchagin, we have encountered an unexpected situation,” Sumi stated coldly.

  Horii smiled. “If by this you mean that our warships have been turned against us and our soldiers have been resoundingly defeated, I quite agree with you. It would appear that Lieutenant-Colonel Vereshchagin is a formidable antagonist. He understands that when an enemy starts to collapse, he should be cut down utterly.”

  “There is one way for us to rectify this situation. I have directed my security companies to take up positions in the towns of Pretoria and Johannesburg. I am quite certain that Vereshchagin will be dissuaded from following up the advantage he has gained after a sufficient number of logs have fallen,” Sumi said, fingering the hilt of his sword.

  Horii turned to Captain Yanagita, who had followed Sumi into the room. “Spirit is like water, Yanagita. It adopts the shape of its receptacle. Sometimes it is a trickle, sometimes a raging flood. We have lifted the lid on a teapot and brewed a typhoon.” He raised his voice. “And if you are wrong, Colonel Sumi? What then? Regrettably, Lieutenant-Colonel Vereshchagin is a professional and will not yield to misplaced pity for those ‘logs.’ I forbid this. Please countermand your instructions.” He turned his back on Sumi.

  “I will not!” Sumi shouted.

  Horii smiled at Yanagita. “Are you prepared to disobey me as well?”

  Yanagita loosened his pistol in its holster. “No, Admiral.” Sumi did not seem to know how to take this. Horii stepped over by the window. Sumi followed, silently unsheathing his blade. As Sumi did so, a bullet came through the reinforced glass and took him just below the right eye.

  Yanagita threw himself to the floor and pulled out his pistol. “Admiral, get down!”

  “A large-caliber sniper’s rifle, no doubt. It was a very good shot from that distance, don’t you think, Yanagita?” Horii said conversationally. He smiled again and moved away from the window. “If Lieutenant-Colonel Vereshchagin had wanted to kill me, he would have done so before now.”

  Yanagita shakily returned the pistol to its holster. “Honored Admiral, how could—”

  “I did not know.” Horii pointed toward the small rise, nearly eight hundred meters away. “But lacking the men needed to hold an extensive perimeter, I removed the troops there a half hour ago, as Vereshchagin’s watchers undoubtedly observed. It seemed likely that they would take advantage of this.”

  Two officers appeared at the door with drawn weapons. “Colonel Sumi has been shot by a sniper. You two, please remove his body,” Horii said, loftily overlooking their astonished expressions.

  As they left, half carrying, half dragging Sumi’s corpse, Horii nudged Sumi’s fallen sword with his toe. “If this were a genuine Sukesada blade, Yanagita, it would be a national treasure and I would direct you to pick it up. But of course it is not, so you might as well allow it to lie there. It is time. Please begin destroying our papers and data files.”

  Yanagita picked himself up. He paused as he reached the threshold. “Admiral, should I also destroy the money in the safe? We are accountable for it”

  Horii grinned. “Leave it. We will need some of it for the ferryman over the river Styx.”

  As soon as Yanagita left, he drew the curtains over the windows and whispered to himself, “In the universe what is there but dream and illusion? Those who are bom in the morning die before night, and those who are bom in the evening are dead before dawn. Is there anyone who is bom and does not die?” He entered one last poem, a jisei, into his war diary before he burned it.

  Why then should I cling? to a life that is fulfilled when nobly given for the love of country for the sake of the people

  The blackleg company in Pretoria imprudently holed up in the two-story brick bank building they had sequestered to use as a headquarters. Maya sent four thousand-kilogram bombs through the building’s thin roof, gutting it and its inhabitants. Part of the other blackleg company was ambushed by a section of the reconnaissance platoon as it attempted to reach the spaceport. The survivors were hunted down.

  Reprise—Week 318

  THE SIXTH LIFEGUARDS BATTALION STILL HELD THE SPACEPORT IN A

  perimeter bounded by the administration complex and low hills to the south and east. Horii assigned one Lifeguards company to each hill and formed his service and supply troops into provisional infantry companies to guard the low ground to the west. He retained the remaining two Lifeguard companies and his howitzer company to defend the area around the administration complex.

  Fixated on offensive operations, Colonel Enomoto’s guardsmen had failed to fortify the spaceport. This neglect cost them dearly.

  Vereshchagin did not intend to allow them time to profit from their mistakes. He placed the reserve company, a composite platoon from B Company, and the reconnaissance platoon in a loose net around the spaceport, where they harassed the Lifeguards with intermittent but intensifying sniper and mortar fire as the Lifeguards sweated to dig in. Then he used Ajax and Maya to isolate the administration buildings and began systematically to rip the defenses apart in a bitter two-day struggle of artillery and engineers.

  A half dozen former ARM members were assigned to assist the mortar crews with the rest of Henke’s half trained recruits. The conflict was by no means one-sided; Recruit
Private Gerrit Terblanche was one of the casualties.

  After Reinikka’s engineers cleared approaches, and direct fire from Okladnikov’s Cadillacs tore down the walls, A Company and C Company crawled slowly and painfully into jump-off positions. When the wind shifted, weighted with grenades and explosive charges, they launched a well-reheai sed assault under the Iceman’s personal direction, covered by billowing clouds of phosphorus smoke to obscure their visual and thermal outlines.

  The Iceman’s No. 2 platoon spearheaded the attack. No. 2’s platoon leader was Lieutenant Tikhon Degtyarov, A Company’s second officer of that name. Degtyarov had been bom on Esdraelon, and his men included most of Vereshchagin’s Cadmus soldiers—the ones who loved combat rather than respected it. They were perhaps the only men in the battalion who carried bayonets and expected to use them. Normally, a three-to-one fire superiority is necessary to ensure a successful assault. Captain Stash Wojcek’s aircraft and helicopters, flying suicidally low, provided the necessary margin.

  In the ruins of the administration building, Section Sergeant Niilo Leikola of the Iceman’s No. 3 platoon spotted Lieutenant Isa Miyazato’s Nakamura target pistol next to a headless body. Leikola had lost several friends. “How’s the hunting?” he asked. He left the pistol lying there.

  Out of the three Imperial companies defending the area around the administration building, there were two survivors, both badly wounded.

  After Coldewe’s men raised the Vierkleur flag over the rubble, Vereshchagin watched it flutter through a patch in the smoke from the smoldering pyre of the helicopter that Wojcek had flown and repeated a poem by Basho that Horii would have recognized.

  Withered summer grass is truly all that remains Of the dream of the warriors

  Horii had broadcast one final order just before the Iceman’s men finished clearing the buildings, directing his soldiers crouching in dugouts to the east, south, and west to “please report to Lieutenant-Colonel Vereshchagin to assist in the process of returning the remains of fallen comrades to the homeland, as it has become extremely difficult to continue our efforts here.” His body, like many others, was never positively identified.

  Virtually ammunitionless, they did so, and Paul Henke took charge of them.

  Separating out the officers and noncommissioned officers among the prisoners, Henke put the Japanese to recovering and cremating the bodies of the dead, and used the Manchurians to repair some of the damage. Mixing the two groups would have significantly increased the death toll.

  He placed the officers and noncommissioned officers in individual cells so that the zealots among them couldn’t try to shame the others into committing suicide, and Chiharu Yoshida spent hours talking to them. A week later, they were released into a camp called “Rebirth” and introduced to group self-criticism. A handful of obnoxious ones were left to quietly rot; most of them took the easy way out.

  Eva Moore took charge of the Thai and Filipino prostitutes of Sumi’s “comfort detachment.” Like many areas on colonial worlds, the cowboy country had a population imbalance of roughly three men for every two women. With Beyers’s approval, Moore picked out a few who had not been addicted or thoroughly brutalized and conditionally offered to let them stay. The rest would go back when transport could be arranged, together with the captured soldiers and what was left of Matsudaira’s staff.

  In orbit over Akashi continent, Maya still had over a hundred bodies aboard, most of them gassed in the crew areas. Lacking the manpower to move them, Sanmartin shut off the crew deck’s life support systems and allowed them to freeze. When the tempo of operations allowed, he moved a crew of civilian volunteers on board to clear out the dead and their personal possessions. It was grim work.

  Without being asked, Vroew Beyers bought up several hundred pottery vases and turned them over. They made tolerably good urns.

  BOWING TO PUBLIC OPINION, ALBERT BEYERS HELD VICTORY RE-

  views in Johannesburg, Pretoria, Bloemfontein, and Upper Marlboro. Lest anyone forget, Vereshchagin had his men march with spaces left in the ranks for the dead and severely wounded.

  Saturday (318)

  SIX POLICEMEN TOOK DAISUKE MATSUDAIRA FROM THE OFFICE

  where he’d barricaded himself, imperiously ordering up hot meals from the Complex cafeteria. They placed him in handcuffs and formed a wall to get him past his employees, who pelted him with wads of paper as he went by.

  At the front door, Matsudaira clumsily took a poison pellet from his belt and tried to place it in his mouth. One of the policemen slapped him hard on the back and knocked it away. “If you wanted to do that, you should have done it before. Now, behave yourself! We are going to have enough trouble getting you to the gaol in one piece.”

  “Please,” Matsudaira begged brokenly as he listened to the jeers.

  The policeman squeezed his shoulder jocularly. “Oh, no. Everyone is far too annoyed with you for that.”

  IN SOME WAYS, MARTIN HATTING’S FATE WAS THE CRUELEST OF ALL.

  He hid out in a shack behind his house waiting for the police to come arrest him, but no policemen came. Instead, his neighbors and friends began pretending he didn’t exist. A by-election was announced to fill his assembly seat. Instead of his salary, his wife began receiving a widow’s pension. Eventually, she began pretending he didn’t exist.

  He tried to file a lawsuit, but the landrost’s court sent it back stamped, “Petitioner Deceased.”

  For an ambitious politician like Hatting, a bullet would have been far kinder.

  ALBERT BEYERS ARRANGED FOR HANNA BRUWER’S FUNERAL. RAUL

  Sanmartin was persuaded, with difficulty, to attend. As Anton Vereshchagin had realized long ago, a victory is the greatest tragedy, except for a defeat.

  WIND

  Sunday(319)

  DESPITE THE ELATION IN THE STREETS, THE MOOD OF THE SOLDIERS

  that Vereshchagin gathered to discuss the future was somber.

  Captain Ulrich Ohlrogge spoke first for the survivors of Ebyl’s battalion. “My men have taken a vote.” Ohlrogge looked at the faces of Vereshchagin’s officers. “We’ll keep our flag and other things, but we want to reorganize ourselves as a light attack company in your battalion. The Third Light Attack Company, so we can keep what we can of our name.” “Does anyone disagree with this?” Vereshchagin asked. “It is so moved. Shall we move on to matters of strategy?” Matti Haijalo gave everyone else a second or two to speak, then said, “Hai, O-Anton-sama. Let’s move on to strategy.” The Iceman said with mock levity, “Having declared war on the universe, how do we propose to win?”

  “The transport that got away took off at high speed in the wrong direction. This will give us a couple of extra months of breathing space. We may have as much as six or seven years,” Henke pointed out.

  Haijalo shook his head. “We’ll be lucky if we get more than five, and they’ll know we have warships the next time around.” “Chiharu, for the benefit of us all, what is the likelihood that the Imperial Government may simply decide that Suid-Afrika is not worth the cost to pacify?” Vereshchagin asked.

  “Very low, I regret to say.” Eschewing corrective surgery, Yoshida had begun wearing steel-rimmed reading glasses. He took them off and began polishing them.

  ‘United Steel-Standard will, of course, view recovery of its position here as essential and will make every effort to induce the Imperial Government to act. As it is presently constituted, the Imperial Government will conclude that its prestige will not allow it to avoid a confrontation. The Imperial Defense Forces and the Ministry of Security will undoubtedly view pacification of Suid-Afrika as a matter of honor, while expansionist elements will argue that control of Suid-Afrika’s fusion metals is essential for national security and that allowing rebellion to succeed here will undermine the foundations of the Imperial way.”

  “You would think that people there would realize that we are serious about keeping USS out,” Christiaan De Wette commented.

  “What about the Japanese public?�
�� Per Kiritinitis, newly promoted to captain, asked.

  “It is doubtful that the Japanese public will pay any attention to the matter,” Yoshida responded. “Information about colonial wars does not circulate freely, and apart from persons who enter the military and the security services, very few Japanese pay attention to colonial matters. The persons governing Japan, I regret to say, have become narrowly Japanese in their focus, and do not have a realistic understanding of how they are perceived by other cultures, which is very distressing. Although I hope that reforms will be implemented, it may take a significant shock, perhaps a shock similar to our defeat in the Great Pacific War, to correct the cultural and psychological narrowness that has led us to present Imperial policies.” “Conquering this planet looks cheap on paper,” Matti Haijalo added “The Imperial Government has already put out two task groups, and the more effort they put into conquering this place, the less likely it is that they’ll quit. I think that we can expect to get hit at five- or six-year intervals until they finally bury us.” “We can still hope that the Imperial Government will implement reforms,” Yoshida said.

  “Chiharu,” Kolomeitsev said, with unaccustomed gentleness, “once a self-perpetuating system of repression has established itself, it cannot be reformed, it can only be toppled. My people lived under communism for four generations and under the systems that succeeded it for four generations more, and I would tell you from the heart that you cannot reform something that is corrupt at its roots.”

  Ohlrogge asked, “In five or six years, can’t we bastion the planet so that they can’t take it?”

  Henke nodded. “I have begun working up a plan for a national redoubt, modeled on the Swiss strategy. Briefly, in years one and two, we would dig cavern complexes and prepare the population psychologically. In years three and four, we would begin shifting industry and storing additional food; and in years five and six, we would begin shifting the population itself, destroying the facilities we leave behind. I envision enrolling all adult males into the militia, and a significant percentage of the juveniles and adult females into supporting services.”