“I left her with Mother—Tant Betje. I couldn’t stay there, Hans.” Sanmartin walked into the room Coidewe indicated, dropped his bergen, and leaned his rifle against the wall.
“Where’s your personal stuff?” Coidewe asked.
Sanmartin smiled, ever so slightly. “I gave away the suit and left my singlestick for Hendricka. The rest I burned.”
Coldewe blinked. “It took forever to get you into clothes that fit.”
“I won’t be needing them. If the Variag approves, we’ll be leaving in about thirty days.”
“What about Hendricka?”
“Albert and Betje are really her parents. It’s better this way.” “Look. Raul, I understand that you’re upset. Grief is a natural thing, but you can’t—•”
“Nascentes morimur, every day I die a little,” Sanmartin said woodenly. “Apart from the soldiering, nothing makes sense to me anymore. Too many ghosts around here, Hans-— Rudi, Rhett, Edmund. Now Hanna, always Hanna.”
Coldewe quietly shut the door.
Sanmartin leaned his back against the wall. “Hans, this time the pain won’t stop. Something’s broken inside. Say something poetic. Say something funny.”
“Raul, if that’s true, Earth is the last place you should be going,” Coldewe temporized.
“The brain still functions, and that’s what matters. All I need to do is get through the next thirty days until we up ship.” “What about Hendricka? How old will she be when you get back? How old will you be? If you drop out of her life now, she’ll never let you back in!”
“What about Marta?”
Coldewe scowled at him. ‘That’s not fair, Raul, and it’s not the same. This is your daughter.”
“I tried to tell Hendricka where her mother went. Heaven is difficult to explain to a three-year-old. We adopted her out, remember? She belongs to Albert and Betje.”
“Look, if you stay, you don’t have to be a soldier. Why don’t you think about going back to the university?”
“Live a normal life, you mean?” Sanmartin laughed a little and closed his eyes. “You lose your sense of time in the icebox. It rubs the edges off. It leaves marks. You can’t see them, but they’re there. Besides, you and Anton need me on this one. There are no better military minds than Paul and Piotr, and you’re not so bad yourself, but our problem is political, not military, and that’s where I fit in. By definition, what we’re trying to accomplish is crazy, and I’m that. Soldiering is what fits me, Hans.”
“Look, Raul—nobody can take Hanna’s place, but there’ll be somebody for you. I know it. Don’t cut yourself off. What about that woman who was hanging all over you at the funeral?”
“Anneke Brink. I felt like hitting her.”
“Well, maybe not her, but somebody. What about Daniela Kotze? You like her. She lost a boyfriend in the rebellion and a husband this time around. Try consoling each other over a cup of coffee.”
“No, Hans.”
“There are lots of fine women out there. Heaven knows Marta deserves someone better than me.”
“You don’t understand, Hans,” Sanmartin said with deceptive mildness. “It wouldn’t be fair.”
“To whom?”
“To anyone. It’s too soon. It’ll always be too soon. Everything inside me is gone. I can’t just pretend that nothing happened. I resent the living a little, the ones who didn’t suffer. Remember years ago, when I told you I felt like cleaning this world off and starting over? I feel a little like that now.” His eyes chilled. “And I understand this—if I don’t go, Hendricka may not have the chance to grow up.”
Coldewe made one last attempt. “If you go, where does that leave Albert? Who’s going to fix the environment?”
“Simon, or Maria, or no one. Anyone but me.” Sanmartin looked up. “You don’t understand, Hans. Albert will keep things going for a few more years, but he’s lost control of the legislature. It’ll take them awhile to muster the courage, but they’ll run him out, sooner or later. And Claassen’s lost control of the Reformed Nationals. It’s only a matter of time before the people here start squabbling over the spoils.” He smiled wistfully.
“For five years, we had a dream that we woke up to every morning. Now, the best thing I can hope for is that the people who come after us don’t do too bad a job.” He shook his head emphatically. “But I can’t stay to see that.”
Isaac Wanjau knocked on the door and opened it. “Captain Coldewe,” he said with a straight face, but with deep compassion in his eyes. “I think we need you out here to help us decide how to fit the sauna in.”
“Thanks, Isaac,” Coldewe said automatically.
Tuesday(319)
CHRISTOS CLAASSEN, ELECTED EMERGENCY SPEAKER OF THE Assembly with only a modest amount of chicanery, called a special session to discuss the plan to go to Earth, which Beyers had approved as commander-in-chief. Beyers and Claassen privately made two things clear: The expedition was going, regardless; and if anyone played politics with the debate, there would be repercussions.
Vereshchagin and Sanmartin were called upon to testify. The member from Linden wanted to know why they couldn’t simply fight a defensive war; she was gently asked if she was volunteering her home and front yard for the next battlefield. The member from Annapolis wanted to know why the expedition couldn’t confine its attacks to “military” targets; he was politely told that the distinction had gotten a little blurred.
Sanmartin explained the theory behind the expedition as the “mule” theory. A mule responds very well to gentle coaxing— once you get the mule’s attention with a sufficiently big stick.
He didn’t slip until one member made a long speech, in the form of a question, exulting over the prospects of hitting Tokyo and making lots of the “little yellow monkeys” pay for their sins. Sanmartin rejoined tersely, “If this doesn’t work, I hope you’re the first one to fry.”
The exchange was omitted from the official record.
Wednesday(319)
WHILE THE ICEMAN BUSIED HIMSELF ARRANGING LOGISTICS AND
reviewing potential landing sites, Sanmartin began working on the technical side of things. Before he was fairly started, Dr. Natasha Solchava dropped by.
“Hello, Natasha. I was meaning to see you. I need to talk to you about Yuri Malinov.”
“I have burned out three malignancies along Yuri’s spinal cord and two more in his brain, but even with his iron constitution, this is too much. He is dying.”
“How long will he be able to function?”
“Depending on how he deals with the pain, three months, perhaps. Perhaps six.”
“And if he went into the icebox?”
“The cooling would retard the growth of the tumors, perhaps even cause them to regress slightly.” She looked at him sharply. “Yuri asked me the same questions yesterday, but he would not tell me why. What are the two of you up to?” “We’re going to Earth in twenty-nine days. I want to take Yuri with me. It’s a nine-month trip, and I can afford to keep
him on ice for seven months of it. I want someone to handle Ajax's weapons systems when we get there. All Yuri has to do is shoot, and if you can keep him functioning for three hours in combat when we get there, that’s all I need.”
“It is not a question of me keeping Yuri functioning, it is a question of Yuri keeping himself functioning, but yes, I can do things to dull the pain. But can’t you let him die in peace?” Solchava asked pedantically.
“Yuri has been a soldier for twenty-four years. He didn’t think much of the Imperial Government before and he thinks less of it now.”
Solchava softened. “Yes, I know. I doubt that anything would give him greater peace than to go with you. But Hans didn’t ask me here to discuss Yuri Malinov. Hans is concerned about you.”
Sanmartin looked at her. “Natasha, can you imagine what it would be like to lose Jan?”
“Yes. I know that they make jokes about me behind my back, but they do not make words to describe what I would feel if I los
t Jan.”
“Just do the same for me that you’re doing for Yuri, Natasha. Get me to the battlefield and let me function for three hours.” “Jan tells me that you want him along on this expedition. He has already asked me to allow, him to go. You will need a surgeon along, I imagine.”
“Yes, I want both of you.”
She smiled painfully. “How kind of you to ask.”
After she left, he called Resit Aksu—the Turkish Senior intelligence sergeant and team were busily interrogating prisoners on the latest changes to Tokyo’s topography. Then he went to find Aleksei Beregov, who was acting as battalion sergeant in Malinov’s place, and Lieutenant Men Reinikka, the engineer platoon leader.
He caught Beregov by the arm as he passed him in a corridor. “Bery—can you find me nine men who look and sound Japanese?”
Beregov rubbed his chin. “Including Aksu, Liu, and Captain Yoshida, maybe eight.”
“Nine would be better.”
“Maybe we could use Soe.”
“He looks Japanese. Maybe Aksu can work on him enough so that he acts and sounds mildly retarded instead of obviously foreign.”
Slapping Beregov on the shoulder, Sanmartin flew up to see Meri Reinikka and gingerly took a seat on Reinikka’s hammock. Reinikka had found himself a computerized drawing table somewhere and worked from it standing up, which made watching him an interesting process.
“Meri—some technical questions. If we wanted to use our ships to thoroughly wreck some buildings, from top to sub-sub-basement, how would we go about it?”
Like most engineer officers, Meri Reinikka enjoyed blowing things up a great deal more than he enjoyed building them in the first place. He pursed his lips. “It would take an awfully long time to reach underground with composite particles.” “We won’t have it. There are six missile-defense centers ringing Tokyo. With a little luck, we can take out one or two with assault teams and clear a lane into the city, but if we circle around and try to pound buildings into rubble, the centers we don’t take out will lob missiles over the horizon at us. We’re also going to have to hit the central air defense command and control center, which is almost certainly a hardened target.”
“Maya has precision munitions, doesn’t it?”
Sanmartin made a face. “The projectile mix they sent Maya out with was mostly light stuff, and she’s already fired off the biggest things in her arsenal. Most of what she has left is only good for antipersonnel work.”
“Nukes?”
“We have one nuclear artillery shell that we inherited from the former Republic of Suid-Afrika that we can attach to a missile, but using nuclear weapons on buildings in the heart of Tokyo is something that I’d rather not do—it’s a little indiscriminate.”
“Possibly,” Reinikka conceded.
“If we sent assault teams into the city, is there anything they could carry with them that would do the job? How about a dust initiator?”
‘To take out a really big building?” Reinikka shook his head. He called up a window in the comer of his electronic table and consulted a table. “Probably not. A kilo of explosive, another kilo of incendiary mix, and eighty kilos of surround—coal dust, flour, powdered coffee, tapioca, what have you—will cover about sixteen hundred cubic meters. That’s maybe one floor of a building that’s twenty-eight meters on a side. I could build you something to pump the dust, but that’s an awful lot of weight to lug around. I don’t know that conventional explosive would work either; you need too much for a team of men to carry, and it would take a lot of time to put the charges in place.”
He thought for a minute. “Of course, I could probably build you an air-to-ground projectile that would do the job.”
“We don’t have time to set up a production line.”
“I could do it in a couple of weeks from stuff we have on hand. Listen, for the body of the missile we take the barrel off one of the 210mm howitzers we captured—those gun tubes are made of extremely hard alloy, and thirty-two calibers times 210 millimeters is nearly seven meters long. You can pack an awful lot of HE into a tube that big.” Reinikka warmed to his task.
“Put a fuse with a time delay in the tail, pull the motor and the laser guidance system off one of the smaller guided projectiles, fabricate some wings and a nose cap, and presto—you have something that goes off in the basement. The shell of the building will still be there, but the insides will be a wreck. I could slap one together and test it on a rock someplace to make sure it goes off. Of course, a projectile like that wouldn’t travel very fast, so you would have to launch it from where the missile defenses can’t knock it out of the sky.”
“If you can fit a couple of them to a corvette, we could launch them from in close.”
“On a corvette?” As an engineer, Reinikka had all sorts of strange things loaded into his data base, and he promptly called up a diagram and scanned it. “I don’t think we could mount them externally—the heat and stress when the ship entered atmosphere would likely snap them right off. On a corvette, there isn’t much internal space to work with. Maybe 1 could squeeze one or two in. Doesn’t a corvette carry a little boat of some kind? We could pull that out and use the platform as a launch rail.”
“Talk to Jankowskie and the people over at Complex and work up a plan. Now the big question: The hardest target we want to hit is the Ministry of Security. Would one of these missiles you’re talking about take it out?”
Reinikka consulted his computer again. “All the way to the bottom? No, at least, I don’t think so,” he said after a pause. “Why not?”
“The MoS was built before the crack-up. Half a dozen nations had cruise missiles. I can build you something that will crash through six meters of solid concrete, but I’m guessing that they have at least one and probably two basement levels with sealed armor plating to survive a hit from anything short of a fairly big nuke. The 210mm penetrator I was talking about would take out the mice on the top floors, but the rats would stay snug in the deep basements until somebody came to dig them out.”
“Maybe if we built something bigger.”
Reinikka shook his head emphatically. “Not unless we put a nuclear warhead on it. We’d need a larger hardened tube and a bigger motor, which we don’t have, and we still wouldn’t be able to invest enough kinetic energy in it to make it punch through two layers of armor—it would break up. It just wouldn’t be dense enough. I could build you something that would penetrate, but I couldn’t build anything that would penetrate and blow up.”
“We’ll have to go after the MoS with assault teams then.” “I wish I could be more helpful.” Reinikka wrinkled his nose. “I’ve got another bit of bad news for you. I talked to some of the people over at Complex.”
“And?” Sanmartin shifted his weight on the hammock. ‘The USS Building was put up right after the crack-up. It may also have a reinforced basement level.”
Sanmartin leaned back, lost in thought. After a minute, he said, “Okay. Thanks, Meri. Get Rytov to start pulling the barrels off those two-tens for you.”
After Kasha forced him to eat lunch, he and Chiharu Yoshida went to see Vereshchagin to discuss acts of “negative daring.” Vereshchagin did not trouble to mince words. “Which politicians do you suggest we assassinate?” he asked them quietly.
“Chiharu and I agree that it should be these two.” Sanmartin laid two photographs copied from magazines on the table.
Vereshchagin picked up the top photograph of a fat man with gray hair.
“Schunichi Gyohten is head of the most openly expansionist UDP faction. Interestingly enough, he’s never been elected to public office, although he’s been UDP secretary general twice. He’s described as being warm friends with the leaders of two right-wing extremist groups, which means that he finances them and uses them at election time,” Sanmartin said. “They call him the Money Man.”
Vereshchagin slid one photograph under the other. “And the other?”
“Osachi Abe. Abe leads what is either the third
or fourth largest UDP faction. He’s headed up ministries in four of the last five cabinets. He’s the fifth generation of his family to be elected to the Diet from Niigata.” Sanmartin shrugged. “Most current Diet members are the sons or sons-in-law of former Diet members, but the Abe family seems to carry hereditary service to extremes.”
“Why Abe?” Vereshchagin asked.
“While Japan has had thirteen different prime ministers over the last twenty-eight years, it has only had seven different secretaries general of the United Democratic party,” Yoshida explained “Unless a scandal occurs prior to our arrival to bring down the government which was just installed, Abe will be the only faction leader of his generation who has not served a term as UDP secretary general, and he has only picked one prime minister.” Sanmartin added, “In a word, when the most recent cabinet gets pushed out of office, it’s his turn at the trough.”
“If our assault is successful, the current government will be discredited and forced to resign,” Yoshida continued. “The current generation of faction leaders has exercised power for nearly thirty years, and a younger generation of politicians is openly restive. Assassinating Abe will almost certainly lead to a succession crisis within the UDP as younger, less-tainted politicians attempt to push aside the aging faction leaders.”
“This might help us,” Vereshchagin said, laying the photographs down.
“Rattling the dice,” Sanmartin said as he picked them up. Moving to the last person on his list, he went to see Timo Haerkoennen about creating a computer simulation that would allow them to work through the rough spots in the plan.
Haerkoennen was an absolute genius when it came to communications and computer systems, and utterly disinterested in virtually everything else. After reviewing the initial design criteria, Haerkoennen voiced one terse criticism. “You’re looking at this wrong, sir. We’re going after people, but we’re not going after information systems. Your plan doesn’t call for us to screw with the companies, if you know what I mean.”' Sanmartin shook his head. “Come again?”
Robert Frezza - [Colonial War 02] Page 29
