Starfist - 12 - Firestorm

by Dan Cragg

  Lance Corporal Dave “Hammer” Schultz had been leaning on the embrasure, looking out over Pohick Bay—just because the Marines, with help from the 27th Division, had defeated a reinforced division didn’t mean the Coalition wouldn’t order another assault. When he heard Kerr, he casually glanced over his shoulder at the squad leader, then just as casually turned back to his vigil and spat a thick stream of saliva onto the glasis that led from the beach to the escarpment. After the battle, the glasis had been carpeted with bodies, parts of bodies, and unidentifiable bits and chunks of gore, all of which had since been removed for mass burial. The detritus knocked from the face of the escarpment still lay on the glasis. Schultz rolled his shoulders. His back hurt from the wound he’d received weeks earlier when a metal facing-sheet from a trench fell on him while the Marines were beating off a major assault.

  Kerr’s fury really wasn’t at the condition of his squad’s bunkers, rather it was a mechanism to distract him from his anguish over casualties. He’d become squad leader only because the previous squad leader, Sergeant Linsman, had been killed a few weeks earlier. He was in anguish about that, and about having had one man in each of his three fire teams wounded on the operation—so far. For that matter, he’d been wounded himself. Right, five of the ten Marines in his squad were already casualties, and as far as he could tell there was no end to the campaign in sight. That kind of thinking could lead to despair. Kerr didn’t want to despair, so he turned his emotions to fury, and took it out on his men.

  Besides, if his men were uncertain about him, and they kept busy making their bunkers shipshape, they’d be less likely to dwell on the things that had him so upset.

  “Look at this sty!” Kerr shrieked, kicking at the rubble strewn on the floor. “I want this bunker shipshape when I come back.” He glared at the three Marines of second fire team in order—he even glared at Schultz’s turned back. “And I want you and your weapons and gear clean and ready to stand inspection on my return.” One more glare and he spun and left the bunker as suddenly as he’d stormed in.

  After a lengthy moment of silence, MacIlargie murmured, “What crawled up his ass and died?”

  “Wants us too busy to think,” Schultz rumbled.

  Claypoole stopped staring at the bunker entrance where Kerr had vanished and slowly turned toward Schultz. “Uh, too busy to think about what?” he asked.

  “Half casualties.”

  Claypoole mulled that for a moment, wondering what might constitute a “half casualty.” Then it clicked; half of the squad had been casualties so far in the defense of the Bataan Peninsula. “Right,” he said. Damn good idea. Let’s get busy cleaning up this shithole.” He grabbed a push broom from a corner and tossed it to MacIlargie. “Start sweeping up, Wolfman.”

  MacIlargie deftly caught the broom, but instead of sweeping the floor, he cocked his head in thought. “Rock,” he said slowly, “we barely have enough water to drink. How are we supposed to get ourselves and our gear clean enough to stand inspection?”

  Claypoole gave MacIlargie a that’s-a-dumb-question-but-I-don’t-expect-anything-better-from-you look and said, “We’re Marines. When we don’t have what we need to accomplish a mission, we improvise. When we don’t have what we need to improvise, we simulate.”

  MacIlargie blinked a few times. He understood improvising, but “How do we simulate cleaning ourselves and our gear?”

  “Fake it,” Schultz grumbled.

  MacIlargie quickly glanced toward the big, taciturn Marine, then started pushing the broom. After a couple of minutes he looked at Claypoole and said, “I could use some help here, you know. Why don’t you do something?”

  “I am doing something,” Claypoole retorted. “I’m the fire team leader. I’m supervising. You missed some shit over there.” He pointed at a patch of floor that MacIlargie had just swept.

  “Supervising, yeah sure, supervising,” MacIlargie grumbled. He didn’t look at Schultz, still looking out over Pohick Bay. A few minutes later, though, all three Marines were working together to clean out their bunker.

  First squad hadn’t suffered quite as badly as second squad; four wounded and none killed. And, unlike second squad, two of its fire team leaders were both senior and experienced enough to be in line to be slotted into squad leader billets—should one become vacant. As a matter of fact, Sergeant Lupo “Rabbit” Ratliff, the first squad leader, believed that if 34th FIST had not been quarantined, and if its Marines had been rotated out to other units like everybody else in the Confederation Marine Corps, Corporal “Dorny” Dornhofer, his first fire team leader, would long since have been promoted to sergeant and made a squad leader. But it wasn’t Ratliff’s place to question the decisions of higher-higher, not even when he believed higher-higher was clearly in the wrong.

  No, Sergeant Ratliff had more immediate concerns than howcome-forwhy nobody was moving on to other duty stations. Word had filtered down that a Marine lieutenant general was on his way to Bataan to take over combat operations from General Billie. Of course, that word was scuttlebutt, and probably as accurate as the idea that Ensign Charlie Bass was the secret love child of Confederation President Cynthia Chang-Sturdevant. Not that Ratliff thought a Marine lieutenant general wasn’t on his way, but the idea that an army general commanding a major operation would give up combat operations command to a Marine was just too absurd to consider. Sure, sure, a Marine had relieved the army combat commander on Diamunde. But in that case, the overall commander was a navy admiral, and he had removed the doggie and replaced him with the Marine. Here, the doggie was the overall commander and the admiral was subordinate to him. So there was no way—short of all the army generals getting killed—that a Marine would get command.

  The straight scoop—and Ratliff knew it was straight because he’d gotten it directly from Charlie Bass, who had been in the squad leaders’ meeting that had just broken up—was that a Marine lieutenant general was on his way. Bass didn’t know what the three-nova’s function would be once he delivered the two divisions and two FISTs he was bringing. If it came to the worst, he’d be an inspector general.

  Nobody ever wanted to stand an IG inspection, especially not in the middle of a shooting war. But, dammit, Charlie Bass thought third platoon should be as ready for one as it could be. So Ratliff called his fire team leaders together and told them to get their bunkers ready to stand a round of inspections. “I don’t care that you don’t have the shit you need to get your bunkers properly cleaned,” he said when they objected. “Do what you can with what you’ve got!”

  When he dismissed his fire team leaders, he went in search of the other squad leaders.

  “How’d your people react when you told them to get ready for an IG?” Ratliff asked Sergeant Kerr when he found him.

  Kerr gave him a blank look. “What IG?”

  Ratliff returned the look. “The IG Ensign Bass told us about.”

  “He did?”

  “I had a feeling you weren’t listening during the squad leaders’ meeting,” Ratliff said, shaking his head. “What’s the problem?”

  Kerr looked into nowhere in particular. “No problem. I was, I was thinking about casualties, that’s all.” He hung his head.

  “Look at me, Tim.” Ratliff put a hand on Kerr’s shoulder and drew him close. “Come on, lift your head and look at me.” When Kerr’s head stayed down, Ratliff squeezed his shoulder and gave it a shake. Kerr slowly raised his head and looked into Ratliff’s eyes from a distance of just centimeters. Ratliff shifted his grip to the back of Kerr’s neck and pulled until their foreheads touched.

  “Listen to me, Tim,” Ratliff said softly. “I know you feel like shit because of how you got your job. So what? Most of our fire team leaders got their jobs the same way—someone above them got killed or too badly injured to come back. We’re Marines and that’s life for us.”

  “B-but I, I…”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know. You were almost killed on Wanderjahr and it took a long time for you to make it b
ack to where you could be returned to duty. And then you had to deal with your own mortality. You’ve done a pretty good job of it, you didn’t let it get in the way of doing your job when you were a fire team leader. Now you’ve got more lives to be concerned about. That comes with the big bucks. You’re a good Marine, you were an outstanding fire team leader. Now be the outstanding squad leader you can be.”

  Before Kerr could respond, Sergeant Kelly, the gun squad leader, boomed out “What’s this, kissy-face between squad leaders?”

  “Up your ass with a railroad tie, Kelly!” Ratliff boomed back.

  “Nah, Rabbit’s trying to teach me squad leader’s contact telepathy,” Kerr said.

  “Squad leader contact telepathy? Never heard of it.”

  “That’s because you’re a gun squad leader,” Ratliff snorted. “Gun squad leaders don’t have enough brains for anybody to read their minds.”

  “So what do you think of that IG happy horseshit?” Kelly asked in a more normal voice when he reached the other squad leaders.

  “Happy horseshit about says it,” Kerr replied.

  Ratliff nodded at him sharply, glad to see Kerr was coming out of the funk he’d been in. “Whatever’s going to happen, it won’t be like the IG we missed by coming here in the first place.” The Inspector General of the Marine Corps was at Camp Major Pete Ellis, home of 34th FIST, when the orders for the deployment arrived and the inspection was canceled.

  “Better not be,” Kelly muttered. “Ain’t a man jack in the FIST could pass a fire team leader’s inspection right now, much less a proper IG.”

  “Damn straight!”

  “So what are we going to do about it?”

  “Improvise.”

  “And what we can’t improvise, simulate.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Heb Cawman, former Chairman of the Coalition Committee on the Conduct of the War, sat inside his comfortable cell in the brig of the CNSS Kiowa, twiddling his thumbs and humming an old folk song popular among the farmers of Ruspina, his home world, where he sincerely wished he were. But he would be willing to settle, instead, for a bottle of Old Snort bourbon.

  “Sittin’ by the roadside, on a summer’s day. Chattin’ wif muh messmates, passin’ time away,” he sang quietly. The cell had no bars and was more like an efficiency apartment than a detention facility. It measured about four meters by ten. The door to the companionway that ran down the row of cells was always open, but the prisoners couldn’t go through it because a strong detention field blocked the way. Guards carried electronic devices that neutralized the field so they could come and go, but unless a prisoner had access to one of the things and knew the codes, he was stuck in his cell. Besides, even if he could’ve gotten out, what could a man like Cawman do aboard a navy starship except get himself put right back in the brig?

  A hatch hissed open down the companionway, out of Cawman’s sight, and he sat up. As far as he knew, he was the only prisoner in the brig and visitors, even a guard bringing him something, broke the monotony. Since he was under constant video and sensor surveillance, he often amused himself by making ugly faces and passing gas—weak substitutes for even casual human contact.

  “Mr. Cawman?” A woman dressed in a navy officer’s uniform, but without badges of rank, came into view on the other side of the field. She filled her uniform in a most delightful manner. She was petite, with a very pale complexion, and she looked to be no more than twenty. Actually, she was in her forties, a highly trained intelligence officer who’d been at the business of prisoner interrogation for more than fifteen years.

  “The one ’n’ only, Missy.” Cawman stood up and grinned. He bowed deeply to bid her enter.

  “My name is Fatimah, Mr. Cawman, and I have some questions to ask you.” She passed through the field and Cawman graciously offered her the only chair in the cell; he sat on the bed. Smiling, she sat down and popped open a case that she placed on her lap. Her knees were kept primly together.

  “You gonna hook me up to that thing ’n’ turn on the juice?” Cawman nodded at the case. He could not see what was inside.

  “Oh, Mr. Cawman,” Fatimah said, and laughed, “you know the Confederation, as well as your own government, is a signatory to the Richmond Convention on Treatment of Prisoners of War and Other Detainees! Torture, threats, intimidation—they’re illegal! Even you, Mr. Cawman, a noncombatant taken on the field of battle, are to be afforded every courtesy and treated humanely. While we’re together, Mr. Cawman, I want you to consider me in the same light you would, say, your niece, not a nasty old interrogator.” She smiled broadly, revealing perfect teeth.

  Cawman grinned, revealing the dirty stumps of the few teeth that remained in his mouth. “Niece is fine but third cousin’d be better.” He leered. “Missy, I was snatched by your Marine pirates ’n’ drug up here against my will! I want to file a protest!” He continued to grin. “Hey, you got any other names besides Fatimah?”

  Fatimah only smiled and said, “Of course, Mr. Cawman, I will help you file your protest as well as help you file any other complaints you may have about the way you are being treated here. Do you feel like answering a few questions now, Mr. Cawman?”

  “I’ll letcha know,” and he gestured at the case on Fatimah’s knees, indicating she should proceed.

  “I’m going to record your remarks, Mr. Cawman. I’ll stop recording anytime you like. Is that all right with you, Mr. Cawman?”

  “Sure.”

  “First, do you have any complaints?” She smiled again.

  Cawman noted that her eyes were brown. Her auburn hair was cut short, conforming to the contours of her head. Her tiny nose tilted upwards slightly. She’s looking mighty good, he thought. “Naw,” Cawman answered. “Them Marines, they was pretty rough at first, but what the hell, I been roughed up even worse in some o’ the best bars back home.” He laughed and slapped his knee.

  “Mr. Cawman, you were the Chairman of the Coalition’s Committee on the Conduct of the War. Is that true?” Cawman nodded and Fatimah smiled. “Can you tell me what your duties were on that committee?”

  Cawman shrugged. “Hell, Missy, my only duty was to be a big pain in Gen’ral Davis Lyons’s behind! The folks back home wanted to believe we was keepin’ the ol’ boy’s nose in the manure, so to speak, so we harassed ’im without really interferin’ too much with the way he ran his army. He ran it pretty durn good too, I’d say! He even put some of the boys in the hoosegow!”

  Fatimah smiled. “I heard about that. It doesn’t seem to me, sir, that your government was, er, well, very well organized.”

  “It weren’t. Mostly we sat around throwin’ spitballs at each other ’n’ drinking Old Snort to kill the boredom. Ol’ Preston Summers, the president, ’n’ Gen’ral Lyons, they actually run the war. The rest of us, the senate, jist rubber-stamped their decisions.”

  Fatimah was silent for a moment. “Mr. Cawman, I have the impression there’s a lot you’re not telling me. Now, we have to be honest with each other here.” She leaned forward, eyes locking with Cawman’s. “What happens to you depends on how cooperative you are with us.”

  “Are you intimidatin’ me, Missy?” Cawman grinned.

  Fatimah smiled. “I have the authority to restrict some of your privileges, sir, if you give me a hard time.” She shrugged. “Cut down on your smokes, for instance, turn off your closed-circuit vid system for another.”

  “Well, yer smokes is much inferior to what I’m used to, and those vids are for kids, so go ahead, cut ’em off.” Cawman leaned back and put his arms behind his head. This girl, he could see, was a pushover.

  Fatimah smiled. “I have some Davidoffs here and a bottle of Old Snort and they’re yours if you promise you’ll try to get along with me.”

  “Holy Martin Luther in hell!” Cawman yelled, sitting upright. “Where do I sign?”

  “Let’s talk first, all right? You were a senator and the chairman of an important committee, sir, so we think you are a high government official
of the Coalition. That makes you a very important prisoner. Moreover, you are a high-ranking member of a government that is in rebellion against the Confederation of Human Worlds, and your forces have mounted an unprovoked attack against one of our garrisons. That makes you subject to charges of high treason and you know what that could mean.”

  “Miss Fatimah, let me straighten you out here. First, I am well aware of the legal niceties involved in any definition of war. Who attacked whom first, who provoked that attack—that is open to question. Eventually you’ll have to try me on charges of treason; no way you can shove me under a rock somewhere, so I’ll make lots of noise. Second, in my person you have a mere functionary of the Coalition government. Yes, I voted for the war, along with several hundred other people, but we thought at the time that we had been provoked by your forces, that our citizens had been fired on and killed by them. Third”—

  So, Fatimah thought, the old windbag can speak Standard English when he wants to. Is his country hick persona just an act?

  —“I am not really as important as you think. Other people are more important in what transpired on Ravenette and in the Coalition government than I ever was. I had nothing to do with the attack on Fort Seymour, when all those demonstrators were cut down. No. What you have in me is a nobody.” There was a noticeable tinge of bitterness in the way he said that.

  Attack on Fort Seymour, Fatimah thought. What a curious phrasing. She also inferred from his remarks that Cawman was not happy with his role in the Coalition’s government. Was there something here she could exploit? Cawman’s vanity? “Mr. Cawman, where is President Preston Summers now?”

  “Ah, Missy,” Cawman drawled, shifting his position on the bed, glancing downward at the deck before he spoke, “I cain’t rightly say.”

  Fatimah knew he was lying. His body language expressed surprise and nervousness at the question and glancing downward like that indicated to her he was gathering his thoughts before he responded.