"Back to the radio room, this is it, it's over, we've got to tell Legion H.Q. and then get out. Split up and carry the word, south end and bug out to the woods, move, people." They paused for a single instant, dim gleams of teeth in faces negro-black with soot and dirt. "Good work," he added quietly, before spinning and diving through the next ragged gap. Fuckin' good."
* * * *
Dreiser felt very lost in the dark tunnel. Everybody else had seemed to know what to do, even when the order went out to scatter; he clutched the precious tapes through the fabric of his jacket and lurched into a bank of stone jags. For a moment pain blinded him in the echoing dark, then hands gripped him and jerked him aside through an L-angle where one cellar joined another through an improvised passage. A palm clapped over his mouth, hard and calloused.
"Shuddup," hissed into his ear, as he was passed through another set of hands and parked against a wall. The American struggled to control his breathing, feeling his heart lurching between his ribs; that might have been a bullet or a dagger. Fighting a feeling of humiliation as well: he was tired of being handled like a rag doll. The blackness was absolute, silence broken by dripping water and the distant explosions. Then hobnails rutching on stone, and closer a long, faint schnnnng sound, a bush knife being drawn from its sheath. Dreiser found himself holding his breath without concious decision.
A light clicked on: only a handlight, but blinding to dark-accustomed eyes. It shone directly into the faces of the two Germans who had turned the corner. They had been keeping close to the right-hand wall, facing forward; the Draka were on the left, across the two-meter width and parallel to their opponents. Nearest to Dreiser was the woman with the bush knife, reaching as the light came on. Her left hand jerked the SS trooper forward by the blouse while the right thrust the two-foot blade forward, tilted up. Dreiser could see the German's face spasm, hear the wet slicing and grating sound as she twisted the broad machete blade and withdrew it in a wrenching, motion. The next Draka was a man, tall enough to stoop slightly under the seven-foot roof. He merely slammed a fist forward as the German turned toward him; it connected with the SS man's face, and the Draka was wearing warsaps. Bone crunched under the metal-reinforced glove, and the German's helmet rang as his head bounced backward and rebounded off stone.
The third Draka had been kneeling nearest the L-junction. He dropped the light as his comrades struck, swept up his assault rifle, and fired. Dreiser blinked in puzzlement. The curve was sharp, there was no direct line of fire at the room beyond, and the paratrooper was firing up. Then the American followed the line of tracer up to the groined vault of the ceiling: continuous fire, long, ten-second bursts, the roar of the shots in the enclosed space of the cellar almost hiding the whining ping of the ricochets. His mind drew a picture of the narrow stone reach beyond the exit, bullets sawing back and forth… There were screams from around the corner now, and the sound of bodies falling, and blind crashing retreat. The morale of the SS men was growing shaky.
And no wonder, Dreiser thought, wiping an arm across his face. The slightest misjudgment or ill luck and those metal wasps could have come bouncing back into this section of tunnel; that risk was why the fighting below was mostly cold steel or cautious grenades. The Draka gunman was shaking the empty drum out of his Holbars, snapping in a fresh one with a contented grin but leaving the bolt back to allow the chamber to cool. Darkness returned as he snapped out the light. There was a moaning, then the sound of a boot stamping on a throat, as unbearable as fingernails on slate.
"C'mon, Yank," one of them said. "We'll drop yo' at the aid station. Clear path from there to the south end. Lessn' yo' meets cousin Fritz, a'course."
My morale would be shot, too, the correspondent's musing continued as he coughed raw cordite fumes out of his throat and stumbled along with the retreating troopers. The Draka were nearly as deadly as they thought they were, and they never gave up; hunting them down here would be like going blindfolded and armed only with a spear into a maze full of tigers.
Tigers with the minds of men.
* * * *
"Nobody in here but the wounded!" Dreiser shouted, in German. The cellar beneath the mosque was the aid station; his post the only place a noncombatant could do any good. The darkness was thick with muffled noise, or the louder shouts of the delirious, but he had heard the SS men talking in the next chamber. And "grenade" was hard to miss. "We surrender!"
A cautious hand and head came through, flicked on a torch, speared Dreiser where he stood plastered against a wall, zigzagged briefly across the rows of bandaged figures.
"Ja,' the German barked over his shoulder, and another figure with a Schmeisser followed. Perhaps it was the dim glow, but the American thought he could see the strain of fighting in this warren on their faces, death waiting in cramped blackness like the inside of a closet. They straightened, relaxing.
"Hande hoche!" one said to the American, tucking the grenade back into his belt.
"I am an American war correspondent," Dreiser began. The burst of automatic fire caught him almost as much by surprise as it did the two SS troopers it smashed back against the stone.
The flashlight fell, bounced, did not break as it came to rest on the stomach of a staring red-headed corpse, lighting the expression of shocked amazement on her freckled face. The glow diffused quickly in the dusty air, but Dreiser could see a head that was a ball of bandage with a slit for the eyes, and the muzzle of the Holbars poking through the blankets that had concealed it. The head eased back down to its pack-pillow, and the assualt rifle dropped out of sight again.
"Keep…"a halt, and a grunt. "Keep 'em comin', Yank."
* * * *
"No answer," Sofie said. She and Eric were alone now in what had been the command bunker, except for the corpse of the sapper in one corner. It felt abandoned, colder somehow, darker despite the constant blue glow and the flicker of lights from the radio at which the com tech labored. A burst of assault-rifle fire echoed on the stone, bringing their heads up.
"Scan the cohort and tetrarchy frequencies, then," he said, laying down his Holbars to load the bandoliers with extra drums. "Quick."
Her fingers turned the dials; static, German voices, then snatches:
"Sir, sir, come in, please." A young voice, tight-held. "Sir, the centurion went out half an hour ago and didn't come back, I can hear them talking in Fritz outside the door, what'm I supposed to—" Shots, static.
"Fall back to the green line an' regroup, fall back—"
"This is Palm One, Palm One, I've got Fritz armor coming at me from north'n south both, I'm spikin mah guns and pullin out, over." A decisive click.
Sofie abandoned the radio, tearing off the headset and throwing it at the communications gear, turning to him with a snarl.
"That's it?" she said, her voice shrill. "That's it? It was all fo' nothin?"
"It's never for nothin', Sofie," he said gently. "We fight for each other; the job is what we do together." Sharply: "Now move, soldier!"
"Shit!" The obstacle was soft, and might once have lived. Eric tripped, and his hand came down into something yielding and wet. "Light, Sofie." They had to risk that; information was worth a brief stop. A click, and he was blinking down into the turned-up face of the old Circassian, the Hadj. Something had sliced halfway through his skull, something curved that pulled out raggedly and spilled the brain that had seen Mecca and spent fifty years in a losing fight to protect his people. The Draka recognized the signs: a sharpened entrenching-tool swung like an axe, not popular among the Domination's forces, who preferred the ancestral bush knife. He hoped it was not one of his who had killed the old man, in a moment of fear or frustration. Grunting, he knelt up and turned to look at Sofie.
And froze. The shovel gleamed beyond her head, held like a spear in a two-handed grip, point down and ready to chop into her back. No firing angle went through him, as he watched the reflected light ulint on the honed edges. But the weapon was trembling, and it had not fallen. Sofie saw the
fear in his eyes, checked her turning motion before it began at his lips' silent command. He could see her face glisten, but the hand with the torch did not shake, or even move.
Slowly, slowly, Eric came to his feet. No aggressive movement, he thought, with a sudden huge calm. He could not afford to fail, and therefore he would not. Not now, or ever. Up, half-crouch, erect. There was a German behind her, standing rigid as a statue save for the trembling of the hands clenched on the haft of the spade. The underlit face quivered as well, lumps of muscle jerking under the skin, tears pouring down through dirt and soot, cutting clear tracks down from the wide-held eyes, a swath of bandage covering the back of his head. White all around the iris, pupils enormous, staring through time and space. It was eerie to hear words coming from that face; it was as if a statue had spoken, or a beast.
"You… killed them," he said. "You. You."
Standartenfuhrer, Eric thought, reading the tabs. Meeting the eyes was more of a strain than he would have believed possible; like peering inside one of the locked, red-glowing tombs of Dante's hell. The Draka spoke very softly, in the other's language, as much to himself as to his enemy.
"Yes. We killed them, all of them, both of us." The other's face seemed to change, and the uplifted spade wavered. Eric extended his left hand to Sofie; hers joined, the palm warm and dry against the wet chill of his. She turned, facing the German.
"Inge—Ingeborg?" he asked. It was a different voice, a boy's. "What are you doing here? This is Moscow—this is no place for you." The shovel came down to the stone with a light clink, and something went out of the man. Eric and Sofie took a step backward, and another; there was nothing to prevent the centurion from using the Holbars hanging at waist level in its assault-sling. Nothing physical, at least. The SS man faded out of their circle of light.
"I am not afraid," he said, in a conversational tone. "Not afraid of the dark, Ingeborg. Not any more. Not any more."
* * * *
The panzer rumbled toward them as they turned the corner at the south end of the village; the steel helmets of infantry riders showed behind its massive turret. There was no escape, not even back to the tunnels.
Sofie cursed and scrabbled for her weapon, feeling even more naked now that the familiar weight of the backpack radio was gone. Eric controlled his impulse to dive for cover; what point, now?
So tired, he thought, raising the Holbars. One of the soldiers stood, black face dull grey in the overcast afternoon light.
"Black face?" Eric said, as the man shed his German helmet and stood, waving a rifle that was twin to the one in the Draka's arms. A vast white grin split his face as he leaped to earth. The rest of his lochos followed, spreading out and deploying past the two Draka toward the ruins and the sound of the guns.
The turret of the tank popped open, and another man stiff-armed himself out of the hatch. A Draka, thin, sandy-haired, with twin gold earrings and the falconer's-glove shoulderflash worn by Citizen officers commanding the Domination's serf soldiers.
"Hey, point that-there somewheres else," he railed. "This here a ruse, my man. A plot, a wile, a stratagem y'know." There were more vehicles behind the tank with its Liebstandarte markings, light eight-wheeled personnel carriers, Peltast-class.
"The Janissaries," Sofie said, in a voice thick with tears. "Oh, how I love the sight of their jungleboy faces." A warm presence at his side, and an arm about his waist, "And you, Eric."
"Me too, Sofie, me too," he said. The Holbars fell to earth with a clatter. "And, oh, gods, I want to sleep."
Shapes were coming down the road to the south, low broad tanks whose armor was all smooth acute slopes. A huge wedge-shaped turret pivoted, the long 120mm gun drooping until he could almost see the grooves spiraling up it; he could make out the unit blazon on the side of the turret, an armored gauntlet crushing a terrestrial globe in its fist: the Archonal Guard. A flash, the crack of the cannon a moment later. Clatter as the split halves of the light-metal sabot that had enfolded the APDS round fell to earth five meters beyond the muzzle; from down range a fractional second later the heavy chunnnk! of a tungsten-carbide penetrator slapping into armor.
We won, Eric thought, more conscious of the warm strong shoulders in the circle of his arm. It might be years, this was a big war, but nothing could stop them now. Victory.
Victory had the taste of tears.
* * * *
There were fifty members of Century A left, when the medics had taken the last of the seriously wounded; enough casualties were coming in from the direction of Pyatigorsk that walking-wounded would be left until there was spare transport to evacuate them all to the rear. The Ossetian Mili tary Highway was bearing a highway's load, an unending stream of Hond III tanks and Hoplite APC's, ammunition carriers and field ambulances and harried traffic coordinators. The peculiar burbling throb of turbocompound engines filled the air, and bulldozers were already working, piling rubble from the ruins of the village to be used for road repair when time permitted.
The noise was deafening, even inside the shattered remnants of the mosque, where walls still rose on three sides. Especially when the multiple rocket launchers of the Archonal Guard Legion cut loose from their positions in the fields just to the south, ripple-firing on their tracked carriages, painting the clouds above with streaks of violet fire like a silk curtain across the sky. The explosions of their 200mm warheads on the Fritz positions eight kilometers to the north echoed back, grumbling, from mountains shrouded in cloud like a surf of fire, glittering like sun on tropical spray, each shell paced with a score of submunitions, bomblets. Behind them came the deeper bark of the self-propelled 155mm gun-howitzers.
"I—" Eric began, looking around the circle of faces. There was no one there but his own people; they had taken the medical help and the rations and nobody had cared to intrude further. Or to object to Dreiser's presence.
"I—" he rubbed a hand over his face, rasping on the stubble, feeling an obscure shame at the grins that answered him. "Oh, shit, people, congratulations. We made it." A cheer, that he shouted down. "Shut up, I got the most of us killed!"
"Bullshit again, sir. That was the Fritz, near as I recall," said McWhirter, a splinted leg stretched out before him, leaning on his crutch. "You saw the job got done." More laughter, and he shook his head, turning away and wiping at his eyes.
"I'm turning into a fuckin' sentimentalist, Bill," he said. The American shut his notebook with a snap and stood.
"Not likely, Eric," he said, and extended his hand. "And my thanks, too. For what will be the story of a lifetime if I'm lucky!" More seriously: "It's time I went home, I think. I have things to do; but I won't forget, even if we have to be enemies someday."
"We may," said Eric quietly, gripping his hand. "But I won't forget either. If only because this is the place where I learned I have things to do, as well." He glanced over at Sofie, smoking a cigarrette and leaning against the scrap of wall. She met his eye, winked, blew a kiss. "Other reasons as well, but that mainly."
"Things to do?" Dreiser said, carefully controlling eagerness. He had more than a reporter's curiosity, he admitted to himself. Eric's face was different; not softer but… more animated, somehow.
"I'm going to write those books we talked about, Bill. Got a more defnite idea of them now. Also…" he drew on his own cigarette "… I've about decided to go into politics, after the war."
"Good!" Dreiser clapped him on the shoulder. "With someone like you in charge, there could be some much-needed changes in this Domination of yours."
Eric stared at him for a moment, then burst into laughter, fisting him lightly on the shoulder. "Don't look so astonished, my friend; I was just reflecting on how… how American that was. How American yo're, under that reporter's cynicism you put on."
Slightly nettled, the correspondent raised a brow.
"How much of a believer in 'Progress'," Eric amplified, his face growing more serious. "An individualist, a meliorist, an optimist, a moralist; someone who doesn't really
believe that History can happen to them…" Another flight of rockets went overhead, cutting off all conversation for the ninety seconds the salvo took to launch. Eric von Shrakenberg propped a foot on the tumbled stone of the mosque and leaned on his knee, watching the armored fist of the Domination punching northward; the turrets of the tanks turning with a blind, mechanical eagerness, infantry standing in the open hatches of their carriers. The noise sank back to bearable levels.
"Which shows me how much of a Draka I am. A believer in the ultimate importance of what you Will; that what life is about is the achievement of honor through the fulfillment of duty." He smiled again, affection rather than amusement, the expression turned slightly sinister by the yellowing green of his bruises. "I always loved my people, Bill; enough to die for them. Now, well, I ve found more to like about them. Enough to work and live for them, if I can.
"Bill—" his hand tightened on his knee, "nothing is inevitable. The Draka have always been a hard people; we're a nation of masters, oppressors, if you will. But it's a human evil, limited by what human beings can do. I've tried to look into our future, Bill; I've seen… possibilities that even Security's headhunters would puke at, if they had the imagination. Read Naldorssen again someday, only imagine a science that could make her ravings something close to reality." He made a grimace of distaste. "It doesn't have to be that way."
Dreiser frowned. "Like I said, Eric: changes."
"Oh, Bill." The Draka crushed his cigarette out underfoot. " To desire the end is to desire the means: if you are not prepared to do what is necessary to achieve it, you never wanted it at all.' That's a Draka philosophy I believe in. To have any chance at prominence at all, I'll have to gain my people's respect in the way they understand. Doin'… questionable things." His face went hard, and a hand chopped out over the village, to a fragment of wall that stood forlornly upright. "This! It isn't enough to be willing to die for my people, I have to be willing to kill for them. It's what they know an' respect.
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