by Tom Kratman
Occasionally, they found something. This something was then subjected to the most minute scrutiny. Parallels were drawn, analogies made, judgments rendered. By the time the something was sent in the form of useable information, more often than not it was too old to be of use. Almost as often, the something found was found in a populated area where it could not be engaged by any heavy or indiscriminate firepower; so bad an image would that make on the evening news.
Yet it was not all in vain. From time to time an image would show something interesting, other images would confirm, orders would ring out and a small patch of Terra Nova’s surface would be scoured of life. Sometimes.
Below the satellites, below the aircraft, far below the headquarters that collected so many images, small groups of men crept through jungle, walked nervously through savanna. Sometimes they did so in response to information given them from on high, even though they knew that, often enough, this would have long gone stale. More often the small groups of men hunted for information—targets—for themselves.
Usually, the hunting was in vain. Metal they could find…often. Heat signatures were all too plentiful and all too often in the wrong place. Photo images might well show the face of an enemy, or of an ally, or of a neutral. Few heat signatures could definitively tell the difference between a group of men and a herd of large animals. No method, none, could look inside the human mind and heart.
Chapter Fifteen
Despite the hopes expressed by observers like Betty Friedan—who assured readers of her The Second Stage that women warriors would, as women, have more sensitive concern for life than do male warriors, hence would be a force for caution and against brutality in any future war—such sentimentalism strains credulity.
—Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War
You cannot qualify war in terms harsher than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out.
—William Tecumseh Sherman, to the Mayor of Atlanta
The light of three moons filtered through the firing port over Marta’s head. She looked old beyond her years, weary beyond the ability of any amount of sleep to cure, and thinner than Maria had seen her since she’d resigned from Cazador School. With her eyes closed, one hand lightly holding her rifle to her thigh, her rear end on a firing step and her back against the rough-hewn logs of the bunker, she said, “Thank God the Taurans won’t let the Zhong use any real mines. We’d never have gotten away if they did.”
“Rough night?” Maria asked, just as if most of the nights weren’t rough.
“No words,” Marta answered. “Just no fucking words.”
“Find some,” Maria ordered, more harshly than she felt.
Eyes still closed, Marta nodded. She knew Maria needed every scrap of operational information that could be found.
“They’ve started putting up wire,” Marta said. “Long barriers. I think they intend to cut our area into sections then sanitize those sections in sequence. We ran into one we didn’t expect—it wasn’t there yesterday—and cut our way through rather than go to the ends that they might be watching.
“About two kilometers past where we cut through, we ended up in a running firefight with one of their patrols. Chance thing; they weren’t expecting us and we weren’t really expecting them. They didn’t hit any of us and I kind of doubt we hit any of them. But I figured we’d better run for it.
“ ’Course, I didn’t try to escape through the same section we cut through; I found a different place. But if it hadn’t been wire, if it had been a minefield, we’d have stumbled into it before we even knew it was there.”
“Lose anybody?” Maria asked.
Marta opened her eyes, though they stayed unfocused and her head still rested on the logs behind her. “No,” she said, “but the wire’s a new kind, more like razor-sharp metal tape. Arias cut the crap out of her hand on it. Goes right through leather gloves. Nasty shit.”
“Ya done good, Marta,” Maria said. “Go get some sleep.”
Marta didn’t answer except to nod. She closed her eyes again, let her chin fall, and in a moment was softly snoring.
How do I use this? Maria wondered. How do I keep them from using the wire to separate and pen us up? Mines watch themselves to a degree. Wire they’re going to have to put people to watching. I foresee a lot of work for Zuli in the coming weeks and months. And—I think—the wire’s going to let us know where they’ll have small teams out on their own, but stationary, where we can destroy them.
Then, too, wire can be cut. So it has to be checked. That means men walking the line of the stuff. That makes it almost as much of a burden as an asset. And maybe we can make it more so.
* * *
From the crest of a hill, from the progressivine-fringed edge of a copse atop that hill, and not so far from where some of the enemy’s wire made a dog leg, Sergeant Ponce, the engineer, watched through binoculars as the enemy helicopter touched down. It was the fourth time she’d seen it do so in her field of view. The intervening trees and hill made it impossible to tell whether any troops had been dropped off at any given one of the touchdowns.
It was the same basic model the legion used, a Volgan IM-71. The legion had bought its helicopters; the Zhong pirated the design and built their own.
Zhong are little folks, Ponce thought, even smaller than us. They could have had forty men packed into that thing and have dropped off ten at each touch down. And if they have, I’ve no way to tell.
She consulted her map. I think they’re not really looking for us. I think it’s a wire inspection detail. That matches the touch downs…pretty well, anyway. So where are they going to check…?
Ponce slithered back through the vines into the copse, to where she’d left the three women with her. Each of them, and Ponce herself, had a directional antipersonnel mine in her pack. These things resembled nothing so much as very shallow buckets—or saucepans with inverted covers—with straplike handles that, with the attached spike, could be used to aim them or to affix them to trees.
“Get the mines out, girls,” Ponce ordered. “We’re going to do a little wire integrity team discouragement.”
Two hours later, when one of the Zhong squads dropped off by the helicopter had an unfortunate incident with four directional mines, Ponce and her girls were sharing an unpleasantly warm beer in a bunker, three kilometers away.
* * *
“Who’s out there?” Marta asked. “There” was a patch of mixed rain forest and savannah over which three Zhong helicopter gunships—maybe working in conjunction with some of their infantry—were trying to flush some of the guerillas out of hiding to the open where they could be killed.
The gunships were working like an oversized team of raptors, two circling overhead while one searched out the floor with noise and fire.
“Lola Saavedra and her fire team,” Sergeant Ponce answered. “Assuming they’re still alive.”
Marta reached out and pushed some tall grass out of the way. Too far for naked eyes, she thought, rolling to her side to take out a compact pair of binoculars. Or even the integral scope on the F-26. Holding her hands cupped over the lenses to reduce the chance of glare or flash giving her position away, she scanned left to right, looking for the team under attack. Finding nothing that way, she thought, But if the Zhong are firing, they, at least, think they know where the girls are. Or might be.
She adjusted her aim, concentrating on the areas where rocket and cannon fire occasionally lashed down. Nothing.
“Eleven o’clock,” Ponce announced in a dead voice. The sound coming from the hunting gunships changed slightly in pitch. Marta shifted her view again.
“Shit,” Marta said. In her view one of the girls—she was certain it was Saavedra herself—had broken from cover and was running, weaponless and with rucksack abandoned, across an open area for a thicker section of trees on the far side. The woman’s mouth was open and her eyes wide with s
heer terror.
Marta looked up and saw that one of the circling helicopters had come down and was swinging to line up with Saavedra’s break for safety. She thought she could see the Zhong pilot’s toothy grin, even through the glare of the windscreen.
“Run, Lola, run,” she whispered, shifted her binos down to where her Amazon footraced for her life. For a moment, Saavedra had her face turned away, toward the pursuing helicopter. She didn’t seem to slow even though she need to see where she was going, which was something in her power, a lot more than she needed to see what was coming to kill her, which was outside of her ability to influence.
“Watch where you’re going,” Marta said, softly. “Watch where…shit.”
Twin puffs of smoke bloomed from pods slung under the gunship’s pylons. Mere moments later, the ground behind Saavedra erupted with two blasts from high explosives. Predictably, between not watching where she was going, and the shock of the explosions close behind, the Amazon tripped and fell. She rolled and was up in a moment, this time with her head and eyes firmly fixed to her path. Two more explosions went off close behind her, this time close enough to knock her down on their own. Saavedra managed to get back up to her knees and one hand.
Marta could have sworn the woman was looking right at her at the moment half a dozen rockets impacted all around her, swallowing both her image and her life in a storm of fire, smoke, and hot pieces of flying steel. Past her, at the far treeline, Marta made out faint images of Zhong infantry beginning to emerge.
“Shit!”
* * *
“I’d rather dance ballet on and around their booby traps,” Marta said, later on, back at camp.
“Your tits are too big to dance ballet,” Maria answered, not unreasonably.
Marta ignored the jibe, continuing her rant, “I’d rather crawl through a field of their homemade mines, with snipers and artillery zeroing in, than have one of those things on my ass.
“Saavedra was looking at me, Maria. She was looking right at me when they engulfed her.”
Which is probably what’s really bothering her, Maria thought. That’s a pretty intense and personal experience.
Truthfully, it’s getting to where my women’s almost sole relief from fear is when they’re in one of the refugee camps. Then the gunships can’t tell the difference between the civilians and the soldiers. And, while they’ve demonstrated a certain ruthlessness with regard to civilian casualties, at least when the Taurans aren’t looking, ordnance is expensive and they don’t seem to like wasting it too often.
True, sometimes if we’re in one of the deeper shelters the enemy almost never seems to have a clue. But moving from place to place, where no civilian ought to be, at night? That’s just become an invitation to be collanderized.
And sure, we fight back with our light antiaircraft missiles; small arms, too, if the gunships come low enough. The gunships, though, seem to be able to take a fair amount of damage. The best we can hope for is to drive them away, temporarily. We’ve never actually shot one down.
Still, the damage builds up, when we manage to inflict some. Also, there are only so many of the aircraft for a fairly large area. We’ve got a partisan war raging over more than fifteen thousand square miles. A few dozen airplanes and about three times as many helicopters aren’t too many for such an area. From the Zhong’s point of view, I’m sure, they’re never even enough. This is especially true given that each one spends a fair amount of time—many hours—in a maintenance hangar for every hour spent hunting us. And my women drive up the amount of time in maintenance dramatically every time we get a couple of hits on one, too.
Thank God, I’ve got properly trained—which is to say irrational—troops who will accept the considerable personal danger involved in taking on an aircraft with rifles for something that’s really very unlikely to bring any immediate personal benefit.
Maria knew how to get her friend out of her funk. “Since you don’t seem too worried about the mines and snipers, Marta…”
“I would rather have none, thank you, Maria,” Marta answered, sensing what would have been coming. “The only good thing I can see is that the gunships can be dangerous to both sides. Zuli told me that she found some bodies while leading a patrol. She said there were about four enemy troops that had been shot up something awful by the old mill down by the Rio Tetona.”
“About?”
“Yeah. Her exact fucking word. ‘About.’ That’s how bad they’d been hit. She just couldn’t tell. No way we could have done it, not that kind of butchering. She thought she should leave the weapons and equipment alone so that the enemy would have no doubt but that we hadn’t done it. I sent her to drop a message to the enemy as to where they could find the bodies.” Marta paused. “Maria?”
“Yes.”
Her voice held terror. “No shit; those things really scare me; the gunships, I mean.”
Maria patted Marta’s cheek and answered, “I know. Me, too.” And still, it’s an ill whore that blows nobody any good. I wonder if…
* * *
“Why this encampment?” Zuli asked Colonel Nguyen, who had volunteered to lead the mission. A small loudspeaker hung by the old Cochinese’s side. The moons shone down big and bright, though the light of one of them was diffused by an intervening cloud. There was expectation of rain later on in the evening.
“Every revolution…” Nguyen said, “is people…on other side. Inform. Report. Help enemy. We gots…you women gots…nobody this place…your side. Don’t know why. Seen over, maybe. No, that not right.” Nguyen thought for a moment and then said, “Oversight. Is oversight.”
“So?” Zuli asked.
“Is way to fix enemies of revolution…enemies of people.”
“You’re the boss,” Zulucinda agreed, white teeth shining in a serious black face. “What now?”
“Now we wait. Keep girls out…spread. Umm…spread out. Rain start. I lead. You follow. Bring everybody. Bring big gun.”
* * *
The rain was pouring down as Nguyen led off, his sprightly steps belying his age. Behind him came five of the eleven infantry Amazons with Zuli, then the twin 23mm antiaircraft gun with its four-girl crew, a light mortar with three women and a mule, and then the other half of the infantry. The antiaircraft gun, drawn by a mule on its vestigial wheels, clattered and clinked slightly, but not enough to be heard over the rain. They entered the encampment by a side trail, avoiding the Zhong checkpoint at the main one.
Zuli slung her .34 caliber rifle, drew her dirk, and whispered to another woman, “Follow me.” Nguyen nodded approval as he saw the shapes, one tall and black, the other short and brown, disappear into the wet darkness.
Nguyen pointed at a barely visible elevation and said to the corporal in charge of the gun, “You, set up there. Point south. Hide with tree cuts.” He looked at the tiny mortar crew but said nothing as they were already setting up in the center of the encampment. “Rest girls, surround camp.”
Zuli came back, wiping her dirk on her trouser leg. She towered over the diminutive Cochinese. “The guards are dead,” she said, matter-of-factly. “So are their replacements. The whole undisciplined rabble of a crew was asleep.”
“Is good. Now wait.”
* * *
As the sun arose, the rain began to lessen and then to cease altogether. There was a thick fog rising in the valley between the encampment and the nearest group of Zhong, a large platoon or small company under ponchos on the other side, perhaps two and a half kilometers away.
Nguyen handed over his loudspeaker to Zuli and said, “Now. Do what planned.”
Zuli nodded and turned the volume on the loudspeaker down to a fairly low setting. Then she lifted the microphone to her mouth, and shouted, “All right you bastard enemies of the people; out of your tents and huts. NOW!”
I like this girl, Nguyen thought. She’s got the right words for the occasion.
As the civilians came stumbling out, many rubbing at their eyes with sleepin
ess, the women surrounding the camp arose from the ground and, rifles across chests, directed any who might have tried to run back to the center of the camp. Then the Amazons on the perimeter began to push inward, herding the people into a mass.
“Separate out the children,” Zuli ordered. Once this was done she had four of her women lead the children off, through the fog to the sanctuary of the jungle. Some of the mothers tried to follow but Zuli was having none of that; the older children had to carry the babies.
To the adults, Zuli said, “Into the holes we had you dig.”
The Amazons kept the parents in the camp, in their holes, at gunpoint while Nguyen waited.
When the sun was fully up, but not very high in the sky, Nguyen pointed at the corporal leading the mortar crew. She immediately bellowed, “Hang it!”
One of the others lifted a mortar round and placed the finned tail over the muzzle, holding it there with her hands.
“Fire! Continuous fire.”
They managed to kachunk out a dozen rounds before the first one hit. It exploded up in the tree, above the poncho-sheltered Zhong. Even at this distance, and even over the sounds of the outgoing shells and their terminal explosions, the women could hear voices raised in consternation intermixed with screams of fright and pain coming from their enemies.
“Slow; fire slow,” Nguyen ordered. “We’s gots them’s attention. No want lose.” Zuli passed the order to the mortar crew who dropped down to a sustainable rate of five rounds a minute. Even so, the remainder of the thirty-six shells they’d already sent flying continued to drop about every other second for the next minute.
“There,” Zuli pointed. In the distance, sun glinting on glass, were two aerial flashes that told of approaching helicopters.
“Fire all left round,” Nguyen said. “Quick-quick. Use up and mortar girls run.” The rate of fire went up again to something approaching the maximum.
After another fifty or so blasts, the mortar went silent. The women on the crew began to disassemble it until Zuli’s shout reminded them, “Skip the fucking mortar. We’ve got plenty. Just go.”
