by Tom Kratman
* * *
Zamora could still function, if not so well, the next day and the next. A scout reported to her concerning what the mortar shells had done at the camp.
“Where did this information come from?”
The scout answered, “From some civilians who fled it. It seems that three of the camp’s new inhabitants—all women, the civilians were positive on that—anyway, three of them rushed one of the guard positions with sticks in their hands and killed the occupants. Then they took over a machine gun and tried to engage the rest of the guards. They shouted out for the refugees to flee, that this was a rescue by the legion. The refugees fled en masse, not to be rescued, I suppose, but to avoid being killed. The camp’s guards—some of them—panicked and opened fire, killing a fair number of the civilians. All the refugees swamped the wire then, running for their lives. Our sisters died well, I was told.”
Zamora noticed a funny thing, thereafter, for certain very odd values of “funny.” Between the mortar crew and the enemy guards who’d panicked, so the scout said, one hundred and seventy-one refugees had been killed. That was about twenty civilians for each member of the mortar crew. Nor did the mortar crew actually kill any Zhong soldiers or Gallic Gendarmerie themselves. Curiously, they aren’t overmuch bothered by what they had to do. The girls in the ambush, on the other hand, killed maybe a half a dozen Gendarmerie and no more than three civilians each, yet are emotionally devastated and look like they’ll stay that way for a long time.
Fascinating concept, morality as a function of what you see rather than of what you do. Perhaps that was how enemy pilots are able to sleep at night. I wish I could sleep at night. Why must we always become just like what we fight?
Of course, she had them all on her conscience. Nguyen noticed the next morning.
“Snap out of it, Tribune,” he ordered with his quaint, almost French, accent, after he had stopped by Zamora’s bunker and caught her crying.
“It’s just so…so…damned sickening, sir.”
He didn’t, quite, sneer. “Terror make sick, yes?”
“Yes…sir.”
Nguyen took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. “Tribune Zamora…you young. So listen older, maybe wiser, man. All armies terror use. Anyone use weapons that hurt, kill, any army still issue bayonet, terror use. It is, always been, always be, primary instrument war.”
“But not on civilians,” she cried.
“Ah.” Nguyen shook his head. “That nonsense.”
“If we do these things, we’re no better than they are. We’re no better than the Salafi Ikhwan.”
“More nonsense,” Nguyen said, heatedly. “Double nonsense. You fall in same trap as Salafis.”
Zamora didn’t understand and said so.
“How big Salafi, when at biggest? Tiny, yes? How often they really risk lives? Rare, yes? Why? They cause, it have no support. That why tiny; that why don’t take real risks. Because have faint support, these peoples, they never win. So, all suffering they cause? It wasted. Pure waste. Wrong. Immoral.
“Now you peoples, you gots support. You fight, you risk, you lose friends. You do this can, because you support have. You use terror, with righteous, because you win, eventually. End justify harm, justify terror.”
“The ends do not justify the means,” Zamora protested.
“No? Then what they justify?”
Interlude
There are many ways of gathering and transmitting important information. Little Balboa had no spacecraft or satellites. It had no high altitude aircraft. It had few really sophisticated sensors.
It had a lot of eyes. Deep behind Tauran lines, in the south along the Transitway, between the bleeding edge of the battle and the port of Cristobal—still held, barely, by Fourth Marine Legion—small teams of Cazadors waited underground. They emerged but rarely, and then, more often than not, merely to confirm that no enemy were in their area. Sometimes, they emerged to find there were enemies in their area. Often those teams did not make it back into hiding. This, too, was information of a sort. This information, in itself useless, became priceless when matched against the reports, and failure to report, of dozens of other teams. In the constricted area between the Port of Cristobal and the line of defense built along the Gamboa River, the knowledge of where the enemy was not was the same as the knowledge of where he was.
Sometimes the reports came by remote radio. At least as often they came by courier pigeon.
On a huge map, the positions of the Tauran Union forces had been plotted with commendable accuracy. Carrera knew where they were because he knew where they were not.
Still, Carrera looked at the map as if willing it to yield more information than it could. So intent was he that he didn’t notice when Parilla entered the huge war room.
“Patricio? Patricio! Are we ready?”
So intent was Carrera on the map that it took him a moment to realize someone was talking to him. He turned his face away from the wall and answered, “Hm? Oh, excuse me, Raul. Almost.”
“Almost?”
“The guns are in position. Since the island has held, the legions have long since been shifted to the north. We are paying a high price to make the enemy deploy along the Gamboa the way we want him to. Still, they are conforming. Jimenez in Cristobal awaits the order. Our three Q-ships are ready to enter the Shimmering Sea. The Air Defense Brigade is straining at the bit to shoot back. Only one thing remains.”
“The diversion?”
“Yes…that.”
“You don’t want to do it, do you?”
“Frankly…no.”
“But you will do it.”
“Yes. Of course. Damn me.”
“When?”
“Very soon.”
Chapter Sixteen
Scientific vivisection of one nerve ’til it is raw
And the victim writhes with anguish like the Jesuit with the squaw.
—Kipling, “The Female of the Species”
Maria:
Right after that, they stopped trying to clear the civilians out of the way so they could get at us. It wasn’t because of those Gendarmerie we killed, nor even because they were overly concerned with civilian life in general. Rather, I think it was that the civilians themselves refused to be moved.
I didn’t see it, but I was told that the next time the Taurans and Zhong tried to relocate a camp, all of the people just sat down and refused to budge. Some TV news type was present. She’d probably been expecting some such thing, some kind of refusal, after the ambush of the truck convoy and the mortaring of the big camp.
Maybe if she hadn’t been there the enemy would actually have used their weapons on the civilians to force them to move. I don’t know, but I think they would have. They threatened to, for certain. I do know that when those people were forcibly picked up and put on the trucks, they got off again once they were set down. And, despite threats, the Zhong wouldn’t shoot; at least not with that camera going they wouldn’t.
It was about that time that the enemy stopped really trying to hunt us on the ground. Whether that was because their commanders were taking heat for the casualties they had suffered, because of a change in their strategic plans, or because they just didn’t see the point anymore, I haven’t a clue.
Even the small patrols they sent out didn’t have the fighting heart they’d once shown. Oh, sure, sometimes they’d really try. But, as often as not, they would find some spot where it was extremely unlikely to run into us, then hunker down for the night. They were, in plain words, playing it safe. We went after those bolder enemy squads with a vengeance when we could. Call it reinforcement training.
And if they did a sweep, they did it in maniple strength, nothing less. Sometimes they swooped in on our area with what looked like a whole battalion. It was kind of flattering, in a way. It sure wasn’t very dangerous for us. Did you ever try to move a maniple quietly, through the jungle, at night, less still a cohort? We just avoided them.
But if they’d giv
en up on the ground, their flyboys hadn’t given up from the air. No, they were no better at finding us now than they had been before. I don’t think they were really trying for us, however. Any target that showed up in a thermal sight at night would do. The more targets, the smaller the area, the better.
The refugee camps took it hard. Some people began moving away from them. Some, if they could avoid us, started defecting to the enemy’s camp. Most didn’t, however. After all, Zuli had mostly recovered from her wounds.
* * *
We began seeing strange devices in unlikely spots.
“Sniffers,” Colonel Nguyen announced, with some disdain. “Seismic detectors.” The former, he explained, sampled the air for traces of human beings. Going to the bathroom had just become a dangerous enterprise. Urine and feces were the chemical traces they were most likely to pick up, he said, though we’d have to watch for smoke, insect repellent, anything both strong and volatile. Antania breath would do in a pinch. Though catching the nasty little bastards…blech.
The latter detected any kind of foot or vehicular traffic by the energy transmitted through the ground. Beating those involved us manufacturing…well, have you ever seen the little devices where the wing turns a windmill and the windmill makes a tiny wooden man pound a tiny wooden hammer onto a tiny wooden anvil? We made a simplified version of those we called “thumpers.” Then we placed them everywhere there was an acoustic sensor that we could find or that we used frequently as a route.
The danger lasted for maybe two days. That was how long it took us to place the thumpers and randomly place kerosene-, urine- and feces-soaked rags all over the area. For fun, once, we put a bunch of them in a deeply wooded place where there were no civilians or troops. We also made a dozen little firepits that we put on time delay fuses. We carried in some large chunks of metal as well. Then we went to a hill a couple of miles away to watch the festivities. We didn’t have any popcorn for the show and so made do with canned shoug and foil-wrapped chorley.
It began with artillery fire. Then came the jets and gunships, more artillery, napalm…the works.
I later heard that the Zhong reported an estimated one hundred twenty “terrorists” killed.
I had actually had one of my troopers suffer a sprained ankle from stepping in a hole…as we were leaving.
* * *
Remember all those extra weapons and supplies we’d been given early on? I started to have a use for them. The more the Taurans bombed on or near the camps; the more the civilians were endangered, hurt or killed; the more of them decided that maybe they ought to support us in an active way. In a roundabout way, the enemy was forcing us into becoming more of the democracy they claimed we were not. The roll of potential voting citizens was going up rather faster than casualty figures were dropping it; at least in my area they were.
With all these new replacements—including the tiniest dribble sent to us now from our Gorgidas training maniple—I split up my platoon to provide cadres. Not that there was much left of it, even including the few Cazadors remaining. One squad and half the mortar crews I kept with me, out in the brush. The rest I split up, one Amazon or Cazador for every two or three camps.
“Teach them to defend themselves,” I said, passing out extra rifles to the troops.
“Train them to fight,” I said, passing out cases of ammunition. “But don’t have them do it much. Run away if the enemy gets close.
“Make lots of booby traps. Plant many mines,” I said, when I broke into the caches of explosives and detonators. “And don’t forget the foot traps Madam Nguyen showed us about.
“And dig in!”
Of course, the more the camps began to look like military sites, or moved to get away from the bombing, the more they became targets. But, then again, the more they became targets, the more people went to my girls and boys and asked to be enrolled and armed. I think it more than evened out.
For the Zhong, though, and the Gallic Gendarmerie, it rapidly became a nightmare. When this had all started they could have been reasonably sure of someone taking a shot at any given group of them every few days. They could be sure, as well, that the shots would be aimed by someone who knew how to shoot. Usually no one would get hit, of course, unless it was Zuli pulling the trigger. Usually no one does. But they’d have to duck anyway.
The percentage of people who really could shoot had dropped. That didn’t mean anything, though, because the number of people shooting had gone through the roof. I’d passed out over three hundred rifles, mostly older, more primitive ones and sundry captures, to willing hands. They were untrained hands, to be sure, but could the enemy know that? No. They had to treat every shot fired at them as if Zuli were behind the rifle stock. Which, sometimes, she was.
Bang. They dive for the ground. I couldn’t speak the language, but I knew what they were saying: “Anybody hit?” “Hell no, but if blood were brown we’d all have medals.” “Where the fuck did it come from, Sarge?” “C’mon. C’mon, soldier boys. Back on your feet. Get moving. We haven’t got all day.” “Fuck that! I signed up for college money and to pass out free food to Uhurans. I sure didn’t sign up to get shot! Besides, I’ve got my stress card right here.” Whisper, whisper, from the sergeant to the private. They’re back on their feet, start to shuffle forward a few meters.
Bang.
You can have a lot of fun doing this sort of thing. And nobody gets hurt, usually.
Sometimes though, they do, and not always the ones you might want to see hurt.
I was shadowing a Zhong maniple once, for a couple of days, careful to keep myself and the girls with me at a safe distance. Don’t look askance, they outnumbered us about twenty-five to one.
This maniple was having a tough time of it. They’d come in by helicopter to a landing zone about four kilometers from a medium-sized refugee camp, established a quick perimeter defense, then collapsed that and taken off into the woods. They were moving through an area where our control of the population was solid; most of the people had already signed on with us, at least for part-time work. A number, maybe a half a percent or so, had volunteered for active service. We hadn’t had time to train them worth a damn, of course, but they had already gone a long way toward making the area a nightmare of booby traps and mines.
This poor enemy maniple had no idea what it was getting into. The first warning they had was when one of their troops set off a directional mine, one of the Volgan jobs we used. From the little brush-covered hill from which I was watching I saw one unfortunate boy’s legs torn off. Another one behind him took what must have been about two hundred chunks of steel cylinders through the chest and belly. The last one lost his eyes and face. Only the second one was given the mercy of dying quickly. The other two just screamed and screamed while their overworked medic tried to do something, anything, to help. It made me wince to hear it, and I was responsible for it.
That maniple halted for the ten minutes of shrieking before a medical helicopter could be brought in to evacuate the two wounded, then another five for a second chopper—this one without Red Cross markings—to take out the body. When one of my girls asked me if she should shoot up the second helicopter I shook my head “no” even though we had a fair chance of damaging it from where we watched.
The Taurans hadn’t been moving another ten minutes before someone shouted out a pained cry for help. I hadn’t heard any explosion so I guessed he’d run into one of the staked foot traps we’d taught the refugees to make. Those things were sickening. We’d dig a small hole then put in a barbed stake pointing straight up from the bottom. From the sides we’d put in two more stakes, those ones also barbed. Then we poured in something nasty, usually bolshiberry or progressivine juice, but sometimes it was human shit, to cause infection, and camouflaged the hole.
When somebody stepped into the hole one of a few things could be expected to happen. Sometimes they’d break or twist an ankle. That wasn’t so bad for them. Slightly more often the stake pointing straight up would
go through the sole of the boot and right through the foot. Sometimes it slid off the sole and went into the calf. Even if the enemy soldier didn’t do either of those things, unless he was very careful pulling his foot out the two stakes pointing down would impale his calf or ankle. If the poor bastard actually managed to impale his foot and then tried to pull it out of the hole quickly, he’d end up with three wounds, all of them agonizing—lots of nerve endings in the human extremities—and no good way to get out of the trap.
Sometimes we’d booby trap the pit with a grenade, directional mine or other explosive device so that even if the guy got his foot out he’d die anyway, usually taking a friend or several with him.
It took even longer this time for a helicopter to get the wounded man out.
When the Zhong maniple began to move again, this time almost all their eyes were on the ground and the trees. They really weren’t looking for us anymore. I took the chance and began to follow just a bit closer. I could, because I had someone—a young boy—from the nearby refugee camp to guide us around the mines and traps.
The next thing they hit was a mortar shell that had been hung from a high tree. Somebody pulled a wire, probably with his foot, releasing the shell. He shouted a warning to the others while diving to the ground himself. They all hit the ground in time—nobody was even scratched that I could see—but they were pretty shaken up by the whole thing.
Normally a mortar shell won’t explode unless it’s been armed by that tremendous kick in the pants from being fired out of a mortar. We’d played around with the fuses for these shells, however.
The enemy might have made as much as a kilometer of progress by nightfall. I didn’t risk trying to ruin their sleep. One never knew when a gunship might be loitering out of hearing.
