The Amazon Legion-ARC

by Tom Kratman

  “Maria, the XO tells me that the artillery is about as neutralized as it’s going to get. She said that reinforcements are pouring in by air and the Cazadors are not holding them. She’ll be lucky to get away at all if she waits much longer. You’ve got to go in now!”

  “Incoming!” Again they pressed themselves to earth to avoid the deadly flying splinters.

  Maria lifted her head very slightly and shouted to Zamora over the mortar blasts, “Are you out of your fucking mind? I can’t order my girls into that!”

  “It’s now or never, Maria. You’ve got to go!” She thought what her position didn’t allow her to say. I’m so sorry, Maria, my friend.

  Maria, not dissimilarly, thought, Shit. Shit. Shit!

  “All right. All right!” Maria picked up a Yamatan radio, feeling herself step outside of herself as she did so.

  “Michele Six; Michele Six; this is Mother Superior, over.”

  The radio crackled back, “Michele Six, over.”

  “Fire your prep, over.”

  The words, “Shot, out,” barely preceded the faint distant crump of the Amazons’ own mortars, flinging their loads heavenward to fall onto the enemy camp by the town. Almost immediately, the Zhong mortar fire lifted.

  They’re back-plotting the flight of the shells to return fire on my mortars. Good luck and good-bye, Michele.

  It took maybe half a minute for Michele’s fires to start falling on the camp. Two mortars were playing over the enemy tents in the center, two more were flailing the bunkers nearest to Maria and Cristina. The last pair walked white phosphorus from left to right to lay a blanket of smoke between the assault line and the enemy riflemen and machine gunners. The mortars had been ordered to try to keep their fire away from the town.

  Maria rolled over onto her back and shouted to two otherwise useless boys from the Fourteenth to start the illumination. These began popping off hand-held flares as fast as they could. Some were green, some white. Together with the explosions and the smoke the flares lent the landscape a very surreal quality, all bizarre shapes and flickering shadows.

  The flares were the signal to begin the assault. Maria hadn’t worried overmuch about the Zhong or the Gendarmerie screwing things up by using flares themselves. They had so many very nice and expensive starlight scopes to see by, it was unlikely they would use flares that would only hurt them and help their attackers.

  To Maria’s right a brace of machine guns under Marta began to hammer through the smoke screen at the bunkers beyond. They couldn’t see anything, of course, but they hoped to make the enemy nervous enough to aim high or wide. That was the theory, anyway. Maria heard Marta’s voice over the racket. “Come on, murder the bastards! Mátalos!”

  Into the radio, Maria said simply, “Breach team in.”

  A dozen men from the Fourteenth began loping forward, sections of what appeared to be very heavy poles clutched in their hands.

  Maria watched the men, half expectantly, half fretfully. She’d had to use men for this job as the bangalore torpedoes they were going to use to blow a hole through the Zhong wire were too heavy for all but the very biggest and strongest of her Amazonas, her combat engineers. She needed those women for something else.

  Marta had objected earlier that the men weren’t reliable enough for the job, that the Amazon engineers should do it; breach the wire.

  “It takes more—pardon the expression—sheer balls to do what I need those women for than the bulk of the Cazadors can muster anymore,” Maria had answered.

  Most of the Cazadors made it to the first concertina fence unscathed, though an unlucky burst cut down two of them. One of those screamed for help but had to be ignored for the moment.

  Splitting into two groups, the Cazadors lay on their bellies at the wire and began joining the explosive sections and feeding the assembly forward under it. The whole time they lay there Zhong machine gun fire chattered only a foot or less over their heads.

  Maria had figured on four sections of torpedo being enough to cut one lane through one concertina fence. There were three fences to get though, two lanes each. The dozen men carried four torpedo sections each, each section of about ten kilograms. She’d wanted a little extra, just in case. And if the bangalores weren’t needed to make it though the wire? They made pretty good general purpose demolition charges.

  Little Robles—the sixteen-year-old sergeant—shouted, “Fire in the hole!” three times.

  Everyone in the attack force, men and women, both, scrunched down against the blast. Shortly after it came, dirt, rocks and bits of wire pattered down on them.

  Maria looked up even as the stuff was falling to see Robles shoving men forward through the breaches they’d made.

  The first set of breaches was the signal for the rest of the assault party to begin moving forward. They moved up by short rushes and hops, not firing themselves much for fear of hitting the breach team. Some of the girls were hit even despite the short hops; random fire from the enemy. The rest continued on.

  Maria couldn’t make short, safe little rushes. For one thing, she had to be able to see what was going on. For another, the woman carrying the radio she was depending on to control the attack was too overburdened to keep getting up and down continuously.

  Again they heard “Fire in the hole!” three times from Robles. Even the radio operator had to duck for that. The twin blasts shook their bodies and rattled their brains.

  From behind, Zamora was calling out encouragement, “Forward, chicas. Forward.”

  Kneeling on one knee, Maria was trying to call the mortars to get them to shift fire when she heard, “Falcon! Falcon!” The shout became general. She looked up to see where the enemy aircraft were coming from and going to. Marta’s tracers pointed her view in the right general direction.

  One of the attacking aircraft, the highest above the ground, dropped a big flare, probably so the others could see what they were aiming at and to hell with their own side’s starlight scopes. The other aircraft went straight for Robles at the wire.

  Maria guessed, I suppose that they won’t want to cut the wire themselves. Damn. Napalm.

  The whole scene in front of her eyes suddenly lit up as bright as day, a long sheet of pure flame. One…person—she couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman anymore—ran directly towards her, screaming and dripping liquid fire, fingers clawing at face and eyes. He, or she, or it, dropped about fifty meters in front of Maria, still screaming, still burning. The attack abruptly stopped.

  Maria couldn’t take her eyes from the horrid sight until her RTO pulled her back to the ground, handing her the microphone and yelling, “It’s the mortars.”

  Michele Six—her name really was Michele—was half sobbing into her radio. In the background Maria heard what had to be mortar or artillery fire coming in a steady drumming.

  So much for Michele, at least for a while. The shelling of the camp abruptly stopped.

  * * *

  Can’t think. CAN’T think. Zamora saw the attack failing, knew it would fail unless someone made a breach in the wire…and soon.

  She looked about her for someone to order into the attack, someone who looked big and strong enough to move nearly one hundred pounds of explosive by hand. No one. Zamora’s gaze went to her own fairly beefy hand.

  Someone. She got up and ran forward.

  * * *

  Marta immediately noticed Zamora’s sprint. Oh, no. Cristina, if you die I will never forgive you.

  She began to tongue-lash her now silent and shocked machine gunners. “Can’t you see what the CO is doing, you dumb twats? Get some fire on those people.”

  She saw Zamora disappear into the smoke.

  * * *

  Zamora felt her gorge rise as she stumbled through the tangle of ripped wire, smoldering vegetation and charcoaled bodies. Through first one breach, then another, until finally she came upon a neat line of burned lumps in the rough shape of men. One of those lumps was small; Robles, age sixteen.

  F
or courage in face the face of the enemy above and beyond that normally expected of a soldier of the Republic, Zamora recited, as she pulled tubes of explosive from what must have once been hands. One such lump stuck to the bangalore, charred finger wrapped around the long, dark tube. When she had gathered four, as much as she could hope to carry, she stumbled and fell all the short—though seemingly endless—distance to where the breach was supposed to be but wasn’t. A series of hammer blows knocked her legs out from under her. Zamora fell.

  * * *

  Over the roar of battle Maria heard a voice crying out. It was Zamora, screaming, “Fire in the hole…fire in the hole…fire in the hole.” The last was very weak.

  The explosion that followed was not.

  Maria knew. She stood nearly straight up and began running forward. “Adelante las Amazonas!” Her girls must have heard her; they followed right enough. They’d fixed bayonets long before. These glinted in the flare- and flame-lit night as they surged ahead.

  Maria and her RTO ran straight forward. They couldn’t see a thing, what with the smoke from the white phosphorus, the demolitions, the napalm, and the burnt grass. They stopped abruptly, throwing themselves to the ground, when they saw three tracers streak across their path a few feet to their front.

  Which way is the breach? Which way is the breach? Maria had gotten so confused she couldn’t tell if it was to her left or right. The RTO didn’t know, either. Finally she flipped a mental coin and came up with “We’ll go right from here.” It was the right decision.

  When she found the breach she also found Vielka Arias and another girl crouching over a half-shredded Zamora. Zamora’s hands weren’t shaking and she looked perfectly calm, even detached. Maria knelt beside her.

  “Hello, Cristina,” she said.

  Zamora’s eyes shifted, lost focus, then gained it again. She looked up at Maria. “Not gonna make it, am I?”

  “I’ve seen you look better.”

  “It’s okay. I don’t want to make it. I don’t want any more nightmares. I don’t want any more sickness in my stomach. It’s okay.” She coughed up some blood, spat it away, and said, “Now go take this place.”

  Good-bye and God bless, Cristina. Maria bent over and smoothed Zamora’s hair away from her face, then lightly brushed the dying woman’s lips with her own. Then, reluctantly, she turned her attention back to the fight.

  I’ve got to find a way to signal my troops that the breach is here.

  The way stumbled upon her a couple of minutes later.

  The Amazons hadn’t had much use for pipers of late. For this occasion, though, Maria had foregone one rifle to put one of them back on her pipes. She told the piper, “Blow anything you please, but do it loud and do it now!” The piper did, the noise of her war pipes rising even above the firing and blasting. It was perhaps not the best rendition ever played of “Scots Wha Hae,” but it was heartfelt. More importantly, it worked.

  The first group to reach Maria at the breach were the remnants of the Cazadors, under the command of León.

  She looked at León and his men intently for a moment. Do they have any fight left in them? Yes!

  “All right, you crew,” Maria shouted, over the rattle of the battle and the din of the pipes. “Sergeant León, straight through the breach then strike right into the heart of the camp. I want you to get the tanks before their crews can man them. Destroy them if they’ve already been crewed. Then find and smash the enemy’s command post.”

  León nodded, dumbly, and led his men forward.

  As groups of old and new Amazons found the breach, Maria sent them left or right to clear the line of bunkers around the perimeter of the Zhong camp. She stayed near the breach itself trying to see what was going on and bring some order out of the mess. Some more enemy aircraft flew by but, since the Amazons were now in and among their compatriots, the planes didn’t attack.

  The air defense team fired a couple of missiles at them anyway. One, Maria thought, might have been a near enough miss to send one plane limping home. At least that plane turned off while the others moved up to a higher altitude.

  Marta led the machine guns to Maria. Her still substantial chest was heaving with the strain of sucking in enough oxygen to keep her body going. “Where now?”

  “Wait here,” Maria answered. “Catch your breath. Then head that way.” She pointed towards the general location of the enemy command post. “Support León and his apes.”

  Marta just nodded while trying to catch her breath. She hadn’t quite caught it yet when she ordered, “Follow me” and disappeared into the night, machine gun crews in tow.

  From the breach Maria could hear firing—and a lot of small explosions, probably grenades—to both her left and right, as well as to her front. I haven’t heard the big cannon from a tank yet, so maybe we’ve gotten lucky there. We’ll see.

  See? She couldn’t see much, beyond a bunch of burning tents and shacks…and bodies, of course; far too many of them hers. The two boys she’d had on the parachute flares must have run out because the sky overhead was clear of any lights. But for the flames and occasional explosions it had grown very dark. She pulled out those night vision goggles she’d captured seemingly so long ago, put them over her face and scanned.

  Maria saw them by the light they made themselves, four huge steel behemoths spitting flame on her right flank, rolling it up. The goggles flared out and went dark, then came on again.

  Over on the right the girls were trying…and dying, shot or smeared under half-meter-wide treads. They would have all been chopped but for one Amazon with an RGL who waited for the last tank to pass over or near her, then hopped up on the back deck. She fired her warhead right down onto the top of the turret. She was blown off, broken and dying. The tank stopped in its tracks.

  You made a good bargain for us, girl, one grunt for one tank.

  It just wasn’t the kind of bargain logical mathematics will teach one to make. “A rational army…”

  The other tankers must have been confused and frightened already. When the rearward tank died without the others knowing how, the remaining three simply pulled into a perimeter of their own, defying all comers, but not advancing any farther.

  Those Amazons remaining on the right, willing to live and let live for the moment, perhaps, found what cover they could and hunkered down. On the left the Amazons were clearing out the enemy bunkers one by one.

  Then the Cazadors got into it. One of their few survivors later admitted that when they’d seen the women under attack by the tanks they couldn’t help themselves; they just had to charge to the rescue.

  They didn’t rescue anyone. They were shot to pieces for no gain. Worse, they had been almost on top of the enemy command bunker when they’d turned around to “save” the women.

  Though in her own mind Maria was never sure if it was quite fair to say there was nothing gained from the men’s self immolation. The three tanks backed off a couple of hundred meters. That was worth something; if not enough. It certainly didn’t make up for the men’s not having taken out the command bunker or caught the tanks earlier.

  “Incoming!” Mierda. Maria threw herself to the ground for the hundredth time. The RTO was a little too slow, the inertia of the radio on her back keeping her upright a fraction of a second too long. A shell splinter took the top of her head off. Her body fell across Maria’s, pinning her to the ground briefly. Maria felt a sticky, lumpy wash of wet, nasty stuff all over her face and uniform. She started to shake and pray, feeling very tired.

  It was normal. Mind-numbing terror tires one out quickly.

  That was just an adjusting round, an unlucky chance shot. Maria visualized the satellite jammers and what sort of job they were doing on the enemy’s automated fire control system. She was pretty sure they were having to do things the old fashioned way. It was also a very slow way.

  A half dozen girls reported to her. Two of them carried monstrously heavy flamethrowers strapped to their backs. It was the engineer se
ction.

  Maria asked the senior—and largest—of them, “Sergeant Ponce,” an Amazon in fact as well as title, “do you believe in God, chica?”

  When Ponce answered, “Yes,” Maria added, “Then let’s hope he believes in us. Come on, ingenieras. Follow me!”

  The seven of them sprinted as fast as they could to the left. When they reached the point of the group clearing that side of the perimeter they halted.

  “There’s a set of four bunkers there, Centurion,” the squad leader gasped out. “We tried to take them but…I’ve lost four of my girls.”

  “Grenades?” Maria asked.

  “Can’t get close enough. We tried.” Her finger indicated several bodies that had not quite made it close enough to the bunkers to use grenades.

  The little subcomplex of bunkers was about twenty or twenty-five meters to the front. Maria ordered Ponce to, “Toast ’em.” Stabbing tongues of jellied flame licked out to saturate the firing ports of, and entrances to, the bunkers. The occupants began to scream. They were fear screams though, not pain screams. They lasted only until the fire had burned up all the oxygen in the bunkers. Then they died away.

  A few of the enemy tried to escape, maybe even to surrender. The women didn’t have time for that. They shot them down. Nobody who resists an assault, inflicting casualties right up to the last minute, can expect to be given a chance to surrender. It just doesn’t work that way.

  Maria told the left section leader to keep clearing ahead. With the engineers, she, herself, started to move into the center of the camp, toward the command bunker. They had to fight almost the whole way forward. There were Zhong troops running all over the camp. Some were panic stricken and harmless. Some were still trying. It didn’t matter. The women shot all they came across. Those who were already on the ground, dead or wounded, they slashed or stabbed with bayonets…to make sure.

  When they reached their command bunker Maria found a couple of Cazadors who apparently had resisted their primal urge to rescue damsels in distress. The senior of them told her, “We’ve got them pinned inside. They can’t get out. But we haven’t been able to get in either. Grenades don’t seem to do much. The entrance seems to be baffled somehow…or maybe the interior is.”