Salutes
Metzada, Central Warrens
Military Educational Wing, Indoor Combat Section
12/20/43, 1613 local time
The one-way glass at the front of the classroom looked out on both rooms: the smaller one that was labeled hallway, with the directions of the entirely theoretical continuation of the hall chalked in on the far wall; and the larger one that contained a table, around which sat ten men. This one was labeled general staff room.
Men, not boys: while they were all wearing the elegant black and silver uniforms that Freiheimer field-grade general staff officers used a war and a half ago—real uniforms, by the way; war prizes—the men gathered around the table in the room were in their fifties, one well into his sixties.
That's not unusual for us. There are countries, there are worlds, where good, albeit old soldiers are sent out to pasture, to sit uselessly and watch the days go by.
Good men die too early in those countries, on those worlds, both young soldiers and old ones. We still don't do enough for our old ones, granted, but we do have them teach our young how to not get killed unnecessarily. That's something.
In the hallway, just outside the door, a twenty-year-old private in Metzadan khakis waited, a pair of goggles high on his forehead, in his hands a Barak assault rifle, its muzzle hooded by the orange cylinder of the fire simulator. His back was to the wall adjacent to the general staff room; at his feet lay a dummy wearing a Freiheimer uniform and private's stripes.
At the top of the glass wall separating the classroom from the two other rooms beyond, a timer stood, poised at 1503.
The Sergeant stood at the front of the room, a pointer in his hand. He was pushing sixty and his khakis were cut amply to allow for his expanded belly.
But, underneath the honorable retirement pin on his chest, there were six rows of campaign ribbons.
We don't give out medals for bravery on Metzada, not to ourselves. Just campaign ribbons. The Sergeant had six rows of campaign ribbons, under the little gold Star of David pin that means a man is now retired, has completed all military obligations to Metzada.
The pin is intended to be an honorable award; the notion behind it is that we wouldn't make such jewelry if it could fall into enemy hands.
We, those of us who haven't gotten one yet, call it an honorable retirement pin.
The men who wear it call it something else entirely.
"Okay, now we're fifteen minutes into the assault, and he's taken out the guard. Next step?" He didn't pause in his questioning to greet me; he just gave me a quick nod and smile.
A skinny fourteen-year-old waved his hand frantically; the Sergeant ignored him and pointed to the round-faced, bored-looking boy sitting behind him. "Aaron?"
"I dunno." Aaron shrugged. "He should just kick open the door and throw in a grenade, then run like hell."
The Sergeant grinned. "Not a bad answer."
Aaron's face broke into a smile.
"Just a wrong one," the Sergeant said.
The boy's face fell.
"Still, let's give it a try," the Sergeant said. He picked up the microphone and announced, "Grenade assault, please. One grenade only—oh, and you kick the door down. Beginning timing in five seconds. Five. Four. Three. Two. One."
The private pulled the goggles down. As he moved, the Sergeant slapped his hand down on the big red button on his desk; the timer started.
Transferring his rifle to his left hand, the private pulled a dummy grenade from his web belt, caught the pin on his belt hook, and pulled the grenade away from the pin, not letting go of the spoon. He kicked at the door—it took him two tries to get it to swing away—then threw in the grenade and ran the couple of feet down the hall until he reached the wall, where he ran in place, miming running along further.
The general staff room suddenly went dark; the speaker or. the wall announced, "Moderate explosion behind soldier. He escapes down the hall uninjured, for at least the next ten seconds."
"Freeze," the Sergeant said into his microphone, slapping at the red switch and stopping the timer at 1513. The private stopped running in place, slung his rifle, and leaned back against the wall, closing his eyes.
"Wait a minute—" Aaron raised his hand to protest. "How many did he kill?"
The Sergeant shrugged. "I don't know. Do you?"
"No. Somebody coulda thrown himself on the grenade."
Another boy laughed. "Yeah, yeah, you'd do that."
"Maybe," another boy said, "maybe he only got one or two of them. Maybe even none. They could have turned the table over and hidden behind it."
Another boy didn't like the whole thing. "I thought you said we usually can't get at a general staff."
The Sergeant nodded. "We're lucky if we ever get this kind of shot at even, say, a regimental staff."
"Then he should be sure that they're dead. I mean, it sounds like maybe I think I'm brave or something without anything to show it, but even if he gets killed, if he's killed off a regimental staff, it should be worth it to Metzada. And more so for a general staff, no?"
"Right. And very good, Levi. You're thinking in exactly the right terms." The Sergeant picked up the microphone. "Prepare to restart it," he said, resetting the clock.
He finally seemed to take notice of me. "I see we have Inspector-General Tetsuo Hanavi visiting the class today. He used to be a real soldier, before he joined the IG Corps. Remember your lessons, Tetsuo? You mind demonstrating another wrong way to do it?"
"Fine," I said, "but let's just simulate the door being kicked down. I have a bad knee."
"Will do." He threw me a pair of goggles. "Put them on."
"What for?"
"See, the thing of it is, I'm teaching this class, and you're not. That means that you get to do it my way," he said with a smile that he didn't entirely mean.
I put the goggles on, and he waved me toward the door leading into the hallway. I walked through, shut the door behind me, and relieved the private of his phony weapon. I checked the empty magazine and chamber as a matter of reflex before I slid the magazine out and then back in, resetting the fire simulator's counter.
"Now watch this carefully, class."
I took up his position to the side of the room, and raised the rifle to port position.
"Beginning timing on five," the overhead speaker announced. "Five. Four. Three. Two. One."
"Simulating kick," I said as I turned and gently kicked at the door; it swung open immediately, as though broken.
I stepped inside the staff room.
"Good evening, gentlemen," I said.
Two of the staff officers yelled; a third snatched at the pistol on his belt.
I just held down the trigger and sprayed imaginary fire all the way across the room, ignoring the simultaneous loud cracks of two simulated pistol shots, while the rifle went silent, simulating emptiness.
Their shots weren't quite as simulated as they used to be when I was a boy in school. One pellet slammed into the wall next to me, but the other caught me on the right side of my forehead, snapping my head back, sending a cool wetness sliding down the right side of my face.
I brought up my hand to my face; it came away red with fake blood. Now I understood the reason for the eye protection.
"Score; six out of ten men wounded, three dead, one uninjured. Our striker is also dead. Now, pay attention: what mistakes did you make, General?"
"One." I stripped the goggles off and held up a finger as I turned, letting them see what a bloody face looked like.
Not really the way it was, but as the lights came up in the classroom, I could see from the pale faces that the point had gotten through.
"Kicking open a door when you haven't even quietly tried the knob is pretty silly. It just announces that something violent is about to happen, and can draw attention from other quarters. If you know the local knock, and can talk the local language, much better to just knock, announce yourself, and walk in."
"Two."
"Two: I ha
d the burst suppressor off, and I sprayed around the room like I was using an autogun to sweep a beaten-fire zone. That would have been a bad mistake. An assault rifle has a limited clip—I should have set it for five-round bursts, then picked targets and walked the bursts through them."
"Priorities?"
"My first target should have been the man who was moving; he was clearly the most dangerous adversary.
"Second and third," I went on, "should have been the ones yelling; they understood what was going on, and were the next most dangerous. That would have taken about twenty rounds, altogether—including an extra insurance burst.
"After that, I should have remembered that the Barak assault rifle has only thirty rounds in the clip, and disengaged from the room, firing another burst while I did so, which would have left me five rounds to deal with anything unexpected in the corridor. Then I could toss in a grenade while I reloaded."
"What is the worst thing you did?"
"The 'Good evening, gentlemen.' That was ridiculous. I was there to kill them, not to talk to them."
"True."
I wiped the phony blood from my face and waved my wet hand at the Sergeant. "You got something I can use to wash this off?"
I was toweling at my wet hair while, behind the plexi, the old soldiers who had been playing at being Freiheimers were busy rearranging the room for the next class.
"Very nice," the Sergeant said. "I see that you remember your lessons."
A bit. One of the things I did, in my spare time, was to teach the Section version of an entry-and-assault, which is a bit more demanding: we're supposed to be able to move in and out a lot more quietly than regular soldiers.
But I remembered the basics, the ones you teach to line troops.
I nodded. "The question is, Uncle Tzvi, is this all just practice, or do you still have it? And do you have five friends?"
He was silent for a long moment. Then:
"For what?" he asked, as if it mattered. He knew what I was offering; he would do whatever I asked him to do, and he knew it damn well.
I shrugged, as though I was considering, then dismissing, his concern. "To spring Shimon Bar-El out of whatever problem he's in on Thellonee. Hope it's a small problem, because there's going to be less than a dozen of us, altogether, and we're going under cover of a negotiating team—I don't want to use any of the real negotiators. No weapons, except for whatever we can procure locally."
"On Thellonee? That's going to be a bitch."
I shrugged. "No pretenses between you and me: it's likely to be bloody, Uncle. We'll start it off with the Mercenary's Toast, but it'll be a lie."
" 'The Mercenary's Toast is a wish, not a promise.' " The Sergeant smiled. "I think that can be worked out. Only promise I need from you, is that if I do well enough on this, you'll consider using me again. For something where the goal is something better than this."
Shimon was my mother's brother; Tzvi Hanavi, my father's. Little love was lost between the two of them; Uncle Tzvi would have cut off his own hand before betraying Metzada.
Still, this wouldn't be about rescuing Shimon Bar-El. It would be about blood.
The wars drive us all insane. Some men are broken into useless hulks that can't even feed themselves. Some men get a taste for blood. The Sergeant was one of those. I'd just given him a whiff of it. He'd follow the scent all the way to Thellonee, as long as I let him, as long as I led him. It wouldn't even matter if I told him that I was deliberately manipulating him.
He wouldn't care.
"No promises," I said. "Now, can you find some friends? Or do you want me to fill out the team?"
"What kind of friends?" he said, again with a smile. It was a real smile, but it wasn't an amused one.
"Old ones. Expendable. Retired. Blooded. The kind of men that it's easy to underrate, but who still have a little something left, even if they can't run as hard as they could when they were boys."
His smile wasn't friendly anymore. "Expendable old soldiers for an expendable mission? What expendable idiot is running it?"
"Me."
"You? Correct me if I'm wrong, little Tetsuki, but have you ever had a command? You were a staff officer until they made you IG."
I touched a finger to the star on my left shoulder. "This says I'm considered qualified to command an offplanet mission, all by myself. You want in or out?"
His smile ceased being that of a hunting tiger, and became the sad one of an old man who felt more than a little useless. "Any good news?"
"I think I can get Dov in on the team."
"No. That wasn't what I meant. I mean, it is important?"
I shrugged. "I don't know. I think it may be, but I don't know."
"But you think so?"
"I think so."
The smile broadened. "In."
As though my saying it might be important had made a difference. The old tiger would have been in anything that meant action, anything that meant another taste of warm blood in his mouth, even if it was his own.
He nodded again. "You'll have your retread soldiers, Tetsuo; I'll get started now. When do we leave?"
"One week."
"Good."
"Why is that good?"
"In another two weeks," he said, smiling as he clapped a strong hand to my shoulder, "I might be too old for this. I'd best get to work. One would think that there isn't much time to get another five old useless men."
"How long do you figure it'll take? All you can say is that it's a mission, and that they are to consider themselves expendable."
For a moment, we were pupil and teacher again, and he was again disappointed with me for not paying attention to the words of yesterday's lesson. I could see my father in his eyes. My father never approved of me.
"Tetsuo, Tetsuo . . . you forget, sometimes," he said, with my father's voice. "Remember Eleazar ben Mattityahu?"
What's colloquially known as a kamikaze attack—a suicidal attack by a single man on a capital asset of the enemy—was not invented in Earth's Second World War by the Nipponese. Our people had invented it millennia before, when the Maccabees kicked the shit out of the Assyrians, sending the bastards running home.
The Assyrians had elephant cavalry—large, destructive beasts, easily two men tall—that could crash through our lines, crushing whatever was in their way, scattering the rest. The sides of the animal were always armored, and it had a trunk—a long, snakelike protuberance growing out of its face—to protect itself from a frontal attack.
There was only one way to stop an elephant, and Eleazar, son of Mattityahu, brother to Yehuda the Hammer, found it: he stood still and let one of the beasts come over him, knocking him flat to his back.
And then he thrust his spear upwards, into its soft underbelly. The elephant collapsed on the spot.
Eleazar was the spot.
"I don't see the connection."
"Fuck you, General. Like hell you don't." Tzvi Hanavi picked up his microphone. "Zachariah," he said, "go home. Your grandchildren need to see you." The thin, silver-haired man shrugged, nodded, and left.
The Sergeant looked through the glass and dismissed five others, leaving behind five men, ranging in age from perhaps as young as fifty to Yehuda Nakamura, who I knew was sixty. Don't let his Nipponese name mislead you; old Yehuda has a little Nipponese blood as I do, but the Nakamuras kept their patronym when they joined clan Aroni.
"Eleazar ben Mattityahu is calling you," Tzvi Hanavi said, to what I suddenly realized was all that was left of his old company. Blunt fingers came up to his honorable retirement pin, and tore it away from his uniform shirt. It dropped to the floor. "You'd better plan on reporting in uniform tomorrow at oh-eight-hundred—and you can lose those fucking we-don't-need-you-anymore pins."
"We can what?" one asked.
"You heard him, he said we can lose the fucking we-don't-need-you-anymore pins."
The Sergeant hugged me. When he pressed his cheek against mine, it was wet. "Tetsuki," he said, "thank you.
I thought I was going to die in this fucking rock."
As he released me, five old men gathered around us, all of them half out of the Freiheimer uniforms, none of them wearing anything from the waist up but their undershirts. Not very prepossessing, to look at. They were all slack-bellied, skins whitened from too many years in Metzada.
"Tzvi?" Thin, bald Menachem Yabotinsky asked. "Are you serious?"
"Yeah," the Sergeant said. "You in, or do I need to find another corporal?"
Yabotinsky barely smiled. "In."
"Besides, he wouldn't shit us about something like this," white-haired Yehoshua Bernstein said. "Is it still okay to be scared?" He looked older than he was, and was clearly the frailest of all of them, but if he was good enough for the Sergeant, I hoped he'd be good enough.
"Fuck, yes," Ephriam Imran said. "For me, this is almost enough to put lead back in my pencil."
"C'mon, Eph." Yehuda Nakamura snickered. "Take a hell of a lot from your medikit to put lead back in—"
"Shut up and line up," Tzvi said, and he and Yabotinsky glared them into order.
"It's purely a voluntary assignment," I said. "Nobody's under any compulsion to volunteer."
It wasn't as though what I said was heard and decidedly ignored; it was as though I was broadcasting on a frequency that they weren't equipped to receive.
The Sergeant performed a sharp right face and drew himself up to attention as he faced me.
"General," he said, as he turned back to me, "Sergeant Tzvi Hanavi, with elements of Company C, First Battalion, the Old Eighteenth Regiment, reporting for duty, sir."
Then he threw me a salute, and held it.
We're not much on saluting in Metzada; it took me aback.
" 'A salute,' " he said, when I didn't react, " 'is not a bow. A bow is a gesture from a subordinate to a superior. A salute is a greeting between practitioners of the profession of arms, one that is initiated by the junior, and returned by the senior.' You have six practitioners of the profession of arms in front of you, sir. You have six soldiers."
"That I do." I returned the salute. "Carry on, Sergeant."
CHAPTER FIVE
Not For Glory Page 7
