by Tom Kratman
At Chapayev’s command his officers left to carry out their instructions. Within minutes the sound of tank engines overpowered the pelting of the rain of the warehouse’s tin roof.
Some miles away shouting cadets, mostly the younger ones, rushed out of the makeshift barracks to break open conexes containing their 81mm and 120mm mortars, and Grad rocket launchers. Manhandling—rather, boy handling—the tubes into position went fairly quickly. Then the cadets returned to cart the heavy boxes of ammunition to the firing positions. An instructor or older cadet went forward of each firing position to lay the guns and launchers in with an aiming circle. The guns were soon up and had enough ammunition on hand for immediate needs.
By the time the indirect fire weapons were ready at Sabanita, the Recon troops had moved out from Clay Farms. Chapayev had the rifle maniples to follow in two long, snaking columns. Between them, on Avenida Scott, Koniev’s tanks and Ocelots, the drivers and commanders using night vision goggles, took the asphalt road in between the two lines of foot troops. The armor quickly outpaced the infantry cadets.
Fifty meters to either side of the last tank, teams of cadets carried and laid communication wire from the battalion to the TOC and fire support coordinator at the warehouse.
As soon as Koniev crested the hill at Magdalena, he saw the sky in front of him lit up with the flashing fires of the Tauran Fourteenth Infantry, the return fire of the Castilians, and the glow of at least one burning building.
“Faster, boy,” Koniev said into the microphone of his vehicle crewman’s helmet. “Faster or there won’t be much left to save.”
Chapter Forty-two
In one of his handwritten memos to himself entitled, “Things Worth Remembering,” the methodical Arthur Currie had included as Item 3: “Thorough preparations must lead to success. Neglect Nothing,” and as Item 19: “Training, Discipline, Preparation and Determination to conquer is everything.”
—Pierre Burton, Vimy
Santisima Trinidad II, Bahia de Balboa, Mar Furioso, Terra Nova
She was at least the eighth vessel to bear the name. Moreover, in all honesty, the name was not a particularly lucky one. Of the preceding seven, three had been captured, of which one had sunk in a storm, taking its prisoner crew to the bottom. Another, the most recent predecessor, had had to ram itself into another ship, a terrorist suicide ship, to save the ship it was escorting at the time, the aircraft carrier Dos Lindas.
Glorious and admirable that might have been. Lucky it was not.
Now the ship, a small corvette—about nine hundred tons displacement—formerly of the Volgan Navy, patrolled around the legion’s major training base on the Isla Real.
The crew was on alert, there having been reports—confused and fragmentary to be sure—of fighting on the mainland. Still, “alert” didn’t mean much to a ship with twenty rather short-ranged surface-to-air missiles, a 76mm gun, a twin mount with 57mm guns, a number of elderly antisubmarine weapons, including a rather massive array of antisubmarine rocket lauchers forward of the bridge, and radar that was, charitably, not of the best and latest.
In any case, alert or not, the corvette was not particularly stealthy, while the carrier launched aircraft that popped up over the cordillera central and acquired it was quite stealthy. A more modern radar would not have helped.
That aircraft, a P-53 off of the carrier HAMS Furious, launched a single Dark Cloud antishipping missile. In this case, the half-ton warhead of the Dark Cloud was probably overkill.
The missile, rather stealthy itself, followed the lay of the land until reaching Balboa’s northern shore, then sped out just above the waves at about a thousand kilometers an hour for the last sighted position of its target. It neither knew nor cared the nature of the target.
Twelve minutes after launch, give or take a bit, the missile went high, reacquired the Santisima Trinidad, then kicked in rockets to go high supersonic. It struck the corvette about four-tenths of the way back from the bow, right below the superstructure, where the radar return signal was greatest. The half-ton warhead was bad enough, but the hit was also terribly close to the antisubmarine rocket launchers just forward of the bridge. Worse, on a small ship like this one, the ammunition magazine had to be automated and placed near to the weapons they served. And armor was, of course, right out. The ship didn’t so much blow in two as disintegrate by phases.
Most of the crew of the Santisima Trinidad never knew or saw what hit them. Those of the sixty who survived the shock of the initial hit did so with multiple broken bones, flash burns on their exposed skin, ruptured organs, and even a few inhalation burns. If any lingered in agony after surviving that, they probably found it a blessing when the propellant and warheads of the ninety-six antisubmarine rockets ahead of the bridge went up. Even exclusive of the propellant, the warheads massed two and a half tons of high explosive.
SSK Megalodon, Mar Furioso, Bahia de Balboa, eighty kiloyards north of the Isla Real, Terra Nova
Auletti ripped the headphones off his head in agony, as if someone had set off a large firecracker in each ear. “Son of a BITCH!” he exclaimed. Then, after shaking his head to clear it, he told Chu, “Skipper, that was an explosion. A big, and very brissant, explosion.”
“War then,” said Chu, softly and sadly. He was sad for the commencement of the war, not for anyone in particular who’d been lost in it already. He’d been there before, seen it before, and learned that, while he could do it, it wasn’t anything to cheer over.
“Start warming the tanks.”
The Meg class had an odd—really a unique—method of flooding and evacuating its ballast tanks. Like the pressure hull, these were cylindrical. Basically, the boat took advantage of the very low boiling temperature of ammonia. The ammonia was kept inside of flexible tubing made of fluorocarbon elastomer with a seven hundred and fifty angstrom thick layer of sputtered aluminum, followed by a five hundred angstrom layer of silicon monoxide with an aerogel insulation layer. Heating elements inside the tubes—called “rubbers” by the sailors and designers, both—heated the ammonia into a gas, which expanded the “rubbers” and forced out the water. To dive, the ammonia was allowed to chill to a liquid rather than be heated to a gas. Chilling was really only a factor when quite near the surface, and then only if the water was unusually warm.
“Bring us up to fifty meters. I want to try to lift a radio buoy to see if we can get some information as to where we can apply ourselves best.”
Fuerte Guerrero, Balboa, Terra Nova
Sergeant Major Cruz had been under artillery and mortar fire before, in Yezidistan, Sumer, Pashtia and Kashmir. He’d also had a taste of it in training. Those had, in many ways, been worse than what he experienced now. True, the Tauran shells were far more accurate. And their sizzling shards drove Cruz’s head down again and again. But the intensity of fire was not so great as the Sumeris had thrown, nor was there the surprise the enemy in Pashtia frequently had counted on. Moreover, Cruz’s concrete shelter was rather better than a scrape hole in the sand.
Give the Devil his due, though, thought Cruz, as a nearby barracks wall was shattered by a direct hit, these fuckers are good.
The real bitch here was that the incoming artillery, for all that it wasn’t killing many legionaries, was still almost completely effective in keeping their heads down, or ruining the aim of those ballsy enough to put their heads up. This allowed lift after lift of helicopter-borne infantry—Cruz thought he saw a couple of field pieces, too—to descend to the parade field, golf course, park, causeway…pretty much anywhere they wanted to, form up at their leisure, and move to assault positions.
Now let’s hope Cara listened and did not pick up a rifle to try to help.
Cruz hadn’t heard from the commander of the cohort, still less from Legate Chin. He was, he believed, the senior man at least in this barracks building. Decision’s mine, I guess, he thought. When the time comes, there won’t be a lot of time to give orders. So…
“Fix bayonets!” He
shouted, loudly enough to be heard throughout the building, even over the incoming artillery. Other people picked up the cry and passed it on: “Fix bayonets!”…“Fix bayonets!”
And, mused the sergeant major, that’s as much about letting each other know we’re determined to stick it out to the bitter end as it is about actually sticking it to someone else.
Carrera’s Command Post, Lago Sombrero ASP, Balboa, Terra Nova
Tracers drew bright lines in the sky to the south. Carrera watched them calmly, no movement or expression betraying his nervousness. Around him the RTOs of his command post called off the morning’s disasters. Carrera closed his eyes and simply listened to the reports of invasion.
“For Christ’s sake, sir, order the cadets into action. They’re murdering us!” exclaimed Siegel. In fact, Carrera had ordered one and permitted another of the six cadet cohorts to attack. It was around the Tauran main effort that he was holding them back.
“Not yet, Sig,” he answered. “Not yet.”
“What are you waiting for?”
“I want them to feel like they’re doing well,” answered Carrera.
At Siegel’s low-voiced curse Carrera explained further. “Sig, I want them to be fully committed before we make our move. I want every body they can commit to action committed and tied down. Up to a point, the longer I can wait, the more committed they will be.”
“Then why permit us to act here and around Cristobal?”
Carrera sighed. Not everyone had quite his grasp of timing, and human possibilities. No shame in that, though. “Here,” he answered, “we’re too far away for them to react. For Cristobal, it’s almost as far away and they don’t have the mindset that the Shimmering Sea side much matters.
“Okay, sir,” Siegel conceded. “That’s fine for us, but there’s a moral factor in there. What about those poor bastards taking it up the ass? They need us to move now.”
“Sig…they’re buying me…buying Balboa…time with their lives. There are worse ways to go, I think.”
Carrera continued to listen to the reports without obvious emotion. One could hardly have told, from anything he did or said, that he was bleeding inside. Finally there came a report that the Gallic parachute brigade had reached the defensive perimeter of Herrera Airport. The cadets were fighting a desperate holding action. There, though, Carrera needed to give no orders. Third Corps was already mobilizing as quickly as one could hope for. Let the cadets hold on for as much as ninety minutes and the Gallic Paras would be facing eighty-thousand Balboans with vengeance in their hearts.
Carrera looked south to where fighting raged at the Lago Sombrero garrison area. He turned to Siegel slowly. “Let the big dog hunt,” he said simply. With a shout of triumph Siegel ordered the cadets’ commander, Sitnikov, to emerge and attack.
* * *
The Anglian Paras’ command post was nothing more than a half dozen radios and their operators clustered around the brigade commander. Two of the radio operators were wounded from some strange four pointed jacks they had rolled on in landing. Allegedly several hundred more men, maybe as many as a thousand, had also been perforated by the caltrops, and wounded worse when they pulled the barbed monstrosities out. Still, they were Paras and Paras didn’t stop for little wounds. The men in the line battalions continued the attack even as agonized radiomen stuck to their commander despite the pain and dripping blood.
The area around the command post was lit by the flames of burning legionary self-propelled antiaircraft guns. By the flickering firelight the brigade commander, Brigadier Porter, read his map and received reports of his battalion’s consolidation and movement to action.
The flames of the burning ADA pieces were some comfort to Porter. Had the Royal Anglian Air Force failed to take them out initially his brigade would have been dog’s meat on the drop zone. Now they had a decent chance to accomplish their mission without heavy loss.
One thing bugged Porter. Though his men had driven the Balboans back to the general vicinity of their barracks, there were reports—as in the report of a cannon’s muzzle—coming from the south-southeast. And he had limited contact with the battalion down that way.
Tracers arced over Porter’s head as he issued orders into the radio. The legion troops were apparently still in the fight. To suppress this, or destroy it, from time to time the aerial gunships lashed down at the legionaries in the barracks and bunkers to the north, west, and east with a stream of fire: 20 millimeter Gatlings, interspersed with 40 millimeter cannon, highlighted with blasts from the gunships’ 105s. Wherever their streams of death touched, resistance ceased—at least temporarily.
Had Porter been one for reflection he might have paused at how unfair the discrepancy in firepower was. Neither Porter’s character nor his mission allowed for much reflection at this point. Tough enough to take out the cadre of a mechanized corps from the air, in the dark. Any advantage he had seemed no more than fair.
One of the RTOs handed Porter a microphone. It was the commander of his second battalion, and that commander had a complaint.
* * *
At almost the first sign of the Tauran assault Lago Sombrero’s defenders had fired off their caltrop projectors, over a hundred otherwise innocuous looking plastic drums. Nearly a million of the sharpened four prong jacks now littered the field. The caltrops were slowing down the brigade’s assault on the legionary positions.
Over and over again, Porter’s battalion commanders called to say they were being delayed by the nasty little obstacles more than by the legionary fire that covered them.
* * *
“A quarter of my men have been wounded by those caltrops, Porter,” said the second battalion commander, inferior in rank but in the peculiarities of Anglian military culture a complete social equal.
“Yes…yes…we’re still moving to the north to continue the attack. But a company slows down when its men do, and a man slows down when every rush might land him on four or five spear points, or every step might mean five centimeters of sharp, barbed plastic through the foot.”
That was worrisome, of course, and added to Porter’s natural anxiety. Even so, that anxiety began to lessen as the first battalion commander reported that the Balboans in one of the barracks had been silenced—dead or driven out—and his troops were clearing the building.
Porter’s satisfaction was short-lived. So far his regiment had landed and consolidated with relatively little opposition. Then, from overhead, he heard the freight train sound of incoming artillery, a lot of it, coming from the southeast. Porter called for a gunship to suppress those legionary. That got him a, “Wilco,” followed shortly by the sound of powerful aircraft engines and a very satisfying stream of tracer fire to the southeast.
The commander of the Anglian Paras felt only a momentary satisfaction. In contrast to the sheets of tracers descending to the ground, three streams of green tracers arose and intersected on the gunship, causing it to fireball in the tropic night.
* * *
Carrera still stood atop the ammunition bunker that served as the Cadet Cohort’s command post, as well as his own. From where he stood he could see the red and green tracers arcing up over the barracks to the north.
A good sign, he thought. If they’re still fighting now they should hold out strong until the cadets can stick it up the Paras’ asses.
The cadets’ recon maniple was already in contact. That, however, was only thin skinned stuff, armored cars and the like. The cadets had made contact, then pulled back to observe and report.
From underneath and around Carrera the “ammunition” bunkers continued to disgorge their seventy odd armored vehicles and nine hundred plus cadets and cadre. The first vehicles out had been the air defense guns carrying their own crews but with the light missile gunners hitchhiking on top. These raced to their preplanned firing positions while the second group of tracks, the mortar carriers, began to emerge to head a few hundred meters north to their own posts. Then came the infantry carriers, Ocelots wi
th reasonably modern night vision equipment. The Ocelots were followed by the cadets’ maniple of motorized infantry in wheeled armored personnel carriers. These raced ahead to sweep down the trail west of the airstrip. Last out, emerging from a dozen bunkers, came the tanks.
From the maintenance facility to the east, the artillery began to fire in support of the First Corps cadre, cadet forward observers calling in the fire from observation posts atop the bunkers even before the combat vehicles were lined up in formation. Mortars likewise fired from the north.
Like a magnet, the mortars drew the attention of the Tauran air. Helicopter and fixed wing gunships turned from suppressing and silencing the legionary defenders to the south to engage and destroy the new threat. But two aerial gunships and nine attack helicopters were at a grave disadvantage when faced with an unexpected eight four-barreled, radar guided, self-propelled antiaircraft guns, and twice that many shoulder-fired-missile teams. Add to that the fires of almost a thousand rifles and machine guns. It was going to be ugly…at least from the Tauran point of view.
Carrera saw the first gunship explode as three streams of tracers from the mobile air defense guns ripped it apart. More cannon, machine gun, and rifle fire sought out the other aircraft of the invading Tauran force. Light IR guiding antiaircraft missiles, not so good a weapon as the Taurans had but not so bad, either, added to the toll of Tauran aircraft. In minutes, the badly shot-up survivors were seen limping from the area, some trailing smoke and flames. The night sky was lit by the burning remnants of others, not so lucky. As the cadets gained security from the air, the artillery and mortars continued their pounding of the Paras on the ground.
