by Tom Kratman
Why? wondered Janier. You’ve already told the general who matters.
The Tunnel, Tauran Union Security Force-Balboa, Cerro Mina, Balboa Transitway Area, Balboa, Terra Nova
The news from Janier was a death knell for the defenders. They had little enough chance with the Sachsen paratroopers, Without them there was none.
Moncey, long Janier’s underling and supporter, took it particularly badly. Pounding his desk repeatedly, he exclaimed, “That cowardly son of a bitch! Get me de Villepin!”
When de Villepin arrived, a matter of less than a minute, Moncey explained what he wanted done. “Everybody holds on until we can get the wounded and civilians out.” He spit out his next words. “Then I’ll try to surrender to Carrera…if he’ll accept a surrender.”
“But where the hell do we evacuate the civilians and the wounded to?” de Villepin asked. Surrender was too uncomfortable to talk about, even when imminent.
“The Navy. That’s the only safe place there is.”
“I suppose,” de Villepin agreed. “The Zhong have been evacuating their civilians for hours now.”
SSK Megalodon, Mar Furioso, Bahia de Balboa, eighty kiloyards north of the Isla Real, Terra Nova
The Meg had not even managed to close half the range to the Tauran ship it stalked. The zigzag pattern made it seem unlikely to Chu they would ever get much closer.
“Sonar? What’s the range?”
It was there on the display screen but, what the hell, Auletti figured the skipper was nervous and wanted a human sound. “Sir, thirty-eight thousand yards. It’s extreme if you want to fire now.”
The XO piped in, “Sir, we’ll never hit them at this range; if they keep on this course the wire will run out before we hit while, with their unpredictable behavior the torpedo will not hit without guidance.”
Sonar raised a hand for silence. The whole bridge waited expectantly. After some minutes of listening with great care the sonar man announced, “They’ve changed course, sir. They’re heading almost exactly toward us. I make their speed to be…call it sixteen knots. The escorts are tagging along.”
“All stop,” ordered Chu. “Fine. They can come to us.”
Southern Perimeter, Herrera International Airport, Balboa, Terra Nova
Every Balboan tercio had a small band of pipes and drums. Most Tauran soldiers didn’t know this. Nor had the morning’s festivities done much to inform them, since most of the pipers and drummers had dropped instruments and picked up rifles as they received news of the invasion. It came, then, as something of a surprise when, through the twisting smoke, was heard the sound of a dozen and a half pipers playing “el Pato,” a brisk Scots’ tune, perhaps drearier than most but giving a profound sense of impending violence. They also couldn’t know that “The Duck” was used in the legion to signal precisely that: “Make your hearts ready for the fight.” But then, that was pretty much the story with all bagpipe tunes, not least the wedding march.
Adjudant-Chef Jung sensed the meaning of the message before most of his company. “Goddamnit! Get ready! They’ll be here soon!”
* * *
No counterbattery radar could hope to acquire bagpipes. No sophisticated satellite would notice them. The most subtle propaganda had no effect on them. A precision guided bomb had no more likelihood of hitting a piper than of hitting anyone in particular. It was not for nothing that England had forbidden them to the Scots as a “weapon of war.”
Radio waves carried complex messages, with detail and—sometimes, at least—clarity. Friendly pipes sent a simpler message: “You are not alone. You will not have to fight alone.” To the enemy on the receiving end, the message was different: “We’re coming to kill you. You can’t stop us. All you can do is surrender…or die. And, by the way, we’re not all that interested in prisoners.”
* * *
“Incoming!” shouted Jung, along with a dozen or so of his men. Suddenly, the wailing of the Balboan pipes was drowned out by the shrieks of dozens of incoming shells. Soldiers of the Para Brigade hugged earth as best they were able. Even so, some were flung into the air, torn apart by hot flying shards of steel and iron. Amidst the explosions, they never heard the revving of engines as legionary Ocelots raced forward.
A near-landing shell tore Jung’s left foot away. He fainted with pain and loss of blood. “The Adjudant-Chef’s down!” cried a nearby Tauran soldier. Another shouted “Tanks! Tanks!”
Balboan rifle and machine gun fire picked up to a furious crescendo. Bullets cracked and spat against walls and streets. It was death to put one’s head into the air, or so it seemed. It would have taken better training, and been more expensive in money and blood than the country was willing to pay, to have convinced the soldiers otherwise. It was, in any event, far too late for that.
The artillery lifted. A soldier took one look at a nearby Ocelot and raised his hands in surrender. The tank shot him down; no time for prisoners.
A breach made, the Eleventh Tercio poured in to the center of the Airborne’s perimeter. Rout became general. First one, then another, of the Tauran artillery batteries were overrun. Not dug in, with no armor to protect them, the gunners died by their guns. The wounded were abandoned.
To the north the Third Tercio, painstakingly reassembled, renewed its attack. An hour later the commander of the Gallic Para Brigade died by his command post, fighting to the end and cursing politics and politicians to the last.
Later in the day, as the survivors of the Airborne brigade were herded away, a lone soldier was seen to take his wallet from his back pocket. He removed a card from the wallet. On the card were instructions telling those who had given him his initial training some years before that they were to stop harassing and intimidating the soldier should he produce the card. With a remorseful look back toward the place where his brigade had been destroyed, the soldier proceeded to rip the card into very tiny pieces. Then, prodded by a rifle butt, he began his journey into captivity.
Alfaro’s Tomb, Ciudad Balboa, Balboa, Terra Nova
“Take them!” Fernandez ordered. Though as a cripple he’d ordinarily have had more sense than to go near the fighting, in this case, the importance of the capture and the fact that the Taurans were on the run made him be at the site.
Grenade launchers coughed out rounds of tear gas. Then a half dozen of Fernandez’s own men hurled themselves against the doors and windows of the little house. Fanning out through the rooms, they used rifles as clubs to subdue the occupants.
A few minutes later Fernandez entered. The prisoners were already bound and gagged. “Your wife sends her regards,” he said to the leader, Arias. “Now you and I are going to have a little chat.”
Alcalde Flores, Balboa, Terra Nova
The Tenth Artillery Legion had had a fight of it taking back their casernes and guns. The defenders on the ground were badly outnumbered, true. But they had had the support of a full battalion of good guns, even if the guns were slower than usual. The Tenth Artillery had paid in cash for every building and gun retaken.
The legate of the Tenth had been torn between offering his batteries in support as soon as the casernes had been recaptured or waiting until he could assemble a sizable, even decisive, number of guns, mortars and rocket launchers. In the end he had listened to the pleading of Third Corps’ commander and assigned two batteries of heavy guns to help that brigade crush the Taurans at Herrera International. The rest were held quiet for the nonce, except for those that smoldered, wrecked, where a Tauran aircraft had penetrated the legion’s air defenses umbrella.
There had also been the problem of getting the guns away from their artillery parks. Many a brave, and rather unlucky, Balboan boy had given his life trying to move the pieces away to safer firing positions while 105mm harassing and interdiction fire fell around him.
Only the Tenth Artillery Legion had a substantial counterbattery radar capability, radar that could trace incoming enemy shells back to their point of origin. The artillery tercios in the ground co
mbat brigades had less of it, and far less sophisticated models. This was a cost saving measure on Carrera’s part, one that he later came to regret.
The Tenth’s legate, however, didn’t really need his counterbattery radar just yet. Certainly he didn’t want to use it while the Tauran artillery could trace it back and knock it out. Besides, he knew with a fair degree of surety the four square kilometers around Imperial Base from which the Tauran guns were supporting their ground troops.
“Four klicks square, four klicks square?” he mused. “Tell me, XO, do we have enough to crush four square kilometers?”
The XO of the Tenth Legion did a few quick and rough calculations in his head. “Our first minute of firing on Empire we can throw…mmm…four thousand rounds of 122mm rocket, about one hundred and twenty rounds of 180mm…oh…maybe three hundred, at least two-fifty, rounds of 300mm. Call it…ah…two hundred and fifty tons. The first minute.” He continued, “The last intel update we had before they hit us the Taurans weren’t all that well dug in there.”
“Fine,” said the legate. “Except for what we’re giving Third Corps, have the batteries hold their fire until the last of them is in position or in ten minutes, whichever is sooner. Then give those motherfuckers twenty good minutes of everything we can throw. Then we’ll light up the counterbattery radar to catch whatever we may have missed.”
The exec nodded agreement, then asked, “They’ll have a lot of ammunition around their guns, sir. Vehicles with full fuel tanks too, I’d imagine. Shake and Bake?” That meant throw mixed high explosive and white phosphorus.
“Yes, by all means, Shake and Bake the sons of bitches. Let’s see how they like being on the receiving end for a change.”
The XO ran into the Brigade Fire Direction Center to give the necessary orders.
Fire Base Eagle, Imperial Range Base Camp, Balboa, Terra Nova
Reality often, even usually, frustrates theory. The apparent exception to this, academia, isn’t really an exception as reality is rarely allowed to penetrate to frustrate academic theories. In any case, there had really not been time for the Tenth Artillery Legion to do the calculations that would have made the first volleys fall on time, simultaneously. Thus the first rounds—they were thirty-two 180mm shells—landed rather raggedly over the entire area. Few men were hurt by them, although there were a few cries for medics immediately thereafter. A rather larger number had more brown stains on their uniforms than red.
In a way, the early shots helped the Taurans rather than hurt them. Given the warning, most men—all who could—scrambled for the safety of bunkers and firing positions. The firing of the big guns stopped as legionary gun crews went through the laborious process of reloading the heavy shells.
Few if any of the Tauran gunners had ever heard of the Birkenhead Drill. No more did they know of the spirit behind it. Their civilian lives had trained them to think their individual lives to be rather more important than perhaps would be true under all foreseeable circumstances. Their military experience had not perhaps done all that was possible to change that.
Even though the Balboan fire stopped, the Taurans remained in their shelters rather than manning their guns to return fire.
Then came the flood. They heard it first from a distance, a muffled continuous…fooshing. This was followed by a sort of a moaning wail. Then over four thousand rockets, each with a hundred-pound warhead, slammed down on them at a rate of just over twenty per second.
The rockets had no particular accuracy. They didn’t need it. They landed everywhere. No place above ground was safe. Few were safe below it, if a rocket fell near enough.
Men cowering behind the earth walls of their guns’ firing positions were stunned, sometimes killed, by concussion alone. Others, those unfortunate enough to have a white phosphorus rocket land nearby, were driven mad by the pain of chunks of the awful stuff burning into their flesh. These ran screaming until cut down by a later falling round.
Near one battery a fuel tanker was first ruptured by high explosive then set afire by the white phosphorus. Burning fuel leaked along the ground to where it touched upon some of the charges that launched the Taurans’ shells. These began to burn, then exploded. A nearby store of ammunition soon joined the conflagration. A soldier who survived later reported seeing a big 155mm gun sailing end over end though the air from the blast.
Other fuel tankers were burst. In places the raging fuel leaked into bunkers, driving their occupants out into the steel-shredded air. Not everyone had the choice of burning or shredding. In places the flames made exit impossible. Those men died very badly indeed.
Still, making sure, the legionary fire continued to fall until the full twenty minutes were up. Then, ignorant and uncaring—should they have cared?—of the human damage done, the legion’s guns and launchers shifted fire to other, still living, targets.
They left seven wrecked batteries behind them.
Chapter Forty-nine
He will meet no suave discussion, but the instant, white-hot, wild,
Wakened female of the species warring as for spouse and child.
—Kipling, “The Female of the Species”
Perish any man who suspects that these men either did or suffered anything unseemly.
—Plutarch, Pelopidas
Between the old Comandancia and Cerro Mina, Ciudad Balboa, Balboa, Terra Nova
Legate Suarez took his binoculars from his eyes. He held them in his left hand, his right arm and shoulder being tightly bandaged to his chest. He could not see much anyway, what with the shell smoke still hugging Cerro Mina. His eyes were also blurred, perhaps from the smoke of the fires razing the neighborhood, perhaps from having seen some of his wounded.
Suarez had been in the briefest of radio contacts with Carrera, still directing the First Corps and Sitnikov’s half brigade of cadets, east of the Transitway.
“I’m up to my eyebrows, Suarez,” Carrera had said. “I want you to take Cerro Mina at any and all costs, as soon as possible…except quicker than that.”
“Take it with what?” he asked himself, for the dozenth time. “Second Tercio won’t be near mobilized for another hour and a half. Tenth Infantry’s fought out for now. Fifth Legion’s over with Carrera and he damn well knows it, too. All I can do is pound the bastards with artillery until I get more force.”
Suarez’s Ia, his operations officer, walked near his chief and coughed slightly.
“What is it, DeSantis?”
“Sir…I’ve got a tribune…name of Avila, outside. He says he has two fully mobilized infantry maniples for you.”
“Avila? Avila? Where have I heard that name?”
“Tercio Gorgidas, sir.”
“The queers?” Suarez’s eyes rolled. “What the hell do I need with them.”
DeSantis framed his answer with some care. “Sir, we may not like them. We may not want them mixed in our units. And we’re probably right in that. But by themselves? Why not? Besides, they may just take the fucking hill.”
Well, I have no better ideas, thought Suarez. “Okay, fine, bring the cocksucker up.”
“Sir.”
* * *
A few minutes later a tribune reported to Suarez, with his executive officer, who was also his partner, at his side. They had a female tribune in tow.
Adorable little thing, thought Suarez. What a fucking waste what I’m going to use her for.
Suarez tried had to keep the contempt from his voice. Mostly, he succeeded. “I’m told you have two infantry maniples, Tribune.”
“Yes, sir. One from my own tercio and one of the Amazon maniples.”
“So…what brings you here?”
“It seemed obvious, sir. You need to take that hill. We’re here to do it.”
“Yeah, well…with all respect, Tribune, I don’t think you can.”
“Perhaps more important, sir…we do.”
Suarez looked at the legionary in front of him. Who knows? Maybe they can. Certainly they’ve at least got more of a c
hance of taking it soon than my boys do…because we can’t yet.
“All right, Avila. We’ll see what your queers and your cunts can do. Come over by the map.”
Avenida de la Victoria, Ciudad Balboa, Balboa, Terra Nova
It was appropriate to use the old name, Avenida de la Victoria, the name Belisario Carrera had given it in centuries long past. Whether the talismanic use would grant the victory remained to be seen.
Not far from where the Second Tercio had fought the Gallic Dragoons a few years past, Number One Maniple of the Tercio Amazona waited with heaving breasts and wide eyes. To their east, but out of sight, was Avila’s maniple. No bullets cracked around them. Perhaps the Taurans on the hill were short on ammunition. The maniple was clustered so close together that they had to hope it was true.
The Amazon tribune—she was the maniple commander—listened intently into the radio. Avila had been given all the support Suarez could muster. The female tribune overheard him controlling and correcting artillery fire.
Sergeant Maria Fuentes, she whose daughter had once given Carrera flowers near where an Tauran helicopter had been shot down, lay on the ground nearby. She was simply scared to death. Lying down let her control her shaking a bit better. She didn’t want the others to see.
On the hill ahead of Maria the tempo of artillery fire picked up noticeably. Cerro Mina seemed to shake with the impact of hundreds of high explosive rounds falling in rapid succession. Please kill them or make them run away, she thought. I don’t want to fight anybody.
