The Rods and the Axe

by Tom Kratman

  I haven’t a fucking clue. And our little flotilla of coastal defense subs, and their skippers, really don’t understand the capabilities and limitations of a nuke boat.

  And the positioning intel from Yamato? How long is it taking to get to us? I’m pretty sure they’ve got a sub trailing the Zhong. But that sub’s not contacting us directly. Whatever they’ve got they’re sending home. Then it’s going by secure line to their embassy here—that’s what Fernandez says—then to us. How much massaging is the information getting before I get it? If we’re talking two days then I need to go into full run-away mode when they tell me the Zhong are three days out. But what if it’s taking three? Or four? Or less than one?

  This is our only carrier. Patricio’s told me he’s going to need it for the end game. I can’t risk it to the Zhong.

  Zhong Submarine Mao Zedong, Mar Furioso, Terra Nova

  Some two thousand miles to Fosa’s east, Captain Liu of the Zhong Navy submarine fretted. He could have, though of course would never have, told Fosa the reason for his tardiness. It was the bloody Archangel system the Zhong knew the Balboans had bought from the Volgans. Most Zhong weapons systems were derivative of Volgan systems. Some were outright copies. In few cases had the Zhong actually been able to improve on Volgan performance. In no case had they ever been able to reach claimed Volgan performance.

  Thus, when the salesmen in the cheap suits had come peddling Archangel to the Zhong, they’d made some very extravagant claims for it. Whether the Zhong believed those claims entirely or not, they had to take them into their calculations. This was why Captain Liu’s Mao Zedong and the other three subs of the Dynasty class on their way to Balboa were taking their sweet time about it. They believed if they rushed, they’d be found and engaged.

  Vicinity, Town of Concepción, Balboa, Terra Nova

  Mrs. Nguyen—“Madame”—spoke fair Spanish. Her husband, Colonel Nguyen, did not. They both spoke excellent French. Since Maria had high school French, a couple of years’ worth, they got by.

  “Recruited girl . . . name ‘Han,’ ” Mr. Nguyen said, in the Spanish he was still working on. “She marry one you people . . . or maybe white round eye. Not sure. She recruit bunch us. We help.”

  Colonel and Madame looked to be somewhere between seventy and one hundred, though they acted healthier and fitter than that. Gradually, in mixed French and broken Spanish, it was revealed that they had something like a century’s worth of fighting as guerillas between them. They were a great help, much more than one would expect from hired guns. Sergeant Ponce thought it was mostly a case of loving their work.

  “You got sleep,” the colonel said. “You got eat. You got . . . stand down . . . plan . . . prepare . . . rehearse. Enemy use that. Come in when sleeping . . . quick-quick . . . helicopter . . . no warning.”

  “We could mine all the open areas,” Fuentes offered. Sergeant Ponce just shook her head. After a bit, the centurion came to the same conclusion as Ponce had. “No, no we couldn’t. We have a lot of mines, not an infinity.”

  “Got better trick anyway,” he said. “Need little air legion . . . you call, ‘ala,’ yes? Anyway, need little help from thems peoples.”

  Ponce’s sapper girls had dug a rather large hole about two feet by twelve and chest deep the night before. While they’d been digging, Ponce and one other had constructed a cage around a one-ton, unfused bomb, then had run a current through the cage. Now, cursing, straining, and groaning, they rolled that Tauran aerial bomb, provided courtesy of the Tauran Ammunition Supply Point at Arnold Air Base, up to the hole.

  The hole—more of a slit trench really—was centered in an open area about three hundred meters on a side. Off to one side was the spoil. On the other they’d laid out some fast-growing progressivine cuttings they intended to transplant to help camouflage along. In Balboa’s soil and sun, and with Balboa’s rain, the progressivines could reasonably be expected to cover the thing entirely within a week.

  With a final curse, Ponce exhorted her girls to a last push. The bomb rolled into the hole and stayed there, swaying a bit as it rocked on its side. A bright gray and green trixie leapt from a tree at the edge of the wood line and flew across the open space, cawing in indignation at being disturbed.

  While Ponce and the sapper girls busted their butts, the Cochinese advisor worked on educating their leader.

  “Trick with Zhong,” Mr. Nguyen said, “is threaten face.”

  Fuentes shook her head. “Like . . . threatening to punch them?”

  Nguyen, frustrated with the difficulties in communication, shook his head. He answered, “No . . . no . . . threaten . . .” Then he stopped for lack of the right word and concept. “What you call what show to world? Appearance?”

  “Like . . . honor?” Fuentes asked.

  The colonel nodded enthusiastically. “That it. You call ‘honor.’ With us—Zhong, Yamato, all us—we call word translate ‘face.’ With Zhong, must be able to make commander lose face.”

  “What’s that have to do with putting a bomb in a field?”

  “Big shame,” Nguyen said. “Okay lose helicopter once, maybe. Maybe twice. After that, commander enemy look stupid if lose a third. Won’t take risk.”

  “Ohhh.”

  “Yes, make lose face. Helicopter come . . . wind bend tree . . . tree has wire . . . wire runs bomb. Bomb go boom. Helo go boom. Do once. Do twice. Enemy lose face. After that, you sleep sound. Plan easy. Secure.”

  “Ohhh.”

  “You good girl,” Nguyen said, reaching up to pat her on the cheek. “Remind me own daughter.”

  “How is your daughter?” Maria asked, quite sure that the daughter was a grandmother herself by now.

  Nguyen looked very sad for a moment. “She dead,” he said. “Killed young . . . planting bomb.” Then he added, his chin lifting with pride, “In war against Zhong.”

  The hut had had most of the furniture removed and replaced by long planks atop stumps and milk crates. On the planks sat two of Fuentes’ squads, plus a couple of the cooks and artillery types temporarily reclassified as infantry. There were some covered cages along one wall, as well as some plates filled with a red powder. At one end, facing the girls across a makeshift lectern, Madame spoke.

  “Since your enemy,” Madame said, “has so very kindly given you so many, many bombs—such generosity!—during and after their last invasion, surely someone ought to get some use from them.”

  “Among other uses . . .”

  “Okay,” said Madame, “ten-minute break.” The break was perhaps a few minutes early, but Madame had noticed the female leader of the group, the one called “Centurion Fuentes,” waiting in the back of the classroom.

  The women shuffled out, most of them, as they reached the door, lighting up one of the canned cigarettes that came with the rations. Centurion Fuentes didn’t entirely approve, but the cigarettes were made from tobacco infected in ages past with a virus that removed most of the harmful effects.

  Fuentes had been paying attention, but had come in late. Moreover, she wasn’t able to attend every session. Still, Madame never ridiculed an honest question and seemed to have some idea of the thousand different directions the centurion was being pulled in.

  “Madame Nguyen,” asked Fuentes, “what about magnetism from the bombs? Won’t they be found? What about radar from the air?”

  “Well, naturally, child, you should de-gauss them, if you can.”

  Fuentes hadn’t heard the term before. “Degauss?”

  “Ah . . . eliminate the magnetic signature. I’ve shown your Sergeant Ponce how to do it. And bury the bombs with a radar-scattering shroud over them to keep the enemy from finding out which landing zones were so trapped and which weren’t.

  “Then too, some places, you can put the bombs in underground but don’t wire them to the saplings. Just like you are doing with some of the antipersonnel mines. That way, so you see, the enemy gets accustomed to using a particular landing zone, or trail, or road until some night you
ladies pay a visit to the place and the next day—or the next, doesn’t matter really—it goes boom right in their overconfident faces. On the other hand, all you must do is get to the area and assemble the mines. You need not even carry detonators with you. Just bury them nearby. Then even a strip search would reveal nothing.”

  Fuentes nodded, then smiled, tentatively, as if she were long out of practice in smiling. “I’ve got to ask, and I hope you won’t think I’m prying, but where did you and your husband come from, that you know all this?”

  Madame sighed, “The colonel and I?”

  “The colonel?” Maria asked.

  “Yes, he was a colonel. You would say a ‘legate.’ We’re from Cochin. For the last couple of years we’ve been teaching the Revolutionary Warfare course for about-to-be-discharged veterans.

  “He’s more a regular who knows how to operate like a guerrilla than an actual guerrilla himself. I was a real guerilla, though some might say a terrorist.

  “We fought for our country, between us, for over a century. Then we discovered that Tsarist-Marxism wasn’t compatible with patriotism. Things got bad for us. We were recruited and came here.

  “Listen to the colonel,” Madame warned. “I know a lot of techniques, but he understands things like intelligence, communications, and coordination, and the consummate importance of never letting the enemy think he’s doing well.”

  Madame checked her watch and announced, “Break’s over, girls, back to class.” The women began shuffling in from outside.

  “Let me show you some of the difference, a trick,” Madame said, and beckoned them to follow her out of the hut and into a concrete house. Inside that house, on one wall was a picture, painted by a perhaps not terribly, talented local artist. It was hanging askew.

  “What’s wrong with that?” Madame asked.

  “It’s crooked,” one of the very new Amazons answered. “So?”

  Madame wagged her finger. “Only a fairly senior officer of the enemy is likely to be bothered by a picture askew. Idiocy and focus on mere appearances often increases with rank. So you booby trap the thing so the bomb goes off—so an electrical connection is made—when the picture is righted.”

  The young Amazon’s eyes lit up. “Ohhh.”

  Madame went to the wall and pulled the cover off of one of the cages. An antania hissed, threateningly. Antaniae were winged reptiles with septic mouths. They were noted mostly for cowardice and attacks on the feeble-minded and young.

  “Now these,” Madame continued, “are a different sort of trap. They can chew through mere rope, so they must be chained. They’re at their best in tunnels, where you know they’re they but the enemy does not . . .”

  Madame bent to pick up a plate containing a reddish-brown powder. “This,” she announced, “is made from the seeds of Satan Triumphant, dried and ground . . .”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The conventional army loses if it does not win.

  The guerrilla wins if he does not lose.

  —Henry A. Kissinger

  Log Base Alpha (so called), Balboa, Terra Nova

  One of the gunners sat atop his gun’s container, dipping his chorley bread in a hot sauce composed of somewhat diluted Joan of Arc pepper. These were one of the milder peppers found on Terra Nova, though not especially mild, in objective terms. Joan of Arcs were a poor relative of their distant cousin, the Satan Triumphant pepper. The chorley was made from the seed of a plant that might have been a native, or genengineered, or imported from some other planet besides Old Earth or Terra Nova. The plant, which looked like nothing so much as a low-growing orange sunflower, produced seeds that resembled tiny kernels of corn and produced a bread high in gluten and tasting somewhat naturally buttery.

  Tribune Ramirez leapt atop that containers and stood over the eating gunner. He scanned his area with satisfaction. There were sixteen containers there now. Eight of those were laid on their sides, buried and sandbagged, with the southernmost edges elevated at ten or twelve degrees above the horizontal. From each of the eight, a narrow trench zigzagged back to where a wider trench ran generally east west, connected all the others. That wider trench was sandbag- and stake-revetted, and of octagonal trace. In spots that main trench became a tunnel, as the troops had covered it with logs and sandbags over long stretches.

  At each end of the main trench was another container, though these were dug in and buried flat. More zigzag trench ran northward from the main trench, leading to Ramirez’s command post, the aid station, the cooks’ shelter, and three more, fairly close together, for the supply section. In a couple of other spots there were holes dug for the unit’s scanty supply of vehicles, two light four-wheel-drive command vehicles and three medium trucks. The unit owned more vehicles, but they were held elsewhere.

  Around the perimeter, in little knots that were sometimes connected to each other by slit trenches and sometimes not, with those slit trenches being sometimes connected to the main trenches and sometimes not, forty or so fighting positions had been dug. Some were of odd shapes. There were still parties of men working on those, especially on the entrenching, and so it was reasonable to suppose that eventually all the fighting positions would be connected by trench.

  There had been a pile of premade concertina, single-strand barbed wire, and stakes, once all the barrier material had been removed from the containers. Sadly, an engineer officer had shown up, waved something official looking in Ramirez’s face, and then carted all the material off.

  On the plus side, the engineer had left a two-man chainsaw team behind for a while, and these had cut a very impressive amount of logs for overhead cover and reinforcement. When they’d been called away, another, somewhat larger team of engineer demolitions types had shown up. They hadn’t blown anything up, but they had wired a number of branches and entire trees for demolition to the south of Ramirez’s position.

  Overhead, his men were adding an extra layer to the triple canopy of the jungle, in the form of radar-scattering camouflage screens, or nets. He had his doubts about the usefulness of the screens, since anyone overhead would have had weeks to search through the foliage, assuming they could get through it at all.

  But what do I know? Maybe they’ll be of some help against the planes once the bombing starts.

  Concepción, Balboa, Terra Nova

  Madame showed them how to pack a bicycle with explosives and a timer, and how to scrounge or make their own munitions when the materiel they’d been supplied ran out as it would if the war lasted long enough.

  Madame Nguyen also spoke to them at length about maintaining political control and what needed be done with enemy prisoners of war. None of the Amazons cared much for what she said on those subjects, which didn’t mean she was wrong or that they wouldn’t do it.

  Supplies rolled in almost daily. Keeping track of them, receiving, accounting for, and transmitting them, was the job of the platoon optio, Marta Bugatti. One day, each platoon in the maniple received at least one “secret” weapon. It came in an electronics-proof case. When opened, the case revealed a remote-controlled miniature tank with just enough armor to protect it from small-arms fire and about a quarter of a ton of explosive. The little robots were wire guided and each carried a closed-circuit lowlight TV for the operator to see where it was going. There was also a loudspeaker on each one so the operator could make announcements to the enemy.

  “What the fuck?” Bugatti asked when she saw it.

  “I read about the idea in Franco’s class,” her centurion told her, “in the single science fiction book we read. ‘I am a thirty-second bomb. I am a thirty-second bomb. Twenty-nine. Twenty-eight . . . ’ ”

  “Oh, funny!”

  “How many did we get?” Fuentes asked.

  “Three of the little terrors,” Bugatti replied. “They’re called”—she consulted the hand receipt—“ ‘Davids.’ ”

  “Okay,” Maria said. Pulling up an image of the area to her mind, she said, “Send them to cache areas one . . . thre
e . . . and four. And have one girl per squad trained to drive them.”

  “Wilco, Centurion,” Marta answered.

  It was a good thing, thought Pastora, watching the Amazons dig in one day, that Carrera didn’t skimp on the engineer tools. We are, all of us, moving mountains.

  Centurion Cesar Pastora, Fourteenth Cazador Tercio, was, with his small command, a part of the Amazons’ cover. Mixed in among the women, they were expected to buy a little time, simply by being men and thus by being the more probable perceived font of violence. Eventually, they’d be dead or captured—there just weren’t that many of them—but in the interim they’d serve as cover.

  Pastora’s small platoon and Fuentes’s much larger one got along famously, except insofar as the individuals tried to keep just how well they were getting along a secret.

  The amazing thing, thought Pastora, is that we get any work done at all, what with every one of my boys having to service three or four of Fuentes’s chicas. ’Course, to be fair, the girls are more into emotional support than just sex, and they manage to get three or four times more work out of the boys than I’ve ever been able to.

  Better, Pastora liked the Amazonas. And as more than just women. They were tough and smart and eager to please, as soldiers. It also didn’t hurt that . . .

  “My sister’s a squad leader in your regiment,” Pastora told Optio Bugatti. “Let’s say that that gives me a certain perspective on the Tercio Amazona that some others may lack.”

  And she was a tough bitch, even as a baby.

  Pastora added, “There may be some other things that we lack, too. Have you noticed, Optio Bugatti, that your women are actually quite a bit better at camouflaging things than my men are? No joke.”