A Band of Brothers

by William R. Forstchen

  Vincent watched them, remembering the first time he had seen this place, serving on the escort to Colonel Keane when he had come up to the city to meet with Boyar Ivor. How fairy-tale it had all looked then, the onion-domed cupolas, the log walls, the elaborate wood carvings, the exotic women of the court wearing long flowing gowns embroidered with golden thread, and not one whisper yet of the existence of the Hordes.

  “They’ve effectively blockaded Roum,” Vincent said. “Isn’t there some way we can run the blockade?”

  Bullfinch sighed. “That steamer going down in the middle of the channel’s what did it, Vincent. We have to hug in close to the eastern shore to get in, right under their damn guns. Two days ago they had a fifty-pound Parrott, one of our guns captured at Fort Lincoln, dug in on the bluffs. For the old transports that’s it. Even for our ironclads it makes a bit of a rattling.”

  “Then use the monitors to take supplies up.”

  “What I’m planning on. But Vincent, the monitors are designed to fight, not to haul supplies. I got six ironclads left here. We can maybe cram a hundred tons of munitions on board. It takes three days up, a day to off-load, and three days back. So we’re getting a hundred tons up a day, less than half of what they need, and all the time we’re pounding the engines on our monitors to hell running at top speed. In a month the fleet will all be in dock for refit.”

  “Why not anchor out in the bay and just have one monitor offloading from a supply ship?”

  “Actually, that’s what I’m thinking of doing, but we’ve got two small access hatches, we’re out in a rolling sea, the loads will have to be transferred by hand from one ship to the other, so it comes out about the same as loading a monitor up here.”

  “You wanted that marine division of yours,” Vincent said, increasingly exasperated. “You got a brigade almost trained. Move them up, land them, and assault the gun, take it out.”

  Bullfinch shook his head. “He must have a full umen dug in around that one gun. I tried to shell it out, but I tell you, unless I put a shot right through the gunport— when it’s open, mind you—it’s useless.”

  Vincent sighed, and sitting back down, he looked at the report sent back by Pat.

  They were continuing to hold eight days after the breakthrough, but casualties were mounting, and ammunition was being used up at a horrendous rate, twice what they had expected. The burning of several key warehouses had put the city on half rations. Pat was still claiming they could win, but it was at least two more months to the mud season of spring thaw and the bogging down of the Bantag’s supply system. The numbers simply didn’t add up to victory.

  “And remember, I still have to supply Hans as well.”

  “Hans,” Vincent sighed. He had just had another bout with the president over that the night before. Try as he could, he simply couldn’t get it through that Hans staying where he was had tied up at least ten umens and that to move him north in an attempt to relive the city was worse than useless, it was suicidal in the middle of the winter, and beyond that, even if he did land Hans smack in the middle of the city, how were an additional fifty thousand men to be armed and fed?

  “Anything new beyond Kev?” Bullfinch asked.

  “Some raids, not much. 5th Corps is dug in along the White Hills. The lines are thin but bolstered with old men, disabled veterans, and boys from the Home Guard. Two of the newer land ironclads and two flyers have been sent up there as well. The flyers are great for keeping an eye on the bastards. We won’t have much trouble on that front.”

  Committing two of the flyers and the new ironclads had been a move he had dreaded. His only hope was that since it was a raiding force there were no trained observers who could accurately report to Ha’ark about the newer technology. If it hadn’t been for the absolute demand of Kal and several senators to do this he might have held off anyhow.

  “Speaking of flyers,” Bullfinch said, “the report really doesn’t mention it. I saw them when I was up there. They’re getting damn bold. Dropping bombs on the harbor, the palace, the old forum. They’ve got four airships up there now bombing. Terrible things, firepots and sulfur matches, caused a lot of fires. Pat’s screaming for airships.”

  Vincent shook his head.

  “I released them to Kev because they were desperately needed there as eyes for our army. We know where they are around Roum, and wasting our air strength over the city is useless. Besides, where will they land in all that confusion?”

  “Well, what about the new ironclads? You’ve got at least twenty-five now.”

  “For what? Fighting in the city? They’ve got them damn rocket tubes all over that city, you told me that yourself. The few ironclads Ha’ark put into the town were burning within the hour. No, not yet.”

  “Well, damn it all, Vincent, if things don’t change damn quick the city will be lost and it won’t matter if you got a hundred of the damn things, they ain’t going to stop the Horde when it comes rolling over the White Mountains come spring.”

  Vincent wanted to reply that if the city did fall there wouldn’t even be a fight at the White Mountains. The mood of the Senate was worsening. Shouting matches, even the threat of duels and brandishing of pistols on the floor during a session, were becoming near daily occurrences as the body split between those seeking a truce and the group, made up almost entirely of old veterans, who demanded a fight to the finish. If Roum fell or Pat was forced to evacuate, he knew that surrender would be offered, the honeyed promises of Ha’ark believed.

  And then what? We won’t surrender, he thought, not those of us who came here with Andrew, not many from the army. Head west—no, Tamuka and what was left of the Merki still lingered out there. Into the forests of the north then, hide with the exiles, the wanderers and outcasts, and be hunted like beasts. The thought was beyond his ability to accept or to contemplate. No, there had to be a victory, some victory, before spring or it would be lost.

  “Andrew—how is he?”

  Bullfinch shook his head.

  “About the same,” he whispered, leaning forward as if afraid someone would hear. “The fever was dropping the morning I left there. But he drifts in and out. He’s, how can I say it …”

  “He’s fragile,” Vincent said. And merely saying the word was frightening to him. It was the brittleness he felt within himself as well. The terror of being hurt again, hurt with a pain no one could ever imagine unless he had been there and survived. It made him realize just how much of a fraud he felt himself to be. Since that final moment on the field he had not heard a shot fired in anger. He had been sent back here to Suzdal to recover, to coordinate the home defense, to oversee ordnance and the industrial complex needed to support the armies. All looked at him as a hero, and in his heart he knew he was a fraud.

  Bullfinch said nothing more. Somehow they all felt rudderless. The hand of the young colonel who had gone to middle age building an army, a republic from a race raised up from slavery, was gone, and he felt like a child suddenly forced to be the head of a fatherless family.

  “We’ve got to do something, Vincent. We can’t just sit here, let it drag out.”

  “I know.”

  “And?”

  Vincent finally nodded. “We’ll try the plan we’ve been cooking up.”

  “Hans will have a fit. Kal will never allow it, and Andrew never even heard of it.”

  Vincent smiled. “Regarding Kal, well, what he doesn’t know he can’t stop. As for Hans, since I’m senior to him as chief of staff of the army it’ll be an order. And besides, I think he’ll like it. As for Andrew, let’s just pray that he doesn’t fire us all if it fails.”

  “If it fails, we’ve lost,” Bullfinch said coldly.

  “What a damn stink,” Pat muttered as he climbed down the steps into the basement, following a line of replacement infantry for the 1st Corps. The far wall of the dank basement was knocked in, revealing the dark cavern of a subterranean sewer. The damp air drifting out was thick with cloying smells, and Pat quickly lit a
cigar to block them out.

  A staff officer from 1st Corps who was waiting for him saluted and announced that he would be the general’s guide. Pat nodded and pointed for him to lead the way. Half sliding down a wooden plank, he stepped gingerly into the ankle-deep muck and set out, the only illumination coming from the occasional drain slits set into the roadway above. Muffled sounds drifted down, the thumping of artillery, the occasional crump of a mortar round detonating, the tramping of feet.

  Reaching an intersection with a pipe heading off to the south, the guide halted for a moment. Rifle shots boomed with rolling echoes.

  “Down in the fourth sector they pulled back the paving, dug down. You can smell the fumes from the burning oil they poured in. It’s been a tough fight.”

  Two men came crawling back down the pipe, covered in muck, dragging along a third comrade who was dead, pushing him out into the main sewer. They looked at Pat blankly, then turned and crawled back.

  Pat stepped around the body, then pressed himself against the wall as a casualty clearing party came past, bearing half a dozen stretchers. Emil was having a fit about moving men with open wounds through the sewers, but for the surrounded units of 1st and 9th Corps it was the only way out.

  Pressing along behind his guide, he stopped again for a moment, a sergeant blocking the way, hand up for them to halt.

  The sergeant was intently peering at a grating in the ceiling.

  “You can hear them light the fuse for a grenade,” he whispered. “If I say run, you got four or five seconds, then get down.”

  Pat nodded, and the sergeant silently waved them forward. Blast marks scorched the walls from previous explosions.

  Pat had barely cleared the grate when the sergeant screamed, “Run!”

  Looking back over his shoulder, Pat saw the sergeant scooping up a grenade that had dropped through the overhead grate and pinching off the fuse. Looking up at the grate, the sergeant let loose with a stream of invective, answered in turn by growling roars. Strange, a game almost, and Pat sensed that both sides were actually enjoying themselves. A dim flare ignited ahead, flames balling up, a dull whoosh thumping down the corridor.

  “Benzene,” the guide announced. “They pour it through the vents. Sometimes they get somebody. Crouch low—the air is better.”

  Looking down at the muck under his feet, he decided to endure the fumes. Crossing the next intersection with a tunnel almost as big as the one they were in, he saw a knot of soldiers, rifles poised, aiming at a clear patch of light where an explosion had caved in part of the line.

  The sense of hellish confusion was increasing, wounded coming past, a carrying party shouting for the way to be cleared, rifle fire booming with cacophonous roars, another whooshing burst of igniting benzene followed an instant later by animal-like shrieks of agony, all of it combined with the stench, filth, and sick clammy feel of the enclosing walls.

  Creeping forward, Pat’s guide finally relaxed. “We’re inside our lines now—at least inside the section we were holding an hour ago. You missed the coal gas.”

  “Coal gas?”

  “Last night, fumes from a coal fire started to fill up the next sewer line over, which connects to the 9th Corps. The bastards built a big fire, made some sort of pipe with bellows, and were pumping in the fumes to gas us out. The old 7th Suzdal attacked the temple where they’d set this contraption up and smashed it.”

  Ingenious. Chances were they’d try it elsewhere; to them it was smoking out rats.

  Pat saw a stream of light ahead and gratefully accepted a hand that pulled him up into what had once been the cavernous cold-water bath. In the dim glare of a torch he caught a final glimpse of the sewer line ahead, blocked off with piles of rubble, with Bantag holding the other side less than a dozen feet away. Only the day before they had blasted it with several hundred pounds of powder, collapsing a large section and killing a score of men.

  Climbing into the baths, he looked up, squinting his eyes against the bright light. The roof was gone, and thousands of shattered tiles and flame-scorched beams half filled the bath. A stretcher party carrying a dozen men stood to one side, waiting for the order to go down, while a line of filth-encrusted men struggled to clear crates of small-arms ammunition and boxes of hardtack.

  Scrambling up a ladder out of the pool, Pat quickly surveyed the ruins. Ten days of nonstop fighting had reduced the headquarters to a smoldering pile of rubble. But rather than rendering the building useless it had in some ways made it even more defensible. Collapsed ceiling beams had been piled up and covered over with tons of bricks to form bombproof shelters. Infantry were dug in along the smashed walls, the men having burrowed down into the ruins, creating dozens of small rifle pits. Following his guide, Pat bent down low, passing under what had once been the bronze doors of the main entryway and into a deep burrow that now served as Schneid’s headquarters.

  The telegrapher was busy, a small pile of copied dispatches by his side, the key chattering away. The bombproof was rich with the smell of freshly brewed tea, and Pat gratefully accepted a cup, pulling off his mittens and wrapping his hands around the mug for warmth.

  A roughly sketched map hung from one wall, pinned against two upended benches.

  “Losing block twenty-two,” Schneid announced, pointing at the map. “They broke into the villa in the center of the block a couple of hours ago.”

  Pat nodded. “And the Temple to Venus?”

  “Oh, that regiment from 12th Corps you sent up, they’re fighting like demons for it. Say they’ll be damned if they let Bantag defile it.”

  “Pagans,” Pat muttered with a grin. Making sure that Roum regiments were assigned to hold religious sites had been a shrewd suggestion from Rick, and it seemed to be working.

  “Care for a look around?”

  “That’s what I’m here for,” Pat said.

  Grinning, Schneid beckoned for him to follow. They crawled up out of the bombproof, and a detachment of filthy-looking infantry, many of the men wrapped in layers of dirt-encrusted blankets, fell in around them.

  “Sergeant Zhadovich here can guide us,” Schneid announced. Pat turned, expecting to see the typical Rus sergeant, in his late thirties or early forties, gray-bearded, tough but with a fatherly edge. Instead he was surprised to see a boy not much more than nineteen or at best twenty years old. But the eyes instantly gave him away—they were cold, remorseless, those of a natural-born killer. Pat sensed a strange aura about this young sergeant, that somehow, no matter what happened, he would get through it alive, and thus other soldiers would gravitate to him and follow his orders.

  “All right, sirs, one thing we gotta understand. Once over the wall. I’m in command. I say stop, you stop. Get down, you get down. Keep an eye on me. Not a sound out of you, and if I start running like hell, you better keep up. Understand?”

  Pat grinned and nodded. “Fine with me, soldier.”

  “I’ll tell you, sirs, I don’t like this assignment. Getting one, maybe two generals killed on my watch is not my idea of fun. General, you sure you want to see this?”

  Pat nodded.

  The boy turned his head and spit. “With his excellency the colonel still down, sir, shouldn’t you think twice about it?”

  “Sergeant, a hell of a general I’d be if I didn’t see what my men were facing.”

  “Fine then, sir, but if you get killed, that’s your responsibility, sir, not mine and my men’s.”

  Pat smiled inwardly. Zhadovich was damn good. Not just covering his ass but making sure his unit was covered as well. It was the type of move that would win him respect with his company long after Pat was gone and would be talked about around the campfire—how their sergeant put a general in his place.

  Pat stared at Zhadovich for a moment, the look conveying that he understood the game the two of them were playing. Zhadovich seemed to ease up a bit but still held eye contact. Finally, offering a shrug of resignation, the sergeant started for the south wall of the bathhouse, a quick han
d gesture giving the order for his men to move out.

  Gaining the wall, Zhadovich bent over to talk softly with a soldier dug in between two broken marble pillars. The soldier nodded, whispered back, pointing to his left.

  Zhadovich slipped up to just below the top of the rubble, raised his head for an instant, slid down, then waved his arm for the group to move quickly. As Pat slipped past him, Zhadovich hissed, “Through the broken green door, then wait.”

  Pat scrambled up over the rubble, sparing a quick glance to his left toward what had once been the outer battlements. They were invisible in the lightly falling snow. Sliding down the rubble, he slammed into the swollen corpse of a Bantag. He leaped over it, nearly twisting an ankle as broken roof tiles skidded on the icy pavement under his feet. Ducking low, he ran for the door and went through it. The interior of the building, which looked to have been a pottery shop, was a shambles. In the middle of the room a knot of soldiers were squatting about a fire, heating cups of tea. They barely acknowledged Pat and Rick as they slipped past, weaving through the building, passing a cluster of men curled up in blankets and asleep in an alcove. Reaching the rear wall of the shop, Pat scrambled through a hole cut in the wall, out across what had once been a garden, and into the ground floor of yet another potter’s shop.

  The same was repeated through the next two blocks, darting across rubble-choked streets, weaving through the ruins of buildings, at one point diving under a heavy stone workbench when two mortar rounds whistled in. The roar of battle was incessant, and as they drew closer to what was the front line of the pocket it became deafening. Coming into the courtyard of a villa on the third block, Pat paused for a moment to kneel down and chat with half a dozen wounded who were laboriously being moved back to the corps headquarters and the entryway to the main sewer. All the men were exhausted, hollow-eyed, the wounds the results of up-close fighting.

  Next to them a group of men were fashioning crude grenades out of canteens, funneling a mixture of powder, nails, and rock fragments in through the spout, sticking a fuse in, then sealing the spout with hot wax. Zhadovich picked up two of them, their manufacturers stifling their protests at the sight of two generals with the group.