by Tom Kratman
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-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: 20mm Gatlings, interspersed with 40mm 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 microph
one. 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 with 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.
From his position in the center of the cohort, Tribune Rogachev chivvied his troops into position. Nothing fancy was envisioned. A simple on line attack was all that would be needed. The cadets formed up, east to west. The infantry dismounted from their tracks and lined up close behind them. At Rogachev’s command the entire formation faced toward the Taurans and began a stately procession to the sea. Up front, the tanks’ 125mm guns lanced out regularly and frequently with high explosive and canister, munitions against which the unquestioned bravery of the Anglian Paras would be of little avail.
Once he heard the cannons beginning to belch, Carrera lifted a microphone to his lips and ear. He spoke into it to a small to a small fishing vessel sitting at dock at the Port of Balboa. The ship—the Pericles—answered “Roger, out.” When finished contacting the ship, Carrera made hurried further calls to his scattered units.
TUSF-B Headquarters, The Tunnel, Cerro Mina, Balboa Transitway Area, Balboa, Terra Nova
McQueeg-Gordon stayed in his office and hid. It was just too humiliating the way the Gauls who ran the operation patronized and then ignored him.
Conversely, now that the action had begun Moncey had more to do than pace. Both the Anglian and Gallic Para brigades had reported that they were on the ground meeting serious but surmountable resistance. The chief also had cause for satisfaction; better than when the Federated States had invaded, decades before, his attacks had jumped off on time.
As gratified as the chief was at the excellence of the timing, his C-3 (Air) was positively jubilant. Report after report flooded his work cell area of targets successfully engaged and destroyed by the air armada sent to fire the first shots in the action. As each report was received the C-3’s staff, under his direction, ordered the attack aircraft on to their secondary targets or, somewhat more commonly, released them to fly home as the airplanes reported low fuel or ordnance.
When the chief asked his C-3 (Air) how he knew the targets were genuinely destroyed, the answer was basically that the pilots had said so. Had he been a little more careful he might have asked about the extent to which armored vehicles attacked had shown signs of secondary explosions, fuel and ammunition blowing up, after the attacks. The chief, a tanker by background, knew that overestimation of the damage done to a target was an unavoidable vice of all pilots, in all countries, at all times. Still he didn’t worry overmuch. Things really did seem to be going like clockwork.
There came a spate of calls from headquarters attempting to establish radio contact. This would not have been unusual except that those headquarters had already established contact. More than a few RTOs answered with a slightly surly tone.
In a few minutes the calls to establish contact ceased. Their place was taken by reports of action and requests for orders or information. These, too, lasted only briefly before an NCO manning a radio sat straight up and shouted, “That was my voice, Goddamit. We’re being spoofed!”
TUSF-B began to work through the jamming, then to change codes. The code changes, especially in light of the jamming, were time-consuming, incomplete, and—for the men in action—unutterably confusing.
Initially, the Pericles almost kept up with the changes. Eventually, it caught up.
The chief returned to his pacing, though now it was quite nervous, when a strange and eerie piece of music began to blare from the loud speakers connected to the radios. M
ore jamming. The general couldn’t quite place it until one of the headquarters radio operators, a Castilian-born enlistee into the Gallic army announced what it was.
“Deguello,” the citizen of Gaul said with wonder. “Who the fuck is playing Deguello?”
The private had no more than spoken the words when a major rushed into the Operations Center. Looking around quickly, the major spotted the chief and hurried over. Speaking in hushed but excited tones the major told of what he had seen from the top of the hill. “Sir, Arnold and Brookings are both under attack. Rockets I’m sure of; I could see them. Maybe mortars or artillery too. Heavy fire sir, I counted over fifty rounds a minute landing in both places.”
Heart sinking, telling his staff he was going topside, the chief rushed out of the Operations Center to see for himself. When he’d climbed to the very topmost crest of the great hollowed out hill, his heart leapt to his mouth. It was worse than the major had said. Fire—rockets, artillery, mortars, and God knew what else—wasn’t just coming from one or a few places. It seemed to be coming from everywhere.
My God, thought the chief, as a fireball blossomed over Arnold AFB, how will we ever keep the troop flow going?
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Now that was the story my grandfather told,
As he sat by the fire all withered and old.
“Remember,” said he, “that the Irish fight well,
But the Russian artillery’s hotter than Hell.”
—“The Kerry Recruit,” Traditional
Santa Cruz, east of Arnold Air Force Base, Balboa, Terra Nova
Tribune Ilya Kruptkin, XO for the cadet cohort, was thankful beyond words at finally getting out of the hot, stuffy, and miserable little warehouse in which he and more than two hundred cadets had been hiding for three days. As he emerged he heard the cohort’s artillery “club”—rocket launchers, 85mm guns, 81mm and 120mm mortars—pounding on the enemy to his west without mercy. A suddenly bright glow, the source hidden by the sharp ridge overlooking the air base, suggested the fire was particularly effective where aircraft were parked.
