by Tom Kratman
They’d had their part, too, in defeating the charge of the Amazons. They hadn’t known it at the time. Then Hendryksen had crawled out to try to succor one of the Balboan wounded. She’d died about the time the Cimbrian had discovered the he was a she. He crawled back to Campbell, then lifted her bodily from the hole.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” he said. “Those weren’t men we killed. Those were women.”
“So?” Campbell asked. She didn’t see what possible difference that could make.
Hendryksen, being a man, did understand. “We killed their women,” he said. “When they take this hill—and they will—they’re not going to leave anyone alive. This place is a massacre just waiting to happen. And we need to get away from it.”
Just north of Avenida de la Victoria, Ciudad Balboa, Balboa, Terra Nova
Suarez went to one knee beside the stretcher bearing Captain Avila. With a raised eyebrow he looked up to the medic attending. The medic shook his head “No.” Suarez nodded and turned his attention back to the tribune.
“Your men did great, son,” he said. “Just great.”
“Son . . . my father would never call me son after . . . you know.”
“I imagine. Well . . . he should be proud of you today.”
“My boys?”
“Casualties were pretty bad. But,”—Suarez lied—“they’ve just about gotten to the top of the hill.”
“Juan, my . . . XO? I thought I saw him fall.”
“Maybe he tripped. Anyway, he’s fine. A few minutes ago he reported that he’d be pulling down the Tauran flag momentarily.” Another lie. There had been no report of late from anyone in the two shattered maniples.
“Good . . . good. Tell him not to miss me too much, to take over the company and find someone worthy to take his place.”
“I’ll do that, son.”
“I think I need to sleep now, sir.”
“You do that. The medics will take care of you.” Suarez patted the dying man’s shoulder and stood up. He walked out of the makeshift aid station. Outside DeSantis, his operations officer told him, “Second and part of Tenth Infantry Tercios are ready to go in now.”
De Villepin threw down the microphone in frustration. “Fucking cowards.”
Hearing, Moncey asked what the problem was.
“It’s the goddamned aviators. They’re saying its getting too hot around the hill to come in to the hospital any more. How the hell are we supposed to get the wounded out without helicopters?”
“Give me the microphone.” When he did Moncey keyed it and spoke in the clear.
“Who is this?” Moncey demanded. “No . . . I mean your name and rank . . . Good. Let me make this clear as a bell, Colonel, as completely unopen to interpretation as anything in this world. This is General Moncey. You will come in and continue to pick up the wounded until they are all evacuated or you and your men are dead. I’m already sending lists of commendation to Taurus. I’ll be happy to add a list—a short one—with recommendations for trial by court-martial. Not that I’ll let you live long enough for that . . . Yes, I’m sure you were only thinking about the safety of the wounded, Colonel. Let me worry about that. Moncey, out.”
The chief shook his head, then said, “He’ll go in. How’s the evac of the civvies going?”
“Better, sir. Their pick-up zones are not under fire yet. I shudder to think about what will happen when they are.”
“The pressies?”
“Refuse to leave, sir. Insist we cut loose some troops to guard them.”
“Right. Fuck ’em. Can the Navies take all we have to send them?”
“They’re not complaining yet.”
“Imperial Base?”
“They’ve been off line for a little while now. I think they’ve had it.”
“Yes . . . I suppose so.”
CHAPTER FIFTY
Will you yield, and this avoid,
Or guilty, in defense, be thus destroyed?
—William Shakespeare, Henry V
Front Street, Cristobal, outside 4th Corps Command Post, Balboa, Terra Nova
Jimenez stood next to the wave-lapped bay. Opposite him, Fort Tecumseh’s huge barracks stood, clearly silhouetted in the light of morning. To the north, Eighth Tercio was even now battling for possession of the Shimmering Sea Locks. The cadre of the Taurans’ Jungle School were putting up a strong resistance.
Along the piazza-covered walkways of Front Street the First Cohort of the Ninth Tercio clustered by squads around the pitiful rubber boats that were to carry them across the bay. Men from Jimenez’s transportation company stood by each boat. They would carry the infantry across and return for the next load.
The other two infantry cohorts of the tercio were marching and trucking toward Cristobal as fast as possible. This was not all that fast. They had taken losses and were very tired as well.
In the long narrow park toward the eastern side of the city Jimenez’s six heavy mortar batteries and two rocket batteries stood manned and ready, fifty-four mortars and eighteen 122mm launchers. They were recruited from Cristobal itself and had assembled with little trouble.
The First Cohort’s heavy and light mortars had found other little open areas from which to support their infantry. The other battalions’ mortars were with their own battalions and would be along sometime.
Jimenez barked a command. Word was passed. The small boats were dragged from behind him to the water. Squads of legionaries carried, pulled, and dragged them into the salt water, then clambered aboard themselves. Coxswains pulled the starter ropes on the small engines mounted to the back of each boat. Some started reluctantly, a few refused to start at all. For these the coxswains passed out short wooden paddles on the theory of better late than never.
The line of boats, it was nearly two kilometers long from north to south, put-putted for the far shore.
Jimenez waited until the boats had almost reached the halfway mark before ordering the Ocelots to follow. They moved through the water at nearly twice the speed the boats were capable of.
He didn’t give the order for the heavy mortars to fire until the boats were fifteen hundred meters from Fort Tecumseh. Before the first lance of defensive fire could lash out, the far shore was wreathed in smoke and fire.
Fort Williams, Balboa, Terra Nova
Ham was the platoon leader now. Delgado had died after being hit but while being evacuated. He hadn’t quite turned eighteen yet. Sitting in the ruins of the post, looking around at dinosaur-chewed walls, crumpled roofs, fire, and smoke, Ham thought, maybe inanely, Dad is going to be pissed. He loved this post.
The cadets had suffered badly. They’d never really had the numbers on this side, and surprise only carried them so far. Indeed, it had been touch and go until Ninth Tercio had intervened.
Give the fuckers their due, thought Hamilcar, the Anglians are tough.
The Anglians, such as remained, were gathered under guard in the middle of the post’s trapezoidal parade field. By eye, Ham estimated no more than two hundred prisoners. He didn’t know how many might be back at Fort Melia. He also didn’t know how many wounded were being treated. Certainly a number of the less seriously wounded were still out on the parade field under guard.
One of the Anglians began to sing. The song had elements of faith to it, of course, but also a degree of defiance. The Anglian sang:
“Abide with me; fast falls the eventide”
Twenty or so more joined in:
“The darkness deepens; Lord with me abide”
Fifty more added their voices:
“When other helpers fail and comforts flee”
All of them sang now:
“Help of the helpless, O, abide with me.”
And then Ham and a couple of others stood. They knew this song from services back at the academy:
“La luz del día aquí conmigo está
Desaparece ya la oscuridad
Tu das la fuerza y la libertad
Siempre contigo v
ivire verdad”
And in two tongues one song filled up that sky.
Fort Muddville, Balboa Transitway Area, Terra Nova
It was a nightmare: screaming women, civilian men, children, without order and control, all desperately trying to get aboard any helicopter as it touched down. From every side, at a distance but growing almost imperceptibly closer, came the sound of rifle and machine gun fire. Windows rattled as the big tank cannon fired. Whimpers were heard whenever an artillery strike landed.
To the east, the last holdouts of the dragoons’ headquarters troops—cooks and mechanics—were buying time, dying gallantly on and around Florida Locks and the swing bridge that would let hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of Balboan troops take Muddville in flank.
The tattered remnants of crushed military police units attempted to maintain some kind of order in the unplanned evacuation. Whenever a Navy or Marine helicopter touched down to pick up a new load, the MPs were forced to use their sticks to prevent the helicopters from being swamped by a horde of terrified refugees.
Anshan Battle Group, Imperial New Middle Kingdom Navy, Bahia de Balboa, Terra Nova
The Zhong evacuation was going better. For one thing, they had more naval helicopters of greater carrying capacity than all four Tauran carriers combined. For another, they’d started sooner, having put out word through their own channels for their people ashore to muster at certain key points. For a third, they weren’t part of this war; their people had no reason to expect being punished for the actions of their government. Lastly, not being part of the war, the Anshan and her consorts had come in closer to shore, thus cutting flight times drastically. Finally, they were simply better disciplined than the hedonistic, individualistic Taurans.
Even so, a crowd of weeping women and screaming children, many more than the helicopter should have been carrying, were driven off into the welcoming arms of a reception committee made up of sailors and Imperial Marines. They joined there some thousands of others who had already been lifted from the mainland. A few had been injured, artillery being no respecter of persons or neutrality. These were carried below as they were triaged. Most were expected to live—the others, the expectant ones; expected to die—had been left ashore to die in peace.
The Anshan’s escorts hovered around her and her replenishment ship like guard dogs, the more so with her new cargo.
SSK Meg, one hundred meters below the surface, Bahia de Balboa, Terra Nova
The submarine had moved a bit to keep ahead of the incoming carrier, then slowed to a crawl in order to be sure of approaching the target ships so closely that the carrier would have no chance to make its escape once engaged. It had not broken the surface in any way since Chu had decided his duty lay in attack. Even this far down, the sub’s sonar man could, faintly, make out what he swore were helicopters, many of them, transiting from ship to shore. The crew was tense, without even the privilege of drumming their fingers for relief.
“So the attack is still on, is it,” Chu said softly. “Well, Taurans, your part of it ends in about half an hour. I hope you’ve all had a nice filling lunch.”
Chu couldn’t know, but might have wondered, why the ship had taken from moving in a large box at considerable speed to almost keeping station in a much smaller area at much less speed. Probably the answer he’d have come up with would have been, So we lost ashore, did we? Well, some of you won’t be around to celebrate.
The Meg continued to close.
Northern Slope, Cerro Mina, Balboa Transitway Area, Terra Nova
“C’mon, Segundo a Nadie!” Cruz shouted to his men. “Let’s show the Taurans just what us little brown fuckers can do!”
With the lesson of the fate of the Gorgidas and Amazonas maniples literally before them, Second Tercio attacked with much more care. Its own normally attached artillery battery, 85mm guns, and its own mortars kept Tauran heads down until it had passed the broad avenue with its scores of Amazon and Gorgidas bodies. Machine guns stationed on the friendly side of the street added a steady rattle. Even fired at random, they helped.
Cruz walked forward in the customary position of the cohort sergeant major, behind the mass of the unit. He seemed rather nonchalant as he sauntered confidently across the street and up the slope, stick under one arm except when he used it to point the way to a befuddled trooper. He looked to his right and saw a legionary’s face assume a vicious expression as he stepped over a uniformed woman’s shattered body.
Oh, oh. I don’t like this. A wide-ranging glance told him the rest of the cohort was equally enraged at the slaughter of the women. The men picked up a chant—perhaps from one who had described what happened to the Amazons. They chanted, “Massacre! Massacre!” Up ahead, a rapid fire began to build. The lead elements of the cohort were in contact.
The came an explosion to Cruz’s right front, then another to the left. The tercio’s engineers were blowing lanes in the wire. The volume of fire increased, enough so that Cruz was forced to the ground. He heard a shout; then a dozen more. There was a clash of metal on metal as though a fight with cold steel had broken out, as indeed it had. The firing from Cruz’s immediate front ceased. It was replaced by screams and what Cruz thought might have been pleas for mercy.
Cruz was distracted from the fight ahead by the sound of diesels, hundreds of them, moving along Avenida de la Victoria to his rear. About time, he thought, that First Corps showed up. He couldn’t know, and didn’t much care, that the bulk of the mechanized troops had been mercilessly attacked by the Tauran air forces.
Casualties had been high enough. Time, however, had been the greatest cost. The rumble of diesels and treads continued past, the Corps was on its way to attack the Taurans still fighting at Muddville and Brookings.
Cruz reached the line the Thirty-fifth Commandos had once defended. He didn’t know any of them, of course. On the other hand, he wouldn’t have recognized any even if known, because the leading troops of his battalion had bayoneted them, gutted them, smashed their faces to red pulp. Two or three—it was hard to tell—had no obvious heads attached. Cruz walked on, not shouting encouragement any longer.
He reached an open area and saw a small female Tauran fleeing. A soldier, Cruz thought, though she was actually a Navy clerk attached to TUSF-B. Her helmet was off and blond braids streamed behind her. As she ran the girl kept turning around to see the Balboan who pursued. At length he reached her and, swinging his rifle butt against her head knocked her to the ground. She landed on her back. The butt-stroke had not been hard enough to kill.
The girl was screaming as the bayonet pinned her to the earth. Another Balboan soldier joined the first. He too, stabbed down at the writhing and shrieking girl. Together they shifted their grips on their rifles, picked her up on the ends of their bayonets, lifted her, still crying, screaming, and pleading, tossed her up in the air and caught her again on the points. They tossed her again. On the third toss, the girl made no motion, her formerly frantically waving arms and legs still. The two dropped the corpse and went looking for other Taurans to kill.
Cruz’s eye caught sight of a video camera lying on the ground. He noticed abstractly that the camera said TNN. A face-down body clothed in fatigues lay beside it. A Balboan straddled the body, beating down, again and again, with the butt of his rifle. Two others, also in Tauran battle dress but without insignia, raised their hands in surrender. They were simply shot where they stood. They were shot again where they lay.
All over the top of Cerro Mina, Balboan troops were avenging themselves on the people who had killed “their” women.
Not entirely incongruously, pipers played a stirring tune amidst the massacre. Janier’s old house was soon in flames. Someone—Cruz never knew who—ran to the flagpole and cut the lanyard holding the Tauran flag. It fluttered to the ground.
A petite and very pretty woman, also in fatigues without insignia—but a military contract civilian rather than a reporter—lay on her back and spread her legs before she could be killed by the u
nusually large legionary sergeant who stood before her. The invitation was plain. The sergeant began to unbuckle his trousers. Cruz shot him because, while massacre was an occasional and unavoidable fact of war, rape was indiscipline. Then, because Centurion School had taught him to expect this sort of thing to happen from time to time, and because he had been trained to ensure that, when it did, there were to be no unfriendly witnesses left alive, Cruz—reluctantly—took aim to shoot the woman. Well . . . she was in uniform, after all, and had not surrendered to him.
Cruz’s finger began to exert pressure on the trigger. Seeing that he was aiming for her, the petite woman grew wide-eyed and screamed for her life, her hands moving frantically to undo her belt and pull down her fatigue trousers. Cruz’s finger stopped squeezing for a moment, began again and again stopped.
Crap. I can’t just shoot her while she’s looking at me. He walked to where the woman struggled with the confining clothing.
“Keep your clothes on, girl,” he said. “I didn’t shoot that son of a bitch to have you myself.” Cruz reached a hand down for her. “Here, stand up. You’ll be safe now.”
It will be easier for her if it’s a surprise. “Now put your hands up and start walking slowly to the base of the hill,” he commanded.
The woman began to comply. Once she looked back at Cruz, half expecting him to shoot anyway. He gave her a friendly wave. When she was about twenty-five meters away, Cruz raised his F-26 to fire. He had an idea that caused him to lower it.
“Come back here, girl.”
Reluctantly, and very nervously, she did.
