Robert Frezza - [Colonial War 01]

by A Small Colonial War (epub)

  “Cover my back,” he told the younger mere as he opened the door to the street. Outside in the darkness, he tried to pinpoint the sound of a developing firefight over the noise and bustle at his back.

  The whole town might have been dead for ought else he heard. Overtop his head in the tower, that poor fool of a naked cowboy was ringing the church bell for all he was worth.

  * * *

  WHERE COLDEWE HAD LEFT THE FIRST OF THE MORTAR CREWS,

  Mekhlis listened to the ringing as well, then opened a channel.

  “C point one. Break. Mekhlis. The church bell?”

  “Sure. Take it out. Sanmartin out.”

  Mekhlis’s crew had already lowered the hydraulic spade-feet of the utility vehicle and elevated their firing tube. Mekhlis whistled to the second utility vehicle positioned wheel-to-wheel to act as an limber. Number five was already shifting a case of ammunition into the hands of number four.

  Mekhlis checked again to make sure the computer had adjusted the extension of the feet to compensate for irregularity in the ground. He ran the firing calculations quickly. His crew dropped nine HE rounds a distance of 4,327 meters, give or take a hair.

  THE RINGING FROM THE BELL OF THE PIETERSKERK ACROSS THE street also awakened Elise Louw. Huddled in her bed, she wondered what it might portend. Abruptly, she ran to her window and threw it open in time to see part of the church explode outward in front of her eyes. Chunks of masonry crashed through the wall Clouds of billowing dust and smoke emerged from everywhere.

  As Louw fled, three more rounds ripped the top off the bell tower. She ran to the next room. Hearing the sounds of weapons firing through the shattered window, she crept back against the wall.

  Outside her window, Danny Meagher shook his head. Twisting it, he observed Pat, similarly prone, bleeding about the face from a succession of small cuts. To his back, the mortar fire that had tom the guts out of the church halted punctually.

  He rose to his knees and crawled over to see what was behind the ruined door. With its blast confined by the walls, the mortar had turned the inside into a chamel house. For a second time on Suid-Afrika, Meagher commanded a unit that no longer existed. Pat jerked his head toward the darkness.

  “A church, yet. Colonel Vereshchagin’s lads are not a trusting lot. Well, let’s blow, Pat,” Meagher said at last.

  As an afterthought, he said, “Friend Hendrik, we purchased him a few minutes. I suppose we ought to look in and see if he’s all right.” Pat climbed to his feet and shrugged, setting off at a dogtrot through the streets, Meagher at his heels.

  AS THE BOERS IN THE TWO LITTLE KOMMANDOS BEGAN RAISING their heads, the slicks went in, gun slicks leading, to give a few minutes personalized attention to the uneven rows of little green tents.

  Zerebtsov watched seven-sevens wrapped in the bulky shrouds of their coolant jackets move in tandem with the gunners’ helmets to play over the startled Boers. They held down opposition for the s-mortars on the trail slicks to do the real work. Unhurriedly, he and Salchow took out four unusually active individuals in the confusion.

  The slicks abruptly wheeled and sped off in an unexpected direction, firing Parthian arrows. The astonished but relatively undamaged Boer contingent reacted with enthusiasm. Expected and understandable, this was also silly. As light and flimsy as the slicks appeared, tire extreme slant to their armor left them largely invulnerable to small arms fire and everything else being thrown at them. Not so the Afrikaners.

  Half of them were standing up, blazing away, when Zerebtsov called in fire from all three mortars and let them use the Hummingbird to see the fall of shot. A sixty-second barrage and a follow-up five minutes later blew the bells out.

  Zerebtsov observed the damage critically and spoke again to his radio. “Twelve point one. Break. You got mines, right? Scatter a dozen shells worth, same coordinates, and we call it a day.” The slicks had already shoved off to give Okladnikov’s Cadillacs a hand, and Zerebtsov made to follow. What was left of these Boers wasn’t going to be of much use to anybody until long after the fight for Krugersdorp had been settled.

  The guns fired the mission before they prepared to shift back and pound assigned targets inside the town. Out of habit, Mekhlis and his crew lifted the spade-feet and began to displace to a new firing position. Before his vehicles had traveled a hundred meters, three rounds of accurate counterbattery fire from the center of town landed squarely on the position they had just vacated.

  The town was awake. Number four in back whistled loud and long.

  DAWN ARRIVED ABRUPTLY IN THE FOREST. FOR ABOUT AN HOUR, it penetrated the canopy as a strange, luminous gray part-light without reds or shadows. Then suddenly, each leaf emerged in iridescent light as sun’s rays infused the water droplets.

  The forest was green.

  Chekhov had said somewhere that the best description of snow he ever heard was one given by a schoolgirl. She said, “The snow was white.”

  Waiting in the gray half-light to the side of the stunted excuse for a road, Coldewe tried to recall other tidbits from his vantage point on the back of Okladnikov’s Cadillac. Okladnikov flipped open the hatch and stuck his head out.

  “Hello Sergei. Of interest?”

  Okladnikov shook his head. “I just came up to feel the breeze.”

  Coldewe nodded. He let his eyes drift downward until they fixed on the tires. “Did you know that they once made those things out of rubber?”

  “Like chewing gum,” Okladnikov replied noncommittally, his interest in matters historical nonexistent.

  “No alveoli, just a long tube full of air.”

  Okladnikov made appropriate noises.

  “What we need are the ravens, to set the mood,” Coldewe said, feeling the night breeze brush against his face, listening to the gunfire.

  “Sure, sure,” Okladnikov whispered as the firing intensified. Seven spaced clicks from Sanmartin’s radio spared him further.

  He watched Coldewe mask himself and returned a casual salute. The Hangman’s company had a few rituals all its own. As the engine purred into life, Okladnikov shut the hatch and opened a channel to his vehicles.

  “Hear me, my brothers. The winds of Paradise are blowing. Where are you who long for Paradise?”

  They moved out to crash the barriers.

  SANMARTIN WAS FIFTH THROUGH THE HOLE. PASSING DOWN-

  ward to the second level, he felt his knees shake as one of Muslar’s riflemen put a stick grenade down to clean out the cellar.

  They knew house drill. On either side of the street, starting from the top, a section would clean out dividing walls with shaped charges and clean up the rooms with grenades. Machine guns at street level and on the rooftops kept the party private.

  It was a little rough on the nonfighting Boers, but a lot of fighting Boers were billeted in the cellars. It was a lot rough on them.

  Eveiy movement sent a cloud of blue wafting through the interior of the house. Sanmartin had them dusting the upper floors with incapacitant grenades for the time being; the blue powder was everywhere. He could see the particles adhering to the walls, the floor, the surface of Muslar’s mask. Incapacitants were about the most humane weapon known to man. They worked fairfy well in confined spaces. Sanmartin intended to use them until the first Boer turned up in a protective mask, and then things would be a lot rough on the nonfighting Boers as well.

  Muslar had his assault rifle resting in the crook of his right arm. With his left he held up the engineer’s axe he had taken from lyulenev after the big dummy had stepped in a hole and wrenched his knee.

  From the comer of his eye, Sanmartin saw a side door flung open and slammed his body onto the plaster chips, squeezing a burst. Incongruously, a naked man with a rifle stumbled over the towel blocking the door’s lower edge and fell into the space where Sanmartin’s fire intersected with rounds from the steps above. Behind the man a woman sank to her knees untouched, dropping the sheet she held in front of her body. Gingerly, she reached down to shake
the man’s arm, and her hand came away red. Sanmartin raised to one elbow. He turned to Muslar.

  Muslar was flaccid on the steps. The rifleman stooped over his body shook his head and pointed to his cheek and chest, indicating where return fire Sanmartin had never seen had gone in. The first hit had ruptured Muslar’s aorta. As Sanmartin watched, Muslar’s face settled out, exsanguinated. He died without lifting his head. Gently prying fingers apart, the rifleman bent to take up the big axe from where it stood stiffly wedged against the rail.

  Sanmartin sprang down to the landing and absently scooped up the Boer’s rifle by the barrel to smash it against the wall. Billowing blue dust had taken the girl; she slumped. Unconscious, naked, she looked elfin, childlike. Innocent. He felt a sudden urge to kick her. The team leader recovered Muslar’s weapon.

  “Atque in perpetuum, frater, ” Sanmartin chanted softly.

  From the steps below, he heard someone ask, “You coming, captain? The armored cars are here.”

  He hurried to a window and looked far down the main street.

  The barriers on the side streets had been designed to stop straying cattle, not armored cars. As AP rounds from the mortars crumpled the bunkers on either side of the main road, Okladnikov cut in his sirens and swung his Cadillacs in from the fields. His gunner hosed down the buildings on either side with high-velocity flares for lurking missile teams and impact-fused projectiles for everyone else. The barrier came apart like wet paper.

  They hit the main street, and Okladnikov formed his vehicles into a tight diamond, guiding left. Shifting fire, they cleared the streets on either side and ripped the facades. Twenty meters from their entry point, the red light of an errant rocket flared briefly. Stabbing white fire smashed the Boer with a launcher against a wall and the wall behind the Boer before the light armor darted down another side street and away into the night. Behind them, Coldewe’s Gurkha infantry consolidated a position, rounding up dazed Boers, military and civilian.

  Sanmartin pulled his head inside.

  VINCENTE ALMOST SEEMED TO BE ASLEEP, WEDGED AGAINST

  the concrete steps. Snyman listened to the light chatter over the radio, waiting for his own name or Vincente’s.

  Dead bodies looked nothing like what Snyman had expected. Some of them were very young. Any lingering faith in martial glory that Orlov hadn’t kicked out of Snyman’s soul had been erased by the sight of Cornelius du Toit kicking up his fat legs with a bellyful of caseless 5mm killing him a centimeter at a time. The old burgemeester had guested in Snyman’s house several times.

  Du Toit had always esteemed himself to be one of the heros of the First Republic reborn. Still, it was no way to die. Vincente had eased him with a shot of opiate.

  A few prisoners passed, frightened. Each of them had his arms taped and a loop run around his throat. A Boer light machine gun was firing down the length of the street, trying to buy time. Captain Sanmartin had wedged a section of No. 9 platoon in next to No. 11.

  Across from him, Snyman saw an 88mm team from No. 9 move around the side of the building out of his field of vision. Curious, he stuck his head around to see and immediately felt Vincente’s long fingers hook his harness and jerk him back. Machine gun fire splintered plaster where his head had been. He looked back at Vincente.

  Vincente tapped his radio as he lay back down. “Hey! No hurry. You made two trips already, why rush? They’re good boys. They’ll tell us when they want us.” He closed one eye. “Orlov tell you you could stick your head around up high like that?”

  Synman nodded and wetted his lips.

  “Say, ‘Mario, I owe you a beer.’ ” Vincente closed both his eyes and folded his hands over his chest. “Dignity, kiddo. Dignity. Don’t let them take that away. Hey, you listen to the radio and give me a kick in the ribs they call our number.”

  He fell asleep and began snoring.

  De Kantzow’s team was supporting Miinalainen’s 88mm. “Nine point two slash three. Break. Fripp, you and Mother Elena get frosting lost? ’ ’ he sang out into his wrist mount as the machine gun fire stripped the paint off the walls over his head.

  Without lifting himself, de Kantzow expertly directed a grenade from the launcher slung under his rifle through the shattered window and reloaded. The small projectile had no discernible effect on the volume of fire. In the open field, the Boers were a mob. Wedged into the houses, they had to be smoked out one by one, gutter fighting.

  De Kantzow knew the center of the town was holding. Someone had welded the Boers together well enough to regroup and try to cut their way out. Although crippled, they’d stopped Co-Idewe’s Gurkhas stone-cold. Spotted, the Boers weren’t especially hard to deal with. To spot them, there was one sweep sensor per section. There was also the old-fashioned way, which was to stick your head up and see if it got shot off.

  Thursby crawled over from where he was lying, dragging his light machine gun. “Hey, Filthy DeKe!” he whispered.

  De Kantzow ignored him. “Do you frosting hear me, Frip-pie?” he yelled, and listened for a reply. What he heard was a familiar voice singing slightly off-key.

  By that stone, there runs a flood,

  the bells of Paradise, I heard them ring,

  The one half runs water, the other runs blood,

  and I love my Lord Jesus, above anything . . .

  “Frippie, you frosted turtlehead, is that you frosting singing frosting Christmas carols?”

  The singing broke off. “Prayer and patience, Deacon. Jerusalem was never built in a day. ”

  De Kantzow clicked off mouthing obscenities. He rolled over to look at Thursby shrugging off plaster from the ceiling. “Now what’s your frosting problem, Thursday?” he whispered.

  “DeKe, there’s gold back here. Little bars. Lots of it.”

  “So?”

  “So? Is that all you can say? So?”

  “So. You can’t screw it. You can’t drink it. You can’t even frosting crawl with it. Has it skipped your frosty, feeble mind that maybe I don’t want to spend the rest of your unnatural life mucking out frosting latrines for Berry because you got itchy fingers?”

  “But DeKe . . .”

  The unseen machine gun ripped through the building, knocking away what was left of the glass in the windows. De Kantzow turned his back on the speechless Thursby and keyed his radio. “Nine point two slash three. Break. Hey Fripp! You and Mother Elena stuffing sheep out there?”

  The triple blast of Yelenov’s s-mortar, finally positioned, resolved the question to de Kantzow’s satisfaction.

  Snyman watched a half-dozen Boers tumble out the door of the ground floor with their hands held high, coughing from the smoke and dust. Fripp leaped up and darted forward. Like thistledown, the surrendering Afrikaners scattered as rifle fire broke out from the floor above indiscriminately. Fripp’s head snapped back as four bullets smashed into his body.

  Thursby and de Kantzow raked the upper level. Snyman watched Yelenov jump out in the street and carefully pump three s-mortar rounds through each of wide big windows, stepping calmly back to reload. As he nerved himself to come across, Vincente waved him back.

  “Mine, kiddo!” And he was gone.

  Yelenov braced beside the smoking doorway. “Help him check out inside,” Vincente shouted, kneeling beside Fripp, who was obviously dying.

  Snyman found himself on his feet. When he reached the far side, Yelenov grabbed him by the shoulder and pulled him against the wall. “Get out of the light,” Mother Elena told him petulantly, his own submachine gun poised in the crook of his arm and the s-mortar dangling from its strap. Then he vanished inside.

  Stumbling, Snyman followed and flung himself beside Yelenov. Over his head, dawn streamed through the cracks in the floor above.

  “Headquarters,” Yelenov whispered. He leveled his submachine gun and fired a dozen rounds through one unopened door. “Cover me,” he said, moving across the room to kick the door in.

  Sheepishly, Snyman thumbed his weapon off safety. The little
room was empty. Responding to Yelenov’s hand signals, he moved to where he could cover the stairwell. Cautiously, Yelenov explored what was left of the upstairs. He reappeared almost immediately.

  “Want another trip? The guy at the top of the steps is still breathing, looks bad. Forget the rest. I’ll tell Vincente.” Yele-nov tapped his radio. “Chiba point one. Break. Yelenov. Building fourteen is a headquarters, secured, lots of documents. Yelenov out.” He darted past Snyman back out into the street without awaiting a reply.

  Snyman recognized his father in the man in the black uniform at the head of the steps. The elder Snyman was unconscious, breathing shallowly with blood oozing from a small hole in his temple. Jan Snyman climbed the steps and ran his hand across his eyes. He began unfolding his A-frame, using his fingers to brush away little bits of hardened foam.

  Yelenov reappeared. “Vincente’s busy. Can you manage?” he said, flipping through his pockets absently for another sheaf of grenades. He looked down at the Boer and looked at Snyman quizzically. “He looks like you. You know him?”

  Snyman nodded. “My father. Help me slide him on.”

  He spoke as they worked. "He would have loved me very much if he had known how to go about it. Perhaps he would not be here if I had not joined. Then again, perhaps he would, he was very much a patriot. Still, I am old enough to be responsible for my actions. I suppose he is old enough to be responsible for his.” Once they had him on the A-firame, Snyman immobilized him with the foam. Then he got underneath, lifted the apex, and settled the weight over his hips while Yelenov folded the legs. “Guide me down,” Snyman directed.

  Yelenov did so. They reached the street, passing Fripp and three dead Afrikaners. De Kantzow met them.

  “What’s the word?” Yelenov asked in his soft voice.

  “We’re going to frosting leapfrog. Three minutes. ’ ’ De Kantzow looked at Snyman. “We’ve got two more frosting bleeders and a couple who can move. Think you can get them back?” “Vincente left his A-frame for one, and I see half a door for the other,” Yelenov said.