Robert Frezza - [Colonial War 01]

by A Small Colonial War (epub)

  “Do you want to go? It only takes one of us, and I’m sure they won’t harm you,” Claassen said quietly.

  Olivier shook his head, not trusting himself to speak. Claassen nodded his head wearily. “Down the shaft then with you. We all die sometime. In order to be brave, I suppose that you must first learn how to be afraid. I still think that you were an idiot to get yourself mixed up with this Order nonsense, but I suppose God won’t mind.”

  Olivier held his left hand clutched in his right, his fingers curled rigidly, as he tried to control the twitching. Many of the ones who had been the loudest had been the first to fall away when the Imperials struck back, but not all.

  “There are special weapons in the vault. Almost the last ones we have,” he said, his teeth rattling uncomfortably.

  Claassen pondered this. “We can call them atom bombs now, there’s no one to hear. Do you know the combination?”

  “No.”

  “A pity. Ask Strijdom if you see him before I do.” His eyes softened. “I would not have used them in any case.”

  Olivier nodded, acknowledging the sentiment. “If it comes to it, you pull the switch. I don’t think that I can,” he said, attempting to command his fear. He looked out the entrance between the supports suddenly. “Who is that?” he exclaimed.

  Sanmartin approached, waving an embroidered handkerchief. “Don’t shoot. This is a flag of truce, and I’m not armed.” “Come in,” Claassen said with a gesture. “Are you here to surrender? ’ ’

  “Not hardly likely.”

  “Are you not afraid we will take you prisoner?” Olivier said in labored English.

  “Again, not hardly likely. Abuse of an emissary is a class three war crime. You’re better off taking a shot at the emperor. It means your family gets transported without civil rights. Transportation with civil rights is bad enough. You’re Olivier? You have two small daughters.” Sanmartin shook his head. “When they get dumped off somewhere, they can support themselves by begging, stealing, or prostitution. Kinder to cut their throats.”

  “I assume you are here for some reason, ’ ’ Claassen said dryly. “It’s over, Claassen, and I can use you to help put things back together. Your people are going to need a few honest men.” He pulled a small radio out of one pocket. “Here, Albert Beyers can tell you better than I can.”

  He looked at Olivier. “You can stay for all I care. But your family gets transported with civil rights either way, and they might like you along.”

  “What about the ammunition? We cannot leave it for you!” Olivier protested.

  “Oh, that. Just so.” He reached into another pocket and pulled out a detonation charge. “Go ahead and make it a professional job, but if you’re not out in an hour, we’ll blow the place for you.”

  He turned and walked out into the sunshine.

  Forty minutes later, he asked, “Any sign?” The engineer lieutenant, Reinikka, shook his head.

  “All right,” Sanmartin said resignedly, “clear the pithead.”

  “Hold it, they’re coming!” Reinikka said suddenly. “All that work wasted.”

  “Now that we’ve gone to the trouble, it does seem a shame. What did we set that charge for, an hour? ’ ’ He watched Claassen and Olivier walk toward them with their hands raised. He cupped his hands and shouted, “Hurry up!”

  They used the mining equipment to pump in a slug of elec-trolized water. With four minutes to spare on the charge, Reinikka fired an incendiary round from an 88 to flash the liberated hydrogen. They heard a muffled tremor and a huge dust cloud shot out.

  Sanmartin detailed Moushegian and another engineer. “Stay behind and check for radiation. Send the bill to USS.”

  “THIS MAN, BEYERS, OF YOURS IS SHARP, HENDRIK. HE CER-tainly makes what you've done sound dirty. Do you think I should switch over, now? I’ve done poorly on picking sides of late,” Meagher observed, listening.

  “I didn’t know you knew Afrikaans, Daniel,” Pienaar replied absently.

  “You would have if I’d meant you to know.” He thought he recognized a name. “Le Grange, isn’t he the footballer?”

  Pienaar didn’t know and said so with no great enthusiasm.

  “Some hearts will break if he is,” Meagher said darkly. Beyers finished with a series of names and a different voice began speaking.

  “You were right, Hendrik, it’s your friend, Vereshchagin. A subtle man, as you say. When you come right to it, the deal he’s offering is better than the one I’d give if I were wearing his shoes after the kicking he gave us.”

  Pienaar made a show of interest. “Will the Imperial government ratify, I ask?”

  “As your Dr. Beyers so aptly expressed it, by the time the Imperial government drafts a response, the porridge will be very cold indeed.”

  Pienaar growled. “What is Beyers saying now?” he asked.

  “It isn’t him at the moment. That man Ssu has one of Schee-pers’s pups on to bear witness to the truth. A simpleton they captured who obviously knows too much for his own good and is eager to share it. ”

  Beyers had called men by name, telling one to repent, another he was infected, a third to come home. Some listened. As for the committees of safety he had called upon to disperse, many of these who were not on them, and some who were, were more than ready to see them disappear. Members on more than a few had already begun to even old scores. Pienaar said morosely, “Scheepers just announced that it was a court-martial offense to listen.”

  “Indeed. I’d still like to know why you elected him your little tin god. Half the world must be listening out there.” Meagher jerked his thumb toward the encampments. “Does the man really think they care whether he forbids them to listen or not?”

  * ‘I don’t know what the man thinks anymore. When the whole crew of them get together and start puffing away at each other, good sense flies out the window,” Pienaar said.

  He had spoken to Scheepers, bone-weary, in the bright, hard sun of morning before the rains came. Scheepers had been surrounded by his minions, insulated from the disaster, isolated from the events he sought to influence.

  “You were the last man out of Krugersdorp!” Scheepers had said aloud, as if the act had been something heroic and Krugersdorp had been something other than a tangled, bloody fiasco. Pienaar had looked from one heroic face clustered around the generalissimo to another, then to his own arthritic knees and tom feet. If Pienaar’s escape from Krugersdorp had been something not quite miraculous, Scheepers’s own departure from Elandslaagte had been dearly purchased.

  “My horse got away,” he had answered truthfully. “I can’t run as fast as I could as a young man.” Poor Koos Gideon had puffed up just like a frog. That silly, dangerous man Strijdom had hissed like a snake. Pienaar decided that when the devil came to take his own on the day of judgment, Scheepers would be there to make an uplifting speech.

  The memory brought half of a smile to Pienaar’s blistered face. “Good sense just flies out the window,” he repeated to Meagher, who was patient with an old man’s maunderings.

  “You’d better catch it and send it back to them,” Meagher said in reply. “Your man, Beyers, will break in to read some more names shortly. The Imperials run smooth graves’ registration, and it’s sobering. At a rough count, the names from last night are running about twenty to one against. Demoralizing, that. And then there’s the plague we’re all infected with. Psittacosis, the man says. Nasty stuff. Has your little tin god figured out what

  we’re going to do about that?” He smiled sweetly. “Do you know, Hendrik, I’ve never seen a war stopped over the tele before.” Pienaar continued to stare off into space. “Don’t be foolish,” he growled petulantly.

  Meagher laughed a little. His voice was playful, but his words were deadly serious. “It’s over, Hendrik. Now the silly men get desperate, and the rest of us start thinking for ourselves. This may be a personal idiosyncrasy of mine, Hendrik, but I gready dislike being used. And it strikes me that some of us have been
used pretty shamelessly.”

  Pienaar didn’t answer, and for a moment Meagher was afraid that he hadn’t heard. Changing the subject, he said, “Do you know, you were so slow getting here this morning that I was starting to think that you’d met with a misfortune.”

  Nearly enough, Pienaar thought. Imperial aircraft had caught up with the first truck he’d ridden and turned it into a torch. The bums were on his arms and face. “I stopped at a farmhouse to telephone my granddaughter,” he said aloud.

  “That sounds like a breach of security to me. Wouldn’t Koos Gideon be annoyed? ”

  “You do not know the half of it, Daniel,” Pienaar answered soberly.

  “Well, what did she have to say?”

  “She has a mind of her own, that one. She wanted to know if I had gone crazy.”

  “So what did you tell her?” Meagher asked, curious.

  "When I found out what she had done, I asked her the same. ’ ’ Pienaar wagged his finger. “Be quiet, Daniel. I need to think.” He wrapped himself tighter against the driving rain and began thinking as a soldier, as a man.

  It was a clever trick the Imperials had fastened upon them, to open the fourth seal. Pienaar knew of the rider on the horse of pale green; his name was Death. With his handmaids typhus, cholera, typhoid, and dysentery, he had swayed the course of a thousand campaigns and capriciously toppled dynasties. Power was given him over the four parts of the earth.

  The thoughts tripped over themselves, one after another. Pienaar did not consider himself a reflective man, but he knew that he was as ruthless with himself as he was with others.

  In haggard faces around this woeful encampment, already he could see traces of fever. Some of these belonged to men from different camps. It might be another day before its victims realized, but then the panic would set in.

  On the planet of Suid-Afrika, space quarantine and the absence of native diseases had left them unprepared. Massing in the camps had left them concentrated. Pienaar did not know how the Imperials had spread the disease among them, but this was unimportant. The fact remained that it had been done swiftly and effectively, and that they would not escape the blow. He had lived to see the Afrikaner nation broken on the Highveld. He knew a defeated army.

  Koos Gideon and his puppet masters had failed to consolidate a hold on these men. The shattering to which they had been subjected and the numberless dead had eroded their faith.

  That faith would not be afforded an opportunity to return. The guerrilla bands that Strijdom planned would not now come into being. Once these kommandos scattered, the dispirited survivors would carry away no memories of proud victories against the Imperial fist, only fear that cold, hard professionals had fostered, and the seeds of infection.

  Frightened men by the score would turn themselves over to the Imperials for treatment; farms and villages would close their gates to the others who would be harried by Imperial wolfpacks across the face of the land, their trail marked by the refuse of the sick and the dying.

  Under field conditions, the mortality rate might be twenty, thirty, seventy percent? Only the Imperials knew. They had not said, and camp rumor would make it far higher.

  Pienaar knew that the ones who had not declared would rally to Albert de Roux Beyers. His voice was clear, and his hands were free of the stain of defeat and savage losses, the shame of atomic murder. And the moment that the war became one of Koos Gideon Scheepers and his ragged “Order” against Beyers and his voice of hope, that war was lost.

  Even so, maddened until original causes were forgotten, brother would strike brother. Hands-uppers would swell Imperial ranks to compel bitter-enders to make an end to the suffering; bitter-enders would murder hands-uppers in hatred and bitterness. Fever and famine would stalk the land as men were sundered from their fields and their homes. The Volk would be divided, and exhaustion would sap them as a nation.

  In the end, there would only be a bloody shadow of a land, and Afrikaners who would bleed. Only the most ruthless of men could contemplate this; yet wars were not started by ruthless men so much as by small, frightened men who sheltered their eyes from what the Lord plainly intended for them to see.

  The Volk could flee, someone had said. They could strike out into the wilderness, trusting in the hand of God to feed them as had the original Voortrekkers.

  And they could starve, a nation of jungle bunnies.

  Pienaar looked at his hands and thought of his own infertile fields. Any man who dreamed of turning his back on the Imperials and trekking out into the wilderness had done his farming in coffeehouses.

  There was nothing to debate, to chop logics. Pienaar had the ruthlessness to see this clearly. He did not have the ruthlessness to force this upon his people.

  He knew as well that there were men who would not recognize this. He also knew that there were men, a few, who did not lack that final ruthlessness, for reasons of their own.

  Having considered, Pienaar turned toward Meagher with cold dispassion.

  “My granddaughter has done her part and what she did was right,” he said enigmatically. “Now I must do mine.” He took off his hat, vainly trying to shake some of the water from it. Then he said, “My Irish hireling friend, Koos Gideon will call a meeting soon. I think that it is time that we talked.”

  WHEN THE TIME CAME FOR SCHEEPERS TO CALL HIS GENERALS

  together, Pienaar was searched at the door, roughly, for weapons. It pleased him, ever so slightly, that Scheepers, or perhaps Strijdom, was so afraid for his tattered skin.

  Both of his feet were swollen, the right one so much so that his right leg was almost unusable. It occurred to Pienaar for the first time that perhaps he really was an old man. He set his lips together. There were a few things that the old men couldn’t very well leave to the young ones.

  Strijdom was speaking, but for some reason Pienaar heard not a word. Instead, he looked around the room and smelled the stink of fear. Many were coughing. It struck him how few of the ones who had started were left. As the Lord willed, perhaps it was better that way.

  With Claassen gone, there was not one of them that Pienaar considered a friend, and perhaps this too was better.

  Strijdom was speaking about guerrilla warfare, unconscious of any irony. One of the weaknesses endemic to Afrikaner military units, even the beloved Regiment Danie, had been the tendency to gloss over awkward facts with vague exhortations and appeals to the Lord, not that this motley collection of frightened schemers could be considered military any longer. Pienaar looked at his watch and waited another thirty-eight seconds before he rose to his feet and began hobbling steadily to the platform where Strijdom was speaking.

  “Veld-General Pienaar, you are out of order!” Strijdom erupted uncertainly.

  Pienaar bore down upon him stiffly. Strijdom took one step back. It was enough.

  “You, be quiet!” Pienaar said with the same voice he had used to frighten recruits. “We have heard enough. Now, it is time that we all started to be truthful to one another. ’ ’

  Turning his back to Strijdom, Pienaar spoke to them all, for them all.

  “Let us stop this pretending that we are playing with toys instead of men’s lives. We have been beaten. Perhaps we were not beaten as fairly and chivalrously as we might like, but it is not a game and we can hardly complain after what we have done. Yes, what we have done, for we are all stained with that sin.”

  “You traitorous underminer!” Strijdom blazed, motioning frantically to his security men.

  “Yes, you be quiet! I’m tired of hearing you slander better men than yourself. Go on Hendrik,” one man said, unexpectedly.

  Refreshed from this cup, Pienaar took a deep breath and one last time, he assumed the mantle of faith and the words as he set out to win over his audience.

  “Glibly, your kind speak of traitors. You shall not silence the truth that is within me! Yes, I remember well all of your kind, they made their brave noises about what a true Afrikaner must be, and when the Bantu rose up in
their wrath and desperation, they fled across the seas and left us to fight their battles. I knew you then and I know you now. I will not be silenced, for I know you, Satan!”

  He threw off one restraining arm imperiously, as if he were once again a youth of seventeen, the old medals rippling softly on his tunic.

  “Oh, come now, Hendrik,” Scheepers began timidly, “we are all in this together. We must all stick together and be loyal to one another. Do you not think that there is a man here that the Imperials would hesitate to hang?”

  “And what of it!” Pienaar demanded. He looked from one man to another. “For weeks I have "kept my silence, and my faith bids me to keep it no longer. I recall those self-styled true Afrikaners crawling like maggots behind us, whispering, slandering those of us who fought and were sickened by it. Now, when I look around me, I see fear! Fear in the faces of brave men who are afraid lest some viper say that they are not true Afrikaners! Is there doubt in my heart? Yes, there is doubt because the road we have led our people down is the wrong one, and we do not have the courage to turn aside. We have been beaten, we have been outtricked, and I for one will not condemn our people to pay the price for our mistakes. I say to you, if we do not lead our nation back from the brink of the pit, then God will turn his face against our nation for our hatred and our crimes, our sins and our pride.

  "Who are you, Koos Gideon, to condemn our people to death and suffering? All the blood on your hands, all your brave dogmas, will that bring back so much as one? Bow your head! Bow them all of you and pray that the Lord will forgive us for what we have done!”

  He had them now. He could feel it. Out of the comer of his eye he saw Scheepers cowering, Strijdom flushed with rage so that he could not speak. In that instant, Pienaar knew that God had answered his prayers truly, by cleaving Strijdom’s lying tongue to the roof of his mouth so that truth might this once be spoken. It was then that Pienaar’s old, grim humor began to reassert itself.