The Men of War
Page 1
The Men
Of
War
a fantasy novel by
Damon Alan
This book is dedicated to my critique group, you know who you are, and to my wife, without whom none of this would be possible.
© Damon Alan 2019 All rights reserved, including internal content and cover art. This book may not be reproduced without the express written permission of the copyright holder. Cover art may also not be reproduced without written permission, except for usage that pertains to bona fide blogging, review, or other legitimate journalistic purpose associated with the content of this book.
This is a work of fiction, and any names, places, characters or events are created solely from the mind of Damon Alan, and then revealed via this book to you, the reader. Any resemblance to any human of the estimated 100 billion humans who live or ever have lived is purely coincidental. Other than the historical figures I do use, of course, who were real. Many were agents of evil, many were great heroes. I’m certain you know who is who.
Chapter 1 - The Chinese Dragon
Chapter 2 - The Call Home
Chapter 3 – Visitor
Chapter 4 - von Krosigk
Chapter 5 - Sergeant Nelson
Chapter 6 - Lost Hold
Chapter 7 – Allies
Chapter 8 – Treaty
Chapter 9 - Iron Mountain Hold
Chapter 10 - The Amusement of Dragons
Chapter 11 - A Day of Loss
Chapter 12 – Migration
Chapter 13 - The King’s Sister
Chapter 14 - Crossover
Chapter 15 - Étables-sur-Mer
Chapter 16 - Travel
Chapter 17 - The Underways
Chapter 18 - Jangik
Chapter 19 - A Narrow Way
Chapter 20 – Dynamus
Chapter 21 - Deep River
Chapter 22 - A Delicate Balance
Chapter 23 - The Great Pyramid of Jangik
Chapter 24 - Brest
Chapter 25 – Slaughter
Chapter 26 - The Hall of Gates
Chapter 27 - Outer Barrier
Chapter 28 - The Frailty of Men
Chapter 29 - The Temptation of Men
Chapter 30 - The Sacrifice of Men
Chapter 31 - Enemies are Legion
Chapter 32 - Pursuit
Chapter 33 - Down Under
Chapter 34 – Insolent
Chapter 1 - The Chinese Dragon
July 11, 1940
Terrified, Lieutenant Heisuke Abe raced over the treetops, his Ki-51 at war emergency power. The plane screamed, the engine roared, and the bullet holes in his left wing whistled as he tried to maintain control.
His tail gunner, Lieutenant Aketo Nakamura, worked hard to keep the panic from his voice as he yelled commands at Heisuke, all of which the pilot ignored.
“Today we die, Heisuke, today we die!”
“Has it happened yet?” Heisuke barked. He jinked the aircraft to the right and downward into a ravine. A river flowed at the bottom, at various points as rapids and other times in deep slow flows. “We might make it if we can get hidden and stay that way.”
“Did you see what happened to the American? We’re not going to survive this.”
“The P-40 that shot holes in our wing?” Heisuke asked. “He’s dead and we’re not. I’m flying, not sightseeing.”
“Look up.”
“Chikushō!” Heisuke yelled over the roar of the fighter’s engine. Several hundred meters up the P-40 was in a flat spin, smoke trailing in a spiral above the plane, with a large section of tail missing. As Heisuke watched, the pilot leapt from the plane, narrowly missed by the damaged tail as it spun around.
“The thing ripped the tail off,” Aketo added. “I saw it.”
“Where is it now?”
“I can’t see out of this ravine.”
Heisuke glanced upward again, over his shoulder. His heart pounded in his chest, he forced himself to focus on saving his life and Aketo’s. The beast looked to be fifty meters long and even wider side to side with wings outstretched. Surprising him once again with its speed, the creature shot over the ravine a kilometer ahead where the river gorge widened.
The Ki-51 tilted back and forth as he fought to keep it off the ravine walls and stay below the upper level of the gorge. Death was an instant away it seemed, the only question was if it would be by crashing or by being an appetizer.
“The creature swung back around and grabbed the American pilot out of the air,” Aketo informed him twenty seconds later. Horror tainted Aketo’s next comment. “Now it’s eating him!”
“You saw that?” Heisuke asked.
“As it disappeared over the lip of the gorge.”
“We’re ditching the plane,” he told Aketo. “That monster is looking for us, and if it finds us we’re dead too.”
“Are you crazy?”
“It’s our only chance. It’s faster than we are, and the gorge narrows again before it opens up once more ahead of us. Once we clear the narrow walls, it will attack us there.”
He didn’t wait for an answer. The river deepened and slowed down just ahead of him, in a location where the gorge was no more than twenty meters across. He pulled back on the throttle, the engine noise died away.
“Today we die, Heisuke, today we die!” Aketo cried out.
Heisuke understood his friend’s fear, even as he was embarrassed by it. When he’d first seen the creature, he’d soiled his own flight suit.
It was a dragon.
Had the Chinese summoned it? A creature of their mythology to fight for them? If so the dragon wasn’t very well controlled in its actions. First it took out the American plane as the P-40 and Ki-51 fought over the ravines northwest of Ya’an. The town, burning below as Heisuke and Aketo raced southward trying to survive, was burning.
Somewhere in the area more Americans fought. Whether they fought the dragon or Heisuke’s squadron mates he had no idea.
Or maybe they were all dead. The dragon was much faster than any of the planes, including the one he was about to ditch.
The aircraft shuddered as it approached stall speed, then dipped downward. Heisuke pulled back on the stick just before hitting the river, causing the tail of the plane to strike the water first. Aketo yelped from the back. The rapid deceleration caused by the drag of the river water slammed the front of the plane down. The nose cowl caught after the propeller blades ripped off.
The aircraft rolled up on its nose, then slowly fell over, facing the opposite way, top down into the water.
Behind him Aketo shrieked.
“Unbuckle,” Heisuke screamed, then his head was covered with water. At the same time he yelled, he followed his own advice.
He slipped his arms out of the harness and pushed downward into the river, leaving the cockpit. The flow of water was clear, tinted green, and cold. He slipped back up into the cockpit to grab a small bag he always flew with. It contained a few pebbles from the Shinto shrine near his home.
Looking aft, he noticed the gun seat was empty, so either Aketo was dead and drifting downstream or he was out and heading toward safety.
The plane was sinking, but for the moment one wing was in the water and the other canted upward toward the lip of the gorge. This gave Heisuke something to hide under, catch his breath, and survey the surroundings.
Holding onto the lip of the cockpit, he rose to the surface and broke the water with just his head. Twenty meters downstream, swimming at a slight angle toward the shore, Aketo furiously breast stroked, slapping the water loudly.
“Toward the shore, to the right!” Heisuke yelled.
Willows lined a narrow bank, densely packed and fully fleshed out in leaves that would hide them from the sky.
Had the fool swam straight toward the shore, he’d already be there.
The plane groaned and started tilting forward. The heavy engine was going to drag it down.
Heisuke sucked in deep breaths then dove underneath the aircraft hoping to make it to the edge of the river unnoticed. He swam ten meters to the shoreline, the scrape of rocks against his fingers the first sign he was going to make it. He raised his head momentarily to get a breath and look for the willows. He’d gotten turned around and missed them by several meters.
The plane, behind him now, was downstream a bit with only a few meters of the tail sticking out of the water. A hundred meters away Aketo stood on the bank, taking off his flight jacket and surveying the surroundings.
A shadow blotted out the sun, and a deep air-sucking roar sounded like a childhood memory from his Uncle Isamu’s forge filled the canyon. The dragon, wings skimming just above the canyon walls and stretching out wider than the gorge itself, raced down river. Its head, on a long neck, hung downward into the ravine. The roaring sound stopped as the creature spat fire past Heisuke’s position.
Aketo died in a furious conflagration.
The creature rose back toward the sky and disappeared over the lip of the ravine. Heisuke sank below the water before pulling himself the few meters upstream to the willows. Entwining himself within them, he kept his body submerged although the water was growing brutally cold. The pebbles he’d saved from the plane hopefully had a bit of protection left in them.
Nothing but his face exposed above the surface, he breathed shallowly and awaited his fate. The willows obscured the sky, providing a small comfort to him. At least he wouldn’t see death coming.
Chapter 2 - The Call Home
Resting in a stand of trees, Irsu Crackstone looked over his amassed forces. Five hundred of his dwarven troops, and another thousand human troops assigned to him by the Swiss General Henri Guisan. It would appear his meeting with Guisan’s attaché, Eugen Hager went well enough that Guisan trusted him to lead some of his men.
The commander of the human troops, Captain Conrad Hurst, rarely left Irsu’s side.
The relationship he’d developed with Hurst was a strange one. Being in such close quarters with the human helped Irsu learn the ways of these strange people a little better. Clearly the information handed out by Hagirr before the Day of Joining wasn’t accurate. The humans were capable, intelligent, and committed to most of the same values Irsu held. The captain was even making a very honest effort to learn Dwarven and was doing quite well with it.
The reality didn’t fit the mythology of humanity at all, even that which didn’t come from Hagirr. On Aerth, after ten thousand years of absence, the humans were thought of as barely more than animals. Beings who responded more to urges than thought.
Maybe ten thousand years ago this was true. But most of the Swiss Irsu had met so far seemed exceptional in both intelligence and resourcefulness.
It took Irsu some time to get over his biases and realize victory for the Lost Hold depended on trusting the Swiss. He also made great effort to learn the language that Hurst spoke, which he called German. Irsu had soldiers learning it as well, including Numo. Coragg, Irsu’s second in command, complained about any such requirement, but was trying.
“Their language makes me spit all over myself,” Coragg complained when Irsu told him to stick with it. “A wet beard is a smelly beard.”
“Trees. German line,” Captain Hurst said, interrupting Irsu’s thoughts in his slowly improving Dwarven. He gestured toward a line of forest over ten dokadros away. “And you smell already, Coragg.”
Coragg sputtered as the three soldiers looked over the rise they hid behind. Their small copse of trees was bordered on the north by a berm, probably containing the rocks pulled from the fields between them and the next stand of trees.
The Germans, known to Irsu a few months ago as The Grays, were the same people the dwarves fought so hard to get through moving toward Nollen. These soldiers, while intimidating to the other humans, were nothing special.
Still, it didn’t pay to underestimate an enemy.
“Do they have catapults?” Irsu asked Hurst.
A puzzled look was the response.
Irsu picked up a rock and simulated the noises he’d heard when the Swiss had bombarded his unit. “Thump,” he said as he swung his arm upward to simulate a catapult’s lever. The rock sailed in an arc, and when it hit the ground Irsu said, “Boom.”
Hurst laughed. “Cat-apult? Nein. Is called artillery.”
Artillery was the human word for whatever they used in place of catapults. Obviously better than catapults, if Irsu was being honest. He pointed toward the trees. “Artillery?”
“Yah. Some.”
Irsu turned to one of his platoon commanders who’d moved closer to learn their situation. “Get your men under cover. Dig holes. Set this as our line for today. We advance at night, so tell those who can to get some sleep. Nobody leaves this area. If the Germans see us and use their artillery, we die. Tell the other leaders.”
As the platoon commander moved off, Coragg rested his hand on Irsu’s shoulder. “Digging in is good, Iron Commander, but I have been working on a tactic for the open fields.”
“What sort of tactic?”
“Sort of an arrow shield, but in all directions.” Coragg waved at a group of soldiers standing in the trees. “My testers have taken to calling it the beetle.”
Irsu was intrigued. “Let’s see it.”
Coragg snapped his fingers and pointed at the soldiers. Clearly, he’d intended for Irsu to see this. Fifteen seconds later the dwarves were under a dome of shields. Around the base were a few holes, but the rifles the Swiss had given them quickly projected from them. Twenty dwarves, in short order, looked like a dome fort complete with defensive armaments.
“And you think that will be effective?” Irsu asked. “Can they move?”
Hurst sneered. “This is way to die. Artillery does not care about your shield!”
“I was about to say that I don’t think it’s going to be effective against bombardment from enemy,” he paused to mouth the next word carefully, “ar-til-lery, but that is something I don’t think we can save ourselves from. And the dome can move,” Coragg replied, looking annoyed at Hurst. “I think this will be effective against the fast spitter sticks.”
“Machine guns,” Hurst corrected.
“Move west along the tree line,” Coragg ordered the men.
The dome moved at a tenth the walking speed of a dwarf, which was already slower than most races.
“The enemy will just pick up their guns and move to a different location,” Irsu said. “What will this accomplish?”
“Retreat?” Coragg said. “Some defense is better than none.”
“You do have a point there,” Irsu agreed. “But a crawling child could follow you at that speed.”
“We’ll keep working on it.”
Irsu looked over the small rise again. Numo said the Germans were in the trees ahead of him. Hurst said the same. But he didn’t see anything.
A flash of light caught his eye, up in one of the trees so far away. He stared at the location for a second.
Something hit him in the side of the face with the ferocity of a rock beetle’s bite. He spun sideways down the incline, landing on his back at the feet of Coragg and Hurst.
“Sniper!” Hurst yelled and started waving everyone down toward the ground.
Coragg leaned over Irsu.
Irsu looked up at his friend, feeling confused as to what just happened. His ears rang and a stinging sensation was starting to burn on his cheek.
“Flesh wound. Not going to kill the likes of you,” Coragg said as a Swiss medic knelt down next to him. “But you’re going to be even uglier now.”
The medic slapped what looked like white cotton on the side of Irsu’s face, and the cloth stuck to what felt like wetness.
“I’m bleeding, aren’t I?” Irsu asked. Numbness s
tretched across his face and seemed to permeate his head. Events unfolding around him seemed surreal.
“Just a scratch,” Coragg replied.
Hurst slunk over like he was hiding from an Elven archer. “There is a sniper in the trees,” he said in German. “You were very lucky, Commander Irsu.”
“What’s a sniper?”
“Kills from far away, using a rifle… a gun,” Hurst answered. “You’ve got a nice gouge on your cheek there.”
“And a battle scar to tell your kids about,” Coragg added.
Hurst turned back to the matter at hand, and good for him. Someone had to. “The Germans know we’re here. There are probably machine guns waiting for us to cross this field. We’ll be slaughtered.” He paused to think a minute. “We are going to need a different plan…”
A commotion to the side caught Irsu’s attention as a dwarven soldier ran up from the south. The soldier was in full plate, but also carried a tabard that indicated he was functioning as a royal courier. Another dwarf directed the man toward the group of commanders.
Irsu groaned. Royal couriers bearing messages was rarely, if ever, a good sign.
“Get down,” Hurst barked at the new arrival as he waved his hands downward.
Everyone understood that gesture. Despite the full plate, the courier dropped to a kneeling position then unrolled a scroll as they invariably did. Even if their message was one sentence it apparently became more official if read when delivered. “Iron Commander Irsu Crackstone, you are summoned back to the court of King Scorriss Bloodstone to resolve a situation by order of the Underking. Scout Numo is to accompany you.”
“What situation?” Irsu asked.
The dwarf turned the scroll over and checked the other side, then looked at Irsu blankly. “It does not say.”
“It’s something outside the hold,” Coragg said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t need Numo.”
“Makes sense,” Irsu replied, wincing as a lance of pain shot through his face. “Veznik can look at my face as well. I’ll see if Kordina can still love me now that my beauty is marred.”
“You’re not getting rid of her that easy.” Coragg looked at Hurst. “What’s the plan with that… as you say… sniper.”