A Desert Called Peace (38 page)

An alarm buzzed in Mendoza's ears. He swore as he brought the tank to a complete halt, brakes squealing as his foot slammed down. His hand felt for the gearshift, then threw the tank into idle. Mendoza popped the hatch and was immediately surrounded by a cloud of red smoke billowing from a canister. The acrid smoke irritated Mendoza's eyes and throat, forcing him to tear up and to cough violently.

Half out of the hatch, Mendoza twisted his body around to see his tank's Volgan trainer climbing aboard, face red with fury. With frantic gestures supplemented by curses in mixed Spanish, Russian and Azeri,
Praporschik
Suleymanov pounded on turret top, screaming. Reduced to their essence, his words amounted to, "Left! Right! Left! Right! Always you do the same. Don't you think your fucking enemy is going to pay attention? Shift! Vary! Alternate! Don't be so damned predictable!"

"Yes, sir," answered Mendoza's chief, Sergeant Perez, once he was made to understand the problem. To Mendoza, Perez said, "Don't take it to heart, Jorge. It's my job to tell you which way to go. So . . . my fault. We'll do better in the future."

"Right, Sergeant. Got a set of dice to randomize?"
Thank you, Sergeant Perez, for not blaming me. But I could do better and I will.

"Do you think we could have done any better, Josef?"

"Maybe," Raikin admitted. "But if so, I don't see where. I don't know about the others, but
this
tank has no flaws." He looked at the vehicle, admiring it from the fresh paint of its hull, to the gleaming treads to the spotless rubber around the road wheels. Soon a heavy transporter would come to take it to the port. He would miss it, miss the sense of purpose it had given his life.

"Did you test fire the commander's machine gun as I told you?" Raikin asked.

"Yes, even that. Two hundred and fifty rounds through the barrel, just as you insisted. Then I cleaned it. Do you think it is enough?"

"Maybe not. But we did do the best we could."

Stefan smiled. "We actually can do a little better."

Raikin twisted his head, looking quizzical.

"Well . . . I was thinking about that tank crew; the one that will get this tank. I have been out in the desert, alone and scarred shitless."

"So?"

Stefan pulled a liter bottle of vodka from his lunch pack. "Does anyone in the factory write Spanish? I'd like to leave them a note with this."

For the first time since it had been formed, the entire brigade stood together in one place. Basic Combat Training was over. The various training centuries had been reorganized into the ten cohorts, one
ala
and one
classis—
the naval squadron—that would participate in the war. As part of these cohorts and centuries—basically very large platoons that could be expanded into companies, or maniples, as money and manpower became available—the men would now train on the more advanced tactics, skills, techniques, and weapons they would actually use when they went to war.

In front of the now-formed legion the president of the Republic, General Parilla, the defense attaché from the Federated States, Colonel Sitnikov, and various other dignitaries—including the Roman Catholic archbishop—stood on a reviewing stand. Off to one side of the stand, a band played a martial air as the cohorts marched onto the field under the command of Carrera. TV news cameras recorded the event.

Once formed on the field, the officers and the legionary, cohort and century eagle and guidon bearers marched to the center behind Carrera. At his command, they all marched forward to a position directly in front of the reviewing stand. After the archbishop of Balboa had invoked a blessing, the president and Parilla presented the legion, each cohort and each century with the eagle or guidon it would carry as its colors. They were the same eagles Parilla had seen in Carrera's mess. These were gold for the legion and silver for the cohorts,
ala
and
classis
. There were miniature bronze eagles for the centuries with guidons attached. Each eagle perched atop an enameled copy of the national shield of Balboa. The shields were attached to seven-foot mahogany poles carved in a spiral design. The eagles' wings stretched upward until they almost touched overhead. A bronze plaque under the shields proclaimed the unit number and motto of each.

After presentation the men swore their oath of allegiance to, "God and the legion," rather than to the Republic. This was not lost on the president of Balboa who made a long-winded prepared speech, even so. Parilla made a rather shorter one which also had the function of promoting all the corporals in the legion to sergeant. The archbishop prayed for God above to also bless and protect the men who would follow the eagles. Then the officers and eagles marched back to a position in front of their units. With the brass band playing—it was borrowed from the
Cuerpo de Bomberos,
the firefighters, as the pipes weren't quite ready yet—the legion passed in review by the stand. Then—no time for celebrations—they went back to training.

The man on the view screen was plainly dying. His face was pale, sweat running down it in sheets. His voice was breaking with pain. Even so, he managed to eke out, weakly:

"
Captain's log, UNCS
Cheng Ho
. Final entry."

"Turn up the volume, Coms," the captain of the
Annan
ordered. "And see if you can get rid of some of the static."

The image cleared; the volume raised. In the view screen the master of the
Cheng Ho
grimaced with obvious agony.

"I haven't been able to stop the troubles. Maybe . . . maybe if I'd had more Marines aboard. But rampaging youths
 . . ."

Did the captain of the
Annan
detect a sneer in the words, "rampaging youths?" She thought she did. She almost missed the next few words:

". . . 
have sabotaged the reactor. We've managed . . . just . . . to keep it from going critical. We have not been able to . . . control the radiation. It overheated . . . melted the shield. The ship's been flooded . . . with hard rads."

Annan's
captain winced.
A bad way to go.

". . . 
the Phalange flooded the reactor deck with some poisonous gas they ginned up in the labs . . . too late . . . we can't get at the reactor even to build a temp shield . . . around it."

"What the hell is a
phalange
?" the captain asked of the bridge crew, generally. Her question was rewarded with blank stares.

". . . 
to anyone who comes after me . . . I can't explain what happened, how it all fell apart. I don't know why we can't . . . all . . . just . . . get along
 . . ."

The captain of
Cheng Ho
began to sob on the screen. Unable to speak, he clutched as his midsection for long minutes before crumpling and falling off of his chair and off screen.

"Oh, my," whispered
Annan
's skipper. Then, setting her face firmly, she ordered, "Major Ridilla, return here with your men. I want the complete log for the
Cheng Ho
brought with you. Take them to my port cabin and give them directly to me and to no one but me."

"Aye, Skipper."

And the plan of God was being accomplished.

—Homer, The Iliad, Book I

Shift gears. Back up. Shift again. Move forward to the left. Feel the restraining straps cut into your body as it's thrown forward when the brakes bite in. Stop at the next covered position. Shift gears. Back up. Shift again. Move
right
to the next covered position. Right, again. Left. Left. Right. Stop.
Incoming!
Back up
fast!
Pop smoke.

Perez's voice shouts in the microphone. "Two o'clock! Gunner! Sabot! Tank!" Buttons are pushed. The autoloader selects a round of kinetic energy ammunition from the carousel, lifting it easily to the breech and feeding it in. The gunner and commander shy away from the autoloader; it has been known to feed in arms, shoulders and heads. From behind Jorge Mendoza's head comes the whine of a 15- ton turret moving smoothly on its bearings. Jorge braces himself.

"Target!"

"Fire!" The crash of the gun ripples Mendoza's internal organs.

"Hit! Hit!"

"Eleven o'clock. Gunner! Sabot! Tank!"

"Miss!"

"Repeat!" The loader recycles with a fresh round. Again the crash sends Jorge's stomach bouncing against his backbone.

"Hit!"

"Driver, move out!"

Shift gears. Back up. Shift again. Forward. Forward. "Ten o'clock! Gunner! Sabot! . . ." An alarm goes off in Mendoza's ears. "Shit!" As always after a failure, red smoke floods Jorge's compartment as soon as he opens his hatch.
Shit!

Jungle-covered for the most part,
Cerro de Infierno
jutted up between the Gallardo Trench of the Transitway and the road that ran generally alongside it. The hill overlooked the relatively open maneuver areas of Imperial Ranges Eight and Ten. From his vantage point above the road, Carrera watched one of the legion's tank sections going through its paces. While the rest of the legion had been going through basic training, the tank and PBM-100 crews, largely composed of long service professionals with Basic far behind them, had been doing their individual and crew training on the Jaguars and Ocelots. They were now working up to section and century level operations.

Through his field glasses Carrera saw the four tanks move by bounds toward
Cerro Marieta
to the east-southeast. As one group of two moved forward, the other protected them, overwatched in military parlance, by searching for and engaging any targets that presented themselves. As he watched a pair bound forward, Carrera's attention focused on one tank in particular. He couldn't see what had hit it, but the expanding cloud of red smoke told him something had. Perhaps the crew didn't know either, though Carrera could see a red- faced Russian, he assumed it was a Russian, screeching a small four wheel drive vehicle to a stop and getting out. In his glasses Carrera saw the tank crew, already emerging, flinching from the anticipated lesson.

Carrera cursed himself for a fool.
I've made a mistake in this training plan. This range is simply too hard. Truth be told, this platoon has already been "killed" more than once over
.

The primary problem was that the jungle and the hills and ridges made the range available to let the tanks engage targets far too short. This meant that when targets appeared they were so close to the tanks that the Jaguars had little chance to traverse and engage before, realistically, they would have been hit.

Everything is a trade off in tank design. Engineers trade size against ammunition and fuel capacity, height against ability to depress the gun, armor against speed, and engine and speed against fuel consumption and—sometimes, in peacetime—safety.

Politicians trade off expense against numbers. Sometimes, in the industrialized parts of Terra Nova, they traded safety and combat performance for environmentalist sentiment, too. Politicians on Old Earth had once made similar choices. If they'd never paid for those choices, their soldiers often had.

One of the trade offs the Volgans typically made was slow speed of an electrically powered turret traverse against the complexity of a hydraulic traversing system and the danger of its fluid catching fire if hit. The Jaguar, like all Volgan tanks, was notoriously slow in traversing its turret. There were actually ranges, close ones to be sure, where a fast man on foot could run in a circle around a standing Volgan tank faster than the turret could track him. This sounded like more of a design flaw than it really was. Volgans used tanks in mass and with supporting infantry always close by. Try to run circles around one Volgan tank in combat and the odds were good that a dozen others would perforate you before you had a chance to turn the first corner,
if
the infantry didn't get you first.

Carrera thought,
Once they get to the desert this won't really be a problem. Shots there will usually be so long-range that the typical engagement will require only a small angle of turret movement. On the other hand, if the boys start believing their tanks aren't up to it here, they're likely to carry that attitude over to the desert. This is definitely not good.

Carrera reached a decision and it didn't take him long to do so. He told his driver to call on the radio for Brown, Sitnikov and Kennison.

Brown was the first to arrive, having been the nearest. "Sancho Panzer reports, sir."

When the other two showed up, a few minutes later, Carrera told them, point blank, "This range sucks. Not your fault; still your problem. The troops aren't getting the chance to engage targets at a realistic distance and they're getting their clocks cleaned by the targets because they can't traverse quickly enough to engage. Here's what I want done by tomorrow morning. Carl, you go get your hands on a dozen small boats with outboards and a dozen, no better make it two, without. Get five hundred feet of tow cable for each powerboat. Brown, find some ballsy fuckers from among your tankers to man the powerboats. Offer a bonus if you have to. Don't be overgenerous . . . say, no more than daily combat pay would be. Fit out the others with tank-sized plywood targets. We'll tow the targets behind the powerboats out in the ocean north of the FS Army's old drop zone at Vera Cruz. Sitnikov, move half the Jaguars you've dedicated to gunnery to Vera Cruz. We'll do long-range firing from there."

With a moment's reflection, Carrera added, "Carl, better get the word to the merchant freighters anchored out there to move. And find me a place to do a tank platoon attack where they can shoot at some distance."

Kennison thought briefly. "No place near the Transitway, Pat.
Rio Sombrero,
maybe? I'll look tomorrow after we get the Vera Cruz affair set up."