Tactics of Mistake (11 page)

For a long moment there was nothing but a random sequence of thoughts flowing across the surface of his consciousness. Then his imagination steadied down, and a concept began to form. He felt as though he was no longer sitting on the seat of the electric horse, but standing on the soft, spongy surface of the jungle floor, his camouflaged suit glued to his body by sweat as he squinted up at the sun, which was already past its zenith, moving into afternoon. An irritation of combined frustration and apprehension filled his mind. He looked back down at the circle of guerrilla under-officers gathered about him and realized that he had to make an immediate decision. Two-thirds of his force had already failed to get across the Blue River at the time and places they were supposed to cross. Now, already behind schedule, he was faced with the last opportunity for a crossing—but also with the opposition of enemy forces, in what strength he did not know.

Clearly, at least one thing was true. The infiltration of this group he commanded had turned out to be not the secret from the Exotics that it had been expected it would be. To that extent, his mission was already a failure. If the Exotics had a force here to oppose him, what kind of opposition could he expect on the way to the coast?

Clearly, the mission now stood little or no chance of success. Sensibly, it should be abandoned. But could he turn back through the paths now without some excuse to give his superiors so that he would not be accused of abandoning the mission for insufficient reason?

Clearly, he could not. He would have to make an attempt to fight his way across the river, and just hope that the Exotic forces would oppose him hard enough so that he would have an excuse to retreat…

Cletus returned to himself, opened his eyes and straightened up in the saddle once more. Lifting the electric horse up just under treetop level once more, he tossed three singleton mines at different angles toward the guerrilla position, and then set them off in quick succession.

Immediately, also, he opened up with both his rifle and sidearm, holding the rifle tucked against his side and firing it with his right hand while firing his sidearm with the left.

From the crossing, and from the two other sides of the guerrilla position, came the sound of the gunfire of his soldiers upon the Neulanders.

Within seconds the guerrilla force was laying down answering fire. The racket was the worst to disturb the jungle so far this day. Cletus waited until it began to die down slightly, so that he could be heard. Then he took the loudspeaker horn from the crossbar of the electric horse. He lifted the horn to his lips and turned it on. His amplified voice thundered through the jungle:

“CEASE FIRING! CEASE FIRING! ALL ALLIANCE FORCES CEASE FIRING!”

The cone rifles of the men under Cletus's command fell silent about the guerrilla area. Gradually, the answering voice of the guerrilla weapons also dwindled and silence filled the jungle again. Cletus spoke once more through the loudspeaker horn:

“ATTENTION NEULANDERS! ATTENTION NEULANDERS! YOU ARE COMPLETELY SURROUNDED BY THE ALLIANCE EXPEDITIONARY FORCE TO BAKHALLA. FURTHER RESISTANCE CAN ONLY END IN YOUR BEING WIPED OUT. THOSE WHO WISH TO SURRENDER WILL BE GIVEN HONORABLE TREATMENT IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE ESTABLISHED RULES GOVERNING THE CARE OF PRISONERS OF WAR. THIS IS THE COMMANDER OF THE ALLIANCE FORCE SPEAKING. MY MEN WILL HOLD THEIR FIRE FOR THREE MINUTES, DURING WHICH YOU WILL BE GIVEN A CHANCE TO SURRENDER. THOSE WISHING TO SURRENDER MUST DIVEST THEMSELVES OF ALL WEAPONS AND WALK INTO THE CLEARING AT THE CROSSING IN PLAIN SIGHT WITH THEIR HANDS CLASPED ON TOP OF THEIR HEAD. I REPEAT, THOSE WISHING TO SURRENDER MUST DIVEST THEMSELVES OF ALL WEAPONS AND WALK INTO PLAIN SIGHT IN THE CLEARING AT THE CROSSING WITH THEIR HANDS CLASPED ON TOP OF THEIR HEAD. YOU HAVE THREE MINUTES TO SURRENDER IN THIS FASHION STARTING FROM WHEN I SAY NOW.”

Cletus paused for a moment, then added:

“ANY MEMBERS OF THE INVADING FORCE WHO HAVE NOT SURRENDERED BY THE TIME THREE MINUTES IS UP WILL BE CONSIDERED AS INTENDING TO CONTINUE RESISTANCE, AND MEMBERS OF THE ALLIANCE FORCE ARE INSTRUCTED TO OPEN FIRE UPON SUCH INDIVIDUALS ON SIGHT. THE THREE MINUTES IN WHICH TO SURRENDER WILL NOW BEGIN. NOW!”

He clicked off the loudspeaker horn, replaced it on the horse and quickly swung toward the river, out and around to where he had a view of the clearing without being visible himself. For a long moment nothing happened. Then there was a rustle of leaves, and a man in a Neulander camouflage suit, his hands clasped over his head and some jungle grass still stuck in his bushy beard, stepped into the clearing. Even from where Cletus watched, the whites of the guerrilla's eyes were visible and he looked about him apprehensively. He came forward hesitantly until he was roughly in the center of the clearing, then stopped, looking about him, his hands still clasped on top of his head.

A moment later another guerrilla appeared in the clearing; and suddenly they were coming from every direction.

Cletus sat watching and counting for a couple of minutes. By the end of the time, forty-three men had entered the clearing to surrender. Cletus nodded, thoughtfully. Forty-three men out of a total of three groups of thirty guerrillas—or ninety—all told. It was as he had expected.

He glanced down along the riverbank to the place, less than ten meters from him, where Jarnki crouched with the two other men who had been left here to defend this crossing and were now covering the growing mass of prisoners. “Ed,” Cletus transmit-pulsed at the young corporal. “Ed, look to your right.”

Jarnki looked sharply to his right, and jerked a little in startlement at seeing Cletus so close. Cletus beckoned to him. Cautiously, still crouching low to keep under the ridge of the riverbank, Jarnki ran up to where Cletus hovered on the electric horse a few feet off the ground.

As Jarnki came up, Cletus set the vehicle down on the ground and, safely screened from the clearing by the jungle bushes before him, stepped stiffly off the horse and stretched himself gratefully. “Sir?” said Jarnki, inquiringly.

“I want you to hear this,” said Cletus. He turned to the horse again and set its communications unit for the channel number of Lieutenant Athyer, over on the Blue River. “Lieutenant,” he pulse-messaged, “this is Colonel Grahame.” There was a short pause, and then the reply came, crackling not only in the earphones plug in Cletus' ear but over the small speaker built into the electric horse, which Cletus had just turned on. “Colonel?” said Athyer. “What is it?”

“It seems the Neulander guerrillas attempted to infiltrate across the Blue River crossings here, after all,” Cletus said. “We were lucky and managed to capture about half of them—”

“Guerrillas? Captured? Half … ” Athyer's voice faltered in the earphones and over the speaker.

“But that isn't why I messaged,” Cletus went on. “The other half got away from us. They'll be headed back toward the pass, to escape back into Neuland. But you're closer to the pass than they are. If you get there with even half your men, you ought to be able to round up the rest of them without any trouble.”

“Trouble? Look… I… how do I know the situation's the way you say it is? I…"

“Lieutenant,” said Cletus, and for the first time he put a slight emphasis on the word, “I just told you. We've captured half their force, here at the upper crossing on the Blue.”

“Well… yes… Colonel. I understand that. But—”

Cletus cut him short. “Then get going, Lieutenant,” he said. “If you don't move fast, you may miss them.”

“Yes, sir. Of course. I'll message you again, shortly, Colonel… Maybe you'd better hold your prisoners there, until they can be picked up by support ship… Uh, some of them might get away if you try to move them through the jungle with only your six men.” Athyer's voice was strengthening as he got control of himself. But there was a bitter note in it. Clearly, the implications of the capture of a large group of enemy infiltrators by a desk-bound theoretician, when Athyer himself was the sole field officer in command of the capturing force, was beginning to register on him. There was little hope that General Traynor would overlook this kind of a failure on his part.

His voice was grim as he went on.

“Do you need a medic?” he asked. “I can spare you one of the two I've got here and send him right over by one of the support ships, now that secrecy's out and the Neulanders know we're here.”

“Thanks, Lieutenant. Yes, we could use a medic,” said Cletus. “Good luck with the rest of them.”

“Thanks,” said Athyer, coldly. “Out, sir.”

“Out,” replied Cletus.

He cut transmission, stepped away from the electric horse and lowered himself stiffly to the ground into a sitting position, with his back to a nearby boulder.

“Sir?” said Jarnki. “What do we need a medic for? None of the men got hurt. You don't mean you, sir…?”

“Me,” said Cletus.

He extended his left leg, reached down and took his combat knife from its boot sheath. With its blade he ripped open his left pants leg, from above the knee to the top of his boot. The knee he revealed was extremely swollen and not pretty to look at. He reached for the first-aid kit at his belt and took out a spray hypo. He put the blunt nose of the spray against his wrist and pulled the trigger. The cool shock of the spray being driven through his skin directly into his bloodstream was like the touch of a finger of peace.

“Christ, sir,” said Jarnki, white-faced, staring at the knee.

Cletus leaned back gratefully against the boulder, and let the soft waves of the narcotic begin to fold him into unconsciousness.

“I agree with you,” he said. Then darkness claimed him.

Lying on his back in the hospital bed, Cletus gazed thoughtfully at the stiff, sunlit form of his left leg, upheld in traction above the surface of the bed.

“So,” the duty medical officer, a brisk, round-faced, fortyish major had said with a fiendish chuckle when Cletus had been brought in, “you're the type who hates to take time out to give your body a chance to heal, are you, Colonel?” The next thing Cletus had known he was in the bed with his leg balanced immovably in a float cast anchored to the ceiling.

“But it's been three days now,” Cletus remarked to Arvid, who had just arrived, bringing, as per orders, a local almanac, “and he promised that the third day he'd turn me loose. Take another look out in the corridor and see if he's been in any of the other rooms along here.” Arvid obeyed. He returned in a minute or two, shaking his head.

“No luck,” he said. “But General Traynor's on his way over, sir. The nurse on the desk said his office just phoned to see if you were still here.”

“Oh?” said Cletus. “That is right. He'd be coming, of course.” He reached out and pressed the button that tilted the bed to lift him up into a sitting position. “Tell you what, Arv. Take a look up and down the other rooms for me and see if you can scrounge me some spacepost covers.”

“Spacepost covers?” replied Arvid, calmly unquestioningly. “Right, I'll be back in a minute.”

He went out. It took him more like three minutes than one; but when he returned he had five of the flimsy yellow envelopes in which mail sent by spaceship was ordinarily carried. The Earth Terminal postmark was square and black on the back of each. Cletus stacked them loosely together and laid them in a face-down pile on the table surface of his bedside console. Arvid watched him.

“Did you find what you wanted in the almanac, sir?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Cletus. Seeing Arvid still gazing at him curiously, he added, “There's a new moon tonight.”

“Oh,” said Arvid.

“Yes. Now, when the general comes, Arv,” Cletus said, “stay out in the corridor and keep your eyes open. I don't want that doctor slipping past me just because a general's talking to me, and leaving me hung up here for another day. What time was that appointment of mine with the officer from the Security Echelon?”

“Eleven hundred hours,” said Arvid.

“And it's nine-thirty, already,” said Cletus, looking at his watch. “Arv, if you'll step into the bathroom there, its window should give you a view of the drive in front of the hospital. If the general's coming by ground car, you ought to be able to see him pulling up about now. Take a look for me, will you?”

Arvid obediently disappeared into the small bath cubicle attached to Cletus' hospital room.

“No sign, sir,” his voice came back.

“Keep watching,” Cletus said.

Cletus relaxed against the upright slope of the bed behind him, half-closing his eyes. He had been expecting the general—in fact, Bat would be merely the last in a long line of visitors that had included Mondar, Eachan Khan, Melissa, Wefer Linet—and even Ed Jarnki. The gangling young noncommissioned officer had come in to show Cletus the new sergeant's stripes on his sleeve and give Cletus the credit for the fact they were there.

“Lieutenant Athyer's report tried to take all the credit for himself,” Jarnki said. “We heard about it from the company clerk. But the rest of the squad and me—we spread the real story around. Maybe over at the Officers' Club they don't know how it was, but they do back in the barracks.”

“Thank you,” said Cletus.

“Hell…" said Jarnki, and paused, apparently at somewhat of a loss to further express his feelings. He changed the subject. “You wouldn't be able to use me yourself, would you, Colonel? I haven't been to clerks' school, but I mean—you couldn't use a driver or anything?”

Cletus smiled. “I'd like to have you, Ed,” he said, “but I don't think they'd give you up. After all, you're a line soldier.”

“I guess not, then,” said Jarnki, disappointed. He went off, but not before he extracted from Cletus a promise to take him on if he should ever become available.

Jarnki had been wrong, however, in believing that Athyer's report would be accepted at face value among the commissioned ranks. Clearly, the lieutenant was known to his fellow officers for the kind of field commander he was—just as it had been fairly obvious that Bat had not by chance chosen an officer like him to test Cletus's prophecy of guerrilla infiltration. As Arvid had reported to him, after that night at Mondar's party, the word was that Bat Traynor was out to get Cletus. In itself this information had originally meant merely that Cletus would be a good person for his fellow officers to avoid. But now, since he had pulled his chestnut out of the fire up on the Blue River without burning his fingers, there was plainly a good deal of covert sympathy for him among all but Bat's closest supporters. Eachan Khan had dryly hinted as much. Wefer Linet, from his safe perch inside the Navy chain of command, had blandly alluded to it. Bat could hardly be unaware of this reaction among the officers and men he commanded. Moreover, he was a conscientious commanding officer in the formal sense. If anything, it was surprising that he had not come to pay a visit to Cletus at the hospital before this.