The Rods and the Axe - eARC (21 page)
Read The Rods and the Axe - eARC Online
Authors: Tom Kratman
Tags: #Fiction, #Science Fiction, #General, #Action & Adventure, #military
“You can tell them that we know there are five out there, and that the Zhong sortied only four. If they have another explanation . . .”
“There is one, you know,” Fernandez said. “The Federated States, even under the Progressive Party, still takes a keen interest in undersea doings in this hemisphere.”
Hisss . . . beepbeepbeep. . . . hisss.
“Oh, shit,” said Fosa. “Now that you mention it, if there’s one thing we absolutely don’t want to do, it’s piss off the FSC about now. What do I do if a sixth sub pops up on screen?”
“Run,” answered Fernandez. “Or get sunk. But in any case, remember that drowning’s less painful than anything Patricio’s likely to do if you bring the FSC into the war against us.”
Roughly four miles south of Concepción, Balboa, Terra Nova
Pastora was out there with his men, with logs weighing in excess of a couple of hundred pounds perched on shoulders, as the
Cazadores
ferried the logs from a woodcutting area to an area being bunkered in.
“I am glad we are not alone in all this,” Bugatti said, as she and Centurion Fuentes watched the sweating and straining group of
Cazadores
shouldering loads that none of the women could have hoped to. Well, none but the engineer, Sergeant Ponce, who took up some of the less stout logs. Then again, Ponce was a fireplug with tits.
“You’re glad?” said Fuentes. “I am ecstatic that I am not entirely in charge. Speaking of which, how are you and Centurion Pastora getting along?”
“We get along pretty well, actually,” the
optio
said, smiling broadly.
“I know. And that surprises me. I thought you preferred . . .”
“I’m not doctrinaire about it,” Marta answered, primly. “Besides, it’s not like I’m the only one who’s gotten all gooey.”
Fuentes nodded. She thought, sadly,
Half my girls will cry themselves to sleep when the men march out. And don’t march back.
Doctrine and sound judgment were as one in this: Everything was to be used to resist an occupation. Besides the
Amazonas
and
Cazadores,
and below them in the military scheme of things, were the refugees, not all of whom were helpless. There were one hundred and eighty-three people in Fuentes’ platoon’s area whose credentials were pretty much impeccable: Retired soldiers, veterans discharged into the Home Guard, children of soldiers and the widows of soldiers who had been given jobs in legion-owned factories.
The
Amazonas
and
Cazadores
trained those as and when they could. Where there was no time or opportunity to train them, those impeccably credentialed civilians were a source of labor. The others, those not so trustworthy, could be used, too, but not for some of the more secret projects.
It was expected they would become a useful source of intelligence. The credentialed ones were also a means of controlling the others whom the soldiers didn’t know and had no real basis for trusting. Ultimately, they might be a source of recruits.
Until that day came, though, all the rest, the nearly fifteen thousand otherwise useless mouths without credentials, worked on open projects: Communal bomb shelters, sharpening wooden stakes to use for foot traps, making charcoal, drayage and storage.
Some, those with agricultural backgrounds, were put to growing food. Though it would be a while, even in Balboa’s growth inducing clime, before anything could be harvested. And there was always the chance they’d have to destroy it to keep the enemy from subsisting off of it.
Pelirojo, Santa Josefina, Terra Nova
The sun had
just
given its first hint of day, a thin red glow on the eastern horizon.
The town was pretty well fortified, by now, at least in terms of bunker preparation and preparation of the few buildings Salas had taken over. The defenses had some mines out, but there was a serious shortage of barbed wire. For whatever reason, the
Roger Casement
hadn’t had any concertina at all, and only a limited amount of single strand barbed wire. Salas’s subordinate commanders were cutting and emplacing wood and bamboo stakes, to make up the difference, but it wasn’t as good for most purposes. Off in the distance one could hear them chopping, then hammering, then chopping some more to add points.
There’d been a small meeting engagement. One of the Cimbrian patrols had run into a platoon from Salas’s tercio of Santa Josefinans. The frightening thing about that was that the engagement had taken place southwest of the town, behind it, in effect.
Salas looked down at four bodies, stretched out bloody and lifeless in the village square, all dressed in something that looked remarkably like legionary camouflage. They weren’t legionaries, though, or at least not legionaries from the
Legion del Cid.
A couple of his intel people were searching the bodies; a small pile of various items was growing on the concrete where the loot was tossed.
Is this a war crime, wearing our camouflage pattern? What about when we’re
not
wearing it? When the equipment’s different enough to put us on notice that they’re not our pals? I don’t think it is. And I think that I’m better off not treating it like it is. Though I’d better get the word out to be very suspicious of anyone who looks like he’s in legionary uniform.
Salas bent down and began to go through the pile himself, even before his people had a chance to sort it. He opened a wallet, then scanned through the pictures.
Pretty wife
, Salas thought.
And the girls seem to favor her, but not the boy.
He looked at one of the bodies, decided that was not the owner, and settled on another.
Sorry, old man. In another life, we might have spent a fine evening remembering our youth “with advantages.”
He replaced the wallet in the pile, not least because it struck him as innately dirty to be going through a dead man’s personal things.
“Map, sir,” announced one of the searchers, holding it up, an acetated, folded, inch thick map, with drawings and diagrams done apparently in alcohol pen.
Salas grabbed the map and unfolded it.
Doesn’t tell me much. I can assume, from the route they drew, that there is probably no other patrol on that particular route. Doesn’t tell me a lot about where they
are
though
.
“No radio?” the legate asked.
The section chief shook his head. “No, sir. There were seven of them in the patrol. Three, as far as we know, got away. And one of those was humping the radio.”
“Where were they from?” Salas asked.
“Cimbria,” was the answer. “Don’t let the black dyed hair fool you, sir. Check the roots. Every one of these guys is blond as the high admiral’s cunt . . . so I hear.”
Salas nodded, then said, “I need a prisoner, or, better, two.”
“Yes, sir, and the platoon that made contact is chasing them. But these guys are their equivalent of
Cazadores
. Not much chance of catching them.”
“No, I suppose not. Any word from our own scouts?”
“Yes, sir. We know where the enemy is: Cerveza. Looks like a tank company, an infantry battalion, maybe half a battalion of engineers, and a battalion of artillery, though we haven’t found all the gunners, we think.
“All out of range, sir.”
“Yeah . . . close call whether to risk a . . .” Salas suddenly stiffened. It was something in the air, a change in pressure perhaps. Some old vets insisted it was precognition. Whatever it was, it told him to throw himself to the ground, shouting, “Incoming!”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
You can’t describe the moral lift,
When in the fight your spirits weary
Hears above the hostile fire,
Your own artillery.
—Aleksandr Tvardovskiy,
Vasily Tyorkin
Cerveza, Santa Josefina, Terra Nova
There was only one battery of guns visible from the road, and that, in the bare hint of presunrise light, not much. The other battery, for one had been left behind facing their Balboan border, was hidden over a rise and down a dirt road.
Standing close by that visible battery, was the commander of the Haarlemer
Korps Licht Rijdende Artillerie,
the Corps of Light Horse Artillery. A broad smile beaming from Lieutenant Colonel van Heutsz’s florid face, with drama in his every muscle twitch, the Haarlemer slowly raised his right arm, palm forward and over his head. His left hand, with watch facing inward from his wrist, was held in front of him.
Thought van Heutsz,
Oh, this is going to be
so
good
. Van Heutsz liked ceremony. And why not? It had been decades since the Haarlemer red legs had gotten in a shot in anger.
Hidden in the jungle, the Hordalander tank company began revving engines. They were soon joined by trucks, both nearby and farther away. A second group of tanks, smaller, but with the same distinctive diesels, kicked in on the other side of the battalion. A section of bridge layers from the Tuscan engineer battalion kicked in with their contribution, followed by a pioneer company from the same group.
Van Heutsz counted the seconds down . . .
five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one
. . .
He dropped his hand like a saber stroke. “Fire!” A half dozen 105mm cannon belched flame. Their first target was the battery of heavy mortars spotted on the other side of the town of Pelirojo. A fraction of a second later, the second battery joined in on a different target.
Southwest of Pelirojo, Santa Josefina, Terra Nova
It wasn’t actually a battery; a full battery of heavy mortars ran, in the legion, to twelve guns. But it
was
a third of a battery, four guns. Given that six was usually the number of guns in a battery anywhere in the Tauran Union, the Cimbrians could be forgiven for reporting it as a battery, just as Marciano’s intelligence section could be forgiven for accepting that report. That the other two thirds of the battery hadn’t been found—for the excellent reason that it was nowhere in the area—supported the assumption.
The guns were pretty well dug in, in pits about a meter and a half deep. They had no overhead cover, of course, unlike some of the 160s in fixed positions inside Balboa. They did have a certain amount of protection from the trees between themselves and the Tauran guns, since they fired a higher angle than field guns ordinarily would. And, while the guns were open, the troops, the ammunition, and the all-important fire direction center had solid cover over them.
The first Tauran salvoes came in at such an angle to the thick canopy of the tree that the wood and leaves may as well have been solid. All six shells exploded at a distance from the target well outside their effective burst radius. Still, some hot, sharp shards of metal made their way to the gun positions, enough to kick up dirt and set the troops to scurrying for cover.
The next salvo, following on the first by mere seconds, did better. True, two of the shells went off either in the remaining canopy—such as the first salvo hadn’t cleared away—or hit one of the trees, but four passed by all that, hitting the general area of the gun position. The third salvo actually did worse, random chance putting three of the shells into the trees. The fourth, however, saw all six rounds pass safely through the canopy and the splintered wood, to fall with fair precision on and about the gun line. One mortar was wrecked beyond redemption when a high explosive shell struck it on the left buffer tube, between the elevation crank and the barrel. The crank was blown off, while the baseplate was split and the barrel ripped from the base plug. The two soldiers manning the mortar became for the most part so much strawberry paste.
The centurion in charge of the platoon was knocked half silly by the blast. The concussion might have done more serious damage, except that the mortar pit, itself, tended to direct the blast up, while its walls soaked up the fragments. When the centurion looked up to see a head fly one way, while three quarters of an arm went the other, he ordered, “Into the bunkers! Leave the guns alone for now; there’s nothing we can do without a target we can range to!”
Still, the shelling continued.
Pelirojo, Santa Josefina, Terra Nova
Salas was probably saved by the Cimbrian bodies. At least, the first salvo landed on the far side, with the bodies between him and it. One of the shells was sufficiently close to shred the body, and throw another one right next to Salas, where it formed a sort of low and leaky berm.
Those first rounds were it, though, for that part of the town. The second battery then shifted their fires to a position identified by the Cimbrian
Jaegers
as a key antiarmor battle position.
As soon as Salas sensed that the fire had lifted from him, he stood and scanned around for his driver.
Where is that no good . . .
The legate was shocked by the sound of a horn, coming from right behind him. Turning, he saw his driver in his commandeered vehicle, the driver’s face split by a broad grin. “You rang, sir?”
“Yeah,” said the legate, jumping in on the passenger side, “take me to the cohort commander. Fast.”
Cerveza, Santa Josefina, Terra Nova
The Hordalander company commander had reorganized his truncated company, thirteen tanks, into a more normal configuration, three platoons of four, with his exec taking the third platoon.
The area they had to pass through was typical, some remnants of old tropical rain forest, with exceedingly thickly grown fringes, a lot of open farmland, the occasional
hacienda
, and some streams. The ground was rugged enough to be “interesting,” but little of it, on its own, was impassable to tanks. “Interesting,” is this case, meant something like, “We tankers are very interested in getting home alive, so you Sachsen ground pounders and Tuscan ditch diggers, get out of your bloody trucks and clear that wood line.”
Since that
was
the infantrymen’s job—engineers, too, to a point—the Sachsen battalion commander,
Oberstleutnant
Barkhorn, actually agreed with this approach.
First contact came about three kilometers northeast of Pelirojo, along an east-west running escarpment through which Highway One ran at near right angles. Pretty plainly intended to be an antiarmor ambush, the Sachsens tripped it well before the tanks entered the planned kill zone. Dismounting, themselves, well out of range, the Sachsen company formed up, then moved west toward the escarpment.
The guerillas waited until the better part of a platoon of Sachsens was in the river between the escarpment and the road before opening up. Some of their fire went high, some low, but enough was on target to set nine of the Taurans floating, mostly face down, down the river.
By that time, though, the Sachsen battalion’s own 120mm mortars were set up, in range, and ready. They dropped a deluge of shells on the Santa Josefinans, long enough and heavy enough for the rest of the Sachsen company to get across the stream. The Santa Josefinans pulled out in good order, but had to leave several bodies behind.
Just past the escarpment, and partially, at least, because of the availability of water from the river, the first houses began. These were nothing much, mostly the scrap wood shacks of the very poor, occasionally interspersed with better houses, of concrete block or adobe. These, Salas’s tercio had entirely left alone. Even so, at the first sound of firing the Santa Josefinan civilians head streamed off, east and west, into the fields and forests. Their houses, poor and pathetic things, were left abandoned.
There had been however, one concrete block-built government building Salas’s men had taken over and fortified.
Barkhorn found considerable comfort in the sound of shells flying overhead, not least because he knew they were keeping the guerilla’s heavy mortars pretty much out of play.
In range and accuracy, his own task force’s 105s beat the heavy mortars six ways from Sunday, as the phrase went. But, and it was a big “but,” once in range, the 160mm mortars the Cimbrians had identified outclassed the 105s in weight of shell, in effectiveness of shell—by a factor of three or four or so—and in rate of fire. In particular, were the mortars’ shells nasty. Since the stresses of being fired at low velocity inside the smoothbore tube were not nearly as bad as those from being fired at high velocity from a rifled gun, the mortar shells could be made of iron, which fragmented better than steel did. Since they tended to come down almost vertically, they spread those fragments better. And they simply packed a lot more explosive. Being on the receiving end of a barrage from 160s was an experience no one wanted twice.
Still, so far, so good
, thought Barkhorn. Then he heard an explosion that did
not
sound like either the Hordalander tanks’ cannon, the 105s, the 120 mortars, or anything much but a mine. The radio calls for medevac confirmed it; one Hordalander tank had taken a mine right through the driver’s seat. He was dead, said the radio, and the three in the turret in poor shape.
Barkhorn was in the process of ordering, “Evacuate them by ground to a covered position, don’t risk . . .” when there came several more blasts, these ones doubled.
“Fuck!” exclaimed the radio, in the voice of the Hordalander tank company commander, speaking German. “They’re dug into one of the bigger buildings. Recoilless rifles or those Volgan things that might as well be. Get me some infantry here; I lost another tank! And a fucking ambulance!”
A Santa Josefinan sergeant lay beside one of the Volgan heavy smoothbore rocket launchers that had come in on the
Casement
. These were effectively recoilless muskets, since the rockets burned out completely before the round left the tube. Effective to a range of five hundred meters, more with an exceptional gunner in windless conditions, they had a tandem warhead. The major charge could penetrate as much as thirty inches of steel, plus there was a smaller charge on a prod, to defeat reactive armor.
The sergeant—he went by “Segura”—told the gunner to hold fire as the Tauran tank eased into the thin minefield between the building and the highway. He was about to give up on the mines and order the gunner to fire when suddenly the ground erupted under the tank, and an armless and legless body was propelled upward through the driver’s hatch. The tank commander had been standing in his hatch, but shortly after the explosion he sank down into the tank.
A smaller armored vehicle followed the tracks engraved by the tank in the dirt. “Track that one,” said Sergeant Segura. The gunner wordless nodded. “Fire when you have a clear shot,” the sergeant amended, then crawled off to the other rocket launcher. By the time he got there, another Tauran tank had shown up and had taken up an overwatching position, out of the minefield.
The sergeant felt the first rocket launcher fire, then saw through the loophole of the second as the small armored personnel carrier stopped and burst into flame. The overwatching tank turned its turret, slightly, then fired at the building. It wasn’t entirely clear the tank had seen where the rocket had come from, since it missed at a range it should not have missed at. Even so, a chunk came off of the building. The turret turned just a bit . . . just enough . . . just . . .
“Fire!” ordered Segura.
The government building into which the Santa Josefinan’s were dug started coming apart at the hurricane of 120mm tank shells rained down upon it. Eventually, the wooden and plastic and cloth parts caught fire, the heat and smoke driving the defenders to try to escape to the next building. The tanks, though, saw through the smoke and dust easily. One of them, machine gun chattering, swept across the group of scuttling, Santa Josefinan guerillas, knocking down several and driving the rest back to the burning building.
With fire racing along the beams holding up the tile roof, the defenders’ options narrowed drastically. They tried sticking white flags out the windows but these simply drew fire. The problem was that ambulance. They hadn’t intended to destroy an ambulance but, what with all the smoke, fire, sound, and confusion, it had just sort of gotten in the way. They still didn’t even know that they
had
taken out an ambulance.
Conversely, the Taurans did know, and were most annoyed by it. Briefly, Barkhorn considered telling him men to let the guerillas surrender then decided,
Fuck ’em. You don’t get to shoot up an ambulance and then surrender all nice and sweet. Instead, you just die.
“What the fuck, Sarge?” asked one of the younger legionaries of his squad leader, Sergeant Segura. They’d both been driven back, back where the heat and smoke weren’t so bad. Still, the troop was gasping from a combination of exertion, fear, and smoke. “Why won’t they take a surrender?”