CHAPTER THREE
“All the business of war, and indeed all the business of life, is to endeavour to find out what you don’t know by what you do; that’s what I called ‘guessing what was at the other side of the hill.’”
—Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington
IV Corps Headquarters, Magdalena, Cristobal Province, Balboa
The irregular crump-crump-crumb of bombs—filtering through the earth and then to and through the thick-walled concrete shelter—was frequent enough now that nobody really paid it much mind. The people in the shelter knew, too, that they’d never hear the one that came for them, so why worry about it? They went about their chores and duties, thus, with fairly light hearts . . . or, at least, they were able to put on a good enough show of it, even though, however carefully they hid it, they did worry.
Fourth Corps was something of an ethnic mishmash. In and around the city of Cristobal, the bulk of the populace was more or less black; “more or less” because, after centuries of crossbreeding on Old Earth, followed by more centuries of crossbreeding on Terra Nova, nobody was pure. The most that could really be said was that someone tended black or white or brown or yellow or red. Thus, for example, Legate Arocha, Jimenez’s Ia, or operations officer, was black, like Jimenez, himself. Conversely, his Ic, or Intelligence Officer, was almost pale and bore the surname of Standish, even though almost no one in the area with an English-sounding name was white.
The two glared across the map at each other.
Other armies used most advanced computers for this, but Balboa not only didn’t have money to waste on such luxuries, it had an active prejudice against anything that could be hacked. As such, Jimenez’s operations and intelligence staff plotted known and suspected enemy positions on a huge map, set up on moveable tables at the center of the ops room. Those positions looked like a series of spreading stains on the map. Some of them already leaked tendrils toward each other. In places, the stains had merged into ominous blobs.
The corps logistician, the Ib, black and named Harris, didn’t plot anything, but took notes for places and units of the IVth Corps he thought might need a tad of logistic succor, as well as trying to pierce the enemy’s logistic plan, the knowledge of which would be the surest possible guide to his intentions. That was one of the reasons for the staff arrangements in the legions, actually, with operations, logistics, and intel all in the same section, that intelligence types were not usually as good at analyzing logistics as logisticians were, while nothing was quite as good a predictor of enemy actions as were logistic realities.
The Ia, Arocha, looked at a several recent plots on the map, then announced in a loud voice, “It’s not fucking possible; somebody’s full of shit.” His accusing glare was directed at the intelligence officer.
“What’s not possible?” asked Jimenez.
“Sir,” said Intelligence, “Operations has a point. We know what the Taurans had for airborne forces. We know—we know beyond the slightest shadow of a doubt—that we destroyed two of the four brigades they had, the Gauls’ and the Anglians’. We are certain that the defection of Colonel Muñoz-Infantes is keeping Castile, which has one of the two remaining brigades, out of the war in any serious way. I am seeing, we are seeing, impossible numbers of paratroopers, coming into the airheads established by their helicopter-borne troops. I can’t tell you where they’re coming from. They ought not exist, not in the numbers we’re seeing.”
“Show me,” ordered Jimenez.
The Ic grabbed a wooden pointer from an underling. Moving it from east to west, tapping the map as he went, he explained, “The Tauran paras all came in on airheads previously grabbed by airmobile forces. They are reinforcing by parachute, not doing parachute assaults.”
“That’s a lot safer,” Jimenez observed.
“Yes, sir,” Standish agreed. “Also, much more reliable, certain, practical . . . sir, we need to adjust our opinion of Tauran arms upward . . . way the fuck upward.
“Reports are that the Sachsens—they have a very distinctive field uniform so we are quite certain who they are—came in here”—the pointer went tap—“and here”—tap; the taps indicating drop zones northeast of Cristobal and northwest of Puerto Lindo.
“That’s all perfectly understandable,” the Ic continued, “Sachsens reinforcing the perimeter and supporting the marine forces while the latter clear their beachheads. It’s working for them, too.”
Jimenez scowled but then said, “I follow so far. Continue.”
The pointer went tap, tap, tap across the map in rapid succession. “But we are seeing more than that. Each of those places has something like a brigade or a short brigade landed or landing. That’s not counting the reports of smaller teams coming in outside the area of their major drops.
“There seems to be a brigade of Gauls, another of Anglians, and a mixed group of I don’t know what, but they’re probably Tuscans, Haarlemers, and maybe Leopolders. They might be Hordalanders and Cimbrians in there, too, since the Cimbrians have two companies, and only one is in Santa Josefina.
“That last group is predictable but . . . well, sir . . . where did the Anglians and Gauls come up with more?”
“I don’t know how they did,” Jimenez said, “but I can tell you how I would have. I’d have called up reservists, especially if I had a formed unit. I’d have used my special operations people as cadres for new battalions. And I’d have raped the school system as completely as possible for more cadres. In all, if you tally it up, that may account for both the Anglians and the Gauls’ newfound airborne capability.
“We may find, too, if we ever manage to get a prisoner, that for some of those jumpers it’s their first jump.
“Note, too, gentlemen, that we didn’t, in principle, do anything much different in using the training brigade cadres to form forty-sixth through fifty-first tercios.”
Standish still looked a little skeptical. “Yes, sir . . . maybe, sir, but we didn’t use any of those to parachute into a hot drop zone, either.”
“Is it working for them?” Jimenez asked.
“Well . . . yes, sir.”
“If it looks stupid but works then it isn’t stupid.”
“All right, sir,” Standish agreed. “But I can’t help but wonder why Fernandez’s organization didn’t warn us of this. It’s his job, after all. But, yeah, sure; we’ll assume that those paras are not figments of our imagination, but were reconstituted somehow.” Grimly, the operations officer nodded agreement.
“Do that,” Jimenez said, “and make a mental note that, as they’re reconstituted, which is to say, kind of new, those formations may also be kind of fragile . . . .hmmm . . . speaking of which . . .”
Jimenez turned away and walked to the artillery desk, where his chief of artillery, Legate Arosamena, looked ready to weep. Arosamena had once been acting chief of staff for the entire Legion. Fired by Carrera for incompetence in that role, Jimenez had taken him on as, first, an artillery tercio commander, and later as chief of IVth Corps Artillery.
“Every time I allow somebody to fire,” Arosamena told Jimenez, “that firing battery’s life in measurable in minutes. I never saw or anticipated what that kind of air superiority could do. I’m sorry . . .”
“Not your fault,” Jimenez assured the gunner, adding a hearty slap on the back. “You would be doing better, Legate, if we were allowed to use our air defense and if we could use everything at once. Since we’re not, and we can’t, you just have to mark time and wait for a target that’s worth losing a battery or platoon over.”
“I don’t know that I’ve seen anything worth losing a battery over,” Arosamena said.
Jimenez shook his head. “It’s not really the damage to the target we care about, but the overall threat and the friction we inflict on the enemy by making that threat credible.”
“Yes, sir. That’s what doctrine says, sir.” Arosamena didn’t sound like he had a lot of faith in doctrine.
I’m not too sanguine about doctrine, either, Jimenez thought. And, just like Standish, I wonder why Fernandez didn’t find out and let us know about the reconstituted para brigades. And I wonder what else he’s let us down on.
Estado Mayor, Sub camp C, Ciudad Balboa, Balboa
The General Staff building, Estado Mayor in Spanish, was, if anything, even more thoroughly wrecked than Jimenez’s brownstone headquarters in Cristobal. That was to be anticipated. Moreover, it had been anticipated, with widely scattered concrete fortified camps having been constructed long since, to hold and shelter evacuees from the main building. Sub-camp C held about half of Legate Omar Fernandez’s organization, to include the hard interrogation section headed up by Chief Warrant Officer Achmed al Mahamda. He was a Sumeri immigrant to Balboa, expressly recruited for his peculiar expertise more than a decade prior, and sheltered from paying for his crimes on behalf of the old Sumeri regime ever since. It was said of Mahamda that he could make a rock weep and, given two rocks, could extract the ultimate truth from both.
If this was an exaggeration, it was not much of one.
The screams coming from a chamber to the south of Warrant Officer Achmed al Mahamda’s office seemed to make the underground, concrete lined tunnels reverberate. Fernandez shuddered with sympathy. Not that he didn’t detest the men undergoing interrogation; he did, just as he’d detest any native-born Balboan caught spying for the enemy. This detestation, though, was coupled with a measure of admiration for how long this particular set of captives had held out.
Even at that, Mahamda hadn’t gotten everything. Fernandez knew, and took considerable personal satisfaction in knowing, that between seven and twelve spies from the Rocaberti camp had been reintroduced to Balboa. He’d be more sure of the numbers except that the prisoners were still lying about them. He knew some of the methods of reintroduction, ranging from parachute drop, to submarine, to simply walking across the border or, in one case, coming in via a Castilian diplomatic passport and, in another, as a notional member of a news organization. He also knew their mission hadn’t been either espionage or direct action, but to re-establish contact with sundry spies already in country.
But I don’t know who is still at large. With names, real names, I could come up with pictures. With pictures we’d have the last of them rounded up within the week. But those miserable bastards simply won’t give up the same stories on the names. Fucking . . .
Fernandez let the thought die. Best I remember that just because I think somebody is wicked, wrong, evil, a traitor, a swine . . . that doesn’t mean he thinks he’s any of those things, or is any less dedicated to his cause than I am to mine. If there weren’t . . .
The thought was interrupted by a long and heartrending shriek of utter agony.
Ah, that sounds like the young captive.
Fernandez turned his wheelchair toward the interrogation chamber, using the small stick on the right arm to direct it forward. What I can order Mahamda to do I can make myself watch.
The boy—and he was just a boy, no more than eighteen—hung by his wrists from a rope running through a hook overhead. His wrists were behind him. His shoulders strained near to dislocating. Mere inches below his outstretched toes, his feet twitched and danced to find purchase on the floor. Tears ran down his face, while snot poured from his nose. The three streams joined somewhere below his lower lip, the mix dripping from his chin onto the floor.
The thing is, boy, thought Mahamda, that this is the light stuff. It can get a lot worse, and will, unless your story and the stories of the others come to match.
Mahamda barely glanced over as Fernandez silently rolled in on his powered chair. The chief didn’t often come to watch and, when he did, Mahamda was fairly sure it was to punish himself for the punishment he had inflicted.
Reaching out one hand to grasp the boy by the hair, Mahamda visually signaled an assistant to let the rope down a bit, enough for the boy’s toes and the balls of his feet to rest on the floor. It wasn’t entirely unprecedented when the boy’s sobbing increased at even that much relief from the pain.
Pulling back on the prisoner’s hair, thus raising his face, Mahamda said, not ungently, “It can only get worse from here, Sancho. You’ve had the tour. You know what awaits you. Why don’t you tell me the truth? You know you will eventually.”
Mahamda, naturally, had no particular moral issues with lying to the people he tortured, especially if the lie might reduce the amount of torture he had to apply, which reduced the risk one of them might die before spilling his guts.
“The others,” he said, “have broken, boy. Whether from having their nuts squeezed in a vise or a blowtorch applied to their feet; whether from the dental drilling or the rack or Skevington’s Daughter; they’ve all broken. Still their pain goes on because you won’t tell me the truth.” The warrant seemed most distressed at this, for all one could tell from his voice.
“You want their pain to stop, don’t you, Sancho? Sure, you’re young and healthy, you can take it for a while longer. But old Pedrarias? He’s just this side of death from the pain.”
In fact, Emilio Pedrarias had died under interrogation, but no sense letting the boy know that.
Mahamda let the boy’s hair go, then signaled with his chin for his assistant to turn the wheel to raise him off the floor again. The screaming resumed, with new intensity.
“We’ll leave Sancho here to think a while, especially to think on what his comrades are enduring because he refuses to speak the truth.”
As Mahamda left the chamber to confer with Fernandez, he said to his assistant, “Don’t pull on his legs yet or start the raise and drop routine.”
Outside the torture chamber, shaking his head, the Sumeri warrant said, “Sayyidi, I’ve been in this business a long time. I honestly don’t think the poor shit knows anything beyond what he’s said.”
“So why are you continuing?” Fernandez asked. “Piping the sounds into someone else’s cell?”
“Yes, sir, with a ten-second delay. Sometimes it helps. And, besides, I could be wrong; he just might know something significant.”
“Any insights from the others?”
The Sumeri shook his head, saying, “Nothing beyond what I’ve already sent you.”
“Any chance it’s all a fake,” asked Fernandez, “or a mere distraction?”
“No way for me to be sure,” admitted the warrant officer, “but I am sure that they don’t think so. People do not put up . . . well . . . unless their name is Layla Arguello, of course . . . anyway, people do not put up with what these men have put up with unless they believe it’s for a purpose they consider among the highest. I think we have to take them at face value, as the enemy’s main effort in trying to restore their old intelligence network here.
“And if it’s obvious and we crippled it quickly? Well . . . sir . . . it’s not like the Tauran Union has proven to be all that competent to date.”
“They’re invading pretty competently,” Fernandez countered.
“That’s operations,” the warrant said, “not intel. In intelligence matters they’ve been pretty poor so far.”
“Point,” conceded the crippled legate. “Unless we don’t catch the somewhere between none and five infiltrators still at large. In that case, they may prove competent enough.”
“Point,” agreed the Sumeri.
South of the Parilla Line
The battery commander decided to walk point himself. He had no one more qualified, at hand, in any case. It was a function of having a largely citizen-soldier army—technical expertise tended to be thin and narrowly focused at the top.
Tribune Alfonso Ramirez had only two officers in his battery, himself and his exec, the latter back with the rest in so-called “Log Base Alpha.” All but one of the centurions were back there, too, with the sixteen shipping containers and eight guns the battery had dug in under the jungle canopy.
The other three guns, the three the battery had held before the first Tauran invasion, were out here, likewise dug in, along with just enough men to minimally man them, a tiny cell from the fire direction center, and a quantity of ammunition well over what they were likely to need. The ammunition was actually dug in better than the guns were, with the fuses stored separately and dug in better still.
Unlike back at Log Base Alpha, there was no overhead cover for the guns here. All they had were the radar scattering camouflage screens, simple pits, a few fighting positions, and some crawl trenches. Even the fire direction center wasn’t properly built, though the logs overhead might be adequate to shrug off cluster munitions and their small bomblets. And there were some small personnel scrapings in the sides of the gun pits, which might or might not have served well enough to the same purpose.
The detachment’s greatest and best defense, though, as the battery commander ruefully admitted, was that they hadn’t fired a round, simply because no one had asked.
And now, with reports of Tauran fingers closing in around the detachment, it was time to go, without even that one shot of defiance having been fired.
“Sucks, boys,” Ramirez admitted to the one junior centurion and eighteen enlisted men with him, “but there you have it. I’ve asked permission already, which was granted. It’s time to go. Or will be in an hour, when Second Infantry is in position.
“Centurion Avilar?”
“Sir.” The junior centurion was on the tall side, taller than his commander, in any case, and of a medium brown complexion. A nose broader and lips fuller than the national norm for mestizas told of somewhat more mixed ancestry than most. He was probably the second-best centurion in the battery, after Top, which was why Ramirez had him along on this detached mission.
“I’ll take point. You take tail. Make sure to take the sights with you and to bury the breechblocks.”
The centurion nodded, sadly, then called off three names. “You rats will leave last, in order of march, with me. Get the shovels and dig out a small pit, fifty meters west of gun three, half a meter deep.”
“Si, Centurio.”
Turning back to his commander, Avilar asked, “What about the radio the Fifty-second Tercio left with us, sir? I know what they said, but . . .”
“They said ‘leave it,’ so leave it,” answered Ramirez.
Avilar was inclined to argue, but it might be one of those close hold, hush-hush, dumb-assed officer things, so, Maybe better not. The tribune usually knows what he’s talking about.
Avilar gave a thumbs up to Ramirez. From a civilian or a private it would have meant little. From a centurion it meant, “All personnel present or accounted for. All weapons accounted for. All personal gear packed and on the troops’ backs. All non-firearm serial number items present and accounted for and on the troops’ backs. All radios but one are on the troops backs. Field phones and their wire is collected and on the troops’ backs. I have the sights. The men have sufficient food and water for the trip, and are healthy enough for it. They’re camouflaged to standard. Loads are more or less evenly distributed, allowing for different levels of fitness. The gas is drained from the tanks for the auxiliary propulsion units of the guns. Etc. Etc. Yes, that, too. Etc. And that. Etc. Trust me on this, Boss; I took care of it. We can go on your order.”
Saves so much time, thought the tribune, when you can just count on the routine shit getting done routinely.
He raised the flaps of his lorica, his legionary issue silk and liquid metal body armor, and ran the zipper down the the bottom without quite undoing it. The thing was miserably hot just sitting there; doing any kind of labor in one was right out. But we’ll have to, just to get home.
Then he turned north, consulted his compass, and said, over his left shoulder, “Follow me.”
All around, a rising noise in the jungle gave Ramirez the sense—correct, as it turned out—that most or all of the detachments that had been posted forward of the Parilla Line were likewise pulling out and heading north to shelter.
Then came the warning shout from Avilar, the ferocious scream of the incoming Tauran jet, and the pummeling impact of rockets on the old position.
“Twelve o’clock!” the tribune shouted. “Two hundred meters.”
As Ramirez turned his eyes forward and began to sprint, he saw that Avilar and three gunners had already passed him by.
Within the first mile, every eye in Ramirez’s small detachment was scanning through the small gaps in the thickly interwoven jungle canopy overhead, every ear straining to hear through the muffling tree cover the harpy’s shriek of incoming bombers. A mile after that they found the smoking, cooked remains of what was probably an infantry squad, dismembered, burned, with a naked, blackened, armless torso impaled on the ragged stump of a tree branch, overhead. The torso dripped blood down the stout, bomb-sharpened stump of the tree branch on which it hung. Half a mile further, the party went to ground at a crescendo of small-arms fire, coming from ahead.
Even the normally phlegmatic Avilar exclaimed, “Fuck!” at that.