A Pillar of Fire by Night Read online

  Ambassador Tom Wallis was just about to leave the compound to return to his staff car, thence to his not-yet-bombed embassy, when Fernandez stopped him for a brief word.

  “I won’t insult you with an offer of either women or money, Ambassador,” Fernandez said, “but you’ve always seemed to be a true friend to us and even to our little political experiment.”

  “I am,” Wallis answered. “I always have been.”

  “Ah, very good. I was wondering if you might, then, manage to leave certain intelligence items where, say, somebody on both our payrolls could see them.”

  Wallis barely kept from laughing. Well, of fucking course Fernandez has people in my embassy. Silly not to have.

  Instead, with his face the essence of diplomatic neutrality, he asked, “What, specifically, do you want, Legate?”

  “Satellite imagery, actually, of the Tauran air bases in Cienfuegos. Do they send you that kind of thing?”

  “Not usually,” Wallis answered carefully. “When we get sent something like that it’s generally to put us in high dudgeon so we don’t have to just act angry or sympathetic in negotiations.”

  Fernandez considered that, then asked, “Well . . . what if you asked for them to give you conviction enough to show us the hopelessness of our position, the better to restart the peace negotiations?”

  “You have an evil mind, legate. But, you know, that might work.”

  South of the Parilla Line

  Foliage was scarce at ground level in the deep, dark jungle. Only with the death and rotting of an old tree, or the lightning-blasted sundering of a major branch, had enough light leaked through to allow anything much to grow, those places, and in the few Carrera had cleared allegedly for housing and farming purposes.

  Of course, now, what with the war and the bombing, there were a lot more places where sufficient light to feed life could leak through. A LOT more places. And, in some few spots, there was already the beginning of what might turn out to be substantial growth. Or might not, bombing schedule depending.

  Tribune Ramirez lay in the dirt, the detachment from his battery strung out in the damp draw behind him. The tribune’s dirt-camouflaged face lurked behind a patch of thick grass, raised where the sun peeked through the canopy, caressing the spot on which the grass grew for a portion of an hour a day.

  Ramirez stuck his fingers into a grass clump then spread them, forcing the grass apart just enough to peer through, as one might peer through a keyhole. It was not enough to be seen by someone distant on the far side. What he saw was a firefight. Rather, he saw the enemy side of it, their machine guns pounding, providing cover, chipping bark off trees and sending clods of dirt into the air, while riflemen and grenadiers lunged forward in short leaps and bounds. He didn’t recognize the uniforms, but the shouted orders sounded distinctly Teutonic to him. Worse, though the Balboan F-26 rifle and M-26 light machine gun put out rounds at a much higher rate than anything the Taurans had, he heard little of that rate of fire being slung toward the enemy.

  He slowly moved his head left and right, making a few tiny changes to the sheltering grass as he did so. Eyes darted back and forth, engraving a replicable picture on the brain. Then he slithered back, with the mud forcing itself up under his uniform jacket and lorica as he did.

  With curt whispers and a finger drawing in the muck, Ramirez illustrated what he wanted done. “Some of our guys are in trouble ahead . . .”—scratch, scratch—“the enemy is here”—point, circle—“We’re already on line, here”—point, scratch—“and about well-enough oriented.”

  Avilar raised one eyebrow. You sure about this, Boss?

  “They’re our guys, we can’t just abandon them.”

  The eyebrow dropped. Avilar, reluctantly at first, and then with determination, gave several curt nods. “All right.”

  “Walk the line to the far end,” Ramirez said, pointing in the direction from which they’d come. “Tell the boys, fix bayonets . . . quietly. Full auto, not burst. I’ll lead. You follow, kicking any stragglers in the ass. We’ll charge. Screaming like maniacs, we’ll charge.”

  Again, Avilar gave a couple of curt nods, then arose to a crouch and began walking the line down the draw, giving whispered orders even more curt than his commander’s had been.

  Ramirez watched for a second, then took up his own rifle. Normally, being a tribune, he bore only a pistol, but he’d figured this mission might call for something heavier when he’d been ordered out, so had drawn a spare from his unit’s arms room. Everyone carried the same model bayonet cum wire cutters, so he hadn’t had to borrow one of those.

  With one thumb, the tribune unsnapped the clasp, his hand covering the thing to muffle sound. Unnecessary? Who could say? But few if any soldiers in human history had lost their lives for being too quiet.

  Not untypically, his heartbeat became much more rapid as his fingers closed around the bayonet’s plastic handle. The pounding came faster and harder as he maneuvered the blade onto the muzzle, seated it, and checked that it was firmly affixed.

  Glancing down the line, Ramirez saw that Avilar had beaten him to the draw, despite having to walk and give orders as he did. How the fuck does he do that?

  Oddly, the tribune’s heart rate slowed considerably after that. It went up again as soon as the centurion gave him the thumbs up.

  Ramirez rolled to get on one knee, his left, with his right foot planted firmly in the muck. He took a final deep breath—and it might be final, at that—then launched himself up and over the lip of the draw.

  His brother, the senior non-com of the aircraft carrier Dos Lindas, now interned in Santa Josefina, had taught him a battle cry once. The tribune used it now. Firing from the hip at a machine-gun crew about one hundred meters to his front, his men joining in almost immediately, Ramirez screamed, “BANZAI, MOTHERFUCKERS!”

  Sergeant Major Ricardo Cruz prayed silently. At least when he was conscious, he did. When he prayed, it wasn’t for his life; he thought that was lost anyway. At least, the amount of blood he’d been coughing up suggested very strongly that this was pretty much it. Rather, he commended his soul to God and asked of his God that He should look to the welfare of his wife and children.

  For doesn’t the song the cadets sing insist that God in His Heaven loves His faithful soldiers?

  How the fuck did we end up like this?

  Cruz asked the question, but he already had the answer. We never really trained for this. A little lip service, sure, but really, we trained for attack, attack, and attack some more. And we never lost while doing that. So, when it was the enemy on the attack, and we had no ambush ready, we fell apart a little. At least . . .

  At least that was what happened when the maniple Cruz was accompanying was hit from the flank by a unit—hell, was it even a platoon?—of Tauran paras. The maniple commander went down quickly, followed by the first platoon leader. The exec had gone ahead and the first centurion was still waiting back at camp, to the north. And the platoons had simply broken and scattered, demoralized in advance by the unaccustomed retreat.

  Cruz had managed to round up ten men, forcing them by sheer force of personality—well, that and a credible rumor that the cohort sergeant major wasn’t above shooting a coward—to hold a line to cover the rout of the rest, hoping that enough of them would get through to reform the unit under the exec. And they had bought some time for the rest, though all but two were dead or wounded now. And Cruz . . . Cruz . . .

  “Sergeant Major,” asked the private, his voice filled with fear and desperation. He was a young kid, fairly new to the maniple. As he shook the bleeding Cruz to something like alertness, he asked, “Sergeant Major, what do we do now? I’m just about out of ammunition. So’s Salazar. And that’s after looting the dead and wounded. What do we do now?”

  “Fix bayonets,” said Cruz, though he was hardly aware of having said it.

  “Yes, Sergeant Major,” said the private, and was just about to click his bayonet home when he heard, coming from h
is front, a flurry of fire such as he hadn’t heard since the Mad Minute in basic training. The fire shocked him, which shock became deeper still when it was followed by “Banzai, motherfuckers!” in turn followed by a less distinct bellow of pure rage, coming from a mass of animals or maniacs, somewhere to his right front.

  Ramirez’s first burst, not unpredictably, missed the machine-gun crew. It hit close enough, though, to make the gunner and ammo bearer nearly soil themselves, and to stop their continued firing on whoever or whatever it was that had been in the gunner’s sights. The assistant gunner took a shot at Ramirez, no better aimed than had been the tribune’s. Ramirez raised his F-26 rifle to his shoulder for a better aimed burst, but even as he lined the sights up, someone or someones in his crew bowled over the machine-gun team in a red misty haze. He dropped the rifle back to a lower position.

  The tribune charged on, still screaming wildly and firing from the hip. If he’d been thinking he’d have, rightly, doubted he’d hit anything. Thinking, though, was quite beyond his capabilities at the moment.

  Passing a thick tree, Ramirez sensed a hulking presence. He was just turning when said presence launched himself forward, his unbayoneted rifle raised with the stock forward, for a butt smash.

  Ramirez ducked, which was a lot easier for his being so much shorter than his assailant. The butt smash went right over his head, leaving the Tauran tottering forward from the overbalance.

  Instinctively, as the hulking Tauran tottered, Ramirez lunged with the bayonet. He cursed at having the point fail to find any purchase on the Tauran’s body armor. The bayonet slid off, sliding further under the Tauran’s load carrying equipment, the harness holding ammunition, canteens, and first aid pouch. Instinctively—“Attack! Attack! Attack!”—Ramirez pushed forward on his rifle, twisting the falling Tauran around and causing his legs to entangle. The Tauran went down, losing control of his rifle as he did. However, with hands firmly—nay, desperately—holding onto his own F-26, Ramirez was pulled down with him.

  And came up to hands and knees just in time to take a ferocious punch to the jaw from a Tauran who recovered his senses just a fraction of a second faster than Ramirez did. The tribune flew sideways, spun by the blow. His helmet flew off in a different direction.

  Landing on his back, the wind knocked from him, and stunned besides, Ramirez’s swimming eyes saw the Tauran stand and draw a knife. Inanely, the tribune thought, What kind of moronic army issues a knife that can’t be fixed to a rifle, when they could issue a bayonet that can always serve as a knife?

  Somewhat less inanely, realizing what the advancing Tauran intended for the knife, Ramirez’s right hand scrambled to his left side for the legionary issue, large bore pistol, held in the underarm holster there. He pulled out the firearm, aiming it at the Tauran with one unsteady hand, pulled the trigger and—

  BLAM! Shit! Missed! BLAM!

  The second shot did hit but the bullet, not yet having travelled enough for the spin to stabilize it, hit at an off angle, and thus merely staggered the Tauran, lurching him back a couple of feet, and probably hurting like hell.

  BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! Two misses and a hit; the Tauran coughed from the blow, and seemed stunned, but definitely did not go down. Instead, he shook his head, tightened the grip on his knife, and came on.

  “Die, goddammit, die!” Ramirez exclaimed. Still on his back, he took his non-firing hand, his left hand, and placed it under the magazine well to steady it. Wincing a little in advance at what he expected to happen, he took a more careful aim—the care coming from his desperation—and with equal care, squeezed the trigger at the Tauran who was now no more than ten feet away.

  A hole, about half an inch across, appeared in the Tauran’s face, about an inch to the left of his narrow nose. His head snapped back at the same time as the hole appeared, then, pulled by the head, the body arched backwards and collapsed.

  Stifling a sob, Ramirez likewise folded into the dirt, exhausted beyond care by his ordeal, by the close call, and by the feeling of having committed murder.

  He actually came to his senses while being led by Avilar to a place with several bodies, and some thousands of spent stubs from their 6.5mm rifles.

  “I’m okay, Centurion; I can walk now.”

  “If you say so, sir,” Avilar agreed. “The leader here”—Avilar pointed down at someone bloody, still breathing, and unconscious—“is Sergeant Major Cruz from Second Tercio. He’s hurt bad—sucking chest wound, both front and rear—but our medic reset the bandages and resealed the plastic, and gave him a blood expander. This group didn’t have a medic so it was just what a private remembered from basic training. At least his lungs have stopped collapsing and he’s got a fair chance of not drowning in his own blood if we can get him out of here. There are also two unhurt ones, two walking wounded, plus two more of ours. And five dead of the sergeant major’s along with two dead of ours.

  “I’m having litters prepared from ponchos but we can’t carry all of them, not if we try to take the corpses out. And sir? There’s absolutely no time to bury the bodies.”

  Ramirez winced, nodded, then said, “Sometimes I hate my fucking job. Leave the bodies. Load the litters as soon as you can. We move out in fifteen minutes.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “We’re going to switch, too. You take point, head north. I’ll need whatever can be spared from the litters for a rear guard.”

  Avilar nodded. “I’ll set it up sir. Now sit and rest, why don’t you?”

  Ramirez sat. He was shocked, then, when the wounded sergeant major opened his eyes, looked at him, and said, “Ramirez? What are you doing here? I thought you were on a boat.”

  “Ship, Sergeant Major,” Tribune Ramirez corrected. “My elder brother, the squid, would insist on calling it a ‘ship.’ We look a lot alike.”

  “Elder brother? Oh . . . oh, okay. Tell him I said ‘hi.’” Then Cruz closed his eyes, letting unconsciousness take him once more.

  Parilla Line, Balboa

  As they had gotten closer to the line, Centurion Avilar had aimed for wherever he didn’t hear firing ahead. Passage of lines was a stone bitch under almost any circumstances. Trying to do it where a battle was in process approached the suicidal.

  He tried the recognition signal over the radio and got nothing. He tried shouting out the approved code phrase and got a blizzard of bullets in return. The bullets that thunked into the tree behind which he sheltered were “friendly,” he thought, based on the rate of fire. What worked, however, was simple. In their own accent he said, “This is Centurion Avilar, Sixty-Second Field Artillery, with a party of twenty-one. If you motherfuckers shoot at me again I am going to come forward, take your fucking rifles, and shove them up your asses.”

  “Cease fire! Cease fire!” passed along the line ahead. A voice called out, “Come forward, centurion, with your party of twenty-one. You’ve got to be friendly because nobody but an Anglian or a legionary centurion talks like that, and you don’t sound Anglian.”

  “Fine,” Avilar shouted back. “We need an ambulance or three, and a landline to graves registration.”

  “The command post can give you the landline. I’ll call for the ambulance or, if I can get them, ambulances. Come on in and welcome back.”

  Log Base Alpha, so-called, Balboa Province, Balboa

  Avilar was still away, taking care of some details with graves registration and seeing to the men put in hospital. He’ll be along within an hour or so, Tribune Ramirez thought.

  Exhausted as he hadn’t been since Cazador School, Ramirez dumped his lorica and load-bearing equipment, leaned his rifle on a stump, sat down on a short stack of ration boxes, and then leaned his back against the corrugated metal of the repurposed shipping container that, buried and sandbagged, served for his battery headquarters. The chill metal was almost a shock against the commander’s sweaty back. After a few moments of reveling in the sweet cool of the shelter, he asked of his small battery headquarters staff, “Where’s Top? Where’s
the Exec?”

  The company clerk’s eyes rolled. The supply sergeant cleared his throat. Commo began to whistle. The battery chief of smoke started to say something, then clammed up.

  “It was a simple question,” said Ramirez. “I want an answer. I . . .”

  “They’re under arrest and on charges,” said the chief of smoke, Optio Rosario.

  “WHAT?”

  “Charges, sir. They put up a sign saying who and what we were. A big sign. ‘Morale,’” the XO said.

  “Within two hours of the sign going up, some of Legate Fernandez’s people had shown up.” Everyone, including Ramirez, felt a little shiver at that name. “Next thing I knew the XO and Top were in cuffs, being marched off, and the sign was being taken down. We’ve still got it, hidden away. Then the tercio commander came by and chewed my ass on general principle. He said he’d try to get them out and get the charges dropped, but he wasn’t sure he could.”

  “Shit.”

  At the word, as if on cue, the sirens began blaring.

  “Shit,” cursed the chief of smoke, “another goddamned air raid.”

  Estado Mayor, Sub camp C, Ciudad Balboa, Balboa

  “They don’t know anything,” was Warrant Officer Mahamda’s judgment. “They don’t even understand what they did wrong. That’s good, isn’t it?”

  Fernandez began chewing his lip, let his chin drop nearly to his chest, and thought about that question before answering. Do I take Mahamda’s judgment on this? I think so; he’s probably—no, certainly—the best interrogator we’ve got, for any level of interrogation. As for those two ninnies and their fucking sign . . . it’s . . . not actually their fault. Any instructions to avoid advertising what’s in the “Log Base” would themselves be advertisements that something’s in the “Log Base.” Besides logistics, that is.