CHAPTER FOUR
“Be extremely subtle, even to the point of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious, even to the point of soundlessness. Thereby you can be the director of the opponent’s fate.”
—Sun Tzu
Cristobal Province, Balboa
The prisoners of war marched into captivity with their arms, as promised, but had to deposit them at a point along the way.
As it turned out, there were a lot more non-Anglian Taurans with the Die-hards than Carrera had expected. More of them were wounded, too, than he’d hoped for. The sirens of ambulances filled the air along with the continuous whopwhopwhop of helicopter blades, fetching the savable among the wounded. This was still a welcome improvement over the roar of the big guns and the screams of the dying. Not that there weren’t men still dying; there were. At least, though, they could die drugged against the pain.
That’s something, Carrera thought.
Carrera asked RSM Ayres to send the senior medico to him. As it turned out, that was an officer, a surgeon major, whom the RSM simply hadn’t counted among the officer ranks. When the surgeon showed up, Ayres was in attendance.
“How many ‘expectants’ have you, Major?” the Duque asked. “Expectant” was code for “expected to die no matter what we do so last priority for evacuation and treatment except for pain.”
“Between fifty and sixty,” the Anglian major replied.
Carrera nodded and said, “We’re giving your wounded priority equal to our own, but our hospitals, military and civil, both, are overtasked and not as modern and sophisticated as you’re probably used to. Think: A generation behind the times.”
“Between ninety and one hundred, then,” the major amended. “I hope.”
“Amen,” said the RSM, then asked Carrera, “What becomes of us now, sir?”
“You’ll be going on a ship.” Seeing a distressed look cross Ayres’ face, Carrera hastened to assure him, “Not a prison ship, RSM, relax.” On two worlds prison ships had history enough to make them synonymous with misery. “For you it will be one of the ones that brought us the supplies we’d stockpiled out of country. They’re reconfiguring the containers on that one now to accommodate you and about ten or twelve thousand more Anglians. Won’t have much in the way of bedding, but we can probably get you some lumber and nails to build your own. I’m not telling you it won’t be crowded and uncomfortable, no, but you’ll be dry and well fed. Medical care will be as good as yours and ours can provide.
“And . . . ummm . . . you’ll have an opportunity for some education.
“Speaking again of medical care, Major, we’ve made an arrangement with some of the Tauran medical personnel we’ve captured to accept their parole and, just for the time being, work as part of our overall medical establishment, some in field hospitals and some in city hospitals. My troops are forbidden from giving their parole, with the two huge exceptions of medical and religious personnel.
“I won’t ask for your answer now, but when you get to the ship, if you could tell your keeper that you would prefer to pitch in against the common disaster . . .”
“I’ll consider it, sir,” the major replied, “but my priority has to remain my own.”
“Funny,” Carrera said, “the priority for my medical folks in saving human life, period. Surely we’re not more civilized than you.”
The Anglian medico started a retort but bit it back; there really was no good answer to that one.
“How do we get to this ship, sir?” interrupted Ayres.
“There’ll be trucks within the hour. They’re going to be crowded, too, what with your folks and the guards. In your case, we won’t ask for your parole. However, you might pass the word that it is our fixed intention to get you all back home as soon as a final peace is negotiated. Hence, why risk the jungle or getting shot or running into a mine field? To say nothing of the antaniae and snakes . . . oh, and caimen.
“The other thing is,” Carrera said, “that I have, oh, excellent reason to believe Anglia is going to need all her sons and daughters. And soon.”
“Why’s that, sir?” the RSM asked.
Carrera just shook his head and smiled, while thinking, Because I’ve arranged for you to be needed soon.
Muelle 81, Ciudad Balboa
Sergeant Major Kris Hendryksen, Army of Cimbria, waited under a tiled bohio for the new prisoners to arrive. With him stood Marqueli Mendoza, tiny and perfect, and her husband, Jorge. Behind them and the bohio, tied to the dock, rode MV Clarissa, one of the ships aboard which had been stored the carefully gathered and even more carefully hidden war stocks that had seen Balboa through a frightful war. The Clarissa, a container ship capable of carrying some seven thousand forty-foot containers, was still in the process of being reconfigured and reloaded with material for her soon to arrive occupants. This was a little tougher than planned, since one of the two cranes for the dock had been destroyed in the war, the remnants even now being cut away by men with acetylene torches.
Opposite Clarissa, was another ship, the slightly smaller Beatriz. While Clarissa was being configured for English speakers, Beatriz was already set up for both Anglians and contingents of those reasonably expected to speak English as a second language, the Hordalanders, Haarlemers, and Cimbrians, among others. Further down were more boats for French speakers, Italian speakers, Portuguese speakers and what not. A special ship, one of the two ocean liners that had been used to ferry in allied troops, between the campaigns, was set aside for officers. The other, the Mary Ann Ball, had been set up as a hospital ship.
For everything but the hospital ship, some space had been left for future cargoes.
Most of the ships were unoccupied but for some advanced parties, from both Balboa and the prisoners, setting things up for the expected mass arrivals. The bulk of the prisoners, nearly two hundred thousand of them, by now, were still coming in, some by foot, some by truck as trucks could be made available. The advanced parties had come from those captured in the first Tauran invasion, who had been moved for their own safety to the national airport.
The road to the dock was lined on both sides with armed guards. They looked bored.
And I sincerely hope they stay that way, thought Jorge.
“And I see an old friend,” said Hendryksen. “Guard? If you would be so kind as to escort me?”
The trucks pulled in en masse, about one hundred of them. The first twenty or so contained several hundred wounded, in various states of corporeal disrepair, though none urgent enough to have needed aeromedevac. Those went to the more permanent facilities in the city, in any event. One exception among the wounded was an officer, an Anglian major, confined in what appeared to be a home-made strait jacket. Someone had written on the straight jacket, in marking pen, “Do not open until Christmas.”
The guard on the wounded was quite light. An MP from the guard on the docks took charge of that section of the convoy, leading it slowly toward the hospital ship, where a couple of hundred prisoners waited to cart and assist the wounded aboard.
The next group were the officers, a dozen trucks’ worth. The guard here was considerably heavier, as was the guard waiting to double search them and escort them to their new quarters. It was expected that every officer would be reasonably fluent in English, so the educational cadre for that boat was entirely English-speaking, though they all spoke Spanish as a native tongue, and had a fair sprinkling of every other language of the Tauran Union, to boot.
The last group was made up of about fourteen hundred POWs, mostly Anglian but also with the one hundred percent English-speaking Haarlemers and the nearly one hundred percent English-understanding or -speaking Cimbrians. The guard here was quite heavy, but jovial enough. Administration and logistics personnel lined the space before the ship’s brow, with containers filled with supplies for the latter, including books, and cameras and computers for the former.
RSM Ayres stood by the line, along with a sprinkling of some of his fellow warrant officers, to maintain order and decorum as the men passed through. Previously taken senior POWs waited aboard ship, to ease the men into their new billets.
Ayres heard from behind, in a perfect Anglian accent, “I suspect you’ll be senior, RSM, so you’ll end up having to take charge of both English-speaking ships.”
Ayres didn’t turn immediately, puzzling, Now where have I heard that voice, that impeccable received pronunciation . . .
He spun about. “Hendryksen! I am surprised you’re still alive, frankly; surprised and pleased.”
“No less than me, I assure you, RSM.”
Turning to speak over his shoulder, Ayres called out a name, ordering, “Take charge of this mob until I return.” Then, with Hendryksen in tow, he marched just out of earshot.
“This is the strangest thing I’ve ever seen, Kris,” Ayres said. “They’re treating us like guests, not enemies. No threats and no attempts to bribe anyone into cooperation. What the hell is going on? Is this because they think the war’s over?”
Hendryksen laughed softly. “You want my personal opinion? Okay, no, they know the war is still on until its officially over. As to what they’re doing . . . they’re turning us into weapons.”
Ayres’ quizzical look prompted the addition, “Wait until the education sessions start.”
“Aha, so it’s going to turn nasty after all.”
“Sadly not, RSM; you could resist that. Indeed, it will all be most civil, and in ways that are hard to resist. You won’t even have to attend. And, if you do attend, you can sleep in the back and no one will mind as long as you don’t snore too loudly. The only restriction is that you won’t be allowed to prevent anyone else from attending and you won’t be allowed to prevent those who do attend from talking. Other than that, they don’t really care what you do except that they’ll prevent escapes.
“Indeed, the only enticements they’ll use to get people to come and pay attention are boredom—there won’t be much to do aboard ship except education, refreshments offered during the instruction and . . . well . . . turn around and look for the very tiny and very beautiful girl. That’s Marqueli Mendoza. The man standing next to her is her husband, Jorge. Both fine folks and she, in particular, is both a great instructor and an extremely nice woman. Your men are going to love her more than they do the queen, and in very short order. I watched it happen with your Paras, some of whom are going to be her and her husband’s assistant instructors.”
“Treason,” Ayres growled.
“Nope; they will never say a word against the sovereign of Anglia, the Anglian Parliament, or Anglian law, and will reserve judgment on Anglian food. Instead, they’ll be talking about history, right and wrong, the Tauran Union, undemocratic rule by unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats, and against a great number of things one doubts you or any of your men swore or owe allegiance to. Moreover, if you or anyone should claim it’s treason they’ll simply change the subject until they can decide if it is or isn’t. But that’s not going to happen, I don’t think. They despise traitors and have very strong—I mean absolutely frightful—laws against treason which they apply impartially to their own and us. For example, there are some hundreds of Taurans who came here trying to become hostages for the Balboans. The Balboan courts duly sentenced the lot to death and threw them out of the country with the warning that, should they ever return, they’ll be stood against a wall and shot.”
“Very strange people, these are,” observed Ayres.
“More than you know, RSM, more than you know.”
Assembly deck, MV Clarissa, Muelle 81, Ciudad Balboa
An open area had been left amidst the tall piles of neatly stacked containers. There were containers below it and only a tarp and a large number of large, slow-moving fans between those and the open sky, above. About a thousand folding chairs were laid out in rows, with a cruciform of wider spaces dividing the whole assembly into four parts. At the three far termini of that cross on the deck, Balboans, part of the legionary educational directorate, passed out cans of beer, one per man who wanted one, to the incoming Tauran prisoners.
Toward the front of the area, which was also toward the bow of the ship, a wooden platform had been raised by about five feet. On it were several chairs and one microphone on a stand. Behind the stand, on a wall composed of the ends of yet more containers, hung very large versions of a crucifix, a star of David, and a star and crescent.
Seeing those, the men typically moaned and said something like, “I joined the bloody army to get away from the holy joes” or “rabbis” or “imams.”
It was due to the nontrivial numbers of Moslems in the Anglian forces that the first one to speak, after the RSM has quieted the men down, was Achmed Qabaash, the Sumeri sent, with his brigade, to help Balboa against the Taurans.
He wore his Sumeri uniform, the insignia of which was plainly recognizable by any Anglian. Qabaash, himself, being partially Anglian educated, simply ordered them, without the usual flourishes, to, “Take seats.”
“Gentlemen,” he began, “I am Liwa Achmed al Qabaash, commanding Forty-third Tercio, Legiones del Cid, also known as First Brigade, Sumeri Presidential Guard. I think this is our first chance, this war, to get to know each other, since we played in somewhat different circles during the war.
“Moslems among you, of whom I know there are some; if you look behind me you will see our own star and crescent. You may remain here, with your old comrades and you will be treated the same as anyone else. Alternatively, I have received special permission—no, do not ask about the intricate legalities behind this and behind why you are the only exceptions granted—to sign you up with my own brigade. I have taken serious losses, so you will be welcome. However, in all honesty, I must confess that the pay is not as good as you are used to. Still, the cost of living is less in Sumer, we have a lot of fun and, after all, we were smart enough to be on the winning side.”
That got a mass groan, though not an angry one, from virtually all the men in the assembly deck.
“Please make your decision quickly, for our airship home comes for us the day after tomorrow, tomorrow being our victory parade with the other tercios of the legion of which we were a part . . .”
Unheard, Marqueli quietly asked her husband, “Just what are the special circumstances that allow them to leave and give up on their own army?”
Leaning over slightly, he whispered, “There are two I am fairly sure of, love, along with one guess. One is that Qabaash is leaving, so anyone who crosses over won’t be sticking around here to potentially have to fight their own armies. Thus, our laws against treason shouldn’t kick in. The other is that nations are inherently suspect, under Islam, so the Duque felt it was questionable if the Moslems even could have legitimate loyalty to the Anglian state. The third, my guess, is that the Duque is planning something for which he doesn’t want Qabaash here and doesn’t want to ever send the Moslems back to Taurus.”
“Oh.”
Still at the microphone, Qabaash missed that interplay, but announced, “and so, let me introduce to you your two primary instructors for your upcoming course in History and Moral Philosophy, Warrant Officer Doctor Jorge Mendoza, and his lovely wife, Marqueli.”
Jorge came to the microphone first, while Qabaash backed away, then walked down the side stairs to the back of the assembly area. About thirty swarthy men in uniform awaited him there.
“I was a healthy private once,” Jorge said. “Then I was a crippled private. Let me tell you about that. I was in a tank, serving as a driver, in Sumer, during the invasion there. We were all brand new then, fighting, among others, the same man who just stepped down. The reputation of Arab armies is quite bad, of course, but there’s an exception to every rule. The men Legate Qabaash fought alongside were that exception.
“My tank was hit from above by a gutsy son of a bitch with a light antitank weapon. The ammo went off; the fuel went off; and I was blown bodily out of the driver’s compartment. My last sight for many years was of my own legs being snipped off as I was propelled upward on a column of fire. And that’s when and that’s why I went blind. There was nothing wrong with my sight; after seeing my own legs crudely sliced away my brain simply shut down and refused to admit to seeing anything my eyes sent it.”
Jorge then bent over and began to roll his uniform trouser legs up, first the left one, then the right, exposing his very high tech prosthetics, all black carbon fiber and wiring. “For a legless man, you know, I could probably outrun two thirds of the men here, today.
“I know it’s going to be hard for you to believe, coming from a continent where soldiers are not only not very high priorities, but are actively despised and hated by the transnational ruling class, that a crippled soldier from a poor country like ours should get the very best in medical care and the very latest is prosthetic limbs. Well, as my wife will explain to you, there are reasons for that . . .”
Marqueli was speaking on the stage now, talking about truth in advertising, her relationship to Carrera through his wife, Lourdes, but also how Jorge’s medical care preceded any relationship except that of soldier and commander between him and the Duque.
“You’ve heard all this before, I suppose,” said RSM Ayres to Hendryksen.
“One version or another of it, yes. This isn’t the persuasive part. That comes when they start talking right and wrong, nature and nurture, and sacrifice and power.”
“Do you buy it?”
“Some of it,” the Cimbrian admitted. “Okay, most but not all.”
“Are the men going to buy it . . . no, let me ask a different question; before we speak of buying what are they selling?”
“The short version is that service must come before citizenship, and that citizenship in the absence of service, and in the appearance of democracy, is a fraud.”
Ayres digested that for a long moment, then asked, “And the men, do they buy what the Balboans are selling?”
“Overwhelmingly.”
Cristobal Province, Balboa
While there has never been any such thing as the old joke about “mess kit repair battalions,” there actually were military organizations that did similar things. Sometimes called “salvage” units, of whatever size, these took damaged, lost, and abandoned equipment and supplies, inventoried them, assessed them, repaired them and issued them at need. Typically, these had a very close relationship with quartermaster laundry and bath units, because when front line soldiers reduced to rags finally got a shower, their own uniforms were past repair and would be replaced with either new uniforms or used ones from the salvage unit.
Currently four of the five corps level salvage maniples were busily inventorying and amassing the almost incredible haul from the Tauran Union’s late expeditionary force. There were perhaps as many as one thousand armored vehicles, heavy and not so heavy, a similar number of serviceable or repairable guns and mortars, thousands, tens of thousands, of tons of ammunition, small arms galore, radios, wheeled vehicles, helmets, rations, medical supplies . . .
“But rounding up the small arms is the priority right now,” said the commander of one such company. “Small arms and their ammunition. Oh, and the mortars, antiarmor weapons, and the ammunition for those, too.”
“Kind of strange, sir, isn’t it?” asked the maniple’s first centurion. “I mean, you would think we’d prefer to feed the Taurans their own food and to use their medical supplies, but, no, we’re salvaging rifles, machine guns, mortars?”
“We only serve and obey, Top.”
“Yes, sir, but, you know, sir, it’s going to be a while. If we put one hundred men on the small arms alone, and those just in this sector, it’s going to take a month just to clean and preserve them and match them to their ammunition.”
“Yeah, Top, I know. How about the containers and desiccant? Any word?’
“Just that they’re coming, sir. Maybe in the next day or two. Oh, also corps told us we could coat the weapons with used motor oil in a pinch.”
BdL Dos Lindas, Mar Furioso
It’s been, thought Fosa, a very long time since we’ve gone through this ballet.
The dance, the ballet, he had in mind was the complex drill of fueling, arming, and, where needed, moving to the deck the light attack aircraft, the Turbo-finches and Gabriels scheduled for the attack on the Zhong destroyers covering Marciano’s northern, seaward flank.
Though it had been months since they’d had to do anything of the kind, the crew had never really stopped practicing during their internment. As they had regularly, during the interment—standing behind Fosa, who occasionally glanced their way—the handlers coordinated—choreographed—every step, using models laid out on mockups of the flight and hangar decks.
The whole show was made more complex by the need to maintain the existing aerial antisubmarine screen even as the strike package was launched and assembled.
It’s just possible that they’re in the best form they’ve ever been.
Anyone else watching the show would have had to agree, as the ballet played out, with the elevators rhythmically lifting aircraft to the flight deck, fuel hoses dragged by men in purple snaking out to top off the fuel tanks, red bedecked ordnance crew moving, jacking up, and attaching missiles to hardpoints.
This last process was particularly of interest to Fosa, as some of those missiles cost a good deal more than the aircraft carrying them. In particular, the six Shiva-class antishipping missiles cost about two thirds as much as all the other aircraft in the strike package, combined.
Part of the ballet was, of course, getting the aircraft airborne. This, given the kind of aircraft—basically derived from crop dusters—was much easier for the Dos Lindas than for any other aircraft carrier afloat on the planet. No catapult was needed, only that the ship nose into the wind, that the yellow-suited aircraft handlers ensure the way was clear and give the pilots their signal.
On the other hand, even as improved, the Gabriels could only carry one missile when launched from the Dos Lindas, rather than the two they could have carried if flying from a fifteen hundred or so foot hard surfaced airstrip on land. Even at half a load, and even with a strong headwind, the planes typically waddled down the flight deck, and almost disappeared as they sank toward the ocean before rising up again.
Near gives me a fucking heart attack every time I watch one of those.
Turbo-finch Number 72
Number 72, which was the tail number of the plane and had nothing to do with its serial number of the seniority of the pilot, was the command bird for the mission. As such, it carried, uniquely for this strike, in addition to the pilot, both several extra radios, a senior officer to use them, and a horribly cramped rating to assist.
It had been the first up, piloted by a Warrant Officer Valdez and carrying a Legate Third named Cortez. The rating also had a name, but nobody much cared about it except for him.
Both the Gabriels and the Finches were economic with fuel even as they carried a good deal of it. Their loiter time was impressive, at seven hours for the latter and five and a half for the former. What made that important was that even taking half an hour to form up the package, they had lots of range still. This mattered because the Zhong destroyers they were aiming at were a good two hundred nautical miles away.
Zhong Destroyer Changsha,
Off the northern coast of Santa Josefina
A frowning helmsman kept his eyes to the front and his ship on course as his captain scanned forward over the calm sea.
There were two destroyers, only, in Captain Liu’s flotilla, Changsha and Chengdu. In line abreast, they moved toward a rendezvous with the enemy fleet. Water feathered up to either side of Destroyer Chengdu’s bow as it sliced through the waves at about one quarter speed. Looking at the sister ship’s bow wave from the side, Liu thought, One quarter speed is plenty; no need to hurry to die.
The Zhong skipper was under no illusions about his chances; they were nil. He once again glanced left from the bridge at Changsha’s sister ship and thought, I could run. I could just scuttle the ships and claim we were sunk. But then someone would talk; someone always talks, and I’d be lucky if my children were not skinned alive.
And the enemy? Yes, they’re primitive, too, as much so as, or even more than, my ships. But they have the numbers. They own the water underneath me, if those Gallic reports are to be believed. Then, too, something destroyed the Wu Zetian. My cousin, commanding the Mao Zedong, could not be very specific, but he was nearby when the Wu was destroyed and he warned me to watch out below. And behind.
Maybe worse, they own the skies above me. Primitive aircraft? Yes. Not built to purpose? Yes. But in the kingdom of the blind . . . and we are so blind . . .
I know they’re out there, both my sonar and my radar know exactly where they are, ships out of range of anything I can throw at them.
Of course, we don’t know where their submarines are. Nor will we until it is far too late. Even so, I’ll make a guess that it’s not submarines I have to worry about today, that those are staying fairly close to their irreplaceable carrier.
So no, my death will come from above . . . unless they want to send their heavy cruiser to destroy me. It can; it not only outguns both my ships taken together, it has enough armor to take the hits we cannot.
I can just picture the command and staff meeting before the Balboans sailed out, with submarine captains getting into fistfights with the cruiser’s skipper and the pilots, because everybody wanted the chance to kill us and any of them can do the job.
The image in his mind of that supposed argument made Liu laugh. Thought the helmsman, If the skipper can laugh, what do I have to worry about? He previous frown was replaced with a slight smile.