Gold cannot always find good soldiers, but good soldiers can always find gold.
—Machiavelli, The Prince
Casa Linda, 5/10/459 AC
For a change the Casa Linda was quiet. Differently from the past month, this day there were no shouting matches, no screaming in the halls. Even the keyboards and printers of the computers bought to design the force were silent. Above stairs, the only sounds were the hum of the window-mounted air conditioners, the sound of the kitchen staff going about its business, and the steady drumming of the incessant rain.
None of those sounds penetrated below to the basement which held, among other things, a plain but well equipped conference room. In this the entire staff, minus Lourdes but with Abogado added, had collected themselves for the final decision brief.
It was informal, that brief, as Carrera (once known as Hennessey) was, himself, informal. He sat at one end of the table that ran lengthwise down the room. The primary staff, some of the important secondaries, and Abogado filled the rest of the spaces. The remainder sat behind Carrera on upholstered chairs in three rows of five. Soult sat at a keyboard, in front and all the way to the right.
There was nothing on the walls but for three projection screens opposite Carrera and thirteen carved poles with bronze placards and topped by gilded or silvered, carved eagles.
This is going to be an insufferable data dump, Carrera fumed. God, I hate meetings. Nothing to be done for it, though.
"Let's get to it," he began. "Matthias, what do we have to work with?"
The Sachsen cleared his throat and answered, "Not as much as I'd like. Ze most—und, Patricio, I mean ze most—I vas able to come up viz vas seven hundred fifty million. Vorse, you can't use all uff it. I leveraged you zo hard zat you simply must keep a reserve to cover any downturn in your family's fortunes . . . zay, eight perzent. You may be able to use zat, even to dip a little deeper later on, if ze economy improves, generally."
Carrera had hoped for more but . . .
"Fair enough, Matthias. Let's see the Table of Organization and Equipment you've come up with, Dan."
All three projection screens lit up. The two on the flanks showed spreadsheets. The right one was budget, broken down by major element of expense: Pay, Subsistence, Operations, Major End Items, and the like. Some of those were further subdivided as, for example, Major End Items which showed separate entries for Small and Crew- served Arms, Aviation, Armor, Artillery, Transportation, Command and Control, Intelligence, Medical, Foreign Military Training Group, and so forth.
The left screen was a detailed breakdown by rank and military occupational specialty, or MOS, for the entire force to include the rump that would be left behind to send support forward and train replacements.
The center screen was a diagram marked "Brigade Table of Organization." Carrera knew it already, in general terms. After all, he'd been in everyone's shit for the last five weeks as they struggled through. The chart showed one unit, marked as a rectangle with a large X feeding to each corner and a smaller one above to show the size; namely, a brigade. The larger X indicated the type, infantry. Above that box and to the right was a number, "4997." This was the strength, not subdivided by rank, they'd agreed on.
One line ran down from that box to touch another line that ran almost from one side of the screen to the other. Twelve short lines descended from that longer one to a series of boxes. These twelve boxes had other symbols inside. Four showed large X's for infantry, one marked with the X and oval symbol for mechanized infantry, and one with crossed arrows for special operations troops or "Cazadors." —the word meant basically the same thing as "Jaegers," "Chasseurs," or "Rangers." Still others were marked for Artillery (a single large dot representing a cannon ball), Combat Support ("CS"), Aviation (a propeller), Service Support (SSP), Headquarters (HQ), and Naval (an anchor). Numbers showing above these boxes ranged from "372" for the smallest unit, the Cazadors, to "578" for the largest, the Service Support people.
Above each of that series of boxes were drawn two vertical lines, indicating that the units were "battalions."
"Let's just call a fucking spade a spade, shall we?" Carrera said. "We're forming with the intention of hiring ourselves to the Federated States. That makes us mercenaries even though we may call ourselves 'auxiliaries.' Traditionally, mercenaries form 'legions.' Moreover, we're going to be about the same size as a traditional, Old Earth Roman legion. Additionally, if you subtract the aviation and naval groups, we have ten sub-units just as did the legions of ancient Rome. And while we're at it," he added, "note that the sizes of our battalions are a bit small to really be battalions. Call us a legion and them fucking cohorts. Or celibate cohorts, for that matter, I don't give a shit."
A really good subordinate must sometimes read his leader's mind, even in fairly trivial matters. Carrera had hand picked some pretty good ones. He was unsurprised, therefore, when all traces of the word "Brigade" were instantly replaced with "Legion" and all references to "Battalion" became "Cohort."
"It occurred to several of us, too, Pat," Kuralski explained.
"No comment, General Abogado?" Carrera asked.
"Your command and control is going to be stretched with twelve subunits reporting directly to headquarters," Abogado answered. "On the other hand, when I was commanding the old 391st Separate Brigade here I had one mech battalion, plus two infantry, one special forces, one combat support, one military police, an aviation, a service support, a jungle operations school, an attached infantry battalion attending the jungle school, an international school and a headquarters battalion all reporting to me, plus two full brigades of the Territorial Militia that would have deployed here in the event of war. So I think it's in the realm of the plausible, at least. Moreover, I didn't command the air force and naval commands here. Instead I had to coordinate. Command is easier."
"Yeah, I'm not worried about that. Okay, if we can't afford it, it's a pipe dream. Let's talk money, Dan," Carrera said.
Kuralski nodded. "The biggest element of expense is troop related: pay, subsistence, allowances, operations, training—which includes maintenance—and training ammunition, for the brigade, err, legion. It's based on paying forty percent of FSA scales, housing them in tents, feeding them at local costs for food . . ."
Clinton, the supply man, piped in, "Sir, myself and the log officer checked local wholesale prices on that and matched them against FS Army ration schedules. No more than one hundred drachma per man, per month to feed the troops well."
"Yes," Kuralski agreed, "but we don't know if that would be feeding them what they like. I suspect feeding a good local diet will be a little cheaper."
"Enough cheaper to make a difference?" Carrera asked.
"Not really. Might save a hundred D per man for the year. Not even half a million drachma, overall."
"Okay, continue."
"Ammunition and personal and crew-served arms are so tightly interwoven that we really need to talk about them together," Kuralski said. "And we never could come to an agreement among us as to which to go with. It makes a pretty whopping difference in cost, at one end, and battle performance on the other, with proficiency in the middle. The short version is that if you buy Volgan, you can afford a war gun, a training gun, and ammunition to the tune of fifty or sixty thousand rounds of training ammunition per man. If you buy Tauran or FS, you can afford one rifle and maybe four thousand rounds per man. Of course, the Volgan arms are simple, reliable, and none too accurate. The best compromise we could come up with was to buy Volgan and add three Draco sniper rifles to each section."
"What's that save us over buying FS or Tauran with, say, fifteen thousand rounds per man?"
"About nine million," Kuralski answered. "That's an estimate, we haven't worked out any deals yet."
"Works. Do it: Volgan, if we can get them. Besides, they're more accurate than they get credit for if they're properly zeroed."
"We can get them, surely. There are also a lot of Volgan equipment clones out there," Kuralski reminded, "so it's probably fairly safe to plan that way. And Sachsen is allegedly sitting on hundreds of thousands of unusually high quality Samsonov rifles and machine guns, too."
He went on, "The next largest element of expense is aviation equipment. That isn't counting training on that equipment."
"Dan and I have worked on that one together, mostly by e-mail and phone," Abogado interjected. "I don't know all that much about training for pilots and such, though I can deal with maintenance training well enough. Most of what he's talking about using is Volgan or really, really simple Tauran and FS birds. I think that, rather than set up an aviation subdivision of the FMTG, we ought to send pilots and maintenance personnel overseas. I've looked into the prices and, in the short term anyway, that would be cheaper . . . a little. Maybe later, once we've got enough local pilots trained and a larger scale organization, it might be worth it to bring the aviation training base home."
Carrera looked over the screen showing cost factors. Aviation stood out above everything but personnel and training costs. The figure, "FSD 115,000,000," was a little shocking.
"How do we save some money there?" he asked.
"I don't think we can cut numbers, Pat," Dan answered. "What we have listed—eight converted crop dusters for attack birds, twelve medium and four heavy lift helicopters, eight cargo, six recon and twelve remote-piloted vehicles—is about the minimum to do the job. The basis was to be able to lift the critical elements of an infantry cohort and the Cazador cohort in two lifts, assuming an eighty-five percent serviceable rate for the transport helos. Almost everything else was based on that. Oh . . . and we'll need two more helicopters for medical evacuation. We can save something if you're willing to go with used, rebuilt helicopters and to substitute short takeoff recon birds for choppers for the medevac."
"And save how much?"
"About eighteen million. Note, here, that this is a bad bargain, unless you find more money at some point to buy newer aircraft. Older and cheaper also means sooner to wear out."
"All right. Buy used. You have a line on used?"
"For a lot of it, we do. For some we're still looking. IM-71 medium lift helicopters, for example, can be had for about one point six million FSD, each, used. IM-62 heavy lifters run about two point six. New they run over twice that, by the way. We've found nine IM-71s for sale. We're still looking for three. IM-62s are available."
"Okay, let's talk armor."
Kuralski laughed slightly. "If you think we fought over small arms, that was nothing compared to the fight over armor. If we thought you could afford it, we'd mutiny before letting you buy anything but Zion-built Chariots. Too damned expensive, even used. Sixty of those would cost two hundred and twenty to two hundred and forty million. It would break the bank, in other words.
"Instead, what you've got there under that sum of 'FSD 84,000,000' is our best guess of what it will cost for a mix of Volgan T-38s and PBM-23s. Until I can go over there—"
"You?" Carrera asked.
"I'm the only one who speaks Russian. Until I can go over there, that amount remains an educated guess. We do have fairly hard numbers and figures for some much less capable equipment, T-27s and the like. But that stuff is truly shit, well designed but what's available is so badly made it would be almost as criminal to use it as to not have anything."
Carrera looked like he had a very sour taste in his mouth. He mulled the prospect of losing his chief of staff for anywhere from weeks to months and clearly didn't like it. After perhaps a minute of looking sour, he went along. "All right. You go to Saint Nicholasberg as soon as possible to hunt arms. Moving right along, who do we have among the Civil Force competent to command the mechanized troops?"
Kuralski shook his head. "Xavier says there's no one."
Carrera thought about that for a minute. Harrington or Brown and I need Harrington as a loggie. He then said, "Brown?"
"Sir."
"I dub thee, 'Sancho Panzer.' You'll command the mech and tanks. You're going to go spend about a month and a half somewhere where nobody speaks a word of English to immerse you in Spanish."
"Sir!" The single word meant: I won't let you down, Boss. Promise.
The brief moved along, covering artillery and ground transportation
"Twenty-four 105mm guns and six multiple rocket launchers will cost WHAT?"
"We have an alternate plan to substitute twelve 122mm guns and twelve 160mm mortars, plus six Volgan . . . "
By the time they got to individual equipment beyond small arms . . .
"Twenty-two hundred FSD per man for body armor, Pat. Unless you want to go with something Terry Johnson has come up with."
Johnson stood up. "I knew that figure would floor you. It floored me. So, off duty, I started nosing around the Globalnet. There are two developments I think you ought to consider. By the way, Harrington let me dip into discretionary funds to get this stuff."
Johnson bent over and pulled what looked like a thick vest from under his chair. This he passed to Carrera.
"What the fuck is this?" Carrera asked. "It's light."
"It's silk, Pat, regular old silk. Well, not regular. It's specially woven and encased in polytetrafluoroethane cloth. That model is what this company in Rajamangala had available to send us. It's thirty-four layers of heavy duty silk and, yes, at about four and a half pounds, it's pretty light. It will stop anything up to .45 caliber but not .44. It will stop damned near all shrapnel. Though both .45 and heavy shrapnel will hurt. It will definitely not stop high powered rifle ammunition. Neither will the twenty-two hundred drachma vest the FSC makes which is also, by the way, a shitpot heavier."
"Cost?"
"One fifty to five hundred, depending. I say depending because there are some modifications we can make that would make it lighter and make it more effective. Some mods would lower the price but one modification also raises it substantially.
"That modification is this." Johnson again reached down and handed over a four inch by twelve inch metal plate, about a tenth of an inch thick. The plate was deformed in five spots.
"This is what is called 'glassy metal' or 'liquid metal.' It's an alloy of five metals—titanium, copper, nickel, zirconium and beryllium— that really don't like each other. It's cooled very quickly so that the metals can't form crystals. What they do form is an alloy about seven- eighths as dense as steel and two and a half times stronger. It's also precision castable. What that means to us is that we can make a plate a tenth of an inch thick out of this shit and have it be as strong as a quarter of an inch of good steel. We might also consider using it for some other things; bayonets come to mind, and maybe helmets.
"I figure that we can make it something like the old Roman lorica, a series of thin plates maybe four inches by twelve or so and running partway across the chest and back, and over the shoulders, to cover all the really vital organs and the hard-to-rebuild shit, like shoulders, for maybe eleven pounds. Add that to the silk which, because we'll be able to make the chest and back portions thinner will reduce in weight, and you're looking at a fourteen pound set of torso armor."
Carrera looked skeptical. "You tested the metal?"
"I shot at it, yes. Those deformations are what I got firing different calibers. Got to warn you, armor piercing .30 cal and higher will go through if it hits straight on."
"Fair enough. What's the total cost for a vest with the metal plates, again?"
Johnson put out his hand, spreading his fingers and wiggling them slightly. "A little under five hundred drachma . . . give or take."
"And that saves us," Carrera summed up, "about eight or nine million drachma. Which, even if this shit turns out not to be as good, is still eight or nine million I could spend on training, training which is at least as likely to save life, by killing the enemy, as a vest is. Okay. I'll think on this one though."
Casa Linda, 6/10/459 AC
Carrera and Abogado spoke privately on the balcony that led from his office to overlook the Mar Furioso. A steady drumbeat of electric crackles told of myriad mosquitoes being fried before they could come to feast.
Abogado handed Carrera a thick notebook with rings. "These are people I've talked to about coming here for the FMTG that have indicated a willingness to come. No, I have not made an offer to any of them. It's set up by rank—former generals in front, then former colonels and lieutenant colonels, then other officers, other warrants, and noncoms—and the position I think they could fill. It isn't alphabetical."
Carrera shrugged, took the book, and began flipping pages.
Flip, flip, flip. "No, you can't have 'Moon' Mullins," he said, tearing a page out and laying it on the coffee table between them. "He's a toad, an incredibly stupid toad, and a sycophant. He brings out the worst in you; I've seen it." Flip, flip. "Hmmm . . . maybe." Flip, flip, flip. "Good choice on Frazar." Flip. "Lambert? No. He's the 'Salute in the Field' type. Had his Special Services Group operatives shaving when their mission required them to blend in with locals, none of whom shaved. Altogether too stupid for me to let near my boys." Flip, flip, flip, flip. "Bolger? Are you out of your fucking mind? Disloyal and treacherous. Mulholland? Nice guy but almost as stupid as he looks. Well . . . that's not quite fair; nobody could be that stupid. Maybe Mulholland." Flip, flip. "Mace? You have got to me shitting me! He could be a good stage manager in some major theater, great at putting on a show, but there's never a drop of substance behind the show. Add in . . . oh, off the top of my head, smuggling exotic birds and falsifying physical fitness tests. If he sets foot in this country again I'll have him shot. I wouldn't let him near my troops except in a sealed glass case marked, 'Be nothing like this man.'" Flip. "Taylor's very good."
Looking up, Carrera saw that Abogado face had become a mix of frustration and worry. "Look . . . you saw these guys from one end. I saw them as peers or superiors and I saw something very different. The Army of the Federated States does a very bad job, generally, of choosing general officers. For the most part, they're charming men without an ounce of good character. How the hell could it be any different? In an environment where every decision is a moral one, where you get rated by fifty or sixty people before you're looked at for stars, the ones who make general are, almost entirely, those who never pissed anyone off. How does one never piss off the boss? Almost the only way is to have no real character, or at least no good character. The exceptions to that rule are just that, exceptional."
"I had character," Abogado objected.
"You were fucking the secretarial pool at Building Four on Fort Henry," Carrera pointed out. "I'll overlook that because you have other virtues. But let's not pretend that you aren't a rotter, too."
True to his pledge, Carrera had not assumed command of the expeditionary force. When Kuralski asked him about that, he answered, "Dan, I don't need to be in the top position to be in control. I don't even want to be. Besides, I'll own every piece of equipment the legion is going to use, and be making the payroll. How much more control do I need?
"Then, too, Parilla's an old soldier, but he doesn't know much of anything about war, less still about modern war. He understands discipline, leadership and politics. I need him for that. But I'm quite sure he'd let me do what I want to train and lead the force, even if I weren't paying for it."
Parilla, escorted by Kennison, Morse, and Bowman, pulled up to the entrance of Casa Linda in Carrera's Phaeton. Once, when he had been the effective ruler of the country, Parilla would have been driven in his own. Since then he had fallen on somewhat harder times, although he was hardly living in poverty. Carrera would have been more than prepared to give Parilla the Phaeton, or to buy him one of his own, to get his cooperation. He knew that wouldn't be necessary.
When the vehicle stopped, Morse got out to open the door. Carrera and Kuralski came to attention and saluted although no one was in uniform. After Parilla returned the salute, Carrera walked down the steps to greet him.
"General Parilla, it is good to see you again." The two smiled conspiratorially.
After shaking hands, Carrera escorted the party down to the briefing room. The rest of his staff was already there. Lourdes served drinks while Carrera introduced Parilla to the staff. Then Carrera began the briefing.
"General Parilla, I have asked you here today to get your approval for a plan for raising, equipping and training an expeditionary force, roughly brigade sized, to participate in the war against the terrorists. I thank you personally for coming out of your way to meet with me here at my home. The Estado Mayor would once have been a more appropriate spot for this but, since this house is air conditioned and the Estado Mayor has been demolished, I thought you might prefer to be brought up to date here."
"And besides that," Parilla added, "this place is secure. There probably isn't another quite so safe in the country."
"This first item of business is the shape of the organization we have planned." Carrera gestured for a slide to be shown on the screen in the front of the briefing room.
"As you can see, General, we've named it a legion. It should be obvious enough why."
Parilla looked confused but let it go. "I confess I don't know, but do you think, do your people think, that this is a good design, Patricio? It seems odd to me."
Carrera frowned, not at Parilla but at circumstance and fate. He shrugged. "Honestly, in some ways it's a crappy design. But it has some serious good points. It actually is not designed for use so much as for expansion. In the expanded form, with every cohort grown to the size of a small regiment of about one thousand to fourteen hundred men, and the legion grown to the size of a division, it would be fairly optimal for the kind of war we expect to fight. As is, it is as much as we can afford, as much as we have the personnel to lead, and as much as we have time to train those leaders for. Matthias, explain to the general, would you?"
Esterhazy nodded and went over the finances. He didn't need to remind Parilla who was paying for everything.
Carrera interjected, "Basically, Raul, the hit my family's fortunes took in the TNTO attack has not been made good. The value of our assets is down to about forty-seven percent of what it had been."
"Ja," Esterhazy agreed. "If he vere to cash out assets now ze loss vould be enormous. His family vould object and he might lose control in a shareholders' fight. As is, if Patrick can vait, zere is no reason for ze assets not to return to zere prior value . . . in a couple of years."
"Matt's used his contacts to arrange loans secured by my holdings, Raul," Carrera added. "We have a line of credit for seven hundred and fifty million FSD, a personal loan, really, secured by me, er, rather secured by what will be my personal share once the estate is finally probated. That's all we have to count on."
Carrera sighed, a bit wistfully. "I'd have gone for a full division, anyway, and just used shit for equipment until we could afford better but the personnel and training issues make that more than a little problematic. As is, not only are we going out smaller than I'd like, and not organized the way I'd like; we're not going to be able to afford the best equipment either.
"There is no telling exactly how the war will roll out. It could be that Sumer folds immediately and we go right into a counterinsurgency war."
Seeing Parilla's somewhat quizzical look, Carrera stated, "Oh, yes; no matter what, there will be an insurgency, though I have reason to suspect the FSC is not even considering the possibility.
"It could be that there will be a major conventional fight, something like the last Petro War, though on a lesser scale, because Sumer has not managed to make good its losses. What we really expect though, is a campaign—more or less conventional—of about three to seven weeks' duration, followed by an insurgency."
Triste, sitting in the left rear corner, added, "You got that right. Those idiots in the War Department, to say nothing of that king of idiots, Ron Campos—that's the FSC's secretary of war, General—are really being obtuse about this. I don't think I've ever even heard of anyone engaging in such wishful thinking since the FSC got itself into that dumb-assed war in Cochin, forty years back."
Carrera scowled a bit. This was Campos' second stint as SecWar. Carrera had not thought the first sufficiently impressive to justify a second.
He continued. "Anyway, the legion is based in large part around the needs of counterinsurgency. Thus there are four infantry cohorts, each with four infantry centuries, plus combat support and headquarters and support, because a square organization is more suitable for controlling an area and the people on it than a triangular one is. Note though, that triangular is clearly better for maneuver warfare. There are Cazador and mechanized cohorts because the one is critical, and the other useful, for counterinsurgency. The rest is fairly self explanatory except for the size and shape of the aviation ala."
"Ala?" Parilla asked.
"Latin for 'wing,' as in 'cavalry wing.' But all the real cavalry is in the air now, so . . ."
"Bring up the aviation slide, would you, Mitch?" Carrera asked.
When the slide was shown, Carrera frowned. "General, this one makes only limited sense except in terms of its being a training vehicle for a cadre for a much larger air organization. It's the largest group after the service support cohort. It has fifty aircraft including remotely piloted vehicles. That doesn't include medical evacuation aircraft. Of those fifty, it has sixteen helicopters, twelve medium and four heavy. We don't know yet which medium and heavy lift helicopter we will choose or what we can afford. I am inclined towards Volgan and there are a sufficient number for sale, usually used and rebuilt, at an acceptable price. We are probably going to use modified crop-dusters built in the FSC for the close air support role." Carrera saw Parilla's smile and hastily added, "No, sir, don't laugh. They have impressive capabilities—over two tons of ordnance, thirteen hardpoints and can turn on a dime—and have already been combat tested in the close support role in Santander."
"In any case, in designing the air ala, our twin goals were: every asset that would be in divisional level air support wing must be there, and it must be able to lift the combat elements of one infantry cohort plus the Cazador cohort in not more than two lifts with eighty-five percent of the helicopters operationally ready. This does that but the personnel inefficiency when dealing with numbers of aircraft this low is just appalling.
"Naval slide, Mitch."
Parilla looked that over and saw a few light warships plus a number of merchant ships. He shrugged. Soldiers were soldiers and didn't care about ships. One thing did catch his eye, though.
"What's this intelligence collection ship?"
Omar Fernandez, sitting next to Triste in the left rear of the room piped in, "That one's for me, General."
"We need to have a long talk about that, Fernandez," Carrera said, his eyes narrowing to slits. "And soon. Like, say, after this meeting is over."
"Anyway, General, that's it. You have detailed diagrams of the tables of organization in your packet. Pending your questions . . ."
Carrera stopped to sip at a cup of coffee. Parilla sat digesting the rest of the chart of the Headquarters. Parilla asked about the unusual staff set up.
"A good question, General. There are basically four staff arrangements in use in the civilized world. The FSC's system of four equal sections, which is what you are used to, and which they inherited from the Gauls in the Great Global War, is designed to be something of a committee. I believe it has a number of defects, chief among them being that these staffs inject an equality into the planning and conduct of military operations that has no place in battle. The Anglian system is needlessly complex and badly over officered; we don't have enough trained officers to hope to emulate it anyway. The Volgans could be said not to really have much of a staff structure below division level.
"Instead, the model we have chosen is the same staff form that the Sachsen used with great success in the Great Global War and before. Historical experience says that this is much the best form for a highly mobile force. To some extent I expect this to make up, partially, for the fact that our organization is not really geared to highly mobile warfare. This staff form also does not suffer the defect of permitting the rear echelon to act as a dead weight upon the fighting line. Instead, everything goes to support the front. Lastly, this form for the staff does not permit the personnel managers to have much of a say in operations. It locates the clerks so that they cannot harass the line with constant demands for timely information that no personnel management system can do anything useful with in a timely manner."
Parilla chewed his lower lip for a few moments before saying, "I don't think I like that, Patricio. Armies are composed of people; hence personnel management is a critical component of the force. It's as important as, maybe more important than, logistics."
Carrera jerked his chin slightly sideways, then chewed his own lip for a bit. "I am put in mind of a story I read once," he said, "a true story, about a day in August, 1944, Old Earth Year, when the American Army in France had a total infantry replacement pool of one rifleman for perhaps twenty or so divisions. Imagine, if you will, General, a situation where thousands of personnel managers are in a position to manage one poor rifleman. How privileged that man must have felt! I have always thought that if those personnel managers had been mostly infantry themselves they wouldn't have been managed quite so thoroughly, but there would have been more than one man to replace the hundreds killed and wounded that August day. Computers, by the way, do not seem to help this problem much once the shooting starts."
Parilla thought about that for a minute and decided Carrera was probably right. His face said as much. He thumbed through his hand- out packet and said, "I note you have General Abogado in charge of our foreign trainers. How is old Ken doing?" He remembered Abogado rather fondly from his days as commander of FS Army troops in Balboa.
Carrera smiled. "He's fine and raring to go last I saw him, Raul, which was here, two days ago. He asked about you. In any case, he says he'll be ready within six weeks to begin the first course he is going to be running for our senior officers, a sort of truncated CGSC, a command and general staff course. He'll also be running a number of other courses to train and select lower leaders and technicians."
"Good, good," said Parilla. "I remember—with envy, too, I admit—the way he used to train the FSC troops here. A fine old soldier."
"He was that," Carrera agreed. Pity about having feet of clay. Still, Abogado is superb at what he does provided you keep him away from women.
"Where are we going to train the troops, by the way, Patricio? Most of the old FS facilities have been sold off. The Civil Force lacks facilities, generally."
"Mitch, bring up the Fort Cameron slide, please."
The previous slide disappeared to be replaced by a map of a small area well known to Parilla from his days as commander of the Guardia Nacional.
"Sometime, someday when we can afford it, Raul, I hope to buy the Isla Real outright and turn it into a base for us," Carrera explained. The Isla Real, or Royal Island, was about eighty kilometers north of Ciudad Balboa and was about two hundred and seventy square kilometers in area. "But that alone will cost twice our total budget now to buy and build up. It will have to wait. In the interim . . ."
He pointed at the slide. "This is a map of the old Centro de Instruccion Militar at Fuerte Cameron. As you can see, it is sufficient to our current purposes, with enough range space and well-drained, open, flat areas for tentage. Most of the buildings will go for housing cadre, offices, and school rooms."
Again, Parilla accepted that. He asked, "What about rank structure? I see lots of old Roman military titles, few modern. Is there a reason?"
Carrera nodded. "We'll be working mostly with the Army of the Federated States and the Anglians. They are extremely rank conscious. I simply do not want them, initially, to have the slightest clue as to the ranks of our people they are dealing with. Thus, signifers are roughly second lieutenants, but could be considered first lieutenants or captains. Tribunes I through III are, for our purposes, 1st lieutenants through majors, but could be considered majors through colonels. Legates 3rd through 1st are lieutenants colonel through brigadiers. On the other hand, in Latin 'legate' means lieutenant general, three stars, or ambassador, which is a four star equivalent. The sole dux, or duce, is yourself. The centurionate runs from optio, basically a platoon sergeant, through 1st centurion, the senior noncom of a cohort, and on to sergeant major, of which this expeditionary force needs only one at this time, Sergeant Major McNamara."
"Seems silly to me, Patricio."
"Give it time, Raul. Are you ready for dinner?"
Adjourning to the mess, Parilla asked about a set of thirteen carved and silvered or gilded eagles perched atop poles.
Carrera gestured toward the table and chairs, mahogany and intricately hand carved. "There is a furniture factory in Valle de las Lunas, Fabrica Hertzog, that does fine wood carving and makes some really superb furniture. They made this table, the chairs, the sideboard and the china cabinet. Good work, very good. When you gave me this mission, I gave some thought to what the units' symbols should be. I had Fabrica Hertzog make these up.
"We'll present them to the legion, cohorts, ala and classis at a solemn, probably half-religious, ceremony sometime in the future."
Carrera moved to take one of the eagles from its rack against the wall. He presented it to Parilla. "As you can see, sir, the eagles themselves are of gilded or silvered wood. The plaques we just had made up. They give the name and number of the unit that will carry it. This one, for example, is for the 8th Artillery Cohort, Terremoto." Earthquake. He put down the Eighth's eagle and picked up another. Pointing to its plaque he read off, "Eleventh Air Ala . . . Jan Sobieski, who beat the Turk at Vienna with his winged hussars." Carrera went down the list, pointing to each in turn. "Legion: Ruy Diaz de Bivar, Legio del Cid for short . . . First Cohort: Principe Eugenio, Prinz Eugen who led the Austrians against the Turks . . . Second Cohort: Roberto Guiscard, the Crusader . . . Third Cohort: Ricardo, Corazon de Leon, the Crusader . . . Fourth Cohort: Barbarossa, Crusader . . . Fifth: Carlos Martillo who stopped the Moslem advance at Tours in old France . . . Sixth: Vlad Tepes who fought the Turk for Transylvania . . . Seventh Combat Support: the sword of El Cid, Tizona . . . Ninth Service Support: his horse, Babieca . . . Tenth: the Headquarters, Santiago Matamoros, Saint James the Moor killer . . . Twelfth Classis: Don John who crushed the Turk at Lepanto."
"You see where I'm going with this, right?"
Parilla laughed, "Oh, yes, I see, my friend."
Dinner commenced and carried on more or less silently. Parilla was on information overload and the staff knew better than to talk plainly. After all, they worked for Carrera, not Parilla. When it was done, and the maids were clearing the table, Carrera asked the general—no, el Duce—yet again, if he had any further questions.
"No, none. You have done a fine job . . . by the way, what is your rank in all this?"
"We have to talk about that, privately. At this moment I probably have no official legal rank beyond a mandate from the Legislative Council to be your deputy and to help prepare the Legion. Shall we repair to the living room for a nightcap to discuss just that? We also need to talk about your own rank." Carrera nodded to Kuralski to keep the rest of the staff away while he and Parilla chatted.
"The day after tomorrow I am flying to Hamilton, FD to speak with, umm, my family senator. She owes my family a great deal. She also needs our support for future campaigns. Frankly, I despise the bitch on principle but she ought be a useful conduit to greater FSC support."
An hour and a half later, while Bowman and Morse drove the general home, Kuralski, Sergeant Major McNamara, Fernandez and Carrera relaxed on the back porch of Casa Linda, overlooking the sea. The salty smell of ocean, overlaid with the smell of decayed organic matter from the coast, wafted up.
McNamara chided his boss. "Now, sir, if you had been t'at good at dog and pony shows back in the FS Army you would have gone far. Why I can just picture you as some four star's aide de camp."
Carrera made a gagging sound and then leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head, satisfied at a job well done. "They tried to grab me to be someone's aide de camp three times, Top. The idea made me ill; I despise general officers, for the most part. And, besides, don't confuse inability with unwillingness. I could always dog and pony with the best of them. I just wouldn't do it without a really good reason. Tonight I had a good reason.
"And, Mac, tell the boys to put on the uniforms starting tomorrow. With the ranks I gave them when they first got here, with the proviso that Kuralski and Kennison are Legates I and the ex-captains are Tribunes III. And they can skip the promotion party for my having made Legate III. It's just another tool. Besides, we are going to be much too busy for that nonsense over the next several months."
"As shall I be, Legate Carrera," smirked Fernandez. "So if we could have that talk now . . ."
For such a sensitive matter neither the front steps to the casa nor even the dining room would do. Instead, Fernandez and Carrera repaired to the basement conference room.
"What the hell do you need an 'Intelligence Gathering Ship' for, Fernandez? There is no way I can afford the equipment you would need to gather intelligence from a ship. You have no people trained for the equipment anyway. I cannot afford more people from Europe or the FSC, either, not with what I am paying for trainers."
Fernandez gave a tiny and wintery smile. "It is not to gather intelligence from the ship. It is to gather intelligence in the ship. I have in mind a prison cum interrogation vessel."
"But why on a ship? We can put up tents and string wire much, much more cheaply."
"Yes, you can, Patricio. And you can have Amnesty Interplanetary, Liberation International, Freedom of Conscience, the World League and every other cosmopolitan progressive organization breathing down your neck and harassing you twenty-four hours a day. A ship— a ship that never comes to port—prevents that."
"But what do I care if . . . oh, you are talking about them objecting to . . . what shall we say? 'Rigorous' interrogation methods?"
"Precisely," Fernandez agreed.
Carrera considered for a bit. There was a time I would not have permitted anything like torture. Now? Do I still care now? Maybe not. It would have mattered to Linda and that would have once made me care. Then, too, the bar on torture was a bar to torturing real soldiers, honorable men and women. What consideration do I owe to those who kill innocent people deliberately? Maybe none.
"What do you have in mind and why?" Carrera asked.
"To begin with, Patricio, pain, force and violence, either physical or mental, are always at least implicit in any interrogation, in war or in peace. It may have been the rack and the hot pincers in the Middle Ages, or it could be a longer sentence—or at least not a shorter sentence—to some hell hole of a prison now, for failure to cooperate. The person being interrogated has no—let me say that again, no— reason to cooperate without some threat or violence."
"Yet some do," Carrera objected.
"Oh, yes," Fernandez admitted, "whether in police work or intelligence work, you will sometimes get someone who sings like a bird from the moment you bring him in. In ninety-nine cases out of one hundred, Patricio, even then he is responding to the fear that he might be subject to force and violence. And the other one in a hundred? He's likely to just be a nut from whom you can't get anything of value."
"Witch trials?" Carrera objected again. "Forced, valueless confessions? What about all those people on Old Earth who confessed to being what they could not possibly have been, and to doing what they could not possibly have done?"
Fernandez's face acquired the indulgent smile professionals sometimes confer on tyros. "In the first place," he said, "the price of confessing to witchcraft was, for a first offense, generally nil. Some not too onerous penance, and being watched carefully for a time thereafter. On the other hand, the penalty for not confessing was often quite awful. If we were interested in obtaining confessions for witchcraft, your objection might be valid. We are not. I am interested only in intelligence which can be corroborated, a very different proposition."
Carrera shook his head, unconvinced. "People will still say anything to avoid torture. You can't count on it."
"Anything, Patricio? That is what you said, is it not: 'anything'? Is not the truth also 'anything'? Will people not speak the truth to avoid torture as well?"
Fernandez knew Carrera smoked. He took out a cigarette and lit it before adding, "The trick is that you have to have something to work with, some intelligence the person being interrogated does not know you have that you can use to trick him with. You catch him in a lie and then you apply enough duress that he is terrified ever to lie again. Sometimes it takes catching him in two or three lies before you break him, but break him you will provided that you are ruthless enough and have some means of corroboration. Sometimes, if the interrogator is skilled, he can sense when someone's lying if not about precisely what. Then he applies duress until the man contradicts what he had said previously. That's tricky, though, and not everyone can pull it off.
"And then, too, sometimes you can get instantaneous feedback even if you know nothing. If you catch two people who know the same information, you separate them before they can concoct all that complete a story. Apply duress—oh, all right!—torture, until their stories match. Or, too, if you have a true ticking time bomb scenario, your feedback is when the bomb is found. You torture until then."
"It's sickening," Carrera said. Apparently he had some of his old sensibilities left, after all. He was honestly surprised at himself. "Just sickening."
"So? If you are willing to let men be crippled and killed for you under your command, don't you think you owe them a little nausea on your part to give them the best possible chance to live and win?"
Carrera started to answer, and then stopped cold. Perhaps I do.
"All right, tell me exactly what you have in mind and how it will operate."
Carrera wore a suit and tie—God, I hate ties!—and carried an old leather coat over one arm. Unaccompanied, he entered the senator's reception area and announced himself as, "Patrick Hennessey. I believe I have an appointment."
"Oh, yes, sir" the receptionist said. "The senator was very explicit that you were to be given every courtesy and shown right to her office . . . but . . ." The girl looked stricken.
"But?"
"She's tied up in a meeting and won't be quite on time. "Fifteen minutes late, she told me, 'no more.' I'm terribly sorry."
"That'll be fine."
"If you will follow me, sir."
Hennessey followed the receptionist to a tastefully decorated office. He noted the probable expense with disapproval, then chided himself for being a cheap prude. Apparently the senator, Harriett Rodman, felt nothing was too good for her comfort and prestige. In the unreal political world of Hamilton, he conceded that she probably had a point.
When he had asked the attorney, Mr. Tweed, about Rodman, he had answered, succinctly, "Corrupt, venal, power hungry. She can be bought, however, and for only a modest interest payment will stay bought. There is, after all, Colonel Hennessey, sometimes honor among thieves."
Hennessey thought, by her description, that Rodman would be perfect. A little money—very little, actually, in comparison to the family trust at full value—and she could be a strong arm at his side, pushing, prodding, nagging and threatening to force the Federated States' military to give things they otherwise might have been most reluctant to give.
He heard a sound from the open doorway. "Colonel Hennessey!" exclaimed Senator Rodman, almost as if she were truly happy to see him for himself. "I am so pleased to meet you . . . and so terribly sorry about what happened to your family."
Dripping mutual insincerities for the next two hours, Hennessey and the senator worked out a deal favorable to both of them.
UEPF Spirit of Peace
Khan and her husband had asked for a special appointment with the high admiral. Given the offices they held, the appointment had been readily granted. Rather than meet in his office, however, Robinson had, on a whim, told them to meet him on the Peace's observation deck.
This was a small area, relative to the size of the ship, with a thick, transparent viewing point. Normally, the port was protected by thick, retractable protective shields. Those shields were withdrawn to the sides now, allowing Robinson unimpeded view of the planet slowly spinning below.
Neither Khan nor her husband were privy to the full scope of their admiral's plans and intentions. Some things were better left unsaid, after all. Nonetheless, from the high admiral's questions and interests they'd surmised some important portions of what he wanted, not merely what he wanted to know about, but also what he wanted to happen.
Khan, the wife, began the informal briefing.
"High Admiral, do you recall my saying that the kind of war mattered?" she asked. Seeing that he did, she continued, "Well, there is a new development down below that might change the nature of the war. Note, please, sir, that I only say it could, not that it will or must."
Robinson, who had been watching as the continents of Uhuru and Taurus slowly spun by, lifted his eyes from the planet and looked directly at the speaker. She was informally dressed in a long, flower- printed skirt. Her bare breasts stood out magnificently in the low, shipboard gravity, the nipples pert from the cool air blowing across the observation deck.
A much more attractive view than the cesspool below, thought Robinson. "What development?"
"One we did not predict and are still investigating," Khan, the husband, answered. "There is a force building, down below, that was not in any of our initial calculations. Right now, all we can say definitively, is that it will be about the size of a brigade, that it will be technologically primitive in comparison to the most sophisticated armed groups on the planet, but that it is unlikely to be constrained by the web of treaties and accords your predecessors have thrown up around most of the planet's armed forces."
"You mean to act like the Federated States?"
"No, sir," answered the wife. "We expect it to be much worse than that."
29 July, 2067, alongside Colonization Ship Cheng Ho
The UNSS Kofi Annan adopted almost the same high orbit as the ghost ship, only a touch farther out. This allowed the captain of the Annan to watch as the launch neared the derelict and docked.
"There's still a charge to the batteries, Captain," the Marine officer in charge of the away party announced. "The hatch is cycling and . . . we're in. Good Lord, the radiation is bad! Skipper, this ship is so hot we couldn't even hope to scrap it for a thousand years."
"Very good, Major Ridilla. Put us on visual please."
"Wilco." The Cheng Ho suddenly disappeared from the bridge's view screen, being replaced by the view from the Marine's helmet cam.
"Where to first, Skipper?" asked Ridilla.
"Check out the bridge to the Cheng Ho," ordered the captain. The image on the view screen wobbled as the Marine walked forward under the small gravity provided by the Cheng Ho's spin, his magnetic boots gripping the deck lightly.
"Stop," the captain ordered. "What's that writing on the walls?"
"No clue, Captain," Ridilla answered. "I can't read Arabic."
"Hold on the image, Major." The captain looked around the bridge. "Who can read Arabic?" she asked.
"I can, Skipper," answered a lieutenant at life support. "It's from Sura Forty of the Koran. It says, 'Whose is the kingdom on that day? God's, the One, the Dominant!'"
"Thank you, Lieutenant. Stand by and give me translations if Major Ridilla finds more. Proceed, Major."
"Aye, aye, Skipper."
Time passed slowly on the bridge, with little on the view screen but a trembling image and nothing to hear but the hum of the Annan and Ridilla's labored breathing.
"I've got bodies, Skipper . . . twelve . . . no . . . fourteen. Mostly young but there's one old guy with a beard. The radiation must have killed any bacteria and the cold preserved them."
The captain ordered, "Show me." The image on the view screen twisted down to show the fourteen corpses identified by Ridilla. They were all but one young men, half of them bearded and half clean- shaven, apparently locked with each other in deathgrips at a point where two corridors of the Cheng Ho met. One young man, frozen eyes staring blind at the opposite bulkhead, had managed to sit up before he died. The arms were clutched around a stomach wound and bloody icicles trailed outward from the fingers.
Other bodies, singly and in pairs, dotted the way to the ghost ship's bridge. Most had apparently been killed by cutting or stabbing implements. There were only two obvious gunshot wounds, both of those outside the sealed hatch to the Cheng Ho's own bridge.
"The hatch is locked tight, Skipper," Major Ridilla announced. "We are cutting through."
"I want the log for the Cheng Ho, Major. I want to know what happened on that ship."