Carnifex (65 page)

Hanging his head in despair, Belisario thought, for perhaps the thousandth time, about just giving it up and surrendering to the Gurkhas and Sikhs who hunted his men morn and night. They were good men, those. Better, by far, than the other troops the UN set loose to terrorize the population.

"Don't shoot, Dad," he heard and looked up. It was the voice of his daughter, Mitzi. She walked into the center of the camp, gripping an
escopeta
and accompanied by a young man.

A
gringo, by his looks
, Belisario thought. He saw half a dozen others, leading heavily laden mules.
Gringos, too, most likely
.

"Mom says 'hi,'" Mitzi said. "She told me to lead these men to you. Even loaned me her shotgun for safety and I
never
would have expected her to do
that.
"

"Are you Belisario Carrera?" the young man with Mitzi asked.

"I am."

"Sir, I'm Juan Alvarez, Jr., from down in Southern Columbia, and, sir, I've brought some things I think you maybe need."

The guerillas are the fish and the people are the sea.
The Great Helmsman, on guerilla warfare
We
fish with dynamite.

Patricio Carrera, on counter-guerilla warfare

With the noonday sun high overhead, the valley was bathed in stifling heat. Even high on the green hills surrounding the Tuscan Ligurini base, it was oppressive. It was all the more oppressive for those troops of the Legion filling in fighting positions, mortar pits, and ammunition dumps. These, stripped to the waist, wielded their shovels with a will, however. When the marks of preparations for the aborted attack on the Ligurini were erased, they were going home.

With the election over, and with the FS-imposed practical partition of Balboa, Carrera felt reasonably comfortable standing down his troops, barring those surrounding the local base for the Gallic Commandos. For the Gauls, he'd wait and see how well peace held out in Balboa. The rest would move on to Thermopolis, along with their equipment, and from there go home to Balboa via road, rail, sea and air. Even the ones surrounding the Gauls would eventually leave; they were just further behind in the order of movement.

Besides, it isn't like I'm not working on ways to hit them where it hurts even when I give up the ability to get at the Frogs and Tauros here.

Nor could anyone in the coalition really complain about the Gauls being confined to their little rathole. The legionaries surrounding them were also engaged in something the Commandos had signally failed even to try to do (though to be fair this was not the result on any unwillingness on the Commandos' part); hunting down and obliterating the insurgency in the area. In this, the Legion was having some success.

Carrera drew a mental map of the country and the position of his troops within it. His mind clicked over each stage in the evacuation of two legions from Pashtia and he could find no flaw.
Gotta love a good staff
, he thought.

"Call from the staff, sir," said one of his guards, holding out a microphone. "Secure. Bad news, they say."

Of course, it's bad news
, he thought.
Here I am enjoying a peaceful moment and pleased that I
won't
have to butcher ten thousand allied troops so, naturally, there is bad news. God, someday I hope to have a long talk with you about your sense of humor.

He took the proffered radio microphone and announced, "Carrera."

The radio operator at the other end acknowledged and said, "Wait one, sir, while we connect you to the
classis.
"

The
classis?
My bad news is from the
classis?
This is going to be really bad.

There was a series of beeps, and then a voice, distorted by the encryption devices and with odd, unrecognizable sounds in the background, said, "Fosa, here." The voice seemed to Carrera to contain an infinity of sadness and weariness.

"Carrera, here. What is it, Roderigo?"

"Patricio . . . I don't know how to tell you this, so I'll just lay it out for you. We got hit this morning, hit
hard.
I don't even have a final count of the dead and wounded, but both numbers are going to be high. I lost just about half my fixed-wing aircraft and two thirds of the helicopters. I'm holed, though—thank God—it's not below the water line. Even so, I'm taking water at the stern and the hole is close enough to the water line that a big storm could put us down. One elevator is totally out. My drives are down . . . well, one is down. The other was blown clean off. My flight deck is warped, but not so badly we can't loft and recover aircraft. I've no radar. And I lost one of the escorts."

"Holy shit!" Carrera said, though he didn't key the microphone.
My brave sailors; where will I find your like again?
When he keyed it, he asked, "What happened, Rod?"

"It was an ambush in the Nicobar Straits. Somehow the wogs managed to assemble about a dozen speed boats, half a dozen cruise missiles, two torpedoes, and one big fucking suicide ship. We took one cruise missile hit, plus a near miss that did for the radar, a torpedo hit at the stern, and then the suicide ship . . . Pat, it must have been about a two-kiloton explosion . . . anyway, it went off about a klick away." Fosa hesitated and then added, "Well, it didn't actually
go
off. One of my escorts, the
Santisima Trinidad
, rammed it at full speed.
That
set it off. Pat, if they hadn't rammed it, we'd have been obliterated.

"Pat, I want authority to award gold crosses, four steps, to that crew, and three to it's sister, the
Agustin
. Three and two just wouldn't be enough."

"Given," Carrera answered. "Is your ship recoverable? What about the wounded?"

There was doubt in Fosa's voice, mixed in with determination. "If I can get her to a port . . . maybe. But getting her back in order will be expensive. The wounded we're flying off with whatever I have that can carry a man or two."

"All right. I'll assume you're flying your hurt men to some safe port. As for the expense;
damn
the expense; a ship like
that
doesn't come along every day."
In fact, I haven't a clue where we could find another one. Rebuild the static training ship? Probably a lot
more
expensive. And besides, the ship that survived an attack like that has
mana.
It has
soul.
Men will adore her and fight all the better for her. Some other ship just wouldn't do as well.

"Captain, we've found something you ought to see."

Fosa nodded his head and said, "Pat, I've got to go. I'll report in around sunset. I might have a better idea of our chances then."

"Before you go, put me on the speaker," Carrera ordered.

Fosa looked over at the communications bench and gave the nod. A sailor flicked a switch. "Go ahead, Pat. Wherever the intercom still reaches, you'll be heard. Fosa, out."

From the speakers, echoing across the length and breadth of the carrier, came, "
Duque
Carrera to the officers, centurions and men of the
classis
, and of the
tercios
Jan Sobieski, and Vlad Tepes: Men, listen; don't stop working to save your ship, but listen. You've taken a hard hit . . . "

Fosa didn't really listen to Carrera's speech. It wasn't much more than the same generalities he'd been spreading, himself:
We've done well . . . they threw the worst they had at us and we took it and came back punching . . . we'll save the ship.
He just hoped it was all true.

At the base of the tower he turned around and looked out over the flight deck. Already crews with cutting torches were slicing away the warped sections and forcing some of the underdecking back into position. There was plywood and perforated steel planking, down below, that they could use to make some temporary patches, enough for the Crickets and maybe even a lightly loaded Finch.

From there, he descended down the double stairs to Deck 2. A balcony off that deck overlooked the hangar. He went to the balcony and looked down. The hangar was filled not only with burned and blasted airframes; it had become a morgue, as well. Even now, parties of crewman, some of them hurt themselves, brought in corpses and laid them out respectfully in rows. Some of his crew, Fosa saw, were curled up in fetal positions, their charred limbs eloquent testimony to the fire that had killed them.

You will
not
throw up
, Fosa gave himself the order. Even so, he turned away.

The sailor who had summoned the captain from the bridge said, "This way, sir. By where we took the hit near the stern."

"Lead on."

The way led through the officers' quarters at the stern, past Fosa's and then Kurita's cabin.

What am I going to do without that old man to guide me?
Fosa wondered. For, though he had put out the call to find the commodore, no one had as of yet seen a sign. The nearest thing to a report was the mutterings of a now legless and semi-comatose sailor in sickbay, a gunner on one of the port rear platforms. He'd said something about going "back for the commodore."

Fosa rested his hand lightly on the cabin's hatch, then continued on forward and past the filter room and the two rocket storage rooms.

"We found it out here, Skipper" the sailor guiding Fosa said as he pointed to the twisted scrap that had been a gun platform.

Fosa stepped gingerly out onto the ruin of the platform. It seemed solid enough. There was a ruined forty-millimeter gun there, as well. Fosa turned and . . . 

"My God," he whispered.

There, against the hull, to all appearances a
part
of the hull now, was the outline of a small man. He might not have known who it was except for the ancient, once reforged
katana
that was apparently
welded
to the hull, and joined to the body's outline by the shadow of a thin arm.

Fosa crossed himself and said a small prayer for the soul of Tadeo Kurita, along with the wish that he now be reunited with his wife and children.
For, Lord, he was a good man, and a good sailor, and did his duty as he saw it . . . to the end.

Fosa looked ahead to where the two corvettes were being rigged to tow the
Dos Lindas
to port. Astern, they'd managed to get the one remaining AZIPOD working, but it was non-steerable. The corvettes would pull the bow around to steer the ship, with the AZIPOD providing the bulk of the forward drive. He guessed he'd be able to make at least ten knots that way, maybe even twelve, which put the nearest useful and trustworthy port, in Sind, a good eight or ten days' sailing away.

"We're going to make it, Pat," Fosa told Carrera, later that night via secure radio. "We may be pumping like madmen all the way, and we're toast if were attacked at sea, or hit a really atrocious storm. But barring those, we'll make it."

"I've alerted Christian back in Balboa to push to make good your personnel losses," Carrera answered. "A freighter will be sailing in three days with replacements for your lost Crickets and Finches. It will be a month and a half before we can replace your Yakamovs. I've given orders that a cruiser be readied to sail ASAP. That, and that another escort be sent along. But, Rod, we don't have another Patrol Torpedo until we can have some built. Will a corvette do?"

"It will," the captain answered. "Pat, has the cruiser been rechristened yet?"

"No, why?"

"Because I'd like it to bear the name of
Tadeo Kurita
, if that works for you."

In the limited confines of his quarters, Robinson paced furiously.
Nothing works; h
e fumed,
nothing fucking works! It didn't even help to take a belt to Khan's ass because
she
likes it.

Wallenstein sipped coffee shipped up from below. To all appearances, she was calm and composed. Inside, though, she was worried.
An unhappy High Admiral is a High Admiral who is less likely to get me a caste lift. This will not do. But . . . still, I have to tell him or he'll be even less likely to give me the boost I need.

"Martin, we've got a decoded message we intercepted between the mercenary fleet and its commander. Not only is the ship not going to sink; it's going to be reinforced."

"With what?"

"A heavy cruiser. I believe it's the only heavy cruiser in commission in any wet navy down below. Good armor, ten six-inch automatic, long range guns in five twin turrets. It's also nuclear powered, just like the carrier. I'm sorry, Martin, but the mercenary fleet is not only not substantially weakened, except in the very short term, it's growing. Worse, the Yamatan Zaibatsu appear to be so eager to get it back on station that they're paying two thirds of the cost of restoring and refitting the carrier. I'm afraid that using piracy to both raise funds for the
Ikhwan
and to undercut the economy down below is . . . " Wallenstein hesitated.

"Doomed to abject failure?" Robinson supplied. "Tell me something I
don't
know."

"I don' know, skipper," the master of the ship fitting company said, shaking his head. The master was an old man. Underneath his turbaned head, Fosa thought, his hair was likely as gray as his beard.

The
Dos Lindas
rode at dock, Cazadors guarding from the landward side while corvettes and the
Agustin
watched to seaward. Getting her here? Through one of the worst storms in the history of the Sea of Sind? With waves battering at the temporary patch welded over the spot where the
Ikhwan
cruise missile had struck home? That would take a volume. Suffice to say that there were a lot more
Cruces de Coraje
earned by the crew. Some heroism was never recorded. For that, for those unknowns washed over the side, Carrera had issued the first unit citation in the history of the
Legion del Cid.

"I don' know," the master repeated, tapping the temporary patches on the flight deck with his cane and he and Fosa toured the ship with an eye to damages and estimates. "It gonna cost."