Read The Rods and the Axe - eARC Online
Authors: Tom Kratman
Tags: #Fiction, #Science Fiction, #General, #Action & Adventure, #military
The Rods and the Axe - eARC (22 page)
“Dunno, Private,” answered the sergeant. “But we need to get word out that they’re not taking prisoners.”
“How?”
“Fucked if I know, son.”
It was a damned good thing that the Santa Josefinan civilians had scampered off, given the approach being taken by the Taurans to buildings, now that they’d lost some of their own to defenders inside them. That approach was simple; concrete and adobe homes were smashed from a distance with cannon fire. Wooden ones were set alight with tracers from the machine guns. In cases of doubt, Tuscan sappers with demolition charges disintegrated still others.
In the space of half an hour, the one government building and fifty-odd personal homes lining both sides of the highway were either smashed to dust or burning merrily.
At the far end of that little linear monument to free fire zones, the Tauran task force stopped briefly, to reorganize for the assault on the town and to spread out across the rivers that had channeled them into what could have been a disastrously tight kill zone. While they were doing so, the first couple of sorties of air support came in. These weren’t directed at the town of Pelirojo, nor at the troops immediately defending it. Instead, the flight of eight Anglian-flown. Tauravia-built, Hurricane fighter-bombers split up, with four circling like vultures overhead, while four more split off and went for the 160mm mortar position, now clearly marked by smoke and dust.
Salas watched from a distance as the four enemy aircraft swooped low over the one platoon of 160s he’d put out. He was not so far away that he couldn’t see the eight silvery canisters come tumbling off the planes. And the mixed orange, red, and black fireballs that arose from those left him in no doubt about the fate of his platoon.
Shit. I thought that by taking a disadvantageous position or a less advantageous one, anyway, I’d be able to preserve the guns until they could be of use. Didn’t count on how good the enemy’s recon would be. Damn me to hell. What’s it going to do to the cause when we lose this battle? Because we are
going
to lose it. Shit.
Ah, well; the Nguyens said that the battle doesn’t matter; the
war
is what matters.
Pelirojo, Santa Josefina, Terra Nova
There was a minefield east of the town, anchored on two of the three rivers. So much the Cimbrian
Jaegers
had reported.
Oberstleutnant
Barkhorn had intended that the Tuscan sappers would clear lanes through the minefield under cover of the artillery, while he swung the bulk of his force south, across the broader river, to take the town in flank.
As it turned out, that river was a bit too deep for wading. Nor did the Tuscan sappers have the ability to bridge it. They could, so they reported, bridge the faster flowing but much narrower stream to the north.
“Do it,” Barkhorn ordered through his Tuscan translator. Then, leaving one of his infantry companies to support the Tuscans at the minefield, Barkhorn led the other two across the scissor bridge erected by the Tuscans across the northern stream, the
Rio Pelirojo
.
“You want us to follow?” the Hordalander commander had asked.
“Yes, but not yet,” Barkhorn responded calmly. “While the enemy is watching the minefield, my infantry will get an assault position for a drive into the town. You mill about and make it look like you’re going to burst through the lanes the Tuscans cut in the minefield. When I’m ready, I’ll call you. Then load up the engineer company that’s clearing the lanes and come running.”
“Wilco,” replied the Hordalander.
Legionaries Herrera and Madrigal, on observation post north of the town, were just possibly a little too junior for the decision that faced them. It would have been better for them if they’d had a radio to report to maniple headquarters about the several hundred enemy infantry practically racing through the woods toward the town. But radios were in somewhat short supply and besides, they had a field telephone. Legionary Madrigal was currently squeezing the little black rubber covered button that should have made someone on the other end answer, and so far had failed—pardon the expression—
signally.
Madrigal let the phone drop from his hand. “
Mierde
, Herrera, nothing. No motherfucking answer.”
“Shit,” agreed Herrera, “what the fuck are we going to do, Mad? What the hell happened?”
“My guess would be artillery cut the wire . . . yes, even though we buried it. Shit happens. As to what we’re going to do . . . how long you been in?”
“Two years and about a month,” Herrera answered. “Why?”
“Because that makes me senior. That means I get to cover you. You keep low but get back as fast as you can and tell the tribune that we got company, a lot of company, coming from the north.”
“Man . . . Mad . . . I can’t leave you here alone.”
“Just go before I change my mind, Herrera. This sucks enough without being reminded of how much.” Madrigal jerked a thumb rearwards. “Now GO!”
Herrera froze for a couple of seconds, no more, then, with a nod, turned and crawled out the scrape hole he’d shared with Madrigal. He crawled another fifty feet or so, at which point he was in a low draw. Instead of standing upright, the legionary got to his feet but stayed bent over. In that position, he began to trudge for the town.
Madrigal looked at his rifle with distaste. A Tauran bullpup design, captured in Balboa, he’d never so much as fired one. Supposedly the things were zeroed, but he had his doubts.
Oh, well
, he thought, moving the stock to his shoulder,
I’m probably more likely to hit with an unzeroed unfamiliar rifle than I am with a zeroed one.
He took aim at someone talking on a radio, a few hundred meters to his front—
at least the sights are simple—
then began slowly squeezing the trigger.
Oberstleutnant
Barkhorn was moving forward quickly, approximately at the juncture of the two companies he had with him. He’d already had his own battalion’s 120mm mortars cease fire, to let the tubes cool for when he’d really need them. He could hear and feel the Haarlemer artillery flying overhead and pounding the guerillas that were supposed to be keeping the minefield from being breached. He’d had a report from his intel officer, back at Cerveza, that the enemy were, in fact, moving toward the northeast and the minefield. With a little luck, he’d charge into a vacuum, and route them out of the town at a single go.
Satisfied with progress, Barkhorn turned to give the handset back to his radio bearer, when that young soldier’s head disappeared in a spray of blood, brains, and fragments of bone.
“Scheisse!”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Engage people with what they expect; it is what they are able to discern and confirms their projections. It settles them into predictable patterns of response, occupying their minds while you wait for the extraordinary moment—that which they cannot anticipate.
—Sun Tzu,
The Art of War
Pelirojo, Santa Josefina, Terra Nova
Herrera careful jaunt turned into a dead run for the town once the firing commenced behind him. Bullets sang by, knocking off bark from the trees or impacting more solidly upon them with deadened
thunks
.
Whatever Madrigal did,
Herrera thought,
it must have been something impressive to get himself that much attention. Hope he makes it; got my doubts.
Shouting the running password, past the last of the trees the legionary ran, across the open field of recently planted corn, then past the first couple of buildings and toward the school building that maniple had picked for its headquarters. Only to find . . .
“Jesus, where the fuck is everybody?” Herrera asked of the company clerk, currently bundling up some files into a cloth bag.
“They all headed east,” said the clerk. “Cohort commander’s orders. Why?”
“Why? WHY? Because the fucking Taurans are coming from the north, that’s WHY! I saw them, hundreds of them, myself.”
The clerk turned white. Reaching for a field telephone he held it towards Herrera. “Tell cohort. They won’t believe me.
Tell them!
”
Salas was watching as the cohort commander, Legate Rodriguez’s, eyes widened and his skin turned pale. The cohort commander was facing west, more or less instinctively. That was where the enemy sappers were reported to be chewing through the minefield. It was also where the bulk of his artillery was landing, albeit at a slow rate of fire. Rodriguez listened for a few moments, said, “Buy me whatever time you can,” then dropped the field phone and reached for the radio handset offered him by one of the headquarters RTOs.
Announcing himself to the mid-ranked tribune on the other end, Rodriguez announced, “The move on the minefield’s a feint. Back to your positions on the north of the town . . .” Before he could finish the sentence, from the left came a tremendous volume of musketry, punctuated by large caliber cannon fire.
Barkhorn fought down the urge to throw up as his radio bearers body sank to the earth. Kneeling down beside it, he stripped off the radio, then threaded his own left arm into the carrying strap on that side. Holding the handset to his face, even as he was putting his arm through the shoulder strap, he ordered the artillery to shift one battery to the center of the town, to keep the enemy from redeploying back to the town’s northern edge and for both batteries to, “Expend ammunition like it was water.” Then he told the Hordalander tank company commander to pick up the sappers and come running. Lastly, and by this time he had the radio under his full control, he ordered his two infantry companies, present, to, “Jink it for the town. Get me the first row or two of buildings!”
“Forget it, Rodriguez,” said Legate Salas, once the cannon fire kicked in. “They’ve suckered us out of position. This town is lost. Save your command.”
Rodriguez opened his mouth as if to argue, then closed it again. He nodded slowly, a couple of times, then agreed, “Yes, sir.”
Rodriguez hesitated. “Sir?”
“Yes, Legate?”
“You
have
to get out of here.
You
made the announcement of the revolt against the government and the Taurans. If they get you, the people . . .”
“Don’t you think I know that?”
At the southwestern most edge of the town, where a residential area jutted out from the town center, Salas raised one hand to stop his driver. Both were afoot; a moving vehicle, even if commandeered civilian and looking the part, was just too obvious.
Behind, the pair could hear the sounds of the battle raging through the town. Overhead, the Tauran Hurricanes still circled like vultures. What concerned Salas, though, was a fairly steady
wopwopwop
coming from the south, ahead.
As Salas faced, from his right a single missile, an Anglian Shooting Star—like almost all the tercio’s arms, captured in Balboa—shot up toward the circling Hurricanes. The thing was fast, but not so fast that the Tauran fliers couldn’t drop countermeasures and split up. Still, the helicopter that Salas and the driver had heard ahead of them popped up over the wood line from the stream over which it had been sheltering, then moved briskly for the location from which the missile had been launched. At this range, and with its fixed wheels brushing treetops and grass, depending, the helicopter—a Tuscan-built Z921 gunship—was safe from even the best shoulder-fired missiles.
What it was not safe from was the twin-barreled antiaircraft gun—Volgan, by way of Balboa but so common around the planet as to be essentially sterile—that opened up from off to the helicopter’s flank.
From where Salas stood, it wasn’t clear if the helicopter had taken one of the 23mm shells or if the pilot had been panicked. It didn’t make a lot of difference; the chopper dropped in altitude, smacked hard into the ground, rolled with its main rotor splintering and disintegrating, and then blew up in a great ball of black smoke and orange fire.
“Come on,” Salas ordered the RTO. “That’s our cue to run.”
Barkhorn had the Teuton’s built-in distaste for
Francs-tireurs
. Thus, the youth of the civilian clad corpses unceremoniously tossed against the wall of the school to make room for the command post moved him not a bit. Had they surrendered, he’d have shot them out of hand.
But, then, they
didn’t
try to surrender, did they
, thought the Sachsen.
That would be a concern if they were riflemen, but one of them was obviously a clerk of some kind. When clerks fight to the death, it’s time to start worrying.
He spared a moment to examine the rifles the two guerillas had been wielding.
Gallic,
he thought.
Captured, I have no doubt, in Balboa not so very long ago. Ammunition is compatible with ours, so we won’t be able to afford losing an engagement or, if we do, we’ll be supplying our enemy.
A tank parked next to the building thundered, the muzzle blast making Barkhorn wince. He’d already received some complaints over the radio that the Hordalanders were endangering his own men. It might be time to rein them in before somebody got hurt.
The only thing one can be sure of hitting when there’s a friendly fire incident,
thought Barkhorn,
is the front page of the
Altstadter Allgemeine Zeitung.
The treasonous swine.
Barkhorn’s operations officer leaned against a desk. He had a radio handset tucked in between his ear and his shoulder. With his left hand he held a map, while annotating the map with an alcohol pen with his right. Barkhorn took a few steps and looked over the major’s shoulder at the map.
Yes, well go figure that they’d be running away to the south; it’s the only route open.
With his own radio, Barkhorn summoned up the Tuscan aviation battalion, the gunships of which were attached to his command. Whoever answered didn’t sound familiar and either didn’t speak German or didn’t want to.
“Anyone here speak Italian?” asked Barkhorn. Unfortunately, no one in the tiny headquarters seemed to.
“Nearest translator is with the sappers, sir” said the operations officer. “Want me to try to work through him.”
“Never mind,” said Barkhorn. “Do what you’re doing. I’ll get the translator with the sappers.”
That took some time. The translator with the sappers had all the pertinent codes and frequency hopping patterns, of course. What he didn’t have was them set on his own radio.
“The German speaker with the gunships,” so the translator told Barkhorn, “went down. Baited ambush they say. They strongly recommend not using them without some better way to communicate so they don’t lose any more. Sir, my recommendation would be don’t push it.”
Man, I fucking
detest
coalition warfare.
“Right,” Barkhorn agreed, though the tone of his voice said he most certainly did
not
agree. “Will the fuckers take a position along the Pelirojo River, facing west, and prevent anyone from escaping?”
After a few moments, the translator came back, answering, “Yes, sir, they’ll do that, but it won’t do much good.”
“Why is that?”
“They say some of the guerillas running away are leaving their arms behind—”
“Yeah, that’s the truth,” Barkhorn again agreed.
“They say they can’t tell the difference between a guerilla and an unarmed civilian and they don’t want to be tried for murder if they—”
“Just stop there,” said Barkhorn. “I know the rest of this fairy tale.”
Barkhorn’s operations officer piped in. “It’s true though, sir. Tuscany’s signed the most restrictive provisions of the Kosmo”—cosmopolitan progressive—“treaty regime. We’ve got it tough but they are unbelievably tied up.”
“Fuck!”
“Fuck or fucked,” said Operations, “but speaking of the latter, maybe we should lay off and let them go, sir.”
Barkhorn’s glare was withering, but his operations officer was loyal enough even to go against his commander. “I’m serious, sir. If there are any civilians mixed in, or anybody the press can claim were civilians, and we kill any of them, the press back home will crucify you. And, for all General Marciano’s as good a commander as can be found anywhere in the Tauran Union, he can’t protect you. He’s a Tuscan and you, and maybe me, too, will not be tried by Tuscany. No, sir; we will be dragged back to Sachsen for our court-martials.”
“Shit!” exclaimed Barkhorn. “Oh, all fucking right. Get me the artillery.”
South of Pelirojo, Santa Josefina, Terra Nova
Legate Salas really didn’t understand it. Indeed, he’d been halfway to safety before he even noticed it. But the enemy weren’t pursuing, not even by fire, not even with aircraft.
How fucking stupid can they be? Have they never heard of the tenth principle of war, annihilation. If they let us go, we’ll be back.
He thought about that first question and, being a fundamentally fair man, had to concede,
Oh, all
right;
not so stupid that they didn’t run me and mine right out of town. And maybe they never did hear of the tenth principle. Or maybe they just aren’t allowed to follow it. I confess, I don’t understand it but the Taurans are, by all reports, quite odd when it comes to their militaries.
Salas and his driver had found it easier walking in the trees that abounded on both sides of the narrow, swift flowing, south running river. To both sides he saw ragged knots of his own men, dejected with defeat, slinking away with heads sunk on chests.
Going to be tough to buck the boys up from this one, or at least to restore moral in this cohort. Going to take some thought, and some very careful treading.
To Salas’s left there was a brace of twin 23mm guns, with their crews looking determined as they scanned for Tauran aircraft in range. One of these was certainly the same crew that had taken down the helicopter gunship.
On the other hand, for some it won’t be hard at all.
Of course, while the big problem is morale and confidence, those are the only problems. We put a lot of mines into the defense of Pelirojo. Those are lost to us now. And, while I have more, I don’t have huge numbers. I need to get an organization set up for making mines.
I’ve lost weapons, too, and ammunition. Not least the irreplaceable heavy mortars. I could try to get some dragged in from Balboa, or maybe sailed in.
I’ve got more small arms, mostly cached in the jungle. But those were for expansion, once we had enough prestige to recruit reliably. We’ve lost a
lot
of prestige, and we weren’t starting with all that much.
And, while it’s not as bad as the loss of what little prestige we had, we lost position. With Pelirojo in Tauran hands, they can seal off that flank with one battalion, rather than the two they’d have needed with us holding it. That means they’re still too strong for the
Tercio la Virgen
to cross over.
It could be worse, I guess, but I’m not sure how.
Pelirojo, Santa Josefina, Terra Nova
Could be worse,
thought Barkhorn, sipping a not too very cold beer in the smoking ruins on Pelirojo.
I’m not sure how it could be worse, but my ops officer insists it could.
The town still smoked in odd places. They’d managed to collect most of the bodies for decent burial, too. Unfortunately, the press had shown up before they could be buried. Between the smashed houses, the scorched public buildings, the bodies, and the civilian clothes on the bodies, the press quickly became convinced that a massacre had taken place. That Tauran casualties had been so low, under thirty dead, only added to that conviction.
It hadn’t helped any that—go figure—some genuine civilians had been caught up in the fighting. What really made it awful, though, was when some of the Tuscans sappers and Sachsen infantry had been caught by the press planting firearms on the civilians.
For now, Barkhorn was still in command, despite all the whining from the press for his relief and court-martial. When asked how he expected it to go, the battalion commander had answered, perhaps optimistically, “Fifty: fifty. No better than that.”
And then trying to explain to the idiot press that, “No, almost all the rifles captured were Gallic. We are Sachsens, Hordalanders, and Tuscans, and we use different rifles. Moreover, the serial number of every rifle we’ve captured can be traced to those lost in Balboa, during the recent unpleasantness there.”
And no, you moronic twats, we didn’t put the—oh, ever so naughtyevilbadwickedbadbadbad landmines out—
they
did.
Barkhorn didn’t even try to explain that one to the pressies, any more than he bothered to correct them when they included the wrecked medical ambulance, basically an armored personnel carrier, a “tank,” in order to drive up the losses they could report. What, after all, would have been the use?