The Rods and the Axe - eARC (3 page)

CHAPTER ONE

Strike at the enemy with humane treatment as effectively as with weapons.

—Alexander Suvarov

The Tunnel, Cerro Mina, Balboa, Terra Nova

There was still a smell of rifle smoke in the air, and broad bands of color in the skies. The latter came from buildings still burning in the city. Past the smoke and fire-lit, scattered clouds, the moon Hecate was in the constellation of the Leaping Maiden. With barely a glance at the familiar sight, Fernandez rolled his wheelchair through the widely agape, badly perforated steel doors leading down into the tunnel. Even with the power up again, and clean cooled air flowing, the place still reeked of smoke and, especially, of burnt human flesh. Still, there was hope that the fire had not penetrated the steel files and safes. Of course, that hope dimmed slightly as teams recovered the crisped bodies and brought them topside, to lay them out alongside the hundreds of other bodies atop this fortified hill overlooking
Ciudad
Balboa.

Fernandez’s hope was dashed as one of his assistants pulled open a sliding file draw, revealing to him a mass of thermite-crisped ruin.

“They’re all like this, Legate,” said the underling. “Here and at Building Fifty-nine. Whatever else the Taurans fucked up, they made sure to burn their intel files and especially the files of their spies in our forces and country. We can’t even tell which files are what, to see how big their organization was.”

“Fuck,” muttered Fernandez. He’d always had a few double agents and the mistress of the Tauran commander on his payroll, plus a couple of Tauran Union troops who were sympathetic to the Timocracy. And his organization had identified perhaps a score or so of spies.

The problem, though, is that I know about maybe twenty, who are being rounded up even as I sit here, but I suspect hundreds. Damn, I needed those files. I can calculate to my heart’s content, but it’s all bullshit without something concrete to work with. And the fucking Taurans are good at this sort of thing; none of the people I know about are going to have a clue about any of the others. Shit! And I still haven’t been able to get someone convincingly on the crew of Rocaberti, up in the Federated States. Paranoid motherfuckers.

“Could be worse, Legate,” the underling reminded. “We got their payrolls, after all, and the counterfeits are ready.

Cristobal, Balboa, Terra Nova

It was a simple calculation really. Carrera needed X-many days to finish his preparations. There were Y-many Tauran prisoners to return. There were only Z-many Carrera was willing to return, which was a number much less than Y. Parilla had promised the return of one hundred per day. Z over X, however, was less than one hundred per day. Even stretching it out by including Tauran noncombatants wasn’t quite going to equal one hundred times the days needed.

“So fuck ’em,” said Patricio Carrera, watching as the crew of an Anglian-flagged container ship, fitted out as a hospital ship, loaded the fifty-seven badly wounded Tauran POWs. The hospital ship claimed to be, and possibly even was, owned and run by a humanitarian nongovernmental organization. In the Tauran Union, however, what appeared to be and was billed as non-governmental was often anything but.

“We’ll give them however many we feel like,” Carrera continued, “in order to stretch out the truce. And no more. Besides, we’re just incompetent jungle rats, incapable of keeping to a schedule.” He closed by repeating, “Fuck ’em.”

The Anglian humanitarians doing the loading were enough that they didn’t need any help from the legion. This was to the good as Carrera’s troops, plus the numerous civilians who worked the port, were fully engaged on either side of the container ship unloading four Balboan-owned freighters that had docked in the last three days, bringing in over a hundred thousand tons of war materials between them.

Another nineteen ships were docked at the port of Balboa, disgorging the first of an eventual half million tons—food, assemblies, fuel, building material, ammunition, personal items, major end items, medical supplies, replacement parts . . . basically everything needed for an army of four hundred thousand to fight a major war. Still other ships were being unloaded at other, smaller ports in the coastal interior of the country. One biggie and a couple of coasters were unloading their cargoes by the
Isla Real
. A couple of smallish ships, no more than five thousand tons displacement, sat idly by, doing nothing but spurring commentary.

Not that the Balboans paid no attention to the prisoners they were returning. Rather, legion medical personnel sufficient to provide care for the fifty-seven stayed with them right until the moment that the Taurans signed for them. The Tauran skipper, on the other hand, had orders to pick up one hundred. Infuriated at being shortchanged, he stormed up to Carrera demanding the rest.

“Fuck you,” Carrera had replied, genially, setting the captain to sputtering, impotent fury. “You’re in no position to make demands. You get what’s here. If you annoy me, tomorrow there may be even fewer or none. Explain that to the bureaucratic swine you report to.”

“It’s not right to use wounded men like this, like bargaining chips,” the Anglian insisted.

“It’s not right to attack a country without a declaration of war, in the middle of the night,” Carrera countered.

“Two wrongs don’t make a right,” the Anglian quoted.

“Who’s interested in making a right” Carrera sneered. “I’m just telling you to fuck off and quit bothering me, and stop your silly moral preening, or I won’t give you back anybody.”

I am, in any case, not giving you back a single uncrippled infantryman, artilleryman, engineer, or tanker. Nor are you getting back too many intelligence shits, lest they have seen and then reveal something I don’t want revealed. Of course, I will give you back a couple who have seen things Fernandez has arranged for them to see.

The weasel-faced Omar Fernandez was Carrera’s intelligence chief, which meant he was also responsible for the propagation of certain disinformation. Though bound to a wheelchair by a would-be assassin’s bullet, there remained nothing wrong with his brain. He was also amazingly ruthless, even more so than his boss.

Parilla Line, South of
Ciudad
Balboa

and south of the
Rio Gatun
, Balboa, Terra Nova

Eighty-odd Tauran POWs, under the command of their own, swung picks and shovels, or held open sandbags for the latter, in a broad ditch now approaching half a dozen feet deep, just north of a thin wire fence, itself north of a thick belt of concertina. The space between the two was alleged to be mined. None of the laboring POWs doubted that enough to test the theory. There were two other groups of POWs engaged in the same work.

Though under their own command, the Taurans were guarded by Balboan legionaries in their own pixelated jungle striped uniforms and bearing the legion’s own battle rifle. The Taurans had been allowed to keep their national uniforms, of which there were at least half a dozen on display in this group, alone.

Though it was still being worked on, the main line had been built years before. Centrally located, it sheltered behind the swift flowing, steep banked river that fed the two lakes that fed the Transitway. To all appearances, it was oriented toward the north, with a presumption of an invasion from that direction having either taken or bypassed the capital of
Ciudad
Balboa. An invader coming from that direction would have run, first, into the stream. Moving farther south, presupposing he managed to cross that, there were some thick wire obstacles, currently being made thicker, broad, high density minefields, and several layers of mutually supporting bunkers connected by tunnel and trench. Behind these came the
Cordillera
Central, the mountain range that ran like a spine down the length of Balboa’s quarter-rotated S-shape. This had been partially hollowed out and tunneled through.

On the other slope, the reverse slope, there were a few positions and some entrenching to guard against an attack, probably airmobile, from the rear. From those bunkers and trenches still more trenches ran down to twenty-three very large, very solid bunkers, mostly of the cut and cover variety. Except for the degree to which man and nature had conspired to hide them, that, and the enormous size, they resembled nothing so much as Sachsen Christmas cakes, or
Stollen
, much as the
Legio del Cid
had used in a Sumeri valley between Multichucha Ridge and Hill 1647, over a decade before.

From the trees, older and newer, that covered the Parilla Line hung a fantastic number of metalicized strips. Some strips were older and, torn and tarnished, looked it. Others were brand new. Most were somewhere in between.

“What the hell are those things?” asked Anglian captain Jan Campbell, of her chief NCO, Cimbrian Army Sergeant Major Kris Hendryksen. She was pointing with her finger at something down in the ditch. Her nose and chin pointed elsewhere.

She, heart-faced, blue eyed, short, shapely—extravagantly shapely, as a matter of fact—and blond, was a late entry captain in the Anglian Army, once seconded to the Tauran Union Security Force-Balboa, which force was now extinct, prisoners where not dead. He, larger, of course, was a Viking, now letting his face go to beard. He was also, though some miracle of slave-capturing genetics on another planet entirely, tanning much better than she was, or indeed, than any of them but the couple of Tuscans in the group.

She and Hendryksen were lucky to be alive, having just managed to get away from the old Tauran headquarters at
Cerro Mina
before the Balboans troops had taken it. Ordinarily, they could just have surrendered. Hendryksen, being male had figured out that was a bad idea, after the wounding and deaths of hundreds of Balboan female infantry on the hill’s northern slope and the broad boulevard beyond. To Campbell, being female, it had simply not occurred that normal male soldiers would take any exceptionally dim view of the killing of female combatants. Hendryksen had understood his own sex better than she had. Plunging into an orgy of massacre and mutilation in revenge for the losses to
Tercio Amazona
, the legion’s females-only infantry regiment, the legionaries had left hardly anything alive atop the hill, and burned alive or suffocated those who’d sheltered in the underground complex beneath it.

The metalicized strips lay on the ground as well. Hendryksen picked one up and, after checking the ends to make sure it was a whole strip, measured it by eye. He then checked another, determining that it was precisely half the length of the first.

“My guess,” he said, “and it’s only a guess, though an educated one, is that these are designed to screw with ground penetrating radar. Maybe also the global locating system, but I don’t know enough about that. That they’re a deliberate defensive measure, though, seems certain.”

“Do the Balboans
do
anything that is not a ‘deliberate defensive measure’?” Campbell asked, pointing with her nose at the menacing firing ports of the bunkers nearby and running up the slope. So far as she could tell, the bunkers were at least mostly empty, their nominal occupants currently guarding the detail of eighty or so Tauran POWs, digging a ha-ha under Campbell’s command.

“They have us digging this ha-ha to keep the animals out of the minefields,” Hendryksen said. “Naturally, that is its only purpose. It wouldn’t do as an antitank ditch, or we would not be digging it, since we are not to be used in aiding the enemy’s war effort.”

Campbell shot him a dirty look. “You mean it’s a ha-ha on the surface, so they don’t feel compelled to shoot us for refusal to work on an antitank ditch?”

“See, that’s why you’re an officer and I’m just a—”

“Can it, Kris.”

Smiling, satisfied with the jab, the sergeant major shut up. In the silence, Campbell continued studying what she could see of the defensive line.

“Formidable enough,” was her judgment, a judgment in which Hendryksen largely concurred.

“Hard to flank, too,” he said, “being anchored on the lake, I imagine, at one end and probably with a refused flank off in the jungle somewhere, at the other.”

“Take it from behind?” she asked.

“Maybe, if in force, especially on the ground. I wouldn’t count on the chances of an airmobile assault doing the job; the Balboans appear to be pretty much death on people who try to get fancy with them.”

“They’re not above getting ‘fancy’ themselves,” she observed.

“True,” Hendryksen agreed, “but they’ve definite limits.”

“Why this?” Campbell asked. “When their major enemy, us, was bound to come from the Shimmering Sea side, why have this line facing the
Mar Furioso
?”

“It’s still just an educated guess,” he answered, “but my guess is port capacity.”

“Huh?”

“There’s essentially no way that an invasion coming from the Shimmering Sea side can get to the capital city until the port of Cristobal falls. Though they haven’t let us see it, I’d bet a month’s pay against yours that Cristobal can also be turned into a fortress, or is being turned into one, in short order. Thus, there
is
no real threat from the south. They think.”

“We’re no logistic slouches, ourselves,” she said, “even if we won’t commit the resources to it the Federated States will.”

“Right,” he agreed. “We probably could isolate Cristobal and supply over the shore a large enough force to besiege that city and take this line from behind. But I don’t think they know that.”

Jan was skeptical. “Why not?” she asked.

“Because Carrera’s not a Marine nor, so far as we’ve ever been able to determine, has he ever done any major Logistics Over The Shore work.”

“Oh.” Though she was loathe to admit it, Jan had never done any LOTS work either.

“Wouldn’t have to be just LOTS,” said a nearby, tall and beefy, ruddy-faced Sachsen in a pause for breath between lifting shovelfuls of dirt to a sandbag. “There’s a good port at
Puerto Lindo
, and one almost as good at Nicuesa to the west. Can’t really use that last one, though.”

“Why not,” Hendryksen asked.