The Rods and the Axe - eARC (6 page)

CHAPTER THREE

“Good is better than evil because it’s nicer.”

—Mammy Yokum, in Al Capp’s
Lil Abner

Quarters Twenty, Fort Guerrero, Balboa, Terra Nova

The woman sat on the back porch to her quarters, staring out across the water to the space between barracks that showed the docks of the port of Balboa. She’d been here on the porch many times, yet never had she seen anything like the swirl of activity she had been seeing for the last couple of weeks.

At least my Mike’s alive,
thought Judy Tipton, living now under a kind of loose house arrest here in the former Tauran Union housing area on post, now designated as a guarded holding area for the families of prisoners of war and families of the dead. There had been a lot of dead, though rather less, as a percentage, for the regular Tauran forces in the Transitway Area than for the poor Anglian and Gallic paras who’d jumped en masse into the briar patches of
Lago Sombrero
and Herrera International.

She had to share her house now with another family, but since that consisted of one young lieutenant’s widow and her three-year-old child, Judy thought she could put up with it.
Poor thing
, she thought of young Mrs. Lydia Gordon.
And, if she cries a lot? Well, I’d cry, too.

Even there, the Balboans had tried to be civil about it. “We can only guard so many places,” said the elderly warrant officer who’d come with the widow. “So we have to cram you all into where we can guard.” He’d added, “It won’t be long. As a widow, she’s going to have priority for a flight out.”

“It’ll be fine,” Judy had insisted, taking young Lydia under wing, more or less literally, and leading her to the spare bedroom. The warrant had carried in the woman’s two bags and left them just inside the door.

It had been a couple of weeks since then and—however charitably inclined and sympathetic Judy may have been—Lydia’s crying had started to wear.
But then, so have those Gallic tarts singing the
“Internationale”
under Balboan supervision.

Then the Balboans had come and taken the widow to her old quarters to supervise packing up of her household baggage. When she returned, it was with travel orders cut by the legion’s own travel section. The orders only took her as far as Asseri, Santa Josefina, though. From there, she’d be the responsibility of the Tauran Union.

Decent of them, though
, thought Judy,
more decent by far than just putting us in tents behind barbed wire and feeding us gruel for however long it takes for things to resolve themselves.
She’d been around the Anglian Army enough to have heard that that was normal procedure in cases like this.

One of the chaplains occasionally came by, too, to check on them. This Judy found more than a little embarrassing, as the very same chaplain had once caught her in the middle of her living room, stark naked and shocked speechless, as a Balboan gun battery in the parade field lit up the night.
Oh, will I ever live that down?

A knock from the stairs leading to to the porch caught her attention. The knock was followed by, “
Señora
Tiptón?” It was one of the guards. He hadn’t quite gotten English pronunciation down yet, and might never.

“Yes, Legionary?” she asked.

“The car to take you and Mrs. Gordon to the
comisariata
is here,” said the guard. “Comisariata” was not, strictly speaking, the right word, but it had entered Balboan currency a century prior and never quite been superseded.

“It’s around the other side of the house.”

“Ah. Thank you, Legionary. I’ll get Lydia and be right out.”

And that was another point of decency,
she thought,
the Balboans giving us a credit—a limited credit, to be sure, but still a
credit—to allow us to shop at the commissary. Of course, that means it’s easier on them because they can feed us through our own efforts with food seized when they took the Transitway area, but even so . . .

At the very least, when I do get home and someone asks me how we were treated, I’ll have to tell them, “Very well, indeed.”

MV
Roger Casement
(Hibernian Registry),

Port of Cristobal, Balboa, Terra Nova

The forty-foot container hung suspended by one of the ship’s two cranes, a few dozen feet above its red painted hull. The container swayed in the light tropical breeze coming off the Shimmering Sea to the south. About a hundred containers had already been loaded, and three hundred and twelve more were visible not far away, awaiting their turn.

It was a truism that no one really knew who owned any given merchant vessel. Between leases, lease backs, shadow corporations, dummy corporations, registrations under flags of convenience, and any of a hundred other tricks, merchant ships were essentially orphaned prostitutes. In the case of the
Roger Casement
, the owner was the Senate of Balboa, though even
years
of investigation was unlikely to prove that.

The
Roger Casement
had come in, bearing little but food and medical supplies, plus some building—which was to say, fortification—material. Its cargo discharged, orders had come from the corporation which at first glance might be said to own it, to pick up a load of Balboan fruit and coffee and deliver it to Jagelonia and Hordaland. The fruit, duly placed in refrigerated containers, was to be loaded where power could be supplied to those, for the most part aft of the ship’s superstructure. The coffee was rather hardier, and would go aboard in normal containers.

All that was to go in later, though. The first cargo needed to go in first and low, where inspection would prove difficult.

If there was anything Balboa was not short of, in the current circumstances, it was weapons and ammunition of Tauran manufacture. The legion had, at last count, twenty-six thousand, four hundred and nineteen rifles of various types, from the Anglians’ wretched things to the Gauls’ and Sachsens’ rather better ones. There were three thousand forty-eight light and general purpose machine guns, along with twelve hundred and fifty-three heavy machine guns of Federated States design. To go along with those were something on the order of fifty million rounds of ammunition. At least, that much had been inventoried so far. The process of inventory was still ongoing.

Additionally, there were one hundred and forty-one light mortars, as well as ninety-four mediums and seventeen serviceable heavies. Some others, adjudged unserviceable, were in the shop for evaluation and possible repair. For these, the legion had a bit over one hundred thousand rounds of ammunition of various types.

Of anti-tank weapons, both guided and unguided, light throwaways and heavier crew served, there were thousands. They were still coming in from wherever Tauran troops had lost them. Radios there were in plenty, along with night vision devices, as well as plentiful batteries for both. Antivehicular mines, grenades, shoulder fired antiaircraft missiles?
We gots.
Signal devices and booby traps.
We gots.
Medical equipment and supplies?
We gots.

Some of this largesse was currently being issued to the
Tercio Amazona
and some of the troops from the Fourteenth Cazador
Tercio
.
Some was going to the Fifth Mountain and its Lempiran and Valdivian attachments, though they were mostly holding the materiel for others. A small portion was put aside for trophies for the various regiments. Some was intended for Taurus, for the Islamic groups created by, among others, Khalid the Assassin.

But roughly a third, by tonnage, was right here on the docks, intended for Santa Josefina as soon as the
Casement
had made its delivery of fruit and coffee and could turn around.

Interestingly, a small mule train, only forty-seven mules and a bell mare, carring not more than eleven tons, in total, set off from the Balboan port of Capitano, on the Shimmering Sea near the Santa Josefinan border, at about the same time the
Casement
left Cristobal for Taurus.

Off the
Isla Real,
to the southeast, North of
Ciudad
Balboa

Ahead, a small boat, not much bigger than a largish yacht, and not nearly as fancy, reeled off two cables, one port, one starboard. The cables sported hydrophones. Translated from the Cyrillic, the cases from which the cables were drawn were labeled, “Archangel.”

Behind the cable layer, and offset a few hundred meters, a coasting freighter slid a large cylinder, steel-cased, explosive-filled, hence quite heavy, down a ramp erected to its stern. The mine rumbled down the ramp, dropped free, then hit the water, raising a great splash above the choppy waves.

The mid-sized coasting freighter was one of a pair. The cable layers were likewise matched. Both pairs were formed into two others, consisting of a cable layer and mine layer, each. Operating on opposite sides of the
Isla Real
, one mixed pair couldn’t see the other. Neither could it be seen by the other. However, both were visible from much of the large massif, Hill 287, that dominated the island.

Anyone looking from that hill through a fair pair of binoculars would have seen the stern of the coaster, bearing the name,
Thetis
, as it made its way on a perfectly straight course toward Punta
Gorgona, which course would take it just north of
Isla
Tatalao. They’d also have seen the mines rolling down the ramp into the sea. Were the binoculars good, they’d also have been able to see that the mines were of mixed types, that along with the cylinders were some equally large egg-shaped containers on wheeled cradles. The observer could have made out the rolling mines, as well as the splashes, but probably would have missed the reserve naval officer recording the grid where any given mine was released and the white cord that actually armed the mine, or, rather, began its timed arming sequence, once it was underwater and the
Thetis
reasonably out of the way. The cords were reused, once they’d pulled the safety out of the mines and been hauled in.

Recording the mine was possibly an exercise in near futility, since they almost never came to rest in a perfectly predictable way. Moreover, the Balboans were also dumping over the side some wedge-shaped gliding mines that could be guaranteed
not
to come to rest too very near the ship’s path. Indeed, those gliders would end up roughly twice the distance from the ship as the depth of the water. The gliders were also on a long arming delay, a full week, to ensure that the job would be complete before they went active.

That said, it wasn’t completely random; the ship’s sonar scanned ahead and the mine chosen for dropping was selected based on the depth and nature of the spot ahead. Enough ready mines were held on deck to allow the crews to efficiently select the one to be used.

To add confusion to anyone trying to clear the mines, a mechanical device tossed false mines—mere flat plates—to port and starboard, even as a crane heaved some simulacra over the side.

The mines were of several types. Most of these were Volgan though Balboa had been able to get a small number of more sophisticated mines, some of which it had copied in slightly larger numbers. There was also a respectably large number of somewhat inferior Valdivian-made copies of an Anglo-Tuscan mine. The original was a device of great discretion and power. Even the copy was rather capable.

The most common mine laid was a fairly simple cylinder, filled with some six hundred kilograms of tritonal, and set off by magnetic signature, acoustic signature, or by water displacement. The mines weren’t sophisticated enough to permit any combination of targeting parameters; the crews had to pick a fuse for one method and attach it just before rolling it down the ramp.

Less common were several versions of Volgan rising mines. These were generally placed deeper and, on receipt of sufficient signature, would begin to rise to the surface. This allowed the mines to be placed on the bottom, where they were hard to detect, hence hard to clear, and move closer to a target upon detection. That they were especially effective against submarines was an additional benefit.

Least common of the Volgan mines was the type once known on Old Earth as CAPTORs. In essence these were torpedoes, mated to sensor suites, that selected targets based on certain criteria and engaged them as if the mine were a submarine. The major difference between the Volgan torpedo mines and those of the Tauran Union and Federated States was that the Volgan versions could not self-emplace from a distance as some of the others’ could. Neither was really ideal for use against surface ships, being small with small warheads. They were best used against subs.

The Balboans were not being terribly sophisticated about all this. Instead, they were just putting down a
lot
of mines, enough mines to ensure that no channel could be cleared through them quickly. Still, since the
Isla Real
,
Isla
San Juan,
Isla
Santa Paloma, Punta Gorgona,
Isla
Tatalao, and the town of Chimaneca contained extensive direct and indirect fire capability, to say nothing of fixed torpedo launchers for some of them, clearing a path was likely to prove prohibitively costly until at least the main island was cleared. Then, too, the mix of mine types and the mix in their fusing made the mine barrage somewhat self-defending.

Nor was the intent to simply seal off the northern approaches to the Transitway. Balboa’s life blood was trade and transportation. Cutting off the Transitway completely would be economic death. Instead, they were ensuring that the heavily defended
Isla Real
and its largish near neighbors couldn’t be bypassed, hence that no invasion of the coast by the capital could succeed until the islands were taken. They were leaving unmined two gaps almost a kilometer wide to the main island’s east and west. Thus, at their discretion, ships and trade could continue to flow until the legion elected to shut them down.

Three men stood on the northern slope of Hill 287, not far from the ground-laid portion of the chimney for the archipelago’s solar power system. These were Carrera and Fosa, the chief of the naval arm, plus Legate Rigoberto Puercel, the chief of the corps responsible for the defense of Balboa’s northern coast. Puercel commanded the Fifth Corps, built around the Eighth Training Legion, now the Eighth Infantry Legion, the School Brigade, and certain other units, some of which had been part of the “hidden reserve” but most of which were simply normal organizations, the members of which wore second hats. The Fifth Corps consisted of that same Eighth Infantry Legion, Eleventh Infantry Legion, which was newly constituted from preexisting tercios and allies come to help, Twelfth Coastal Defense Artillery Brigade, Twenty-fifth Combat Support Brigade, plus sundry other specialist and support organizations.