Come and Take Them-eARC (43 page)

Chapter Forty-one

Strike ’til the last armed foe expires.

Strike for your altars and your spires.

Strike for the green graves of your sires,

God, and your native land.

—Fitz-Green Halleck, “Marco Bozzaris”

Alfaro’s Tomb Gates (back gates), Brookings Air Force Station/Fort Muddville, Balboa Transitway Area, Balboa, Terra Nova

NDI had only taken over security for the site where the Tauran women had been tortured and killed scant hours before. Even then, it had been a couple more hours before authorization was granted to release the troops that had been guarding it.

Exhausted from searching and guarding, as well as from the perennial worrying that was a signifer’s lot, young Boyd let the
thrum
of the bus’s engine and the steady droning of the wheel lull him to sleep on the drive back from the warehouse. The driver’s instructions were to take the men to a point in
Ciudad
Balboa from which the troops could easily walk to their homes.

For all that he was bone weary, the signifer slept uneasily in the front seat of the bus. His mind, asleep though he was, noted his body being pushed to the right, and automatically adjusted for it, as the bus made a sharp left-hand turn to avoid going through either of the checkpoints the Taurans had at the rear of the two installations. Boyd came half-awake when he heard a shout, in French-accented Spanish, for the bus to halt.

Looking out the front window, Boyd saw a machine gun armed vehicle—a Sochaux S4—blocking the road. The driver pulled a lever to open the door as the signifer arose to his feet. Then Boyd went for the door, intending to go outside and explain. Surely the Tauran would appreciate that this was the unit that had found so much evidence concerning the murder of the Tauran women. As he descended to the ground, Boyd heard, though did not so much understand, a shout of alarm from the half dozen Tauran soldiers he could see. Surprised, he gripped his submachine gun more tightly and turned toward the shout. It was with greater surprise that Boyd saw bright yellow blossoms blooming from the muzzle of the Tauran machine gun. His surprise was short lived, however, since the gun was pointing directly at him.

From the west side of the bus a platoon’s worth of rifles and machine guns, hidden in the jungle that bordered the road, began to riddle it from one end to the other. Balboans caught dozing died with spasmodic jerks without ever understanding what was happening to them. A few—brave souls or determined—tried to shoot back. They were quickly silenced.

Finally, a burst of fire with at least one tracer punctured the gasoline tank. Flames began rising through the floor. Even unwounded Balboans began to scream as the flames found them.

Still the Tauran fire continued. In action already and with a deadlier action fast approaching, the Taurans were far too keyed up to cease fire, except to change magazines. Finally, with flames from the bus beginning to rise dangerously, the Taurans withdrew a short distance to a safe position. The footsteps were followed for several minutes by a lone Balboan’s screaming. The cries didn’t stop until the bus blew up.

The Tunnel,
Cerro Mina,
Balboa Transitway Area, Balboa Terra Nova

De Villepin swore as the report of the “fight” at Brooking’s back gate came in over the radio. Then, thinking how little good a mere fifteen minutes’ warning was likely to do the legion, he relaxed, shrugging the incident off as a mere matter of timing.

* * *

In the Operations Room, in an even deeper part of the Tunnel under the hill, the chief of staff paced nervously from wall to wall. While he paced, staff officers and noncoms posted the latest reports of the troop movements that were expected to catch the legion largely unmobilized and unprepared for the invasion. Radios crackled with reports of helicopter lifts taking off, flights of medium and heavy cargo aircraft reaching checkpoints in the air or landing at Tauran Union controlled air fields, armored vehicle convoys reaching their release points and lines of departure. At this point in the Tauran Union’s invasion of Balboa the chief had little to do but fret. The intricate planning had been done months and years before. Every known legionary mobilization point and headquarters had been assigned a force adequate to either overrun it or, at least, keep it from mobilizing before an adequate force could descend to take it out. The chief of staff, Moncey, stopped pacing from time to time to look over the chart that tracked the movement of troops to their assault positions. Of the ninety-seven legionary targets listed for action by Tauran forces at H Hour, each a distinct operation in the plan, virtually all were moving on schedule. None were off schedule by more than a few minutes.

The chief strode to the main operations map and asked to be briefed.

“Sir,” said the watch officer, a rather bored seeming Sachsen
Oberst
, “the friendly situation is as follows: the fighters are about two minutes out from their main targets at
Lago Sombrero
and Herrera Airport. Those are eight sorties each of fighter-attack aircraft plus the usual support. Other, smaller, packages are aimed at the following legionary dispersal sites.” The
Oberst
’s pointer tapped a number of locations about the large, horizontally laid, map.

“The Anglian Paras are in the air less than eighty kilometers miles from
Lago Sombrero,
south of it. The Gallic Parachute brigade is closing on Herrera, also from the south. The Sachsen Panzer Battalion is moving up the InterColumbian highway toward
Nuevo
Arraijan. They should reach the town in about twelve or fourteen minutes. They’ll cross the border in two. The highway into Cristobal has already been cut. The Four Hundred and Tenth Infantry and Four Hundred Seventeenth are in their positions to take out the Castilian Battalion plus the legionary tercios at Fort Melia and Lone Palm. The jungle school is guarding the locks and dam on the Shimmering Sea side already. The Four Twentieth Dragoon, plus one company of Sachsen Panzers, are in their assembly areas ready to roll down on the legion’s Second Corps headquarters. The Thirty-fifth Commandos are already seventy percent on the ground around Fort Guerrero and their other jump off points…”

The Sachsen continued for some time in that vein. Eventually, the chief was satisfied. From the operations room, he strode to the C-1/C-4 sections—Combined Admin and Combined Logistics. From the latter’s charts, all supply categories looked adequate.

The J-1’s wall charts held the chief’s eyes for some time, especially the anticipated casualty chart. To the chief, four hundred and seventy-five to five hundred and fifty dead—most of whom were going to be Gauls—seemed a very high price to pay.

Balboa Railroad,
Isla Repressa,
Balboa, Terra Nova

Railroads,
Pililak discovered,
have their crossbeams set the distance apart they are not for any reasons of strength, or economy, or anything remotely like that. Oh, no; they’re set the distance apart they are because that distance is shrewdly calculated to make it as painful as possible for a human being to walk on them. Bastards. No good rotten motherfuckers. Stinking shits. Why, why, WHY did you old time railroad builders have to make the things just
that
far apart? They make
everything
hurt. You didn’t even know me; why did you hate me already?

The rain that had been beating down on the girl let up momentarily. She didn’t expect the respite to last, of course. In the last few days since crossing the water and nearly being killed she’d seen more rain that she had in her entire
life
back home in Pashtia.

How do the people here stand it?
she wondered.
That and the heat…always the heat…always the rain…they must be very fierce. But of course they are or my lord would not have chosen one of them to be his mother.

And what’s more…

The girl stopped her wretchedly uncomfortable walking on the hateful tracks. There was something, a motor sound, off to her left, in the water, where it ought not be. And it was more than one. She concentrated hard to separate out the motor sounds and finally decided,
Four of them. Big. Powerful. But not straining hard…at least as far as I can tell.

She was almost at the point where the train tracks left the edge of the island. She didn’t know if the boats—
They must be boats
—could pass under the tracks. If not, they were going to land on her island and probably capture her.
That wicked, evil tyrant whom my lord calls “Father.” Even here he sends his hounds to pursue me and keep me from my duty. I must hide. Maybe they’ll miss me.

Trawler
Pericles
,
Puerto de
Balboa, Terra Nova

TUSF-B made a habit of changing the frequency hopping codes of its radios precisely at midnight. Being an orderly people, much given to routine, this day was to be no different. In truth, the Taurans had much reason on their side. Every change to radio frequencies or codes meant a period of confusion and delay while every station—and TUSF-B as a whole had literally thousands of stations—reestablished contact with its higher headquarters and supporting units. Had it not been for a persistent nagging feeling that the legion just
might
have some electronic warfare capability, the Taurans would probably have made the change much earlier than the usual midnight switch.

Still, the trawler
Pericles
—not at sea but gaining the protection of being in port, one among dozens—was not one’s average, everyday catcher of fish. Despite appearances, the
Pericles
was an electronic warfare vessel. Its job, and that of its mixed Balboan and Volgan crew, was to capture the codes used by TUSF-B’s radios, then interfere with that radio traffic. It was equipped with the best radio intercept and decoding capability available from Volgan arsenals.

Long before midnight, the
Pericles
had acquired a complete frequency hopping code for the TUSF-B. That old code became obsolete exactly at midnight when every unit in TUSF-B changed to the new.

Of course older transmissions were not worthless. The
Pericles
had a whole library of voice tapes from almost every important sender in TUSF-B, as well as simple radio operators.

None of that would be of any use until today’s code was broken.

Fortunately, in the rush to reestablish communications after the daily changeover, TUSF-B was providing a great rush of data for the
Pericles’
decoders.

Fire Base Eagle, Imperial Base Camp, Balboa, Terra Nova

There was none of the normal semi-confused hustle and bustle around the guns. The firing platoons and batteries were already and long-since laid on their primary targets. Fuses were set; charges cut. Each gun was loaded with the first of some hundreds of preplanned shells it would soon begin firing at Carrera’s legions.

That there was no “hustle and bustle” did not mean that the crews were bored; far from it. Each gunner was, understandably enough, scared silly. They were confident, of course, that their side would prevail. Their confidence in personal survival was rather less absolute.

The gun positions were well dug in for towed artillery pieces. A thick berm—a wall of earth—surrounded each gun, the berm being substantially cut only for the entrance to the position. Also well dug in, better, in fact, was a headquarters to which each battery of guns reported. At those headquarters, which were also the fire direction centers, noncoms and officers scanned their watches as the minutes and seconds ticked down. The crews around the guns likewise kept track, and also fidgeted continuously with bad cases of nerves. The gun chiefs kept field telephones glued to their ears, waiting…waiting…waiting…

“Fire!”

Herrera International Airport,
Ciudad
Balboa, Balboa, Terra Nova

A frantic warning sounded in the ears of the Mosaic-D pilots waiting on the airstrip. Radar had picked up incoming hostile aircraft. The pilots quickly engaged their engines to taxi down the runway. They made it less than a quarter of the distance before one of the two planes blossomed into a fireball in the night. The other pilot scarcely had time to utter a short prayer before he too was blown into the next kingdom.

Two Tauran fighters then spent several minutes bombing likely targets. They couldn’t cut the runway, because the plans required capturing the runway intact to facilitate further reinforcement. With flames and smoke rising behind them, weapons exhausted, the Tauran planes turned toward home. The pilots’ radios chattered with reports of other missions successfully completed all over the country, many of which did include cutting airfields. Balboa’s tiny air force was out of the picture for the time being.

Fort Melia, Republic of Balboa, Terra Nova

The Shimmering Sea side of the Transitway Area, the part near Cristobal, Balboa, was just a side show to the main effort taking place on the
Mar Furioso
side. While thousands of paratroopers descended upon the presumably sleeping Balboans and hundreds of aircraft and helicopters ferried and dropped other troops, while scores of combat aircraft from four huge nuclear carriers and scores more from bases in the Tauran Union and Santa Josefina bombed and strafed legion installations, the job of taking out the cadres of the tercios of Jimenez’s Fourth Corps, or most of it, fell upon the men of the Fourteenth Anglian and Four Hundred and Seventeenth Gallic Infantries, Thirty-seventh Gallic Commando, the Nine-forty-fifth Tuscan Military Police, a battalion of Tuscan light guns based at Fort Tecumseh, the cadres of Tecumseh’s jungle school, and a company of Sachsen engineers flown in the day before. Little helicopter, and no air support, were made available to this purely secondary operation. Only one company of landing craft, the Nine-seventy-first Medium Boat, from Cimbria, some trucks, and a couple of dozen helicopters had been allocated to Task Force Shimmering Sea for the upcoming attack.

The units on the Shimmering Sea side, for all they were treated as bastard stepchildren, still had one huge, and not unrelated advantage. While everyone on the
Mar Furioso
side had had to rehearse every move under the watchful eyes of the TUSF-B staff, Task Force Shimmering Sea had been able to rehearse one approach, while planning something completely different.