Standard
, he thought. The village might have been any of a thousand thousand others in High Asia, anywhere from Anatolia to Sinkiang: flat-topped structures of rough stone with mud mortar, some plastered and whitewashed, others raw; sheds and narrow, twisted lanes. The military "highway" went straight through, with the burnt-out wreckage of a Russian T-34
standing by the verge on the northern outskirts, the blackened barrel of its cannon pointing in silent futility down toward the plains. There was a square, and a building with onion domes that looked to have been a mosque, before the Revolution, then until last fall a Soviet "House of Culture." There were a few other modernish-looking structures, two nondescript trucks in German army paint, more horse-drawn vehicles parked outside.
Movement: chickens, an old woman in the head-to-toe swathing of Islamic modesty… and
yes
, figures in Fritz field grey.
He switched his view to the outskirts, almost hidden in greenery: spider holes, wire, the houses with firing-slits knocked into their walls… it wasn't going to be a walkover.
He reached a hand behind him and Sofie thrust the handset into his grasp. Senior Decurion McWhirter and the five troopers waited behind her. He clicked code into the pressure button and spoke:
"Marie."
"Targets ranged, teams ready." Along the firing line, hands clutched the grips and lanyards; a hundred meters behind, she stood with her eyes pressed to the visor of a split-view rangefinder. The automortar crews waited, hands on the elevating screws, loaders ready with fresh five-round clips.
"Tetrarchy commanders."
"In position."
Eric forced himself to half a dozen slow, deep breaths.
Hell
, he thought.
Why don't I just tell them I'm going for a look-see and
start walking to China
? Because it would be silly, of course.
Because these were his friends.
"Well, then." He cased the binoculars, hooked the assault sling of his rifle over his head, watched his wrist as the second hand swept inexorably around to 0530. When he spoke, his voice was quiet, conversational.
"Flare."
It went up from the observation post with a quiet
pop
and burst two hundred meters up. Magnesium flame blossomed against the innocent blue of the sky, white and harsh.
Plop-whine
, the first mortar shells went by overhead, plunging downward into the pink froth of apple blossom along the edge of the village:
thump-crash
fountains of black earth and shattered branches, steel and rock fragments equally deadly whirling through the air.
Crash-crash-crash-crash
, without stopping; the new automortars were heavier, on their wheeled carriages, but while the ammunition lasted, they could spray the 100mm bombs the way a submachine gun did pistol-bullets. Century A's teams had been practicing for a long time, and their hands moved reloads in with steady, metronomic regularity.
From either side the heavy machine guns erupted, controlled four-second bursts arching toward the smoke and shattered wood on the town's edge. Red tracer flicked out, blurring from the muzzles, seeming to float as it approached the roiling dust of the target zone. The firing positions here at the treeline overlooked the thin net of German defensive posts, commanded the roofs and streets beyond. They raked the windows and firing slits, and already figures in SS jackets were falling.
"Storm
storm
!" the officers' shouts rang out. The Draka infantry rose; they had shed their marching loads and the lead sticks were crouched and ready. Now they sprinted forward, running full-tilt, bobbing and jinking and weaving as they advanced. A hundred meters and they threw themselves down in firing positions; the assault rifles opened up, and the light rifle-calibre machine guns. The second-string lochoi were already leapfrogging their positions, moving with smooth athlete's grace. The operation would be repeated at the same speed, as many times as was necessary to reach the objective.
This was where thousands of hours of training paid off"—training that began for Draka children at the age of six to produce soldiers enormously strong and fit. Troops that could keep up this pace for hours.
And the covering fire would be
accurate
—sniper accurate, with soldiers who could use optical scopes as quickly as those of other nations did iron sights.
"
BuLlala BuLala
!" The battle cry roared out, as old as the Draka, in a language of the Bantu extinct for more than a century:
Kill! Kill
!
The return fire was shaky and wild—the slow banging of the German Kar 98 bolt-action rifles, then the long
brrrrrtttt
of a MG 34. The line of machine-gun bullets stabbed out from a farmhouse on the outer edge of the village. Draka were falling.
Seconds later one of the 120mm recoilless rifles fired.
There was a huge sound, a
crash
at once very loud and yet muffled. Behind the stubby weapon a great cloud of incandescent gas flared—the backblast that balanced the recoil. Saplings slapped to the ground and leaf-litter caught fire, and the ammunition squad leaped to beat out the flames with curses and spades. But it was the effect on the German machine-gun nest that mattered, and that was shattering. The shells were low-velocity, but they were heavy and tilled with
plastique
, confined by thin steel mesh. The warhead struck directly below the muzzle of the German gun, spreading instantly into a great flat pancake of explosive; milliseconds later, the fuse in its base detonated.
Those shells had been designed for use against armor, or ferroconcrete bunkers. The loose stone of the farmhouse wall disintegrated, collapsing inward as if at the blow of an invisible fist. Beyond, the opposite wall blew outward even before the first stones reached it, destroyed by air driven to the density of steel in the confined space of the house. The roof and upper floor hung for a moment, as if suspended against gravity. Then they fell, to be buried in their turn by the inward topple of the end walls.
Moments before there had been a house, squalid enough, but solid. Now there was only a heap of shattered ashlar blocks.
"Now!" Eric threw himself forward. The headquarters lochos followed. Ahead the mortar barrage ' walked" into the town proper, then back to its original position. But now the shells carried smoke, thick and white, veiling all sight; bullets stabbed out of it blindly. The 120's crashed again and again, two working along the edge of the village, another elevating slightly to shell the larger buildings in the square.
With cold detachment, Tetrarch Marie Kaine watched the shellfire crumble the buildings, flicked a hand to silence the firing line as the rifle Tetrarchies reached the barrier of smoke.
It thinned rapidly; she could hear the crackling bang of snake charges blasting pathways through the German wire. The small-arms fire died away for a brief moment as the first enemy fire positions were blasted out of existence, overrun, silenced.
The medics and their stretcher bearers were running forward to attend to the Draka wounded.
"Combat pioneers forward!" she said crisply. The teams launched themselves downhill, as enthusiastically as the rifle infantry had done; being weighed down with twenty kilos of napalm tank for a flamethrower, or an equal weight of demolition explosive, was as good an incentive for finding cover as she knew.
"All right," she continued crisply. "Machine-gun sections cease fire. Resume on targets of opportunity or fire-requests."
The smoke had blown quickly; a dozen houses were rubble, and fires had started already from beams shattered over charcoal braziers. The fighting was moving into the town; she could see figures in Draka uniforms swarming over rooftops, the stitching lines of tracer. They were as tiny as dolls, the town spread out below like a map…
But then, I always did like dolls
, she thought.
And maps.
Her father was something of a traditionalist; he had been quite pleased about the dolls, until she started making her own… and organizing the others into work parties.
The maps, too: she had loved those. Drawing her own lines on them, making her own continents for the elaborate imagined worlds of her daydreams. Then she discovered that you could do that in the
real
world: school trips to the great projects, the tunnel from the Orange River to the Fish, the huge dams along the Zambezi.
Horses and engineering magazines
, she thought wryly.
The twin pillars of my teenage years
.
It had been the newsreels, finally. There wasn't much left to be done south of the Zambezi, or anywhere in Africa—just execution of projects long planned, touching up, factory extensions. But the New Territories, the lands conquered in 1914-1919… ah! She could still shiver at the memory of watching the final breakthrough on the Dead Sea-Mediterranean Canal, the frothing silver water forcing its way through the great turbines, the humm, the
power
. The school texts said the Will to Power was the master-force. True enough… but anyone could have power over serfs, all you needed was to be born a citizen. The power to make cultivated land out of a desert, to channel a river, build a city where nothing but a wretched collection of hovels stood —
that
was power! Father had had a future mapped out for her, or so he thought: the Army, of course; an Arts B.A.; then she could marry, and satisfy herself with laying out gardens around the manor. Or if she must, follow some genteel, feminine profession, like architecture…
But no,
I was going to build
, she thought. And here I am, destined to spend the best years of my life laying out tank traps, clearing minefields and blowing things up. Oh, well, the war won't last forever. Russia, Europe… we'll have that, and there's room for projects with real
scale
, there.
A trained eye told her that it was time. "Forward," she called.
"Wallis, stop fiddling with that radio and bring the spare set.
New firing line at the first row of houses."
Or rubble
, her mind added. That was the worst of war—you were adding to entropy rather than fighting it.
Just clearing the way for something
better
, she mused, dodging forward.
Hovels, not a decent drain
in the place
.
"… saw
little of my father. Home was the servants' quarters
of Oakenwald. where I was happy, much of the time. Tantie
Sannie fed me and loved me. there were the other children of
the House and Quarters to play with, the gardens and the
mountainside to explore. Memory is fragmentary before six; it
slips away, the consciousness which bore it too alien for the
adult mind to re-experience. Images remain only—the great
kitchens and Tantie baking biscuits, watching from behind a
rosebush as guests arrived for a dance, fascinating and
beautiful and mysterious, with their jewels and gowns and
uniforms. A child can know, without the knowledge having
meaning. We had numbers on our necks; that was natural. The
Masters did not. There were things said among ourselves, never
to the Masters. I remember watching Tantie Sannie talk to one
of the overseers, and suddenly realizing
she's afraid…
The
Young Master was my father, and came to give me presents
once a year. I thought that he must dislike me, because his face
went hard and fixed when he looked at me, and I wondered
what I had done to anger him. A terrible thought—my Mother
had died bearing me. Had I killed her? Now I know it was just
her looks showing in me. but the memory of that grief is with
me always. And then he came one night to take me away from
all I had known and loved, telling me that it was for the best.
Movement cars and boats, strangers; America, voices I could
hardly understand
…"
Daughter to Darkness: A Life
by Anna von Shrakenberg
Houghton & Stoddart. New York, 1978
VILLAGE ONE, OSSETIAN MILITARY HIGHWAY APRIL 14, 1942: 0530 HOURS
Eric cleared the low stone fence with a raking stride. Noise was all around them as they ran: stutter of weapons, explosion blast, screams; the harsh stink of cordite filled his nose, and he felt his mouth open and join in the shout. The rifle stuttered in his hands, three-round bursts from the hip. Behind him he heard Sofie shrieking, a high exultant sound; even the stolid McWhirter was yelling. They plunged among the apple trees, gnarled little things barely twice man height, some shattered to stumps; the Fritz wire was ahead, laneways blasted through it with snake charges. Fire stabbed at them; he flicked a stick-grenade out of his belt, yanked the pin, tossed it.
Automatically, they dove for the dirt. Sofie
ooffed
as the weight of the radio drove her ribs into the ground, then opened up with her light machine-pistol. Assault rifles hammered, but the German fire continued; a round went
crack-whhhit
off a stone in front of his face, knocking splinters into his cheek. Eric swore, then called over his shoulder.
"Neall Rocket gun!"
The trooper grunted and crawled to one side. The tube of the weapon cradled against her cheek, the rear venturi carefully pointed away from her comrades; her hands tightened on the twin pistol grips, a finger stroked the trigger.
Thump
and the light recoilless charge kicked the round out of the short, smooth-bore barrel. It blurred forward as the fins unfolded; there was a bright streak as the sustainer rocket motor boosted the round up to terminal velocity:
crash
as it struck and exploded. Her partner reached to work the bolt and open the breech, slid in a fresh shell and slapped her on the helmet.
"Fire in the hole!" he called.
Forward again, through the thinning white mist of the smoke barrage, over the rubble of the blasted house. That put them on a level with the housetops, where the village sloped down to the road. He reached for the handset.