A Desert Called Peace (44 page)

There was also a patch of ground, the Guarasi "Desert," just a bit inland from the northern coast and rather past
Lago Sombrero
. It was . . . sort of . . . kind of . . . almost . . . a desert. At least it looked something like a desert, having roughly 19,000 dusty acres of various kinds of cactus (and the odd breadfruit tree and tranzitree) amidst a barren landscape of erosion, loss of topsoil, overgrazing and general environmental devastation. It still received forty inches of rain a year so the desert analogy could sometimes seem very strained.

Carrera was—discreetly—looking into buying it permanently for the legion for a desert training area. For the nonce he was able to lease it for a low price from the government of the Republic, which owned it and had turned it into the kind of national park virtually no one ever wanted to visit except for the occasional environmentally conscious gringo or Tauran who went there to reconfirm his view that human beings just sucked and the planet would be better off without them.

On the Guarasi's eighty-one square kilometers Carrera had set Abogado's Foreign Military Training Group to running desert combat training courses for century and cohort sized units. The land had been modified to the extent of constructing several fortified areas for the troops to train on the attack. The type of fortifications differed. There were "pita" types, round raised-berm forts with trenches dug into the berms and firing positions and ramps for armored vehicles inside. There were also the more classic trench systems that the Sumerians were known to use, heavily bunkered and fronted by broad belts of barbed wire and simulated minefields. In addition, Carrera had bought about half the used tires in Colombia Central (and apparently every used tire in Balboa) and had them stacked, wired together, and filled with dirt to create buildings suitable for live fire training in city fighting. Only some of the fortifications, and all the tire houses, were sighted in places where live ammunition could be used to train. They were all, however, sighted to present a fairly coherent picture of a broad fortified zone suitable as an objective for a brigade—or legion—level attack provided, at least, that no tank or Ocelot main gun ammunition was used.

Ah, well,
thought Carrera, watching a century-level (roughly eighty men including the forward observer team and the medic) attack on a "pita." The attack was at night, without artillery or mortar illumination and only about twenty-five percent of the maximum illumination possible from one of Terra Nova's three moons.

It was not quite as dark as three feet up a welldigger's ass.

From his vantage point, and looking through a large thermal imager mounted on a tripod, Carrera observed as three machine-gun teams one hundred meters apart slithered into position in a muddy canal that crossed in front of the "pita." To the right side of the machine guns, in the same muddy ditch, a two-man rocket grenade launcher—RGL—team set up, bowed down under a double or perhaps triple load of ammunition.

Unseen, Carrera smiled.
I know it must have been a bitch lowcrawling the better part of a kilometer with that on their backs. Good boys. Tough boys.
He felt a sudden warm glow of affection for
his
legion.

He saw one man, hunched under a backpack radio, walk bent over extremely low from one team to another, stopping briefly at each. Three other men followed that one. He knew that was the sniper team by profile of the long-barreled Draco rifles they carried. Those four disappeared into the ditch. Behind the ditch, stretched out in wedges about fifty meters deep and as many across, Carrera could make out, just barely, three groups of perhaps seventeen to nineteen men, waiting silently.

Jamey Soult handed Carrera a set of headphones linked to a radio tuned to the frequency of the attacking century. He whispered, "Be only a few minutes, sir. The centurion with that century just reported to the commander that the support is in position. Now, I think, they're just waiting for an 'up' from the mortar section."

Which should long since have
been
up,
Carrera fumed as he slipped the headphones over his ears.
Calm . . . calm,
he ordered himself.
People make mistakes. That's why they're out here; to learn.

To help them learn, five of the FMTG's evaluator-trainers—not "safeties," Carrera despised the idea of special safety NCOs or officers in training for combat—stood more or less among or behind the groups along with another man that Carrera thought might be the FSA officer, Ridenhour. It was hard to tell in the fuzzy green image provided by the thermal sight.

It wasn't too much longer before he heard one long
pop
coming from two kilometers or so behind him. This repeated several times; the two mortars of the century's light mortar section beginning a preparation to drive the notional enemy into their bunkers.

With only a few seconds' delay from when he first heard the crump of the mortars, the machine guns and RGLs opened up across a front of about two hundred meters. The overall effect of the machine guns' tracers was strangely beautiful and quite surreal.

What sounded like three of the four-shot, tube-fed, pump action 43mm grenade launchers carried by an infantry century joined in with a
foofoofoompwhawhawham.
Smallish explosions began blossoming along the front and top of the berm. A few overshot to explode inside.

Instead of one round in five, the machine guns were firing pure tracer, the glowing rounds making actinic lines through the air. This would help keep the assault teams, just now beginning to rise to their feet, from walking inadvertently into machine gun fire.

The first mortar shells fell inside the pita, their high explosive outlining the top edge of the berm in sudden harsh light as they detonated.

Behind the ditch the assault teams finished forming. Carrera thought he heard, dimly and distantly over the pounding of mortar shells and the nearer staccato bursts of machine gun fire, a young voice shouting, "
Legionarios, a pie . . . al asalto . . . adelante!
"

To add to the night's misery, Cruz and the rest of the century wore super-heavy, Federated States surplus, armored vests. These were not the obsolete ballistic nylon that might stop shrapnel but would not stop a bullet. Neither were they the roughly twenty-five pound aramid fiber vests with ceramic inserts. No, no; that would have been too easy. These vests were surplus from the time of the old Cochin war and had been intended for helicopter door gunners who were never expected to walk any farther than from the helicopter pad to the NCO club for a beer. They were ceramic, over an inch thick, weighed fifty-four pounds and would stop anything less than a heavy machine gun's bullet.

One would have thought the protection afforded by the vests would have been a comfort to Cruz. After all, there were only a couple of hundred of them, apparently, and it should have been reassuring to be given them to wear.

Not a chance. True, there were only a couple of hundred of them in the entire legion. Thus, they were only used for live fire problems, such as this one, where the chance of death or serious wounds for
somebody
was very high. Despite the fatigue of lugging himself, his weapons and equipment, two sections of live bangalore torpedo plus a blank, and the bloody-damned fifty-four pound vest, belly to the dirt, across nearly a kilometer of open space fast enough to make muscles scream in protest, Cruz trembled.

This is
so
going to suck mastodon cock. Cara, I want to come
home
!

Cruz, like the others, had learned very quickly that words in the military did not always mean what one thought they ought to mean. "Good training," for example, clearly meant, "Gonna suck." "Really good training," indicated, "Oh, shit, is this gonna suck." "Superb training," suggested something like, "This is gonna suck so hard every whore in Balboa will be unemployed for a week."

Cruz was an acting team leader for the exercise and had the responsibility for breaching the wire ahead. The section leader, Sergeant del Valle (who had gradually become a surprisingly friendly and even gentle sort once basic training was done with), had hinted that there was a good chance, unless of course Cruz screwed everything up badly, that the position might be made permanent. Since this would be a roughly twenty percent pay raise, and since he'd decided he really
did
want to marry Cara and the extra money would be useful, it was just possible that the legionary was as concerned about his performance as he was about being shot.

Well, I'd like to tell myself that anyway. Fact is, though, I am scared to death. Fucking demo. And I thought hand grenades were bad. Jesus! And a fat lot of good this vest will do me if a the bangalore goes off early. No shrapnel or bullets in me, maybe, but also no arms, legs or head. Probably no dick, either, for that matter.

The two sections of live bangalore—basically connectable pipes filled with a cyclonite-trinitrotoluene mix and weighing nineteen pounds each—lay clutched in Cruz's arms along with the one blank section. The blank was there so that if one
did
set off a mine or booby trap in the course of pushing the torpedo through the obstacle the explosion would not be carried back through the rest to prematurely detonate the torpedo and, infinitely worse, one's mortal and all too easily disintegrated body.

Two men had been hurt, one slightly and one badly, and another killed on this range about a week earlier. Cruz considered that and again shivered. Rumor was that the gringos running the training area, the FMTG, had started to add more artificial controls to keep such a thing from happening again when THE Gringo had shown up and nixed the idea.

What Carrera had, in fact, said was, "There's nothing wrong with the exercise as set up. It was a reasonable problem for the stage of training of the troops concerned, the control was generally adequate. It was a realistic simulation of what the legion will soon face. Some men were hurt because
they
fucked up, not because the exercise was. Men get hurt in training; it's the cost of doing business. And besides, Abogado, what the fuck do you expect them to learn if someone's doing their jobs for them? You know better. I
know
you know better."

What had happened was this: the previous week a three man breach team from Third Century, 4th Cohort had assembled their bangalore and pushed it through the wire. They had then sprinted back towards the relative cover of a small depression in the ground in which the rest of the section waited. Unfortunately, because the range had been used several times before, there were sections of barbed wire embedded in the ground and sticking up above it. One of the men of the breach team had caught his foot on the wire and fallen face down. Then, with the fuse to the bangalore burning fast, the other two had gone back to free their comrade from the wire. They were still trying when the fuse reached the blasting cap and the assembly detonated, sending dozens of pieces of serrated barbed wire through their bodies.

One of the would-be rescuers was killed outright with twenty-two pieces of barbed wire in him. The other would be in hospital for quite some time. The one who had had his foot caught got away with little more damage than a few light scratches and one piece of wire embedded in his ham.

Carrera had driven to the 4th Cohort that afternoon, linked up with Jimenez, and presented the almost unhurt soldier with a wound badge in front of his peers.

"There is no moral difference between a wound received in training and a wound received in action," he had told the assembled troops.

He had then gone to the hospital in
Ciudad
Balboa and waited for the badly wounded legionary to come out of surgery and recover consciousness. To this man he also presented a wound badge, plus the lowest step of the six awards for valor—a
Cruz de Coraje,
in Steel—for the attempt at saving his comrade. More quietly, Carrera had whispered in the soldier's ear, "You should have simply got him and yourselves low, with your helmets facing the explosion. Don't fuck it up again. Now get well and come back to us."

He had not gone immediately to see the family of the dead man, leaving that for a Survivors' Assistance NCO from Christian's II shop. Instead, he had gone to the funeral and presented the same awards he had to the wounded man to the dead legionary's family.

The civilian life insurance company that covered the men of the LdC had shortly thereafter done a few calculations, this being the thirty-seventh man killed in training so far for whom they had had to pay 100,000 FSD, and cancelled the group life insurance policy.

Which was how the
Legio del Cid
became a self-insurer.

Cara . . . Mom . . . I hope you don't end up collecting my insurance,
thought Cruz, as mortar and machine gun fire began to strike the pita ahead. He heard the century commander, a signifer, shout, "
Legionarios, a pie . . . al asalto . . . adelante!
" Legionaires, on your feet . . . into the assault . . . forward!

Rifles slung across their backs, Cruz and his breach team stood up. As he stood, finally able to
do
something, he felt fear melt away. He slung the three sections of bangalore across his right shoulder. Then, machine-gun tracers marking the path to either side and the steady flash of exploding mortar rounds outlining the objective, he confidently called, "Follow me."

Cruz and his men began to trot forward, followed by the century commander, his radio-telephone operator, and the forward observer team. When Cruz spotted the wire obstacle he was to breach—nasty looking thing!—he shouted to his team, "Down. Cover." Then he raced forward and flung himself onto the ground on his side of the wire. He felt some scraps of that wire, previously torn apart, dig into his legs as he did so.

Cruz took the blank bangalore section in both hands and began to feed it forward through the tangle. The blank piece had a rounded cap to it, which helped it slither between the strands. When he reached the last foot of that blank section he stopped and grabbed one of the two live sections, feeling first to make sure that he was
not
about to feed in the section that had been primed. Having made sure of that, he attached the unprimed live section to the blank and forced it through. Then he shouted, "Number two, on me."