Against the Tide of Years (79 page)

He walked forward to the spot where part of the heavy-weapons company was setting up. He’d pushed the Gatlings well forward, giving them interlocking fields of fire along his front and open ones to the flanks. The sergeant in charge paused with a rock the size of a loaf of bread in her hands.

“ Bit different from Babylon, nae, sir? ”

He nodded, and she hesitated. “Sir, ask you a favor? Sir, it’s a letter. In case Skyfather calls me.”

He took it:
Delauntarax of the Thaurinii, in Alba
was written in a shaky hand. Vague, but the Postal Service was used to that; things got through eventually.

“Keep masked until the word comes down, and it’ll be the other side who go to feast in the sky,” he said, tucking it into a pocket.

She nodded. The crew threw a khaki-colored groundsheet over the Gatling on its two-wheel mount and scattered handfuls of dirt over that. Having dug their own holes, the infantry were doing likewise.

Hollard walked out in front of his own line and examined it carefully. The
maskirovka
was good—a useful Russian word much emphasized in the tactical manual put together by a committee of retired types with several centuries of combat experience between them. It was another advantage the Islanders had. He’d met plenty of Bronze Age hunters who were
extremely
good at hiding out, but few of the warrior types thought that way. Most of them had styles that deliberately drew the enemy’s attention, and by their codes trying to hide was shameful.

Inconspicuous,
he thought, looking at his own position.
Looks exactly like about one company, hastily dug in.

Besides the
maskirovka,
they’d used the irregularities of the ground well; the supplies and hospital tent were out of sight altogether, behind swellings that turned them into dead ground.

He looked back and forth. Troops dug in, reserves at hand, weapons placed by the book . . . now all he could do was pray.

 

“They come,” Raupasha said, jumping down from her chariot before the hillock that held the expeditionary force’s command personnel. That wasn’t much: Kenneth Hollard, his six-person staff, and a clump of communications technicians and runners.

The horses were flaring their nostrils to draw breath, foam splattered their necks and shoulders, and several arrows stood in the frame of the vehicle. Kenneth Hollard saw with a sudden stab of alarm that she was holding one hand to her side, with blood on her fingers.

“ You’re hit? ” he said.

“It is nothing, Kenn’et,” she said. “A graze. One of the Hittite charioteers had a gun—the type with two barrels, that shoots many bullets . . .”

“Shotgun,” he said automatically.

“A shotgun. But he aimed badly, and I did not.” She pointed behind her. “ They come.”

He nodded. The Hittites were whooping forward about half a mile away, and the Mitannians retreating fast and to the right. Thank God they’d kept enough wits to remember what he’d said; he didn’t want friendly forces masking his fire when the fecal matter hit the air-circulating device. And from the dust—bless the dust here, you couldn’t move troops without raising it, and it was a boon to the man standing still—Walker’s men were coming in on
their
right a mile further back, ready to support their local allies.

“You should get back to the hospital tent and have that seen to,” Hollard said sternly, then smiled. “ I don’t want it festering.”

“ No, it would spoil the coronation if I smelled like a corpse three days dead,” Raupasha laughed. “Teshub and Indara be with you, Kenn’et, and hold their hand over you.”

“Amen,” Hollard muttered.

She saluted and gave him an urchin grin as he returned the gesture—she had earned it, today and in Babylon. Then she walked away; the driver handed off his team and went after her, carrying the scabbarded Werder and the ammunition, and following the princess with an expression about as doglike as Sabala’s.

Have to find her a husband, I suppose,
Hollard thought. Though . . . most of the local aristocrats and princelings wouldn’t be very happy with a woman who had been contaminated with Islander ideas of independence.
Not necessarily or all the time,
he thought.
Look at my new brother-in-law. So we should be able to dig someone up for her.
The thought was obscurely irritating, and he pushed it aside. Business to attend to.

Now to see if his plan worked. Usually they didn’t, in combat. The exceptions were where you’d completely suckered the other side, a successful ambush or flank attack. That was when you won big.

The Hittites were coming full-tilt for his position. He leveled his binoculars; chariots in front at the trot, footmen running behind—standard formation, for the Near East in the thirteenth century B.C. The Hittites would be more prone to try and ram right in than most, using the chariot for shock. He caught one man with a sun disk on the top of his conical helmet, shouting orders and waving a sword; not Kurunta of Tarhuntassa himself, but probably a relative—the Hittite Empire was a family business, cemented by a stream of daughters from Hattusas sent out to marry vassal kings, and vice versa. The snipers had been briefed to look for that insignia.

Closer, closer. Hollard’s lips skinned back as he scanned to his left. Walker’s men were coming on briskly, advancing in company columns at the double, with their rifles across their chests. Trotting along were what looked like fieldpieces, six-horse teams, and light gleaming off iron and brass.

They’re using the Hittites to unmask and develop our position,
he thought, plus using them to simply soak up bullets. Reasonably well-trained men and a commander with some grasp of tactics, then. Possibly one of Walker’s Islander renegades. He hoped so; it would be a positive pleasure to string one of
them
up. They’d all been sentenced to death for treason in absentia years ago, too.

Hollard judged distances; you went by which features of a man’s body you could see easily, when legs became separate from the generalized antlike blob, when you could see arms swing or a face. The Hittites were closing rapidly, but the Walkerites were hanging back—over two thousand yards, extreme rifle range but well within that of heavy-weapons fire.

He reached for the radio at his belt and clicked. “Captain O’Rourke.”

“Here, sir.”

“ Let them have it, Paddy.”

“ With a will, Brigadier, sir, with a will.”

A hundred rifles volleyed from the Scouts’ deliberately badly camouflaged rifle pits.
Maskirovka
was more than just hiding; it was
deception,
disinformation. It wasn’t what you didn’t know that killed you, it was what you thought you knew that wasn’t so. A dozen Hittite chariots went down; a few of them flipped completely over, pitching forward and squashing the screaming crews like bugs beneath a frying pan.

The Scouts’ mortar opened up as well. A shell landed in the middle of the dense-packed Hittite infantry, and men fell, opening out in a circle around the explosion like an evil flower with a crimson blossom. The riflemen were firing independent-rapid as well and at less than four hundred yards mostly hitting. Men and chariots were going down all across the Hittite front; he saw arrows fly out, few covering even half the distance, and there were puffs of smoke from some of the chariots—smoothbores firing shot, even more futile than the bows. The charge wavered, which was exactly the wrong thing to do, like most half measures. They should either run as fast as they could, take cover, or keep charging. A running man could cover four hundred yards in a disconcertingly short time, if you were on the receiving end.

Horns and trumpets sounded. Hollard brought up his binoculars; the man with the sun disk on his helmet had survived and was going into a frenzy of signaling. In between he fired shotguns, handing them off to a loader as he did so—a new use for the three-man Hittite chariot crew, and quite ingenious. The chariots reversed themselves and galloped away, and the infantry flattened themselves to the ground.

Schooonk . . . whonk!
More mortar shells falling among the prostrate men. He sympathized, in a way; that was the most unpleasant part, having to wait helplessly and hope you were lucky. Mostly he felt detached. Down underneath he could feel fear, not so much fear of death as of certain mutilating wounds, and more fear for the lives that depended on his decisions.

“Here they come,” he said aloud, and his staff nodded soberly.

The Walkerites were deploying, going from column into a two-line formation, well spread out, swinging in to envelop the little Islander position.

“Right, about six hundred up, say three hundred in reserve,” he said.

Through the binoculars he could see men manhandling weapons forward. They were on field-gun carriages with shields, like the Islander Gatlings but not quite the same. Fairly light, or they couldn’t be brought forward that fast—keeping up well with the infantry. A battery of six real field guns galloped forward and then deployed, the teams turning and then being unhitched and led to the rear, crews leaping down and running the ammunition limbers forward, ready to form a chain to hand rounds up to the loading teams.

Budumm.
A sound like a heavy door closing and a long puff of smoke from one of the enemy cannon; it ran back under the recoil. No surprise; the Republic couldn’t make a mobile gun with a recoil-absorbing carriage yet either. Then a savage snapping
crack
of red fire in the air not far behind Paddy’s position, and a wide oval of dust as the casing fragments and lead balls hit the ground.

Muzzle-loaders, twelve-pounder smoothbores,
he thought, watching the swab-ram-fire loading drill.
Firing shrapnel, time-fused shells.
They were getting off more then two rounds a minute. Good practice.

Somewhere his soul winced; he’d put Paddy’s unit out there as bait, and they were going to pay again, the way they had this morning. The rifle fire dropped off as the Scouts hugged the bottoms of their holes; the area around their position was turning into a haze of dust and smoke as the enemy fell into a regular rhythm of load-run-up-swab-ram-fire, rounds coming forward from the limbers like a bucket chain at a blaze.

Price of doing business,
he told himself, as the cry of “corpsman!” went up and the stretcher teams went forward. He’d authorized enlisting local volunteers to carry wounded, to free his own troops for the fighting, and they were going in as bravely as men could be asked to do.

“Captain Lautens,” he said into the radio. He wished Chong were here—he knew the man’s work—but Lautens hadn’t screwed up so far. The artillery commander’s voice replied crisply:

“When you unmask, go for those whatever-they-ares brought forward with the infantry; they’re your first priority.”

“Sir, yessir. We’re ready.”

“Good man.”

Closer, closer . . . One of the mystery weapons stopped, turned. The shield hid whatever it was the crew did at the breech, but he could see rifle rounds sparking off it in snapping white flicks of light, leaving lead smears across the metal.
Has to be steel for that,
he thought; a wrought-iron shield would be too soft. Then the muzzle flashes, and a distant
braaaaapp
of sound. The bullets struck sparks all around the Scout company’s mortar position, off rocks and the barrel of the weapon. The crew had gone to earth in their slit trench, as he’d ordered in advance—they were there to lure the enemy, not hurt him.

“Take a note of that shield,” he said to the lieutenant who was in charge of Intel. “Multiple barrels, I’d say.” Hadn’t there been some French weapon? “Rate of fire’s not as high as a Gatling, but it’s definitely useful.”

Fairly close now, the long line of men jogging forward, their artillery firing over their heads. Those heads went up, an apprehensive movement—valuable clue to the reliability of their fuses. Now they went down on one knee, bringing their rifles to their shoulders . . .

“Paddy, your people are out of it—have them cease fire and take cover. All company commanders,” he said into the radio.
“ Now!”

Canvas covers flew off, and the whole of the Islander position erupted in smoke and red strobing flashes. The Marine riflemen were firing at maximum speed, mad-minute snatch-and-shoot; the Gatling gunners turning the cranks and grinding out a storm of lead like water from a high-pressure hose. An endless string of firecrackers might have sounded something like that, if they’d been thrown by the hundreds. The steady, heavy thuds of the artillery came through it, and he saw one of the enemy rapid-fire weapons disintegrate, wheel and barrel and shield flying in separate directions . . . probably with pieces of the crew mixed in.

“Clamp! Clamp and tie off.”

Clemens hated spouting wounds. Azzu-ena’s hand came down into the cavity with the long scissorslike instrument; the blunt tips found the vein and pinched it closed. An assistant slid her fingers in with the loop of catgut ready. They stayed out of his way with practiced skill.