The Rods and the Axe - eARC (28 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

I am purely evil;

Hear the thrum

of my evil engine;

Evilly I come.

The stars are thick as flowers

In the meadows of July;

A fine night for murder

Winging through the sky.

—“
Ethel Mannin,

Song of the Bomber”

Casa Linda, Carretera InterColombiana
, Balboa, Terra Nova

From somewhere to the south, a smilodon or jaguar roared at the stars. Overhead, the Pentagram was visible, as was the moon Eris.
Antaniae
called out,
mnnnbt . . . mnnnbt . . . mnnnbt
as they searched for mates and prey, in the latter case preferably young and weak or blind . . . or stupid. Trixies, of course, one could not hear. Those intelligent proto-birds hunted the
antaniae
silently, only announcing their kills once made.

Most of the valuables and sentimental articles were long since stored deep in a cave halfway from the house to the beach. The people continued to sleep in the
Casa
, largely because the cave was a misery, cold, wet, and insect-ridden. It was also far too small to hold the household and its staff in anything but a standing or, for some of the women and girls, a sitting position. At that, the sitting position for them would mean a lot of wet feminine posteriors.

Ham was gone, sent off with Cano and Alena the witch to Valdivia. They’d keep him in a hotel, not too far from where a ship was expected, not too far from a refugee camp for children with a surprising number of boys each of whom boasted a remarkable degree of military bearing. Ham would join them eventually, but not yet, not when his presence might tip off somebody to something.

For the rest, all of Ham’s thoroughly deflowered wives, five of whom were now pregnant, though not showing much, if at all, the Pashtun guards, a few of Carrera’s personal and household staff . . . they all waited in their normal quarters for the word to run like hell for the shelter of the cave. There were several shoulder-fired antiaircraft missile teams around, but those were mostly to ward off helicopters, should the enemy get too daring. Oh, they might get a revenge shot in, but Carrera thought it unlikely.

Still, one has to try.

Complementing the missiles, there was a platoon of light antiaircraft guns, twin 23mm towed jobs. He had no great hopes for them, either.

Under gleaming moonlight from two of Terra Nova’s moons, Bellona and Eris, sitting outside his quarters—he found no joy in his own bed, with Lourdes for the moment still in Santa Josefina—at his normal table on the elevated veranda, with his usual bottle of scotch still mostly full. A bucket of ice came with the scotch. He looked out to sea, then lifted the condensation-dripping glass to his lips. The sip barely qualified as a taste. He thought about drinking more—
as tired as I am after all these months I need the sleep
—but decided against it.

Carrera didn’t have to see them to know that some of Ham’s Pashtun guard stood silently just off the veranda.
Orders of Alena the witch? The boy? Or are the guards just in the habit?

The glass door squealed open and a Pashtun stepped onto the veranda. “Sir,” said the Pashtun, “father of the God, Iskandr, there is word from the . . . communications center? . . . yes, that . . . or through them from Lanza, commander of the air legion. This word is that there are aircraft, maybe twenty, maybe thirty, heading toward us. Lanza sends that he knows what he can and can’t do, and that the traps are waiting.”

“Excellent news, Sarbaz,” said Carrera, recognizing the voice. He still held onto the glass. He wasn’t sure where the word had come from. He could find that out later, in any case. The news was as welcome as expected.

“Please get everyone into the shelter. And alert the air defense people here.”

The Pashtun gave a quick bow, announced, “I alerted them first, father of our lord.” Then Sarbaz hurried off. In what seemed mere seconds, several long processions of people began winding from the house, the barracks, and several of the stand-alone quarters. None of the women, none of Ham’s wives, none of the men or boys shed a tear. But Lourdes’ latest and final, little Linda, sniffled loudly enough for Carrera, above, to hear.

The little girl cried, “But
why
, Pililak? Why do they want to hurt us?”

Ham’s first consummated and—in his father’s opinion—best wife answered, “Because they are slaves and we are free, beloved sister of my lord and husband.” Ant’s voice dripped pure venom as she finished, “Slaves always hate the free.”

Gotta love that girl. She’
s such
a bitch but, after all is said and done, she’
s our
bitch.

Carrera stood then and turned to the two guards he’d known were behind him. “Loot the liquor cabinet,” he ordered. “As much as you can carry, bring it to the cave.”

“Yes, father of our lord. Glasses?”

“Too fancy; the bottles alone will do well enough.”

Ciudad
Balboa, Balboa, Terra Nova

In theory, twenty-four sorties, exclusive of refueling, could carry an impressive load of ordnance, about one hundred and ninety tons. In practice, that was a rarely achieved dream. In the first place, the twenty-four aircraft used were not all fighter-bombers or attack bombers. One was a propeller-driven early warning and command bird, recognizable by the outsized dome, the radar, carried above it. Two—one Anglian, one Gaul—were set up for electronic warfare; these would prevent the Balboans from sensing the incoming air until late in the game, then would spoof them as to how many, and where, once it was obvious they were there. The electronic warfare birds would also make pursuit somewhat problematic, if the Balboans decided to try that, as they might.

It was believed that the Balboans could lift several hundred obsolete fighters. But it was also believed that, if they did, they would take some time getting airborne. Thus, two fighters were almost entirely devoted, eighteen of twenty-two hardpoints’ worth, to air-to-air missiles. Every other plane carried two missiles on two hardpoints. Each of those also carried an additional two fuel tanks; given the range at which they were operating and the route they planned to take, this was only sensible. Everybody carried at least one homing antiradiation missile, for shutting down or shutting off enemy radar. Thus, the total air-to-ground ordnance was under ninety tons, most of it in the form of larger bombs.

The Gallic fighters, the
Tourmentes
, boasted a few more hardpoints, but their maximum ordnance load was within about one hundred kilograms of the Anglians’ Sea Hurricanes.

Of the nineteen primarily bomb-carrying planes, two split off from the main body and stuck fairly close to the civil airport at
Ciudad
Cervantes and the military field at
Lago Sombrero.

The planes avoided most Balboan radar by the expedient of coming in over the mountains on the eastern side of the country, by Santa Josefina. One of the electronic warfare planes blinded the civilian radar at
Ciudad
Cervantes’ airport. Then they’d turned west, except for the one dedicated to cutting the runway at Cervantes, heading for the capital. The second EW plane took care of the radar for that approach. Whatever the effect of jamming the radar, and it surely had some, it didn’t stop the Balboans from tossing up an impressive display of fireworks above the City as the Taurans approached.

They probably had visual or aural warning passed on to them
, thought the leader of the Tauran strike package.

Visually impressive the Balboan cannon fire might have been, the bright green and red tracers arcing up into the night sky. But it was still a case of small bullet (or cannon shell), big sky. Nobody in the strike package was really all that impressed.

The first visual glimpse of the planes near the city probably came when some of them lit off their antiradiation, which was to say, anti-radar, missiles. Given that the Balboans were being jammed, even as they tried to use their radar to find targets for their guns and missiles, meant that few or none of those so targeted had clue one about the incoming HARMs until their radar dishes exploded in flame and shards of metal.

The first actual bombs to fall near the capital were rocket-assisted, Gaul-manufactured Oliphants. These runway cutters—resembling more narrow pipes with fairings and fins than more traditional ordnance—were released over Arnold Air Base at an altitude of a few hundred feet. They deployed small parachutes behind them which slowed them and also caused them to change angle to about forty-four degrees. Once they reached that angle, at which point the aircraft was long gone, a rocket in the tail fired, driving the bomb down into the concrete or asphalt of the runway. There, because of their narrowness, strength, and speed, they typically penetrated completely.

These did that. Then the larger charge in each of them exploded, creating a large crater and driving a much smaller charge very deep into the earth below the runway. When these exploded, the concrete was lifted up and moved. At that point, repair requirements changed from a few score hours of coolie labor to much, much heavier machinery for a much, much more difficult job.

In short, nobody but maybe a Cricket or Turbo-finch was going to be flying out of Arnold any time soon. Two planes, both Gallic Tourmentes, came back around to give Arnold a more thorough pasting, setting one airship alight, smashing several hangars and two barracks, and generally having a fine time.

With Arnold out, two planes cut left to take out the airfields at Brookings and
Campo de los Sapos
. Two more bore on for Herrera International. There were other airfields around the country, of course. But the six targeted—Cervantes,
Lago Sombrero
, Arnold, Brookings,
Campo de los Sapos
, and Herrera were expected to cripple the Balboans ability to lift the kinds of waves of fighters that had been driving Marciano and his Anglian fighter jock, Squadron Commander Halpence, more or less batshit for quite some time now.

The Oliphants were mounted in clusters of four, with the clusters themselves affixed to the hardpoints. Each of the five aircraft involved in the runway cutting mission carried four clusters. They also carried on their remaining three (or five) hardpoints three (or five) bombs of between a quarter of a ton and a ton and a half. The bombs were satellite guided.

For the bombs, the two planes out to the east of the country, the ones targeted at Cervantes and
Lago Sombrero
, would eventually turn their attention to the buildings at the legion base that fanned out from all four corners formed by the intersection of runway and highway. For now though, the runways needed cutting. This was tougher than it sounded. All of those runways had been designed and built by the Federated States for their much heavier aircraft. They were also longer than the Balboans needed, meant to accommodate heavy transports and bombers rather than nimble little lightweight fighters. This meant that to cut the major airfields, they had to be chopped into sections smaller than the minimum take off run of a Mosaic-D. This meant they had to be cut into sections of five hundred meters or less. For something like
Lago Sombrero
, with its seventeen hundred and thirty-five meter runway, this meant cutting it thrice; once would only have left two perfectly suitable airfields for the Mosaics. Twice would have left two or three.

Legate Thomas Broughton was pigheaded and a prick. Everyone knew it, to include himself. And he was proud of it. Being a prick went with the job: running the legion’s
Escuela de Cazadores,
or Cazador School, a close cognate of the Federated States Army’s Ranger School.

Broughton was also a bit on the short side, though his general prickishness didn’t come from that. If it had, he’d have cheered up immeasurably at being in a country where he was middling tall in comparison. But no, he remained a prick.

Known to Carrera of old, and much appreciated for his qualities, he’d been hired expressly to set up and run the school. He got less credit for it than he deserved, really, since the Cazador School was the very soul of the legion. It was the thing that tied together all of the leadership corps of the legion. It was their sole source value system. It was their moral foundation.

It explained them, everything from their tactical approaches to their training philosophy to their almost incredible bloody-mindedness when it came to casualties.

Broughton didn’t have or want much of a life outside of the school. His joy was in his work. That joy was a little truncated now, since the last graduating class had finished up and departed a week ago. When the school would open up again, no one knew. It couldn’t even really be known
if
it would open up. If Balboa lost the war, clearly it would not.

In the interim, Broughton and the couple of hundred cadre and support troops he had at hand split their time between securing the school, doing the same for First Corps’ base, and conducting security patrolling along the InterColombian Highway, from the thin defensive line facing east, east of the Transitway, to about thirty miles west of the school. Though the school had begun with an entirely FSA cadre, they were almost all Balboan now.

The other cadre groupings, in the deep jungles down in La Palma and the high mountains by Hephaestus, had, in the former case, attached themselves to the
Tercio de los Indios
, and, in the second, to the Fifth Mountain Tercio. They were particularly useful to the latter, by serving as liaisons and advisors to the Lempiran and Valdivian cohorts attached to the Fifth.

Broughton, somewhat resentful at missing out on the major fighting against the TU, was making the best of it now, enjoying the security mission his school had been given. Still, that kind of fun was limited to begin with and became less fun with every increment of acquired routine.

For the nonce, with everything pretty quiet, the legate was tramping across the airfield to his quarters for a richly needed shower and change of uniform. For himself, he didn’t much care about a stench that had long since overwhelmed his sense of smell. He figured he owed it to the troops, though, not to be sending them to hurl every time he walked in a room.