Hero (20 page)

"You don't think he'll snap out of it?"

Galil scowled. "I—"

"Shh." Shimon touched an index finger to his earphone with one hand while he pulled his microphone down in front of his lips. "No, Hebron Twenty," he said, his eyes vague and unfocused. "You are not, repeat not, to engage in clearing operations, not until 08:00 at the earliest.

"Slow it down, Ebi, slow it down. Get at least two companies bedded down—dammit, I've already got Sidney covering just that possibility. I want your battalion rested in the morning; smashing down and in through the roofs isn't something for sleepy soldiers. Sidney is going to give them harassing and intermittent fire through the night. You get to take them in the morning, when they're tired out.

"You can do a company-sized reconnaissance in force to the granary, but don't pull a stone soup on me. If you meet any serious resistance, fall back. Yes, you can have five minutes to make your case—but in five minutes. I've got to finish something here." He lifted his gaze. "I'm sorry, Yitzhak, but it turns out I don't have a lot of time for this. I've got a town to secure, and then I've got to duck out for a meeting in the morning. You were saying?"

"I'm not risking anything on Ari Hanavi again. Ever. Non-negotiable, Shimon."

"Everything's negotiable, Captain," Tetsuo Hanavi said, his voice studiously level as he squared off in front of Galil.

"Shut up, Tetsuo," Benyamin Hanavi said, setting a hand against his brother's chest, pushing him back. "But please, Uncle, don't write Ari off."

"There's another option." Shimon Bar-El's thin lips quirked into a smile. "I've got a friend, a brigade commander, who's been having a spot of trouble on the northern flank. Way I read the situation, he needs either one," Shimon held up a finger, "a hell of a good company commander, or, two," another finger, "a sacrificial lamb wearing captain's bars."

Galil kept the disgust off his face. You don't solve a problem by sending the messenger out to get shot up. That's been out of fashion since King David.

"I don't know if you've noticed, Shimon, but I'm worn to all hell," Galil said. "What I don't need is a foreign command; what I do need is a hot shower and about three days in a bed that isn't made of stones, shit and dirt. And I swear we'd better settle the Ari matter before you reassign me."

Bar-El allowed himself a brief chuckle. "You're missing the point. Effective five minutes from now, I want you back in charge of RHQ company and straightening out the mess at the TOC. Yeah, you're a good company commander, but I don't have any spare good company commanders—so we give him a sacrificial lamb: Ari."

"You're getting tricky again—" Galil started to say.

"I want the family to have a hero," Tetsuo said. "Live or dead."

"Who's going to make sure he doesn't fuck up?"

"I will," Tetsuo Hanavi said quietly. "Family matter, Yitzhak."

Galil believed him, but he couldn't help adding, "No deal. I don't trust you not to cover for him. I want somebody else in on it, somebody I trust."

Natan Horowitz walked in. "He's right, Shimon. You need somebody trustworthy."

"How long have you been listening?" Shimon Bar-El asked.

Horowitz shrugged. "Long enough to know that Yitzhak's right. You need to send somebody with Ari, to make sure he doesn't fuck up—not successfully fuck up, if you catch my meaning."

Galil decided that he was too damn tired; he hadn't even heard Horowitz walk in.

"You?" Bar-El raised an eyebrow.

Horowitz shook his head. "I've got to figure out how we clear this town for you, and in case you didn't notice, cleaning out a town is tricky. Speaking of which, you're needed—Sidney's on the line again."

"Three minutes?"

"Don't make it four." Horowitz turned and walked away.

"Me, I'll make sure Ari doesn't fuck up," Benyamin Hanavi said quietly. "I talked you into giving him a second chance."

Shimon Bar-El snorted. "It doesn't matter what you talked me into. It's my regiment, Benyamin, and my responsibility."

"Not you, Sergeant." Galil shook his head. "You're too soft on him."

Bar-El nodded. "I'm not about to send out two Hanavi brothers to watch over a third. And if not you, Benyamin, then who?" He glanced down at his thumbnail watch. "You've got thirty seconds, and then I have to get back to work."

"Let it be Dov," Benyamin said, his face grim as though he'd just passed a death sentence.

Dov's broad face was impassive. He might almost have not been there.

Shimon Bar-El raised an eyebrow. "Done. Now, the two of you, get the hell out of here; I've got work to do. Tetsuo, you explain the swindle to Ari."

"You want to reconsider that, Uncle?" Tetsuo asked. "You're going to be part of it anyway—this is Giacometti, remember? He's not going to do any favors for me or anybody else."

"Right." Bar-El frowned. "There's no shooting going on around Jocko's CP—so that asshole Zuchelli will be sticking his nose in it. Okay, give me an hour to get this regiment set up for the night, then bring the poor bastard in and I'll give him the bad news. We'll deliver him to Jocko in the morning. That is
all
, gentlemen."

Shimon Bar-El walked out of the kitchen, Dov falling into place behind him.

PART THREE

ASSAULT

CHAPTER 13

Promotion

It was the only time that Ari had ever been alone with his Uncle Shimon.

"It's very simple," Shimon Bar-El said. "I need to swap favors with an old friend of mine, and you're it." He idly sketched a map in the dust on what probably had been a baker's table. "Main assault is along here, but the Casas are expecting a . . . Freiheimer counter-stroke anywhere along here. Doesn't much matter where. If they can have the lines fluid and choppy when the truce starts, they can dicker with the TW busies and win by negotiation what they can't by force.

"Minor sore spot is
here
.
The town, call it Anchorville, sits just on our side of the military crest of this ridgeline, which means that it'll be a nice place to put some arty—if we can own it. What with other commitments, though, there just aren't enough free forces in that sector to stomp in and take it, which is why an old friend of mine has been reduced to sending the same company up against it, again and again."

Shimon Bar-El shrugged. "Way I figure it, it's a morale problem. If we give them a magic Metzadan miracle-worker to lead them, they just might be able to take the town. Or, at the very least, give the Freiheimer defenders reason to panic and divert, say, a battalion of reinforcements.

"Then again, maybe not. Maybe they'll just blow him and that ratty-ass Casa company into bloody little chunks."

He handed Ari a sheaf of flimsies. "So . . . instead of kicking your ass out of the Metzadan Mercenary Corps, we're brevetting it up to captain. Do a good job, and I'll see what I can do for you. Now, all we have to do is sell the idea to the Casas—including that asshole Zuchelli."

He patted Ari on the shoulder. "As of tomorrow, you're an officer. For tonight, you'd better get some sleep, boy. You're going to need it."

The reassembled Kelev One didn't have any formal assignment, not yet, but they had been billeted in the basement of the house next to the operations center. By some standards it was crowded, but it didn't feel that way: Ari had a gloriously roomy three-by one-meter sleeping area on the concrete floor all to himself, a soft, firm, sleeping pad underneath him—and no rocks to torture him.

But he couldn't sleep. Every time he closed his eyes, all he could see was that Freiheimer's face in front of him, and he couldn't shoot, he couldn't pull the trigger.

Buck fever, they called it. Just another form of cowardice.

He heard Benyamin turn over.

"Can't sleep?" Benyamin whispered.

"No."

Lavon turned over and glared at the two of them, but then went back to sleep.

"Here." Smiling, Benyamin held out a white tablet. "Take this."

"What is it?" Ari asked. It looked like—

"Morphine. Just a sleepy dose—I'll stick a naloxone needle in you in the morning if you're still groggy." Benyamin shrugged. "Worked for me in the OP."

"I—never mind." Ari had asked Galil, and had been ordered not to take drugs. To hell with it. He swallowed the tablet dry.

Benyamin's whispered chuckle was warm in the dark. "I know: you asked Galil if you could. I didn't. Like the Sergeant says, it's always easier to get forgiven than to get permission. 'Night, little brother. Do us proud."

Sleep was a long, black, warm thing, punctuated and terminated by the prick of a needle.

CHAPTER 14

Assignment

Hanging by the neck from the improvised gallows, the captain's corpse turned slowly in the early morning breeze. It wasn't a pretty sight, and it wasn't a pleasant smell. His fatigues hadn't been spotless to begin with; his sphincters, in his last moments, had relaxed in the mindless reflex that tries to make all animals less tasty to the predators that bring them down.

Ari doubted that the particular predators who had brought the captain down cared much about how tasty he was. The Casalinguese army's Loyalty Detachment was cannibalistic, but only metaphorically.

As they passed the gallows, General Shimon Bar-El paused at the steps of the former schoolhouse that High Colonel Giacometti was using as his brigade command post. He gestured at Major Zuchelli, Tetsuo, Dov and Ari to precede him, pointedly ignoring both Elena D'Ancona and Zuchelli's two Distacamento Fedeltà sergeants.

Ari had hoped to get a few moments alone with Elena, but that hadn't happened, and wasn't likely to. She had nodded pointedly at his bars, and when Shimon had mentioned that Ari's captaincy was a brevet, she had smiled broadly enough to earn a glare from Zuchelli.

Halfway up the steps, Shimon stopped and turned to stare at the body for a moment before he turned to Ari, a momentary frown quirking across his leathery lips.

His eyes always bothered Ari. Not because he had the epicanthic folds that should go with a Nipponese name like Tetsuo's. The problem was that Shimon's eyes saw too much. Right now, they were looking at a seventeen-year-old boy pretending to be something he wasn't, a phony in more ways than the obvious one of wearing the triple bars of a captain on his shoulders.

But that wasn't special. Anybody could have seen that Ari was just playing officer, that he was a coward, a failure.

"Ari, do you know what bothers me about death?" Shimon Bar-El asked, his eyes searching Ari's, maybe for a sign that this time Ari wouldn't fuck up, that somehow he would find the inner resources to do the right thing, or at least get himself killed trying to do the right thing.

Ari didn't say anything at first; he couldn't answer the unasked question, and the spoken one didn't matter. Then he decided that it couldn't hurt to answer: Shimon Bar-El was always tolerant of subordinates misunderstanding him; he said that it was his fault, not theirs.

"No, sir," Ari said.

Shimon clicked his tongue against his teeth. "It's undignified, death is," he said. "Horribly, dreadfully, uncontrollably undignified." He shook his head sadly. "What do you think, Ari? Do you think that Captain Tommasino has learned his lesson?"

"Tommasino?" Ari's voice almost broke.

Shimon jerked a thumb at the gallows. "Tommasino. He commanded F Company. Until yesterday, Captain Hanavi." His uncle smiled genially at the brand new triple bars on Ari's shoulders. "Correct, Zuchelli?"

"Major Zuchelli." The Casalinguese scowled, touching at his bristly mustache; the DF officer had a face like a ferret. "And you seem to disapprove, General Bar-El."

"I do, at that."

"Captain Tommasino declined to order his company to attack the enemy, General," Zuchelli said, raising his voice. "Is pusillanimous conduct in the face of the enemy encouraged in the Metzada Mercenary Corps?"

Shimon didn't answer the Distacamento de la Fedeltà officer as he dipped two fingers into a pocket of his khakis, coming out with a brown, half-crumpled tabstick. He flicked it to life with his thumb and stuck it between his lips.

"No," he finally said, watching the body dangle. "No, it isn't encouraged, at that." He turned to Tetsuo. "What do you think, Tetsuo?"

"About the hanging? I think it's a good idea to hang a man for refusing to make a worn-out company engage in a futile attack." Tetsuo nodded soberly. "A wonderful idea, sir. I am sure that Tommasino will never do it again."

"Dov?"

"I agree, Uncle Shimon." Master Private Dov Ginsberg didn't bother to keep a twisted grin off his ugly face. "That will teach him."

"Pour encourager les autres,"
Elena D'Ancona put in, very seriously, even though her voice seemed to tremble at the edges. "Orders must be obeyed."

"Or is the concept unfamiliar to you?" Zuchelli asked. The Distacamento de la Fedeltà major hitched one thumb under his glossy leather belt and stroked at his three-day beard with his free hand. The scraggly beard was clearly an affectation: Zuchelli's mustache was neatly trimmed, and his nails were recently manicured.

Tetsuo shrugged. "I don't understand. Why did he decline to attack? Just to give the DF pigs practice in hanging someone? Not that they did a decent job." He spat, more in contemplation than in disgust. "See how straight the head is? If you hang them right, the drop is supposed to snap the neck; this one was strangled. Very sloppy."

Zuchelli and his baby-faced junior bodyguard glared at him, but neither of them said anything. Zuchelli's senior bodyguard, a fortyish sergeant with a well-scarred face, suppressed a smile; not all Distacamento de la Fedeltà personnel are Distacamento de la Fedeltà types.

Elena caught Tetsuo's grin and, perhaps deciding that he was just kidding, returned his smile.

"Maybe," Shimon said, "he just got tired of seeing men die for nothing, watching them carved into bloody pulp by autogun fire and artillery barrages."

The MPs at the table just inside the archway at the top of the steps had been eyeing them and each other.

Ari figured the private was debating with himself whether or not offworld officers' uniforms necessitated a salute. The MP's immediate superior, a corporal with a DF brassard on his left arm to balance the MP one on his right, smiled in self-satisfaction and took out his notebook as though he was going to make a note to report the private for insubordination if he didn't salute or for suspected disloyalty if he did.