Marching Through Georgia (22 page)

"Let him get into the square," he said. "Anyone opens fire without orders, I'll blast them a new asshole." The positions on the north edge were complete, the first priority, but there was no need to reveal them to deal with light armor like this, and much need to make the enemy commander underestimate the position.

Silently, he thanked a God in which he had not believed since childhood for the ten minutes warning the advantage of height and the position northward beside the road had given. Enough to get the Century and the Circassians under cover; it helped that most of them had been in the cellars, of course.

He could hear the Fritz car now as it entered the village: whine of heavy tires on the gravel, the popping crunch as stones spurted out under the pressure of ten tonnes of armorplate.

Below, in the square, the bodies waited—the thirty dead SS men gunned down in a neat line, and as many others hurriedly stuffed in the jackets of Draka casualties.
Got to let him get a look at it
, Eric thought. He wanted the German commander overestimating the Draka casualties; easy enough to make him think his comrades had taken a heavy blood-price. Not too good a look at those corpses. though—the rest of their uniform was still Fritz, and besides, they were all male. But the view from inside a closed-down turret was not that good.

"Centurion." Marie's voice. "That second car is only two hundred meters out. We could get him with a rocket gun, or even one of the 15mm's."

"After we blast the lead car," Eric said. His voice was tight with excitement; this was better even than catsticking, hunting lion on horseback with lances. And these were enemies you could really
enjoy
fighting. The Italians… that had been unpleasant.

Far less dangerous, but how could you respect men who wouldn't fight even at the doorsteps of their own homes, for their families? It made you feel greasy, somehow. This… if it weren't for the danger to the Century, he would have preferred it; he had long ago come to peace with the knowledge that he would not survive this war.
At least I won't have to live through the
aftermath of it, either
, ran through him with an undercurrent of sadness.

The lead car was in the square. "Position one! Five seconds…

Now
!"

Below, the trooper snuggled the rocket gun into his shoulder.

This was a good position, clear to the back with a good ledge of rubble for the monopod in front of the forward pistol-grip.

Fifteen kilos of steel and plastic was not an easy load to shoulder-fire; still, better than the tube-launchers the more compact recoilless hybrids had replaced. The armored car was clear in the optical sight; no need for much ranging at less than a hundred meters, just lay the crosshairs on the front fender. He squeezed the trigger, twisted and dove back into the safe darkness of the foxhole without bothering to stay and watch the results. He had seen too many armored vehicles blow up to risk his life for a tourist's-eye view.

The 84mm shell kicked free of the meter-long tube with a
whump-fuff
as the backblast stirred a cloud of dust behind the gun. At eighty meters there was barely time for the rocket motor to ignite before the detonator probe struck armor. The shell was slow, low-velocity; even the light steel sheathing of a Puma would have absorbed its kinetic energy with ease. But the explosive within was hollow-charge, a cone with its widest part turned out and lined with copper. Exploding, the shaped charge blew out a narrow rod of superheated gas and vaporized metal at thousands of meters per second; it struck the armorplate before it with the impact of a red-hot poker on thin cellophane. Angling up, the jet seared a coin-sized hole through the plate, sending a shower of molten steel into the fighting compartment. The driver had barely enough time to notice the lance of fire that seared off his body at the waist; fragments of a second later, it struck the fuel and ammunition. Shattered from within, the Puma's hull unfolded along the seams of its welds; to watching eyes it seemed for an instant like a flower in stop-motion film, blossoming with petals of white-orange fire and grey metal. Then the enormous
fumph
sound of the explosion struck, a pressure on skin and eyeballs more than a noise, and a
bang
echoing back from the buildings, an echo from the sides of the mountains above. Steel clanged off stone, pattering down from a sky where a fresh column of oily black smoke reached for the thin scatter of white cirrus above.

The twisted remains burned, thick fumes from the spilling diesel oil. Eric nodded satisfaction. "One 15mm only on the second car!" he barked into the microphone. "See the third off but don't kill him."

Standartenfuhrer Hoth had been listening to the lead car's commentary in a state of almost-trance, his mind filing every nuance of data while he poised for instant action.

"… bodies everywhere, Draka and ours. No sign of movement.

More in the central square; heavy battle damage…

Standartenfuhrer, there are thirty of our men here in front of the mosque, lined up and shotl This… this is a violation of the Geneva Convention!"

For a moment Hoth wondered if he was hearing some bizarre attempt at humour. Geneva Convention? In Russia? On the
Eastern Front
? But there was genuine indignation in the young NCO's voice; what were they
teaching
the replacements these days? Thunder rolled back from the mountains, as the all-too-familiar pillar of smoke and fire erupted from a corner of the square out of his sight.

Schliemann in the second car was a veteran, and so was the Standartenfuhrer's own crew. They reacted with identical speed, reversing from idle in less than a second with a stamp of clutches and crash of gears. The turrets walked back and forth along the line of rubble that had been the northern edge of the village, 20mm shells exploding in white flashes, machine gun rounds flicking off stone with sparks and sharp
ping
sounds that carried even through the crash of autocannon fire. Brass cascaded from the breeches into the turret as the hull filled with the nose-biting acridness of fresh cordite fumes. Speed built; Pumas were reconnaissance cars, designed to be driven rearward in just this sort of situation. And they had come for information, not to fight; the luckless Berger had been a sacrificial decoy duck to draw fire and reveal the enemy positions.

No accident that he had been sent forward, of course. Most of the casualties in any unit were newbies—mostly because of their own inexperience, partly because their comrades, when forced to choose, usually preferred that it was a new face which disappeared. It was nothing personal; you might like a recruit and detest someone you'd fought beside for a year. It was just a matter of who you wanted at your back when the blast and fragments flew.

Hoth kept his glasses up, flickering back and forth to spot the next burst. It came, machinegun fire directed at Schliemann's car. He kicked the gunner lightly on the shoulder: "Covering fire!" he barked.

There was a flash from the rubble, a cloud of dust from the tumbled stones above the machinegun's position. A brief rasping flare of rocket fire, and a shell took Schliemann's car low on the wheel well. The jet of the shaped charge seared across the bottom of the vehicle's hull, cut two axles and blew a wheel away to bounce and skitter across the road before it slammed itself into a tree hard enough to embed the steel rim. The cut axles collapsed and the heavy car pinwheeled, caught between momentum and the sudden drag as its bow dug into the packed stone of the road with a shower of sparks. Other sparks were flying as the 15mm hosed hull and turret with fire; even the incendiary tracer rounds were hard-tipped, and the car's armor was thin. Some rounds bounced from the sloped surfaces; others punched through, to flatten and ricochet inside the Puma's fighting compartment, slapping through flesh and equipment like so many whining lead-alloy bees.

The radio survived. Hoth could hear the shouting and clanging clearly, someone's voice shouting "
Gott-gottgott
—", and Schliemann cursing and hammering at the commander's hatch of the car. The impact had sprung the frames, probably, jamming the hatches shut. That often happened. He could see the first puff of smoke as fuel from the ruptured tanks ran into the compartment and caught fire; hear the frenzied screaming as the crew burned alive in their coffin of twisted metal. It went on as the Standartenfuhrer's command car reversed out of sight of the village, into dead ground farther down the pass. Reaching down, he switched the radio off with a savage jerk and keyed in the intercom.

"Back to Pyatigorsk!" Schliemann had been a good soldier, transferred from the Totenkopf units: a Party man from the street-fighting days, an
alte kampfer
. And his death had bought what they came for—some knowledge of what they faced. Of course, once they overran the Draka in the village there would be more positions farther up. It depended on how many from the division's motorized infantry brigades had been killed, and what sort of counterattack the units to the south were staging. A thought came to him, and his face smiled under its sheen of sweat; the gunner looked around at him, shivered, turned his gaze back to the sighting periscope as the car did a three-point turn and headed down the road.

I
must take prisoners for intelligence about the Draka
fallback positions
, the SS officer thought.
I
will enjoy that. I will
enjoy that very much
.

Eric sighed and lowered his eyes from the trench periscope.

That rocket gunner had been a little impulsive, but the result suited well enough. No way of concealing their presence from the Germans, but he could hope to make them underestimate the position. Whoever the man in that command car was, time was his enemy. The paratroopers only had to hold until the main Draka force broke through to win; the Fritz had to overrun them and all the rest of the legion, in time to pull their forces back and bring up replacements to block the pass. With only a little luck the German would try to take them on the run with whatever he could round up.

"Von Shrakenberg to all units: back to work, people.
Move!"

He
handed the receiver back to Sofie and rolled over on his back; he would be needed to coordinate, to interpret when the Circassians and the Draka reached the limits of their mutually sketchy German. But not immediately; these were Citizen troops, after all, not Janissaries. They were expected to think, and to do their jobs without someone looking over their shoulders.

The mid-morning sky was blue, with a thickening scatter of clouds; they looked closer here in high mountain country than down in the plains about Mosul, where they had spent the winter.

"Hey, Centurion?" Sofie held out the lighted cigarette, and this time Eric accepted it. "More ideas?"

He shook his head. "Just thinking about home," he said. "And about a Greek philosopher."

"Come again?"

"Heraklitos. He said: 'No man steps twice into the same river.'

The home I was remembering doesn't exist anymore, because the boy who lived there is dead, even if I wear his name and remember being him."

"Ah, well, my Dad always said: 'Home is where the heart is.'

Of course, he was a section chief for the railways, so we moved around a lot."

Eric laughed and turned to look over his shoulder at the noncom. "Sofie, you're… a natural antidote to my tendency to gloom."

Sofie's eyes crinkled in an answering grin; she felt a soft lurch in the bottom of her stomach. Jauntily, she touched the barrel of her machine pistol to her helmet. "Hey, any time, Centurion."

The Centurion's gaze had returned to the village and the burning Puma. "While this war does exactly the opposite," he whispered.

The comtech frowned. "Hell, I'd rather be on the beach, surfin'

and fooling around on a blanket, myself.

"That wasn't exactly what I was thinking of," he said softly.

Unwise to speak, perhaps, but…
I'm damned if I'm going to start
governing my actions by fear at this late date
. "If we lose, we'll be destroyed. If we win… what's going to happen, when we get to Europe?"

"The usual?"

Eric shook his head. "Sofie, how many serfs can read?"

She blinked. "Oh, a fair number—'bout one in five, I'd say.

Why?"

"Which ratio worries the hell out of a lot of highly placed people. Most of the places we've taken over have been like this—"

he nodded at the village "—peasants, primitives. If they're really fierce, like the Afghans, we have to kill a lot of them before the others submit. Usually, it's only necessary to wipe out a thin crust of chiefs or intelligentsia; the rest obey because they're used to obeying, because they're afraid, and because the changes are mostly for the better. Enough to eat, at least, and no more plagues. No prospect of anything better, but then, they never
did
have any prospect of anything better. Sofie, what are we going to
do
with the Europeans? We've never conquered a country where everybody can read, is used to thinking. Security—" He shook his head. "Security operates preventively. They're going to go berserk; it's going to be monumentally ugly. And I'm not even sure it will
work
."

The comtech puffed meditatively, trickled smoke from her nostrils. "Never did have much use for the Headhunters," she said. "Keep actin' as if they wished we all had neck numbers."

He nodded. "And it's not just that." His hands tightened on the Holbars. "Killing… it's natural enough; part of being human, I suppose. But too much of it does things. To us, that will hurt us in the long run." He sighed. "Well, at least I won't be there to see it."

"How so?" Sofie's voice was sharper.

Eric snorted weary laughter. "Well, what are the odds on a paratrooper surviving the whole war?"

"Hell," Sofie said, shocked.
This has to stop, and quick
, she thought. It was far too easy to die, even when you wanted to live.

When you didn't…

Surprised, Eric turned: she was standing with her hands on her hips, lips compressed.