The Lotus Eaters (43 page)

To his right front Ustinov saw a line of tracers reach out twice toward the ruins of some large building, then return fire to the house. To Ustinov's left, far past the company commander, two more helicopters swung over after dropping off the platoon charged with sealing off the far side of the main building. They then added their fires at right angles to those of the helicopters that had dropped off the bulk of 12th Company.

Somewhere ahead someone was screaming. Whether it was a woman, which it sounded to be, or a man so badly hurt as to scream like a woman, none of the Volgans could tell. Martinson thought it was a man, and muttered, "I wish someone would put that poor bastard out of his misery."

Ustinov heard a siren wail coming above and to his front, and moving right to left. This was joined and then overwhelmed by a sound like a huge sail being ripped in half by a giant. That was the rattle of multiple, wing-mounted heavy machine guns, firing together. More tracers, red unlike the Volgan's green ones, spattered the area immediately around the house. The cacophony of screams, half pain and half terror, increased.

Turning briefly to look behind him, Ustinov saw Samsonov, now standing upright, calmly walking forward and still speaking into his radio.
Well, he never was much of a one for taking cover
, thought the
praporschik.

The siren returned, this time moving left to right. Rockets exploded against the Hacienda walls, ripping off stucco and shattering glass. Ustinov listened to his radio for a moment, then shouted for his platoon to advance at a walk. Several score Volgan paratroopers stood up and began to trot forward, the steady crackle of their rifle fire preceding them, beating down any possible opposition. Helicopters pulled away and moved to a nearby landing area to await the recall. The Volgan advance slowed only once, to allow the men to fix bayonets.

When the company was about sixty-five or seventy meters from the
hacienda
, the commander gave the preparatory command "Into the assault". Ustinov echoed it. The commander then shouted, "Forward!" With a tremendous cry of "
Urrah
!" the Volgans began to run toward the house, spraying fire from the hip.

* * *

The sound coming from their assailants was terror incarnate. Bombs and bullets might kill, but that "Urrah!" was the sound of cold steel and shrieking death.

"Surrender, Señor. We
must
surrender!" shouted Estevez' deputy, Ernesto, over the firing.

Estevez risked a glance out of a shattered window. He saw a scene from Hell, if Hell were lit by tracers and flares. There was a line of—
What? Soldiers? They look like no police I've ever seen
—running forward. Some paused briefly to use their bayonets on any live bodies or corpses lying on the ground. A burst of fire, probably unaimed, drove Estevez back down behind the cover of the solid wall.

He told his deputy "About a hundred men, big and white. Gringo's."
I should have told that young fool to stay away from the Columbians. Oh, well, a gringo jail is better than dead
.

Still, he hung his head in indecision. After a minute's thought, Estevez spoke again. "Ernesto, tie that doily to the end of your rifle. Here give it to me." Estevez then pushed the end of the rifle out the window shouting, in English, "We give up. Don't shoot." From down stairs came the blast of grenades. The house shook.

My God; what if they're not very interested in prisoners?
Then Estevez remembered a small gift sent to him from Balboa and realized,
My God, what if they
are
interested in prisoners?

Rabble. Just damned rabble
, thought Shershavin. He stood on an open patio outside the target house. From inside the house came the sounds of grenades and automatic weapons fire. At each blast and burst the growing crowd of prisoners shuddered. Shershavin looked them over. There were about twenty-five men, two women, one old, one quite young and pretty, as well as a couple of children. The women and children, along with some of the men, cried unceasingly. They never noticed when the firing stopped.

The movement up the hill from the beach had been easy. It was made easier still by the fact that all of the drug lord's "soldiers"—Shershavin sneered at the misuse of the word—had taken shelter against the rain. Most of these had never known what had killed them. His unit was in position for an assault a full twelve minutes before the Finch assigned to support him was to begin its dive. Shershavin had called on the radio to tell the bomber to hold off until further notice. Then Shershavin had sent two teams of two men to take out the guards. This they had done, silenced sub machine guns coughing. So, when the airstrike on the target on the other side of town had begun, and the rest of this Hacienda's guards had spilled out, they had been met by a scythe of fire from 13th Company's men, already in position around all the exits. The unused Finch had been sent off to support the other half of the company. The mortars by the beach had also been directed to give their support to the other men attacking the other target.

A knot of Volgans pushed three men out onto the patio for Shershavin's inspection. The squad leader reported, "This is the last of them, sir. Found them hiding out in a shelter. Quite fancy it was, too, sir. Like the Red Tsar's own winter palace."

Shershavin consulted his target folder. Yes, there was the picture. "Señor Cortez, I presume?"

When the drug lord attempted to deny, Shershavin simply said, "Don't bother. Now, tell me, who is important to you in this group?"

Cortez just glared.

"I see. Well, everyone you don't identify as important dies anyway. It's up to you." Shershavin shrugged, "All the same to me, really."

Not losing his hate filled expression, Cortez pointed and answered, "These two are my deputy and accountant. None of the others . . . you bastard."

Shershavin ordered the guards squad to take Cortez and the other two to the boat. As they were pushed ahead at bayonet point, some other of the Volgans began to push the male adults still left back toward the house.

Shershavin walked to the remainder, the two women and the children. Leaning down and taking firm control of the older woman's chin, he pointed south and said, "Go. Take other woman and children with you. Now."

* * *

At the beach, Cortez asked, "What will happen to the others? My wife and my two mistresses."

Shershavin didn't answer, but simply looked at his watch, counting, "Five . . . four . . . three . . ."

His counting was interrupted by the half-muffled sound of massed automatic weapons fire and screaming. Some of the screaming sounded distinctly feminine.

"Must have a word with that platoon's commander about the importance of precise timing," said Shershavin, to no one in particular.

Cortez gulped. "You bastards!"

"The price of acts of war which fail to follow the laws of war is reprisal," the Volgan answered. "You should have thought of that."

Later, bound and in a rubber boat heading out to a near rendezvous at sea, Cortez looked back and saw a red glow from the hill which his former residence had dominated. The glow soon became a tower of flames, shooting high into the sky.

The Nabakov NA-23, along with several of its siblings, circled high above and out of convenient earshot of the town. The town, itself, if one could call a place a "town" that had a population of nearly one hundred and forty thousand, was crammed into a narrow valley, at one end of a bad road. It glowed faintly. Most of the shacks of the place lacked electricity. Even for those dwellings that had electrical service, bulbs were generally too expensive to be used wastefully.

Still, the town glowed enough to mark its existence. It didn't matter, in any case. For Carrera and the Volgans he accompanied, the town's sole reason for existence was to mark a reference point for the guerrilla camp situated some miles away.

"Over there,
Duque
," said one of the Balboan pilots, pointing to where a rough airstrip had been hacked from a flat area running along one side of an otherwise steep ridge.

Carrera saw nothing until he lifted his own night vision goggles to his eyes. Then it was clear, or clear enough, in any case. Even as Carrera watched, a single Nabakov approached the rude airstrip for an unscheduled landing.

* * *

Several months prior, two men had been captured by a young Balboan policeman and reservist after those men had detonated a bomb, killing two dozen police and more than twice as many innocent bystanders. Those men had been
rigorously
questioned by Warrant Officer Mahamda, one of Fernandez's chief interrogators.

One of the captives, very early on in his interrogation, had spit on Fernandez and vowed that FNLS, the
Frente Nacional Liberacion Santerdereño,
which was the main Santandern guerrilla group, would avenge him.

Fernandez had not been especially bothered by the spit, it was understandable if foolish. Moreover, a crushed testicle had been more than adequate revenge. Still, he had been extremely intrigued by the idea of a Tsarist-Marxist group dealing with drugs and drug dealers for profit. Interrogation had been intensified. Eventually, as Mahamda had discovered, FNLS, cut off from Volgan and Cienfuegan aid, had been thrown back on its own resources. These had been slim indeed. Just to survive, FNLS had had to do business with
Belalcázar
and even distant Atzlan. Sometimes the guerrilla's provided some combat capability and occasional contract terrorism to various drug dealers. At other times, they provided training for the drug lords personal guards. More importantly, the guerrillas had carved out their own niche in the drug world, primarily moving
huánuco
leaves and semi-refined paste from the wild highlands to the urban producers for further refinement and distribution.

With some effort and a little electricity—and this had eventually caused one of the prisoners to die of cardiac arrest—Mahamda had been able to pinpoint the exact location of the FNLS headquarters for drug shipments.

It had all been rather tricky, really. Unlike most pairs Mahamda had dealt with in his long career as an interrogator, the two captive guerrillas had had a prepared story. Almost they'd succeeded in fooling the Sumeri émigré. Ultimately, it was the completeness of that story that had aroused Mahamda's further suspicions. He'd continued the torture, asking a series of seemingly innocuous but detailed questions, things unrelated to either the bombing or the FNLS that the captives were unlikely to have agreed on before hand. Mahamda had asked things like, "What is your partner's place of birth?" or "His preferred brand of rum?" or "Are both of Juan's parents still alive?" Anguish had followed all non-matching answers until the men had been
trained
to tell the truth for terror of the consequences of being caught in a lie.

The information gained having been brought to Carrera, he had duly entered an FNLS headquarters on his target list. As with every other target on the list, the headquarters was reconnoitered in advance, both by air and by a four man team from 14th
Cazador Tercio
. The latter had penetrated the general area only with great difficulty, but had still managed to return with photos and detailed sketches. Another overflight, only a few days prior, had reported no obvious changes.

* * *

Continuing to scan with his goggles, Carrera confirmed the scouts' report. The local FNLS headquarters was in an expansive villa, a complex rather than a single house, surrounded by a low wall, reinforced with earthen bunkers. It stood some five miles southeast of the town of Florencia, up a tortuous mountain road. The wall was itself protected by a broad barbed wire fence. Nearby, less than a kilometer away, in fact, a fourteen hundred meter dirt airstrip had been laboriously carved out of the mountainside. There was a refueling station on the strip. Usually only a few guards were present. A dirt road led from the strip through jungle and wire, to the villa's gate. Per instructions, the recon team had not attempted to get past the wall.

* * *

Mahamda had managed to extract an estimate of the number of guerillas in the camp and their weaponry. Those admissions by the captives had been confirmed by both aerial and ground recon. The latter had also confirmed that these were not mere bandits but well armed men with something like real training. East of the villa, and further up the slope, was a rifle range, reported as being frequently used. The ground recon team had also reported explosions, some single, some double, which they were reasonably certain were both demolitions' and heavy weapons' training in progress. The comings and goings of groups of armed men suggested to both air and ground recon that there were other units in the general area, but neither recon element had been able to pinpoint the precise location of any of them. They were able to confirm that none were within three or four miles of the villa.

* * *

The tactical problem was a difficult one. Other powers might have been content to drop a number of guided bombs. The Legion had those, and could have delivered them easily enough. The difficulty there was that bombs, even precision guided ones, were not all that effective; not effective enough, in any case, when the objective isn't mere punishment, but massacre. That meant troops had to be landed, and landing troops in the face of one's own aerial bombardment was . . . somewhat dangerous.

It had been a close question and neither Carrera nor Samsonov were entirely confident they'd picked the right answer.

Faced with a more serious fight than generally expected, Carrera had asked Samsonov which was his best rifle company. Samsonov had answered, without hesitation "Number 15. I put all men that transferred from Division Recon Battalion into 15th company. Good boys. Company commander, Chapayev, is young, but talented officer. You met him once."

When, in planning, the question had arisen as to the wisdom of jumping from the C-47s to assault the villa, Samsonov had objected. "In mountains? No. Too high, air too thin, men will fall too fast. Besides, most of us are not trained for parachuting into trees."