The Lotus Eaters (44 page)

Those were sound objections. "Assault landing?" Carrera had asked.

"Think best," Samsonov had answered. "One plane to secure strip, then others follow."

"Hmmm," Carrera had wondered aloud, "how do we keep the local guards from shooting up the plane as it lands?"

"That is only question of deciding which Kosmo humanitarian activist organization works most closely with Santandern guerillas," Samsonov had answered. "Maybe Red Cross."

Thus, instead of jumping, one plane would go in first, marked with the insignia of the Red Cross, to secure the landing strip and fuel facilities.

* * *

That first, falsely-marked plane landed with only the airfield guards to witness. The guards hadn't been expecting a flight but in any guerilla movement coordination and information sharing tends to be problematic. Still, the guards began to walk over to enquire as soon as the plane rolled to a stop.

A side door flow open. From it emerged four Balboans from the 14th
Tercio,
all dressed in mufti. Two of the Balboans called out greetings in Spanish and walked toward the three guards running to meet them. The two others, doing a fair imitation of the universal "pee pee dance," trotted to the far side of the airfield as if to relieve themselves. Half disappearing below the lip of the airstrip, the latter two made motions as if loosening their clothes. Instead of penises, however, silenced Pound sub-machineguns were pulled out. The eyes of those two followed their comrades closely as those comrades neared the FNLS guards.

"What the fuck are you guys doing here now?" the chief of the Santandern guards asked. "I've got no word of any flight coming in and I know for a fact we don't have enough leaf or paste on hand to justify using one of these to take out what we do have.

The Balboan shook his head. "Ain't that just like the fucking Committee?" he asked. "Nobody tells nobody nothin'. We're carrying shit in, not bringing it out."

"Shit?" the Santandern asked.

"Serious shit," the Balboan said. "Ammunition, some guns—some
heavy
guns—mortar shells, explosives, and a couple of crates worth of uniforms and field gear." All of which was, technically, true. So what if the uniforms weren't actually
in
crates? They would have filled a couple of crates easily enough.

"No shit?"

"No shit. Estevez, over in
Belalcázar,
made a deal with the Committee. He provides the shit; you guys smash the Balboan Embassy."

"Ohhh. That makes some sense then." The FNLS guard leader agreed. "Need help unloading it?"

The entire time the two parties,
Cazadors
and airfield guards, had been walking closer to each other. At a range of under six feet the two Balboans drew silenced, large caliber, pistols, with cartridges loaded down to be subsonic. The Santanderns barely had time to register shock and surprise before the muzzles flashed and their heads and chests were ruined by bullets that broke up upon hitting flesh or bone to create great swaths of destruction inside human bodies.

The senior of the
pistoleros
spoke a code word into a small radio masquerading as an earpiece. At the word, the second pair of Balboans ran to the little shack that housed the rest of the guards. Civilized men, they tried the door to the shack first and found it open. Gripping their silenced Pound submachine guns, the Balboans walked in and began methodically spraying the reclining men inside. They killed them all, quickly and silently, then went from body to body, shooting each one in the head, once, to make sure.

Meanwhile, back at the Nabakov, the rear ramp dropped and Chapayev's men bustled out and then ran to take positions around the airfield. The Balboans, leaving responsibility for the field to the Volgans, had returned to the Nabakov to await Carrera's arrival. Even without orders from their commander, they intended to wait for Carrera and guard him when he landed.

Crouching by the ramp, under the light of the moons Eris and Bellona, Chapayev saw the
Cazadors
approach. He kept his rifle on them until they were close enough to recognize. Then he rested his rifle and picked up the radio transmitter to order the rest of the company in.

* * *

Overhead and at a distance, the gunnery officer of the one supporting Nabakovs modified to the gunship role scanned the ground through his thermal cameras. The gunner's face was lit green by the glow of his screen. To Chapayev, through an interpreter, he reported, "No armed men outside the villa walls. There are three laying down on the strip—"

"Those are dead," Chapayev interrupted.

"I figured that, Tribune. I see your men forming perimeter around the strip—"

"Forget the strip. We control that."

"Fair enough," the gunner agreed. "Besides, those infrared chemical lights your men are placing are making the thing a little confusing.

"The villa's got a dozen men I can see manning the walls. The whole thing's surrounded by bunkers I can't see into, though I can tell you that at least some of them—mostly the corner ones—are manned."

"Give me the numbers of the ones you're sure are manned," Chapayev said. The gunner began calling them off while the Volgan made notes on his sketch of the place. By the time the gunner had finished his report, the first of the main body of troop carrying Nabakovs was reversing thrust on the airstrip, raising a cloud of dirt large and thick enough to blot out the hurtling moons overhead.

* * *

Carrera was in the first main body Nabakov to land. Before beginning his descent, the pilot had peremptorily ordered him back to his seat and to buckle in.

"This is going to suck like you wouldn't believe,
Duque
," the pilot had shouted back, as Carrera buckled himself in, in the forward-most, starboard-side, seat next to Menshikov. "Would be hard to control it with your body plastered across the windscreen."

Carrera felt a sudden drop as the pilot reduced power to the propellers. Next came a lurching bounce as the first wheel touched down, followed by another. Carrera was forced to his right, and Menshikov against him, as the pilot reversed thrust on the propellers to slow the plane. Whether the pilot screwed up the timing, or a landing wheel had found a soft spot, or the great god, Murphy, had touched the plane with his evil finger, the thing began slewing its tail to the right. That was bad enough, but when Carrera twisted his head to look out the small porthole window he saw through a great cloud of dust that the right side wing seemed to be trying to dig itself into the dirt of the airstrip.

We're going to die
, Carrera thought.
The wing will dig in; the plane will flip; we'll flip and then slide upside down until we crash into the first one. Then it's fire and death.

Well, with luck we won't survive until the fire.

Goodbye, Lourdes. I'm going to miss you.

* * *

Up in the cockpit the pilot fought frantically with his controls. He managed to get the plane pointed in the right direction, only to discover that he'd overcompensated as the tail began to swing to the left.

Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! We're gonna die. And I can't see
shit!

* * *

The moons' light glowed off of the cloud of dust, provided just enough illumination for Chapayev to see the front of the incoming plane, wreathed in dust and twisting left and right as the pilot fought for control.

That's the
duque's
plane. Samsonov will
kill
me if it crashes.

* * *

It could have gone either way. As it went, the left side landing wheel hit another soft spot. This was just enough to nudge the plane to an inclination the pilot could deal with. Slightly. Sort of. In the few seconds of proper orientation the plane slowed a little. This gave the pilot a little more control over the wild swinging of the fuselage. A little more control helped him slow the plane a bit more and reduce the oscillation. That gave him . . .

* * *

"I think I shit myself," the pilot said to his copilot.

"No 'think' about it," the copilot answered. "I
did
shit myself."

Both men, trembling like leaves in a strong wind, peered through the windscreen and the thinning cloud of dust at the first plane to have landed, sitting no more than a dozen meters to their front.

Behind them, the paratroopers and Carrera bustled out of the side door. There wasn't time to fuck with lowering the ramp.

* * *

As his feet his the soft ground, Carrera was met by a pale Chapayev and four civilian clad Balboan
Cazadors
.

Carrera's first words to the Volgan were, "I don't know if the pilot fucked up or if the airstrip is fucked up. No matter. I want these planes bunched at the other end of the strip, and manually turned around to face where they came from. Now! Before another goddamned Nabakov tries to land!"

Civilization is not coequal with aesthetics, however many people who consider themselves civilized may tacitly insist that it is a matter of aesthetics and nothing but. Nor must what we like to think of as civilized conduct be universal or eternal. Indeed, there has never been any such civilization except in the sophomoric pipedreams of the willfully ignorant.
Aztec priests cut the living hearts from captives. The Aztecs were highly civilized. Old Rome's Crassus crucified over six thousand rebellious slaves along Rome's Appian Way. Rome, too, was civilized.
On the frontiers of that Old Earth empire, or along those of the Chinese Empire, when facing the barbarians, barbaric conduct was the required norm. Inside those empires, when dealing with their home grown barbarians and criminals, barbaric punishments were the preferred norm.
On our own planet, when faced with the barbarism of fanatical Salafi nomads, those nomads were treated as barbarically as they had treated others.
This is not a flaw of civilization, nor even a feature. It is a necessary pre-condition for the maintenance of civilization. Civilization must meet barbarism and either convert it, destroy it, contain it, or terrorize it into submission or withdrawal. This is so, among other reasons, because barbarism is the natural state of mankind, the state to which man gravitates on his own and has the hardest time rising from.

—Jorge y Marqueli Mendoza,
Historia y Filosofia Moral
,
Legionary Press, Balboa,
Terra Nova, Copyright AC 468

Female mosquitoes buzzed outside the protective net, slamming themselves repeatedly into the gauze, following their instinctive drive to obtain a blood meal for the fertilization of their eggs. Further away, fearful of approaching the camp, antaniae, Terra Nova's genengineered winged reptiles, cooed softly.
Mnnbt, mnnbt, mnnbt
. Through the torn screen of a glassless window, the diffuse moonlight of Eris and Bellona illuminated the sweat-sheened breasts of a young, sleeping girl.

Comandante Victorio rested his head on one arm, admiring the sleeping form next to him, breasts bare to his gaze in the night's heat and glowing with the moons' light filtering through the windows.

So young, so idealistic, so pretty
, thought Victoria
. Above all, so easy to convince that even
this
was for the revolution
. He smiled at the remembrance of the first seduction of Elpidia, the sleeping girl.

Victorio had himself been just so naive and idealistic. That, however, had been many years ago. Recruited by FNLS as a university student in
Belalcázar, two
dozen years before, Victorio had been enthralled by the by then well-established Cienfuegan Revolution, as he had been by the more recent and still tenuous victory for the Cause in Cocibolca, east of Balboa.

At first, before his broader talents were recognized, Victorio had been used as a rabble rouser, leading many student protests. Then, after a period of observation, testing, and review, once it was known that his ideological purity was unquestionable and his leadership ability high, he had been transferred to a field unit of the movement.

Twenty-one years in the bush,
Victorio mentally snorted.
Twenty-one years and those peasant pigs never rallied to us. Twenty-one wasted years, while the government hunted us like rabbits. Bastards! Using us for little more than training aids for officer cadets. Aiaiai . . . and we had been so
close
for a while, too.

Victoria tore his eyes from Elpidia's gently rising breasts and lay his own head back on his thin pillow.

And then the Red Tsar was lynched in Saint Nicholasburg. Soon Cienfuegos could afford no more aid. Annam being cozying up to the imperialists. Cocibolca couldn't hold.

We tried to use drugs to continue to finance the revolution. The cartels fought us, and we lost. Well,
almost
lost. Too many heroes who, it turned out, could be bought. More ruthlessness than the Army showed; the cartels went after families. Finally, at great cost, we have our own little piece of the trade. And, of course, the odd paid mission from the cartels.

Oh, we still spout talk of revolution, ushering in the rule of the people, all that bullshit. Some of the young ones, like this little thing with her breasts so provocatively exposed, still believe. Not me, not any longer. I am happy with enough to be able to eat regularly for a change, and to have a place to sleep out of the rain. Everything else is just icing.

Victorio rolled over to go to sleep. As he did he heard a commotion from beyond the wall. He listened carefully for a moment. The watch was saying something about airplanes. The guerilla chieftain cursed softly, then arose to investigate. The girl, thus awakened, began to rise, herself, before her lover pushed her back gently to the bed.

"It's probably nothing," he told her. "Rest."

At the leather-hinged door Victorio stopped momentarily to listen. He heard no airplanes, precisely, though there was what he thought might be the sound of an unfamiliar engine.
Well, they've probably already landed. They? No, more likely one; these mountain walls do odd things to sounds.

Victorio walked briskly, Volgan-designed rifle held in one hand, to the building that in a regular army would have been called something like the "orderly room."