Pantheocide

Chapter Fifteen

Border Post 1147E, North of Maesot, Thailand

Being part of the Tahan Phran militia had its advantages. Having the opportunity to operate this border post was one of them. Technically intended to provide border surveillance and cut down on cross-border infiltration, it was also a nice little money-earner for the local militia. It was a secure, well-run stopping point for travellers and tourists who could leave their cars and trucks and walk around in perfect safety. The women from the nearby village came up and cooked food for the visitors. When a bus load of tourists arrived, it was a great day for everybody involved. The tourists would take delight in eating real Thai food, not the bland approximation that most restaurants catering to tourists served. They would buy the jewelry and souvenirs that the local people had made, take advantage of the clean latrines and wash basins, paying a purely nominal charge of course and quite forgetting that what would have been a nominal charge in Bangkok was truly exorbitant out here. Especially since all the necessary supplies were issued cost-free by the Army.

There were even a few guest huts where people could stay overnight if they wished and that was both another source of income and the supply of some more basic entertainment. The Tahan Phran contingent was mostly comprised of young men in their early twenties, fit and well turned-out. The younger European women in the tourist busses seemed to find them quite irresistible and the arrival of a tourist bus for the night usually meant that at least one of the young militiamen would get lucky. The girls in the Tahan Phran outfit might have been expected to object but they had their own suitors. It seemed that the male tourists found girls who handled guns with nonchalant competence equally irresistible.

Captain Momrajong “Lon” Thongtaem smiled happily at the stray thoughts, then continued his inspection of the border post perimeter. Despite the various distractions of the day, the post had continued to function as a military base, sending out patrols to check the border and establishing road blocks so that trucks could be inspected for contraband. Sometimes drugs, sometimes people, sometimes just the small luxuries of life that were commonplace here in Thailand but unknown over the border in Myanmar. Smuggling was a well-established local tradition here. Now dusk had fallen, the need for an alert status had increased. Lon knew that the serious smugglers only moved at night and keeping them under control meant night patrol work. Fortunately, no tourist busses were staying overnight in 1147E today and the local villagers had all gone home. That meant the base was a purely military facility once more.

“Any sign of movement out there Kip?” Like most Tahan Phran outfits, the members of this unit had grown up together and knew each other far too well for military formality to take hold.

Sergeant Charnvit “Kip” Chachavalpongpun frowned. “I don’t think so Lon.” He hesitated. “Nothing I can put my finger on but…”

“I know. Something’s out there. I can sense it too.” Lon joined his sergeant in frowning. One of the advantages the Tahan Phran had over the regular army was that they were locals who knew the area intimately. They knew the jungle, understood its moods, could listen to it when it tried to speak to them. The regulars couldn’t have that level of local knowledge. Now, the jungle was telling them that there were strangers around.

“You think there’s Baldricks coming?” The sergeant spoke quietly but the concern in his voice was obvious. The Tahan Phran still had 5.56mm M16A1s, weapons that were virtually useless against the Baldricks. Units in the cities had the heavy-caliber weapons that were more suitable for that kind of enemy.

“Not Baldricks, no.” Lon peered out into the darkness. “Those attacks are over. Might be angels, but I haven’t heard of them launching marauder raids.”

“Thai Rath had news today, said the Myanmar mob were moving troops around.” The sergeant read the Thai Rath newspaper daily, not least because his wife had been killed in a car crash about 18 months earlier and he was watching the daily list of Thai people freed from the Hellpit. Once day, her name would be there and he could go to welcome her back.

“So I saw. I’d be happier if we had a back-up force to help us.” That had always been the case in the past, usually a cavalry outfit with light armored cars that could move to help the militia out if an action turned out too big for them. But both cavalry divisions, along with Thailand’s only armored division, were in Hell, part of the Human Expeditionary Army. “But the nearest reserve is in Kanchanaburi and they’d take hours to get here. Get some of the boys together, send them out to do a sweep along the river. Might be a big drug convoy is coming over and we’re in the way.”

The Sergeant nodded and turned away to organize a squad-sized patrol. It was possible a big drug shipment was being smuggled over and that meant the post would come under attack to stop them interfering. The only problem was that there had been no such shipments for two years or more. It was whispered that the Myanmar Junta had a huge new customer who was taking all the street corner pharmaceuticals they could produce. As he turned, over in the tree-line beyond the post perimeter, a flock of birds took to the skies, screaming in protest at the interruption of their nightly rest. Sergeant and Captain looked at each other with their eyes widened in recognition of what the disturbance signified, the Lon’s hand smacked the alert button. The wail of the ‘to arms’ siren almost drowned out the whistle of the descending mortar rounds.

Whoever the mortar crews were, they were good. The first salvo of rounds crashed into the barracks area, shattering the timber buildings and setting the ruins ablaze. By the light of the fires, Lon saw the men and women of his unit scattering to their pre-set defense positions on the perimeter. The warning had been adequate, just, to get most of them out of the barracks but he could see from the numbers that some hadn’t made it and that his little force had already been depleted. Then the ground shook under his feet as further salvos of mortar rounds struck home. His command post had been one of the targets of the latest barrage and he saw it crumpling under the impacts. Even worse, the radio shack was also a burning ruin. Border Post 1147E was isolated from help.

Lon knew something else, the mortar fire was too precise, too accurate for this to be a normal border incident. The troops out there were Myanmar Army regulars. Not just regulars but troops from one of the few really competent units in the Myanmar Army. Most Myanmarese units were a joke, a ‘battalion’ might be as few as twenty men, armed with light infantry weapons, and with a few porters to carry their supplies. This unit was different, they knew what they were doing, were here in strength and had a full complement of weaponry. As if to confirm his impression, the whole post area was suddenly bathed in brilliant light. The mortars had switched to firing flares, illuminating their targets while the surrounding jungle remained in darkness. The crackle of machine gun fire from his defenses just confirmed what he already knew, the main attack was just starting.

The damage to his command post was as bad as he had feared. He had taken a few seconds to run over to it but the building was gone. His radio operator was dead, stretched out over her equipment, her body torn by the fragments from the mortar round. The professional part of his mind told Lon that there was hope here, she had been killed while on the air, it was possible that a warning of the assault and a plea for help had gone out in time. The personal part of his mind was shut down, only later would he mourn the death of a girl he had known since her earliest schooldays.

Out on the perimeter, the Tahan Phran militia were blinded by the flare illumination of their border post. The white light had destroyed their night vision and the surrounding jungle was an impenetrable black shadow lit only by the muzzle flashes of the Myanmarese troops as they started their assault. There was a solution to this problem though, a well-established ones. The Thai militia had pre-set firing lines worked out for their machine guns, ones that didn’t need individual targets to be sighted but simply covered the approaches to the camp in a web of gunfire. The machine gunners swept their guns along the preset marks, spraying the advancing Myanmar infantry with fire and forcing them to ground.

Lon guessed that the commander of the Myanmar force had expected the initial mortar barrage to catch the defenses unprepared so that a hasty attack could be into the defense perimeter before the Tahan Phran unit could react. It had almost worked but not quite and the difference was great. With the Myanmar infantry pinned down in the ground between the jungle edge and the border post perimeter, he would have to do things the slow way. The Thai gunners had revealed their positions in beating off that first wave, now the Myanmar troops retaliated by firing rocket launchers at those positions. Of course, that had been expected, and the gunners had shifted to alternate positions but the slow process of dismantling the border post defense had started.

In the end, it took almost four hours and by the end of the fighting, eleven of the twenty five Tahan Phran militia were dead and most of the survivors were wounded. A crippling loss for a unit that was taken from a small village and one that left that village with all too high a proportion of its children lost. Lon regrouped the survivors outside the ruins of Border Post 1147E and led them as they slipped away into the jungle. His unit had done what was expected of it, they had held an enemy assault for a few precious hours and that was enough, for now.

Headquarters, Human Expeditionary Army. Hell

“Good evening General. You got the warning then?”

“Yes Sir, we did. May I ask how you knew? The warning from here actually beat the messages from our front-line units.”

“One of the early casualties was a militia radio operator. She demanded we get a warning out as soon as she arrived here. Fortunately, the receiving staff at the Phelan Plain were on the ball and they got the message to us and we got the message to you. Now, can the HEA offer your country assistance at this point?”

“General Petraeus, it is with deep regret that I must ask for the five Thai divisions here to be released back to Thai command. They are our strategic reserve and we need them badly to defeat this invasion.”

Petraeus walked over to the massive display screen that dominated one wall of his office. A few seconds playing with the controls threw up a map of the Thai border with Myanmar, a few seconds more highlighted the area of the fighting. It extended along almost a hundred kilometers of the border. Petraeus stared at it for a few seconds, absorbing the tactical reality of the situation on the ground.

“General Asanee, your forces are part of the Human Expeditionary Army. That means your fight is our fight. Just how deep a penetration has been achieved by this attack?”

General Asanee shuffled her feet in slight embarrassment. “At this time, I don’t know Sir. The reports we are getting from the area are pretty confused.” She paused slightly and drew her breath. “To be honest Sir, the command staff at Kanchanaburi are not the best we have. Most of our best people are here in Hell, the rest are in the south where we had that separatist problem. The border with Cambodia had the next call and Kanchanaburi got what was left.”

“You need to straighten that out.” Petraeus’s voice was mild but the rebuke was obvious. “You have the authority to make decisions? What does the civilian government have to say?”

“The Prime Minister is my cousin Sir. It’s more a question of family relationships than military-civil authority and my cousin and I get on very well. But, Sir, I must insist we have our five divisions back.”

“You have a nice, well-balanced corps there. One heavy armored division, two light armored divisions and two mechanized infantry divisions. You believe this is adequate to repel this invasion?”

“I do sir. Obviously, the command staff at Kanchanaburi will need replacing.”

“Of course.” Petraeus zoomed the map in. “Kanchanaburi is the key, it’s a major road and rail junction and gives direct, well-built roads right into the heart of the country.”

“I agree Sir, it’s a standard teaching problem at Chulachomklao. Kanchanaburi is the key to the defense of the Myanmar frontier. We’ve got to hold it. The problem is, all we have there is light infantry, we need the armor and even now it’s a question of whether we can get it there fast enough. We have to assemble the units, get them out of the Hellgate and then ship them back. It’ll take a week, ten days more likely. The Myanmar Army is on foot and our people will be fighting all the way but the timing is still off. We may end up having to counter-attack to retake Kanchanaburi before we can do anything else. That will be bloody.”

“General, why should it take that long? We’re in Hell, remember? We can punch a portal through from here to anywhere we want. All we need is a sensitive on the other end. That’s why we’ve got the Human Expeditionary Army here in Hell, we’ve got interior lines to any point on Earth. When this army is complete, we can open a gate to wherever Yahweh, or whoever else we end up fighting, wants to take us and hit him with every mechanized unit most of the world can put together. When this Army is finished, we’ll have 625 divisions, living humans, deceased humans, daemons ready to defend Earth and Hell against anything that can be thrown at us.

“So, your divisions can be wherever you want them, as soon as you want them there. You have sensitives still in Thailand, even after the First Bowl. Get them where you need the troops. At this end, you’ve got lucky, kitten’s here and she’s the best sensitive around. She’s visiting some friends of hers in the deceased special forces so we can get her here within an hour or two.” Petraeus winced slightly, personally he liked kitten but military customs and formalities hadn’t caught up with one of his key staff members being led around on a leash by her boyfriend. It caused protocol problems.

General Asanee was staring at the map. “You knew this was going to happen didn’t you?”

“This particular attack? Not quite, no. But it was obvious that something of the sort would happen all too soon. The Curb Stomp War proved that nothing in Hell, well, almost nothing, can stand against us in a head-on fight. Since Heaven and Hell were deadlocked in their Great Celestial War, the heavenly military arts can’t be much better than anything down here. So they must know they can’t fight us head on. Everything they’ve done points to them having taken that fact on board. So, it made sense they would try and find a surrogate-ally on Earth so they can pitch human against human.

“I can only think of three candidates who are outcasts, who are not part of the Human Alliance and who have access to substantial military power. Kim Jong-Il in North Korea, Chavez in Venezuela and Than Shwe in Myanmar. Our satellite recon tells us Kim Jong-Il is moving his units around and we expect trouble there soon. We didn’t pick up this Myanmar move, infantry movements in heavy jungle are hard to spot but it was a fair bet Than Shwe would be looking this way, the only other option would be to strike at India and even he isn’t that mad. So, when I said, the Human Expeditionary Army stood with you, I wasn’t being melodramatic, although judicious use of melodrama is no bad thing in a General. You must know that. This invasion is part of the war with Yahweh, defeat it and we defeat his purpose.”

“I’ll tell my Prime Minister we’ll have all five divisions assembled at Kanchanaburi within 24 hours. That will please him greatly. We can seal this incursion off and drive it back.” General Asanee thought for a second. “Then what? The Myanmar regime is a pretty nasty one and they just let their people starve after Cyclone Nargis. That was a Yahweh hit and they are still siding with him. This invasion is a betrayal of us humans, they should be punished for that.”

“And it’s a chance to pay off a few old scores right?”

General Asanee kicked herself, she forgotten this General was a military history scholar of notable repute. “Of course, but even so, it’s still the right thing to do. And it’ll give Kim Jong-Il something to think about as well.”

“I agree, in many ways we’re using this fight as a test-bed. To see how commanding Hell affects strategy here on Earth.”

“So we invade then.” The satisfaction in the General’s voice was obvious.

“Why? We don’t have to invade, not any more. We can open a portal and just position troops close to Naypyidaw and by close to I mean on top of the place. We don’t have to fight our way up to a capital any more, we just arrive there. That makes Hell the most commanding piece of territory there has ever been. But, before any of that, you need to get your command problems in Kanchanaburi straightened out. An entire mechanized corps arriving in one place needs a lot of good staff-work.”

“I’ll be on it Sir.” General Asanee thought for a second. “You’ve been thinking a lot about the use of portals in warfare haven’t you?”

“General, since taking this job, I’ve thought about very little else.”