The Lotus Eaters

Florencia, Santander, Terra Nova

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."

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!"