The Shark Boats, page 10
Men were nodding.
“Grey, you and those four men” – he pointed at four randomly, including Pieter the TransEqaaaner – “you’re in charge of finding transport. One of those armored cars wouldn’t hurt either. We’re a bunch of Norks taking priority shit out of town and we’ll shoot our way through the lowlifes – lowlanders – if we have to.”
“Sir-”
“That’s an order, Lieutenant. There’s an appropriate reaction to that,” Reiner growled.
“Sir. Yessir.”
“Good. The rest of you, we’re going in. We find the pieces, we find the gasoline and we load it onto the trucks Grey’s gonna bring us. Hopefully the ones he’ll find right in the same warehouse. And we go.”
“We got your back, Cap,” said Pulli.
That was technically insubordination, but Reiner decided to overlook it.
“Let’s jag,” he said.
*
“Captain,” said the petty officer who operated Isabella’s radio, “we’ve got a communication from Colonel Diaz, commanding Dennyville garrison.”
“What?”, asked Castro. The shark boat’s radio bay was just below the cockpit, where the commander or the pilot could take the mouthpiece if he needed to.
“Says they’re losing ground. The town’s burning, fire’s getting near the warehouses, and the spearchuckers’re coming close to overrunning.”
Albertino hit the throttle; engines revved. Castro noted two gauges in the red, now. Normally that would be something to worry about, but Albertino knew his engines better than any self-respecting officer should.
Which was precisely why the lieutenant could get away with his sort of disrespect to the Party.
“You know how I said ten minutes when we passed those rocks,” he said, gesturing at an outcropping on the coast that they were passing now.
“Yeah,” said Castro. Looking at the load of men his boat was carrying. This was a quality unit, sent here precisely because it had been considered a possibility that serious lowlander heads might have to be taken.
The engines revved more. Albertino’s hands performed a delicate dance over the controls and he leaned forwards, snapped something into the speaking tube to the engineers in back.
“I meant eight,” he said. “Maybe seven.”
“Make it six,” snapped the major.
*
Two rings of warehouses: inner, undefended, away from the docks. Smaller ones, which in peacetime had been cheaper and intended for smaller consignments or permanent ownership by trading houses. A lot of the island loot had been brought there, and the handful of PNA men guarding those warehouses had fled for the safer inner section when the rioting first broke out. Now they were being looted in turn by lowlanders. One at the end of the street was burning.
The outer ring of warehouses directly faced the docks. They were larger – three-storey height, mostly – and separated from the inner ring by an alley, in which coils of barbed wire had been strewn as a very minimal outer defense. More barbed wire covered the gaps between the individual warehouses, coiled thickly above eight-foot chain-link fences. PNA men were on the roofs of the warehouses, firing shots at the looters on the other side.
There was a main gate not far away, on an intersecting street. Around which a heavy firefight was obviously going on, with gun-armed people on both sides.
Everybody knew that the good stuff was in the fenced-off area. The lowlanders wanted it, and some of them were starting to figure that direct attack might not be the best approach. The corpses of a few of them lay in the alley, tangled in the barbed wire. One lowlander lay twitching, dying, at the bottom of the chain-link fence, a pair of long-handled wirecutters lying a couple of inches from one outstretched hand.
All that, Reiner saw from the narrow gap between two of the smaller outer-ring warehouses. He ducked back before one of the patrolling PNAers on the roof saw him.
“We want those guards on the roof gone,” he said. “Mac-Jisani, try to get us some lowlanders. We also need more wirecutters. We get through there and break through. One break, and the defenses around the warehouse area should collapse. They look pretty damn hard-pressed at the front gate.
Suddenly, engines. Revving through.
Two armored cars were making their way down the street, side-by-side, with the secondary warehouses, blazing at doorways and gaps between buildings. One of them fired its cannon at the center of a group of running lowlanders; the shell exploded and bodies – and body parts – flew into the air.
Reiner and his group flattened themselves against the wall. The first car rumbled past, six feet from him. Commander in the top, manning the machine-gun, firing into an upstairs window of one of the upscale inns on the other side of the street.
He’s six feet from me, Reiner thought. Instinctively he raised his gun and shot the commander twice in the chest.
The man slumped hard, pulling on the controls of the gun and sending a long, long blast of tracers up into the sky. The car stopped.
No time to think about how stupid his impulse had been. Move!
“Follow me!” Reiner yelled, running out in front of the car, firing his gun into the driver’s viewport. As he should have expected, the two cars were followed by troops.
Reiner’s men came out of the gap, shooting as they went for the cover of the stopped car. Reiner fired his heavy .45 again, shooting at the troops coming up behind the vehicle.
The armored cars had been expecting attack from in front or sniping from an upstairs window. They’d been expecting a head-first lowlander charge with clubs and blades. Not a flank-attack by a well-armed group of civilized soldiers.
Bullets rang off the front glacis of the car Reiner was in cover behind. The other car. One bullet ricocheted and tore a bloody scratch across the top of Reiner’s right shoulder as he ducked.
Rolled, under the armored car that he’d stopped. Pieter and Grey were behind him, firing their weapons at PNA men coming between the two cars. An automatic burst from Pieter’s submachinegun cut two of them down.
“Schlessing kaffirs,” the TransEqaaner muttered to Grey. “Dying like Bernese bugs.”
Under the front of the heavy armored car, on his belly. Big triple-tires a few inches from him.
This thing better be stopped for good, went through Reiner’s mind. That driver’s still alive and hits the gas right now, I’m crushed.
Not much he could do about that. He checked the ammo in his pistol – just four rounds left, not good. He changed magazines, threw away the old one. Then ducked back out.
The second car came riding past the first one, the machine-gun aimed down, fired a burst that slammed into the gritty paving stones, corrected, and Reiner stared death in the face down the heavy barrel for what seemed like a quarter of a minute-
And then Ben Pulli came leaping over from the top of the first car, yelling an old Globe battlecry that froze Reiner just as much as it must have frozen the driver. Bullets whipped around him as he kicked the car commander in the face with a heavy boot.
“Cover him!” Reiner yelled, and ran around the front of the still-moving car.
A Nork was getting ready to scramble up onto the top of the car, taking one of the handholds. Reiner shot him and ran forwards, vaguely conscious of Grey and Pieter and a couple of others behind him.
Around the edge of the armored car. Heavy machine-gunning from above; brass spilled over from the top of the car. Pulli was using the machine-gun.
The rest of the PNA patrol was dead or running. The first armored car hadn’t moved, implying that Reiner probably had killed the driver. The second one had stopped moving, too. Probably another dead driver.
And that, Reiner thought, is why I refused that transfer to Cavalry.
Then he looked at the two armored cars – the two still-functional armored cars – that his men had taken undisputed possession of. Some of the surviving lowlanders were watching in awe. One or two of them raised weapons in salute.
The vehicles didn’t just have machine-guns. Dents in the buildings, and craters in the cobblestoned road, were mute proof that they’d brought along shells for those twenty-five millimetre cannon.
“The hell with wirecutters,” Reiner said. “Plan’s changed.”
*
The first cannon shell blasted a gap out of the corner of the warehouse, ripping away a skein of chain-link fence and barbed wire.
Reloading it was easy; the cannon was basically a large rifle, with its shells as pre-loaded cartridges that simply happened to weigh a couple of pounds each. It was cumbersome and neither Reiner nor Pulli had any experience with it – and the fact there was a dead man in the driver’s seat of the car, and blood from the commander Pulli had bayoneted through the throat, all over the gunner’s seat, did not make it more pleasant – but there was nothing fundamental that had to be figured out to make it work.
“Fire two!” Reiner ordered, sticking fingers in his ears. Pulli pulled the trigger.
The cannon boomed, as loud as you’d expect from something five times the dimensions of a standard rifle. Aiming, when you were thirty feet away from the target, was not hard. The second shell ripped away the facing corner of the warehouse, destroying the rest of the chain-link fence.
Lowlanders were gathering in the street. The PNA on the roofs were shouting and making a noise, but their friends at the main gate had problems of their own and couldn’t spare anyone.
“Let’s go!” Reiner ordered. “Grey, mind those cars – they’re our escort out of here. Crew `em. We’ll find our own trucks in there.”
“And the other shit,” said Calina, clapping Reiner on the shoulder. Lowlanders were beginning to move through the gap that the cannon shells had made, ignoring the fire that the PNA men on the roofs were pouring down. Jumping the coiled barbed wire in the alley and going directly into the warehouse. The PNAers had dropped a couple of grenades into the gap between the two buildings, killing the first bunch of lowlanders to get through. After that they’d learned.
Shooting inside the warehouses. PNA in there, too. Maybe coming down from the roofs.
“Come on!”, said Reiner. From one of the dead PNA, he’d taken a machine-pistol with a much more comfortable twenty-round banana clip. He’d found about half a dozen clips for it, too, which were stuck into his belt next to the .45.
Jumping the barbed wire in the alley, pushing aside some lowlanders to get into the crack that the twenty-five millimetre shell had made in the thin walls of the warehouse. These buildings were basically shells of cardboard-thin planking hung across frameworks of heavier wood; that was why the light cannon shells had made viable holes.
Inside was semi-darkness and a lot of crates, stacked high in some places. Catwalks and crosswalks at the second- and third-storey levels. Big, open doors at the other end, looking onto water. A truck parked in one of the doorways, as he’d expected.
There was a whole street of these warehouses. One of them – perhaps two – would contain what he needed.
He needed to find it fast. Searching the labels of the crates would take too long. What he needed was a supply clerk or a manifest.
He’d worked in warehouses. He knew where to look.
Toward the office in the front, on the third floor above the gates.
“This way!”, he said.
His men followed – a few of them returning fire that came from PNA men now running down off the rooftops and into the catwalks. A couple of lowlanders were hit; one of the PNA men toppled.
Up a staircase. A PNA man with a submachinegun appeared at the corner landing, running downstairs. Almost headlong into him.
Reiner kicked rather than shot, bringing his knee up into the man’s crotch and narrowly missing. Letting the submachinegun drop on its sling, he realized: I need what this man knows.
The guy was probably a clerk. He didn’t have the tanned look of a soldier, although with dark-skinned Northerners it was hard to tell.
The look of total panic on the man’s face – no way is he a front-line soldier – was a better indicator.
“I want engine parts,” he yelled into the man’s face, slamming him against the wall. The thin wall buckled and tore slightly under the impact; damn, I don’t want to push him through it.
“Uh? No hablo Anglais!”
“Calina!” Reiner called, as his men came up the landing, some of them going up past him to cover him. “Tell this man the list and tell him we need this shit yesterday.”
*
From half a mile away, Dennyville appeared to be completely on fire. Intellectually Castro knew it was just a part of the wharf district; functionally it looked like the entire town.
“Colonel Diaz says his headquarters is about to be mobbed. We’re to relieve him at once and then save the town,” said the major’s aide.
“Got it,” said the major. On the boat, men were readying their weapons, checking bootlaces, crossing themselves. They were veterans who knew that urban fighting could be very unpleasant. Especially against people who didn’t seem to give a shit.
Albertino was cutting the speed, twitching the boat sideways, getting ready to bring them in into the docks in what would seem like a sideways skid.
Show the major that your boat’s your mistress, thought Castro.
Because the major and his four platoons, a concentrated and cohesive force, were about to remind the lowlander primitives who was master.
*
With a ballpoint pen from one of the offices, Reiner checked off the last item on the list of engine parts. They’d escorted the very scared supply clerk through two warehouses, but at least they weren’t competing with lowlanders for the machine- and weapon-parts in those warehouses. They were far more interested in the warehouses containing clothes and personal-issue items, and especially the ones containing weapons and ammunition.
The first of the parts was being loaded onto the truck he’d commandeered, chosen because it already contained two dozen full jerry-cans of gasoline, when the shark boat came roaring into the docks fifty feet away. Soldiers boiled off it, onto the wharf.
It was so sudden that Reiner didn’t have time to react. Didn’t have time to think, or panic, or do anything other than freeze for a couple of seconds.
Officers shouted, and – gunning down lowlanders as they ran – half the troops headed for the main access way to the docks, relieving their friends there.
The others – about a platoon’s worth – headed for the other side of the restricted area, running right past them. Reiner had barely enough presence of mind not to attempt to shoot them – clearly they thought Reiner’s men were fellow PNA, evacuating something important.
That might buy us another, oh, ten minutes to live, he thought, as a second shark boat docked a couple of hundred yards away, outside the secure area. More soldiers came off, coalescing around an armored car and a knot of troops that’d been waiting for them. Shooting, they headed for an objective in-town.
They’re securing the key points and their perimiter. Then they’ll come for us.
Then he noticed the skull dangling from the bow of the shark boat. In the reflected light of a burning warehouse roof, something glinted in one of the eye-sockets.
That’s one of the boats that wiped out our convoy.
That’s one of the same shark boats. They can’t all have skulls with gems. Even though that one’s not red.
“We’re trapped; we’re fucked,” Pieter was saying. “Can we swim, maybe?”
“No,” said someone else. “We bullshit our way through with the trucks and the cars the lieutenant has.”
People, next to the back of the covered truck, looked at Reiner for the word.
“No,” he said. “See that boat over there?”
He un-safetied his machine-pistol.
“We’re taking it. You” – he jabbed a finger at a random man, one of the smugglers – “get Grey. Bring him and his men back. You, TransEqaaner, back this truck up. The rest of you, come on.”
The infantry who’d bypassed them were cleaning out and securing the more important warehouses at the other end of the dock, near large industrial cranes. There was a chance they’d respond immediately when they heard gunfire. There was a better chance they wouldn’t, because there was only a company’s worth of newly-arrived men. They might be organized, but they’d have enough on their hands.
Fuck it, I don’t have time to reason or justify this.
“Come on!”
The machine-pistol kicked noisily in his right hand, spraying wildly as he ran forwards. Bullets hit the deck of the shark boat, made men dive for cover. One of them threw himself overboard; another was clearly hit because he rolled sideways and screamed. Calina and Pulli and the rest of the men were behind Reiner as he charged the shark boat.
One man went for cover behind the cannon mount at the boat’s bow. Another one took the raised machine-guns above and behind the cockpit, expertly traversed them down – and then fell, shot through the skull. Pistol fire came at them, submachinegun fire as the boat’s crew went for personal weapons.
Reiner took a flying leap from the concrete wharf to the bow of the shark boat, onto slippery-wet wood. His machine-pistol clicked empty and he threw himself down, taking cover behind the gun mount while he slammed in a new magazine. Other men were jumping aboard, shooting; one man took a hit to the chest and staggered backwards, toppling overboard.
He got up, squat-ran down the side of the boat. A heavyset man with a black moustache and gold epaulettes jumped out in front of him swinging a long fighting knife; it sliced forwards and would have impaled Reiner if he hadn’t flung himself down and away, bringing his gun up as his wounded shoulder crunched agonizingly against the boat’s hard deck.
Through a haze of pain, Reiner saw the man reversing the knife to stab, but Reiner’s going flat had left a clear field of fire for the man behind him and a burst of automatic fire stitched the officer from his crotch to his neck. One of the bullets must have severed a vein, because warm, sticky blood spattered across Reiner as he got up.
