The Shark Boats, page 9
Hope Calina’s okay, Reiner thought. He’d obviously gotten the job done.
The ghetto was astir. People waking up, talking. Enthusiastic talk. Excitement.
Some of them started to move towards the gates at the arterial road. The PNA officer snapped something at another man, who ran off down towards the waterfront; he disappeared from sight but reappeared a moment later, followed by one of the armored cars.
Armored cars. Being deployed fast. Either the PNA had been alerted to something – one of his men caught and rapidly interrogated, or turned traitor? – or they were unusually paranoid, or the local garrison commander really had his shit in order.
The car turned to block the street, weapons covering it.
“Disperse! Any attempts to come out will be met with lethal force!” the officer shouted. Then he climbed the glacis to stand on top of the car – talked briefly with the vehicle’s gunner/commander, through his open hatch – and repeated the order.
There were hundreds of lowlanders in the street now, up and alert. More were coming out of the buildings and down from the roofs every moment, forming a mixed and milling crowd.
Not quite a mixed crowd; there were physical distinctions. Some of the lowlanders were eyeing each other warily. A few of them were holding knives and a lot more, now, had salvaged clubs from table-legs and the like inside the buildings.
“You are ordered to disperse!”, the PNA officer repeated. From elsewhere in the tenements, Reiner could hear similar trouble, shouts.
Snatches of agitated conversation from the street below, as more lowlanders came out:
“Half of them are dead! Burned to death!”
“Does the deal still hold? What if he’s alive?”
Then a fight broke out: two Uties from different groups. A circle opened around them as the two engaged in single combat – both had clubs. Swinging. Chanting.
One man in the circle of spectators bumped another, deliberately. That man took a swing at the one who’d bumped him, and received a hard kick in the crotch – and, as he went down, a very hard kick in the face.
Reiner looked at the PNA squad and their armored car. They were still ready and alert, but as the mob in the street began to fight each other – a half-dozen single combats, now, with squabbles on the perimiter – they were clearly relieved.
Shit. If they get their glory from killing each other nothing’s going to happen.
“Lowlanders killing each other. Good,” said mac-Levan.
“We want lowlanders killing Norks,” muttered one of the USCA soldiers whose name Reiner didn’t know.
“We can do that,” said mac-Jisani. He disappeared out the door.
“Where’s he going?” asked Grey irritably.
“To do something useful.”
The first fight to break out was being resolved; one of the combatants took a blow to the side of the head that split it open like a melon. He crumpled, and the victor placed a bare foot on the man’s head and shouted something incomprehensible. Others of his tribe yelled in triumph, waving fists and clubs.
“Real warriors fight the northern gunmen!” came a shout from below.
Mac-Jisani, thought Reiner, and tapped Harris on the shoulder.
“Kill the car’s man. Now.”
Harris aimed his rifle as more shouting came from the street. Then the head of the armored car’s commander exploded in a red mess. Harris’s hands moved automatically: ejecting the old shell, chambering a new round and blasting it through the chest of the PNA officer who’d been starting to duck down from behind his place on top of the armored car.
The rest of the PNA men opened up on the crowd. Firing in both directions. Men fell.
But the lowlanders had been united.
“More glory killing the northern butchers!” came mac-Jisani’s voice. If there was a highlander accent, the lowlanders didn’t care: it was speaking their language.
Reiner’s only weapon was a heavy service pistol and the blockade was a hundred feet away; he didn’t bother firing. But others did; they fired out the window and killed the exposed PNA men as the Uties charged. The armored car’s machine-gun cut a swathe through them, but they charged the chain-link fence anyway, scaling it.
Barbed wire’s going to rip them to shreds, Reiner thought for a moment, as the first reached the top of the fence. He shouted triumphantly and slipped through two of the coils, probably scratching himself badly. Then one of the PNAers who’d taken cover behind the armored car shot him down.
There were more behind him. And there were lowlanders on the other side of the street, too, scaling the fence. One of the PNAers ran. The rest died under the clubs. Lowlanders pushed aside the corpse of the armored car’s commander as the vehicle three-point turned, trying to escape. Then a man emerged from the hatch, triumphantly waving the head of the driver.
Shouts. War cries.
A few circles opened as lowlanders, their common enemy gone, began single-combat with each other. But now there were shouts of “Loot!”.
Gunfire from elsewhere in the town. Machine-gun and rifle fire. Perhaps not all one-sided; the dead PNA men were being thoroughly looted, including their weapons. A group of them on top of the armored car, trying to remove the commander’s ring-mounted machine gun.
Reiner turned around and nodded to the ten guys with him.
“Let’s move. Now.”
“Take the car?” asked Grey. “Help the natives unscrew the gun and get the vehicle?”
Reiner thought of the headless driver in there, having to get rid of that first. Ick.
That thing has a light cannon on it. That could be useful. Thing probably had sufficient penetration to kill another armored car, and there were more.
If the PNA garrison commander had thought to deploy armored cars this quickly, it was probable that he was smart enough to keep a core reserve somewhere: enough men and guns that the mostly-unarmed tribesmen couldn’t overrun them with sheer numbers. That reserve would probably include armored cars.
No, he decided. He’d never used armored cars in the Schuylerville gang wars.
“Remember what I said,” he told Grey and the others. “Urban combat is three-dimensional. We stay up on the roofs as much as we can. And we’re not here to kill Norks – the tribesmen are gonna do that just as well as we are. And they might not succeed. We’re here to grab our shit while they distract the garrison.”
“We going to kill the bandits or not?” asked mac-Jisani, coming back in – triumphantly holding a PNA-issue bayonet in one hand above his head.
Reiner remembered the `29 Riots, from his early teenagerhood. And what had taken place then.
“Fuck that,” he said. “We’re going to be the bandits.”
Chapter Five
The Brotherhood major on board the Isabella was talking on his radio. Then he went agitatedly to the cockpit.
“Captain, you need to turn us around. Right away,” he said to Lieutenant-Commander Castro. One of the subordinate Army officers was yelling to the men on the beach, ordering them to get back on the boats.
Well, they did make us a floating reserve, Castro thought.
“What’s happening?”
Men began to pile onto the shark boat, climbing up netting on the sides. The major had stayed on board with his radio.
“Major rioting in Dennyville.”
“When the cat’s away…” muttered Lieutenant Albertino.
The major glared at him.
“Lieutenant, shut the fuck up,” Castro snarled. Because you’re worthless to me in a gulag.
The shark boat’s own cockpit radio.
“Two here.” That was Chavez. “Request permission to stay. Existing operation needs naval support.”
You want Goldstein’s head, not to ferry men back to Dennyville, Castro thought. It was understandable.
Probably even useful. They wouldn’t need four boats because half of the men had gone inland.
“Major, tell your men to get aboard us and the Carmen,” Castro said.
It didn’t hurt that Chavez’s Rubina and the Rosalita were further offshore, outside easy swimming distance. The men had been heading for the Isabella and the Carmen Tres anyway.
Within a minute or so, Castro and half of Squadron Seven were on their way out. Castro’s boat passed near where the Rubina sat, and Chavez waved happily at him.
Castro returned his friend’s gesture with a middle finger.
Bastard gets to command the sharks at the kill, if Goldstein tries to make a break for it. He must love that thought.
Probably, but Chavez wasn’t the type to scheme. A fanatic, but an honest one. In the time Castro had known him, the man’d shown himself to have no taste or interest in internal politicking. ‘It weakens the revolution and is a tool of our capitalist enemies’, was what Chavez had said when, after a few beers together, Castro had once asked him about it. From another man that would have been guarded political bullshit – it was, after all, the exact Brotherhood party line – but Castro knew Chavez well enough to believe the man meant every syllable.
“What’s happening in Dennytown?” Castro asked the major, as Albertino pushed the boat forwards at maximum. “Thought we had the spearchuckers under control.”
“Fire or something in one of the waterfront bars. Bunch of their chiefs got killed. They probably think we caused it,” said the major. “Colonel Diaz has two companies there, dispersed.”
“And the armored cars,” said Albertino reassuringly. “Nothing like armored cars in street fighting. They have machine-guns.”
You want to go into a damn gulag, you stupid fuck?
But the major took Albertino’s comment for stupidity, not insolence. Or pretended to.
“There are sixteen thousand of the spearchucking lowlander savages in Dennytown,” said the major. “Colonel Diaz has three hundred soldiers plus a few dozen supply and logistics guys. I wouldn’t count on the armored cars.”
“What the major means,” Castro said, as Albertino’s hands adjusted the throttle, revving the shark boat’s powerful engines harder, “is that the company of men aboard our boats is needed, because it’s about the only thing that’s going to put a dent into those riots. So go faster.”
Albertino spotted a landmark, an old church on a headland.
“Twenty minutes,” he said reassuringly. “We’ll save your town for you, major.”
*
In near-darkness, lit by a half-moon and the occasional burning building, PNA fought lowlanders fighting lowlanders across Dennyville. The tribesmen fought each other in single- or dual-combat rituals, attempted to behead PNA men, and died under their guns. Others made their way up the slope out of town – or went for loot.
The alleys were darkest. Reiner, his .45 held high and ready, led the way with Calina; behind him, the other sixteen men of the band followed, weapons pointed up and around. There had been a very dicey incident just after leaving their tenement when somebody with an automatic weapon had fired on them from an upstairs window. He’d missed, but that had been pure luck; the bastard could just as easily have taken out three or four men in that first burst.
There hadn’t been time to winkle him out. They’d bolted instead, but now a lot of weapons were aimed at the upstairs windows. The lowlanders were technologically primitive but they weren’t stupid; sniping was very much within their understanding. And there were probably a few Norks who’d gone to ground amidst the chaos, frightened enough to hide but aware enough to see an organized threat.
You’re imagining things, Reiner told himself. It’s obvious to you that the riots are a distraction because you started them. It’s not obvious to the PNA that these are any more than just riots.
He hoped.
Light, up ahead. They were coming to the end of this alley. On the street, running figures, lowlanders. Shooting; one of them collapsed in line-of-sight from the alley. They were running away from something.
That something came rumbling past a moment later; a pair of armored cars, followed by about fifteen PNA troops on foot. Methodically subduing the rioters in this area. Reiner pressed himself to the wall and prayed under his breath that they wouldn’t send a team down this alley.
They didn’t; they kept to the main street, where the cars’ heavy machine-guns could support the grunts’ rifles.
“How far are we from the damn warehouses?”
“No idea,” said Grey, who was also at the front.
“I wasn’t asking you,” Reiner snapped. “Calina?”
“Not far, I think. Another couple of blocks. Down that road.”
“The one the armored cars just came from?”
“Yeah.”
“Look, we’re in an urban environment,” said a man whose name Reiner hadn’t learned. He was tall and looked in his late thirties which, given the exhaustion and hunger Grey’s men had been enduring for the last couple of weeks, meant he was probably in his mid-twenties. At some point and not recently, this guy had lost the top half of his right ear.
“Yeah? So what?”
“So, those durka warehouses aren’t gonna fuckin’ be surrounded by clear turf.”
It took a second for Reiner to notice, because at one level the man’s accent was so familiar. East Side.
No, they ain’t, was the first thing that came to his mind. But who you trying play king, eh? I’m the man, bitch.
I’m half my life gone from there, he reminded himself. Those games are over. Long over.
“So, they’re not,” said Reiner. And couldn’t resist: “Who you run with?”
The man grinned and pulled up his left sleeve, showing a tattoo of a blue circle over a red square.
Blow his filthy mofo brains, was Reiner’s immediate reaction, and he was moving his pistol towards the Globe Square motherfucker’s head when he realized.
Globes and Docks had fought in the past. Fought hard. Globe gangs and Dock gangs didn’t get along. Not since the Globe fucks had, in the chaotic years after three-quarters of the old Schuylerville gang culture’d been wiped out on Red Tuesday, pushed the Dockers out of the waterfront and into the worthless industrial slums, hemmed in on one side by the river and on another by downtown and the Townie gangs.
That had all been before Reiner’s time – he’d been in the orphanage back then – but the stories had been fresh when he started running, and he’d been involved in plenty of skirmishes against the Globes.
“Who you run with?” the man asked.
Other men in the group had sensed the confrontation, were standing around. From the direction Calina had said the warehouses were in, came a couple of heavy explosions and a long, long burst of machine-gun fire. There were cries and sporadic shooting coming from all directions, around the city.
Now is not the time.
In his peripheral vision, Reiner could see Grey getting ready to say something.
I left those animosities behind fifteen years ago.
Yeah, but they’d been strong animosities in their time. Good friends of Reiner had died by the Globes. And he might have killed one or two himself – he’d inflicted wounds on them, certainly. And come close, close, to receiving those kinds of wounds.
“Docks, right?”
Reiner fought to restrain a sneer, and barely succeeded.
You are a civilized human being, he told himself. Not some ganger.
He transferred the gun to his left hand. Extended his right, to shake it.
“I was with the Dockers,” he said. “Fifteen years ago. Got a question for you, private.”
“What’s that, Docker?” the man asked. He was carrying a rifle with a long bayonet, which he hadn’t quite pointed away from Reiner.
“What’s your allegiance to?”
Lieutenant Grey cleared his throat.
Grey’s Regular, not Reserves. He resents me. And if he can argue I’m unfit for command…
“What d’you mean?” the Globe asked.
“We’re not on the East Side,” said Reiner. Partly to himself, because the last time he’d been in urban combat, he had been. “We’re not even in the Colonies. Are you a Globe – or a Southerner?”
The man seemed to hesitate. His gun wavered.
“Lemme rephrase it,” said Reiner. “Who’s the enemy here? Dockers or durkas?”
“Fuck, the durkas,” said the man. “They wiped out my platoon. Fuck them.”
“Fuck the durkas,” Reiner said. On the streets ‘durka’ was derogatory slang for any foreigner, but right now both men knew it meant PNA. “You wanna fuck the durkas, man? You do what I say. You Army or no?”
The guy hesitated again. Then he transferred the carbine to his left hand and extended his right.
“Truce,” he said.
“Truce,” said Reiner.
They shook: hands clasped around wrists. The old serious handshake, the one that applied to major promises.
Probably in the last twenty-five years, it had happened between gangs of different types less than a dozen times. The last universal gang alliance had been political, and it had ended in massacre.
But we’re not gangs. We’re Army.
“You know my name, Private. I don’t know yours.”
“Pulli. Ben Pulli. When’d you stop running?”
“Thirty-three, about,” said Reiner. “I was sixteen. What put you into uniform?”
“Oinkers got me. Judge says, son, it’s the Army or jail for you.”
“And you picked the Army. Good choice.”
Pulli shook his head. “No, Cap. I picked jail, `cause I had friends there. Then the Norks stormed down and they conscripted me anyway.”
“Good,” said Reiner, meaning it. The Army was another vehicle for social mobility, because of the training and the pension.
Meaning it also for another reason: it would be damn useful around now to have another man who understood urban combat.
“No. Those warehouses aren’t going to be on their own,” he said. “There’s going to be buildings around them. Abutting them. We’ll go in alongside them. Go through one of those buildings. Cut the wire and get into the warehouses. Find what we want.”
