The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 1

"I . . ." Befayt said. She looked completely stupefied. Everyone in the district knew that a powerful radio signal generated enough current in the wires of an electrical blasting cap to detonate the primer. On reflection it was obvious that a tank would have radios; but Lamartiere hadn't thought of that, and neither had the guerrilla commander.

Clargue had scrambled back into the driver's compartment. "Doctor, I'm sorry!" Befayt called after him. "I'll warn the men. And I'll get the tarpaulin over you again."

She trotted toward the entrance of the mine which served as the village's command post. Her hand-held radio had been on the equipment belt.

Clargue reappeared. Lamartiere looked at him in dismay and said, "It was my fault. I should have warned her."

"No," said Clargue. "It was my fault for turning on the power without thinking of the radios. It's not only the blasting caps. We—I—sent out a signal that the government listening posts almost certainly picked up. They know where we are now. They'll be coming."

He shook his head with an expression of miserable frustration. Lamartiere remembered Clargue looking the same way six months before, when a child who'd stepped on a bomblet died despite anything the doctor could do.

"I'll apologize to Captain Befayt," Clargue said. "I was angry with myself, but I blamed her."

"First we need to get Hoodoo working," Lamartiere said. Befayt was leading a group of guerrillas toward them to re-erect the camouflage cover. "So that when the government troops arrive, we're ready for them."

The villagers came out in the evening when they heard the truck approaching from Goncourt. They bowed low in the honor due a holy man on seeing that Father Renaud rode beside Franciscus in the cab. There wasn't, Lamartiere thought, much warmth in their greetings.

Father Renaud was a slim, deeply ascetic man with a fringe of white hair and a placid expression. He was personally very gentle, a man who would let an insect drink its fill of his blood rather than needlessly crush one of God's creatures.

But there was no compromise in the father's attitude as to what was owed God. He had blessed a young mother before she walked into a government checkpoint with six kilos of explosive hidden beneath the infant in her backpack.

Most people in the mountains respected Father Renaud and his faith. A man who spent so much of his time with God wasn't entirely safe for ordinary folk to be around, however.

The driver pulled up beside Hoodoo to let out Renaud and the colonel, then circled back to the center of the village to distribute the few crates of supplies which the Council in Goncourt could spare to Pamiers. The gardens planted in the rubble of burned-out buildings here couldn't support the population. Without some supplement the refugees would move to Goncourt, adding to the health and safety problems of what remained of the Mosites' alternative seat of government.

Befayt and several of her aides had started for Hoodoo when they heard the fans of the oncoming truck. The captain knelt and accepted the blessing from Father Renaud, but she and Franciscus exchanged only the briefest nods of greeting. There was no love lost between the Company of Death and local guerrilla units. As for rank—an officer could call himself anything he pleased, but in the field it came down to who accepted his orders.

In Pamiers, only Lamartiere took orders from Colonel Franciscus. Little as Lamartiere liked the man, he knew that local groups like Befayt's could never defeat the central government, though they might keep the mountains ungovernable indefinitely now that the mercenaries had left. In Lamartiere's opinion, decades of hungry squalor like this would be worse even than haughty repression by the government and Synod.

Franciscus waited impatiently for Lamartiere to take the blessing, then snapped, "Have you fixed the tank yet? I've told the Council that we can move on Brione as soon as they've concentrated our forces, but that I have to be in charge. The tank is crucial, and I command it."

"We have all the electronic systems working," Dr. Clargue said in a voice as thin as a scalpel. "The guns are not in operation yet because the magazines seem to be empty."

Clargue wasn't a member of any military body, but he was a Mosite believer and had been an expert on Ambiorix' most advanced medical computer systems before he left Carcassone Central Hospital for hands-on care of the folk of his home village. His presence was the reason the Council had picked Pamiers as an initial destination for the stolen tank.

"What do you mean?" Franciscus said. He turned on Lamartiere with all the fury of a terrier facing a rat. "Didn't you bring ammunition? Did you think we were going to stand on the turret and throw rocks?"