The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 3

Tagrifah had a common well. The women congregated around it in the first dawn, drawing household water and exchanging gossip while adult males were still abed. Barbour hadn’t targeted the well, of course, but one of the firecracker rounds strewed its trail of bomblets across the women and spilled them in a bloody windrow. Some of the corpses looked like bundles of rags rather than something once human; rags of predominantly red color.

One old woman, apparently unharmed, sat wailing in the middle of the carnage. Her blank eyes didn’t react to the combat car, though the vehicle moved past close enough to stir her garments with the air vented beneath the skirts.

Mamie followed Barbour’s eyes. She leaned close to him and said, “It’s not us that did this, Bob. It’s the sons of bitches who deliberately used civilians as a shield. We can’t let them make up the rules for their own benefit.”

“I know that,” Barbour said. He didn’t really know anything at all. He was pretending that he saw Tagrifah in a recorded image, with the camera lens between him and reality.

He pointed. “That was the headquarters,” he said.

More accurately, the Kairene HQ had been concealed in a bunker beneath that, the mosque and the attached madrassah in which village boys were schooled in reading, writing, and the Koran. Girls as well as boys here in Tagrifah, and apparently a mixed class besides.

Kairouan had been settled three centuries ago from North Africa, where both Islam and Christianity had developed unique strains. Even so, Kairene society had departed to a surprising degree from its roots. Tagrifah could have been an interesting subject for study, before the shells hit.

The stone-built religious buildings had collapsed to rubble which barely filled the large bunker beneath. Gray smoke rose through the interstices of the jumbled stones. Mixed with the ashlars and broken roof beams were the bodies of the pupils, seated on the madrassah’s floor at dawn to begin their lessons.

Some of the children were still moving. Captain Currant touched her helmet key again. Barbour heard the word “medics” in the request.

A preplanned operation like this probably had second echelon medical support laid on at the firebase already. The troops wouldn’t need help, but the medics and their equipment would get a workout nonetheless.

The radio antenna serving the Kairene headquarters had run up the minaret. The vertical mast was still standing, pure and gleaming in the sunlight, though the building had crumbled around it.

The mast made a fitting monument for Tagrifah. Barbour had initially identified the village as a hostile center because of the signals emanating from that antenna.

The Kairenes had limited themselves to burst transmissions: data collapsed into the smallest possible packets and spit out in a second or two instead of over minutes. They might as well have flown battle flags and set off fireworks for all the good their attempts at concealing their signals had done. They hadn’t understood that they weren’t dealing with hicks like themselves, they were facing the Frisians.

More particularly, the Kairenes faced Lieutenant Robert Barbour. Barbour’s tuned instruments not only pinpointed the source of the transmissions, they ran the packets through decryption programs which spat the information out in clear faster than the Kairene units in the field would be able to process it.

“It wasn’t a mistake!” Barbour said. “Tagrifah was a regimental headquarters!”

“Curst right it was!” Mamie Currant agreed. “Look at there.”

She gestured this time by waggling the muzzles of her tribarrel. A hand and arm clutching a 2-cm powergun extended from beneath a collapsed house.

The weapon wasn’t of Frisian pattern, though it might well take the same ammunition. The Kairenes had been well equipped with small arms. They lacked artillery and armor, but they would have put up at least a good fight if the Boumedienne government had attempted to reduce them with its own forces.

Guerrilla bands with powerguns, familiar with the terrain and dedicated to victory, could wreak holy havoc with an invader’s lines of communications. Boumedienne’s troops would have flailed blindly, destroying random villages but taking disastrous casualties whenever they tried to move in less than battalion strength.

The money cost to Boumedienne of a Frisian brigade was considerable, but it was the difference between victory and the sort of bloody stalemate that is perhaps the only thing worse than losing a war. Tagrifah was proof the money had been well spent.

Four more combat cars approached from the east. The armored vehicles spun on their axes to extend the line on which 3d Platoon crawled through the village. The cars closed up. Another platoon was in sight to Barbour’s left.

“Bunkers under every one of them?” Captain Currant asked/ observed as she scanned the wreckage.

“Yes, that’s right,” Barbour agreed. The part of his mind that spoke retained its professional detachment.