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,
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
One of the captives, very early on in his interrogation, had spit on Fernandez and vowed that FNLS, the
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
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 emigre. 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
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
* * *
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.
