The Lotus Eaters

It was as well that he was the first one out. Before half the group had left, while the tail of the column was still forming, the camp had been suddenly drenched with a deluge of fire. With trees rising up and then collapsing to the jungle floor, with huts expanding out to their molecular components, and with the cries of butchered men and women somehow rising above the roar of the shells, Esteban and his comrades—such as remained—did what any sane men might do when faced with a power they could not resist. They ran.

* * *

The ambush on the trail leading to the Santander border was 'V' shaped, where the apex of the V was at an angle of ninety degrees. At that apex, two M-26s, the light machine gun version of Balboa's F-26, aimed up the trail. The integral scopes for the machine guns were rotated off to the right side; for this kind of beaten zone in this kind of light, human eyesight, unaugmented, was superior to the highest practical technology.

Each arm of the V was composed of one squad. The third squad to the platoon Cruz had sent swinging out and westward, in two parts, to warn of the approach of others, to seal off the kill zone and 'pick up the spare,' and to act as security outposts for when Cruz and the platoon sprang their first ambush and then raced westward to set up two more.

Cruz, too, was at the apex of the V, his rifle set to one side and twin detonators for directional mines clutched in his hands. He glanced left at a nervous-seeming M-26 gunner. The gunner, Castillo, a short, stocky militiaman with about four months of initial entry training and maybe eight weekend drills, eighteen years old and scared shitless, felt rather than saw his centurion's gaze. Sheepishly, Castillo looked back at Cruz and forced a smile out, then discovered he felt the better for it. The gunner resumed peering through his sight. He didn't say a word, though he did think, Thanks, Centurion. If you don't look worried, I guess I don't have to be.

* * *

Thank God I got out of that camp in time, thought Esteban, still leading the remnants of his group and still moving at as fast a walk as his legs would support. Every now and again, when his path wasn't blocked by vines or the sparse undergrowth that popped up wherever a fallen jungle tree had opened a space for sunlight, Esteban looked behind him.

At least I've still got my chingadera rifle!

Not all did. Especially had those towards the rear, the ones most nearly swept up in the flood of shellfire that had deluged Camp Twenty-seven, dropped theirs. Perhaps some had dropped the arms in shock. Perhaps others merely wanted to shed the weight to increase their speed. It didn't matter. Of the two thirds of the group that had escaped the shelling, over a third were weaponless.

* * *

'Jesus,' Castillo whispered, hugging his face tighter to the stock of his machine gun while easing his finger off the trigger guard and onto the trigger. 'Half the sorry bastards don't even have guns.'

'Rifles,' Cruz absently corrected. 'And so what?' He tightened his fingers slightly on the detonators.

* * *

Directional anti-personnel mines—something like what would have been called 'claymores' or 'MONs' on another world, in another time—could in theory scour an ambush's kill zone free of life on their own. After all, each had about seven hundred ball bearings or small cylinders encased in plastic resin, those fronting a highly brissant explosive that should have shattered them into seven hundred projectiles, which seven hundred should have spread out and swept the ground more or less evenly.

Theory was one thing. In practice, some went into the ground and others too high into the air. Some stayed in groups of five or ten or twenty, nearly certain death should they hit something living and then split up, but considerably less likely to hit anything. And then there's the sheer malicious chance factor with explosives. They do odd things.

* * *

Esteban saw the blossoming black and orange flowers before he felt a thing. It seemed to him that the first thing he felt was the displaced air from the passage of a zillion homicidal bees. Then he felt the explosions, rattling his brain as they pounded his body.

Shocked senseless, his fingers loosened on their own, letting his rifle slip to the ground. He was also distantly aware of something running down his legs toward the ground. Even with that, though, he was too shocked to feel any sense of shame.

Even before the chain of explosions has pummeled his body, Esteban saw flashes from the undergrowth. Only then did he become aware of the screams of his comrades, scythed down behind him.

* * *

Cruz couldn't see shit through the smoke from the mines and the dirt they kicked up. No surprise there; one rarely could. Instead, he trusted to chance for sixty long seconds while the rifles and machine guns swept across the kill zone. Some of them, at least, should have been able to see something. Cruz went by those sounds, by his own sense of timing, and by when the moans and screams of his platoon's victims let up. Then he blew a whistle and charged forward with the assault team, through the smoke . . . and right into Esteban Escobar, standing in utter shock in a place so obvious that every man of Cruz's platoon must have thought that either someone else was surely covering it or that no one could have survived the mines.

* * *

Cruz hit a block that hadn't been there when he'd set up the ambush, and which he had, not unreasonably, assumed would not be there after he fired off the mines. Thus, he wasn't even remotely expecting it and both he and the guerilla went down in a tumble.

Not being shocked shitless, as a single whiff told him the guerilla was, Cruz was the first on his feet. He aimed from the hip and was about to cut down the other, even as the men of his assault team worked through the supine forms laid out bleeding on the trail, when he noticed a small gold cross around the guerilla's neck. That stayed his finger from the light trigger of his F-26. From the cross Cruz looked up at terror-filled eyes, tears beginning to well, and said, 'Ah, fuckit.'

* * *