Not For Glory (14 page)

"You can be what you want to be. Governments have started the way you are." Shimon Bar-El spread his hands. "But if you are a government, then you have to protect your peasants. It would be one thing if they'd snatched a girl from off-turf. But she's a local, and they knew it."

Michael laughed as he let the girl's head drop. She huddled even closer to her father.

"Fair enough. But then why don't I put all the squad in the dock?"

"Because you can't." Shimon smiled. "Because you can't afford to lose ten of your people in the first place. In the second, it wouldn't be just ten, because Kevin's squad won't hold still for you cutting all of their throats—you'd lose some from your other squads, too. In the third place, it wasn't their fault. It was Kevin's job to keep them off local girls, not theirs. They were under his authority; it was his responsibility."

Michael smiled again. I was beginning to dislike that smile. "So it's his neck. You got anything to say for yourself, Kevin?"

"Mike, Mike. You can't I'm your
friend,
dammit I'm your—"

"Shhh . . ." Michael said. Steel flickered in his hands.

"C'mon, Michael, you can't do this to me, dammit you can't do this you can't—"

Michael shut him off with a backhanded slap to the face. He rubbed at his knuckles. "You stupid shit. Told you to keep off of the local girls."

"M-Mister Michael," the shopkeeper stuttered, "can we go now?"

Michael smiled again. "No, no. It was your daughter Kevin raped. You get to cut his throat." He picked up the shopkeeper's right hand and placed the knife in it. "Right, Shimon?"

My uncle shrugged. "It's safer for all. Makes him a participant, instead of just a witness. Not that anybody'll care, one way or the other. It's the advantage of disciplining your own people: outsiders don't care what you do to each other."

"Then it would make sense to have these others help, too."

"Eh?"

"Make them participants, too." Michael said. "Instead of witnesses."

Bar-El smiled. "It would, at that. Although I don't see the need. Once you and they finish doing business, they're likely to be long gone." Shimon jerked his head at Dov. "You. The big one. You mind helping in a bit of butchery?"

Dov shrugged. "Sure."

Michael shook his head. "Nah. Not him. One of the old ones—you," he said, beckoning to Yehoshua Bernstein. "You come over here and help. And then we can all sit down and talk some business."

Like an old man on the verge of fainting, Yehoshua started to sway. One of the guards prodded him with his gun. That was his last mistake.

Everything flew apart at once.

Without warning, without any preliminary, Yehoshua turned, reached out a finger and stuck it in the boy's eye, bursting it like a grape.

The guard screamed. Reflexively, he reached both hands to his face, his grip on his pistol loosened; Yehoshua wrestled it away from him.

He brought it up and started firing.

Neither of the guards near me had a pistol, but one had raised a stick; I ducked underneath and slammed the edge of my hand into his windpipe, crushing it as shots began to echo hollowly throughout the hall.

The hoodlums were tough, and their reflexes were those of youth, but they never had a chance.

They were used to set-piece battles, where everyone knew a fight was about to happen, and to jumping unsuspecting victims. They weren't ready for the old wolves. A wolf attacks the enemy that's the most dangerous to the pack, not to himself.

As red flowers burst from his belly and chest, Yehoshua was already emptying the pistol, not at those who were shooting at him, but at the armed hoodlums nearest to Yabotinsky and Stern.

Moshe Stern was already in a flat dive; rolling, he picked up the gun of an injured boy, half rose, and started picking out targets, stomping once on the boy's face to quiet him.

The Sergeant had spun around to grapple with the hoodlum behind him. He smashed his forehead into the boy's nose, then twisted the gun out of the hoodlum's hands, sliding it across the floor toward Menachem Yabotinsky as three shots shook his body. He crept across the floor toward the barred door, leaving a red trail behind him.

Michael jerked the wiregun from his waistband, but Shimon tripped him and then Dov was on him, moving faster than anybody has a right to. He slapped Michael across the throat, once, and yanked the wiregun from the boy's hand. Michael staggered to the side, clutching at his crushed trachea, gasping, trying to get some sound, some word out, but he was dying as he fell to his knees.

Dov scooped Shimon up and half-carried, half-threw him under the desk, out of the line of fire, and turned to face two of the young hoods, who were already upon him, each with a knife in hand.

He shifted his weight to the balls of his feet and shrugged past their lunges, moving fluidly, gracefully, like a dancer, as he smashed one in the face with his left elbow, then reached for the other one with his right hand. He barely seemed to touch the other, but the boy spun away, spitting blood and teeth, jerking spasmodically until he collapsed a few meters away.

Dov was bringing up the wiregun when a half-dozen gunshots caught him, one smashing his jaw into a red pulp, another knocking his knee out from under him, yet another slamming into his chest, bringing him down.

A hero would have done something about the girl and her father, but I was fighting for my own life when one shot splashed her blood and brains across her father's chest and face, followed by a flurry that cut off his anguished screams.

Yehuda Nakamura was using his second captured gun, carefully taking aim at each of the young gunners in turn. There had been three of them in the far corner; by the time Menachem Yabotinsky and Stem had reached them, all three were down, one dead, the other only wounded.

Yabotinsky and Stern had retrieved the captured firearms and begun shooting, but it was almost all over. All of the gunmen had been taken down, and Menachem Yabotinsky and Stern simply blew away anyone who made a motion toward any of the half-dozen guns lying on the bloody floor.

"Stay the fuck
away
from the guns or you're
dead.
Hands
up,
assholes. Get your fucking hands
up
,"
Menachem Yabotinsky shouted, his shouts cutting through their screams and whimpers. It was the voice of a man decades younger—strong, uncompromising.

Three of our dead and easily four times that many of their dead and dying littered the floor; it was almost over.

The Sergeant lay near the door, now unbarred.

It had started, and it was over, in seconds.

Firefights are like that; even the most active of elite troopers spends less than one percent of their active duty time near shots fired in anger.

The room stank. All of the dead and most of the dying had voided themselves, in the mindless reflex that all animals use to leave themselves unappetizing to their predators.

"Get your fucking hands up, and get over against the wall," Menachem Yabotinsky called out again.

There were only ten or so uninjured; Vators shouted incoherent surrenders, moving quickly, faces pale.

As he worked his way across the blood-and shit-slickened floor, Moshe Stern carefully shot through the head a boy whose outstretched hand was too close to a loose pistol; the shot echoed loudly through the hall, but the cries of the surviving Vators almost drowned it out.

Stern stooped to pick up the pistol. A dark stain spread across his belly as he crouched.

The steel door to the outside creaked open and Ephraim Imran entered the room with a dive-roll-and-recover that would have done credit to a much younger man, and then rose to his feet, tracking Dov's Korriphila across the carnage. He was followed immediately by Zev, who rose to his feet in a half-squat, Dunfey's stolen pistol held out in front of him, Imran's medikit strapped tightly to his back.

It was almost all over.

Shimon was kneeling over Dov. "Medic, here," he said.

"In a sec." Ephraim Imran dropped a hand to the Sergeant's neck. "Shit. Tzvi's dead."

"Move your ass, man," Yabotinsky said. The balding little man wasn't interested in displaying emotions.

Imran was already working his way past Yehuda Nakamura's and Yehoshua Bernstein's bodies before joining the old man over Dov.

I'd finished off my own two adversaries seconds ago, eons ago, and had stooped to recover the leader's wiregun from where Dov had dropped it.

"Shut up, all," Menachem Yabotinsky shouted, his eyes fixed on the Vators crowding against the wall.

"Tzvi?" he asked, more out of long-established practice than any belief that the Sergeant would still be alive.

No answer.

The Sergeant's body was over by the door that he had unbarred. I walked to him and covered his face. It wasn't right that the rest of them should look at him like this.

Zev laid a hand on my shoulder, but I shrugged it off.

"Moshe?"

"Gut shot," Stern said, easing himself down to the floor, the barrel of the gun never drooping. "I can manage."

Some of the Vators were screaming and some were shouting, but it all blended together in a mess of sound.

"Yehuda?"

No answer.

"Yehoshua?" Old Yehoshua lay where he had fallen, un-moving, his eyes distant.

Again, no answer.

"Dov?"

"Stable," Imran said. "I think he's going to make it, although he's going to need a lot of work. He's got a sucking chest wound, but it's the right side." He and Shimon crouched over the big man. "Bring him in," he called.

"Tetsuo?" Menachem Yabotinsky called out, not taking his eyes from the Vatore huddling in the corner.

"Unhurt," I said, realizing that I was lying when I noticed that I was pressing my hand to my aching side. I'd probably worsened the broken rib. But I'd been lucky. The Vators had concentrated on shooting targets, and left me to take out my two guards without being shot at much. I had a dim memory or something whizzing past my ear, but whoever it was hadn't been allowed any more shots.

"Tetsuo, if you're unhurt, I got something for you to do." Imran didn't raise his head as he worked over Dov.

"What do you need?"

"I've got the prefect stashed in the outer room. Drag the hero in here, will you?" He tossed a hypo at me. "Give him this, right on the wound on his arm."

"Will do."

From behind me, I heard a familiar voice. "Stuarti," the major said, announcing himself. "Safe to come in?"

Menachem Yabotinsky was still in charge. "Come," he said. "Tetsuo, watch them."

As I turned, I took another look at the bodies of the father and daughter. It occurred to me that if I'd killed Shimon when I was supposed to, back on Indess, I wouldn't have to be standing here, looking down into the dead face of a man whose last sensation had been the taste and smell of his own daughter's blood and brains—but then it occurred to me that I didn't really have to look, so I looked away.

Zev and Stuarti led Ambassador Adazzi into the killing ground. Zev held Dunfey's pistol out in front of him, not quite pointing it at anyone as he took in the scene, his face as impassive as Stuarti's. The ambassador was white-faced. Apparently he hadn't seen a lot of dead people before.

"Just old, worn-out soldiers," Stuarti said. "And unarmed."

It really looked more impressive than it was. If we'd given them any warning, they'd have handled themselves better, but it had been easy for the Vators to see a bunch of old men as no threat at all. And there had been no warm-up, no anthropoid chest-beating.

A wrinkled old man had just reached up and stuck his finger in an eye, that was all.

Menachem Yabotinsky was at my side; he held open his hands for the wiregun. The surviving Vators crowded even tighter against the wall, milling like sheep. I handed it over.

"Zev, I'll take the hero's gun, too," he said.

"Officially, Ambassador," I said, "we got into trouble and the prefect saved our asses, demonstrating unusual courage and great blahblahblah. We wanted you to see it unofficially. So you can have some understanding of what you're bidding on. What you can either hire or face . . ."

No, you don't get used to the smell of the dead and the cries of the dying. But there are times when you can affect to be unbothered by it, and wave that affectation in front of a civilian, threatening him with your barbarity.

He tried for a bit of composure, and found it. "Impressive," he said, "I can count twelve of them dead, for only three of yours." He knew it was the wrong thing to say as soon as the words were out of his mouth, but they hung in the air.

Menachem Yabotinsky looked at him. "Twelve for only three. I guess that doesn't impress you enough." Menachem Yabotinsky smiled. It wasn't a grin; it was the rictus a wolf uses, to free his teeth to sink into another's flesh. Adazzi would always remember that smile.

Zev echoed what we all were thinking. "You really shouldn't have said that, Ambassador."

"I count thirty-seven to three," Menachem Yabotinsky said. "And no matter, we would have had to use Dunfey's gun a few times, anyway."

"What do you mean—?"

Menachem Yabotinsky brought up both wireguns, and thumbed them both to full automatic.

It wouldn't have made a difference to a military man, but we wouldn't have had to persuade a soldier that Metzada is the best there is. Giacometti and Stuarti already knew just how good we are, but that hadn't convinced Adazzi.

For Adazzi, it had to be something different. Show him a taste, just a little taste of brutality, and then let him think long and hard about what uniforms he wanted men like Yabotinsky to see, as they looked over their sights. Adazzi raised a hand. "No,
don't—"
The Vators started screaming.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Company C

Thellonee, New Britain

New Portsmouth Port Facility

01/15/44, 2211 local time

It had been a long day and a half since the shooting, most of it spent shrugging. But the local police really had two distinct choices: to see us as rescued victims, and Dunfey as our heroic rescuer; or to see him as a dupe and then try to work out what we were, no matter how bad that made him—and them—look.

Cops protect their own; while the questioning had been lengthy, it had also been pro forma: the still-groggy Dunfey was in line for a promotion, and we were all dutifully grateful to him. I don't know who among the cops really believed the bullshit, but nobody was going to announce that the emperor was butt-naked, so it was all right.

We gathered around the table in the living room of our suite, some of us the worse for wear.

I was the least-injured of the injured, and my retaped ribs were only a distant ache. Dov wasn't with us; he was in the Preserve hospital, in stable condition. The big man was deadly at hand-to-hand, but that doesn't armor anyone against bullets.

Neither does innocence. I guess I should have felt bad about the merchant and his daughter dying, but you get used to that sort of thing; they weren't the first innocents to die in a crossfire, and they wouldn't be the last.

The doctors at the Preserve hospital may have been mainly men, but they did a good job on Moshe Stern, doing a keyhole bowel resection, pumping him full of antibiotics and painkillers, and then releasing him twenty-four hours later—granted, against their advice. He was more propped up than sitting up.

Yabotinsky was just tired. He yawned broadly, scratched at his scalp, then reached for the whiskey bottle, pouring for himself and the other oldsters.

"You sure you should be drinking?" Zev asked Stern.

"No," Stern said, as he reached for his glass.

I turned to Ephraim Imran. "Any chance of Dov being able to travel shortly?"

"Depends what you mean," Imran said. His eyes seemed to have trouble focusing; his voice was ever-so-slightly slurred. "They say I can have him fit for a stretcher tomorrow. He can take a launching, although he won't like it much."

Shimon Bar-El shook his head. "Leave him be. Leave him be. We're not going to need him for the fix I have planned. All we need is a bit of time."

I looked long and hard at my uncle, but he either didn't notice or didn't care.

The Sergeant was dead. He'd loomed larger over my life than almost anybody, including my own father. He'd trained me as a soldier, and had watched my back during my first firefight, way back when.

And I hadn't even been watching him while he died; I'd been too busy trying to kill a couple of seventeen-year-old hoodlums.

There are some things you don't get used to. Having people you love dying on foreign soil is one of them.

Zev seemed unmoved by the whole thing. "Fix?"

Bar-El nodded. "A fix. Actually, you'd be better off giving me command of the whole Rand campaign, but I knew you wouldn't do it, so I found another fix."

"Who'd you get it from?" Zev asked. "And what is it?"

"You seem to think I'm stupid, but I hope you don't think I'm
that
stupid," Shimon Bar-El said. "For one thing, the walls may have ears. Which is why I'm not going to tell you where I got the other information, other than that it was before I . . . overreached myself with the Vators."

In the back of my mind, I'd been wondering about that, but his explanation made sense. We knew he'd been doing some consulting work; possibly he'd picked up the news about the Freiheimer tanks during that time, before he'd become a prisoner of/adviser to the Vators.

"As to the fix, it's a bit soon to tell you what, but I don't mind telling you where: Alsace."

Alsace.

We all sat silent for a moment. It really didn't matter which campaign Shimon thought he had a fix for; there would have been people we cared about in any. There always are, anywhere Metzada goes.

But
Alsace.
Benyamin was on Alsace, part of the new Eighteenth, under Yonni Davis.

David Alon walked into the silence, a sober grin threatening to become tastelessly broad. "We've wrapped up the contract with Casalingpaesa," he said. "On reasonable terms."

The room probably wasn't bugged, but there was no sense in taking chances. What he meant was
we've got a deal that would be pretty good, even if we didn't know that an armor strike is going to go through Freiheimer armor like hot lead through butter.

"What kind of force? Did they go for a division, or—?"

"Two. One armor, one line infantry," he said, trying to keep the pleasure out of his voice, failing miserably. He'd been trying to get them to go for
one
division.

"Good," Shimon said. "You're leaving for Metzada tomorrow?"

Alon thought about not answering for a moment, but then he shrugged. "Yes, I am."

"Good, again. Have a message passed to Davis, via the next courier. Just tell him that the IG is on his way. With me in tow."

One of the things about my uncle that always annoyed me was his ability to skip past the preliminaries. It was obvious that he wasn't going to tell us what kind of fix he had planned for the Alsace situation, and that I didn't dare press him too hard—but would insist on accompanying him there.

Alon's face went grave. "We'll be taking the bodies with us," he added quiedy. "The Constabulary just delivered them. They're in cold storage in the basement."

"Wait one minute, General." The glaze was suddenly gone from Yabotinsky's eyes. "We do not carry bodies with us. We are buried where we fall. Tzvi, Yehuda and Yehoshua died for Metzada."

It's long been a tradition, ever since David Bar-El created the Metzada Mercenary Corps, that those serving it are buried where they die, not carried back.

Alon shook his head slowly. "It wasn't official, here or home. Officially, here, they were visitors regretfully killed by youth gang members, despite Prefect Dunfey's heroic efforts. Officially, at home, they were retired old soldiers, helping the inspector-general out with a youth-crime survey, not on duty. The Prefecture returned the bodies to us just an hour or so ago, and I don't want to make a fuss about trying to find burial plots here."

The years fell on Menachem Yabotinsky's shoulders, and he was just a bald man sitting uneasily in a chair, too much whiskey muddying his tired brain.

"Eph," he said. "Help me to bed."

He rose, unsteady, and Ephraim Imran was at his side, helping him from the room. Alon opened his mouth, as if he were going to say something, but there wasn't anything to say and he closed it.

"Sit down, David," Shimon Bar-El said, pushing the whiskey bottle to him.

Moshe Stern intercepted it, and poured himself another hefty slug with a trembling hand.

"As Sergeant Aroni was saying, I don't think that's a good idea, not with a healing gut-wound," General Alon said.

Stern sat silently for a moment. "You know, General, I don't give a shit what you think." He knocked back a slug and poured himself another, then slammed the bottle down in front of Shimon Bar-El. "You any good at lying, Bar-El?"

Shimon Bar-El nodded. "Fair. Why?"

"Because you're about to tell me that what you've got in your head is going to save more of our lives than getting you out of there has cost. And I want to see if I can guess if you're lying."

I can't always tell if somebody's lying or telling the truth, but sometimes I can. I knew he wasn't lying when he said:

"It was worth it, Moshe. It was worth it." Bar-El looked him straight in the eye. "Proof of my sincerity, I'm letting the obvious slide by without comment, let it go over some heads here and now."

Stern looked at him long and hard, then nodded and drank some more.

Alon raised an eyebrow. "What did you mean by that, Bar-El?"

Shimon didn't answer.

He never answered when he didn't want to. We'd find out soon enough, probably. I rose and walked to the window, glass in hand.

I looked out into the night. There were no landings scheduled tonight; the field was unlit. The darkness of the Preserve seemed about to reach out and grab at the city. The city probably deserved it.

I turned my back on the night.

Stern set his glass back down on the table, then slumped back in his chair. It was about all he could do; gut wounds take a lot out of you, and he really should still have been in the hospital.

Bar-El turned to Alon. "My regards to the deputy, and tell her to have the way cleared for the three of us on Alsace. Tetsuo, Zev and I will be relaxing here for a few weeks to be sure the message has gotten through, and then we're on our way—and see if she can arrange a mail drop for the Eighteenth at Circum-Thellonee; we'll carry it"

Zev looked at me, and I nodded. There was no way I was going to get him to tell us what sort of fix he had in mind for the Alsace problem, and if we were to drop blind into that mess, it could be very bad. Too easy for us to be made to disappear—much better to get a bit of a warning going.

We drank and talked aimlessly for a few minutes. There's always something about what you do after a fight that's special, even if what you do isn't particularly special in and of itself. I don't know if that makes sense, but it's always there. The time in the police station didn't count; that was part of the battle, that was among foreigners.

Here was different. Here I was with my own. What was left of them. The Sergeant was dead. I could feel my heart thud slowly in my chest, just the way it did during a NoGain session. Uncle Tzvi had been a pillar in my life, and now the pillar was gone.

They all die on me—my father, my brothers, the Sergeant—the bastards all die on me.

A klaxon started hooting somewhere.

"Fire alarm, fire alarm,"
sounded from speakers that I hadn't seen, couldn't find even now.

Alon was already on his feet. "What's that—?"

"Don't be an ass, man," Shimon Bar-El said. "I'm surprised it took them so long."

"What?" Alon was halfway to his feet; Shimon waved him back.

"It's been too long for you, David Alon," said my uncle, Shimon.

Below, the darkness was shattered by fire: three coffin-shaped boxes blazing away into the night. Two men, one carrying an improvised spear, stood watch over the fire, probably to make sure that nobody put it out too soon. I hoped nobody would try to get past them. Yesterday had been a special case; I wasn't sure I could clear yet another homicide with the local authorities.

Moshe Stern forced himself to his feet, reeling with the pain. "It's Eph and Menachem," he said. "They're cremating the bodies. I wish I'd been strong enough to help them." He spoke quietly, his voice barely louder than a whisper. "You're not taking their bodies home, General. They will be buried where they fell." His face was unmoving, his voice level as he picked up the whiskey bottle and splashed some of the liquid more at than in the glasses on the table, then dropped the empty bottle to the carpeted floor. "You're senior, Shimon Bar-El."

"So I am." Shimon Bar-El stood slowly. He pursed his lips, opened his mouth, and then closed it. When he spoke, his voice was husky. "Friends, brothers, and cousins, a toast," he said, raising his glass. "To Company C, First Battalion, the old Eighteenth Regiment: the fire burns."

Stern nodded. "Company C."

We all drained our glasses, then shattered them against the wall.

Below, the fire burned a long time.