Page 117 of Casualties of War
Chapter Twenty-Four
“Dawn in thirty minutes!” Duardo shouted so Flores could hear him over the top of the ceaseless cracking of rifles and whine of bullets. The twelve men behind the sandbags were doing a superb job of looking and sounding as though the full weight of the Loyalist army was still hunkered down up here.
Flores looked at his watch and nodded. “Let’s go!”
Duardo signaled to CaptainAltira. Altira nodded and gave him a thumbs up, then turned back to firing one of the five rifles he had spread out across ten meters of sandbags. He pulled the trigger, moved on to the next rifle, sighted and fired and moved on again.
Duardo and Flores jogged in a big circle around the rear of the smelter shed. They ducked from bushes to rocks to trees, until they reached the sandy, steep goattrack down to the sliver of shoreline at the foot of the cliff.
They strode down the track, the sand shifting under their feet and speeding them on their way as their footing slipped and slid downward.
Ten thousand years ago, the main island and the Big Rock had once been one island, until a stream had run across the land and chewed a shallow channel across the width. Rain and wind had workedthrough time to wear the channel into a steep-sided chasm that eventually reached down to sea level, when the water rushed through it to form a new island off the tip of Vistaria.
The channel was a frothing churn of seawater only twenty meters across. It could have been a hundred miles across, for all the difference it made. Even though the two armies could reach out and shoot each other acrossthe chasm, the little ribbon of water was uncrossable. The surge and rips that tore through the channel would sweep any swimmer or non-powered craft straight out into the Pacific.
Daniel and Garrett’s guerilla unit had destroyed the bridge that joined the two islands for over a hundred years. Now girders and concrete and iron rebars the width of a man’s wrist made the water look like a bowl ofchunky cereal. Ten meters of frothing white sea tore through the middle.
Lieutenant Juarez stood at the bottom of the goat track, waiting for Flores and Duardo.
“All set!” he reported. “Keep to the right, sirs. Two feet that way, you’re in sight of the Insurrecto rifles.”
To confirm his statement, a slug pounded into the steep slope to Duardo’s left. Even down here, two hundred feet below therifle lines, the crack and bang of guns was loud.
Duardo hugged the rock beside him and lifted his cellphone and punched the “send” button on the text he had thumbed out two hours ago.
The image of a thumb jerking upward appeared.
He put the phone away. “We’re committed,” he told Flores.
“It’s more than time,” Flores declared. He pulled his chest armor straight and put on his helmet. “Howlong?” he asked and hefted his assault rifle.
A deep, throbbing roar of many motors rose, echoing off the vertical walls of the channel. “Now,” Duardo said.
They leaned as far out from the wall as they dared, to peer around the slope at the north end of the channel.
Fifteen boats were making their way at top speed toward the narrow channel. Top speed was not what it used to be. The boats werethe bulk of the fledgling Loyalist navy. The troops had been working on them for the last two days. Soldered and welded iron armor all over their tops and fronts and their left hand flanks weighed them down.
The hurricane, then days ago, had scattered iron sheeting across the island. It laid on the ground like scattered leaves. Now it had been refashioned into plate armor.
The fishing boatsand pleasure cruisers drew together as the channel narrowed.
There were cries from the Insurrectos, above, as the boats were spotted. Guns fired a staccato fusillade. The slugs bounced off the armor with sour whines. The boats kept up their wallowing speed, the motors revving hard to move the extra weight on each boat.
Duardo reminded himself to breath as he watched the fifteen craft cram togetherinto the narrow channel and keep moving.
The speed was enough, as he had hoped it would be. The phalanx of armored boats hit the wreckage of the bridge and grounded themselves upon it with a crunch of wood and a scraping and ding of metal hulls buckling. The boats in the ten meter channel jammed together, their propellers whining, their sides crunching and splintering.
Flores grimaced.
Duardopatted his shoulder.
In planning sessions, when Duardo had first proposed deliberately wrecking the boats to make a bridge, Flores had been appalled. “They are our transports!” he had cried.
“All the more reason to use them this way,” Duardo replied. “There is no going back now, General. If we retreat, if we give up even a yard of territory, then we will lose.”
As the wrecked ships settled,grinding against each other, Juarez signaled. From farther along the ten-foot slice of beachhead at the base of the cliff came a file of Loyalists, armed and armored, running at full speed for the first of the moored boats. They clambered into the boat, while the Insurrectos fired uselessly at the iron plating that shielded them. Duardo watched as the file of soldiers turned into a river of figurespouring over the side of the boat, then clambering into the next one, then the next.
The personnel who had piloted the boats picked up their own guns and joined the river.
