The Colonel sipped his tea. It was sweet and hot, hotter even than the steady wind out of the west.
He’d seen it too often to be surprised any more: local officers who thought their men were dirt. That’s what they were in truth, often enough, thugs good for nothing but to smoke khat or whatever the local drug of choice was and carry off girls to rape for the next week or so until they got tired of them.
But the officers were even worse to any eyes but their own. If the Colonel could speak Telugu or the troops knew English, he wouldn’t have kept Krishnamurtri around even to wipe his feet on. That wasn’t an option—it usually wasn’t—and anyway, the other side was usually just as badly off.
Even now. This was the Colonel’s third operation for his present employer, and the quality of the opposition had been well short of divine. He smiled again.
Before the Colonel could ask about the unit’s training and experience, a vehicle sailed out of the western sky as slowly as a vulture and landed beside the shelter in a shimmer of static electricity. It was a narrow, flat-bottomed craft more like a toboggan than an aircraft. It was open-sided except for the exiguous cockpit in front where a kneeling servitor drove. The Colonel had never seen anything like it before.
The servitor got out, pointed an index finger at the weapons lying on the rear deck, and walked away without a backward glance. The Telugus chirped with amazement as they gathered around the vehicle.
“An air sled!” Krishnamurtri said. “And look, they’re giving us ion guns too, enough for all of us! This is because we serve with you, Colonel. We are honored, greatly honored!”
The Colonel got to his feet with the care his ribs and his many previous injuries required. He kept a straight face as he stepped out of the shelter. He’d never heard of air sleds or the ion guns which the delighted Telugus were now waving in the air. He didn’t suppose it mattered.
On his first operation for the present employer the Colonel’s troops had been mostly Nigerians. They’d been armed with a variety of World War II weapons: Enfield rifles and Tommy guns, with American pineapple grenades and a Danish light machine gun, a Madsen, that took 8-mm ammunition instead of the .303 that the rifles used.
Riddle had been assigned as his XO on that operation. The Colonel had worked with him before, on Bouganville. Riddle knew his business, right enough, but he was a nasty piece of work. He liked his boys as young as possible and screaming, even when they were prostitutes and already, as Riddle put it, stump-broke. The Colonel hadn’t been sorry when the bunker Riddle threw a grenade into blew up and took him with it. There must have been a ton of explosives stored inside.
You could call the operation a success: they’d destroyed the Enemy base camp. Only the Colonel himself and a handful of his troops had survived, though.
The second operation was supposed to eliminate an Enemy command post. The Colonel had been assigned to a unit of Amerinds armed with clubs and spears. He’d worked in Latin America often enough in the past, but he didn’t speak the language his troops did and they had only a smattering of the Spanish that had to serve as his command language.
They’d done their job, caught the hostile commander in his hammock with one of his wives and hacked them both to bloody fragments. Enemy forces had kept up the pursuit to where the canoes were stashed, however; only the Colonel himself and two paddlers had made it all the way back for pickup.
The Colonel examined the ion gun. It had a short barrel, a long tubular receiver, and a pistol grip with a normal trigger and a three-position safety above it. The weapon had no other controls.
He extended the telescoping buttstock, walked around the end of the shelter, and aimed through the disk-shaped optical sight toward the mountains. Telugus crowded behind him, jabbering in excitement.
The Colonel pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. He was deliberately ignoring Captain Krishnamurtri’s offered suggestions, though it was going to be embarrassing if the Colonel couldn’t figure the weapon out himself.