Good thing we’re in range of ground-based air support here, Farr thought.
His sons were inland there, where the fighting was—steadily increasing fighting, as the Land forces battered their way through guerilla harassment and started to bring their weight to bear on the Santander blocking elements. His eldest grandson was in one of those wood-and-canvas powered kites . . . if he hadn’t been the one who plunged out of the sky and died just now. Pride came in many flavors; right now it tasted like fear. An old man might not fear for himself, but anyone living still had something hostage to fortune. His family, his country . . .
I think we’d be in a very bad way indeed if it weren’t for John and Jeffrey, he thought. If John hadn’t been born with a clubfoot, or if I hadn’t gotten that posting as naval attaché in Oathtaking . . .
“Carry on,” he said aloud. “Let’s keep them busy. And stand by to fire support missions for the ground forces.”
* * *
“I don’t give a living shit how many partisans there are out there, Colonel,” Heinrich Hosten said with quiet venom. His fingers were white on the field telephone. “Ignore them. Ignore your fucking flanks. Hit the Santies, and hit them hard, or by the Oath, you’ll be in the Western Islands dodging blowgun darts from the savages next month, if you’re unlucky enough to be still alive.”
He retuned the handset to its cradle with enormous care, fighting through the rage that clouded his vision. He looked at the pin-studded map and tried to force himself to be objective. I’m not justified in going to the front. More information is getting through now. I’m in a better position to coordinate from here.
He could hear the Santy naval bombardment from here, though, a continuous rumble to the south. Guns were firing closer than that, medium field pieces; Land batteries, shooting obstacles out of the way in the narrow passages of the hills.
One of his staff handed him the field telephone again, “Sir, you’ll want to hear this yourself.”
He picked it up. “Ja?”
Gerta’s voice. He closed his eyes; nothing should surprise him today.
“You’ll never guess which old friend of yours I ran into today,” she said. “Ran into literally, but I didn’t quite manage to kill him.”
There were times when he was tempted to believe in malignant spirits.
* * *
Kurt Wallers jammed his palms over his ears and opened his mouth. The gun fired again, and the pressure wave battered at him. No point in going back to the command bunker deeper in the rock; the observation stations weren’t operational yet. With those and the calculating machine it would have been possible to direct accurate fire nearly to the southern shore of the Gut. As it was, each tube was firing under independent control—over open sights.
And not doing a bad job. He hated to think what had happened to the construction people up above; he’d spent a long time training them. All we have to do is hold out until the reinforcements drive off the landing parties. Then—
“Sir! Movement on the beach below us!”
He blinked. “Get some extra propellant charges.” They came in fabric containers the size of small garbage cans. “Strap grenades to them. Pull the tabs and roll them over the edge of the casement. Move.”
Suddenly the background rumble of naval shellfire exploding on the plateau overhead ceased. Wallers looked up; that took his eyes away from the slit of light where the embrasure mouth pierced the cliff. Something flew in. His head whipped around, and trained reflex threw him down, not quite in time.
* * *
Durrison plastered himself to the lip of concrete above the gun embrasures. Every time the long cannon within fired, the concussion threatened to flip him off the ledge, despite the rope sling fastened to pitons driven firmly into the rock above. A couple of his men had been flipped, to dangle scrabbling on their ropes until the hands of their squadmates could haul them back. The enemy hadn’t noticed, thank God; the embrasures might be narrow firing slits in comparison to the size of the guns within or the scale of the three-hundred-foot height of the cliffs, but they were still fifteen feet from top to bottom.