And the doors of the rear boxcars were thrown open from within. Steel planks clanged down, and the dark lurching shape of armored cars showed within. The first skidded down the ramp, landing three-quarters on, almost going over, then steadying. Its engine chuffed loudly as the wheels spun and spattered gravel against the side of the train, and then the turret traversed to send more machine-gun fire against the hillside. Squads of infantry rose and scurried into its shelter, advancing behind it as the car nosed towards the lower slopes of the hill. A grenade crunched with a malignant snap of light. Three more of the war-cars thudded to the ground, crunching through the trackside gravel.
John grabbed Arturo’s shoulder. “Get the fuck out of here!” he screamed in the partisan’s ear. Then to Barrjen: “Collect the rest. Time to bug out.”
“Yes sir.”
With a long dragon hiss, a rocket rose from the wrecked train. It kept rising, a thousand yards or more, then burst in a shower of gold—the colors of the Chosen flag, yellow on black.
* * *
“Sound the halt in place,” Heinrich Hosten said, standing with his hands on his hips. “And remember, live prisoners.”
Troopers were moving down the hillside under the glare of the arc light, prodding at bundles of rags with their bayonets. Occasionally that would bring a response, and the soldiers would pick up the wounded guerilla; cautiously, after the first one who’d stuffed a live grenade under his body was found.
The trumpet sounded, four urgent rising notes. A slow crackle of skirmish fire in the hill country to the west died down. In the comparative silence that followed he could hear the relief train that the signal rocket was intended for, with the rest of the battalion and its equipment. Plus the equipment and workers to repair the track, of course. It was surprisingly difficult to do lasting damage to a railway track without time or plenty of equipment.
“Shall we pursue when the rest of the battalion comes up, Brigadier?” Captain Neumann said.
“Nein,” he said. “Too much chance of ambushes in the dark.” He got out his map case. “But it would be advisable to push blocking forces here and here. Then in a few hours, we can sweep and see how many of these little birds we can bag.”
Captain Neumann looked at the emergency aid station where her wounded were being looked after. There were four bodies with their groundsheets drawn over their faces.
“We only killed twenty or so of them,” she said. “This is a bad exchange rate.”
“The operation is not over,” Heinrich said. “And we have taught them a little lesson, I think.”
“That is the problem—when we teach them a lesson, they learn,” Neumann said unexpectedly.
Heinrich shrugged. “We must see that we learn more than they,” he added, knocking the dottle out of his pipe.
* * *
The cave smelled bad: damp rock, and the wastes of the survivors, since they hadn’t dared go outside for the last three days. Weak daylight was leaking through, enough penetrating this far into the cave to turn the absolute blackness into a gray wash of light.
“We failed,” Arturo said bitterly.
“We survived,” John replied. “Enough of us. Next time we’ll do better.”
“So will they!” the guerilla said.
“We’ll just have to learn faster,” John said. “Besides, there are more of us than of them.”
He looked toward the light. “Now we’d better check if their patrols are still looking,” he said. “It’s a fair hike back to the cove.”
* * *
John Hosten’s wasn’t the biggest steam yacht under Santander registry, by a considerable margin; they were a common status symbol among the rising industrial magnates of the Republic. The Windstrider was only about twelve hundred tons displacement. It was the most modern, with some refinements that Center had suggested and John had made in the engineering works he owned. One of them was a wet-well entrance on the side that could be flooded or pumped dry in less than a minute, as well as turbine engines, something no vessel in the Republic’s Navy had yet. The little ship lay long and sleek against the morning sun, a black silhouette outlined in crimson.