It was hopeless, Raul knew. He might hold on for an hour, or perhaps two if Jesus smiled on him. His uncle assured him that would be enough; that he could surrender himself and his men honorably after he had bought enough time for the core of the clan to escape. Two hours, at most, Raul. So his uncle had insisted.
Raul knew what his uncle was, and despised him for it. He knew that, in some sense, he was on the wrong side. But he was also certain that his uncle had so badly damaged Panama’s prospects for a successful defense that the only chance for his wife and children to survive would be for him to follow his uncle’s orders without question. For that, the survival of those he loved, he would compromise his honor, give his life and sacrifice his men. The thought made him sick, but he would do it all the same.
He consulted his watch for perhaps the hundredth time. Who knows, maybe if we can hold them here for a while we can work something out before any serious blood is spilt.
Suarez halted the Hummer at the western abutment of the bridge. He could not see the far side. This alone was reason enough for him to stop; he had gone forward once, under orders, without adequate reconnaissance and lost thousands because of it. Never again. Enough of my men’s blood has been spilt over political silliness and iniquity.
So, instead of blindly charging over the steep, asphalted hump of the bridge and down the far side, he ordered a company of his mechanized infantry to cut north to gain a view of the opposite bank. What they reported back he used to begin to build a picture, a remarkably accurate picture, of what awaited on the other side.
The bridge is blocked. That would not be so, most likely, unless the men who blocked it were still there. What would they have? Who would they be? MPs? Civil Police? Maybe those. Tanks? No, they’re all to the west, watching the Posleen. Anti-armor weapons? It’s possible, even likely, there in those buildings on the other side. Maybe not many of them but… No, going directly over the bridge is a losing proposition.
One thing he had not found time yet to train his men on was waterborne operations with their Russki BMPs. For that matter, given the exigencies of the Posleen war and the limitations of the Posleen themselves, he had never worried about training his men to disperse as a defense against indirect — artillery and mortar — fire.
He turned to Hector Miranda and ordered, “Get back there and spread the men out. Disperse the trucks to either side of the road. The driver can watch Cortez for a while.”
Miranda saluted and exited the Hummer even while the driver took his rifle and stuck it under Cortez’s chin with a smile. In a few minutes the roar of diesels behind Suarez grew as the trucks strained their engines to get into and through the ditches to either side of the road.
Suarez picked up his radio’s microphone and called the company commander, Captain Perez, A Company, who had cut right to recon the bridge. “Perez, do you think your BMPs can cross the water to the other side?” he asked.
“They’re water jet-propelled, Boss,” the captain answered. “There’s no real preparation required. And you drive them, basically, the same way. But… fine control? Selecting a good spot to try to emerge? Honestly, we’d be clueless. And if we took any close artillery on the way over…”
Suarez stopped to think, despite the racing clock, before issuing his orders. Tough call; tough call. I don’t even know if the poor bastards can get out of the water once I send them in. I don’t know…”
C Company’s commander, First Lieutenant Arias, came from the radio. “There’s a yacht club at old Fort Amador, sir. Where there’s a yacht club there’s likely to be a boat ramp. If there’s a boat ramp…”
Yeah there is. Shit, why didn’t I remember that. Hell, I’ve seen it.
“Do it, Arias. Cross,” Suarez ordered. “Perez, you get in the water, too. Go about half or two thirds of the way across, then cut right, and follow Arias out. Then clear the far side of the bridge.”
“Roger, sir… Roger.”
Raul Mercedes felt a momentary surge of hope when his observers reported that the enemy force — difficult to think of his countrymen as an enemy — had stopped on the far side of the bridge. That hope soared when the same observers reported that they seemed to be scattering their men and trucks into the trees on either side of the Pan-American Highway. Since Raul had no artillery or mortars, though he didn’t know that his enemy didn’t know that, he assumed that this indicated an intent not to try to force his roadblock. This would be fine with Raul.
Surging hope fell like a spent wave on the shore when Raul received the word that the enemy’s armor was splashing into the bay on both sides of the bridge. He rushed forward to the roadblock and peered first right, then left over the sides of the bridge. There, in the greasy looking waters trapped on three sides by the Canal, the City, and the peninsula to the west, two swarms — that was all he could think to call them as they had adopted nothing recognizable as a formation — of a dozen or more armored vehicles each were churning towards him and his men. If they could make a landing, and — since he had not reconned the area Raul had no way of knowing whether they could or not — they would roll up his flanks like a newspaper and then clear the side of the bridge he was charged with defending.
A trained officer might have remembered the old aphorism: who would defend everything defends nothing. Raul, however, was not a trained officer. Instead of concentrating his efforts, he split his reserve into two and reinforced both sections with men from his roadblock, thinning the line there. These two groups hurried south, to Fort Amador, where one group of armor seemed to be headed, and northeast toward what appeared to Raul to be the objective of the other company of armor. Some went in what amounted to police cars, sirens blazing, others in the trucks that had brought his force to the bridge. He was able to estimate their arrival at the likely landing points by when the sirens cut off.
Soon little geysers, the result of the impact of bullets on the water’s surface, began spouting up all around the approaching armor. The commanders of the vehicles ducked down, closing their hatches until only their eyes were able to see out.
To Suarez, looking through binoculars as he crouched in some bushes under and to one side of the west bank of the bridge, it looked like heavy rain on a calm lake surface. He might have thought it looked more like hail except that hail was something of a rarity in Panama. He watched the track commanders half-buttoning up under the fusillade and wondered, worried, how that would affect their chances of finding an egress from the water. He assumed that the reduction in visibility would not help, in any case.
From his vantage point Suarez could make out the spot at Amador where he thought the boat ramp must be. He couldn’t see anything that looked promising in front of Perez’s boys, though this didn’t matter as he intended for Perez to form a second wave at the Amador boat ramp.