Covering behind the solid corner, just as Robles extended his bipod and placed his machine gun to his shoulder, he uttered, “Fuck,” as the first BMP up the ramp emerged through the thick smoke.
Arias was unwilling to dismount either himself or the men in the back of his track until he had more vehicles and infantry ashore. The pitter-patter of bullets striking the armor not only reinforced his original inclination but actually succeeded in driving him completely under cover and even to close his hatch. It would never do to let the inside of the hatch cause one to ricochet into the interior from which it could not escape without bouncing around until it buried itself in one of the crew. Frantically, he traversed the turret while searching for targets through his sight. Nothing. He elevated the sight and gun and swept again. Nothing. He depressed the gun and swept back but the gun would not go low enough to let him see ground level at any of a number of positions that could be sheltering his assailants.
He thought about having the driver back out but, with more vehicles coming up to the ramp in a steady stream, he was afraid of an accident that might block the ramp. Like any infantryman, even a mechanized one, he hated being stuck inside his track. What others saw as protection he saw only as a trap, an armored coffin vulnerable to any man with an anti-armor weapon.
I can’t back up. I won’t stay here. All that is left is to go forward.
Robles’ machine gun chattered until seconds before the left tread of Arias’ track squashed him like a grape.
“Mount up, you bastards, mount up,” Colonel Suarez shouted into his radio. He gave the order as soon as he saw the first BMP break across the street, 100mm gun flaring, and the Presidential Guard breaking in terror. Every now and again, looking through his binoculars, he caught a glimpse of a BMP, with its distinctive silhouette, at one of the city’s crossroads along Avenida de los Mártires.
Before the first trucks of Suarez’s column had reloaded and joined him at the western foot of the bridge, some of Perez’s men had already dismounted and begun to push the vehicles in the bridge’s roadblock aside. A few of the cars gave trouble, bumpers locked or tires slashed or simply jammed together. These the men hooked tow cables up — all armored vehicles carried them — and let the BMPs haul away. By the time Suarez’s Hummer reached the erstwhile roadblock a path five meters wide had been cleared.
Suarez had his driver pull his vehicle aside and dismounted. A uniformed body, so badly crushed it was almost unrecognizable as human, lay in a spreading pool of blood near the Hummer. Suarez spared the body barely a glance. He raised one fist to stop the first BMP from the one company he hadn’t previously committed.
“Go to the Plaza of the Martyrs,” he said to the company commander, pointing at his map of the city to indicate a broadly open area to the south of the main avenue set aside as a monument to those Panamanians killed in the 1964 riots. “Wait for me there. Go!”
Eleven BMPs passed, all of the company that had survived the long road march without breaking down. Next up came a truck. Suarez beckoned the man, a lieutenant beside the driver, down and, again pointing to the map, said, “You know your target, the TV studios?”
Seeing the officer nod, he slapped him on the back. “Go to it, then, son and make them put you on TV to read off the statement you’ve been given.”
Three trucks passed, following the lieutenant. At the next Suarez pointed and shouted out the simple question, “Target?”
“Estereo Bahia,” the senior noncom in the truck answered over the diesel’s roar. The next truck gave a different answer, the DENI — Departmento Nacional de Investigaciones. Three trucks followed that one out as there might be a fight. The next leader gave his target without being asked: the main police station. The next, the Palacio de las Garzas. When the last of the dozen task groups had passed, the dozen needed to take out the most critical assets to a coup or counter coup, Suarez returned to his Hummer and had himself driven to the Plaza de los Mártires. There, he found the last BMP company and ordered the commander to follow him to La Joya Prison.
Mercedes paced fretfully by the open pit dump that was the only treeless area near the prison large enough to accommodate the Himmit stealth transport. The prisoners sat nearby under guard. That is, all of them sat except for one woman who lay on a stretcher, not unconscious but plainly very weak. Mercedes recognized the woman and felt a moment’s shame at his part in bringing her to this. Decency was not one of the president’s notable features but even he had to see the sheer injustice of prosecuting a heroine of the war for no other reason than that she had broken international law by using the material available to her. His wife saw the woman and the prisoners, as did the one mistress he had brought along, and his children by both of them. They knew enough of the story that their eyes, when they met the president’s, were filled with a disgust to match and amplify his own. They saw his fear, too, and that only added to Mercedes’ shame.
The Darhel Rinn Fain smiled a wicked smile, all razor sharp teeth, at the president’s obvious fear. Disgusting human! the Rinn Fain thought. A remarkably low specimen even for such a low race. I cannot imagine what the Ghin and the Tir fear from this group. With humans, all things are for sale. And what little may not be on auction they can be fooled into giving or doing. They are a vile species.
Mercedes saw the Darhel’s smile and interpreted it as calm detachment rather than the disgust the alien truly felt.
“I don’t understand how you can be so calm! The bridge has fallen. The plotters will be here in half an hour; forty-five minutes at the most. Don’t you understand? If they catch us here, they’ll kill us!”
“Do you fear death so much?” the Rinn Fain asked conversationally, his eyes growing distant and dreamy.
“Doesn’t everyone? Don’t you?”
The Darhel’s eyes grew more distant and dreamier still. He spoke as if from a dream. “No, not everyone fears death. Before we found you human rabble there were those of us among the Darhel who volunteered to die, to save our people from the Posleen. I was one of those. I confess, it was something of a disappointment to me that we decided to use your people as mercenaries before I was selected to complete my mission. I had been looking forward to being a true Darhel, for once in my life.”
“You’re insane,” Mercedes accused.
At that the Darhel threw his head back and laughed aloud, something his species almost never did. “Insane, you say? You have no idea, Mr. President. I, all my people, all of us, insane. Made that way, deliberately, by powers beyond your understanding. But, worse than that, we know we are insane, and, knowing, hate it.”
Mercedes shivered, despite the heat, at the chill tone in the alien’s voice. The Darhel had always struck him as cold and odd. But he had assumed, at least, a degree of sanity. If they were insane…
He changed the subject. “When will the transport be here?”
Impatiently, the Darhel answered, “It will be here when it is here.”
He relented then, slightly, and asked, “AID?”
The AID answered immediately, and loud enough for the president to hear, “The estimated time of arrival of the Himmit ship is twenty-two of the human’s minutes, Lord Fain.”