Drakas! Read online

  According to Eric's own account of the battle, Century A came down pretty much on target—that is, we were meant to be the northernmost element of the Draka attack force. Someone has to be stuck out alone—I know that as well as any man and better than some—but I find it rather interesting that Arch-Strategos Karl von Shrakenberg's much hated son and heir was dropped in the ass end of nowhere, voted most likely to die. Consider that the old commander was at that very moment courting an eligible Citizen of unimpeachable credentials and you wonder if he wasn't counting on the Fritz to sweep his family slate clean and give him a chance to start over.

  Ah, but that's neither here nor there. Eric didn't die—and I'm here to tell you why it's no credit to him that he didn't.

  * * *

  Once we were down and gear handed round, Eric ordered us to move on Village One. In his own accounts, he gives an almost accurate account of that early battle. Oh, he beefs up the number of Fritz holding down the shop and minimizes our casualties, but he's hardly out of line there. Most military historians lie. Victors lie more than losers—it's one of the spoils of war.

  Now Eric doesn't tell you what I was doing during this particular battle. There are two reasons for this. One is that the members of his Century are with the exception of Sophie Nixon—for reasons I'll explain later—fictional versions of real people, usually composites of three or four real Draka. So there is no me in all his tales—part of the reason his depictions of the Draka are so shallow, I like to think.

  In interviews Eric has explained that this was artistic license, that he couldn't hope to deal with the heroism of a hundred and ten individuals in one short novel, so rather than slighting one or the other he combined people. I still get a sour taste in my mouth when I recall the saccharine way he referred to "those brave members of my Century, living and dead, whose courage inspired me to the best of which I was able."

  I wash the sour taste away by recalling how little Eric knew about what one of his "brave warriors" was up to.

  Now, in the battle to take Village One most of our Century was ordered to rush into that Fritz-held horror leapfrog style: shoot, drop, move, shoot again.

  Eric sent the Century's four best sharpshooters to scout out good positions. From these we were to pick off Fritz commanders or any other tasty targets. Due to the lack of armor, we sharpshooters were particularly essential. I recall with a grin how Eric admonished us to do our part with dignity and verve.

  This was the kind of assignment I liked the most. It kept me out of the direct action, but gave me opportunity for safe kills so that I could brag with the best when we were all safely in camp and the fighting was over. I won't tell you how many times I simply snugged myself down in a cozy fork in some tree and waited for the worst to be over. Later, when the fight was being dissected and someone mentioned a miracle shot out of nowhere that saved his or her ass I wouldn't say anything, just look at my boots and polish my knife. Pretty soon some wise fellow would "realize" where credit was due and I'd mutter something stern and manly about just doing my duty.

  Ah, it was marvelous, it was, and it didn't hurt that my shooting on the range or on the rare occasions that someone was watching was pure art—if I do say so myself. You see, even Draka aren't immune to the desire for a Guardian Angel. I've been told more times than I could count how someone went into danger all the more willingly knowing that I'd be lurking in the darkness to get them out.

  "Homicidal children who believe in fairy stories, even with their legs ripped off and their faces ground to sausage meat." That's what someone once called the Draka and he was right, too. And like any children, they're happiest with the reassurance that someone is looking out for them. The way I see it, whether or not I actually helped anyone, I provided that reassurance, so I did my duty even when safely ensconced in some blind.

  On this particular grey dawn in 1942, I loped off into the forest surrounding Village One ready to take my ease in some tall tree. I planned to shoot a Fritz or two if opportunity permitted, but I wasn't going to put myself into any particular danger while I was about it.

  Right away, I could see that the countryside wasn't going to cooperate with my idea of a pleasant morning's work. The trees were barely budding, black limbs making dark lacework against a sky that held either traces of moonlight or the beginnings of dawn. The air was chill and the ground kissed with frost—not ideal conditions from a desert-born's way of seeing things.

  I was silently cursing my bad luck and casting around for an alternative fox hole when I heard something stirring in the brush behind me. A branch snapped under a boot. As my heart tried to exit via my mouth, I flashed my knife out faster than you can say "Covington Coemer," but the fellow emerging from the shrubbery to my rear held a heavy P-38 with a calm, deadly assurance that left me no doubt that he knew how to use it. Even in the semi-light, I couldn't fail to see that he held it aimed at my torso so that even a near miss would spill a whole lot of my precious blood.

  My new acquaintance was a skinny fellow, but the clothing that hung loose on his frame testified that once upon a time he hadn't been nearly so gaunt. I guess his eyes and hair must have had color, but I couldn't tell what shade they were in this dim light and I didn't really care. As far as I knew, this grey specter was Death with his lips puckered up round and ready to deliver one honey of a kiss through that unwavering gun barrel.

  "Lean your rifle against that tree," the shadowy figure ordered, his English heavily accented with some other language I didn't recognize, "and take three steps back from it. Remain in the open. Move any way but that which I command and I shoot!"

  I obeyed, leaning my rifle against the trunk of something that might have been an oak. Even if I wanted to try to escape, there was no cover and at close quarters I was nearly as deadly without the blamed thing. Yet, even as I was divesting myself of my weapon, I was wondering why he didn't just have me throw it down. I guessed that he was a partisan and that weapons were dear just then. I was partially right.

  "Now, fold your hands on the top of your head and stand on one leg."

  I did as directed, feeling like a fool and wishing something would distract him for just a moment . . .

  My new friend continued, "You are going to do two things for me or I will kill you."

  I nodded and he studied me. I expect that I was a bit of a disappointment for all my height, broad shoulders, and fine whiskers. Surely he expected a Draka to wither him with curses or spit fire. I suppose some of my fellows would have done just that, but I've never seen it as part of my duty to die when living seems a viable option.

  "Speak on, old chap," I encouraged.

  "First, you will carry a message into the village."

  I liked this. I couldn't do that if I were dead. Then I thought of some of the things I'd seen my comrades do in Italy—things that left a man technically alive and capable of carrying messages, but not long for this world. My blood chilled. Surely this fellow's accent wasn't Italian, was it?

  "Give the message to the old patriarch," my captor continued and I nodded though I had no idea who in Thor's mitten he meant. "You will tell no one of this message. If you do, the message itself will condemn you. Understand?"

  "Completely."

  "Good."

  He glowered at me a bit more while I concentrated on the trickle of sweat from my armpits down my sides. It tickled and I had to fight back a perverse urge to grin and wriggle. I rocked a little on my one leg and wished he hadn't chose to have me imitate a stork. It's hard to feel dignified, you know?

  "I selected to follow you," he said, sounding less than certain for the first time, "since you go by yourself with the rifle with the great scope. You are a sniper?"

  "Right!" I agreed. "The best."

  He snorted, obviously doubting me, which stung a bit. It's hard to be taken for a liar when all you're doing is telling the truth—especially when you are a liar. My captor continued:

  "Since you say you are a sniper, the other job I have for
you is this."

  Stepping forward, he picked up my rifle carefully, keeping the deadly mouth of his P-38 on me so that I had no opportunity to jump him. As he did so, a white flare burst in the general vicinity of Village One, making the forest shadows go crazy. For a weird moment, I actually thought my captor was responsible, then I remembered Eric's briefing. From the near distance, gunshots, screams, and shouts of "BuLala!" announced that my Draka fellows were in the process of ruining someone's morning.

  "Move quickly, Drakanski!" my captor snapped. "Be good and I shall give you a chance to do your job."

  He hustled me over to a spot that provided me with an ideal overlook of Village One. It was just the sort of spot I would have chosen for myself given time—a grand vantage, but completely secure from observation. In the flare's early light I could see long-robed civilians hustling for cover. The Fritz in their grey uniforms stared in confusion. The smarter ones joined the ragheads in the general move toward cover.

  "See the mosque?" hissed the voice behind me. "Aim at the one who is coming out. Now! Fire!"

  I did, noting through the scope that the man he had ordered me to shoot was a handsome young buck in local attire. No matter who he was—he could have been my own brother—with the hard muzzle of the P-38 ready to separate my spine I wasn't arguing target choice. As the handsome Abdul's head exploded, I heard a satisfied chuckle from behind me.

  "Now, the next who come after him. Shoot them too," came the order.

  I was aware of the stench of foul breath and realized that my captor was so close that he must be practically touching me, but I didn't dare get in a wrestling match now. As I popped off three more—a woman and two men—the chuckling deepened.

  "Collaborators," he whispered as if I needed any more explanation than the gun in my back for doing what I was doing.

  "Now the Germanski," he said. "They will come from two buildings to the right of the mosque."

  Damn him if he wasn't right. I guess the Fritz had taken over the buildings as a barracks or club or something. For a minute there it was like shooting serfs on the dunes back home. Then the Fritz got smart and dove back inside, but I fancied that the last fellow through the door wouldn't be sitting any time soon.

  I was so absorbed in my fun that I didn't notice when the pressure at my back altered and the halitosis miasma lessened. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw that my captor was at the edge of the tree line, already in half-cover, though the P-38 was still aimed at my gut.

  "Farewell, Drakanski," he said. "The letter is in your pocket. Think this: If you do not deliver it or otherwise cross me, I know of many places like this one that overlook the village. I, too, may have a rifle."

  He vanished into the pre-dawn gloom and I assuaged my wounded vanity by banging away at the Fritz down below. I avoided shooting natives if I could, not wanting to prevent the planned postal delivery. My back shivered the whole time I was about my fun though, fearing a bullet was due to pierce it any moment. Knowing what horrors lurked in the darkness, that damned letter seemed a pretty fragile shield.

  * * *

  When I rejoined the rest of Century A we were the proud owners of a stone and dirt village without any of the comforts of home. We were still the northernmost Draka unit, but now we were a battered and bloodied northernmost Draka unit.

  I've mentioned the right to lie as one of the spoils of the victor. A more specific spoil of that particular battle was the residents of Village One themselves. They were Circassians, dirty Abduls, half-starved and so accustomed to being beaten on that we were viewed as no worse and no better than the Fritz or the Ivans. All in all, we had captured about two thousand potential serfs.

  Among them was a scrawny old raghead who seemed to make most of the palaver for his people. I guessed this was the patriarch and as soon as possible I slipped him the mysterious letter. It couldn't do me any good anyhow. I'd taken a glance at it and it was written all in those funny Arabic curves and sticks. The patriarch, however, trotted off with it right away. Later, I saw him studying me and looking really thoughtful. His gaze made my blood run cold.

  In his accounts of these events, Eric makes himself out to be some sort of genius for thinking to use the Circassians to replace the Draka labor we didn't have. He also seems to think he was clever in bribing them to work for us instead of cracking the whip over them. He wasn't. Whip cracking would have taken Citizen soldiers that we couldn't spare. Moreover, once we were done cracking those whips, we would have had to deal with our less-than-tame serfs.

  The Security Directorate was still lurking in the background, letting the Army take care of the messy business of pacification, so they weren't an option. We could have shot the Circassians, but that would have been a waste of some 2,000 bullets. We could have stuck them in a basement or two and tossed in a grenade, but that wouldn't have served our purposes. We needed those basements. Besides, killing the ragheads, whatever the method, would have left us with a heap of corpses breeding disease and stench.

  So we let them live. Turning them loose in the countryside with food and blankets meant that they were out of our hair and in to the Fritz's. It also made certain that any guerrilla fighting on the part of their hotheads would be directed toward the Fritz not toward us. We'd given them food and a promise of enough more to survive the coming year. They weren't going to trouble us until they had an opportunity to find out if that promise was good. By the time they found out that the food came with a serf tattoo attached, Century A would be long gone.

  That's why I don't think Eric was particularly clever. He simply did the only reasonable thing. Those Circassians worked like the serfs they already were—for all they weren't yet wearing orange neck numbers—and then got out of our way under their own steam.

  Brilliant? No, no more than keeping your head out of water is brilliant when you're spilled into the ocean out of a sinking ship. Eric's brilliance came later, when he wrote up his account for the masses and portrayed himself as a liberal showering mercy upon the defeated.

  As I write those lines, I can just imagine your all-too-similar mutant faces crinkling up in confusion every time I discuss Eric's deliberate representation of himself as a tenderhearted liberal. After all, why would a Draka commander, one with both political and military ambitions, do such a foolish thing?

  Ah, well here you underestimate the sinister cunning of the Draka mind. Eric von Shrakenberg rose to power during the years when the Alliance didn't even exist, when we still had to deal with individual countries each with its own political and social philosophies. During the Eurasian War, we were allied with the United States. It was an alliance of convenience, not of sympathetic natures, a thing American war reporter Bill Dreiser makes perfectly clear in his book Empires of the Night: A '40s Journal.

  Even back then Eric was, if nothing else, a cunning old snake. He realized that for him to rise to power in the Domination he had to be accepted not only by the Draka but also by the United States and her weak-willed, freedom-worshipping allies. Assassination is a tool that the U.S. of A. has stooped to time and again when the leader of another country behaves in an inconvenient fashion. Doubt me? Look at South American history both of that time and in the years that followed.

  Eric deliberately promoted himself as a Draka who had been a sensitive, thoughtful, even liberal youth. The Draka who got to know him well realized that he had outgrown those failings. Some of us—myself included—doubted that he had ever possessed them. We saw up close and personal what a nasty, scheming, credit-stealing bastard he was. To most Draka those traits made him a man worth following whether in battle or in the political arena.

  The tales of Eric's liberal youth, however, made him acceptable to the Americans and their allies. They sopped up Dreiser's account. They read Eric's own novels. They believed the half-truths and outright lies that Eric spouted for their benefit. And so they let him live. A CIA assassin never slipped heart-attack poison in his wine or bribed a serf wench to sacrifice her own life in ta
king the Master's.

  Don't you ever forget as you read this, smug in your late historical superiority with all the Earth ground beneath the heel of the Domination and liking it, too, that assassination was a very real risk during the years following the war against the Fritz as we set out to pacify the lands that had been Hitler's and were now our own. So don't forget that Eric had every reason to want the Allies to view him as a lesser evil than most other Draka politicians. But I stray from the point.

  * * *

  Once we had the Fritz out of Village One, and the labor problem solved, we set about making the place more Draka-friendly. Fortunately, our radio had come down intact, so Eric contacted the quartermaster and requested some supplies. As our defensive plan and fortifications are a matter of history, I'm not going to bore you—and myself—with a repetition.

  Let me just add that digging and blasting and clearing away rubble for six hours straight gives you more than blisters. Trust Eric to whine about his own blistered hands and to brag that doing a bit of light digging was his way of leading by example.

  For my part, I was down on the basement level, helping create what would become our tunnels. We did this by blasting out connecting walls and then setting a gang of the wild Circassians to clearing out the rubble.

  After that narrow brush with death out in the forest, I was quite edgy. When I get edgy, I get horny.

  Psychologists will tell you mine is a natural enough reaction, one shared by a large portion of the human race. They say that proximity of death creates a desire to create life and other psychobabble along the same line.

  Well, I really can't say whether it's a desire to propagate the Race that makes me want a wench as soon as the worst of the danger is over or whether I simply prefer rogering to getting drunk as a way of forgetting the horror of it all. What I do know is on that particular post-dawn I realized that one of the Circassian wenches in my crew was somewhat better fed and less filthy than the rest.

  Eric hadn't given us any time for recreation once we took Village One. Now that the place was just about secured, I figured it was time for me to have some fun. I tapped my chosen wench on the shoulder and jerked my thumb in the direction of a room off to one side.