I Might Not Know Where I Am, But I Ain't Lost by cmsix

Chapter 5

Most of them were setting up small tents and lean-tos, and building small cooking fires, but they were mostly just sitting around, talking, and scratching their asses.

Finally one of the men that had caught a horse was leading it back and snaking four small eight-foot logs. Shortly the other man left with the horse he'd caught, heading the same way with four more of the small short logs. Hell, they were more like post.

I hadn't noticed while I was watching the men in the woods and those leading the horses, but there were now two men working about a hundred and fifty yards from the camp area. They seemed to be digging holes but the shovels they were using looked almost like sharpshooters.

That was it, they were digging postholes and the logs were post. They had to be putting in post so they could picket all those damned horses for the night. I took a closer count and there were exactly one hundred of the draft horses. Eight posts would make for four picket lines and they'd handle twenty-five horses each.

I kept watching as things progressed and my guesses were correct. They put the post in, very deep considering they were digging the holes with sharpshooters, and then they tamped the hell out of the earth they put back in the holes after the post were in.

When they were satisfied with their work, they tied a rope between each pair of post, and were done. Looking closer I could see that there were lead ropes about every four feet already attached to the picket lines.

All the work seemed over for a while and the men cooked and ate, individually or in small groups. About an hour before sunset, probably a hundred of them went out and caught the horses, put a halter on each of them and then led them to the picket lines and tied a lead rope to each halter, securing their stock for the night it seemed.

I watched as long as I could see, until the sun was fully down, and they never did send anyone out to watch over the horses, not even one man. I asked Chungi about it.

"Why would they need to watch the horses?" he asked.

"What if there are wolves nearby?" I asked.

"What are wolves?" he asked.

"Aren't there any animals that might attack the horses?"

"Not that I know of, horses are very big and their hooves are hard. If it were sheep, a jackal might try to take one, but they wouldn't even try to bother a horse," he said.

Well, that settled that, and I was about to let King Frata's men know that they really should post guards around their horses. Of course I didn't intend for them to have any to guard by morning.

Chungi and I climbed down and I asked him to find all of my original squad and have them meet me in Commander Junga's former office.

They all showed up within half an hour and I spelled it out for them.

"They have a hundred big draft horses tied out on picket lines, twenty-five to the line. They're over a hundred and fifty yards from the camp and there are no guards posted, none at all for any of the camp as best I could tell before the sun went down.

"I want all of you to dig out your night vision gear. Take a dozen or so men and go out and steal the horses. Circle far out around the camp and approach the horses from the rear. Don't try to be too quiet, since you don't want to surprise them and make them nervous.

"You don't want to alert the men but you don't want to surprise the horses either. I think you should be able to just cut the picket lines from the post and have your flunkies lead them away.

"The fifteen of you should take M4s with your grenade launchers attached and loaded. It will be better if you never fire a shot because you know these horses haven't heard anything like that, and we don't want to spook them.

"Have some men waiting at the gate and watching for you so they can have it open by the time you get to it," I said.

"Won't a hundred more horses put a strain on even that giant haystack you had made?" Jorgenson asked.

"Maybe, but we don't have to use it yet. With the army gone those men out there won't be a problem trying to steal the horses back. They aren't even soldiers, they're more like combat engineers. I don't think there is even one archer," I said.

"They will really shit in the morning when they see we have their horses and we're grazing them in plain sight," Jorgenson said, and then laughed like hell, the others joined him.

They left through the tunnel that night and took the original exit, traveling most of the way around by the edge of the woods. They took special care crossing the cleared area near what passed for a road, but it was pointless really. I don't think even one of the kings men rolled over during the whole operation. I know they didn't discover that the horses were gone until an hour after sunrise.

They were fit to be tied then though. They spent the next forty-five minutes yelling and screaming at each other and I even saw a couple of fistfights break out.

That was nothing though, compared to the confusion when our wranglers drove all the stock, including their horses, out to graze. We sent all the archers out with them this morning. They were mounted too, and each of them had four quivers tied onto their saddles.

I was watching from the wall with my binoculars and after another hour or so of arguing the construction crew got up their nerve, all of them strapping on swords or taking axes and they formed up roughly and began walking toward the horses and wranglers.

I didn't think they'd keep coming after the archers let fly a couple of times, but there were nearly four hundred of them and no sense in taking the chance. I'd already had two of the SAW crews' saddle horses and I sent them on out, with two extra flunkies to keep a tight grip on their horses when the lead started flying.

They trotted out and set up in the construction gang's path, about three hundred yards in front of them. The SAWs were ready in no time and the flunkies had a firm grip on the lead ropes. My guys cut loose when the enemy, walking steadily, got to within probably a hundred yards.

Of course it was a bloodbath. Most of the poor bastards that were hit died before they realized they'd even been attacked. In thirty seconds or so about two hundred men were down, dead or dying.

That was the end of their courage and all those that could still move under their own power made a retreat that wasn't even nearly tactical. They carried their asses in a wild panic.

They might as well have, the rest of us from the original squad were mounted now too, and we came out of the gate screaming, with a good one-handed grip on our M4s. I hoped firing wouldn't make the horses kick up a fuss, but we intended to see if it did.

We were well within hip-shot range before they got back to their camp and we began peppering their asses. We didn't even let them slow down at their camp. We stayed hard on their heels, since it's much easier to kill retreating troops, especially in a panicked retreat. Not a one got away.

By now the wranglers had moved most of the horses back inside the walls, where others were waiting to hitch them to wagons or tie on packsaddles.

Within an hour we had nearly eight hundred people out gleaning the field. We didn't bother burying the bodies, I had them piled up where their camp had been after we'd removed every single thing they'd brought with them or had on them. I even had them stripped naked.

Some of them were still alive but their wounds would settle that later. I finished off about twenty or so that looked like they might be able to live over their wounds. The only things we didn't remove were the post they'd put up for the picket lines. King Frata, welcome to Quancho.

Merry old King Frata must not have found much excitement in Katahalana because his mighty army started showing up around two PM six days later. There was quite a bit of excitement now though.

I'm sure the fact that no progress had been made on his siege engine was upsetting for him, but I didn't really give a shit. But surprising me seemed to be his greatest talent. He surprised me this time by spreading his camp out with the closest front portion no more than a thousand yards from our front gate. I could grow to like this type of surprise.

I had the mortars set up in the main plaza, making all the vendors take down their stalls. For some reason the camp followers had staked their claim about twelve hundred yards from the back of the main encampment. This was absolutely perfect from my point of view.

I was dying to try at least some smoke rounds so we could make sure of our range, but I resisted the urge. The guys made their best guesses and assured me they wouldn't drop one on the camp followers. I put the best spotter in the tower with a night vision scope off one of our Barretts and we waited for midnight.

We intended to space the rounds out equally three ways and still make sure they all fell well within their troops. We'd start near the back and walk the fire down toward the front.

At midnight we fired them up and the first hits were right on the back edge, with most of the fragmentation probably doing nothing constructive. The rest was duck soup, with the crews moving the impact about twenty yards per shot. This slaughter was much worse than the work crew's had been, mainly because we had so many more targets so much closer together.

A few in the camp follower's compound ran at first, and then they realized that whatever we were doing, we weren't doing it to them and they settled back down. A few of the terrified horses did come their way but war is hell sometimes.

For some reason most of the escaping horses ran right through the main encampment and that just caused more confusion. We shared twenty rounds from each mortar with them in the first mission and then I had the crews make their best guess at moving their impact points fifty feet to the left and starting over, from front to back this time.

Since we'd shut down for a time, probably thirty minutes earlier, men had been out trying to recapture frightened horses. It was just their bad luck that they were trying to hold them between us and their camp. I had one crew take a special first shot and try to drop it near the horses. It fell about fifteen yards from them and the race was on again.

Then they started the main mission. The wounded they'd been trying to tend to were forgotten and no doubt King Frata was one of the last things on the soldier's minds too. Most of them took off running back down the road toward Kahtal. The biggest part of them weren't even fully dressed. Smarter than they had any right to be, the camp followers hunkered down where we weren't shooting and stayed put.

I had the mortars stop firing before they were half through with this mission and asked the spotter if he could get them onto the tail of the men running for home. He assured me he could and within two rounds each they were chasing the bastards to Kahtal, One drop every three seconds. I wondered if the king had made his getaway.

I went to bed before they even stopped firing.

We were up, mounted, and moving out early the next morning. My squad and I with our M4s again, the thirty original archers, and fifty more that were supposed to be the best of the learners. There were a few small groups of men scattered around, but when they saw us coming, the ones that could move on their own did it, as fast as they could manage.

We didn't pester them, but kept heading toward the camp followers. I had one of the archers hold up a short pole with a white banner on it, and when we reached them three women came out to see what we had on our minds.

They were surprised when I asked them to join us in Quancho, and their obvious leader asked the obvious question.

"Why?"

"From our point of view, we need your help and so do a lot of wounded men back there," I said, waving toward the encampment we'd just come through, "There are so many dead and wounded that it would take us days to find them all, bury the dead, and try to help the wounded.

"I understand that, but why should we move into Quancho?" Shara asked.

"Mainly because we have plenty of food, plenty of room, and plenty of money to pay those who want jobs. We can find plenty of jobs too. We also have a very good doctor," I said, promoting Calhoun, who really was a good medic and he had a huge supply of several types of medicine, a battalion aid station's worth in fact.

"And you'd feed us all?" she asked.

"We've been preparing for this siege for months and we have enough food to last nearly two years if we couldn't come out at all for more supplies. You see that the siege didn't last two days, and by the time we get through cleaning up this mess we'll have even more. Food is not a problem," I said.

"Well, if you have any wagons or packhorses send them out. We'll start working our way toward Quancho," she said.

That began nearly six days of cleaning up, patching up, and burying the dead this time. Calhoun did triage in the field, sending only the ones he thought he could save to Quancho and trying to make the rest comfortable until they died. It turned out that even a few of them lived, though many lost limbs or eyes and even a couple lost their noses.

Only one that lived lost both his eyes and that was all he lost. He turned out to be a good musician with harp or flute and he had no trouble earning his keep playing in one inn or another.

I think the total of wounded that were saved and others that hadn't run off or had been found stunned senseless was four hundred and five. Counting the construction crew we had twenty-three hundred to bury and it was a major task, even digging mass graves, and not very deep ones at that.

We found almost three thousand serviceable bows, an uncountable number of arrows, twenty-nine hundred swords and over four thousand knives and daggers.

I guess the seven hundred and fifty-five saddles with their horse blankets and bridles and other tack were every one they had started out with and we rounded up nine hundred some odd horses, most of them uninjured except for bumps and scrapes. Most of the dead horses that weren't mutilated by close mortar hits were skinned and butchered the first day. Horsemeat was being cooked, smoked, dried, and jerked for days and hides were being scraped and tanned for weeks.

We hadn't been done with the clean up for more than two weeks when King Dasga's army's first scouts appeared. He was probably expecting to find King Frata's army here too, but he wasn't dismayed and he didn't think a thing about putting his encampment in nearly the same place. Some of his men even set up their tents over the mass graves we'd barely finished.

He sent a messenger to the gate and I had Jorgenson shoot him, then had the gate opened and sent a soldier out to collect the horse, leaving the messenger and the white banner where they lay. We watched closely, just in case, but they kept their draft horses near the cavalry horses and they posted plenty of guards.

We'd built a large pen, outside the walls and behind the rear one shortly after we'd captured King Frata's engineer's draft horses. We kept about thirty riding mounts in it all the time now, specifically so we could send people out the tunnel and they'd have horses available if they needed them.

After sunset that night, I sent all of my squad out the tunnel in night camo gear and with night vision goggles, and armed with silenced Glock 43s. I even had them use the special low velocity rounds that wouldn't break the sound barrier when they were fired. We lowered their saddles by rope off the back wall and the sun hadn't been down an hour before they were off to Katahalana.

Military men having similar ideas all over had led me to asking Chungi to check and see if he could find out whether there might be a tunnel from the commander's quarters in Katahalana to provide a hasty escape during a siege. Within a few days he'd found a soldier from the original garrison here that had once been a soldier in the garrison at Katahalana. He had been one of the men who had helped dig the tunnel, and he knew exactly where it came out. He was on his way with my departing squad, but only as a guide.