It was inevitable then, that they should meet. Brian S’pense, in his advisory role, was out in the contested Despojo district, interviewing field commanders when he spotted Wanda Ases standing with a bunch of business suits and a Salidan Five-bar Colonel. They stood together quietly while a pair of technicians plotted sites with laser beams.
S’pense turned to the Salidan recruit under his command and ordered up two cases of forty millimeter ammunition and ten or twelve signal flares. He instructed the soldiers to fire the flares out over the range that the techs were surveying. Then he had the two forty millimeters treat each flare as an incoming guerilla gunship.
At a signal from S’pense, the air above Wanda Ases’ head blazed into magnesium-phosphorous fireworks, and a second later came the earsplitting concussion of the high-explosive shells. The Salidan Colonel let out a shriek and threw himself into the mud. None of the others seemed to need much help finding the ground, either. As the tracers burst above their heads, they dug their manicured nails into the Buena Salidan soil.
The gunning lasted perhaps two minutes, and in the silence that followed, anyone listening could have heard the distant rumbling of tribal drums beating in answer. Those concerned, however, were too filled with the thunder of their own blood to hear anything else.
The colonel was the first to realize what had happened. His limited experience in the ’64 Uprising had left him with the persistent faculty to determine from which direction the fire had come. He leapt up and rushed in S’pense’s direction. The entourage of gringos clung to his heels, partly smoldering with indignation, but mostly caught by a terror like they’d never known before.
Whatever the Colonel had to say, however, remained frozen on his lips, for as he came through the hedges with pistol drawn, he recognized the face of Major S’pense. He knew the American from occasions in San Vallejo: occasions where five-bar colonels had been left to charm the bourgeois women while the real men retired upstairs to discuss weighty matters like the secret Project Rock’n’Roll.
To his relief, the Colonel found himself relieved of any duty to speak for them as Wanda Ases thundered past shouting.
“What the hell was that?” she demanded. “I should have expected something like this from you. You never had any sense of proportion!”
Although he’d had about twenty things to tell her after all these years, Brian S’pense could only suck photons off her with eyes like lecithin.
Out on the firing range, the Salidan soldiers were helping one of the technicians drag his partner toward the car.
Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons, Artillery Corps Fires Practice Cannon2.jpg. Originally posted to Flickr: Artillery Corps Fires Practice Cannon. Author: Israel Defense Forces.
