Moon Dreams Read online

Isle of Discontent

  Sunil Sukala listened to the grunt of truck engines in the village below and the mutter of patrol boats on the lake as well as the more distant beat of helicopters departing. The breeze brought the smell of smoke to his nostrils and he could see a faint glow from the direction of the village. Something had caught fire, probably not on purpose, the land thieves wanted the village and the farmland intact, it was their goal.

  There was a purposeful rustle, and then a soft voice, “More farmers coming up the trail Major.” Faswethet, his corporal, was crouching by his hip; the rustle had been her letting him know she was near. Like the other tribesmen and women her jungle craft was phenomenal, he never heard them coming, never saw them till they wanted him to.

  “Anyone following them?” the last group of refugees had passed thirty minutes before, too long ago.

  “Night Stalkers,” she spat at the mention of the Admiral General’s Special Forces. The Navy had been his power base for the coup, and the Naval Infantry had become his hell hounds, the Night Stalkers. Sunil Sukala, Major, Sunatran Army, Retired, had once respected the Naval Infantry, these days he despised them as human beings, as soldiers he had to respect them.

  “Let the villagers pass, arm the mines as soon as they are through and prepare the ambush. But we have to be ready to pull back in five minutes, the Stalkers will have designators and the patrol boats will have homing rounds for their mortars and the choppers could come back.”

  Sunatra had been a peaceful South Pacific archipelago in Sunil’s youth, he was the son of a shop keeper and small farmer on what was then called East Sunatra. He’d joined the army and risen through the ranks to become a chopper pilot and then an officer. He would have made it his career except for the Admiral General’s coup.

  Admiral Josef Mindow had been a very ambitious and canny officer and politician, a patriot of Sunatra. Over his thirty year career he had built up the Navy to the point that the Army and Air Force had been little more than gendarmes, militarized police, rather than combat forces. Then he’d used his control of the Navy to stage a coup. A coup that had, to almost everyone’s surprise, failed, at least in taking the bigger western isle. After almost five years of fighting the UN, at the behest of the Chinese, had brokered a peace. A deal that split the archipelago into the rump Sunatra, and the self styled Admiral General’s Palalo Sadong. Many of the inhabitants of East Sunatra had protested vehemently, but the politicians had surrendered.

  Sunil, along with many other officers in the Army and Air Force had resigned on the day the peace was signed. Sunil had moved back to his family village on Palalo Sadong, nee East Sunatra. Many of the others had emigrated.

  For two years things had seemed peaceful enough. Then the unemployed in the cities had started rioting about food prices and mythical land rights. This had initiated a steadily more vicious war against the farmers and mountain tribes. Sunil’s home village, close to the newly renamed Mindow City had been one of the first to suffer.

  There were four main ethnic groups on Sunatra, the original islanders, whose warring kingdoms had divided the island for thousands of years. Then Indian farmers had started to arrive followed by the Chinese town dwellers and most recently Filipino technicians, city dwellers. They had lived together, for centuries in some cases, and decades in others, in relative peace and calm.

  The Admiral General’s coup and civil war had changed all that. To a large degree the old line inhabitants, farmers and hill tribes, had supported the old regime and the cities and larger towns had supported the Admiral General, and each side had demonized the other.

  The process hadn’t ended with the war, at least not in Palalo Sadong. The fast expanding urban population’s viewpoint had been twisted so they saw the island as theirs, the Indian farmers as squatters and the indigenous peoples as dangerous barbarians. And with that fall from the ranks of humanity they had become targets, their property forfeit.

  Early on Sunil’s village had come under pressure from land speculators. He’d become a spokesman for the village, then for the farmers and the Indian sub population. That had lasted for less than six months, then his home and the family store had been firebombed, two days later he’d been shot and wounded in broad daylight. The next night a ‘spontaneous’ peoples convoy had arrived, filled with city thugs and frightened men and women from the shanty towns around Mindow city. More general forced relocations had started a year ago and stories of massacres in the mountains and the badlands on the eastern slopes. Anyone who had tried to resist had been dragged out of their homes, anyone who had tried to fight had been beaten, some to death.

  Now Sunil fought with the resistance and tried to organize it into something more than just a collection of near tribal groups living in the bush, armed mostly with bows and spears. His unit was armed with modern weapons stolen from the armories of the Army and the Police and shipped in, in small quantities, by sympathizers in India and other places. He was also in communication with several NGO’s, in particular the Human Freedom Foundation, trying to get the message out that the Admiral General was on the move again.

  There was a ripple of bangs as anti personnel mines exploded into the line of killers driving the refugees away from their home. The mine detonations were followed by gunfire, the loose rattle of his fighters, then shockingly the heavy snarl of a rapid fire automatic weapon flailing the jungle. In a pause between ripping bursts came the single sharp crack of a heavy rifle. The auto gun was silent for a long moment, then started and ended almost instantly with another heavy shot. A third a moment later resulted in a WHUMP, a column of fire and screaming and shouting along the trail.

  By that time Sunil and his unit were trotting away along pre-marked exit corridors. A minute later a fluttering wail came out of the sky to end in shattering crashes and yellow white flashes of high explosives, repeated again and again until the wails were drowned out by the crash and bang of detonations as the rain of high explosives and steel lashed the now empty jungle.

  His corporal, Faswethet appeared, “this way my Major.” And he followed the silent shadow through the darker shadows making a terrible racket in his own ears.

  “Was that Sathwathet who took care of the machinegun?” he called after the corporal.

  “I did Major,” Sathwathet, Faswethet’s younger sister said from just behind him.

  He jumped, “Damn, Sathwathet.” He looked down; she seemed tiny, especially with her huge sniper rifle over her shoulder. She had smooth black hair and smooth café latte skin, her eyes bright and calm. She never seemed to smile but neither did she ever seem unhappy and she never got excited, at least in battle.

  Faswethet, ‘his’ corporal had been running what was now the core of ‘his’ unit for almost ten years now, since she was twenty five and her little sister sixteen. Their village had been destroyed and most of their relatives killed in the first year of the civil war and they had fought on the side of the Government, which had abandoned them to make peace.

  They were the daughters of a headman and had gone to one of the catholic schools in the mountains. They were surprisingly well educated, and both loved to learn, reading anything they could get their hands on. It was a wonder that they hadn’t become animals, but they were civilized and peaceful except when they had to fight, then they were killing machines and he was utterly sure that they would fight to the death rather than be captured.

  Sathwathet spoke quietly as they reached the rally point, “It was a machinegun on a little six-wheel all terrain, no one was driving it or manning the gun, it just followed the men. A gunbot I think they are called. I saw a picture of one in an article from a magazine we took from that army outpost last month.”

  “How did you stop it?”

  “I shot out the optics, then I shot out the traversing yoke, then put an explosive round through where I thought the fuel tank was, I guessed right.” She smiled sweetly and vanished into the jungle having made her report.

&n
bsp; It was almost certain the gunbot had been Chinese. They supplied the Admiral General with all his best toys. It was another sign that trying to fight this war the old fashioned way was just going to get a lot of people killed with no good resolution.

  Insurgency needed a base in the population and the tactic of ethnically cleansing whole townships was making that impossible. They were being driven into the wilds where they could be tracked and then pinned and destroyed. In past jungle wars the ability of small light forces to hit and retreat at will with relatively minor losses had been paramount. With the Admiral General’s modern toys that was impossible for groups who didn’t understand how to do it.

  He was doing some good as a military leader and trainer but somehow they needed to get help from outside. Sunil had friends in America and relatives in India, as well as contacts in many other places. Somehow he needed to use those contacts to find a lever to stop the Admiral General.