“Nothing much, Doña,” Imelda Herrera answered. “Lunch is coming along nicely and should be ready at about two.”
“The stores are sufficient?”
Imelda pointed with her chin, a very Chiricana gesture, to a small herd of cattle held in by a temporary stockade. “Between those and the other food you donated, the rice and corn and beans, we are in good shape for another three weeks. But…”
“Yes? Tell me?”
“Well, Doña, I had this thought. It is fine now, while I and the women and girls working for me can prepare a proper meal. What about when these aliens come? When we have the boys out on horseback, moving fast, and we cannot get them decent food? What happens then?”
“The government has promised me canned combat rations,” Digna answered. “Then again, they also promised me about four times more ammunition and fuel than we’ve been sent so far.” Digna looked at Imelda questioningly. “You have an idea?”
“I can’t do a thing about the ammunition and fuel. But it occurred to me that we could start smoking meat and cheese and storing it against the day.”
Digna thought about that. Her herds, legacy of her husband’s decades of hard work, were more than sufficient. She decided right then to go with Imelda’s plan and told her so.
Then another thought occurred to Digna.
“How much meat can you smoke?”
Imelda thought about that for a moment, then answered, “Standing wood we have in abundance. But we can’t hope to cut enough to smoke more than, say, one cow’s worth a day.”
“I understand,” Digna said. “But what if I gave you twenty or thirty, maybe even forty men a day to cut firewood.”
“I could do several cows’ worth then. But to what end?”
“Oh, it occurred to me that there is going to be a huge demand for preserved food in the days ahead. I suspect I could sell anything you produced… rather, I could trade it, for whatever we are short in ammunition and gasoline. Maybe even pick up some weapons too.
“A little here, a little there,” Digna mused, looking skyward at nothing in particular. “Not enough to make anyone else’s fight impossible, but maybe enough to give us a better chance.”
“Give me the men,” Imelda answered. “Send me the cows.”
“And I’ll do the trading,” Digna finished.
PART II
Chapter 10
Mates, the odds are against us. Our colors have never been lowered to the enemy, and I trust this will not be so today. As long as I live that flag will fly high in its place and, if I die, my officers will know how to fulfill their duty.
Costa Rica went under first. After half a century of conscious, deliberate and nearly universal demilitarization it had never been able to mount much of an armed force. Instead of spending its nominal wealth on a military, relying on the firmly fixed notion that if all else failed the United States could always be counted on to come to the rescue, this very civilized and reasonably prosperous state had concentrated for fifty years on education and health care.
All that meant in the end was that the Posleen had several million very healthy and literate cattle to add to their larder.
Nicaragua did better. Even before news had come of the imminent Posleen invasion the previous rulers of the country, the Marxist-Leninist Sandinistas, had returned to power. The hold on the reins of government by the liberal democratic regime had never been very strong in any case.
Give the Sandinistas their due; a totalitarian movement at least ought to know how to subordinate the individual to the state. This the Sandinistas knew and this they did to good effect. Moreover, with several tens of thousands of combat experienced veterans, most of them fairly young still, of the long civil war between Sandinistas and Somocistas, also known as “Contras,” Nicaragua was able to mount a large and reasonably well trained and disciplined mostly infantry force to contest the alien landings.
But, sad to say, no purely infantry force, using human designed and built weapons of the early twenty-first century, could hope to stand up to the technology and number of the aliens. To stand up to the Posleen human infantry forces needed the backing of masses of artillery. Artillery took wealth, either your own or that of someone who wished you well; that, or thought it needed you alive. Nicaragua, standing alone, lacked wealth and lacked the artillery that wealth could buy.
Moreover, the one really useful source of military aid, the United States, had a long memory and tended to hold a grudge. Even after Nicaragua’s dictator, the Sandinista Daniel Ormiga, swallowed his pride and went hat in hand to ask the gringos for help, the United States turned a deaf ear. Perhaps this was because, as they claimed, they had none to give. Perhaps it was because while aid was possible there were higher priorities. Perhaps, too, it was because, as Ormiga surmised, the United States would weep no tears at seeing an avowed enemy eaten to extinction.
As it happened though, the deadliest weapon in Nicaragua’s arsenal turned out to be a timely earthquake that killed about fifteen thousand of the invaders. It was later, much later, calculated that this slowed down the final digestion of the country and its people by approximately thirty-five minutes.
The only effective barrier to the Posleen advance had turned out to be Lake Nicaragua and its remarkably ferocious sharks.
Sharks, earthquake, and rifle fire notwithstanding, Nicaragua and its people ceased to exist within eight days of the enemy landing.
Small and densely populated El Salvador did receive aid from the United States, mostly in the form of small arms, mortars and light artillery. They, like the Nicaraguans, had a strong base of militarily experienced men who had fought in their lengthy and bloody civil war. The Salvadoran Army was manned, in the main, by Indians who took considerable pride in the knowledge that while the powerful Aztec had fallen quickly to the Conquistadors of Spain their ancestors had never truly been conquered.
Like those ancestors — fierce and brave to a fault, and this had contributed mightily to the bloodiness and duration of the civil war — the soldiers of El Salvador had stood and fought like madmen. From the frontier, to the Rio Lempa, to the very steps of the cathedral of San Salvador, the landscape was littered with the denuded bones of countless thousands of Posleen and Salvadoreños.
In the end, for all their patriotism, courage and ferocity, Salvadoran humanity was wiped from the surface of the Earth.
Honduras held out longer, but only because it was bigger. The Posleen moved as they would, bled and died as they needed. Speed was rarely a consideration except in the great battles of maneuver and attrition waged in North America and Central Europe.
Guatemala and Belize went under as quickly as had El Salvador and Honduras.
A Mexican dictator, Porfirio Diaz, had once observed, “Alas, pity poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States.” The generations who lived during the Posleen war, especially those who managed to live through it, found cause to turn that around to “Lucky Mexico, so close to the devils but even closer to the United States.”
This was so for at least two reasons. The first was that, being next door, Mexico held the southern entrance into the United States proper and so was given massive military aid. The second, and far fewer Mexicans ever had cause to know this, was that when defense failed despite the aid and despite the brave show put on by the Mexican Army, the United States became a safe refuge for more than ten million who found shelter under the wings of the 11th Mobile Infantry Division (ACS).