The Path Changes the Traveler Ch. 01

The girl made her escape then, as her young husband had begged her to do beforehand. She ran straight to her family's home, but it was already mostly burned. What she saw of her parents, her sisters and her brothers changed her forever that day.

The young widow ran into the tall grasses and disappeared.

----

1970

She wandered for a long time, a young widow on a road with so many others, doing whatever was necessary in order to continue to live and yet having little will to live on alone until one day she met a man who spoke of joining a group of rebels who had enough reason and rage to want to fight both the army from the south and the other groups of insurgents who seemed to forget what the fight was over, choosing to use their weapons against former neighbors and friends.

The girl was still a girl by the standards of her dead village, not having given birth even yet and she was a little glad that she and her dead husband had not yet had their children. Where the wolf's cold rage burned within her, there was little room for having to care for a little one.

She was too busy liking the feel of her own death stick in her hand.

Twice she'd been caught at gunpoint, and twice she'd killed to regain her freedom. In both cases, her captor had caught her single-handedly and looked away for only a moment. A moment was all that she'd needed, and both times, she'd left a dead man behind her and trotted deeper into the tall grasses with an assault rifle and a few magazines lifted from the corpse. All that she'd needed was the rock to smash down on the man's head.

Living simply in the grasslands, there were occasions where she would find herself in the middle of a large pack of painted wolves for a day or a night, though she never attempted to do more than rest in their midst. They weren't unfriendly, but their nervousness showed plainly and the human chose not to push her luck. They served as an advanced warning system on those occasions, signalling the presence of other humans by drifting away silently long before any humans other than her were nearby.

Yet they never harmed her. She wondered about it and decided that it was almost as though they knew her.

It wasn't long before her skills at ambush were found out and then she was given a squad to help her with her tasks and she rode her success a while until the day that she was to take part in a large attack and it was the day that she could say afterwards had changed her life.

She'd seen a tank in action.

Careful inquiries brought her the news that there was one tank crew who needed a loader, though they doubted that she was up to it. She begged for a chance and worked her way through all of the positions in the crew but one. One day, a man went from tank to tank in her group, giving slowly-paced oral lessons, since few of them had any real teaching in armored vehicles.

When he came to her crew, she wouldn't let him go, asking question after question and then going into asking about tactics. The man remembered her later on.

Six months later, she was approached about taking command of one old ex-Russian T-34-85. Four hours after that, she was given command of the unit's problem child to see whether she could get it into fighting shape.

That tank was the one tank in the group which had always blundered into trouble and it only came to light afterward that the commander's decision-making process was a little faulty. He wasn't an issue anymore, having spent a little too long with the top hatch open to look out of and a sniper's bullet had removed him.

Even so, there was a morale issue with the crew, she was told. Upper Command for her irregular regiment was considering disbanding them for use in other roles, but after thinking on it for only seconds, the young woman agreed to take the assignment.

There were groans all around when she went to meet her new crew. They'd been hoping for another man.

It was a long evening around their cooking fire and there were fights between her and two other members of her all-female crew, but by the end of it, she had their agreement.

"You cannot force the commanders to give you what you want," she said, "We have no tanks of our own and so we must steal or capture what we can. That makes every single tank priceless and to have one on the line with squabbles and often in trouble just means that the crew needs to be re-assigned to the field kitchens."

"We have no field kitchens,' the large gunner growled and their commander nodded.

"From what I have heard of this crew, you would not even be given a rifle anymore. Shall we try it my way?"

The very next time they were in action, they had their first kill and before long, the way that the young widow operated, the barrel of their tank had twenty rings of white paint adorning it, each one signifying a the death of a tank or other armored vehicle. It accorded them a very small measure of fame within the group and with that, there were a very few perks as well. They were a ragtag group but it was better than being the problem child in an ad hoc tank regiment.

The crew's morale soared.

She asked around until she found a man who'd been an artist before the war and with a little pleading and a few bottles of weak beer, their turret carried a caricature of the head of a ravenous-looking painted wolf adorning both sides, though it was small.

That didn't matter. Their hearts were in it now and after a brief course, the commander was given a functional radio and the assignment to use three more tanks making up one platoon. There were a few little ego issues with one of the tanks, since it had an all-male crew, but that was settled easily enough by a visit from higher-higher. They knew what their girl could do for them by now and it had nothing to do with what was between her legs.

She had her moments.

It didn't happen very often, but now and then there would be a visit by an arms dealer. It was infrequent due to the fact that there was little money with which to purchase much of anything; their major source of supply being the very same forces which beset them often.

But it had happened where she'd been asked for her input on ways to make the meetings less hazardous. She'd set up a large-scale ambush by requesting that the meeting place not show any lights on the nights leading up to the meeting - while she set up a false place and had many lights shown.

On the day of the meeting, her platoon captured a small but heavily-armed convoy of trucks carrying soldiers to the phoney meeting place. They'd only needed to kill the lead tank and the last truck. The rest surrendered without a shot and her unit had more equipment after that.

It all went south for her the day that her tank threw a track and by the time they'd repaired things, they found themselves on the wrong side of the quickly shifting battle line. It had happened before and they knew that they just had to work their way back a little harder, that was all.

But as they came around a bend in the path, they found the SU-100 tank destroyer there directly in front of them. Since it was moving away from the lines, it hadn't been a large jump to consider that someone had seen their stranded tank and recognised the artwork.

An immobile or crippled tank is an easy kill - eventually.

Against a tank destroyer, it was a match which wouldn't take very long at all.

She considered for just a moment. With their hastily-repaired track, they couldn't run and their frontal armour now seemed pitifully thin.

What sat facing them was designed to kill what they rode in and then move on. There was no turret - just a long, large calibre gun. The front of that machine wore armour much thicker than their gun could hope to penetrate, and if they even lived through the first answering shot, she knew that there wasn't a statistical chance worth anything of surviving the second hit. There was only a hundred meters separating the two monsters.

She doubted that the other gunner would miss at this range.

To turn away was suicide, since it would expose their much thinner flank armour. They only had one option as she saw it.

"Give me a round of armour-piercing!" she called out, "and quicker than you've ever loaded one before.

We have one chance. After we fire, be ready to get out and run. Stay only if I order it, but be ready.

Aim for the crease on the gun's swivel. It's all that we have, so don't miss. Load a high explosive round right afterward. Wait for me to fire the gun and then run for the trees!"

She looked into her optics and groaned.

There was no hope at all.

"Azimuth: three five five.

Target: tank destroyer.

Range: one hundred.

Armour-piercing.

"FIRE!"

All that it got them as she watched the smoke clear was a slight delay as the opposite gunner re-sighted.

She heard the sound of the breech being reloaded and closing and then things seemed to slow to a sticky crawl after that as she watched her crew scramble out of their hatches. They hadn't waited for her command, choosing to bail out now.

She found that she couldn't really blame them.

When the last one had gone, she slipped over into the gunner's station as she heard the machine gun on the tank destroyer begin its chattering song. From that, she knew that at least one of her girls hadn't listened to her.

She sighted on the other hulk out there, still sitting ominously. She began to speak to herself, reciting the azimuth and range quickly. She knew that there had to be dismounted troops near that thing, probably hunkered down right behind it and sure enough, she heard the assault rifles starting as they ran to pass it.

She fired the gun, knowing that she couldn't miss, but that it would do little if any harm to the monster. But the explosion of a high explosive shot against their armour might give the ones inside a headache and the deflected blast off to the sides would give the running troops more than that. It might give her girls a better chance and it would cover her own exit.

She fired the smoke launchers on both sides and scrambled out of the top hatch before the smoke from her shooting had cleared.

She was just able to drop down behind the turret a split-second before the tank destroyer fired. The blast stunned and deafened her and she fell right off the back onto the ground.

Her tank - the one which she'd coaxed and cursed at for almost two years was in flames.

She threw herself into the ditch and crawled.

A week later, she was miles away from the area where anyone had heard of the slightly-famous female tank commander. It hadn't been her plan; it had just worked out that way. She was far away from her unit. But the downturn in her luck hadn't bottomed out just yet.

She was captured by men who were not combatants in the long bush war between Eritrea and Ethiopia at all. One minute, she'd been trying to steal a little food and the next, she was on the ground with crude shackles around her ankle and wrists.