“You know our history as well as anybody, Kasia. Any Serbians who live through this war will just live to be killed or killing in the next one! Better to get the job done now!”
Colonel Mirko Jubec stood and waited for everyone to pay attention to him. They quieted down quickly because he didn’t speak often, but what he said when he did talk was always worth hearing.
“If we go in with all guns blazing, we will kill most of the civilians in the concentration camp. Do we want to do that? Can we afford to do that?”
Then Mirko sat down, and a few moments went by before Kasia stood up.
“An excellent point, Mirko. Also, we don’t really know how badly off our own side is, but we know that they are not actively attacking the Serbs just now. I am fairly certain that they would not turn their noses up at two more armored divisions besides our own, especially if they were cost free. I think we can steal those divisions for them! I think that we can rescue the people in the concentration camp and turn many of them into soldiers. As to the Serbian infantry, once their armor is gone and their communications are in our hands, capturing them shouldn’t be too difficult.”
“I’m worried about the civilians too, Kasia. But if we try to be too clever about all this, we could end up losing the civilians, losing the battle, and losing our own lives as well,” Maria said. “We are fighting a war, and we can’t let ourselves get too squeamish.”
I sat back and waited for some sort of consensus to evolve.
It didn’t.
After the debate had gone on for more than three hours, it settled in pretty much as I had suspected. Kasia and Mirko favored a limited attack that would destroy the enemy computer and general staff, but capture everything else. Lloyd, Conan, and Maria wanted to destroy everything and kill everybody who wrote home in Cyrillic, while trying to miss the civilians as much as possible.
When they started to repeat themselves, I told each group to take a three-hour break and to come back with some solid battle plans.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
BATTLE PLANS
On the wall screens around us, slowly, smoothly, our forces were taking up combat convoy positions. The slowness was only apparent because our army was moving in the real world and had to move in real time. We were at Combat Speed, fifty times faster.
Back in history, it often took weeks, even months, for an army to go from a training situation to full combat readiness. With our personnel and machines, we were able to start moving in seconds.
The Combat Control Computer—containing all present company—was near the center of the column and surrounded by the other supply trucks. The artillery took up rolling positions around us, and was itself surrounded by our ten thousand tanks. By the time we were completely deployed, our “column” would be twelve kilometers wide and thirty-five long.
I blinked over to one of my favorite restaurants in town, and everyone there acted as though this was the ordinary way of doing things. I ate an excellent meal a bit too quickly, and blinked back with a heavy feeling in my stomach.
Then I spent the next two and a half hours studying the military situation, trying to work out a battle plan of my own.
Maybe it was nerves, but a simple, straight-forward way of attaining all of Kasia’s objectives safely wouldn’t gel in my brain.
Yet Conan’s plan of blowing hell out of everything was definitely out unless all else failed. There just wasn’t any way to take out a heavily armored enemy standing next to defenseless civilians without killing the civilians too. Rail guns were just too powerful. Conan’s was a worst-case backup plan at best.
Kasia was the first one back, and since we were alone, she just naturally sat on my lap.
“You got it all figured out, love?” I asked.
“We think so. There are one or two rough patches left, but I think you’ll like it.”
“I hope so. I like your objectives, but I wasn’t able to come up with a way of doing it that I liked enough to try.”
“Well, we did always agree that I was the smart one,” she said, giving me a quick kiss and getting up. The others were entering the room.
“So how are we to get a fair hearing when the judge is snuggling up with the opposition?” Conan joked.
“Because whatever we decide to do, my only body is really in a coffin two feet away from yours, and if you think that I would let the bunch of us, and mainly me, get killed just to butter up my one true love, you’re stupider than I look. Especially when she doesn’t need any buttering up. So. We’re all here. You have the floor. Use it. Or are you going to make your lovely better half do it for you?”
“Hmmm . . . Using my better half to do it on the floor? An attractive thought, but I don’t think I could get her to do it on the floor in public, so we’ll put it off until later. You probably want to hear about how we’re going to fight the battle, anyhow.”
“True. We’ll catch the raree show later. For now, talk about the battle,” I said.
His plan was straightforward. We would cruise into the Serbian camp in a manner that looked casual but actually put every one of our tanks into a precisely prearranged position, shown on one of the big wall screens. The enemy Combat Control Computer, the communications building, and the officer’s club would be simultaneously destroyed by preassigned tanks.
Fifty milliseconds later, every enemy tank would be simultaneously destroyed in the same manner, followed closely by everything else, including the tunnel to New Serbia and the local boom town where most of the Serbian troops were watering. The entire battle was scheduled to last just under eight seconds, worst case.
At no time did any rail gun fire get closer than two hundred meters from the concentration camp, but it still looked fishy to me. Two hundred meters was fairly safe for an unarmored human when one rail gun opened fire, but ten thousand?
I turned to the professor. “Compute the radiation dosage, blast damage, and chemical poisoning for each person in the concentration camp. Compute the casualties and total number of civilian deaths that are likely to occur if we carry out this attack.”
“It will take me a few minutes,” the professor said.
This surprised me. Up until now, his answers had always been instantaneous.
“Conan. You never asked him this question when you were planning your attack, did you?” I asked.
“Not exactly. But I knew that a rail gun was safe at two hundred meters, and . . . ”
“Bullshit! You’re not that stupid! You just didn’t want to ask!”
Conan started to make a loud reply when the professor stood up.
“Assuming that all the internees are on the surface, and not dug in, I’m sorry to say that casualties and deaths are the same. That is to say, one hundred percent of them would die from thermal radiation alone. The same could be said for blast shock, chemical poisoning, and ionizing radiation. The plan requires that a quite sizable amount of energy be dissipated in a relatively small area over a very short time. A firestorm is almost certain to be generated, and there would be many casualties even among our own troops, even if the enemy never got off a shot, which is most unlikely. I must say that I was surprised at the results myself and double-checked all of my calculations. How could you possibly guess the results, my dear boy?”
“Human intuition, professor. Conan, we will label your proposal `plan Z.’ Kasia, you’re up.”
I knew that Kasia would be speaking for her team since Mirko hated public speaking, even in front of a small group of old friends. Kasia started in and held our attention for the next hour.
In the end, I said, “I like it, but it’s far from perfect. We will commit to it to the extent of getting the eight X-ray equipped tunneling tanks far out ahead of the mass of our forces. We’ll call them `Forward Scouts,’ if anybody asks. See to it, professor.
“It’s getting late, but we will reconvene at ten, tomorrow morning subjective. Computer, put Kasia’s proposal in writing, with suitable graphics, and put a copy of it on each of our desks. I want each of us to have a critique of Kasia’s proposal ready in the morning. And by `each of us’ I include the professor, Kasia, Mirko, and myself. That’s all for now. Get a good night’s sleep.”
I don’t think any of us did. I was up working until five in my office, and the bed was empty when I got there. Kasia’s office light was on, but after eight years of living with the lady, I knew better than to disturb her when she was busy. I was too tired to accomplish much, anyway.