Fortress
Fortress
Prologue: – Another 1965
Sergeant Tom Kelly listened to John F. Kennedy’s fifth State of the Union Address – his so-called “Buck Rogers Speech” – at a firebase in the Shuf Mountains, watching Druse 122 mm rockets arc toward Beirut across the night sky.
The broadcast, carried live over the Armed Forces Levantine Network, hissed and sputtered in the plug earphone of Kelly’s cheap portable radio. Inside the high-sided command track against which he leaned, the young sergeant could have gotten a much clearer signal through some of the half million dollars worth of communications-intercept equipment which the Radio Research vehicle carried. This was good enough, though, for a soldier who was off duty and waiting for the attack Druse message traffic made almost certain.
Shooooo . . . hissed the green ball of a bombardment rocket.
“Our enemies, the enemies of freedom,” said the President, more distant from Kelly’s reality than seven time zones could imply, “have proven in Hungary, in Cuba, and in Lebanon that they respect nothing in their international dealings except strength. Their armies are poised on the boundaries of Eastern Europe, ready to hurl themselves across the remainder of the continent at the least sign of weakness among the Western democracies.”
By daylight, the berm which bulldozers had turned up around the firebase for protection was scarcely less sterile in appearance than the crumbling rock of the hills from which it was carved. Now, in the soft darkness, the landscape breathed. Kelly’s left hand caressed the heavy wooden stock of his M14, knowing that beyond the berm other soldiers were nervously gripping their own weapons: Mausers abandoned by the Turks in 1917; Polish-made Kalashnikovs slipped across the Syrian border in donkey panniers; rocket-propelled grenades stamped in Russian or Chinese . . .
“In Europe and the Middle East,” continued the President in a nasal voice further attenuated by the transmission and the radio’s tinny speaker, “in Africa and Latin America – wherever the totalitarians and their surrogates choose to test us, the free world must stand firm. Furthermore, ladies and gentlemen of Congress, we in the United States must undertake an initiative on behalf of the free world which will convince our enemies that we have the strength to withstand them no matter how great the forces they gather on Earth itself.
The five tubes of howitzer battery – the sixth hog was deadlined for repair – cut loose in a ragged salvo. The white powderflashes were a lightninglike dazzle across the firebase while the side-flung shock waves from the muzzle brakes hammered tent roofs and raised dust from the parched ground. The short-barreled one-five-fives were firing at high angles and with full charges. Nothing to do with the turbaned riflemen crouching to attack, perhaps nothing to do with even the Druse rockets sailing down toward the airport in the flat curves of basketballs shot from thirty feet out.
“We must have an impregnable line of defense and an arsenal of overwhelming magnitude in the heavens themselves,” continued Kennedy through the squeal of hydraulic rammers seating the shells of the next salvo. Clicks of static from command transmissions cut across the broadcast band, but Kelly was used to building sense from messages far more shattered and in a variety of languages beyond English. He was good at that – at languages – and his fingertips again tried to wiggle the magazine of his rifle, making sure it was locked firmly into the receiver.
“Space is both a challenge – ” said the President as Kelly’s hearing returned after the muzzle blasts of the howitzers which were more akin to physical punishment than to noise. ” – Now also the unbreachable shield of freedom and the spear of retribution which cannot be blunted by treacherous attack as our land-based weapons might be.”
The breechblock of a fifty-caliber machinegun clanged from the far side of the firebase as the weapon was charged, freezing time and Tom Kelly’s soul. Only the sounds of the howitzers reloading and traversing their turrets slightly followed, however. Nothing Kelly had seen in ninety-seven days in the field suggested the hogs were going to hit anything useful, but their thunderous discharges made waiting for an attack easier than it would have been with only the stars for company.