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Hamm could see their officers talking to their men over the noise of the arriving aircraft.
“They look proud, boss,” Hamm observed.
They heard a distant shout, as a company of tankers told their captain they were ready to kick some ass. A news crew was even out there to immortalize the event for local TV.
“They are proud,” the general said. “Soldiers should be proud, Colonel.”
“Only one thing missing, sir.”
“What’s that, Al?”
“Baaaaaaaaa,” Colonel Hamm said around his cigar. “Lambs to the slaughter.” The two officers shared a look. The first mission of the OpFor was to take away that pride. The Blackhorse Cav had never lost so much as a single simulated engagement to anything other than a regular formation–and that rarely enough. Hamm didn’t plan to start this month. Two battalions of Abrams tanks, one more of Bradleys, another of artillery, a cavalry company, and a combat-support battalion against his three squadrons of Opposing Force. It hardly seemed fair. For the visitors.
THEY WERE ALMOST done. The most annoying work of all was mixing the AmFo, which turned out to be a pretty good upper-body workout for the Mountain Men. The proper proportions of the fertilizer (which was mainly an ammonia-based chemical compound) and the diesel fuel came from a book. It struck both men as amusing that plants should like to eat a deadly explosive. The propel-lant used in artillery rounds was also ammonia-based, and once upon a time, in post-World War I Germany, a chemical plant making fertilizer had exploded and wiped out the neighboring village. The addition of diesel fuel was partly to provide an additional element of chemical energy, but mainly to act as a wetting agent, the better for the internal shock wave to propagate within the explosive mass and hasten the detonation. They used a large tub for the mixing, and an oar, like a canoe’s, to stir the mass into the proper consistency (that came from a book also). The re-
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suit was a large glob of mud-like slurry which formed into blocks of a sort. These they lifted by hand.
It was dirty and smelly and a little dangerous inside the drum of the cement truck. They took turns doing the filling. The access hatch, which was designed to admit semi-liquid cement, was just over three feet in diameter. Holbrook had rigged an electric fan to blow fresh air into the drum, because the fumes from the fresh AmFo mix were unpleasant and possibly dangerous–it gave them headaches, which was warning enough. It was the work of over a week, but now the drum was as filled as they needed it to be, about three-quarters, when the last block was nested in with all the rest. Every layer had been somewhat uneven, and the void spaces were filled with a mix that was more liquid and had been handed in by bucket, so that the circular body of the drum was as full as two men working alone could make it. If one could have seen through the steel, it would have looked like a pie chart, the unfilled part a V-shape, facing upwards.
“I think that does it, Pete,” Ernie Brown said. “We have about another hundred pounds or so, but–”
“No place for it to go,” Holbrook agreed, climbing out. He clambered down the ladder and the two walked outside, sat in lawn chairs and got some fresh air. “Damn, I’m glad that’s done!”
“You bet.” Brown rubbed his face and took a deep breath. His head hurt so badly that he wondered if his face might come off. They’d stay out here for a long while, until they got all those goddamned fumes out of their lungs.
“This has got to be bad for us,” Pete said.
“Sure as hell gonna be bad for somebody. Good idea on the bullets,” he added. There were two oil drums full of them inside, probably too many, but that was okay.
“What’s a brownie without some walnuts?” Holbrook asked.
“You bastard!” Brown laughed so hard he nearly came out of the chair. “Oh, Jesus, my head hurts!”
APPROVAL FOR FRENCH cooperation on the meeting came from the Quai d’Orsay with remarkable speed.
794 *”^
France had diplomatic interests with every country bordering on the Gulf that connected to all manner of commercial relationships, from tanks to pharmaceuticals. French troops had deployed in the Persian Gulf War to find themselves fighting against French products, but that sort of thing wasn’t all that unusual. It made for lots of markets. Approval of the mission was phoned to the American Ambassador at nine in the morning, who telexed Foggy Bottom in less than five minutes, where it was relayed to Secretary Adler while he was still in his bed. Action officers made other notifications, first of all to the 89th Military Airlift Wing at Andrews Air Force Base.
Getting the Secretary of State out of town quietly was never the easiest of tasks. People tended to notice empty offices of that magnitude, and so an easy cover story was laid on. Adler was going to consult with European allies on several issues. The French were far better able to control their media, a task which was more than anything else a matter of timing.
“Yeah?” Clark said, lifting the phone at the Marriott closest to Langley.
“It’s on for today,” the voice said.
A blink. A shake of the head. “Super. Okay, I’m packed.” Then he rolled back over for some more sleep. At least there didn’t have to be a mission brief for this one. Keep an eye on Adler, take a walk, and come home. There wasn’t any real worry about security. If the Iranians– UIR-ians was a phrase he hadn’t come to terms with yet– wanted to do something, two men with pistols wouldn’t be able to do much about it except hand their weapons over unused, and either locals or Iranian security would keep the hostile peons away. He was going to be there for show, because it was something you did, for some reason or other.
“We goin’?” Chavez asked from the other bed.
“Yep.”
“Bueno.”
DARYAEI CHECKED HIS desk clock, subtracting eight, nine, ten, and eleven hours, and wondering if anything had
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gone wrong. Second thoughts were the bane of people in his position. You made your decisions and took the action, and only then did you really worry, despite all the planning and thought that might have gone into what you did. There was no royal road to success. You had to take risks, a fact never appreciated by those who merely thought about being a chief of state.
No, nothing had gone wrong. He’d received the French Ambassador, a very pleasant unbeliever who spoke the local language so beautifully that Daryaei wondered what it might be like to have him read some of his country’s poetry. And a courtly man, ever polite and deferential, he’d posed his secondhand request like a man arranging a marriage of family alliance, his hopeful smile also conveying the wishes of his government. The Americans would not have made the request if they’d had any pre-warning of Badrayn’s people and their mission. No, in a case like that, the meeting would have been on neutral ground– Switzerland was always a possibility–for informal but direct contact. In this case, they would send their own Foreign Minister into what they had to consider to be enemy country–and a Jew at that! Friendly contact, friendly exchange of views, friendly offers of friendly relations, the Frenchman had said, pitching the meeting, doubtless hoping that if it went well, then France would be remembered as the country that fostered a new friendship–well, maybe a “working relationship”–and if the meeting went badly, then all that would be remembered was that France had tried to be an honest broker. Had Daryaei known about ballet, he would have used it as a visual image for the exchange.
Damn the French, anyway, he thought. Had their warrior chief Martel not stopped ‘Abd-ar-Rahman in 732 at Poitiers, then the whole world might be. . . but even Allah couldn’t change history. Rahman had lost that battle because his men had grown greedy, fallen away from the purity of the Faith. Exposed to the riches of the West, they’d stopped fighting and started looting, and given Martel’s forces the chance to re-form and counterattack. Yes, that was the lesson to be remembered. There was always time for looting. You had to win the battle first. First destroy
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the enemy’s forces, and then take that which you wanted to take.
He walked from his office into the next room. There on the wall was a map of his new country and its neighbors, and a comfortable seat from which to view it. There came the usual error from looking at maps. Distances were truncated. Everything seemed so close, all the more so after all the lost time of his life. Close enough to reach. Close enough to grasp. Nothing could go wrong now. Not with everything so close.