DON NER WAS STANDING up in the top hatch of the scout track, behind the turret, with his Army cameraman next to him. It was like nothing he’d ever seen. He’d gotten the assault on the gun battery on tape, though he didn’t think the tape would be all that usable, what with all the bouncing and bumping. All around him was destruction. Behind to the southeast were at least a hundred burned-out tanks, trucks, and other things he didn’t recognize, and it had all happened in less than an hour. He lurched forward, striking his face on the hatch rim when the Bradley stopped.
“Get security out!” the track commander shouted. “We’re gonna be here for a bit.”
The Bradleys were arrayed in a circle, about a mile north of the wrecked UIR guns. There was nothing moving around them, which the gunner made sure of by traversing his turret around. The rear hatch opened, and two men jumped out, first looking and then running, rifles in hand.
“Come here,” the sergeant said, holding his hand out. Donner took it and climbed to the vehicle’s roof. “Want a smoke?”
Donner shook his head. “Gave it up.”
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“Yeah? Well, those folks’ll stop smoking in a day or two,” he said, gesturing to the mess a mile back. The sergeant thought that was a pretty good one. He lifted binoculars to his eyes and looked around, confirming what the gunsights said.
“What do you think of this?” the reporter asked, tapping his cameraman.
“I think this is what they pay me for, and it all works.”
“What are we stopped for?”
“We’ll get some fuel in half an hour, and we need to replenish ammo.” He put the glasses down.
“We need fuel? We haven’t been moving that much.”
“Well, the colonel thinks tomorrow might be kinda busy, too.” He turned. “What do you think, Tom?”
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READY AND FORWARD!
WHAT PEOPLE CALL “THE
initiative,” whether in war or any other field of human activity, is never anything more or less than a psychological advantage. It combines one side’s feeling that they are winning with the other side’s feeling that something has gone wrong–that they must now prepare for and respond to the actions of their enemy instead of preparing their own offensive action. Couched in terms of “momentum” or “ascendancy,” it really always comes down to who is doing what to whom, and a sudden change in that equation will have a stronger effect than that of a gradual buildup to the same set of circumstances. The expected, when replaced by the unexpected, lingers for a time, lingers in the mind, since it is easier, for a while, to deny rather than to adapt, and that just makes things harder for those who are being done to. For the doers, there are other tasks.
For the American forces in contact, there came a brief, unwelcome, but necessary pause. It should have been easiest of all for Colonel Nick Eddington of WOLFPACK, but it wasn’t. His force of National Guard troops had done little more than stay in place for their first battle, which had allowed the enemy to come into their kill box, an ambush fifteen miles wide by fifteen deep. Except for the brigade’s reconnaissance screen, the men from Carolina had hardly moved at all. But now that had to change, and Eddington was reminded of the fact that though he was after a fashion a ballet master, the things performing the maneuvering were tanks, ponderous and clumsy j moving in the dark across unfamiliar ground. ,
Technology helped. He had radios to tell his people when and where to go, and the IVIS system to tell them how. Task Force LOBO started by backing off the reverse-slope positions that had served them so well only forty minutes earlier, turning south and heading through pre-
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selected navigational way points to destinations less than ten kilometers south of their initial fighting positions. In the process, the augmented battalion diluted itself, spread itself more thinly than it had been, a feat made possible because the battalion staff was able to program the move electronically and transmit their intentions to sub-unit commanders, who, assigned areas of responsibility, were able to subdivide them almost automatically, until every single vehicle knew its destination to the meter. The initial delay of twenty minutes from notification that Plan NATHAN was about to be activated allowed that selection process to begin. The lateral shift required an hour, with the vehicles moving across what appeared to be vacant land at the speed of commuters in a particularly congested rush hour. Even so, it worked, and an hour from the time the movement was started, it had been completed. WOLF-PACK, now covering well over twenty miles of lateral space, wheeled, turned north, and started moving out at ten kilometers per hour, with recon teams darting forward faster still to take position five klicks in advance of the main body. That was well short of what the book said the interval should be. Eddington had to be mindful of the fact that he was maneuvering a large force of part-time soldiers whose dependence on their electronic technology was a little too great for his total comfort. He’d keep his force of three fighting battalions under tight control until contact was established and the overall picture was clear.
IT SURPRISED Donner that the support vehicles, nearly all of them robust-looking trucks, were able to follow the fighting units as quickly as they did. Somehow he hadn’t understood how important this was, accustomed as he was to hitting one particular gas station once or twice a week. Here the service personnel had to be as mobile as their customers, and that, he realized, was a major task. The fuel trucks set up. The Bradleys and battle tanks came to them two at a time, then went back to their perimeter posts, where ammunition was dropped off other trucks for the track crewmen to load up. Every Bradley, he learned, had a Sears socket wrench, in nearly every
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case bought out of the gunner’s salary, to facilitate reloading of the Bushmaster magazine. It worked better than the tool designed for the purpose. That was probably worth a little story, he thought with a distant smile.
The troop commander, now in his command HMMWV instead of his M1A2, raced about from track to track to ascertain the condition of each vehicle and crew. He saved Three-Two for the last.
“Mr. Donner, you doing okay, sir?”
The reporter sipped at coffee brewed up by the Bradley’s driver, and nodded. “Is it always like this?” he asked the young officer.
“First time for me, sir. Pretty much like training, though.”
“What do you think about all this?” the journalist asked. “I mean, back there, you and your people, well, killed a lot of the enemy.”
The captain thought about that briefly. “Sir, you ever cover tornadoes and hurricanes and stuff?”
“Yes.”
“And people get their lives all messed up, and you ask them what it’s like, right?”
“That’s my job.”
“Same with us. These guys made war on us. We’re making war back. If they don’t like it, well, maybe next time they’ll think more about it. Sir, I got an uncle in Texas– uncle and an aunt, actually. Used to be a golf pro, he taught me how to play, then went to work for Cobra–the club company, okay? Right before we left Fort Irwin, my mom called and told me they both died of that Ebola shit, sir. You really want to know what.we think of this?” asked an officer who’d killed five tanks this night. “Saddle up, Mr. Donner. The Blackhorse will be rolling in ten. You can expect contact right before dawn, sir.” There was a dull flash on the horizon, followed a minute or so later by the rumble of distant thunder. “I guess the Apaches are starting early.”
Fifteen miles to the northwest, II Corps’s command post had just been destroyed.
The plan was evolving. First Squadron would pivot
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and drive north through remaining II Corps units. Third Squadron would come south through lighter opposition, massing the regiment for the first attack into the enemy HI Corps’s left flank. Ten miles away, Hamm was moving his artillery to facilitate the destruction of the remains of II Corps, whose commanders his helicopter squadron had just eliminated.
EDD1NGTON REMINDED HIMSELF again that he had to keep it simple. Despite all his years of study and the name he’d assigned to his counterstroke, he wasn’t Nathan Bedford Forrest, and this battlefield wasn’t small enough for him to ad-lib his maneuvers, as that racist genius had done so often in the War of the Northern Aggression.
HOOTOWL was spread especially thin now, with the brigade’s front almost doubled in the last ninety minutes, and that was slowing them down. Probably not a bad thing, the colonel thought. He had to be patient. The enemy force couldn’t maneuver too far east for fear of running into the left of Blackhorse–assuming they knew it was there, he thought–and the ground to the west was too choppy to allow easy movement. They’d tried the middle and gotten pounded for it. So the logical move for the enemy I Corps was to try a limited envelopment maneuver, probably weighted to the east. Incoming pictures from the Predator drones started to confirm that.