A couple of light pom-poms opened up, winking up at them from the huge piles of turned earth below; then a heavier antiaircraft gun, that stood some chance of reaching them. Black puffs of smoke erupted in the air below, each with a momentary snap of fire at its heart before it lost shape and began to drift away. Ant-tiny, hordes of laborers dove for the shelter of the trenches they had been digging, leaving their tools among the piles of timber, steel sheet and reinforcing rod.
There was a big camera fastened to brackets ahead of the observer’s position, but Jeffrey ignored it. He’d seen pictures; this trip was for a personal look.
All right, he thought. Nice job of field engineering. Everything laid out to command the ground to the east, but not just simple positions on ridge tops. Machine-gun bunkers at the base of the ridges, giving maximum fields of fire; heavier bunkers for field guns, revetted positions for heavy mortars on the reverse slopes, with communications trenches and even tunnels to bring reserves forward quickly without leaving them exposed to direct-fire weapons. All-round fields of fire, so that each position could hold out if cut off, and heavier redoubts further back, layer upon layer of them.
They must have half a million men working on this, Jeffrey thought, impressed.
correct to within ten thousand ±6, Center said. assuming an equivalent effort in other sectors of the front, as intelligence reports indicate.
“Well, we’ll have to take this into account,” Jeffrey said. He tapped the pilot’s shoulder again; despite their two-squadron escort, the man was looking nervously east and upward, to where Land attackers would come diving out of the morning sun. The plane banked westward.
* * *
“Thank you gentlemen for meeting on such short notice,” Jeffrey said.
They were in the Premier’s bunker beneath the hilltop Executive Mansion, nearly a hundred yards underground, as deep as you could get near Santander City without hitting groundwater. The impact of the bombs, a dull crump . . . crump . . . was felt more through the soles of their feet than heard through their ears. Every now and then the overhead electric light flickered, and dust filtered down, making men sneeze at its acrid scent.
“I thought you’d made it suicidal for dirigibles to fly over our territory,” Maurice Farr said dryly to the Air Force commander.
The commander flushed and pulled at his mustache. “In daylight, yes. But the speed and altitude advantage of our fighters is fairly narrow. At night, it’s much harder. Those might be their new long-range eight-engine bomber planes, too. We’re having more of a problem with those.”
At the head of the table, Jeffrey held up a hand. “In any case, the error radius of night bombing is so huge that it consumes more of their resources to do it than it does of ours to endure it.”
The Premier tapped a pencil sharply on the table. “General, we’re losing hundreds, perhaps thousands of civilian every time one of those raids breaks through.”
Jeffrey dipped his head slightly. “With all due respect, sir, there were a hundred and fifty thousand people in Ensburg—and I doubt ten thousand of them are alive now, and those are in Chosen labor camps.”
A pall of silence fell around the table. The siege of Ensburg had been a morale-booster for the whole Republic. Its fall had been a correspondingly serious blow. Jeffrey went on:
“So with all due respect, Mr. Premier, anything that helps keep the enemy back is a positive factor, and that includes attacks that hurt us but hurt him more.”
“There’s the effect of bombing on civilian morale,” the politician pointed out.
observe:
Scenes floated before Jeffrey’s eyes: cities reduced to street patterns amid tumbled scorched brick, air-raid shelters full of unmarked corpses asphyxiated as the firestorms above sucked the oxygen from their lungs, fleets of huge four-engined bombers sleeker and more deadly than anything Visager knew raining down incendiaries on a town of half-timbered buildings crowded with refugees while odd-looking monoplane fighters tried to beat them off.
“Sir, our citizens could take a lot more pain than this and still keep going. In any case, if we could turn to the matter at hand?”