“Is wrong way,” Hudro said, shaking his head. “Static lines no good against Hyadeans.”
“What’s the right way? Gerofsky asked.
“Move fast, all way back to Rockies, deploy new strategies, strike back unexpected. Need more air, orbit support than exists. There is no way. Terrans don’t have mobility to fight Hyadean armies.”
Reports coming in from elsewhere were garbled and contradictory. Even with Gerofsky’s credentials linking him to the presidential staff, it proved impossible to get a connection to Yassem for the rest of the day. Amid the turmoil, Cade found a lieutenant in charge of a supply unit sending ammunition to positions being prepared farther forward. Cade explained their mission, and the lieutenant offered a ride out the next morning to see for themselves what was going on there. Cade put it to the others. They decided that Nyarl should go, naturally. Marie volunteered to assist. Since it would be a venture into a military operations area, they agreed that Gerofsky should go too. They spent the night with a Marine antiaircraft company on the edge of the airfield, sleeping in foxholes and listening to the distant drumming of artillery fire. Aircraft continued arriving and departing through the night.
* * *
After they had shared a dawn breakfast with the troops of sausage, beans, hash brown potatoes, and coffee, Hudro went to the tower with Davis to continue trying to contact Yassem. Cade remained with Powell and Koyne in the plane, preparing the new material for immediate transmission if a link was found. Marie, Nyarl, and Gerofsky hitched a ride to the supply unit, and an hour later drove out aboard an ammunition carrier going to a battery command post seven miles ahead. Nyarl carried the portable recording equipment. Gerofsky got himself and Marie issued with infantry submachine guns. She looked back in her element.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
CLARA NORBURN HAD TOLD Major Gerofsky that Cade possessed an infectious charisma that turned people who started out as opponents into willing collaborators. That was how he had prospered in his unique business of trading commercial and political contacts. The South American TV documentary that had helped propel the Federation to secession had been the work of a mix of Terrans and Hyadeans that he, more than anyone, had brought together. And then Gerofsky had experienced it himself in the space of a few hours, when he found himself reversing his initial position to first endorse, and then join, the enterprise they were committed to now. Admittedly, Cade had failed to win any converts among the high command he had met in Beijing, but the fact that he had even gotten a hearing was in itself an accomplishment not to be belittled.
After hearing Hudro voicing his doubts, Gerofsky was even more mindful now of Cade’s warning that a head-on clash with the aliens could only lead to disaster. If the news they were getting of the Federation’s offensive being hurled back all the way down the southern Mississippi front was correct—never mind what was happening farther north between St. Louis and Indianapolis—the war was not going to be won in a rapid pincers movement through Pittsburgh and up the east side of the Appalachians as had been intended. But the mood permeating from Sacramento was still to defy and fight, not look for ways of winding down. What disturbed Gerofsky most after hearing Hudro’s pronouncement on mobility was the speed with which counter-thrusts seemed to have materialized out of nowhere, already this side of the river—in less than a day! It went against all the accepted norms and doctrines of what should have been possible. Conceivably for that very reason, the commanders were failing to grasp the implications and still preparing for defense against the kind of war they knew.
They drove past pits and emplacements being prepared among the low hills overlooking the plains extending away toward Stuttgart and the Mississippi valley: 125 mm howitzer batteries; 155 mm self-propelled howitzers being dug in hull-down; medium-range ground-to-ground missile launchers; mobile AA missile carriers and multibarrel antiaircraft cannon. Heavy-lift helicopters whup-whupped their way overhead, hauling dangling artillery pieces and crates of missiles to forward positions. Finally, the carrier bearing him and the others came to a false crest ahead of a ridge line, behind which the battery they were delivering to had been situated. The view over the lowlands ahead showed tanks spreading out and deploying behind cover; weapons emplaced along a creek bed; a command post undergoing camouflage and concealment. . . . All according to the book. But this was over a hundred miles from the Mississippi. If they were already facing a credible threat as far advanced as this, then what they were facing was from a totally different book.