“Roger. Glossary, Hildebrand. And TIGER to you, too. Out.”
“Andy, check confirmation all units acknowledge condition Jericho,” Peter said. “Then get me Task Force Atlas, Lieutenant-Colonel Barton.” They were all wearing their Royal Army hats tonight, that was the central reserve, in Dodona. The line there at least was secure.
A wait of a few minutes. “Barton here. Ready to scramble.”
“Ready. Scramble.” There was a tell-tale sing-song background in his earpiece. “Scrambled.”
“Scrambled,” Barton confirmed. “OK. I’ve been following it.”
“You get the same feeling I do, Ace?”
“That joyful, tingling sense of anticipation that comes just before you jam your dick into the garbage grinder? Yeah.”
“How do you figure it?”
“Could be either an agent in place, a pirate tap in the satellite, or both. They know more than we thought, and they’ve got more force than we expected.”
There was no visual link, but it took no imagination for Peter to see Barton’s face, cynical grin, toothpick moving rapidly from one side of his mouth to the other. “Status of the reserves, Ace?”
“Nominal. Of course we’re using up Thoth at a fearful rate, ditto ARM.”
“Any effect?”
“Sure. Their jamming’s just about stopped, and Miscowsky and Katz are having a field day. Between them, they’ve taken out the equivalent of a battalion.”
“Think we got all their antennas?”
“Hell, no.”
“Yeah, I agree,” Peter said.
Owensford looked at the map again. Four Brotherhood battalions with his Task Force Erwin column in the south, and the reinforced battalion of the First RSI. The same with Task Force Wingate in the north. One company with the feint. The mechanized battalion of the First outside Olynthos with two squadrons of armored cars, ready to back up Wingate. Four companies of Legion troops in Dodona, with all the ground-effect transport that the Middle Valley could provide, fast enough to reinforce either Wingate or Erwin. On the map the advancing columns looked like the jaws of a beast, closing around the south-central Dales. On the ground it was fewer than ten thousand men moving through an area of rough terrain larger than many countries back on Earth.
Plenty of troops in reserve, if you counted the militia, Ace had been working miracles with them. Another full brigade of first-line mobilized Brotherhood fighters along the river ready to intervene if it must, and the twenty thousand or so of the second-line were standing to arms on the defensive, giving him a secure base. Five times that number of third-line, women and older men, not field units but ready to fight and doing noncombatant work. None of them very mobile, unfortunately. Sparta’s blessing and curse, the Eurotas; it made bulk transport in the settled regions so easy that there was an overwhelming temptation to put off developing a ground-transport infrastructure.
Should I have taken more of the militia in with me? he thought. Then: no, the reasons are still valid. Risky enough to have them standing by as emergency reserves.
Good militia were still part-time troops, unpracticed in large-unit maneuvers. The Brotherhood fighters were first-rate in their own neighborhoods. That was one reason nobody had ever taken a serious crack at Sparta, the Brotherhoods could field better than a third of a million at a pinch. The problem with that Swiss Militia system was that if you called everyone to arms, there was no one left to do the work; and Sparta’s economy was in bad enough shape as it was.
Losing too many of them could be absolutely fatal; at a pinch, Sparta could stand heavy casualties to its offensive force, but the Brotherhoods were the iron frame that kept this section of the Valley under government control.
“All right, we probe, but carefully,” he said at last. “This operation is primarily a reconnaissance in force, anyway.” The best way to learn about an opponent was to fight him. “It all depends on what they’ve got and how good it is. We’ve already learned something about that.”
“Yeah; they’re pretty good, and they’ve got a secure communications system in there. Which is more than we do.” Owensford nodded thoughtfully; it looked unpleasantly like the enemy had been preparing this for years. The whole of the Dales could be linked together with optical thread-cable and permanent line-of-sight stuff.
“The main thing is not to get hurt,” Peter said. “Get that out to all units. If the other guys want to play, dig in and pound them. They’re better than we thought they were, but they’re still just light infantry.
“Meanwhile, let the SAS teams come home, but keep sending them fire support as long as they can spot targets. After all, it’s what they’re out there for.”
“I ain’t worried about them,” Barton said. “But there’s something sour about this whole operation.”
“I got that feeling too.”
“And we’re blind. Pete, I suggest we wait for new satellite pix before we commit.”
“Trust them?” Owensford asked innocently.
“Oh. Now that you mention it, no. Guess I don’t.”
“So we have to try something else. Bring up the birds; one with me, one with Task Force Wingate. Keep them well back.” Tiltrotor VTOL aircraft, commandeered from the RSMP for the seismic-mapping project. They could transport a complete platoon of infantry; right now they were crammed with other stuff. It would not do to put them in harm’s way, of course. Aircraft over a battlefield had been an impossibility since good light seeker rockets became common. The enemy certainly had those.
“You’re the boss,” Barton said.
“Bring up, code—” He did a quick search on his data base. “The code is Babylon.”
“Babylon.” A pause. “Babylon it is. Anything else?”
“That’s it.”
“Task Force Atlas, out.”
“Out,” Peter said.
Next. “Andy, let Heavy Weapons company dig in and prepare to fire support missions. Have Scout company pull all forward units inside artillery support range.” Not many proper guns, most of it was big mortars, but still enough range once the scouts drew in.
“Roger. SAS teams report enemy activity slacking off.”
Peter glanced at the munitions expenditure readouts. “I should bloody hope so. Haven’t you got a better report than that?”
“Miscowsky reports ‘DYANAMO.’ That translates as ‘heavily engaged.’ ”
“Other teams?”
“Much the same. Heard from Katz finally. His report prior to acknowledging Jericho was ‘JESUS CHRIST!’ Now reports, ‘Heavily engaged, am hurting enemy.’ ”
“Good.” The SAS teams are doing their job, but I don’t like this. Ace doesn’t either. “Bring them home. Send out escort patrols to assist.”
“Suggestion,” Captain Lahr said.
“Spill it.”
“This is all by the book,” Lahr said. “They’ll set up ambushes for the escorts, sure as hell.”
“Gotcha. Yeah, send an SAS Thoth controller along with each escort team. With luck they’ll find some targets going in while the teams kick ass coming out.”
“Roger that.”
“Now get me Collins again.”
“Can’t guarantee security.”
“Understood.”
“Coming up,” Andy Lahr said.
There was a pause. “Kicker Six here.”
“Jericho.”
“Understood.”
“Captain, I need an estimate of how far that mine obstacle stretches. . . .”
“About five hundred meters to my left, sir; three hundred to the right, and it’s anchored in a ravine. About fifty to a hundred meters thick. We estimate a minimum of three hours to clear a path suitable for vehicles.”
“Stand by one.” Owensford studied the map. The western end of the minefield ran down toward a valley; there was a lip to that hill, a traversable slope beyond the mines, and then broken wooded ground down to the low point.
What was it Ace said about garbage grinders? That gap might as well have a sign on it, “Please insert male generative organ here.” Well, a trap you know is a trap is no trap.
“Stand by for orders,” Peter said.
No point in having Collins waste troops on mines. Use fuel-aid to blast hell out of the area and be done with it. The main thing was to stay out of trouble. Owensford typed orders.
“DIG IN. STAY DUG IN UNTIL MINEFIELDS CLEARED. USE ARTILLERY AND HE TO CLEAR MINE AREA. DONT RISK TROOPS ON MINES. PREPARE TO PUNISH ENEMY ATTACKERS.”
“Andy, put this through the data base and give me the codes. Thanks.”
“OK. Attention to orders. Code DECEMBER. Repeat December. Code TRILOGY. Repeat Trilogy. Code ELK HILL. Repeat Elk Hill.”
“DECEMBER, TRILOGY, ELK HILL. Roger.”
“Code TIGER.”
“Tiger it is.”
“Okey Doke. Out.” Peter Owensford reached up and undogged the hatch, climbing up to stand with head and shoulders in the chill air. Cythera was up, shedding patchy moonlight through scud clouds. He cycled the facemask until the scene had a depthless brightness. The main body of Task Force Erwin was moving at the equivalent of a quick walk, no more. A dozen armored cars were leapfrogging forward, moving in spurts and then waiting in hull-down positions while the flanking infantry companies swept through the wooded areas to either side in skirmish line; behind both the bulk of the expeditionary force marched in company columns, enclosing their mule-born supply trains.