Lana Mendes was half in, half out of the hatch of one of the armored cars. I'm not sure which view is better, Reilly mused. He didn't muse, or view, very long though. Instead he walked up and slapped her hard on the thigh. The stream of mixed English, Afrikaans, and Hebrew (really Arabic, since Israel had had to borrow) curses previously emanating from the vehicle let up momentarily, only to commence again with real fury as she withdrew her top half from the turret. Reilly tried not to notice when her shirt caught on the turret and began to ride high.
As she was fixing her shirt, before she could even begin to lay into him, Reilly cut her off, abruptly, saying, "We've got a serious problem, Lana. Leave Green in charge. Round up Sergeant Abdan. Meet me at my hooch in half an hour."
With that he turned on his heel and walked away. Lana thought, I like the other view better.
When Lana and Abdan arrived at Reilly's tent, the other key leadership was already there, seated on Reilly's cot, folding chairs, or the ground. The first sergeant, George, the company exec, FitzMarcach, and the antiarmor section leader, Harvey, shared the cot. The two infantry platoon leaders, Hilfer and Epolito, sat on folding chairs. The mortar section leader, Peters, was already there and seated on the ground, as were Viljoen and Dumisani. Matthias Nagy, who would lead the team of engineers supporting Company A, was likewise in attendance, but standing. Nobody looked particularly happy but Harvey looked especially pale.
The first sergeant and XO spread apart to make a little room on Reilly's cot for Lana.
"As I've said, we have a problem," Reilly began. "The other side have tanks, and near enough to one of the key objectives that we can assume they'll pour out to fight once we show up."
"How many?" Abdan asked. "What model."
"T-55's and-we think-twenty-four of them."
Lana looked instantly horrified. "You can't, I mean you can't take on tanks, even T-55's, in Elands and expect to survive the experience. They got no- "
"Yes, you can," Viljoen interrupted. "I've done it twice. In Namibia. I'm not saying it's easy but it can be done."
"And were you outnumbered four to one?" Lana asked heatedly.
"Well, no," Viljoen admitted. "We had the numbers, if only slightly, at the point of contact.
"Boss," Harvey said, turning to Reilly, "My Ferrets are going to carry eight missiles loaded, between them, and another dozen stowed internally or on the back deck. That's twenty missiles, max. Sir, do you know why they call them ‘missiles?' Because they miss a lot more often than they hit. From my twenty, ideally, we kill seven or eight tanks. That still leaves sixteen or seventeen facing a half dozen Elands. And that's too much."
"Don't count on me to whittle them down," Peters said, spitting tobacco juice into the can that he seemed always to have in his hand. "If I hit something much smaller than the Earth, with a mortar, it'll be a fluke."
Abdan shook his head. "Sir, the boys are already griping about having to traverse the turrets by hand and have the commander double as a loader. If we had four M-1s, I'd take on your two dozen T-55s with a grin. As is . . . "
"Yeah," Reilly agreed. He disagreed about the numbers, though. "Maintenance being what it is, and tanks being what they are, there's not much chance we'd have to take on all twenty-four. Think more along the lines of twelve to twenty." He turned his head toward Viljoen. "Tell us about taking on T-55s with Elands."
"It's simple, Wes," Reilly explained later in the day. "I can handle maybe half of those tanks if they come after us. And they're close enough that we won't have seized our targets before they do come looking for us. They're also close enough to block our egress back to the sea and the ship. Are those targets all that key?"
"Yes," Stauer answered.
"Okay, then my options are A: Hit the tank compound first, before I do anything else, with everything I have, while the fuckers are asleep, killing everything that moves and taking time to thermite the back deck of each one. Understand, though, that the targets might get away.
"If you don't like that, there's option B: Seize the targets: leave the vehicles behind; everybody goes out by air. I won't comment on what this does to the rest of your plan, even assuming we could do it before the tanks are ramming their barrels up our asses.
"Then there's C: Reconfigure the light aircraft due in, in a few days, to attack the armor base. They'll have to linger there, shooting anything that moves, for several hours. My guess is that while they'd cause some delay, even get a few, they wouldn't stop the tanks.
"Lastly is my personal favorite," Reilly continued. "D: Two to four aircraft-call it ‘three'-strike the place, along with the mortars, immediately following which I and the Elands roll in and shoot the shit out of it, while my XO takes the rest of the company to the objective to seize the targets. The aircraft can keep any survivors busy while the company links up and moves to the sea. This has some downsides in terms of the likelihood of meeting serious resistance at the objective, and people escaping through a thinner net. I was counting on those 90mm guns to cow the opposition. Oh, and I'm going to need the cooks to supplement my mortar section. In any case, even D has some . . . issues."
Note to self, Stauer thought, bet with Sergeant Major, pay off, soonest.
"How about dropping off your engineers to mine the road?" he asked.
Reilly shook his head. "I've checked the maps. The road's a convenience, nothing more. With luck we get one tank that way and then the rest pull off road into the desert and continue the march. And there are no unfordable streams we could drop the bridges to, nor even any fordable ones we could mine the fords of."
"What if I cancelled Welch's mission and sent his boys to take out the compound?"
Reilly wrinkled his nose, this time. Despite that, he replied, "I've got no brief against special forces, but they're just as likely to alert the opposition as to take them out. Only so much shit can be back-packed, after all. And besides, you need them for the mission you've already got them on. The whole thing's kind of a waste, from our point of view, if they don't do that."
And if Welch's mission doesn't go off, we can't stay together, and I spend the rest of my miserable life alone.
"Yeah," Stauer admitted. "I'm willing to consider Option D. It's very close to what Boxer and Waggoner came up with, by the way."
"Greats minds and all," Reilly said with a shrug. "That said, I've got another problem."
"Which is?"
"My tankers are maybe on the verge of mutiny over the limitations of the Eland. Sergeant Abdan's playing it down, for now, but it has me worried."
"What are you doing about it?"
"For now, I'm sending the two South Africans around to tell war stories. That should prove especially effective since one of them was Eland crew in their border war, and took out T-55's with them, while the other was on the receiving end, if not exactly in a T-55. I'm also going to have to have a long chat with Mendes about talking up the Eland. That's going to be tough, because she thinks we're suicidal maniacs for even thinking about it. And I don't know how good an actress she is. And while I like Option D better than the others, it's still a shitty plan. If they see us coming, we're fucked."
"That's what I told Waggoner."
The explosion had a metallic quality to it: Blang. The 90mm subcaliber device sounded and a target to the left front shuddered with the impact. A small puff of smoke told of the hit.
The sound of the spotting rifles, as muffled by the 90mm barrels, was odd, flatter sounding than what the troops were used to in the .50 caliber Browning. Lana rode the back deck, with her head inside the turret. Twenty-one of the twenty-seven available subcal devices were loaded on this Eland, in the immediately accessible ready racks. The platoon leader, Green, commanded and loaded-a tough job in itself-while his gunner, face pressed to the gunner's sight, frantically spun the traversing and elevating wheels to line up on targets that appeared at random, ahead and to either side. The gunner's face ran with sweat from the effort, despite the air conditioning the Israelis had installed, clouding his eyes and fogging up the sight. The bouncing of the armored car on the rough ground made the gunner's job seem impossible.