At the moment, the opposite was true. Now he was reduced to hacking away at a piece of Russian pine while the highly trained men he was responsible for were struggling through the maze of shattered forests and across debris-choked streams in an effort to reach their assigned objectives. They were the ones fighting against time. They were the ones who had little opportunity to tend to personal needs or to stop and think about their comrades whom the Fates had not been kind to during the jump. It was moments like this, Hightower thought as he pushed his knife down with all his might, that he longed to be a young officer again, out there in the boonies, fighting the forces of evil and nature for God, country, and the girl next door.
Pausing for a moment, Hightower looked up at the sky again. He chuckled. God, country, and the girl next door. That's what the U. S. Army used to fight for, he thought. That was what he'd joined the Army to do. To him, the principles embodied in his faith and in the Constitution, which he was pledged to defend, had meaning. They were tangible. The idea of going to war to defend corporate America, or to deflect the media's attention from a White House scandal, were as foreign as the very land in which he now sat. He knew that the world changes. He had seen it himself. But the idea that the very meaning of human existence, even if it was a soldier's existence, could change so radically so fast was all but incomprehensible. Only slowly had Hightower come to the conclusion that something was not right, something was out of place, that his own core beliefs were out of sync with the society he was charged to defend. What he could do to adjust things, either of his view of the world or of the world itself, was beyond him. At the moment, though, he had more immediate concerns.
"Colonel Hightower?" A familiar-sounding voice called out, cutting into his dark thoughts. "I have the current status."
Lowering his gaze, the Special Forces colonel looked at Andrew Fretello and blinked as he turned his attention away from his lofty philosophical reflections and refocused his full attention on the mission at hand. "Go ahead. Major."
"Well, sir, there are still a fair number of teams unaccounted for. To the good, we were able to contact Captain Brant. His losses during the jump were minimal."
It always annoyed Hightower when a staff officer giving a briefing equated the loss of life as minimal. Though he knew that such a description was a valid means of conveying an overall picture, minimal casualties were to him akin to saying that someone was only mostly dead. "Exactly how many men, Major, does Captain Brant have with him?"
Pausing, Fretello glanced down at his notes. "Four, sir, not counting Captain Brant."
"So he only lost one man. Any word on his status?"
Fretello shook his head. "Captain Brant did not specify."
Hightower looked down at the stick he held and carved off another chuck. "I guess it doesn't make a difference for now. Continue."
"With Captain Brant and his people, that gives us two teams converging on Alpha Zero Four. We have also managed to contact one of the Foreign Legion teams assigned to hit Foxtrot Zero Two. Their signal was rather weak and the transmission garbled. From what we could make out, they are in fairly bad shape, but retain the ability to hit their assigned target."
Lifting his head, Hightower looked into Fretello's eyes. "Good, that leaves only two holes uncovered."
Though he seemed pleased with this bit of news, the Special Forces colonel did not smile. "We don't know that for sure." Fretello quickly countered. "There's always the off chance that members of the teams assigned to those targets survived the jump but lost their signal equipment. After all, we won't have our backup Comsat until Captain Bell finds us."
Hightower stopped his whittling and gave Fretello a long, hard stare. "You seem to be assuming, Major, that she's still alive and able to walk."
Fretello shrugged. "There's always the hope that she is, sir."
"Hope, Major, is not a good foundation upon which to base a plan of action. You, of all people, should know that."
Unable to frame a suitable response, the young major resorted to the default reply. "Yes, sir."
"So," the colonel stated, as a way of signaling that he was changing subjects. "What are our options as you see them?"
Relaxing his stance, Fretello placed his notepad behind him and grasped it with both hands. "As I see it, we have two options. The first is to divert several of the teams from targets that have more than one team currently converging on them over to hit those that are, to the best of our knowledge, uncovered."
"Not so good," Hightower reasoned out loud. "If your original premise is still operative, Russian security forces at the targets will have to be hit from multiple directions."
"Yes, sir. That is correct," Fretello acknowledged before he went on. "That leaves us with the second-best option. Once those targets that have multiple teams approaching them have been reached and charges have been set, all uncommitted teams will be redirected to those targets currently uncovered."
"How practical is that?" Hightower asked as he took up his whittling again in an effort to work off some of his nervous energy.
"Well, sir," Fretello explained as he reached into a pants pocket and pulled a map out. Squatting, he opened the map and pointed out the position of the uncovered targets. "Both of them are to our south, ten and twelve klicks away respectively. The teams that will in all likelihood be in the best condition to free up one or more of their subordinate teams are all to the north." _
Hightower looked at the locations the staff officer was pointing out. As he did so, something clicked. "It would seem," he stated more to himself than to Fretello, "that the farther south you go, the worse things are."
Having already considered that, Fretello nodded. "Yes, sir. The good news there is that the regional command-and-control complex is pretty much in the heart of an area of near total devastation. Which should mean that their ability to react to our attacks is limited, if they retain the ability to do so at all."
Hightower nodded in agreement as he studied the map. "In the negative," he finally stated, "both of the uncovered sites are on either side of that complex. Which means they are closer to them than we are and will be able to reinforce them faster than we can get to them."
"Well, yes, provided," Fretello countered, "they know we're coming."
Turning away from the map, Hightower whacked away a few chips of wood from the stick he had been whittling as he considered the problem. Without bothering to look up at the staff officer, he began to articulate the decision he had already settled upon. "We'll stay with the plan as it exists, for now. AH teams will continue to make their way to their assigned targets and prepare them for execution on order. However, you will put out a warning order that they will hold onto any unused demo packs. On order, they will bring those charges to this location as quickly as possible, together with all personnel that can be spared. Once we have consolidated them, we will resurrect two new teams and set off to hit those targets that have not yet been attacked. Is that clear, Major?"
As he acknowledged his commander's guidance, the young staff officer's mind was already racing with the possibilities of becoming an active part of the operation that this course of action presented. If Colonel Hightower look note of the glint in Fretello's eye and the smile that the major struggled to suppress, he didn't let on. Instead, he stood up, tossed the butchered stick he had been working on as far as he could and took a deep breath. "Get to work on disseminating those orders to all teams ASAP. And have the comms people gel Brussels for me. I'll fill them in and brief them on how we're going to deal with the situation."