The Lieutenant Colonel moved his gaze around the room and smiled thinly. “Maybe you feel like you haven’t been doing your part, that everyone else has been doing the heavy lifting. Maybe you feel that you’ve been abandoned by the ARF, barely getting any support or supplies to support your fight. Maybe you’re running out of hope because nothing in the city seems worth fighting for. All of that ends now.” His voice grew firm. “We have a chance not just to do some serious damage, maybe cripple their forces stationed here, but to use those gains as leverage to force them into considering an armistice or complete surrender.”
“To do that… I’m going to need you to pick a fight that you can’t win,” he told them.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Morris had the leaders from the five squads present for the detailed mission briefing—Ed from Theodore, Brookelynne from Sylvester, Barker from Kermit, Chan from Yosemite, and Hannibal from Flintstone. All together the five squads contained thirty-two dogsoldiers, twenty-nine men and three women. Not nearly as many as the LTC would have liked, but you worked with what you had.
The Irregulars were just that in every way, operating behind the lines and, usually, without direct support, but that didn’t mean they were a wholly autonomous unit. ARF Command did what it could to support and administrate them, and Morris, as Uncle Charlie, did his best to get to know not just how many people were in the squads but the men commanding them. Ed, commanding Theodore, had the most seniority of any of the squad leaders, and was a Captain in the ARF, although his rank was a secret known only to a few.
There was a large map of the city’s entire downtown area including the Blue Zone laid out before them.
“We know their satellite coverage of the city,” he began. “While they can adjust their observation windows slightly—very slightly—we know when they have eyes available in orbit and when they don’t. And we’re going to use that to our advantage.”
“You know their satellite flyover schedule?” Brookelynne said with a frown. “We could have used that information, I don’t know, fucking years ago. Might have saved a few lives. What, you only care about us when you want to use us?”
Morris fixed her with a stare, then dug a folded piece of paper out of one of his pockets. When he unfolded it they saw dense columns of numbers. “The five recon satellites they have left that cover this city have very different orbital tracks. One orbits the Earth every ninety-seven point three minutes and can go eyes on above us for seven minutes or so, although half that time it’s at a serious angle. The second is in a higher Earth orbit and takes one hundred and two minutes to transit the globe, and can eyeball this patch of dirt for nine minutes. The third is similar to the first but is on a polar orbit, not east-west. Do I need to keep going? Depending on the day and the time, none of them could be overhead or all five could be. These gazillion figures I’ve got here,” he shook the paper at them, “only cover the exposure windows for the next three days. By the time you decoded them in a transmission from ‘Uncle Charlie’ your three days would be up. And,” he said, staring them down, “if I transmitted a math program to you so you could compute the dates and times yourself, after the Tabs didn’t see anything moving on the ground for weeks, how long do you think it would be before they began to suspect something and adjusted the orbits, making our little math program worthless? We felt it was better to wait to use this advantage for something big.”
“Like the allies deciding what Enigma information to act on in World War Two,” Hannibal said, nodding. To the questioning looks from the other squad leaders he explained, “The Nazis had this fancy code machine, the Enigma. Encrypted all of their communication. Thing was, the Brits broke the code way back at the start of the war and could read all of their Top Secret messages. However, they kept that a secret, and only acted on some of that intelligence.”
“Because if they acted on everything, the Nazis would know their code was blown,” Ed finished, nodding.
“Still doesn’t mean I have to fucking like it,” Brooke snapped.
“Understood,” Morris said. “For this mission I’ll be equipping all of you with the latest-gen encrypted radios, as you’ll need to coordinate your movement under fire,” Morris continued. He pointed to a stack of a three large hardcases, and one of the Lt. Colonel’s people flipped open a lid to show the assembled dogsoldiers the small radio units inside. “We’ll get you spun up on how to use them, they’re pretty simple.”
Ed looked at the radios dubiously. “I’ve used things like those before,” he told the LTC. “They almost got me killed.”
“You don’t think I don’t know that? I’m the guy who sends you messages in backwards Sanskrit hieroglyphics. Seriously, naming the squads after cartoon and comic book characters and that four-part encryption system we use to pass messages is literally so Godawful stupid and simple and complicated all at the same time, high tech and low tech, that I’m guessing no one on the other side could even imagine we’d do something so dumb.”
“It’s not stupid if it works,” Chan said.
Morris nodded. “Right. Three years later the Tabs still don’t even know to monitor that message board, or the two alternates, much less have spotted our communications. As for these radios, they won’t be able to decipher your transmissions, but you’re right, Captain, they will be able to triangulate your position if they have enough time. In this case, that doesn’t matter. You’re to be radio silent until you’re engaging the Tabs, and then it won’t matter if you’re on the radios because they will know exactly where you are.”
He took a deep breath. “I am deliberately not going to give you every single detail of every working part of this thing, as I don’t want assets compromised if one of you gets captured. You can’t talk about what you don’t know. That’s how you’ve been fighting this whole war, right? But I will tell you that this is the second such briefing I’ve given for this mission. The first was yesterday, at another location, to four other squads.”
“Which ones?”
“Joker, Donald, Flash, and Mickey. Between them they have twenty-nine bodies, which makes sixty-one total including your squads here today. With me and my people that brings the total up to seventy-five, not counting a few… let’s call them agents-in-place, that you’ll be working with at the objective. So, we’ve got an oversize platoon or an understrength company to work with which, I have to say, is less than I’d hoped but more than I was expecting.”
“You’re coming with us?” Chan asked. He had a green-stocked Steyr AUG A3 slung over his shoulder, the only such rifle any of the dogsoldiers had actually seen in person during the war. Chan was the youngest squad leader there, barely thirty, tall and handsome. He’d had the command of Yosemite for eight months. Just looking at him made Ed feel old. Hannibal, on the other hand, was younger than Ed, but he’d gone prematurely gray. He had a tattoo on his left forearm of a Roman numeral 3 surrounded by thirteen stars.
Morris smiled thinly. “I didn’t come all this way and spend close to two damn years planning this op to sit on the sidelines,” he said forcefully. “So yes, I will be in the field, doing what I can. I’ll spread my people out among your squads so you all have at least one extra body. Four of my people headed out with the squads yesterday.”