Wrath left the press room and walked back to the main war room. There he found the command staff studiously peering at their screens and making notations. On the main screen at the center of the room was a telemetric map divided into four squares — each one showing one of the areas of operation on the surface. He glanced up for a moment and saw that nothing had changed since he'd last looked at it — at least not on the map anyway. He went to his elevated command chair near the center of the room and sat down. A steward brought him a cup of coffee, unasked. He didn't bother to thank the man. Instead, he called for Major Wilde.
"Yes, sir?" Wilde said, appearing before him as if by magic.
"I sent a report on the latest battles off to the Executive Council just before my press briefing. It's just after nine in the morning in Denver so they will be reviewing this catastrophe in about twenty minutes. They're not going to be happy with us."
"No, sir," Wilde agreed, "I don't suppose they are."
Though Wrath and Jules both lied about everything to the big three reporters, to their men, to the WestHem public, they did not lie to Executive Council. Every setback, as well as the reasons for them — when such a reason could be found — had been reported in full detail. Needless to say, the politicians running this particular show and their corporate sponsors who ran the Executive Council, were extremely distressed about the shellacking the marines were taking down on the surface.
"I want some good news to give them in the follow-up briefing," Wrath said. "They're on the verge of removing me from command and confining me to the brig for incompetence. We need to achieve victory with this next push. We need to take those cities. They don't care about the casualty rate. They can manipulate that in the media quite easily. But we need to be standing inside those airlocks by the end of the day."
"We're working on it, sir," Wilde said. "The command staff is formulation battle plans as we speak. We'll launch them simultaneously, hitting all four first lines of defense at once with everything we have."
"Good," Wrath said.
"Unfortunately," Wilde said, "the 'everything we have' is getting less and less by the minute. We're unable to support the ground action with artillery or air power and the attrition of our APCs and the men inside of them continues due to the air attacks by Mosquitoes. If we try to dismount the men the mortars come flying in on top of them. And if we're still sitting in place after sunrise, the special forces teams will undoubtedly start hitting the APCs as well."
"So what are you saying?" Wrath asked.
"We need to hit them as soon as possible. Our men are dangerously fatigued and morale is about negative six on a one to ten scale. The quicker we blast through and achieve some sort of victory, the better."
"So you're suggesting we don't wait until sunrise to attack?"
"Yes sir, that is what I'm suggesting. I understand the rationale for waiting. We're allowed to plan more extensively that way, the visual spectrum will be available for the ground troops, and the delay in attack will allow them to get some sleep. The way things are going, however, they're not getting much sleep out there since every five minutes or so they come under air attack. Also, the Martian biosuits will actually be more visible during the night. And as for planning, well, if our units keep getting smaller with each air attack, it negates a lot of the planning on the small unit level because other forces need to be combined and shifted. I think sooner is much better than later."
"Uh huh," Wrath said. "Do we have any explanation for the ineffectiveness of our artillery barrage against those anti-tank positions? Or the ineffectiveness of our tank guns against those same positions?"
"We've been looking into that," Wilde said. "I managed to pull up some pre-war files we had stored on the computers about MPG positions and tactics. They were in the war plans section under strategy for an invasion by EastHem forces and the utilization of the MPG to assist the fast reaction division stationed on Mars. The plan had always been to utilize the MPG as a speed bump out in the wastelands. Their role was to occupy the various chokepoints — the Jutfield Gap is one of the prominent ones — to slow down the EastHem advance long enough for the fast reaction division to cover the positions in the main line of defense just outside the cities. Of course, we disregarded the possible contributions by the MPG air wing and the MPG special forces teams, writing them off as nothing more than a momentary hindrance to an advance."
"A momentary hindrance, huh?" Wrath said, shaking his head.
"We also considered that the MPG, at best, would provide us with twenty-seven hours of delay — just enough to get our division's equipment down from orbit and deployed. That was assuming nearly sixty percent MPG casualties by the way."
"It would seem that maybe those estimates were a tad conservative," Wrath said. "We hit them with three times as many tanks and men as even the worst-case EastHem scenario and we're still sitting out in the wastelands twelve days after touching down."
"And that," said Wilde, "is more in line with the MPG's assessment of their own effectiveness in such an invasion. The reports in the war plans from General Jackson state that MPG doctrine, training, deployment, and equipment is all designed to hold an invading force out in the wastelands for up to eighty days — long enough for reinforcements to arrive from Earth in the event the fast reaction division is deployed elsewhere and the two planets are in conjunction. These reports were thought laughable by our military experts. Now, however, it seems they were probably not that far off. If EastHem had hit with a standard-sized invasion force I think those Martians would have held them back, probably indefinitely."
"But we're not an EastHem invasion force," Wrath said. "We're the WestHem marines trying to liberate this planet from a bunch of terrorists. So tell me how this report is going to help us."
"Of course, sir," Wilde said. "Among the files was a description of the infantry positions and the armor hull-down positions the greenies had constructed in order to fend off attack. There are no actual blueprints of them, but they are described as: 'concrete reinforced bunkers protected by triple layer sandbags for the infantry positions and titanium shielding for the armor positions.' In addition, the infantry bunkers are protected from above by concrete-lined recesses impenetrable to fused artillery shells and highly resistant to penetrating shells."
"Concrete-lined?" Wrath said, shocked. "Titanium shielding? Recessed underlayers?"
"Yes, sir," Wilde said. "It would seem they're not sitting in simple trenches protected by dirt-filled sandbags. In addition, they cite an extensive network of cross trenches at each position that allows them to move between the anti-tank positions on the top and the infantry positions below them, to evac wounded to battalion aid stations or landing zones, and to retreat to the backside of the hills with almost complete defilade from troops, armor, and artillery to the front."
"Why in the hell didn't we know about this?" Wrath demanded. "Intel told us our artillery would destroy their positions with just a few shells!"
"It seems that no one took the greenie reports on combat effectiveness very seriously," Wilde said. "They were written off as MPG propaganda designed to justify their funding from the taxes the Martians placed on themselves. The reports were only accessed sixteen times since being filed fifteen years ago, and one of those sixteen times was me just thirty minutes ago." And most of the other's, he did not mention, were probably EastHem spies who transmitted the information to London.
"No wonder we're having so much trouble dislodging them," Wrath said. "Do the commanders in the field know about this yet?"