He had come to the conclusion that military disasters follow certain prepared scripts. There is ample warning of the danger. There are critical moments, even after the disaster is clear, where proper orders and actions can correct the situation. And there is a reactionary political response in aftermath.
Given the modern speed of information transfer and decision making, it appeared that the reactionary aftermath was not even going to await the end of the battle. He looked again at the bald prose ordering him to turn over his command to his chief of staff and report to First Army Headquarters in New York. The e-mail continued with the comment that a replacement was on the way. He knew the general, a crony of General Olds; Olds would have done better to leave the COS in charge.
So, he thought, this is what a thirty-year career comes to. Better than the poor bastards caught in the political-correctness witchhunts of the '90s.
He crumpled up the flashpaper and dropped it on the ground, adding one last bit of litter to the battlefield. He turned and climbed in the Humvee as the first crump of departing mortar rounds filled the air.
CHAPTER 52
The White House, Washington, DC, United States of America, Sol III
2045 EDT October 10th, 2004 ad
«That's it,» said General Taylor, glancing at the e-mail brought in by a communications technician. He looked over to where the President was hunched into his chair. «All the remaining units of Tenth Corps are through the Ninth Corps lines.»
«How many are left?» asked the Secretary of Defense, staring at the electronic map on the wall.
«Of infantry, armor, engineers and other front-line units, there are less than two thousand accounted for.»
«Okay,» said the President, in a harsh voice, «put another way, how many did we lose?»
«Over twenty-five thousand . . .»
«Twenty-five—?»
«We sent in a heavy corps, Mister President,» said the general, in tones to bend metal. «Five heavy divisions with full support. Of front-line troops we've gotten back less than one battered brigade! We lost half the total number of casualties in Vietnam; five times the estimate for the first day of the Normandy invasion. We killed approximately nine thousand Posleen, according to the last and only reports we received. All that did was add to their goddamn supplies.»
«If it hadn't been for the hacking . . .» said the secretary.
«If it hadn't been for the hacking,» interrupted the general, «we would have killed more Posleen. We still would have taken these losses.»
«We'll never know,» said the secretary.
«Yes . . . we . . . will, Mr. Secretary,» responded the general, suddenly tired of the whole game. «There's Ninth Corps.» He gestured towards the screen. «It's had hours to dig in, lay wire and mines, which Tenth didn't, and it has nearly secure flanks, which Tenth didn't, and it is not being hacked, which Tenth was, and it is not going to be pasted by its own artillery and mortars, which Tenth was, and we are going to lose them, too! Oh, they'll kill more Posleen, but it doesn't damn well matter, Mr. Secretary, sir, because the Posleen can afford to lose a million troops to destroy one of our corps! This is just the start of the damn war! The only way we could win it from the beginning was to kill over a hundred Posleen for every guy assigned to a gun! And we just took about twenty casualties for every Posleen killed! At that rate we'll lose every goddamn soldier in the eastern United States to this single landing!»
The High Commander suddenly realized that he was shouting at the secretary of defense. On the other hand, no one seemed to care if he was. He also realized that the secretary was not the one to be shouting at.
«What if we recall Ninth Corps?» croaked the President, looking up at the map for the first time in nearly an hour. His eyes burned. He had spent twenty years trying to get into this chair. It had cost him most of a stomach, a marriage and his children. And one mistake was all it took.
The general shook his head in resignation. «Too late.» He looked down at the briefing papers. The critical information on maintenance was damning. «The Posleen can move faster than those units.»
«Tactical mobility is one of the American Army's strong suits,» said the secretary, his tone resounding with surety.
«It is when you have well-trained, experienced units,» said the High Commander, raised back into fury by the fatuousness of the remark. «It is not a strong suit when you have undertrained, inexperienced, unsure units. Patton's Third Army could have done it easily. Waffen SS? No problem. The Allied troops in Desert Storm? Fuck, yeah. Give an order, pull out, run to the next position, be it a mile or a hundred miles, reassemble. No problem, Can Do.
«Here we have troops that have only had a filled chain of command for five months. Units that were rioting three months ago. Units that are a year behind on scheduled maintenance, almost two years behind on training. Units where half the vehicles break down in the first fifteen miles. Units that will have a hard time holding fixed positions, much less maneuvering.
«No, sir,» he continued, looking the President square in the eye. «The best we can hope is that Ninth Corps does more damage to the enemy than Tenth did, before the bastards pull them down.»
«And Richmond?» asked the secretary of defense.
«Well, sir,» said the general, «if we could only get them to turn around and attack Twelfth Corps.»
* * *
«How's it coming?» asked General Keeton.
John Keene spun around in his swivel chair and stared at the commander with a blank, distant expression for a moment. Then he shook his head and focused on the reality of the moment.
«Sorry,» he said, ruefully, «I was elsewhere.»
«I could see that. How's it going?»
«Remarkably well. Good news: by the end of this battle, we'll hardly have to do a thing to prepare Richmond for the long-term projects.» That was good for a weary chuckle.
«And what about being prepared for this particular set of visitors?»
«Well, the weakest points are still there. If they turn to the west, we are screwed and if they turn to the east we have great difficulty. But we think we have a good plan for centering their focus.»
«What's that?»
«Gold.»
«Gold?»
«Yep. The Posleen are notorious looters and they seem to be particularly interested in heavy metals and gems. It seems crazy, because you can get gold and diamonds much more easily from an asteroid belt than you can from a hostile city. But they really seem to crave it. Anyway, the Federal Reserve Bank here had a rather large supply of it. We . . . came up with a designation for Fourteenth Street as 'Gold Avenue' so to speak and have put what looks like some sort of ornamentation, made out of pure gold, on the street every fifty yards.»
«Oh, joy . . .»
«Yep. So, there will be a line of ornaments, on little stands, every fifty yards all the way up to the floodwall gates.»
«And that means that they'll follow the yellow brick road and want to keep following it.»
«Right. And just to add a little fun to it, we had a choice of five different sizes, so the first twenty were small, the second twenty were larger, and so on. By the time the front rank gets to the wall and the word gets around among them, we hope they're in a frenzy. We had quite a bit left over, so as an added bonus we put out larger ornaments from time to time. But only along Fourteenth Street. If they use the logic . . .»
«They will really want to cross that bridge when they come to it.»