He thought for a moment, and said, “Juvenile, I know. But what do you expect? The Army came up with it. I think Newcastle likes it, says giving the enemy demoralizing names is good for morale.” He cleared his throat, only this time more softly.
“The enemy does not appear to have tanks, jets, or vehicles of any sort, and they all carry the same weapon, some kind of light rifle. Frankly, I wish they had something else. Those rifles gave our troops a fit yesterday.”
“Maybe we can replicate their technology,” I said.
“Did you get a close look at one?” Glade asked. “The damned things weigh a ton.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“You didn’t happen to fire one, did you?”
“No, sir,” I said. “I couldn’t find the trigger.”
“We had the same problem. I’m sure the boys in the Science Lab will know what to do with it,” Glade mumbled, not sounding confident at all.
The traffic sped up as three trucks pulled onto the sidewalk and began off-loading surface-to-surface rockets—non-radiation-bearing rockets, each of which packed enough explosives to destroy a city block.
“You’ve been firing STS rockets at them?” I asked. It seemed like overkill. Normally, the U.A. Military tried to win battles as decisively as possible with as little force as possible.
I watched soldiers carefully unloading the rockets from the trucks as we drove by. Crews had formed around each of the trucks.
“We used smaller ordnance last time, but we’ll switch to STSs if the bastards come back. That was Colonel Mooreland’s idea. You remember General Tommy Mooreland, the colonel is his son. His daddy died fighting in the Scutum-Crux Arm; he’s got a score to settle with them, says he wants to end this one quickly. Can’t say that I blame him.”
We arrived at the Vista Street bunker, an enormous structure that stretched twenty miles along the western edge of the city. Similar bunkers lined the northern edge of town. These were the sides of town that faced the forest. Having decided that the southern suburbs offered no strategic value, the Army seeded them with mines and tracker robots, then left them unmanned. The eastern edge of Valhalla fronted a great lake that was laced with all sorts of automated defenses. Philips and Thomer pointed the lake out to me on the way from the spaceport to the Hotel Valhalla.
The car pulled to a stop, and we climbed out. “Wait here for us,” Glade told the driver. “We shouldn’t be more than an hour.”
The outer wall of the bunker was a 50-foot-tall structure made of three-foot-thick steel alloy protected by electrical shields. Like every other piece of equipment that we had on New Copenhagen, this was the best and the latest technology, able to withstand an atomic explosion. The heat from an explosion would not melt this structure, and the force from the explosion would not blow it down. The men inside the bunker might be incinerated, but the bunker itself would survive.
“How long did it take to build this?” I asked, looking down the length of the great wall.
“About a month,” Glade said. “The Army Corps of Engineers rigged a temporary broadcast station just for bringing materials in on special barges. It’s amazing how the red tape gets cut when people are fighting for their lives.”
The bunkers were the same lifeless gray color inside and out. The light from the ion curtain did not penetrate their gloomy depths. Bare bulbs hung from wires in the ceiling.
As General Glade led me up some stairs, I saw a scattering of bright spots that looked like searchlights shining through the wall. It was not until we came closer that I realized the beams were coming from outside; they were holes through the yard-thick walls. The areas around the holes had the wilted-flower look of molten metal. I knelt and looked inside one.
“Pretty impressive, isn’t it?” General Glade asked.
“What happened?” I asked.
“The Mudders’ rifles shoot right through our shields, Lieutenant,” Glade said. “We were able to kill most of their troops out in the forest, but a couple hundred of them got through.”
“And their guns did this?” I asked, my mind on Private Huish lying on the snowy ground, shaking to death.
“And that,” Glade said, pointing to a matching hole in the opposite wall. The bolts had shot clean through both shielded walls.
After that, the tenor of the tour became more somber. General Glade led me through the second-level corridor, an endless lane pinched between charcoal-colored walls lit more by the beams of glare shining through the occasional hole than the lights hanging from the ceiling. We passed through a hatch and entered a metal catwalk that ran the length of the bunker. When I looked down from the catwalk, I saw barracks below us.
When it came to accommodations, the Marines got the better end of the stick for a change. The Valkyrie Ballroom was crowded, but our boys had enough light to read and space to breathe.
Billeted along the bottom floor of this bunker, these soldiers must have felt like they were living in a mausoleum. I heard a few men snoring in the shadows below me. There were none of the spontaneous card games that I would have found back at the Hotel Valhalla. We had bars, gymnasiums, and a pool—the soldiers in this installation were lucky to have running water in their latrines.
“These are pretty shitty accommodations,” I said.
“Frontline accommodations, Harris,” General Glade said. “Soldiers not posted on the front line are billeted in buildings downtown.”
As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw that many of the soldiers were old. Glen Benson, the fifty-six-year-old corporal who had sat next to me on the trip from Earth to Mars, was probably down there …if he had survived the fight. Maybe there were thousands of Glen Bensons down there, all sleeping cozy in their cots waiting for the next attack.
As we cut across the bunker, we passed technicians working on wall-mounted cannons. We passed a radar station. We passed gunnery stations. After confirming that the area was still clear, Glade led me onto the roof of the bunker.
When I had flown into Valhalla, I saw an orderly city surrounded on two sides by pristine forests that were buried in snow. Everywhere I looked, I saw green and white under an ice blue sky. The outskirts were virgin, and the city was clean. That was all gone now.
There had once been a tidy suburb beyond the Vista Street bunker, an upper-class community with large homes and up-scale shopping malls. I could tell that much by examining the smoldering battlefield that spread out before me. The enemy had been beaten back, but the battle had not been won as easily as I had been led to believe.
We had a term in the Marines—FOCPIG, which stood for Fire, Observed, Concealed, Protected, Integrated, non-Geometric. It described the obstacle courses you built to guide enemies into heavy fire. That was the benefit of being the home team when unfriendlies came to visit—they had to make their way through a landscape created to speck them over once and for all.
Acres of homes, stores, and churches had been leveled long before the aliens ever arrived, but the ruins of those structures remained. To get through these ruins, the enemy would need to follow paths designed to bring them into our sights. FOCPIG—limit the places your enemy can enter, then point your guns at the places that are left.
The grounds below the Vista Street bunker were covered with the broken bodies of dead aliens. Now I understood why Lieutenant Moffat advised me not to waste my time bringing back alien parts. From where I stood, I could see the wreckage of a dozen gunships lying about like insects both enormous and dead. A small fire still flickered in one or two of the wrecks.
The real carnage, however, lay about one mile out, where our intermediate defenses had battered the aliens. These aliens were killed by our heavy ordnance—rockets and laser cannons capable of destroying a building or sinking a ship. From the top of the bunker, I could see smoke rising from burned-over craters left by rockets and heaps of brick, steel, and dirt where buildings had once stood.