"And so, gentlemen," said Eachan Khan, winding up his explanation of Cletus' presence in their midst, "we have a new commanding officer from the Alliance Forces. I'll let Colonel Grahame speak for himself from this point on."
Eachan got up from his chair at the head of the table and stepped aside. Cletus rose, and Eachan took Cletus' former place at the table. Cletus moved over behind the chair Eachan had occupied, but he did not sit down immediately.
Instead, he turned about to look at the large map of Etter's Pass-Two Rivers area projected on the wall behind him. He looked at it and something deep, powerful and unyielding moved without warning through him. He drew in a slow deep breath and the silence of the room behind him seemed to ring suddenly in his ears. The features of the map before him seemed to leap out at him as if he saw, not the projected representation, but the actual features of jungle, hill and river that they represented.
He turned about and faced the Dorsai officers. Under his gaze they stiffened and their eyes narrowed as though something massive and unknown had stepped suddenly among them. Even Eachan stared at Cletus as though he had never seen him before.
"You're all professional soldiers," said Cletus. His voice was completely flat, without inflection or emphasis, but it rang in the room with a finality that left no room for doubt or argument in its listeners. "Your future depends on what you'll be doing in the next two weeks. Therefore I'm going to tell you what no one else on this planet yet knows, and I'm going to trust you to keep that information locked inside you."
He paused. They sat staring at him like men in a trance.
"You're going to fight a battle. My aim isn't going to be to kill the enemy in this battle, but to force him to surrender in large numbers, so if all goes according to plan you ought to win with little or no casualties... I don't guarantee that. I only say that it ought to be that way. But, in any case, you'll have fought a battle."
He paused for a second, looking into their faces one by one. Then he went on.
"Behind me here," he said, "you see the upland area into which you're going to move at the end of this week for further jump-training and jungle practice. This practice isn't just to fill time. The better shape your men are in at the end of the training period, and the better they know the area, the better chance they'll have to survive in the fight, later. Colonel Khan will give you your specific orders. That's all I'll tell you now. As I say, I don't want you to tell anyone, not even the men you command, that any sort of real action's in prospect. If you're the kind of officers I think you are, and they're the kind of men I think they are, they'll absorb the feeling that something is going to happen without your having to tell them... That's all."
He sat down abruptly and turned to Eachan.
"Take over, Colonel," he said to Eachan.
Eachan, unmoving, continued to gaze at him for just a fraction of a second longer before he rose, cleared his throat and began to describe the patterns of movement of the various units from Bakhalla into the Two Rivers area.
Four days later support ships of the type that had flown Cletus with Lieutenant Athyer and his troops up to Etter's Pass began ferrying the mercenary soldiers to Two Rivers. Cletus went up on one of the early flights and toured the area with Eachan Khan. Cletus' first concern was for the town or village - it was really more village than town - of Two Rivers itself.
The settlement was actually a tight little V-shaped clump of condominiums and individual homes surrounding a warehouse and business section and filling the triangular end-point of flatland where the valleys of the Blue and Whey rivers came together. This patch of flatland extended itself, with a few scattered streets and buildings, up the valley of each river for perhaps a quarter of a mile before the riverbanks became too high and steep for much building to be practical. The town was a community supported essentially by the wild-fanning of a majority of its inhabitants, wild-farming being the planting, in the surrounding jungle areas, of native or mutated trees and plants bearing a cash crop without first dividing up or clearing the land. A wild-farmer owned no territory. What he owned was a number of trees or plants that he tended and from which he harvested the crops on a regular basis. Around Two Rivers a sort of native wild cherry and mutated rubber plants introduced by the Exotics four years ago were the staple wild-farm crops.
The local people took the invasion by the Dorsais in good spirits. The mercenaries were much quieter and better-mannered in their off-duty hours than were regular troops. Besides, they would be spending money in the town. The locals, in general, paid little attention to Cletus, as, with Eachan Kahn, he marked out positions for strong points with dug-in weapons on the near banks of the two rivers just above the town and down within the open land of the community itself. When Cletus had finished, he had laid out two V-shaped lines of strong points, one inside the other, covering the upriver approaches to the town and the river junction itself.
"Now," said Cletus to Eachan, when this was done, "let's go take a look up beyond the pass."
They took one of the support ships that had just discharged its cargo of Dorsai soldiers and was about to return to Bakhalla for another load. With it they flew up and over the area of Etter's Pass and made a shallow sweep over the some ten miles of mountainous territory beyond it to where the ground sloped away into the further jungle that was Neuland territory.
"I expect the Neulanders will be coming around to see what we're doing," he said to Eachan, "as soon as their people in Bakhalla tell them the Dorsais have moved up here for training. I want this side of the mountains kept under observation by men who won't be spotted. I assume you've got people like that?"
"Of course!" said Eachan. "I'll have a watch on up here all twenty-six hours of the day. How soon do you want it to start?"
"Right away," answered Cletus.
"I'll have men started out in half an hour," Eachan answered.
"Anything else?"
"Yes," Cletus said. "I want those defensive strong points, in and above the town, dug in, with an earth wall inside and sandbags outside so that it's at least six feet thick at the base and seven feet above the level of the ground outside."
Eachan frowned slightly. But his reply was laconic. "Yes, Colonel," he said.
"That's it, then," said Cletus. "I'm headed back to Bakhalla. I'll have the ship drop you back down at Two Rivers first. Are you planning on coming back to town later?"
"This evening," he answered, "as soon as I've got all the men moved in here and set up. I'm planning on commuting. Here, days - Bakhalla, nights."
"I'll see you back at the city then," said Cletus. He turned to the pilots of the support ship. "Take us back to Two Rivers."
He dropped off Eachan and went back to Bakhalla. There he found his work waiting for him - in two stacks, for, in accepting a role as Bat's deputy commanding officer of the Dorsais, he had in essence taken on another full job. The Dorsais operated with a small to nonexistent Headquarters staff, as they did in all areas requiring noncombatant personnel. In the field, each Dorsai was his own cook, launderer and bottle washer, and each officer was responsible for all paper work involving his command. Away from the field, in barracks so to speak, men were hired from the regular fighting units, at a small addition to their ordinary wages, to work as clerks, cooks, vehicle drivers and the rest, but in the field there was none of this.
Those Dorsais, therefore, who ordinarily would have lightened Cletus' paper workload concerning the mercenary soldiers were now in battle gear up at Two Rivers. It was this fact that also required Eachan to commute back to Bakhalla every night to take care of his own paper work.