“I don’t like it, Daisy. It just seems wrong.”
McNair looked at his intelligence officer.
“Sir, no matter the politically correct bullshit you read in the papers, torture does work provided you can at least partially check the information.”
The ship’s Judge Advocate piped in, “Machines were plainly not within the contemplation of the treaty banning torture, Captain.”
“Put it in the box for one day, sir,” Daisy suggested. “Then, if it doesn’t open up and come clean we can think about putting it back, and dropping it over the side.”
“But torture?”
“Sir… we don’t know everything it knows. But we do know that the Darhel were behind your arrest and we have good reason to believe that they were behind the sabotage of the war effort here. This AID knows everything that the late and unlamented Rinn Fain knew. We have to know those things and we have to broadcast them. Your planet must be warned about the enemies it thinks are allies. Captain, it could be a matter of life and death for your entire species.”
Slowly, reluctantly, McNair nodded.
“You can’t do this to me!” the Darhel’s AID shrieked as Davis placed it in the shipping box and placed his hand on the cover. “You can’t — ”
Click.
“Well, that was pleasant,” Boyd commented, his voice dripping with sarcasm.
“The gringo ambassador was that bad, was he?” Suarez asked.
“The bastard was worse than that. I wonder who he is really working for. The only satisfaction I got out of the meeting was when I told him I was withdrawing Panama from the Ottawa antipersonnel landmine treaty, the treaty banning the use of child soldiers, Additional Protocol One to Geneva Convention IV, the Rome Statute that set up the International Criminal Court…”
“Well,” Suarez interrupted, “since the United States is party to none of those…”
“Oh, yes, but apparently their State Department would like for the United States to be party… In any case, I thought the man’s head would explode. And when I said I was taking out a warrant, dead or alive, for Judge Pedro Santiago for crimes against humanity, he practically threw me out of his office. He would have, too, if I hadn’t explained that I had arranged a direct conference call with the President of the United States to explain our position and express our regrets for not falling in line previously with the United States’ preferred diplomatic position on the laws of war.”
“But…”
“The United States has its position, Suarez, and the State Department has its. They rarely match, it seems. Have you got a basic plan?” Boyd asked.
“Yes, but you are not going to like it.”
Almost, Boyd laughed. “I haven’t liked anything since this war began. Show me.”
Suarez cleared a space from a table cluttered with the detritus of Mercedes’ reign. Onto the cleared space he unrolled a map of the country. The map was covered with combat acetate; the acetate itself covered with lines and symbols.
“We’ve got about four months,” Suarez began. “Intelligence says the Posleen will sit tight, farm and build, more importantly breed, until their population almost exceeds the carrying capacity of whatever land they occupy. Then they’ll swarm towards the path of least resistance and greatest food producing potential. The group that occupies from southeastern Costa Rica to western Veraguas Province can’t go west; there’s another, bigger group of Posleen there and the terrain is too tight. With the gringos’ help we’ve been very successful in holding the passes over the Cordillera Central so they’re not heading north, not that there’s much to the north, anyway.”
“East then, towards Panama City.”
“Yes, there’s no place else for them to go.”
“Can the line along the Rio San Pedro hold them?” Boyd asked.
“Yes and no,” Suarez answered. “Yes, it can defeat an attack now. Unfortunately, when the Posleen casualties get great enough from beating their head against the line, they’ll stop. That is to say, once their population drops substantially below the carrying capacity of the area they hold they’ll have no incentive to keep attacking. So says Intel, anyway. But that will only last until their population once again exceeds the carrying capacity. And that will happen a lot faster than our young people will grow up to be trained and take their place in the line. In the medium term, two years, maybe three, they’ll bleed us to death along that line.”
“Ugh.”
“Ugh, indeed. So we have to make sure they can’t do that. And for that, we need to get them out into the open in an artillery kill zone, trap them there, kill them there, then race to liberate Chiriqui and that tip of Costa Rica and plug the road in from the rest of Costa Rica. We can hold a couple of narrow bottlenecks like the ones at Palmar Sur and San Vito, Costa Rica, more or less indefinitely.”
“Couldn’t we hold the area around Aguadulce and Nata at least as long?” Boyd asked.
Suarez sighed and shook his head. “No. If we lose the farmland around Santiago, Chitre and Aguadulce we’ll not only starve, the Posleen population will roughly double and our newborns will be only three or four before they swarm again.”
“Okay,” Boyd conceded. “What do you have in mind?”
Suarez’s finger pointed out markings and features on the map. “We have to build three fortified lines, some strongpoints, some firebases, some logistic bases, and some roads. Basically the lines will be around Aguadulce and Nata, from the mountains to the sea; in the rough parts of Herrera and Los Santos, running east to west from coast to coast; and the one we already have west of Santiago along the Rio San Pedro.
“The firebases go behind the lines and strongpoints. The roads running through the passes over the mountains get some, too. We’ll also strongpoint the roads.”
“What I propose is that we meet them with both mechanized divisions along the Rio San Pedro line to the west and bleed them enough to piss them off, but not so much that they give up. Then we run the mech like hell for Nata. Three infantry divisions man the line around Nata. Three more man the line running through Herrera and Los Santos. The last one is north, in the mountains. The gringo Armored Combat Suit Battalion and their Mech Regiment go into hiding up around Santa Fe in northern Veraguas.”
“That’s everyone,” Boyd objected. “We won’t have a reserve.”
Suarez shrugged. “We can’t afford a reserve and, in our terrain and without air mobility, we couldn’t use one to much effect even if we had one to use. Besides, if, and I concede it is not a small ‘if,’ we can extract the mechanized divisions more or less intact they’ll give us a reserve once they rest and refit for a couple of days. Plus, artillery is by its nature always at least somewhat available to serve as a reserve.”
“Okay, so we’ve pulled back and the Posleen race into the void. Then what?”
“The mountains and the sea almost join near Nata. The two will funnel the Posleen in. Then, we pound them with artillery like this hemisphere has never seen once they concentrate. The gringos’ ACS come south from Santa Fe to San Francisco, Veraguas. Then they cut southwest, force their way across the San Pedro and dig in like hell along the western bank to block the Posleen from escaping to the west. We can set up minefields to help with that. When the Posleen are sufficiently bloodied and disorganized from the artillery pounding, the two mechanized divisions begin to strike west and keep going until the Posleen in the pocket are destroyed.”