"Ground trans should be fine," Ridenhour answered. "If I really need a chopper my budget can cover hiring a civilian one. I'll pass it through your man Mitchell to clear it with you if I have to do that."
"That's fair," Carrera agreed. "All I can tell you is have fun and that I think you'll be pleasantly surprised."
Guarasi "Desert" Training Area,
Republic of Balboa, 7/10/460 AC
Money was less of a problem now; Campos' offer-while less than generous-had helped a lot. Moreover, the interest payments on the loan Carrera had personally made to the legion were being rolled into the operating cost, multiplied by the cost-plus factor, and charged to the Federated States. Thus, Carrera still retained control of the thing, notionally and nominally under Parilla, and would for the foreseeable future. While he had that control, he trained the men.
One major problem was that they were heading to the northern Sumerian desert: dusty, almost treeless, waterless away from the River Buranun, and open outside the cities. Balboa, on the other hand, was about two thirds jungle, much of that being mountainous, and most of the rest either city or valuable farm and ranch land. He could hardly use good farmland for maneuvers or, at least, not for serious ones.
Fort Cameron was about used up. It had never been large enough to train anything as large as the LdC for any purpose higher than initial training for individuals. The Imperial Range Complex, too, was overstrained as were the local training areas attached to the old Federated States military installations, most of which the legion had no access to anyway.
There was a useful open training area at the Lago Sombrero, about fifty miles down the coastal highway east of Ciudad Balboa. This was an old Federated States military base built to defend Balboa from attack during the Great Global War. In time, it had been returned to the Republic. Architecturally it wasn't much, a dozen barracks suitable for housing perhaps one thousand officers, centurions and men, and a large ammunition storage facility. More important was the airstrip that sat astride the main highway that paralleled the northern coast and connected Balboa with Atzlan and the Federated States to the south and east. Most important were the fifteen square kilometers of training land. Even this wasn't really enough though. Neither did it match well enough the damned desert the legion was going to fight in, Inshallah.
There was also a patch of ground, the Guarasi "Desert," just a bit inland from the northern coast and rather past Lago Sombrero. It was… sort of… kind of… almost… a desert. At least it looked something like a desert, having roughly 19,000 dusty acres of various kinds of cactus (and the odd breadfruit tree and tranzitree) amidst a barren landscape of erosion, loss of topsoil, overgrazing and general environmental devastation. It still received forty inches of rain a year so the desert analogy could sometimes seem very strained.
Carrera was-discreetly-looking into buying it permanently for the legion for a desert training area. For the nonce he was able to lease it for a low price from the government of the Republic, which owned it and had turned it into the kind of national park virtually no one ever wanted to visit except for the occasional environmentally conscious gringo or Tauran who went there to reconfirm his view that human beings just sucked and the planet would be better off without them.
On the Guarasi's eighty-one square kilometers Carrera had set Abogado's Foreign Military Training Group to running desert combat training courses for century and cohort sized units. The land had been modified to the extent of constructing several fortified areas for the troops to train on the attack. The type of fortifications differed. There were "pita" types, round raised-berm forts with trenches dug into the berms and firing positions and ramps for armored vehicles inside. There were also the more classic trench systems that the Sumerians were known to use, heavily bunkered and fronted by broad belts of barbed wire and simulated minefields. In addition, Carrera had bought about half the used tires in Colombia Central (and apparently every used tire in Balboa) and had them stacked, wired together, and filled with dirt to create buildings suitable for live fire training in city fighting. Only some of the fortifications, and all the tire houses, were sighted in places where live ammunition could be used to train. They were all, however, sighted to present a fairly coherent picture of a broad fortified zone suitable as an objective for a brigade-or legion-level attack provided, at least, that no tank or Ocelot main gun ammunition was used.
Ah, well, thought Carrera, watching a century-level (roughly eighty men including the forward observer team and the medic) attack on a "pita." The attack was at night, without artillery or mortar illumination and only about twenty-five percent of the maximum illumination possible from one of Terra Nova's three moons.
It was not quite as dark as three feet up a welldigger's ass.
From his vantage point, and looking through a large thermal imager mounted on a tripod, Carrera observed as three machine-gun teams one hundred meters apart slithered into position in a muddy canal that crossed in front of the "pita." To the right side of the machine guns, in the same muddy ditch, a two-man rocket grenade launcher-RGL-team set up, bowed down under a double or perhaps triple load of ammunition.
Unseen, Carrera smiled. I know it must have been a bitch lowcrawling the better part of a kilometer with that on their backs. Good boys. Tough boys. He felt a sudden warm glow of affection for his legion.
He saw one man, hunched under a backpack radio, walk bent over extremely low from one team to another, stopping briefly at each. Three other men followed that one. He knew that was the sniper team by profile of the long-barreled Draco rifles they carried. Those four disappeared into the ditch. Behind the ditch, stretched out in wedges about fifty meters deep and as many across, Carrera could make out, just barely, three groups of perhaps seventeen to nineteen men, waiting silently.
Jamey Soult handed Carrera a set of headphones linked to a radio tuned to the frequency of the attacking century. He whispered, "Be only a few minutes, sir. The centurion with that century just reported to the commander that the support is in position. Now, I think, they're just waiting for an 'up' from the mortar section."
Which should long since have been up, Carrera fumed as he slipped the headphones over his ears. Calm… calm, he ordered himself. People make mistakes. That's why they're out here; to learn.
To help them learn, five of the FMTG's evaluator-trainers-not "safeties," Carrera despised the idea of special safety NCOs or officers in training for combat-stood more or less among or behind the groups along with another man that Carrera thought might be the FSA officer, Ridenhour. It was hard to tell in the fuzzy green image provided by the thermal sight.
It wasn't too much longer before he heard one long pop coming from two kilometers or so behind him. This repeated several times; the two mortars of the century's light mortar section beginning a preparation to drive the notional enemy into their bunkers.
With only a few seconds' delay from when he first heard the crump of the mortars, the machine guns and RGLs opened up across a front of about two hundred meters. The overall effect of the machine guns' tracers was strangely beautiful and quite surreal.
What sounded like three of the four-shot, tube-fed, pump action 43mm grenade launchers carried by an infantry century joined in with a foofoofoompwhawhawham. Smallish explosions began blossoming along the front and top of the berm. A few overshot to explode inside.