As it turned out, the backups and redundancies were virtually unused except for one point on the east side where a stray twenty-five-millimeter round had severed the detcord daisy chain and, surprisingly enough, did not set the whole ambush off. Elsewhere the entire sequence ran like a Swiss watch, a tribute to Ms. Hunt’s consummate professionalism.
When the first claymore detonated, it in turn fired the detcord that was wrapped around it. This cord, like an exploding fuse, carried the explosion the few meters to the next claymore in line which exploded and sent it to the next. With a series of trip-hammer explosions sounding like the world’s largest machine gun, five hundred yards of roadway flashed white and the air filled with dust and smoke.
As the air cleared, it revealed both sides of the roadway packed with dead and dying Posleen, a monstrous abattoir of torn yellow flesh. In many cases of the outer centaurs, only the finest of forensic analysis would be able to separate one mangled centaur from another. In less than a second, over sixty-four hundred Posleen, normals and God Kings, a full B-Dec command, was wiped off the face of the earth.
The lead companies checked, shocked by the destruction behind them and fighting the conflicting stresses of justifiable fear of what they might face and the God King bondings driving them on. As they checked, the first artillery started to fall.
The Posleen in the phalanxes following the erased companies checked as well — shocked and terrified by the sight in front of them — but only for a moment. As some units began to pour around the organic roadblock, other units began gathering the dead and transporting them back to the nearest landers for processing. The Posleen firmly believed in the doctrine of waste-not-want-not.
The lead companies moved back up to a canter to try to close the distance to the enemy through the beaten zone of the artillery but the combination was just too strong. The time the Posleen had used up on Fredericksburg had been put to good use by General Keeton and his staff. Most divisional artillery and all the corps mobile artillery units had been moved forward to support the ambushes while their revetments on Libby and Mosby Hills were being prepared. Over a hundred 155mm artillery pieces — each with a thirty-meter “footprint” — were firing into a zone only one hundred meters wide and five hundred deep.
Between the accurate fire of the Bradleys and the massed artillery, the lead companies of Posleen were erased in seconds before coming within five hundred meters of the cav scouts.
The cavalry had not escaped unscathed. The plasma cannon of the western God King had accounted for two Bradleys and a lucky hit by the massed HVM for another. But the reinforced platoon, the artillery and the ambush had accounted for over seven thousand Posleen in less than five minutes. The destroyed tracks were quickly replaced on the line with vehicles from the reserve platoon while medics worked on the traumatized survivors.
It takes approximately three minutes for a Posleen to gallop a kilometer. The forward edge of the ambush zone had been placed at a kilometer and a half from the cav unit while the surviving Posleen forces were an additional half a kilometer back. The cavalry company commander called for fire to be adjusted outward as the follow-on Posleen companies charged forward.
For the first five hundred meters the centaurs slipped and slithered in the offal-moistened soil of the verge. The unholy slurry slowed their movement through that beaten zone and increased their time in the zone of fire. However, within a few minutes Posleen battle units were up on the interstate and pounding forward towards the cav unit.
Despite the long gallop and the massed artillery fire, it was obvious that the tide of Posleen would eventually break through. Even as the lead elements drove forward — melting like a sugar cube in water — more forces poured around the distant bend. It was an unending stream of centaurs.
The company commander ordered his reserve up to the line and prepared to retreat as the Bradleys and artillery began to pound the assaulting Posleen.
Meanwhile, Mueller took one look at the charging army of centaurs and decided that this was a better fight for the cav. He picked up the circuit board — also being a great believer in waste-not-want-not — and trotted to the waiting Humvee. With a sigh of relief, the driver pulled out as soon as he was on board.
CHAPTER 45
Richmond, VA, United States of America, Sol III
1125 EDT October 10th, 2004 ad
“It’s going well,” said Colonel Abrahamson, watching the bank of monitors set up in the main conference room of the R.J. Reynolds Corporation.
With the security of the north bank of the James questionable, corps command had relocated south of the river and the Reynolds company had graciously offered its facilities. The fact that the building was now the most heavily defended in south Richmond was surely besides the point.
Whatever the rationale, the logistical and information management facilities were top-notch, befitting a Fortune Five Hundred company. The administrative employees who had shown up were immediately press-ganged by the various corps staff to handle the massive management headache involved in creating the Richmond Defense from scratch in the midst of a “murthering great battle.”
John Keene had gotten a start on that early by calling in the top five engineers involved in Richmond’s previous defense design and winning them over to the new plan. Despite their personal desires they could all see the rationale of the plan and they were as familiar with the terrain as could be hoped.
He gave each of them a specific task to organize, and blanket authorization to dragoon anyone and anything they felt that they needed to accomplish it. One of the corps Chief of Staff’s planning officers was slated with the unenviable task of managing the flow of materials. Working from the same office complex in Shockoe Circle where Keene and Mueller had paused in their survey, he set to work coordinating the flow of personnel, equipment and supplies to the various projects.
A radio and television appeal for anyone with construction or demolition equipment had generated massive response. Five assembly points in and around Richmond were designated and practically before the police traffic control could get set up, jams of lowboys with front-end loaders, backhoes, power shovels and earth movers were at each site.
Along with them came concrete and dump trucks, construction personnel and virtually anyone who felt that it was time to volunteer. Some of the volunteers — those who somehow impressed the military and civilian personnel arriving to inventory and segregate the response — were immediately put to work sorting out the sheep from the goats. Within two hours, starting from scratch, the complicated task of receiving the equipment, determining what was where and determining where it should be was running smoothly. In the meantime the engineers had called upon their engineering firms and other firms for support, and by the time that the requested equipment was arriving at the construction sites, the engineers had sketched out plans and movement paths and were surveying the areas to be graded and cut.