The main reserve for the defense, the majority of the Seventy-Fifth Armored, was laagered at the Ethyl Corporation building, overlooking the island. From those positions they could pound the Posleen with direct 120mm canister fire, effectively sweeping the area like a broom. The sole remaining footbridge led all the way across the James and was defended by a battalion of the Twenty-Second Cavalry. The idea was to lure the Posleen into thinking they were getting across the river, while simultaneously setting them up like ducks in a shooting gallery. The battalion had been issued extra manjacks, just to make sure.
In addition to their personal weapons, fighting vehicles and automatic weapons teams, every fire team in the various divisions had a Protean manjack. Accepted only the year before, the Proteans were the brainchild of Hester L. Jacobs, a man well-hated by Ground Force procurement officers everywhere.
Ground Forces had intended to field manjacks, automated infantry weapon systems, all along, but that was where the process had stymied. In the truest fashion of every light weapon developed by a committee, the procurement system finally developed specifications for the manjacks that transformed them from the original concept of a light, relatively simple automatic weapon on an automated tripod, into a virtual mini-tank.
Jacobs, on the other hand, already had developed a weapon system that met the original concept. Sure of his product, the former Marine gunnery sergeant had launched an all-out assault on the Ground Forces procurement program. Jacobs visited numerous infantry field officers and NCOs and, in violation of a slew of regulations, demonstrated his system for them and got written suggestions and testimonials.
In a short time, from the point of view of hundreds of infantry lieutenants, captains, first sergeants, sergeant majors and colonels, he had perfected a battlefield weapon system.
With those testimonials, and presentations on the cost difference and what it meant to production numbers, between his system, already up and running, and the systems being developed by the major corporations, behind schedule and over budget, he pigeonholed congressmen and senators night and day, to the point where those elected officials nearly had him arrested for harassment.
But his arguments finally started to sink in and, in a rare burst of logic. The Congress overrode the military procurement bureaucracy and ordered them to accept the Jacobs Industries Protean Manjack as it was.
The manjacks were heavy, bulky and awkward to carry in their large formed-plastic cases, but they might be the weapon that turned this tide. Each manjack consisted of an M-60F machine gun, the newest version of the venerable platoon automatic weapon that had first seen service in Vietnam, and a removable automated firing system. The firing system contained a mechanized tripod and a simple autotarget system. Place the weapon on a vector, let it “read” the area — get a laser picture of the zone of fire — and if the “picture” changed, if anything broke the continuously sweeping infrared lasers, it would fire down the broken vector. The weapon could be produced for one-third the cost and in a fifth of the time of the first “correct” version to be fielded. Already, in less than a year’s time, there were sufficient manjacks for all the forces and more were being installed in the fixed defenses.
Since the M-60F contained the latest in barrel technology, the barrels actively dissipated heat. Thus the weapons could continue to fire as long as the ammunition held out. To assist in that, each team had hooked the machine guns up to a “battlecase,” boxes preloaded at the factory with twenty-five-thousand rounds of 7.62mm ammunition. The boxes were backbreakingly heavy, one hundred rounds of M-60 ammunition weighs seven pounds, and awkward to maneuver into some of the manjack positions, but once in place they gave every team three times the throw weight of fire they could otherwise expect. In addition, the boxes could be ganged together, so that if one box ran dry, the weapon would be fed from a second. The joke went that if you used up two boxes, fifty thousand rounds of ammunition, you were officially having a bad hair day and could take the rest of the day off.
But the armor, the infantry, even the manjacks, were really only there to hold the Posleen in place.
To truly make the Posleen’s day miserable, and for the long-term defense of Richmond, over fifty percent of the construction equipment had been detailed to the Mosby and Libby Hill defenses.
The two hills towered over Richmond, dominating the landscape at least as much as the city skyline, and loomed doubly over the Schockoe Valley that separated them from the city. While the sides towards the James and Schockoe Bottom were extremely steep, far too steep for the quadrupedal Posleen to negotiate, the north and east sides were another matter. Among other things they had roads leading up to the numerous homes and monuments on the hills.
All of the roads were initially left in place, but demolition of the slopes began immediately. Where a slope was merely steep, it was made vertical by a combination of explosives and graders. The many abandoned buildings again went into the defenses, the rubble used to create hasty fighting positions for the cavalry troops detailed for security. The cavalry, in the meantime, began covering their front with antipersonnel mines, concertina barbed wire and “tanglefoot,” barbed wire stretched tight at knee level, designed to slow the advance of ground troops. Between the slopes and the obstacles, assaulting Posleen should be effectively stopped, sitting ducks for the heavily armed defenders. Their cavalry fighting vehicles were well back to avoid taking fire, but they were ready to go if ordered to sally. The line would be held by troops with rifles, grenades, machine guns and the ubiquitous manjacks.
The outer edges of the defense boasted a brigade of cavalry. Then in the next ring was the massed artillery of the infantry divisions. Over one hundred tubes of 155mm artillery were packed on the hills. In a few cases, the artillery was placed so as to cover straight open steep roads, such as Broad Street, which ran through downtown Richmond, through Schockoe Bottom, and up into the Montrose Heights area.
When, inevitably, the Posleen charged up that street, they would eventually be met by batteries A and B of the One Hundred Ninety-Third Artillery, firing 155mm canister rounds into them from revetments at point-blank. If they were able to overcome the defenses anyway, the road was mined to blow out a crater large enough to make the approach impenetrable.
In the inner ring were better than half of the infantry division’s mortar platoons, set up in their tracked vehicles. Since they were invisible to any reasonable angle of fire from the Posleen, the feeling was that they might as well stay in a mobile configuration in case they had to move off the hills for some reason. They were behind the artillery because mortars have no direct-fire capability. However, as John Keene had pointed out, mortars carry more explosive-weight-to-size than rifled artillery. Because the mortars were fired from smooth bores, they did not have to be able to withstand the rotational force placed on an artillery shell. A 120mm mortar round has the same explosive power as a 155mm artillery shell.
Mortars are a lot of bang for very little buck and there were over one hundred packed onto the hills. In addition, the mortar vehicles, unlike the unarmored mobile artillery vehicles, were designed for close defense. And the mortarmen who crewed those vehicles were trained and heavily armed for it; a mechanized mortar platoon had twice the throw weight of a mechanized line platoon, including just as many manjacks. If the Posleen penetrated the outer defenses, penetrated the cav and the depressed artillery’s point-blank fire, they would still have to penetrate the band of mortar infantrymen and women to take the command and supply facilities.