The “front” wasn’t much better. A battalion had been tasked with retaking the pass but they were stymied by Posleen roadblocks. The Posleen force had sent some of its “normals” down the road and placed them in cover to stop the humans.
The initial assault hadn’t even had a scouting element and the first few trucks full of troops had run straight into what was effectively an ambush. Even if the alien on the other end of a gun was a semi-moron. It had killed no more than a platoon or so of troops, but suddenly to all the units the Posleen could be anywhere!
The battalion commander was dithering, the S-3 was blithering and the XO was having a nervous breakdown. They had been stopped by what appeared to be a single Posleen. Orders to the companies in the advance to move forward were ignored; the company commanders couldn’t get their troops up off their bellies. Calls for fire to the artillery section led to fire everywhere but on the target, everywhere including some of the front-rank soldiers. Finally, the lone Posleen was taken out by a mortar section and some of the troops were induced to crawl forward. But it was nearly four thousand meters to the pass, and crawling wasn’t going to get them there any time soon.
Arkady had returned to the corps headquarters and given a short and somewhat profane description of the situation at the pass. After a moment the corps commander dictated a short note.
“Major General (brevet) Arkady Simosin appointed commander of the 147th Infantry Division vice General Wilson Moser. General Wilson Moser relieved.”
“Arkady, you’ve got twenty-four hours to make it to Rabun Gap,” the commander said.
“It’s going to be ugly.”
“I don’t care. Make it to Rabun, or even close, and those won’t be brevet stars.”
He had his second chance. What he was learning was that no matter how hard the first chance might have been, the second chance was harder.
At the division headquarters he had handed the note to General Moser then read himself in. After that he gave the chief of staff a few orders.
“Get this clusterfuck under control. When I return if I hear one hysterical voice, I will shoot it. If I see one officer running I will shoot him. If the maps are not updated I will shoot you. You’re all on probation. We are going to Rabun Gap. If I get there with a platoon left it will at least be a platoon that knows what in the hell it is doing.”
He’d then gone up to the front. The lead company was stalled, again, by another Posleen outpost.
The company commander was belly down off the side of the road when he walked up.
“Get down, General!” the captain had shouted. From up the road there was a crackle of railgun fire and Arkady could hear it going by overhead.
“Captain, are any of your men dying around you?”
“No, sir?”
“That is when you get down on your belly, Captain.”
The company was hunkered down to either side of the road, still in a tactical roadmarch position. As far as he could determine there was no attempt being made to move forward.
He spotted the company sniper by the side of the road, clutching his Barrett .50 caliber rifle to his chest.
“Son, do you know how to fire that thing?”
“Sort of…”
“Give.” He took the rifle, and the sniper’s ghillie blanket, then slid down the embankment.
The company was huddled behind a curve in the road. There was a sharp road cut and a ditch on the left-hand side and a nearly vertical cliff leading down to a stream on the right. At the turn itself there was a small hillock through which the road was cut. He slid down the embankment, nearly breaking an ankle, then puffed up the hill on the right. At the top he realized how out of shape eighteen-hour days and no PT can make you. But he flipped the ghillie blanket up and slithered forward anyway.
The Posleen was in a similar position about five hundred meters up the road and Simosin was damned if he could spot it. He looked but since everyone was out of sight the damned thing wasn’t firing. The Posleen were not supposed to use snipers; in a way it wasn’t fair.
“Commander!” he yelled down the hill. “Have one of your men stand up!”
“What?!”
“I need to see where the Posleen is. Have one of your men stand up in view of it.”
“I… ” There was a pause. “I don’t think they will!”
“Okay,” the general replied and put a round into the wall by the head of the point. “You! Walk out into the road. As soon as the Posleen fires, you can go hide again.”
He could see the point’s face clearly. The kid was probably about seventeen and terrified. He looked over towards the hill the general was on and shook his head. “No!”
Arkady took a breath and put a round through his body. The fifty caliber bullet caromed off the wall behind the private and blew back out through his gut in a welter of gore.
“You! Behind him! Step out into the road. Now!”
And he did. And Arkady finally spotted the Posleen. One round was all it took.
When he got back to the company CP, he could see his sergeant major standing behind the company commander with a leveled rifle.
“If you had been doing your job, that kid would still be alive,” the general said coldly. “If your men don’t move, you have to make them move. If they don’t obey orders, you have to make them obey orders. I’m giving you a second chance. I want you up that road. If you can’t do it, I’ll get someone who will. And if I have to relieve you, it might just be in a bodybag.”
He turned to the sniper and hurled the thirty-five pound rifle at him. “Learn to use this. If you think you can use it on me, give it your best shot.”
The word got around quick.
After a nuke round took out most of the Posleen, and an attack had hit the survivors from the Rabun side, they had made it to the pass. And on the other side, things started to move. He’d ended up relieving quite a few people, and the people he put in place relieved a few others, but the division had finally started to click. And he’d heard there’d been a couple of other “friendly fire” incidents, at least one of them from the front to the rear rather than vice versa. But he didn’t care. As soon as they had the pass cleared he had sent a battalion of Abrams and Bradleys, with scouts out, barreling down the road past the smoking SheVa. They had taken Dillsboro after light resistance and then barreled up the road to Green’s Creek under increasing fire. The replacement for his artillery officer had finally found people who could hit the broad side of a barn and the replacement for his logistics officer had figured out how to move trucks. All it had taken was explaining that they had better remember old lessons or they would get new ones.
He didn’t like being a son of a bitch. And he really hadn’t liked killing that poor, lonely private. But that one round had gotten the division off the stick better than two months of training or even killing every tenth man.
But at Green’s Creek they were stopped again and it was a fair stop. The lead elements had been so into the chase, or so afraid of what was behind them, that they had gotten chopped to hamburger trying to push the Posleen out of position in the Savannah Valley. And the next brigade had taken more casualties grabbing the high-ground. But they had it. The only problem was, instead of scattered Posleen shell-shocked from the nuke rounds they were faced with apparently unlimited fresh forces pouring down from Rocky Knob pass. He was bleeding troops like water and there seemed no end to the Posleen when the SheVa finally showed up.
He’d worked around them a couple of times but he’d never seen one tricked up like this. It had what looked like MetalStorm 105s on top of its turret and the front was some sort of add-on armor. And the water fountain had been spectacularly visible for miles around. Obviously they’d been doing more than a hasty battlefield repair up Scott’s Creek.