“I’m glad that that’s over,” I said, afterwards. Peter had poured me a small glass of local whiskey and ordered me to drink it. The memory of a body dangling on a rope would be with me for a long time. “Now we get to make war.”
Peter snorted. “Do you think that that’ll make it cleaner?”
“No,” I said, “but at least when fighting the Communists, I know I’m doing the right thing.”
The words ran hollow, somehow.
Chapter Fifteen
An offensive that is not carefully prepared beforehand already has one problem. An offensive launched ahead of time has another. The wise General refuses to bow to political pressure in timing and launching an offensive.
From the air, Pitea looked like any other city on a Colony world, if larger than New Copenhagen. It was Svergie’s largest city and actually the second to be settled, although I doubted that the planners had the vast bands of slums and inadequate housing in mind when they’d created their plans. The UN’s shipments of refugees had spoiled the plan merely by existing; the planet’s economy couldn’t handle them, yet it couldn’t get rid of them. In their place, I’d have told them to work or starve, but successive UN administrations had preferred to squeeze the farmers to feed them, rather than admit that their plans needed changing.
I studied the city carefully through the cold metal eyes of the William Tell. The Fleet starship’s orbit kept it over the main continent on the planet and we had access to the take, although perhaps not with the knowledge of the vessel’s Captain. The images were depressingly clear, yet even they had limits; the Communists could be doing anything at all under cover and we wouldn’t know anything about it until we had boots on the ground. The flow of refugees leaving the city suggested that Communist rule was Not Popular, but it was quite possible that much of the Communist leadership had already escaped, although I didn’t know where they intended to go to hide. After they’d nearly killed the President and had killed half the Council, the entire planet was up in arms against them. They would probably end up being shot on sight.
“The best intelligence can suggest is that there are still upwards of six million people in there,” Ed said, grimly. I winced at the thought of so many people caught in the midst of a battle. They couldn’t all be committed Communists, could they? “We’ve established detention camps for people leaving the city, but there just aren’t enough soldiers to keep a full encirclement. There could be hundreds of people slipping past us.”
I nodded. Pitea had seven heavy roads leading out of the city, towards the other cities, and we’d blocked them as soon as we’d moved light infantry units into the area, but there was little stopping people from walking out cross-country. Everyone who had relatives in the countryside, or good reason to know that the Communists wanted them dead, would be trying to escape the nightmare that had gripped their city. They’d be a plague of locusts ravaging the land, yet even if we held them all in detention camps, we couldn’t feed them all. UN MRE packs were little more than cruel and unusual punishment.
“We’ve also been skirmishing with their patrols around the edge of the city,” Ed added. “We’ve killed several dozen fighters with snipers, but they’ve got their own snipers and a couple of my men got killed. I think they don’t want to come out of the city — I have teams in position to block any attempt to leave in force — but digging them out is going to be a bitch.”
“Yeah,” I said, looking down at the map. Pitea was a confusing mixture of massive factory areas, slums and buildings that had once been warehouses, but had been converted into living space for the immigrants. Fighting our way through it would be a nightmare. “Any sign of heavy weapons?”
“Nothing that we can confirm,” Ed said. “They’ve probably got mortars at the very least, but if they have anything heavier… well, we’ve been unable to catch a glimpse of it. Jock’s somewhere in the city, but I haven’t heard anything from him.”
“He’ll be fine,” I said, with a confidence I didn’t feel. Terrorist organisations tended to be very good at filtering the trustworthy out from the untrustworthy — terrorist groups that weren’t rarely lasted very long — and if they knew who should be there, they’d probably realise that Jock wasn’t one of them. The Specials were good at blending into their surroundings, and chaos was an excellent operating zone for them, but if Jock was located… he’d have to break contact and escape. “We’ll hear from him when he’s ready to hear from us.”
“Doubtless,” Ed agreed, probably with as much confidence as I felt myself. “What about the President… ah, the Acting President?”
“She’s decided to allow us to spend time preparing before we move into the city,” I said. It had taking a long argument to convince Frida that getting the army I’d built chewed to ribbons would be counterproductive. She’d wanted to move in at once and crush the Communists as quickly as possible, but I’d wanted to prepare first. I needed time to ensure that we reoccupied the city with as little damage to the infrastructure as possible. The Communists had already damaged enough infrastructure to force us to spend years rebuilding. “And the ships?”
I hadn’t understood why they’d built Pitea where it was until I’d seen a map. North of Pitea, across the waters, was the Blue Island Chain, a set of small islands that housed a fairly affluent community. There was actually a surprising amount of sea travel on the planet and much of the carrying trade was done by boat; unsurprising, really, when all of the major cities were on the coast. The UN had actually tried to boost shipping by boat because of some halfwit theories about it being better for the environment… and, for once, the natives had agreed with them. Pitea was pretty much the shipping capital of the planet.
“We used the helicopters to move men onto the boats and bring them into safe harbour,” Ed confirmed. “They’re not going to be a problem, although several of them wanted to fight rather than be returned to Pitea. It looks as if most of the pleasure ships and some of the industrial ships managed to get away before the communists could stop them, or place their own men onboard. We called for volunteers to man the ships and moved the remainder of the original crews to the detention camps. That’s not going to be a permanent solution, sir; we’re already running short of food.”
“I know,” I said, rubbing the back of my head. It was a gesture I’d picked up in the UNPF and somehow never lost. “How many people do we have in the camps so far?”
“Several hundred thousand,” Ed said. I swore. That was worse than I’d expected, yet everyone in the camps was someone who wouldn’t be in the way when we finally went into the city, someone who wouldn’t be killed in the crossfire. “We’ve got a few thousand in secure detention — the violent or the known Communists — and the remainder are in looser camps. Still, feeding them…”
”I’m having MRE packs sent over,” I said. It would do nothing for the current government in the polls, but I was past caring. “Once the local government gets its act together, we can probably start releasing most of them to their families, if they have families outside the city.”