“We took a couple of prisoners,” Ed reported, once we were a safe distance from the village and could pause to lick our wounds. I could see smoke rising up from where we’d been and winced inwardly. “One of them is injured, but the other is unharmed, if not talkative. It was clearly a planned ambush, sir; there wasn’t a single child and only a couple of women in the village.”
“That’s a relief,” I said, and meant it. I had no problem with killing insurgents and people who were trying to kill me, but I hated seeing children caught up in the gears of war and mashed to bloody paste. I allowed him to lead me to the prisoners and examined them carefully, but neither of them was feeling talkative, even with the medic binding the wounds of the injured one. They both looked like typical farmers and the uninjured one managed to glare at me, even with his hands firmly secured behind his back with a plastic tie. I wasn’t sure if that were bravery, stupidity or a determination to make us kill him before we could make him talk. “Put them in one of the trucks. As long as they behave themselves, we won’t hurt them, but if they cause trouble, feel free to put them out of the truck with a cut throat.”
I walked back to the armoured car and took the chewy bar I was offered to replenish my strength. I think they make them taste awful on purpose; I’ve heard stories about UN units starving to death rather than eat them. Once everyone had had a snack and paused to answer nature’s call, we mounted up again and drove off towards the Fort. I settled down in the back of the armoured car and returned to studying the take from the UAV. There were three more small villages and one larger town we’d have to pass through before we reached the Fort… and that assumed that the Fort remained unoccupied. If it didn’t, we were going to have to assault it without causing too much damage, although I doubted that the farmers would seek a conventional battle. How many losses could they absorb before they lost the ability to farm their fields?
The next hour passed slowly, even though we picked up an escort in the form of a couple of attack helicopters. I’d kept a handful of them running patrols around the area, but I was persistently worried that one or both of them would get shot down by the enemy. The farmers seemed to dislike the helicopters, but it was still a mystery how many SAMs they had, or even if they had any. They would probably have picked them up from a UN deport, but would they still be in working order?
“Another village,” Ed’s voice said, in my ear. “Here we go again.”
This village was completely deserted. The infantry dismounted and searched the area carefully, but found nothing, apart from signs of a quick evacuation. We checked out the houses that were nearer the roads, but they were definitely empty. I even brought up the bomb-sniffing vehicle and checked the area, but it was clean of IEDs and mines. It actually felt eerie and I was glad to be away when we left. I’d had the feeling that someone was drawing a bead on us from a distance. Still, if they chose not to fight, it was something of a relief. I just wondered where the villagers had gone! Had they been ordered to leave, or had they heard about our approach and decided to hide?
“There’s no way to know,” Ed said, when I commented on it. He sounded as if it had been bugging him too. “They could be anywhere in the fields.”
I looked around at the vast empty fields, the cattle and sheep waiting plaintively for their masters to return, and took his point. There was no time for a search and so we drove on, passing through another empty village and a town that completely ignored us. The inhabitants saw us coming and cleared the main road, rather than attempting to talk or fight. It was better than fighting, I decided, but it would have been nice to talk to someone and try to set up diplomatic links to the militia. We might have been able to talk them out of continuing the fight…
No, I thought, with a touch of bitterness. They have no reason to stop fighting.
Three hours later, after a long drive filled with moments of screaming terror as snipers fired at us and vanished into the distance, we finally reached the fort. There was little pleasant about the massive blocky building — the UN had come up with a design it liked for a fort and kept it on all of the colony worlds — but it was clear, even from a distance, that the fort was occupied. We would have to assault it just to take it off the enemy.
“Get the men rested and bring up additional helicopters,” I ordered, tightly. The advantage of surprise was already lost. “We’ll assault the fort in an hour.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The insurgent will rarely seek a conventional battle with the government forces, as the government forces will generally be much better trained and armed than the insurgent. If they can be lured into such a battle, it is vitally important that as many insurgents as possible are killed or captured. An insurgency may be broken by one massive battle — IF the political conditions are right.
I could hear the sound of snipers in the distance as I examined the fortress through the eyes of the UAV, which was circling high overhead. The enemy forces had to have remained in the barracks until we’d approached, before taking up their positions, trying to keep us in the dark as much as possible. I silently saluted their commanding officer in my mind. He’d done a good job, but I was ahead of him in one respect; I had always assumed that I would have to fight my way into the fort.
Fort Galloway was tiny compared to the spaceport, but it still dominated the landscape and seemed to keep us all under observation. It was surrounded by a network of bunkers and traps designed to funnel enemy forces into areas where they could be mown down by emplaced machine guns and probably minefields as well. Inside, there were a handful of barracks intended for the men, an underground hospital for the injured and a set of command buildings and helipads, all encircled by watchtowers and barbed-wire fences. The tiny fence surrounding the outside of the complex was a joke by comparison; its only purpose was to deter civilians from walking into the firing zone. The warning notices, writing in Standard and all of Svergie’s official languages, warned of dire penalties, up to and including death, for anyone stupid enough to slip under the fence and enter the complex.
“They’ll have stripped her of anything useful,” Peter observed. I tried very hard not to jump. He’d come up right behind me perfectly silently. “They took down most of the fence for marking out the fields, or something.”
I nodded. The reason we’d never bothered with Fort Galloway before was that the local government had removing everything the farmers or miners had left behind, before abandoning the fort to the ravages of nature. The UN Construction Corps generally did good work — several of them had been shot by outraged commanding officers to make the point — and the fort would remain standing for years yet, but anything mobile had probably been taken years ago. It wouldn’t be that much of a problem — we’d brought supplies and could move in more once we’d occupied the fort, either though helicopter or on the roads — and in some ways it worked in our favour. The enemy holding the fort were unlikely to be very well-equipped either.