General Mike Gannon watched radio aerials sprout. The news of Dave Palmer's death had just come in from the air force, and he was momentarily stunned.
Divisional HQ occupied a pair of two-thousand-pound-bomb craters. The area was already covered over with camouflage netting and sweating paratroopers were further reinforcing the position with sandbagged top cover. It was not so much that generals deserved special protection, but more the basic fact that the radios had to be kept safe.
Without radio communications, the 82 ^ nd would be shorn of most of its effective striking power. Air, artillery, antitank, his own armor, and his maneuver battalions all needed to be coordinated. The Kiowa Warriors and the Spectre gunships were his windows into the evolving battle. Certainly all concerned knew their individual roles, but in an airborne operation things changed at speed.
First Brigade were netted in and progressing well. Second Brigade had called for artillery support. They were up against a network of bunkers defended by minefields. The air force had made two runs but then had run out of ordnance. The Spectre gunships were otherwise engaged. The A10s were around, but for some technical reason they could not be contacted.
Under heavy fire, troopers were clearing paths through the minefields by advancing on their stomachs and poking with fiberglass rods. God knows how they had the guts to do it. It was not like they could take their time. During an airborne assault this intricate and highly dangerous job was performed at speed. It had to be done that way. You had to get through. Failure was not an option.
The strike momentum had to be kept up.
The artillery was still not in action. One battery had landed in a minefield, and the gunners rushing to unpack their pieces had taken casualties as they moved in. Another battery had been hit by a mortar strike.
Gannon missed Palmer. Dave was the best executive officer he had ever had, and combined they made a near-perfect team. Gannon was a fighting general at his absolute best when leading men. Palmer was the imperturbable organization man who kept the structure together and the information flowing. The thought that he'd just been blown out of the sky and was now… gone, was sickening.
Gone! What more could you say? You were supposed to be safe at 20,000 feet up, but that was an illusion. Nowhere was safe during an airborne assault.
There was a boom as a 105mm howitzer went off and then another. The camouflage netting fluttered as the shock waves spread.
The noise jolted Gannon back into action. Despite all the shit that had been thrown at them, the gunners were back on the firing line. He looked at his watch. They had been on the ground only twenty-two minutes. The opposition was heavier than he had expected. The air force had worked right through the targeting board, but the terrorists were dug more effectively than he been believed. And the intelligence on mines had been inadequate.
You could prepare as much as you liked, but when it came right down to it every battle had to be fought. There was no easy way.
Gannon suddenly thought of the supergun. If Livermore was wrong, no matter what the 82 ^ nd accomplished, a whole lot of his young men were going to die.
The operations board was coming up with the division's assets. The Kiowa Warriors, electronic countermeasures, artillery, mortars, his TWO missiles mounted on Humvees, the Sheridan tanks, the heavy machine guns. All were now unpacked and operational.
Twenty-seven minutes in. Not good enough. They could always do better.
But not bad.
Gannon studied the big operations map. The wild card mission was the one commanded by Fitzduane. He was heading across to the hangar to link up with a Delta team, and together they were going to try and flush Oshima out of her bunker.
In Gannon's professional opinion, it was a fool's mission, since penetrating a series of armored doors to a location sixty feet underground was tantamount to suicide.
Nevertheless, the game in this case was certainly worth the candle. Gannon had studied Oshima's file and had walked through the bloodstained wreckage in Fayetteville. Oshima was the nearest thing to pure evil that so far in his life he had ever encountered.
Fitzduane, Al Lonsdale, that Washington fellow Cochrane, and then Brock's little army. They were good people and did not deserve to die. But then, neither had Dave Palmer.
"General?" said Carlson, who was standing in as exec. "We've got a report from the Delta observer team on the hangar roof. Armor, sir, and lots of it. Twenty T53s, and they're still coming out of the ground like dragon's teeth."
"Colonel Fitzduane?" said Gannon.
"Raising him now, sir," said Carlson. "But he'll know soon enough. They're heading right for him."
Fitzduane's minder, thought Gannon. Lieutenant Brock. The LouisianaTrainingCenter. OPFOR had attacked in force and caught Brock in a situation just like this.
Using pre-positioned AT4s, Brock had fought one of the best infantry rear-guard actions against armor that Gannon had ever seen. Kill a couple of tanks, make smoke, and fall back in the confusion. Next time they advanced, hit them from a different angle. Shoot and scoot ground-pounder style.
But the enemy had been weaker than this, and technically Brock had still been killed, though he had certainly proved that the right infantry tactics could cause unsupported armor serious grief.
You could harass and you could damage, but in the final analysis pure firepower tended to tilt the scales.
And this was no training exercise.
"Tell Colonel Fitzduane's team to let the enemy armor right through," he said, "and make smoke behind them." He tapped at the airport layout. "We'll let Second Brigade block them, and we'll hit them from the flanks with TOWs and the Sheridans. Sheepdog tactics. I want that hostile force to have only one way out, and that's into their own minefield. Give the Second Brigade all the artillery support we've got. Let the Kiowas loose. Get the air force in on the act, but tell them to be damn careful. Gunships only until we can sort out who is where."
"Airborne, sir," said Carlson.
Gannon had heard the 82 ^ nd referred to as no more than a speed bump when up against massed enemy armor. He had taken the remark ill.
If his division was a mere obstacle, it was a speed bump with real killing teeth.
Fitzduane hugged the ground as Carranza's armor rumbled past.
Stabs of flame and the deafening crack of their cannon punctuated the chattering of their coaxial machine guns.
The detritus of a bomb-blasted air defense position gave some visual cover.
Bodies and pieces of bodies completed the picture. A severed leg lay six inches in front of his eyes. He considered that he was learning more about the violent disassembly of the human form on this mission than he really wanted to know.
An armored thrust from beneath the ground. They had expected something – some kind of counterpunch – and had prepared a reserve, but the scale was disconcerting.
They had planned to bomb using penetrator weapons, which could deal with deeply buried bunkers up to forty feet or so, but had restricted their use after further consideration when the consequences of setting off the nerve agent had been considered. True, the two elements of the binary gas were stored separately, according to Rheiman, but who knew what changes Oshima had made in the last couple of days.
It had been a rational decision to forgo the penetrator bombs, but as the massed wedge of tanks had punched out of the hangar toward them, Fitzduane had second thoughts. Mere flesh and blood seemed woefully inadequate to counter this massed steel killing machine.
He wished the hell the airborne had Guntracks.
He had an enormous urge to flee very fast.
The armored vehicle wedge included vehicle-mounted guided-missile teams. Unless taken out, they would keep the Spectre gunships out of the way. Countering Oshima's surprise was going to be down to the infantry.