‘Well,’ he began, ‘what I knew when I caught the chopper back this afternoon…’
By the time Bret finished, Lohberger’s first sergeant had fetched the squadron’s commander and command sergeant major.
‘Sweet mother of God,’ grunted Sergeant Major Bo Jaanson, a gnarled stump of old wood who looked like he might well have seen off the Nazis at Bastogne. Melton had given them the super-concentrated version of the hours he’d spent plugged into the European and Asian news feeds, finishing up with the news of the primate discovery – fresh when he’d stepped off the tarmac in Qatar, but probably superseded by some new madness in the hours since.
The leadership cadre were otherwise speechless. Outside the slowly billowing walls of the tent in which they stood, the squadron continued to gather its strength. Yesterday it had seemed utterly formidable. Now, Melton felt like an ant sitting on a mound kicked over by laughing, moronic gods.
‘Thanks anyway,’ said Lohberger at last. ‘It’s been hard not knowing anything.’
Bret shrugged helplessly. ‘I’m only telling you what I got off the satellite feed and the web. I wouldn’t call it gospel, but… you know…’
The men were all younger than him, the platoon commanders by a considerable margin. Some of them would have young families of their own. Lohberger, at thirty, was something of a grand old man. He sucked in a deep breath and looked at the map as though he’d found some kind of nasty porn stash in his daughter’s bedroom.
‘Okay. There’s nothing we can do about it from here, not right now anyway,’ the captain declared. ‘We know a lot more than we did ten minutes ago, but nothing that changes what we have to do in the next couple of hours.’
His voice and manner were hard. Melton observed a stiffening of postures and facial expressions among the other men in the room, a turning away from anxiety and doubts, as men jammed them down somewhere deep, at least for the next little while.
‘Do you mind if I ask what’s gonna go down here?’ said Melton.
‘Nope,’ Lohberger replied. ‘You’re gonna be in on it soon enough.’
He jabbed a finger at the map table. Melton read the map plan, named Oplan Katie. It looked like someone’s joke, a Cold War-era forward defence at Fulda Gap write-up. He started to feel ill.
‘Saddam’s moving towards us. He’s pulled a lot of his guys out of those useless fucking trenches they dug, and put them on the road heading this way.’
‘Holy shit.’
‘Yeah. Like we don’t have enough to think about.’
Melton leaned forward to examine Oplan Katie on the transparent acetate. The basic plan had all Coalition forces moving forward out of Kuwait as originally planned. On the map was one phase line, a graphic control measure called Phase Line Katie, that ran through the Sulaybat Depression. All of the units in the Coalition were to hold that phase line and attrit any Iraqi force approaching it. The Brits with the 1st UK Division were still assigned the chore of dealing with Basra. Melton choked back any criticism of the plan. Getting into an urban fire fight, especially now, didn’t seem to make any sense at all. It negated almost all of the Coalition forces’ technological and military advantages. The 5-7 Cav’s objective was Jalibah Airfield, marked as Objective Marne three hundred and seventy klicks south of Baghdad. The Mog all over again, he thought. It explained why everyone in the tent looked pale and sweaty
What idiot came up with this plan? But he kept that question to himself and asked a different one. ‘Any idea which units?’
Command Sergeant Major Jaanson volunteered the answer. ‘The crap ones – militia, Fedayeen, reserve forces. A couple of Republican Guard units as well, but from the way they’re moving, they look like their job is to keep a gun at the back of those other guys heading into the meat grinder.’
The Army Times reporter glanced at Lohberger for confirmation and received a brusque nod. ‘We’ve seen a couple of fire fights break out within the Iraqi ranks. Guard units chewing over militia who tried to break off the advance.’
Melton couldn’t help it. He pointed at Phase Line Katie. ‘Surely you’re not going to attack them, are you?’
Captain Lohberger shrugged as his squadron commander, a lieutenant colonel, left the tent for a meeting with the brigade commander. ‘Well, the Kuwaitis don’t want us fighting on their soil,’ he explained. ‘So that is why we’re moving forward. They are taking positions on the Coalition’s western flank, inside Iraqi territory, just on the other side of Wadi al Batin. These base camps are not the best defensive positions anyway, so we may as well follow the first tenet of warfare.’
‘Engage the enemy as far forward as possible,’ Melton said, nodding.
‘Hooah, Rangers lead the way.’
Lohberger had a Ranger tab on his uniform and thus, in Melton’s mind, the right to talk like one. Still, Bret winced anyway while Lohberger continued.
‘The plan is that Coalition air power will conduct the air war as before, going for command and control. They’ll take out the bridges as well, which should make our life a bit easier. Close air will stomp anyone who gets over those obstacles, then our arty engages them. Whatever is left is our meat, Bret.’
Melton didn’t ask the obvious question – why?
Why the hell did any of them have to be here now? Saddam was no longer a threat to America, was he? And if the wing-nuts were right, and it was all just about the oil and fattening up Halliburton’s balance sheet so that Dick Cheney could retire in comfort… well, again, so what? Cheney was gone. And Bush. And the hundreds of millions of Americans they said they were defending. Melton had to shake his head to clear the buzz of conflicting thoughts crowding each other out. Why the hell didn’t they just pack up and leave the whole sorry mess behind?
Of course, that begged the question of where they might go. Hawaii? Alaska? The Pacific Northwest? Frankly, he couldn’t see anyone staying there if they could find a way out. Not with that hungry fucking bubble buzzing away just down the road.
Lohberger finished and let the air force liaison start his portion of the briefing. Bret found his thoughts drifting once the ALO, a major who liked to dip Oreos in his scotch, had taken over. His private thoughts, a tangle of confused memories and fresh trauma, were interrupted by Jaanson and Euler.
‘You all right, sir?’ Sergeant Major Jaanson asked.
The briefing was over. Melton blushed at having been caught out so badly. He’d seen plenty of others zoning out through the day. Men and women just standing, staring into the middle distance, eyes unfocused and faces slack. The worst ones looked like they’d come out of a session of electroconvulsive therapy. It was a mild form of shock, he supposed, as the rational mind shut down its higher functions to let the hindbrain deal with the violation it had experienced. In millions of years of evolution, humans had never been confronted by a threat like the energy wave. It was going to take some adapting, some getting used to – assuming the goddamn thing didn’t end up swallowing the whole world, of course.