Which, if the rumors were accurate, wasn’t happening the way it was supposed to. Some of the attackers were being spotted and destroyed, but with Hegemony technology, all of them should have been wiped out, and the rumor mill suggested some of them weren’t being. Still, there were no convenient mountainsides or thick belts of forest to hide attackers out here in the midst of these endless, flat fields of grain, and—
• • • • •
Captain Pieter Stefanovich Ushakov watched through his binoculars with pitiless satisfaction as the entire alien convoy and its escort of tanks disappeared in a fiery wave of destruction two kilometers long. The scores of 120-millimeter mortar rounds buried in the stretch of the M-03 motorway between Valky and Nova Vodolaga as his own version of the “improvised explosive devices” which had given the Americans such grief in Iraq and Afghanistan had proved quite successful, he thought coldly.
Now, he thought, to see exactly how these weasels respond.
He was fully aware of the risks in remaining in the vicinity, but he needed some understanding of the aliens’ capabilities and doctrine, and the only way to get that was to see what they did. He was confident he’d piled enough earth on top of his position to conceal any thermal signature, and aside from the radio-controlled detonator, he was completely unarmed, with no ferrous metal on his person, which would hopefully defeat any magnetic detectors. So unless they used some sort of deep-scan radar, he ought to be relatively safe from detection.
And even if it turned out he wasn’t, Vladislava, Daria, Nikolai, and Grigori had been visiting his parents in Kiev when the kinetic strikes hit.
. XVI .
It was hot. It was also dry, and his battalion was no longer in a position to keep itself properly hydrated. “If you don’t need to piss, you aren’t drinking enough.” That was the mantra of the US forces in the Middle East, but the distribution and maintenance platoons the brigade support battalion had been supposed to detach to him had been delayed by last-minute paperwork. They hadn’t made it out of the FOB in time, the single purification plant he had with him was intended to supply only a single company, there weren’t going to be any more water trucks or trailers anytime soon, and the Harirud River’s levels were low thanks to the current drought and the water quality was . . . questionable. What each unit had already stored and what was available from the river’s meager flow and that single purification plant was all they had, and it wasn’t enough.
Which probably won’t be a problem all that much longer, if Traynor and Strang are right, Lieutenant Colonel Alastair Sanders thought grimly. And they probably are.
Captain Mark Traynor was his S-2, the officer tasked with responsibility for the battalion’s intelligence and security, and Lieutenant Christine Strang was his S-5, responsible for the battalion’s signal operations. For the last couple of days, it had been their grim duty to try to make some kind of sense out of what had happened to the rest of the world.
For the first twenty-four hours or so, all they’d had was confusion, speculation, and shock. Sanders’ battalion had been in transit to Herat when the attacks came screaming in out of nowhere. He suspected that was the only thing which had saved them when the rest of the brigade was wiped out behind them, but it also meant they were completely isolated, totally out of the loop and with no support units anywhere in sight.
At first, from the garbled messages they’d gotten, they’d assumed the disaster was purely local. But then other reports had started coming in—reports of strikes on carrier groups at sea, on NATO bases scattered across Europe, on Israel. Nor had they been limited to US allies. If the last they’d heard from national command authority was accurate, Tehran was gone, too. And so was Moscow. Beijing.
And, of course, Washington.
As far as Alastair Sanders knew, his battalion was the last organized military formation of the entire United States Army.
He tried, again, to wrap his mind around that concept as he stared unseeingly into the incandescent band where the setting sun hovered on the western horizon. And, again, he failed. It simply wasn’t something he was equipped to envision or imagine. It wasn’t something that could happen. Yet it had, and if the broadcast from this “Fleet Commander Thikair” was to be believed, this was only the beginning of the nightmare.
Maybe it is, he told himself harshly, but whatever demands “Thikair” may be throwing around, nobody’s ordered me to stand down.
With Tehran (among other places) gone, he’d seen no point in continuing his movement to Herat. Which, apparently, had been a good thing, since the reconnaissance troop he’d deployed forward had reported the city’s total destruction just before midnight last night. He hadn’t really needed the cavalry scouts’ reports, given the incredible brilliance of the fireballs which had illuminated the heavens. His current position in the rugged semimountainous foothills twelve kilometers west of the town of Chesht-e sharif was a hundred and thirty kilometers—eighty miles—from Herat, but he’d been able to see the towering incandescence of the explosions just fine.
The local Afghan citizens had seen the same dreadful sight. The majority of them had already refugeed out, showing a degree of common sense of which Sanders could only approve. Some, however, had stayed, and an impressive array of personal weapons had turned up among them. Given the number of rocket-propelled grenades which had also turned up, Sanders was inclined to think quite a few of the stay-behinds probably had affiliations with the Taliban or one of the other officially outlawed militias. On the other hand, they might simply have been affiliated with the local poppy-growing industry—not that the two possibilities were mutually exclusive by any means.
Wherever they’d come from, however, none of them seemed to have any problem at the moment with the infidel Americans’ presence in their midst. They might not care much for “crusaders” under normal circumstances, but these weren’t normal, and they’d helped enthusiastically when Sanders started preparing his positions. In fact, some of them had obeyed his orders to scatter and disperse into the hills around them only with obvious reluctance. In some ways, he would have liked to let them stay and fight, but they’d be far more useful in the long run as an in-place guerrilla force (God knew Sanders had had plenty of experience of what a pain in the ass mujahedin in mountains could be!) than getting underfoot during the kind of defense he planned to mount if any bad guys came his way. And, perhaps even more to the point, dispersal was the only pretense of “protection” he could offer them against a threat which could destroy every national capital in the world literally overnight.
With no way to know what to expect from the aliens who had attacked his homeworld, he hadn’t truly anticipated any sort of attack on his present, isolated position even after the destruction of Herat. After all, why should anyone want to capture a place like Chesht-e sharif when there were so many far more valuable prizes lying about?
At the same time, every bone in his body had cried out to find, attack, and destroy the creatures who had wreaked such destruction upon his world, but he hadn’t known where to find them. He was far too short on fuel for any sort of maneuvering campaign, anyway, with no hope of more, and even if that hadn’t been true, he would have been up against someone with starships in orbit. They had to have reconnaissance capabilities out the ying-yang, and he was damned if he’d put his units into motion in broad daylight so the same people who’d taken out Washington with a kinetic bombardment could do the same thing to them.
He’d had no intention of being caught napping if there was an attack, however, so he’d dispersed his troops into defensive positions and gone to rigorous emissions control, and his reconnaissance troops had set out remote sensors (using fiber optics rather than radio to report back, this time). They’d also been instructed to launch UAVs for a closer look if their remotes detected movement, but the ground control teams had been very firmly ordered to preprogram the UAVs’ flight paths and keep their own transmitters completely shut down until and unless there was actual har
d contact with the enemy.
At the same time, Lieutenant Strang had continued her efforts, along with Lieutenant Bradshaw’s signal/network support platoon, to contact some higher authority, but Sanders had ordered her to displace her directional antenna to a point ten miles north of his main formation in the rugged hills above the Harirud. And she’d been further instructed to dismount the antenna and locate it as far away from her own vehicle as the available cable would permit. He didn’t know if any of that would do any good, but it had seemed worth trying.
She’d finally managed to establish contact with an Admiral Robinson at something called NAVSPACECOM. She’d had to look it up to identify it as the Naval Network and Space Operations Command in far-off Dahlgren, Virginia, and there was no way for her to authenticate his identity, but it seemed unlikely anyone would be playing silly games at a time like this. And according to Admiral Robinson, at least some of whose satellites were apparently still operational, the aliens had landed a substantial force in what had once been Iran.
Sanders couldn’t think of anything in Iran worth occupying—or not in comparison to a hell of a lot of other places around the planet, at least—but Robinson was insistent. And given the quality of the raw video Strang had downloaded from him, Sanders was inclined to take the admiral’s word for it.
God bless the US Air Force, he thought, then shook his head with a harsh, humorless chuckle. Never thought I’d be saying that, but I guess we don’t have to worry about funding turf battles anymore. And, damn, but those fighter jocks ripped those bastards a new one!
They’d done something else, too. They’d shown Alastair Sanders these bastards—these Shongairi—weren’t invincible. Those transport aircraft or shuttles or whatever they’d been had gone down like sitting ducks, and it was obvious they hadn’t had even a clue that the Air Force was coming for them. That suggested that whatever advanced capabilities the invaders might have, their units’ situational awareness was limited, at best, and their higher command evidently did a piss poor job of maintaining any sort of oversight. Admittedly, from what little he knew about the F-22, those fighters would have probably been extraordinarily difficult even for US systems to pick up, but aliens capable of traveling interstellar distances should also be capable of things like that.
Unless, of course, they’ve never developed the capability for some reason, he thought again. It seems ridiculous, but that’s the only answer that suggests itself. Maybe they’re just not used to attacking advanced—relatively speaking, at least—races?
He wasn’t going to invest any huge amount of optimism in that sort of assumption, but he also reminded himself not to overlook the consequences of military complacency and lack of imagination. There was that little matter of how the US military had been caught looking in the wrong direction in Vietnam, for example, when they suddenly found themselves fighting guerrillas in the jungle instead of Soviet tanks in the Fulda Gap. It hadn’t been as bad in Desert Storm or Iraqi Freedom—not from a purely military perspective, anyway—but there’d still been a painful learning curve following the destruction of Saddam Hussein’s conventional forces. The experience in both of those operations had led (among other things) to the Army’s reorganization into its current modular brigade format, and it had also stood the U.S. in good stead during the ongoing operations in Afghanistan. Yet there was no denying that military organizations were also bureaucratic ones, and bureaucracies tended to get caught on the wrong foot by changing circumstances, especially if they’d been too successful for too long. Military machines which faced no significant challenge saw little reason to change or adapt. After a long enough period of supremacy, they—or factions within them, at least—got far too focused on guarding their own rice bowls to consider the preposterous possibility that someone might actually pose a threat to them.
Which was why the poor bastards who served such militaries had so often found themselves bringing knives to a gunfight.
Was it possible the aliens—the Shongairi—were in an analogous situation? The problem in more recent U.S. experience had been getting too caught up in advanced, heavy combat capabilities. They’d been slow to appreciate the realities of “asymmetric warfare,” in no small part because of their duty to plan for worst-case scenarios. They’d had too much sophistication for the task at hand—or, rather, their sophistication had been pointed in the wrong directions—because it had been designed to defeat the most capable possible foe rather than addressing the far more limited capabilities of the ones they’d actually ended up fighting. He would have expected the same sort of thinking to afflict a species with interstellar flight, since it would have seemed logical that anyone capable of putting up a fight would have had comparable levels of technology.
But if that were true, it certainly hadn’t been in evidence when the Air Force caught up with them. So did that mean they’d gone the other way? Had their military been doing the equivalent of fighting in Vietnam’s jungles so long it was no longer prepared for the Fulda Gap when it came along? There was no way for him to tell, and he wasn’t going to rely on it, but deep inside, he hoped—prayed—that was the case. Because if it was, then his battalion might just have a chance when it caught up with them, as well.
Which looked like it was probably going to happen pretty damned soon.
“All right,” he said, letting his eyes sweep across the faces of his absurdly young-looking company and platoon commanders. “It looks like Robinson was right. They’re on the ground in Iran, and they’re coming this way. The bastards probably took out Herat last night just to clear their route, and the reconnaissance troops say they’re headed our way along A77. Best strength estimate is one hundred and fifty of those floating bastards we’ve tentatively classified as ‘tanks’ and in the vicinity of three hundred wheeled vehicles. Still no sign of missile launchers on any of their vehicles, but don’t get too cocky about that. We’ve got no idea what kind of guns these . . . people might have, and they could have pop-up launchers carried under armor, where we just haven’t seen them. Their current approach speed is sixty-three kilometers an hour—that’s a hard number from the remote sensors and the UAVs—which puts them here almost exactly ninety minutes after sunset.”
And, he thought, the fact that they haven’t even noticed the UAVs have been keeping an eye on them for almost an hour—and transmitting to us the whole time—says interesting things, too. Assuming they really haven’t noticed them, at any rate. I suppose they could simply be ignoring them for some reason. Like to lull you into overconfidence, Alastair?
“You all know as much about what’s happened as I do,” he continued, letting no sign of that particular thought color his expression or tone. “And you’ve seen the footage of what the Air Force managed to do to them. I figure we’ve got a good chance of getting in the first licks. After that, damned if I know what’s going to happen, but I don’t expect it to be outstandingly good.”
He bared his teeth in a humorless grin, and almost to his surprise, two or three of his subordinates actually chuckled.
“I don’t have a clue why these people are heading into Afghanistan, of all places,” he went on, “but I think we owe it to a lot of other people to get some of our own back. Remember your briefings. No one engages until I give the word. All radios on receive-only until I give the word. Do not bring up your JBCPs until and unless I instruct you to. And when I say it’s time to bug out, we rendezvous immediately and boogie as planned. Clear?”
Heads nodded grimly, one at a time.
“All right, people. Let’s get back to our units. But first”—he raised one hand, holding them a moment longer—“let me just say I’m proud, damned proud, of all of you and all your people. I always have been, but never more than I am right this minute. I know how every one of you has to be worrying about what’s been going on back home. I’ve been worrying about it, too. But for right now, it’s time for us to go on doing our jobs as well as all of you and all of them always have before. As far as we kno
w, we’re all the United States has left. I hope and pray that’s not the case, but if it is, then we are by God going to give these murderous bastards the frigging boot, and I want our toes so far up their asses the only thing they can taste is made-in-the-U.S.-of-A. shoe leather! I want them to frigging choke on it!”
As historically memorable prebattle speeches went, it probably left a little something to be desired, he thought. Yet as he looked around the silent faces for a moment longer he saw the hardness in the eyes, the tightness of the jaw muscles, the anger crackling just under the surface, and he was content. He looked back at them, letting them see his own eyes, the promise of his own anger, then nodded back to them.
“Go,” he said.
• • • • •
Brigade Commander Harshair grumbled to himself—but quietly, quietly!—as his long, ungainly column (three separate columns of wheeled vehicles traveling abreast, actually, with one battalion of the armored regiment’s more heavily protected GEVs strung out protectively along the flanks) drove along the “human” road.
Truth to tell, the road was better than he’d expected in such a sparsely populated region, although with so much traffic spread out on either side of it the dust was a literally choking fog. Fortunately, his command vehicle was hermetically sealed, yet he still had to open the hatch occasionally, and every time he did more of the infernal dust filtered inside. And, inevitably, into the electronics’ Cainharn-taken cooling fans.
The better part of a thousand standard years since we got into space, and we still can’t design dust filters that work! His ears waggled in a grimace of disgust. Or, at least, none of our vaunted researchers can tear himself away from the Fleet’s precious needs long enough to run down that particular prey for us poor grunts in the field. They get new sensor suites every forty years or so, and we can’t even get something to keep dust out of the . . . less than capable systems we’ve already got! Why am I not surprised?