will also wear it on the day we make it formal, read official orders over you-bless you, so to speak-and present them in front of the legion. On other days you will not wear it, until you earn the next step, the Cross of Valor in Bronze.' Carrera smiled slightly. 'If you like how they feel on this day and that future day, you will just have to be mindlessly brave one more time.'
Clapping both men on the shoulders and shaking their hands, Carrera turned and walked away.
Cruz didn't think too much of the award. Still, he thought, I'm a corporal? Really? Damn.
Sada's Command Bunker, 33/2/461 AC
'What was the butcher's bill, Qabaash?'
' Amid, we sent out ninety-seven men, nearly a full company. Only forty-three returned.'
'A bitter price,' Sada said. 'Bitter but necessary.' Sada looked at Qabaash. 'You don't understand why it was necessary, do you?'
Qabaash raised his chin and shook his head. Being mostly out of the action was hard on him and very depressing. 'No, Amid, I don't. I wish I did.'
Patiently, Sada explained, 'What's it worth paying to make sure the enemy doesn't sleep well at night, Qabaash? What price should we pay to make sure that he spends more of his effort watching out for a surprise attack than preparing to attack us here? You're a fine fighter, Major. You have to learn to be a thinker as well.'
Command Post, Legio del Cid, 35/2/461 AC
'Well, it's not like I didn't try to accommodate them,' Carrera said, watching the mass of aircraft overhead and on the other side of the river. The aircraft, a mix of C-31 and C-41 medium and heavy lift, were disgorging the better part of the 731st Airborne Brigade, Federated States Army. The air was thick with parachutes.
'You robbed t'em, t'ey t'ink,' answered McNamara. 'T'ree times t'ey planned a drop, t'ree times we overran and passed by t'e drop zone before t'ey could execute. An', Boss, you know as well as I do t'at planning a drop takes time and effort. So, yeah, t'ey're pissed at you. T'at's why t'ey stopped letting their forward support battalion help us, to slow us down so t'ey could make a jump… a 'combat' jump.'
'Interesting application of decision cycle theory, anyway, Sergeant Major. First time I've heard or read of an occasion where a military organization is outmaneuvered by its friends because its friends just decide faster and move faster than the organization is capable of.'
McNamara shrugged. Fancy theories were fine, to him, provided they didn't interfere with the actual fighting.
'Anyway, we've got a problem or, rather, several. I've got a tacit agreement with the Sumeris on the rules for this fight. The 731 ^ st is not a part of that agreement. I know their commander, and he's a dickhead. Jeff Lamprey, ever heard of him?'
McNamara scratched a cheek, idly. 'Name only,' he answered.
'Stuffed-shirt, stick up his ass, prig,' Carrera said, disdainfully. 'Tall, handsome, manly… who happens to be a stuffed-shirt, stick up his ass prig. Not too manly, though, some say. I've been told, by people in a position to know, that when he was a captain commanding a company his wife-beautiful girl, too, they say-used to fuck his lieutenants. I don't think he ever quite recovered from that. That's one of the reasons I'm inclined to believe the story. He's the kind of guy who insists on saluting in the field and that troops should shave daily even when drinking water is short.
'Now, technically,' Carrera continued, 'by the contract Campos signed with us, I outrank him. I know him though and he won't listen to that. Frankly, Sergeant Major, we loathe each other at a really deep, sincere and personal level. So we are faced with the prospect of two forces trying to take the same town at the same time, with essentially no chance that the two forces will or even can cooperate. Hmmm… what to do, what to do?'
Carrera paused, obviously thinking hard. McNamara stayed quiet for the moment, worrying about what his boss was thinking. Then Carrera nodded to himself, turned around, and entered the CP.
'Fire support, have we got an armed Dodo overhead?'
'Yes, sir. Two of them, actually.'
'Good. Drop the bridge on the other side of town. Immediately.'
McNamara, listening, thought, Got to hand it to him. He cuts right to the heart of the problem and finds a solution. It might not be an elegant solution. It might even piss off everyone in the entire world. But he does come up with a solution, every time. Jesus, I see no fucking end of trouble out of this one.
Lamprey and a picked group of paratroopers hit, rolled and recovered. In an instant they had doffed their chutes, prepared their weapons, and were racing on foot to seize the one bridge over the river that led into the town.
The commander of the 731st Airborne saw a dark streak above the bridge. Even without knowing he was still pretty sure what it meant.
'Everybody, DOWN!' he shouted, while still seven or eight hundred meters away from his objective.
KABOOM!
Lamprey looked up to see several concrete sections of the bridge flying up in what looked like an attempt to achieve low orbit.
'Come on, follow me,' Lamprey shouted, getting to his feet and resuming his race. He had gained perhaps another hundred meters when the bridge erupted again. Again Lamprey threw himself to the ground.
KABOOM!
'That son of a bitch, undisciplined, insubordinate bastard,' he muttered when he reached the bridge only to discover it really didn't exist anymore.
Sada's Command Post
'But, why? I don't understand, I really don't understand, why they dropped the bridge, Amid.'
So far his enemy's actions had made a certain sense to Sada. He had to confess, though that this…
'Makes no sense to me either, Qabaash. So it must be a trick. Move Fourth Battalion from reserve to facing the river.'
'That's going to leave us stretched facing the other enemy,' Qabaash objected.
'I know. But I am guessing that they dropped the bridge precisely to lull us into thinking that no attack would be coming across the river. Thus, there almost certainly will be an attack from across the river.'
Dodo Number Two, above Ninewa, 1/3/461 AC
The load this time was five-hundred-pounders, twenty-four of them. Each of the other five birds in the mission carried a similar load, except for Number Four, which carried five two-thousand- pounders. Four was flying somewhere off to the left. Its bombs were programmed for several hardened targets, which did not include Sada's command bunker, within the town.
The navigator-who was doing double duty as the bombardier, to the extent the guided bombs even required a bombardier- announced, 'Release in… five… four… three…'
Command Post, Legio del Cid
'-two… one,' intoned Triste from where he stood between the bank of radios and the operational maps. There was a delay of about half a minute between his announcement of 'one' and the first rumblings of huge aerial bombs exploding in the city.
'It takes a while for the bombs to hit ground,' he explained, a little sheepishly, when Carrera turned an uplifted eyebrow towards him.
Carrera shrugged-a few seconds one way or the other didn't really matter under the circumstances-and returned his attention to the operational maps.
One of these, the largest scale one, Ridenhour was updating with the latest information from Thomas's headquarters, still ensconced in al Jahara. The Federated States had made rapid progress, despite the false start at the beginning of the campaign. Even now its armored columns closed on the capital of the Republic of Sumer, Babel. Whether they would lunge right into the town or wait to allow slower moving infantry to catch up and do the detailed clearing was a matter of some debate within the legion's own headquarters.
Ridenhour, himself, didn't know. He was reasonably sure that Thomas was still undecided. True, the Sumeri Army had mostly folded up whenever FSA troops had gotten close. But there had been exceptions, a few times and places where they'd fought like demons. This was usually the doing of some local commander. Let one or two of that sort be inside the capital with a good sized body of troops under his command and a bold lunge with armor into
