The Chosen

correct to within ten thousand ±6, Center said. assuming an equivalent effort in other sectors of the front, as intelligence reports indicate.

'Well, we'll have to take this into account,' Jeffrey said. He tapped the pilot's shoulder again; despite their two-squadron escort, the man was looking nervously east and upward, to where Land attackers would come diving out of the morning sun. The plane banked westward.

* * *

'Thank you gentlemen for meeting on such short notice,' Jeffrey said.

They were in the Premier's bunker beneath the hilltop Executive Mansion, nearly a hundred yards underground, as deep as you could get near Santander City without hitting groundwater. The impact of the bombs, a dull crump. . crump. . was felt more through the soles of their feet than heard through their ears. Every now and then the overhead electric light flickered, and dust filtered down, making men sneeze at its acrid scent.

'I thought you'd made it suicidal for dirigibles to fly over our territory,' Maurice Farr said dryly to the Air Force commander.

The commander flushed and pulled at his mustache. 'In daylight, yes. But the speed and altitude advantage of our fighters is fairly narrow. At night, it's much harder. Those might be their new long-range eight-engine bomber planes, too. We're having more of a problem with those.'

At the head of the table, Jeffrey held up a hand. 'In any case, the error radius of night bombing is so huge that it consumes more of their resources to do it than it does of ours to endure it.'

The Premier tapped a pencil sharply on the table. 'General, we're losing hundreds, perhaps thousands of civilian every time one of those raids breaks through.'

Jeffrey dipped his head slightly. 'With all due respect, sir, there were a hundred and fifty thousand people in Ensburg-and I doubt ten thousand of them are alive now, and those are in Chosen labor camps.'

A pall of silence fell around the table. The siege of Ensburg had been a morale-booster for the whole Republic. Its fall had been a correspondingly serious blow. Jeffrey went on:

'So with all due respect, Mr. Premier, anything that helps keep the enemy back is a positive factor, and that includes attacks that hurt us but hurt him more.'

'There's the effect of bombing on civilian morale,' the politician pointed out.

observe:

Scenes floated before Jeffrey's eyes: cities reduced to street patterns amid tumbled scorched brick, air-raid shelters full of unmarked corpses asphyxiated as the firestorms above sucked the oxygen from their lungs, fleets of huge four-engined bombers sleeker and more deadly than anything Visager knew raining down incendiaries on a town of half-timbered buildings crowded with refugees while odd-looking monoplane fighters tried to beat them off.

'Sir, our citizens could take a lot more pain than this and still keep going. In any case, if we could turn to the matter at hand?'

The men around the table-generals, admirals, heads of ministries-opened the folders that lay before them. Heading each bundle of documents were aerial photographs of enormous twisting chains of fortifications. Maps followed, and intelligence summaries.

'Is this reliable?' the Premier asked.

'Sir, I've seen a good deal of it with my own eyes,' Jeffrey said. 'And we have the labor gangs working on it penetrated to a fare-thee-well. It's genuine, and it's a major effort. Not just the labor, they've got plenty of that, but the transport capacity it's tying up and the materials. Steel, cement, explosives for the minefields.'

'So you're right. They're going to withdraw,' the Premier said. 'We're beating them!'

'Sir.' The elected leader of the Republic looked up at Jeffrey's tone. 'Sir, we're making them retreat-and that's not the same thing. We have to consider the strategic consequences. If you'll all turn to Report Four?'

They did; it started with a map. 'That line-they're code-naming it the Gothic Line, for some reason-is cursed well laid-out. When it's finished, they'll make a fighting retreat and then sit and wait for us.'

'We've pushed them back once, we can do it again!' the Premier said. 'No invader can be left on the Republic's soil, whatever the cost.'

Christ. Usually the Premier's aggressive pugnacity was a plus for Jeffrey and the conduct of the war; he'd trampled the political opposition into dust, and the people had rallied around him as a symbol of the national will-they were calling him 'the Tiger,' now. But if he got the bit between his teeth on this-

observe:

Men in khaki uniforms and odd soup-bowl helmets clambered out of trenches and advanced into a moonscape of craters and bits of trees, ends of twisted barbed wire, mud, rotting fragments of once-human flesh. They walked in long neat lines, precisely spaced. From ahead, beyond the uncut barbed wire, the machine guns began to flicker in steady arcs. .

. . and men in different uniforms, blue, helmets with a ridge down the center, huddled in a shell crater. Bulbous masks hid their faces, turning them into snouted insectile shapes. Bodies bobbed in the thick muddy water at the bottom of the shell hole, their flesh stained yellow. Somehow he knew that the air was full of an invisible drifting death that would bum out lungs and turn them to bags of thick liquid matter. .

. . and a man in neat officer's uniform with a swagger stick in his hand and the red tabs of the staff looked out over a sea of mud churned to the consistency of porridge. It was too viscous even to hold the shape of craters, although it was dimpled like the face of a smallpox victim. Plank walkways lead off into the steady gray rain; about them lay discarded equipment, sunken in the mire. So was a mule, still feebly struggling with only the top quarter of its body showing.

'Good God,' the man said, his face gray as the churned and poisoned soil. 'Did we send men out to fight in this?' His face crumpled into tears.

Jeffrey shook his head; the problem with visions like that was that the implications stayed with you.

'Sir, right now we've managed to turn the war from one of movement into one of attrition favoring us. This is the Chosen countermove. If we attack their prepared positions, we'll bleed ourselves white; attrition will favor them. Believe me, sir, please-if you've ever trusted my military judgment, trust it now. We'd break ourselves trying. The ground up there favors defense-that's how we survived their initial attack-and those fieldworks of theirs are as impregnable as the mountains. And that's not all.'

He stood and took up a pointer, tracing the Gothic Line with its tip. 'This shortens their line, and with massive artillery support and good communications from their immediate rear, they can thin out the forces facing us. Which means they can concentrate a real strategic reserve, not just rob Peter to pay Paul, pulling units out of the line to plug in again elsewhere. They haven't had a genuine reserve. If they get one, it frees up the whole situation and concedes a lot of the initiative to them.'

The Premier looked at John. 'Your guerillas were supposed to tie down their forces,' he said.

'They are, Mr. Premier,' he said. 'They have two hundred thousand men holding their lines of communication in the old Empire, and another hundred thousand in the Sierra, plus most of Libert's Nationalist army. Which, incidentally, is only useful to them as long as Libert's convinced they're going to win. If they had the free use of those forces, we'd have lost the war in their big push last fall.'

John looked around the table. 'Gentlemen?' There was a murmur of agreement, reluctant in some cases.

'Guerillas can be crucially useful to us,' John went on. 'But they can't win the war. They can make it possible for us to win it, though.'

The Premier smoothed a thumb across his slightly tobacco-stained white mustache; that and his great shock of snow-colored hair were his political trademarks, along with the gray silk gloves he affected.

'Neither will sitting and looking at the Chosen forts-Chosen forts on our soil,' he growled. 'Admiral?'

Maurice Farr nodded reluctantly. 'We can't risk an attack on the Land Home Fleet in the Passage,' he said. 'Not at present. It's too far from our bases and too close to theirs. And while our operational efficiency is increasing rapidly, more than theirs-they were already at war readiness-they're building as fast as they can. They've got