Gust Front

«Yes, sir,» said the company commander, noting the instructions down in his green leader's notebook.

«Four, have someone call the radio station and tell them to start broadcasting for anyone with heavy equipment to come to—«

«The Mary Washington College parking lot,» interjected the executive officer. He and the operations officer had taken over the tactical map from the two privates who normally updated it and were sketching in a battle plan. The battalion staff and company commanders had been together for years, as was common with National Guard units. At this point they could practically read each other's minds.

«Good,» said Robertson. He was new to the unit, but he had already recognized that it had a superior staff for a «part-time» unit. And they were coming together beautifully. If he could keep up the momentum and keep them from falling into depression they would teach these centaur bastards a thing or two. «And call for all noncombatants to head for the city center, coordinate with Public Safety on where. Bravo company . . .»

«Start mining the Chatham bridge . . .» said Captain Avery, the Bravo company commander, glancing at the map on the wall.

«And the railroad bridge and the Jeff Davis, but not the I-95 bridge; it's too far out,» agreed the commander.

«I'll take some of the older dependents with me for gophers. If any of them have a clue I'm arming them.»

«Approved, we're shorthanded.» Many of the perso

«Some of those AWOLs will be coming in now, if they can make it,» Avery pointed out. «There's nowhere to run.»

«And nowhere to hide,» remarked Brown, the Charlie commander, darkly. «Jesus Christ,» he whispered, his mind on his wife and two sons gathering with the other dependents on the armory drill floor.

«Gentlemen,» said the colonel, glad that his children were grown and well away from here. «Many of you have wives and children out in the armory. There is not a lot I can say. There's just not time for you to run, or I would say 'Run like hell.' The landing will happen in moments; if you tried to get out from under the interdiction circle you would run right into it.

«As I told Lieutenant Young,» he said with a nod at the introspected assistant division engineer, «the best we can do is hold them back for as long as possible, make it as painful as possible for them, and ensure that the deaths of our loved ones are quick and relatively painless. We should also try to determine some ma

«Stay straight, keep your troops in hand and do the mission. Our only choice is to stand. We shall stand like Americans have always stood at a moment such as this, on our feet, heads up and fighting,» he concluded. «Now get out and do it.»

As the two company commanders and the staff filed out Lieutenant Young gestured for the battalion commander to remain a moment.

«Sir?» said the young lieutenant.

«Yes, Lieutenant? You've been quiet.»

«I have been thinking about what you said at the first briefing, about how in this situation we would all die and all of our loved ones.»

«And now it comes to fruition,» the colonel snapped. Then he relented. «Your point?»

«That is my point, sir. Does it have to happen?»

«There is nowhere to run, son, and the forces outside the pocket are not going to charge in and rescue us.»

«Yes, sir,» admitted the lieutenant in a distracted tone. «But eventually, in two or three weeks, maybe a little longer, we, that is the United States, will have retaken this area. And we've got enough demo to destroy every bridge in Virginia.»

«We can't hold out for two or three weeks against upwards of four million Posleen with a short battalion of light engineers.» The colonel mused for a moment on a couple of terrain features last used in the Civil War but the situation was fundamentally different and he shook off the unreal idea.

«No, sir, our death is a foregone conclusion, I accept that, intellectually, but what about the dependents?» the acting assistant division engineer continued, abstractedly. His eyes, concealed behind thick glasses, began blinking rapidly.

«Lieutenant . . .»

«That's it!» the junior officer blurted with a snap of fingers.

«What?»

«I was trying to figure out . . . Look, sir . . . damn, this is complicated.»

«Hold on, son, what are you talking about?»

«Okay,» the ADE paused and nodded his head as the last piece of the puzzle fell into place. «Okay, sir, here goes. I'm from here, most of you officers aren't. I got into the history of Fredericksburg in high school really heavily and one of the things I learned is that there are tu

«Hold on, who knows about these tu

«I don't know where most of them are, sir, but somebody will,» the lieutenant answered. «They were used in the old days, like the nineteenth century, to move supplies up from the river. They're not very well-known, even to locals, but I'm sure that someone in EMS or city engineering will know where they are. They'd practically have to.»

«All right, we'll get past that,» said the colonel. «The Posleen will still sniff them out.»

«Yes, sir, so we have to make the Posleen think there is nothing left to find in Fredericksburg.»

«And we do that . . .» asked the colonel, quizzically.

«By setting off a real mother of an explosion,» said the junior officer excitedly. «If I had a nuke it would be perfect.»

«But we don't have one.»

«Quarles Gas is right outside of town, sir,» the lieutenant pointed out. «Fill up a couple of the buildings with natural gas and set them off. Can you say, 'F-A-E'?»

The colonel opened his mouth to rebuke the idea then pulled out his pipe and began tamping it in thought.

A fuel-air explosive, FAE, was the next best thing to a nuclear weapon.

During Desert Storm the United States Air Force dropped pamphlets—helpfully translated into Arabic—on the Iraqi lines explaining that at 10 a.m. on a certain date they would drop a fuel-air bomb on an area which was held by a brigade of the Iraqi Republican Guard. The pamphlets went on to explain that the weapon would have the effect of destroying all the life in a two-square-kilometer area and be severely damaging out to three square kilometers. All perso

Naturally, Saddam Hussein—that polite and abstemious gentleman—derided the idea that such a weapon existed. So at 10 a.m., a battalion and a half of soldiers, over eight hundred human beings, were wiped from the face of the earth in a pair of milliseconds. The Air Force spokesperson promptly held a press conference to defuse Saddam's natural reaction that America had initiated first use of weapons of mass destruction.

The next day the United States Air Force dropped pamphlets—helpfully translated into Arabic—on the Iraqi lines explaining that at 10 a.m. on a certain date they would drop a fuel-air bomb on an area which was held by a brigade of the Iraqi Republican Guard. The next FAE took no lives, but did leave a three-mile-wide stretch of the lines open to advances. At least three Iraqi officers, however, are known to have lost their lives trying to stop the mutinying troops from retreating out of the area of effect.

«That's 'Can you say FAE, sir,' « the colonel corrected, distractedly.