is forty-one. Good contrast for the thermal viewing systems. They seem to use the kind of stoves we had in the Boy Scouts. Damn, there’s a bunch of ’em. Like hundreds.”
“Got a hole in their lines?”
“Looks thin right here, ’tween these two hills. They have a company on this hilltop, and another company here—I bet they’re in different battalions,” Williams said. “Always seems to work that way. The gap between them looks like a little more ’n a kilometer, but there’s a little stream at the bottom.”
“Bradleys don’t mind getting a little wet,” Diggs told the junior officer. “Duke?”
“Best bet for a blow-through I’ve seen so far. Aim Angelo for it?”
Diggs thought about that. It meant committing his cavalry screen, and that also meant committing at least one of his brigades, but such decisions were what generals were for. “What else is around?”
“I’d say their regimental headquarters is right about here, judging by the tents and trucks. You’re going to want to hit it with artillery, I expect.”
“Right about the time QUARTER HORSE gets there. No sense alerting them too soon,” Masterman suggested. General Diggs thought it over one more time and made his first important decision of the night:
“Agreed. Duke, tell Giusti to head for that gap.”
“Yes, sir.” Colonel Masterman moved off toward the radios. They were doing this on the fly, which wasn’t exactly the way they preferred, but that was often the world of real-time combat operations.
“Roger,” Diggs called.
Colonel Roger Ardan was his divisional artillery commander—GUNFIGHTER Six on the divisional radio net—a tall thin man, rather like a not-tall-enough basketball player.
“Yes, sir.”
“Here’s your first fire mission. We’re going to shoot Angelo Giusti through this gap. Company of infantry here and here, and what appears to be a regimental command post here.”
“Enemy artillery?”
“Some one-twenty-twos here, and what looks like two-oh-threes, eight inch, right here.”
“No rocket-launchers?”
“None I’ve seen yet. That’s a little odd, but they’re not around that I can see,” Captain Williams told the gunner.
“What about radars?” Colonel Ardan asked.
“Maybe one here, but hard to tell. It’s under some camo nets.” Williams selected the image with his mouse and expanded it.
“We’ll take that one on general principles. Put a pin in it,” Ardan said.
“Yes, sir. Print up a target list?”
“You bet, son.”
“Here you go,” Williams said. A command generated two sheets of paper out of the adjacent printer, with latitude-longitude positions down to the second of angle. The captain handed it across.
“How the hell did we ever survive without GPS and overheads?” Ardan wondered aloud. “Okay, General, this we can do. When?”
“Call it thirty minutes.”
“We’ll be ready,” GUNFIGHTER promised. “I’ll TOT the regimental command post.”
“Sounds good to me,” Diggs observed.
First Armored had a beefed-up artillery brigade. The second and the third battalions of the First Field Artillery Regiment had the new Paladin self-propelled 155-mm howitzer, and the 2nd Battalion, 6th Field Artillery, had self-propelled eight-inch, plus the division’s Multiple Launch Rocket System tracks, which ordinarily were under the direct order of the divisional commander, as his personal shotgun. These units were six miles behind the leading cavalry troops, and on order left the roads they were on and pulled off to firing positions north and south of the gravel track. Each of them had a Global Positioning Satellite, or GPS, receiver, and these told them where they were located down to an accuracy of less than three meters. A transmission over the Joint Tactical Information Distribution System, or J-TIDS, told them the locations of their targets, and onboard computers computed azimuth and range to them. Then they learned the shell selection, either “common” high-explosive or VT (for variable-time). These were loaded and the guns trained onto the distant targets, and the gunners just waited for the word to pull the strings. Their readiness was radioed back to the divisional HQ.
All set, sir,” Colonel Ardan reported.
“Okay, we’ll wait to see how Angelo’s doing.”
“Your screen is right here,” Captain Williams told the senior officers. For him it was like being in a skybox at a football game, except that one team didn’t know he was there, and didn’t know the other team was on the field as well. “They’re within three klicks of the enemy’s first line of outposts.”
“Duke, tell Angelo. Get it out on the IVIS.”
“Done,” Masterman replied. The only thing they couldn’t do was cross-deck the “take” from the Dark Star drone.
SABRE Six was now in his Bradley instead of the safer Abrams main-battle tank. He could see better out of this one, Giusti judged.
“IVIS is up,” the