Chapter 8

The plan was for the attack on the headquarters to start exactly at 2300 hours. The attacks on the ammo dumps would start 15 minutes later. That should give everybody time to hear the noise from the first attack and to react. Our attack should start about the time everybody who was mobile was rushing to help with the defense of the headquarters tent. Luckily for us, these guys were not professional soldiers and were poorly trained, so there should be a lot of chaos associated with everybody running around.

Ah, there it was. The first RPG flew into the tent and hit something hard enough to set it off. The selector for the warhead type on the rocket had been set for incendiary, so a nice fire should be raging about now. Oh, yes, there went the second RPG. That one was scheduled to be a fragmentation round. A few seconds later, the third explosion signaled the arrival of the next RPG warhead, also a fragmentation round. The intention had been for there to be five seconds between the first three rounds, but, after that, the rounds would pour in as fast as there was a target.

Meanwhile, the rest of the grunts were to be firing with their .45s at targets of opportunity. It would have been silly to waste an RPG round for just one man, so that's what the .45s were doing.

There it goes, the counter fire has finally started. In a regular army, somebody would be court-martialed for taking so long to respond to the attack. However, I was glad for the time to be as long as possible, since that was my men being shot at. They should be ready to high-tail it out of there pretty damned soon. I know it's hard for a Ranger to run from a fight, even when that's part of the plan, but the squad leader should have that much control of her squad.

There was a lot of noise all over the place, even shooting from locations where none of my people would be. Panic in the right place can be a big help at times, though never to the one who panics. This little exercise may turn out better than we had hoped.

At last, it's time for our part in the action. I kept an eye on my watch and my squad leader was doing the same. Just as the time flashed up, he yelled fire, and an RPG rocket tore into the ammo dump. The trooper using the RPG was good, and he poured HE (high explosive) rounds into the dump as fast as the replicator could turn them out. After the fifth round, he switched to incendiary rounds, but that made little difference in the noise level. The squad leader made sure that there was a good fire going among the HE cannon shells before he directed the trooper to switch his target to the gas shells. The gas was destroyed by excessive heat, so the gas shells were bombarded by incendiary rounds as fast as the trooper could pour them in.

We had only been firing for three minutes when it became apparent that no more RPG rounds were needed for this ammo dump. It was an inferno with flames rising to 300 feet or so. It was time for us to get our asses in gear. I signaled to the squad leader and let him handle the details of the withdrawal. We took to the air and scattered enough to keep from being too easy targets, but close enough together to be able to support each other if the need arose. As I flew, I could see that Anfon had been successful with her raid, judging from the flames coming from the ammo dump over there.

We put on a burst of speed and were soon at the rendezvous. Nobody was late in arriving, and everybody was there. Furthermore, there were no wounded, so we had just made the best possible kind of raid. Now, all we had to do was to wait to see if we had accomplished what we had in mind. As soon as we had pulled back far enough to make camp for the rest of the night, I reported in to headquarters via radio, and gave a summary of the results of the raid. I said that we would hang around for up to one day to see if the siege was broken. If not, we would try something else tomorrow night.

Dammit, that commander of the siege was stubborn, an absolute fanatic, or both. They were still there that afternoon and didn't look like they were leaving. OK, time for something else. I assumed that they were waiting for a new shipment of ammo to be delivered, but I knew that was going to take several days for the HE shells and at least three weeks for the gas shells. Amsterbad was going to get a break in the shelling, but it didn't look like anything else would change.

The only other thing that we could attack like we did the ammo dump was the food supply. The problem was that the food dumps were not as centralized as the cannon ammo had been. The aerial photos stored in my AI showed that there were 14 separate food storage areas. I absolutely refused to send in demolition teams of less than two men, so one of the areas was going to be skipped. Then I had a brainstorm: the food dump used by the commander would be the one we skipped. That would be a psychological blow that should play hell with morale. I could imagine what the average soldier would think when he was hungry, but the commander was eating a normal meal.

We were able to dial up explosive satchel charges with our replicators, so we were fixed for the means to destroy the dumps. The teams would not even have to carry the satchels with them, they would only have to replicate the charge when they were ready to plant it. Every man always carried a replicator with him at all times, so this was perfectly normal for a Ranger.

The food dumps were so widely scattered that it was going to be a practical impossibility to coordinate the attacks very closely, but we agreed on the arbitrary timing of 0130 hours. If a team had to set off their charge and skip before then, there was no great harm done, and if a team had to set off their charge later than that, that was OK, too. The main thing was not to get caught! We didn't have enough people to pull off a full scale rescue operation, so everybody had to be sure not to get caught!

By this time, breaking the siege had become a kind of game with the troops, and they had a pool on the time when the first unit of the besieging army would leave. I didn't care who won the pool, but I hoped that it would be soon. At least, nobody had bet on the siege never being broken.

The demolition teams set out on schedule at 2300 hours. The satchel charges all had timers, so the plan was for a team to sneak in to a dump and place the number of satchels that were appropriate plus one and scoot before they were discovered. The timers on the fuses would insure that all of the bangs took place at the same time. The demolition teams could replicate as many of the charges as they thought were necessary, so I had instructed them to leave that number, but add one just for effect. I wanted the army to understand that we meant business and were not just fooling around.

Three or four supply trains came in every week, so they could recharge on food before anybody starved, but that would have been too easy on the attackers. I planned to blockade the supply trains and force them to lift the siege by that means. There were only three highways that supplies could come over, so it would be easy for even my small group to maintain a blockade, especially with the RPGs to enforce our will. The railroad had long been destroyed by the defenders, so that was not a consideration.

The demolition charges went off on schedule, and they made quite a fireworks show with the burning stuff flying in every direction. The firefighters were in for an all-night job trying to keep the whole camp from burning down. All of this made for a lot of joy in our camp, but nobody relaxed his vigilance—the squad leaders saw to that.

Other than the two attacks against the dumps, we had not advertised our presence. I was sure that the attackers still believed that the defenders were responsible for the destruction. Both sides in the conflict knew that the GC (Galactic Council) took a very dim view of this war. The planet could have any sort of government it wanted as far as the GC was concerned, but they wanted the indiscriminate slaughter of noncombatants to stop. The GC took the attitude that anybody who wanted to be left alone should be left alone. Other than that, the GC felt that both sides could kill each other off to a man if they really wanted to. Amsterbad was one of those enclaves of people who wanted to be left alone, so we were here to make that happen.