Gears of War: Anvil Gate (23 page)

“They’re running late, Fenix,” said Colonel Choi. He sipped his tea. “I expected them to invade weeks ago.”

Adam Fenix checked out the aerial recon pictures, trying to pin them flat on the wall while the permanent, infuriating wind snatched at the paper. Tyro was a collection of temporary huts clinging to the slopes of the mountains that separated Kashkur from its neighbors on three sides. At this time of year, the wind never gave up for a moment. If there was a crack in the building, it would find it. It had.

“So what’s the delay at our end, then?” Adam asked. “If this is
from the Furlin border, the Indie cav and heavy artillery could be at the first crossing point tomorrow. These images are about four hours old, yes?”

“Politicians.”

“The Chairman was talking tough about defending Vasgar’s neutrality only an hour ago, on the radio.”

“Oh, that’s
talk,
” Choi said. “Not
do
. And I thought you were one of the great intellects of Tyrus, Captain.”

Adam took the comment as a joke, nothing more. “I can see we’re going to fling poor old Vasgar from the sled to divert the wolves, then.”

“Neutrality’s a bitch, isn’t it? No enemies, maybe, but no allies, either.”

“Hasn’t the interim government asked us for help?”

“Do we seriously want to be first to walk into a country that’s ripping itself up? No, the Indies can have that privilege. We’ll end up with a whole new theater to fight—that’s a long border to defend. If we just let the Indies walk in, it won’t make it any easier for them to reach Kashkur. Anvil Gate can just shut down the pass and pick off the Indie armor at leisure. All we have to do is stop the Indies moving through Shavad.”

“Very economical.”

“We’ll need everything we’ve got to hold
this
end of Kashkur.” Choi stared into his teacup. “Is this sediment something I should worry about?”

“It’s spices, sir. The locals put spice in everything.”

“As long as it’s not your ambitious lieutenant trying to poison me to create a vacancy.”

“Stroud wouldn’t bother with poison.” Adam kept a straight face, partly because it was true. “She’d just put a round between your eyes. Very forthright, our Helena.”

Choi paused for a moment and then bellowed with laughter. “Good-looking girl. Has she said who the father is yet?”

“No, sir, and I don’t think that’s any of our business.”

“Must be hard for a woman to leave a small child behind under those circumstances.”

“It’s hard for a man, too.” Adam went back to the map on the wall and tried to see the swirls of color and contour lines in three dimensions. “I’ll start moving the company down to Shavad now.”

“Change of plan. You’ll be shutting down the imulsion pipeline and making sure supplies stay rerouted north the moment Furlin crosses the border. Then, if need be, you reinforce the Kashkuri forces in Shavad.”

The big picture was suddenly clear. “We’re cutting off Vasgar?”

“Exactly. No fuel—so the Indies are going to have a tough time resupplying. If necessary, we’ll destroy that section of the pipeline and make it permanent. But in the meantime, just implement the contingency plan. Shut down Borlaine and Ecian Ridge, and open the emergency pipeline at Gatka.”

It was an interesting way to receive a change of orders. Adam saw the map in a whole new light. He’d already started working out the logistics of who and what he’d need to cut the supply—three teams of engineers, three infantry platoons to guard the pipeline hubs just in case the UIR managed to insert special forces—before the very obvious realization sank in. There were millions of neutral civilians who were going to be plunged into even worse chaos than an occupation.

“Just as well this isn’t later in the year,” he said. “I’d hate to see a Vasgar winter during a fuel embargo.”

“It’s not going to be too clever in the summer, either. But disgruntled civvies will give the Indies something extra to worry about.” Choi stood up. “Time you got going. I want your teams in place tonight. We haven’t warned the imulsion companies, just in case they talk, so they’re going to be very surprised to see you. They’re going to be losing a lot of revenue.”

Revenue? Of course. Life goes on. Companies need customers, bills need paying
.

Adam sometimes wondered how he failed to factor commerce into warfare. He’d have to watch out for that blind spot.

“So we’re commandeering pipeline hubs now, sir.”

“You got it, Fenix. Can’t rely on civilians to cooperate even in a war. It’s gone on too long. No sense of crisis—unless they’re the
ones in a combat zone.” Choi got up and looked out the window, then checked his watch. “Mustn’t keep the chopper puke waiting. He has a tendency to show his displeasure with bouncy landings. I’ll call in at twenty-five-hundred.”

Adam saw Choi off at the landing pad. The clock was ticking. He had less than a day to roll into three imulsion hubs, tell the operators that they were shutting down an entire country’s supply, and keep that supply shut off until further notice. Military objectives were clear-cut. He approached them knowing he was going to take fire and give as good as he got. But this was one of those operations that was fraught with delicate problems, because it involved civilians,
allied
civilians.

If they don’t cooperate, it’s going to get … unpleasant
.

Choi’s aging Tern helicopter dwindled to a black spot against the backdrop of mountains. Adam knew he had an audience peering from the barracks windows and standing around in workshops and doorways. He had to turn around and look. He knew everyone was expecting an order to move down to Shavad to join the rest of the battalion on the front line.

“Captain?” Helena Stroud walked up to him. “Shall I get the staff and NCOs together for your briefing?”

Helena was an unnerving combination of a beautiful face, a wonderful actressy voice, and the eye-wateringly profane vocabulary of a drill sergeant. Adam had fully expected her little girl’s first word to be
motherfucker
rather than
Mommy
. As Choi had correctly judged, Helena was ferociously ambitious and as hard-charging as any of the men, and Adam didn’t expect her to be his lieutenant for long. Complicated bets were already being laid in the sergeants’ mess back at HQ as to when she would make captain, then major, then colonel, and how many medals she’d be awarded while doing it.

“It’s not what we thought,” Adam said. “We’re cutting off the imulsion pipeline to Vasgar.”

He expected her to react as he did; uneasy, and wishing he was doing some clearly defined fighting. But Helena was always up for any challenge.

“That’ll be a nice change of pace,” she said cheerfully. “We’ll need some clankies for that. Let me see if I can rouse them from their oily slumber. Briefing in the canteen tent, sir, fifteen minutes?”

“Very good,” he said. “I’m glad you’re relishing this, Stroud.”

“I’d rather be brassing them up, but a girl can’t always have it her own way.” She walked off briskly in the direction of the company office. “Maybe we’ll get some decent contact later.”

When Helena said fifteen minutes, she meant it to the second. Adam saw the flurry of activity between the huts as he gathered up his maps and made hurried calls. By the time he got to the canteen tent, she had all the NCOs and officers sitting on benches, the company’s detached squad of 2 REE clankies—men from the 2nd Battalion Royal Ephyran Engineers—with schematics pinned to an easel, and a chalkboard awaiting Adam’s attention.

It would have irritated some officers, but Adam was already used to Elain’s rigorously organized approach to life, so he simply felt reassured to have a fiercely competent female on his staff. One of the corporals tossed something small and brightly colored in Helena’s direction and she caught it one-handed. She held up a pair of pink knitted baby bootees.

“Oh, Collins, bless you! That’s a
very
sweet thought.” She flashed him that luminous smile. “Anya’s nearly three now, but I’ll put these away for
her
daughter.”

“Or your next one …” someone said.

Everyone laughed, including Corporal Collins. “My wife’s a very slow knitter, ma’am. Do what you can.”

Helena stepped aside to let Adam start the briefing. He clipped the central Kashkur map to the board and penciled circles around the imulsion facilities.

“We have some asset denial to carry out, ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “By twenty-five-hundred tonight, we need to have these imulsion pipeline hubs secured in preparation for shutting them down. Yes, this
is
in allied territory. No, the imulsion companies haven’t been warned, for opsec reasons. So expect this to be
challenging.
”

The assembled Gears looked at him in silence as if thinking through the likely course of events. It wasn’t what any of them usually did. Eventually someone spoke.

“But doesn’t it take days to shut down a pipeline, sir?”

“It takes days to shut down
production
safely,” Adam said. “All we’re doing is rerouting the flow. “We shut the imulsion spur pipelines supplying the two Vasgari refineries, and reroute the output into the west. That means closing Borlaine and Ecian Ridge, and opening the pumping station at Gatka to divert the stream. Either way, the Indies won’t have access to fuel if and when they roll across the orders, and they’ll have to ship it in, which is going to seriously crimp their logistics.”

“Technically simple, sir,” said one of the engineers. “But also a big and provocative step to take, because we’re depriving a whole country—a
neutral
country—of essential power.”

“The Indies might not think we’d go that far this early.”

“But the Vasgari power stations run on imulsion too. They’ll lose electrical power in days.”

“That’s the idea. Let’s get this done, Gears.”

Adam knew all too well what would cascade out of this. Once Vasgar used up its imulsion reserves, not only would the traffic stop and the factories grind to a halt, but the lights and refrigeration would go off too.

And the hospital power supplies. And the water-pumping stations. And everything the civilians rely on to live
.

“Doesn’t Anvil Gate get its fuel from the Vasgar side?” Carmelo was one of the transport engineers. “Who’s resupplying them?”

“It’s all brought in by the same road anyway, so we can just as easily get tankers down to them from the nearest Kashkur depot.” Adam reminded himself that he needed to talk to the garrison commander, just a courtesy to let the man know what was going on in his backyard and that someone was taking care of the smaller detail for him. He’d be busy preparing for the Indie advance. “All they have to do is sit tight and lob some heavy ordnance down on any Indie foolish enough to try to beat history.”

Foreign invaders had always met the end of the line at the Anvil Gate garrison. Nobody had tried to fight through that pass from the south for more than a century. Adam tried to recall any army that had managed to fight its way past Anvegad, and he couldn’t think of one. They’d always been forced back to try another longer, more troublesome route.

The UIR would meet the same barrier to its ambitions—if it didn’t run out of fuel first.

“Okay, be ready to roll by sixteen hundred,” he said. “It’s two hours overland to Borlaine, and they won’t be expecting us.”

“Lieutenant Stroud can give them a big smile and grab them by the nuts, sir,” Carmelo said. “That usually works.”

Again, everyone laughed. They weren’t disappointed that they weren’t going into battle yet, and they had that unquestioning optimism that 26 RTI—the Unvanquished—always seemed to radiate.

It might have been the momentum of an undefeated tradition. It might have been that this particular company knew their captain’s reputation for meticulous planning. It might also have been the aggressive certainty that Helena Stroud could inspire out of thin air.

Adam Fenix took the logical view that it was a combination of all three, and decided not to look closely at the ratio.

“Well, that’ll teach me to keep my mouth shut.”

Pad Salton walked up and down the elevated gantry that ran from the main gun emplacement to the observation post, a metal bridge with a thirty-kilometer view across two countries. He was checking out the best sniper positions. With this terrain, he was spoiled for choice. Hoffman leaned on the rail, finding himself torn between his usual anxious impatience to fight and get it over with, and wondering what the hell had gone wrong.

“Bit pessimistic, Pad,” Hoffman said. “Assuming they’ll get close enough for you to slot one.”

“Your pessimism, my optimism, sir.”

“You know the range on those guns? Fifteen thousand meters. You’ll have to get the bus to even
see
the Indies.”

“Yeah.” Pad braced his elbow against the brickwork and sighted up his Longshot. “But some bugger always gets through. That’s why you’ve got me.”

Nobody had tried to take Anvegad since the days of horse cavalry. The Indies were either crazy, pulling a flanker, or just anxious to grab Vasgar now that its government had fallen apart. The place had plenty of heavy industry further south, and—Hoffman tried to recall his briefing notes—iron deposits that probably made it worth the Indies’ time even if they didn’t get to take Kashkur.

Hoffman watched the activity directly below the bridge. Sander, cautious to a fault, had decided to rush in extra supplies and munitions just in case the campaign dragged on. Gears were already muttering about being stuck here beyond the planned end of their deployment, and the gunners were moving 150 mm shells on hand trucks through the narrow alleys and passages to makeshift shell stores. It was just getting light, and the fort-city was speckled with street lamps and illuminated windows below him.

“Is he expecting a siege or something?” Pad asked.