Hero (7 page)

Still, putting Cohen in charge of the company might have been a mistake. Normally, Peled would have preferred Adelberg; Stu had more infantry experience. But Avi Cohen was senior, and he'd handled himself well toward the end of the firefight. Damned if Mordecai Peled was going to jump somebody over his head—not in front of the Casas, particularly not in front of the perverted IG corps they called the II Distacamento de la Fedeltà, the Loyalty Detachment.

Fucking DFs.

As Peled and his team worked the clearing, a pair of the DFs—one male, short and skinny; one female, fat and dumpy—kept them under observation. Idiots. What did the DFs think they were going to do, run off with the bodies?

Peled didn't mind things being done wrong—war is the domain of mistakes—but he didn't like things being done stupid. Command and authority are supposed to flow up and down, not be shoved in from the side by a bunch of official kibitzers who didn't have to live or die with their mistakes.

He sighed. He was getting too old for this, woolgathering when there was work to do. The area was secured; fine. The captives had been pulled out and were up at the road under the control of Shimon and Galil—no, Shimon and Skolnick. The sharp-eyed sergeant was running Kelev for the time being; he'd be glad to be rid of that once Galil was back on his feet.

Peled still had to figure out what to do about staff.

The officer complement of a Metzadan infantry battalion headquarters was supposed to consist of six: a battalion commander, either a colonel or light colonel; an exec, generally a major, who doubled as S3, the ops officer; the deputy S3, generally a captain; and S1, S2, and S4, all lieutenants or captains. Usually there was a senior medician in the rank of a captain, but he was out of the chain of command, in general practice although not in theory. For the time being, Reuven Zucker was very much in the chain of command: he was running Company C, which was busy handling field aid and triage up on the road.

The officer complement of First Bat HQ was supposed to be six; right now, it was Mordecai Peled.

Period. First Bat was operational in theory, and it would fire back if fired upon, but it was headless.

Except for me
, he thought,
and God knows that I can't carry Bat HQ in my hat.

Peled needed a good battalion staff, and quick. It didn't matter that they would probably reconfigure themselves as a training regiment again tomorrow; right now, right this fucking minute, they were a goddamn infantry battalion, and that's how he had to run it.

In other armies, the senior NCOs, the men who really ran a battalion, could manage about as well without officers as with—sometimes better. But Metzada didn't do things that way, and this was supposed to be a cadre job. While the enlisted complement of the improvised Bat HQ weren't virgins, they weren't ready to run things, not if things got sticky.

Which they already had. Assuming they were going to stay configured this way for even a day or two, Shimon was going to ask Peled for some recommendation on what do about personnel, and Peled hadn't the slightest idea what to tell him.

SOP was to promote from below—and that would be fine for S4, any damn fool could run supply—but who would he get for S3? Peled was acutely conscious that he was good at carrying out someone else's plan, not drafting his own, and he needed a good S3 and deputy S3 or the battalion would be stepping on its dick the next time guns started going off all around them.

At least they were all operational now. Fuck this administrative shit.

Possibly he could raid the Goren's training detachments for some officers. Maybe; he'd have to think about it.

He didn't know what to do about the personnel problem, but Mordecai Peled had always gone by the simple rule of if you didn't know what to do next, figure out what to do now.

Establishing and clearing a defensive perimeter was easy and clean, and besides, Cohen could use the practice of moving a company, even a platoon-sized company, through the slimy woods. There was every indication that that would come in handy.

This was supposed to be a simple cadre and command job: finish the training of a division made of green recruits and recycled officers and noncoms—mostly misfits who had burned out in the line. The senior staff—battalion-level staff and up—would take that division into the field for ten days of combat and then turn it all over to their Casa deputies.

It still could be a cadre and command job, but Peled had a suspicion about that. He hadn't liked the look in Shimon's eye. Shimon didn't keep Mordecai Peled around as chief of staff because he needed a buffer between himself and his top officers; Shimon wanted a spare combat commander handy, somebody whose mind as well as his reflexes could function when it all hit the fan.

And, maybe, who could supervise the cleanup afterward.

Mordecai Peled sighed, then returned to work, under the watchful gaze of the two Distacamento Fedeltà onlookers.

The next body was clearly dead; the right foot was blown clear off, and it had bled out. He chalked an x on it and moved on.

One of the unchalked Freiheimer bodies wasn't visibly injured enough, although it was lying face down and it had soiled itself. Probably dead—the only thing more amazing than how much punishment a human body could take without dying was how little damage could kill—but nobody under Peled's command had ever been killed by a supposedly dead man. Seeing to that wasn't a particularly ugly job, not compared with what you sometimes had to do, but it was disagreeable enough that Peled didn't want to delegate it, not when he could do it himself.

He thumbed his Barak back to single-shot and mechanically raised it to his shoulder. The front sight ring had broken loose during the fight, but the body was only two meters away; even without working sights, he should be able to put a bullet in a spine at that distance.

"Haifa Twenty to All Hands," he said on All Hands One, override mode. "Barak rifle, firing one."

He squeezed the trigger, and was rewarded by a jerk, a bang and a gout of flying flesh and gore. But just to the right of the spine, dammit.

You're getting old, old man.
Couldn't even kill a dead man right.

Still, while the hole was bloody, it wasn't bleeding. There was no heart pumping; Peled had just killed another dead man.

He thumbed his rifle back to safe and handed it to his clerk/driver/bodyguard, who slung it over his own shoulder. He was still able to work his stylo and notebook, although he did look a bit hunched over.

Peled pulled on his blood-spattered field gloves as he knelt at the corpse's side. He drew his knife. "White male, brown-haired, apparently," he said, slashing down at a hunk of hair, then examining the roots carefully as he laid the scalp open to white bone. "True dark." One of the others had had dyed hair.

He slashed off the uniform shirt and stuffed it into the sample bag at the left side of his waist. The shirt looked like a real Casa uniform blouse. Maybe it was, and maybe it wasn't. Ditto for the undershirt. It was a normal Casa tee.

He chalked the corpse.

Ezer Laskov, the regimental S2, hadn't been on the commo net before, but he wasn't among the RHQ casualties, far as Peled knew. Maybe he was back on. Peled flipped the identity switch at his belt—making him Tel Aviv Ten, the regimental chief of staff again, and not Haifa Twenty, the First Battalion commander—and bulled into the RHQ freak.

"—and that's ten, repeat ten—"

"Tel Aviv Ten for Tel Aviv Two Twenty."

"Laskov. What is it, Mordecai?"

"Tel Aviv Ten. What's the standard issue Freiheim undershirt?" Most Metzadan Intelligence officers had eidetic memories, although Laskov's was only close.

"Err, that'll be A-shirts for three-season wear—ten or fifteen-weight—long shirts for winter. Polysil for officers, cotton for the enlisted."

"Tel Aviv Ten. Casa?"

"Cotton tees. I don't have manufacturer data."

"Tel Aviv Ten. Get it. I'll have some samples for you to compare."

"Fine. Now can I get—"

"Tel Aviv Ten. You
will
follow comm discipline, Two Twenty."

"Tel Aviv Two Twenty to Tel Aviv Ten. Aye, aye, roger and will cooperate on that, sir," Laskov said, his intonation carrying not a whiff of insubordinate irony.

"Tel Aviv Ten out."

Peled flicked his identity switch back to Battalion, and called up the company commanders. Everything was quiet. He slashed the shirt off and bagged it, too. Just as he thought. Real Casa shit. He—

Shimon's voice cut through the thought. "Ebi's on RHQ One for you. Too busy?"

It was a reprimand; Peled should have delegated somebody to monitor regimental freaks while he was doing battalion commander things. His own deputy would normally have done that for him, and while he hadn't picked out a deputy yet, that didn't excuse the lapse.

"Tel Aviv Ten. I'll get it."

There was a crackling in his phone. "Hebron Twenty for Tel Aviv Ten."

"Tel Aviv Ten."

"Hebron here." Chaim Goren—called "Ebi" by everyone, in a not-particularly-funny bilingual joke; he was barely one hundred sixty-five centimeters tall—sounded tense. But Ebi was always tense. "We're down; next shuttle is due in one-two-five minutes. Orders?"

Hebron was the administrative designation of the second group of men down—the Aggressor/Defender Company, the Special Training Group, and the third Troop Training Detachment.

It had been just an administrative designation, until now.

"Tel Aviv Ten," Peled said. "Hebron—you are now Second Battalion; go operational now, and when we're done, call up Bar Yosef and Laskov for briefings."

"Hebron. Got it. Hang on." There was a click, but Goren was back in about five seconds, less time by at least ten minutes than it would have taken Peled to issue even the preliminary orders to turn an odd collection of units into a hastily operational battalion. Who was his deputy? Natan Horowitz? Was he
that
good? "Hebron Twenty. We're operational in five-zero minutes, but I've got one company up now."

"Your Ag/Def detachment?"

"Yeah. You need relief?"

"Tel Aviv Ten. Negative." But exactly the right question; this was the sort of thing Goren was good at, and Ebi wouldn't need more than a hint. "Yossi Bernstein is taking care of your transport; he's going to arrange a full escort—and you ride in APCs, not buses. Have Laskov fill you in on the situation, then call up Bernstein. It won't be there for a few hours, at least, but in any case you wait until Third Bat's down, and you—that's both battalions—stay operational for the trip to Camp Ramorino. You're senior; you take command."

"Hebron. Understood. Any idea of how soon we can expect to move?"

"Tel Aviv Ten. I told you, we're working on it." What the hell did Goren expect? A bus schedule?

"Hebron. I don't like things so up in the air; what say I assume we're going to throw up a quick biv just this side of the fence and you come get us in the morning?"

The Commerce Department busies wouldn't like that, but they weren't likely to make a big fuss about it; there was room on the reservation for a dozen battalions to camp.

Peled pulled his maps out of his chestpack and found the one covering the TW reservation. "Tel Aviv Ten. Tentatively, sounds good; I'll check with Shimon. Coordinate with the local CD Inspector's office; Map Gimel One, Hex Oh Eight Two Three. I'll see about getting rats out to you. Anything more?"

"Not to worry—I'll send Meyer Kaplan out to the Commerce Department company store. I've got some tweecie vouchers."

"Tel Aviv Ten. Fine. Out?"

"Out."

That would do, for a start. Maybe it was locking the barn after the horse was stolen, sure, but damned if Mordecai Peled was going to let any more of his brothers and cousins die administrative, not here. Maybe the locals didn't like foreign troops going operational this far behind the front lines, and maybe that was in the contract, but Peled would be perfectly happy to explain to even a TW observer why he should overlook the violation: he'd stick the observer's ass in the front seat of a bus going from the port to Camp Ramorino.

"Mordecai," Shimon said over their private channel. "If you're done playing soldier, I've got some work for you. Minor problem of prisoner custody. Need a light touch."

Not too fucking light. He clapped his hands together to get the attention of the soldiers in the clearing. An improvised five-squad commando was about right. He pointed out five squad leaders one by one, spread and closed his fingers, then pumped his arm up and down.

By squads, form on me, it said.

He reclaimed his rifle from his clerk and led his commando back up the slope, the butt of his rifle braced against his hip, like a trapshooter out for a few clay pigeons. His finger was away from the trigger, but the safety was off.

Shimon was supervising the final loading of the last of the wounded under the watchful eye of the rest of the Casa DF squad.

A platoon of Casa regulars stood watch a couple of hundred meters down the road at either end of what had been an ambush, but was now a roadblock.

There were a lot of white knuckles among the neatly uniformed Casas, as they looked over the somewhat scraggly Metzadans.

Hey, c'mon, boys, haven't you seen combat soldiers before?
Actually, it was possible that they hadn't, not soldiers with fresh blood on their hands. They all made Peled's hands itch—the Casas were wearing the same kind, the same shade of uniforms as the Freiheimer attackers had.

The line of halted trucks and buses was up to about half a dozen on either side, watched over by twin merkavot riding low on their air cushions. Despite their Hebrew name, the merkavot were of local manufacture from local plans—the name had caught on here, too—but each of the lightly armed air-cushion vehicles had a Metzadan gunner in the lefthand seat.

"Tel Aviv Ten for Haifa C Twenty," he said into his microphone, even though Reuven Zucker was only thirty or so meters away. "You're sure that this is it?"

"Haifa C Twenty. Affirmative. Last of the criticals." Zucker didn't waste words as he and a junior medician helped Private Yonaton Shapir onto the helo. Shapir didn't look too bad—his left eye and right hand were heavily bandaged, but he held onto his own assault rifle and ammo kit, and accepted help with his pack reluctantly.