“There is no contact, General. The reconnaissance patrol from West Squadron did not even make its first scheduled radio call. Also, our agent at Point Sallatouk reported automatic weapons fire off the coast and the sighting of a boat on fire. We must assume the patrol is lost.”
Belewa nodded slowly. “It is as I said, Sako. We do have a leopard to deal with.”
The Premier General’s personal operations center took up a double-room suite on the same floor as his office and living quarters, the civilian furnishings stripped away and replaced by the functional starkness of a military field headquarters. With its map boards and ranks of field telephones, it lacked the computerized sophistication of a First World command facility. However, it was adequate for Belewa’s needs. The focused efficiency of the half-dozen handpicked personnel staffing it made up for any technological failing.
“Has intelligence finished debriefing the soldiers who escaped from the boat hides?” Belewa inquired, grimly moving on to the next point in the morning’s briefing.
“They have, General. Our long-range patrols recovered three survivors. In all instances they report essentially the same thing. An assault force infiltrated each hide site, apparently after a careful reconnoitering. The attackers issued a challenge, ordering the garrison personnel to surrender. If resistance was offered, the attackers returned an overwhelming volume of fire.”
“And do we have a positive identification of these attackers?”
“Yes, sir.” Brigadier Atiba paused for a moment to take a swallow of bitter tea from a canteen cup. “United States Marines. They identified themselves when they made their challenge.”
“Hmm.” Belewa drank slowly from his own cup. “So we have American troops on the ground in Guinea. What does their press have to say about that?”
“The Strategic Intelligence Bureau has monitored a press release from the White House concerning the operation, proclaiming it a victory in President Childress’s African policies. There has been little reaction noted on CNN and TBN. As UNAFIN and Guinea are of small concern to the majority of the American public and as the operation was a success with no casualties listed, the incident is being treated as a nonstory by most of the American media.”
Belewa’s only response was to take another sip from his cup. His eyes, however, were cold and dark and focused on something far away.
“What is the status on our long-range patrols? How badly is the loss of the hides affecting our deep-penetration operations?”
“Very badly, sir.” Atiba led the General over to a large scale wall map of Guinea, well spiked with colored pins. “We have eight long-range patrols operating in the coastal areas between Conakry and the border of Guinea-Bissau. They relied on our gunboats for resupply as well as for insertion and extraction. With the hides destroyed, they have been cut off inside enemy territory.”
“Do we still have radio contact with them?”
“Yes, General.”
“Then bring them home, Sako. Order them to cease operations and walk out.”
Atiba frowned. “That will effectively end all of our operations in western Guinea.”
“I am quite aware of that. It gives Guinea a breathing space I am not happy about their having. Unfortunately, we have no choice. Starving soldiers don’t fight well. To push the campaign in western Guinea any further right now would only cost us good men and hand our enemies another cheap victory. We will pull back until we can get a new supply line established.”
“And when will that be, General?” Atiba demanded in frustration.
Belewa glanced at his chief of staff, holding a level gaze until the younger officer looked away flustered. “Sooner than you might think, Brigadier,” Belewa said quietly. “And sooner,” he gestured at the wall map with his cup, “than they might think.”
Belewa drained off the last of his tea and set the metal cup on the corner of a field desk. “All right,” he said, straightening. “We are going to weave ourselves a net, Sako. A net to catch a sea leopard in. I want the American coastal patrols kept under constant observation. I want to know how they are operating. I want to know their patrol patterns and strength levels, and I want to know about any changes that occur within them. Arrange for a joint conference with both the commander of the Military Intelligence Section and the director of the Strategic Intelligence Bureau on this matter. Bring the Chief of Naval Operations in on this as well.
“Also have Strategic Intelligence use their Internet access to pull in everything available on Captain Amanda Garrett of the United States Navy.” The Premier General smiled grimly. “We must learn about our leopard. What she eats. When she sleeps. What she thinks and what she fears. Then, old friend, we shall see.”
Mobile Offshore Base, Floater 1 0826 Hours, Zone Time; June 12, 2007
“Operations, this is Captain Garrett. I’m in quarters if you need me.”
She dropped the phone back into its cradle. It had been a long … she couldn’t call it a day, because this particular cycle of work and wakefulness had started well before the previous evening’s nightfall. “Long” would just have to do.
Closing the blinds and turning up the air conditioner, she laid out a fresh set of khakis and underwear where they could be grabbed in a hurry. Then she stumbled into the cramped bathroom, peeling off her current stale and sweat-sodden uniform as she went.
The water-conserving showerhead metered out its miserly three-minute dribble of tepid water. As the task group commander, Amanda could disregard water rationing if she so desired. However, she considered that a form of cheating on her crew and she generally resisted the temptation. Instead, she was coming to appreciate one of the odder customs she had observed aboard the Offshore Base.
Many women aboard the platform had taken to carrying a small plastic envelope of shampoo around in their shirt pockets. Whenever a heavy Gold Coast rain squall would roll over Floater 1, “Shampoo Call” would sound and all female hands not on duty would swarm out onto the deck, lathering up their hair to take advantage of the brief unlimited access to fresh water.
Wringing out her own red-brown-blond mop under the last few drops from the showerhead, Amanda decided that, captain’s dignity be damned, she’d best either take up the local custom or get a crew cut.
Without bothering to towel off, she collapsed bare on the bottom sheet of her cot, relishing the few moments of chill as the dampness evaporated from her skin. Burrowing into her pillow, she sought for sleep.
It was not easy to find. Too many lines of thought continued to swirl and tangle in her mind.
The essence of victory in warfare is attack. Putting it bluntly, when one is on the defensive, one is losing. And that was the situation she found herself in now, trapped in a holding pattern with the initiative in Belewa’s hands. It was all well and good to talk about blocking punches, but that in itself was a tacit acknowledgment of having to accept the punch in the first place.
Amanda was far from pleased with the concept. It meant deliberately holding people, her people, at risk. And all for the sake of a set of engagement rules worked up in the rarefied atmosphere of international diplomacy. Something that might look good crossing a State Department desk, but that had no connection with how things actually worked in a real-world combat theater.
She remembered listening to the stories told by some of her father’s old Navy comrades, officers who had served during the Vietnam conflict. They had been men who had lived through the warrior’s hell of being ordered to do it the wrong way, of being commanded to follow a flawed doctrine. Had they ever lain awake like this?
Damn damn damn! Amanda twisted over onto her back and stared at the ceiling. All right, then she snapped at herself, if you’re going to waste your sleep time on thinking, then think about something constructive. You can’t do anything about the R.O.E.s. You can’t do anything to stop Belewa from coming af
ter you in his own good time and on his terms. What you can do is to start planning for what happens afterward.
How do you manipulate the Union attack into a justification for a counterattack? And where do you hit? And most important, how can you hurt Belewa badly enough to alter the basic strategic and tactical situation in your favor?
More than forty-five minutes passed before Amanda Garrett smiled.
Rising from her cot, she padded across to her desk. Dropping into the chair, she lit off her personal computer and accessed the digital communications link, tapping in the sat code that would connect her with the ordnance section at Conakry Base. Ignoring the decided military incongruity of her nude state, she began to type.
FROM: CMDRUSNTACFORCES- MOB 1 AUTHENTICATOR SWEETWATER-TANG0-038
TO: CMDRUSNORDIV- CONAKRY
SUBJECT: ORDNANCE-SPECIAL OPERATIONS
REQUIRE TWO (2) ORDNANCE PACKAGES BE ASSEMBLED WITH ALL POSSIBLE SPEED FOR PG-AC-1. EACH PACKAGE TO CONSIST OF FULL LOADOUT (24 PODS-168 ROUNDS) OF 2.75 HYDRA ROCKET FOR EACH SQUADRON PG. ALL ROCKETS TO BE EQUIPPED WITH 17 POUND HEAVY BOMBARDMENT WARHEADS. ONE (l) ORDNANCE PACKAGE TO BE HELD AT CONAKRY BASE. THE SECOND TO BE HELD ABOARD MOB 1. ROCKETS ARE TO BE PODDED, PALLETIZED AND READY FOR IMMEDIATE, SAY AGAIN, IMMEDIATE FUSING AND LOADING ON CALL FROM CMDRUSNTACFORCES.
CAPT. AMANDA GARRETT, COMMANDING
Now she could sleep.
Hotel Camayenne,
Conakry, Guinea 1317 Hours, Zone Time;
June 26, 2007
As the U.N. military commitment had taken over Conakry’s largest airport, so had the diplomatic mission engulfed the city’s largest and, purely by happenstance, finest hotel. The Hotel Camayenne fronted on the western beach of the narrow urbanized peninsula from which it took its name. Besieged by both a struggling Third World economy and a burgeoning war, it struggled to maintain the pretensions of a top-class international hostelry.
Vice Admiral Elliot Macintyre, in-country once more to touch base with his theater commanders, spent his morning there in conference with UNAFIN’s civilian administrative staffers, a necessary but not necessarily rewarding task.
He found one consolation in the duty, however. Amanda Garrett took part in the same round of briefing sessions, bringing the U.N. personnel up to speed on the abrupt change of affairs along the Guinea coast. And as a final reward for his bureaucratic labors, he asked her to be his guest at lunch. He found himself extraordinarily pleased at the acceptance of his invitation.
Seated in the palm shade of the Camayenne’s outdoor restaurant, with the heat of the day held at bay by the trade winds angling in from the sea, their conversation drifted from professional topics to casual ones and back once more.
To Macintyre, it seemed as if Amanda had adapted well to both her new rank and her new environment. Her skin glowed in a golden contrast to the frost white of her tropic uniform, a restored sea tan replacing the yard-side pallor Macintyre had noted during his videoconference with her. Likewise her thick fall of brown-red hair was sun-streaking toward copper. There was something else different as well, beyond the mere physical. Something Macintyre couldn’t quite put his finger on. A focus, a surety … a contentment?
“So, speaking in generalities, what do you think of your new command so far?” he inquired as the busboy finished clearing away the meal dishes.
“I’m not sure yet,” Amanda replied, frowning lightly in thought.
While it is easy for a woman to be attractive when she smiles, it’s a far rarer thing to find one who can still be so when she frowns. Maclntyre’s late wife had possessed the knack. He found now that Amanda Garrett did as well.
“In many ways,” she continued, “I imagine Vietnam was rather like this in the early days.”
“That’s an ominous pronouncement if I’ve ever heard one.”
Amanda arched an eyebrow and took a sip of her sherry and soda. “I didn’t necessarily mean the strategic situation. I was referring more to the setting and the feel. The beleaguered ex-French colony. The handful of outsiders trying to make sense of things at the last second. The pockets of normalcy with an ugly little war just over the horizon.”
She nodded toward the hotel’s tennis courts, a mixed-doubles match in progress, and the glistening azure pool with its cadre of laughing and splashing swimmers.
The concertina wire of the security fences lay some distance beyond, partially concealed by the hotel landscaping.
Macintyre gave a grunt. “This is a little pocket of abnormality, actually. What’s happening out there in the jungle, that’s the real world.”
Amanda nodded at the irony. “True, it is very much a matter of perspective. I’ve been trying to gain a little more of that lately. I’ve been doing a lot of professional reading lately about brown-water naval operations during the Vietnam war, the Market Time and Game Warden patrols, that sort of thing. I daresay that’s where a degree of this mind-set comes from.”
“Did you catch Don Sheppard’s book Riverine?”
Amanda gave an animated nod. “Oh yes, excellent. Both as a military study and as a dam good read. Those men faced many of the same challenges and tactical situations off the coast of Vietnam that we are now with UNAFIN. I’m hoping to learn a bit about what works and what doesn’t.”
“Picked up anything good yet?”
“Um, yes. A great deal. In many ways, we won the coastal war off South Vietnam. However, given the strategic situation, that alone wasn’t an adequate enough victory to turn the overall tide of the conflict.”
Macintyre lifted the rye half of his own postmeal Shawn O’Farrell. “Do you think we can pull the win off here?”
“Speaking frankly, Admiral, I’m still not sure. Come back in another month, and I’ll let you know.”
Macintyre felt the corner of his mouth quirk up. “You’ve got a date.”
“Admiral Macintyre, good afternoon, sir.” Another naval officer in tropic whites paused at their table. Handsome in a lean and dark way, his voice carried a mild French accent and the uniform hat tucked under his arm a French navy cap badge.
Macintyre felt a sudden irrational surge of irritation, both at the intrusion and at the conventionalities he was required now to obey. Masking both, he rose to shake hands.
“Commander Trochard. It’s a pleasure to see you again. May I introduce Captain Amanda Garrett, my Tactical Action Group commander. Amanda, Commander Jacques Trochard, captain of the patrol corvette Fleurette.”
“Ah, Captain Garrett,” Trochard said jovially. “The legend at last!”
Amanda had risen to shake hands as well. Only, when Trochard’s fingers closed around hers, the French officer smiled and bowed over her hand in a deft, flowing move of Gallic grace, his lips not quite touching its back.
Maclntyre’s teeth creaked in his jaw.
If the Frenchman’s flamboyant gesture was an attempt to lift a moment of blushing disconcertment from Amanda, it failed. With a tilt of her head and a light smile, she accepted the bow as her due, a queen politely acknowledging the act of a lesser courtier.
“It is a pleasure to meet you in person, Captain Garrett,” the French officer murmured, straightening, “especially after our numerous telephone and radio conversations.”
“You’ve worked together already, then?” Macintyre inquired, he hoped, politely.
“In a way. Commander Trochard and I had a minor difficulty we had to deal with a short time ago.”
“Indeed, Admiral,” Trochard added. “One of the crew of her Dinassaut sent my best torpedoman home with a broken jaw.”
“One which we both agreed he richly deserved.”
“After considerable discussion, yes.” Trochard threw his head back and laughed. “I will not make the politically incorrect error of saying that Captain Garrett is a formidable opponent for a woman. Rather, I will say that
she is a formidable opponent and a woman.”
“You’re learning, Commander,” she murmured.
Following that exchange, Macintyre found that he didn’t mind offering the French Corvette commander a seat quite so much.
“For a moment only, Admiral,” he accepted, sinking into the chair. “Duty calls in a shrill unpleasant voice, and I am scheduled to fly back to the Fleurette shortly.”
“As with me,” Amanda said. “One of my seafighters is making a patrol turnaround at Conakry this afternoon, and I’ll be going out with her.”
“Captain Garrett and I were just discussing the situation here in theater,” Macintyre said, “comparing it with the late and unlamented conflict in Southeast Asia. You’ve worked these waters for a number of years, Commander. Do you see any parallels?”
“Only one.” Trochard paused for a moment to order a glass of white wine. “That being that both are lost causes,” he concluded.
“You believe so, Commander?” Amanda challenged quietly. “I’m not quite ready to admit that yet.”
“That, my good Captain, is because you are newly come here and the sense of futility has yet to settle in.… And do not frown at me so, for I love la belle Afrique and I hope to come here to live after I retire. Granted a ‘here’ remains.”
Trochard’s drink arrived. Taking up the slender, stemmed glass, he leaned back in his chair. “Let me tell you of Africa, my friends, and of what we have done to her. All of you Americans are new here. We French, however, have been here a long time. We came with the other Europeans, back when this continent was an honest wilderness and each black tribe and kingdom held what land it could by tradition and by the strength of its spears. It was a system that worked for them, and they were content.
“We Europeans, however, had different ideas. We divided Africa up like a pie, each colonial power taking its own juicy slice. We drew lines on maps, governing those lines with colonial administrators and enforcing them with garrison bayonets. We did not care that our lines had arbitrarily been drawn across tribal territories or cultural and language groupings. Our system worked for us, and we were content.
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