Tactics of Mistake

by Gordon R. Dickson

  “Well… of course there’s plenty of solid buildings there in the warehouse district for people to climb into,” said Wefer. “I just don’t want to get the Navy billed for flood damage—”

  “It won’t be,” said Cletus. “I’m still under General Traynor’s direct orders as commander here. I’ll take the responsibility.”

  Wefer peered at Cletus in the growing light, shook his head and whistled admiringly. “We’ll get right at it then,” he said. You ought to have your fathom of water up above the city there in about four hours.”

  “Good,” said Cletus. He stepped into the elevator sling and waved to the transport ship to pull him back in. “Good luck.”

  “Good luck to you and your Dorsais!” Wefer replied. “You’ll need it more than we do. We’re just going to be doing our daily jobs.”

  Once back inside the transport, Cletus ordered it to swing back up to within line of sight of Two Rivers itself. The sky was lightening rapidly now, and the individual buildings in Two Rivers were easily picked out. Cletus had a coherent light beam trained on the curved reception mirror on the roof of the warehouse building that the Dorsais had taken over as their Two River HQ during the week of jump practice. He sent a call down the light beam and got an immediate answer from Eachan.

  “Colonel?” Eachan’s voice was distant, clipped and unruffled. “Been expecting to hear from you. I haven’t had any reports from my scouts out in the jungle for better than three hours now. They’re all either captured or lying low. But I gather the Neulanders are clustered in both river valleys above town. I’ve got all strong points here manned and ready.”

  “Fine, Colonel,” said Cletus. “I just wanted to tell you to expect to get your feet wet. You might also warn the civilians in town to gather in the higher buildings of the warehouse district above the second floor.”

  “Oh? Thunderstorm coming?”

  “We’re not that lucky, I’m afraid,” said Cletus. A good heavy rainstorm would have been all to the advantage of the well-trained Dorsai, both the jump troops and those in fixed positions in the city. “The weather forecast is for hot and clear. But the river’s going to rise. I’m told you’ll have four to six feet of water in the streets there.”

  “I see. I’ll take care of it—with the troops and civilians too—” Eachan broke off. “Are we getting reinforcements here in the town?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t spare you any,” Cletus said. “But with luck, it’ll be over one way or the other before the Neulanders are really on top of you. Do the best you can with the men you have.”

  “Understood,” said Eachan. “That’s all from this end then, Colonel.”

  “That’s all from my end for the moment, too, Colonel,” replied Cletus. “Good luck.”

  He broke the light-beam contact and ordered the transport ship back to Bakhalla for a new load of jump troops. Now that it was open daylight over Two Rivers and there was no more secrecy to be gained by operating at low altitudes in the shadows below the peaks above the town, Cletus accompanied the next wave of jump troops riding in a courier craft, which he set to circling above the reach of hand-weapon fire from the ground.

  The second wave of Dorsai troops to go down on their jump belts were harassed, but ineffectively so, by angled fire from the Neulander troops downriver.

  “Good enough,” commented Marc Dodds, who had accompanied Cletus in the courier ship, leaving Major David Ap Morgan to take charge of getting off the last two remaining waves and accompanying the last as its commanding officer. “They’ll have aircraft hitting our next wave, though. I don’t know why they haven’t had Neulander ships in the air over here before now.”

  “Another instance of the too imaginative mind,” said Cletus. Marc glanced at him inquiringly, and Cletus went on to explain. “I was telling Eachan last night that too much subtlety could lead to mistakes. The Neulanders know that the Alliance has supplied the Exotics with many more and better air-combat craft than the Coalition supplied them. So automatically they’ve drawn the wrong conclusion. They think our lack of air cover is only apparent—bait to trap them into putting their own ships up so our superior air power can knock them down. Also, they know that only the Dorsais were jump-training, and they’ll be suspecting that the Dorsais are the only ones who’re being sent against them for that reason. They know they outnumber us two or three to one on the ground, which would tend to make them complacent.”

  The third wave came in and jumped to the jungle below. True to Cletus’ assessment of the situation, there was no appearance of Neuland aircraft to oppose the jump. Nor was there with the fourth and final wave. With all four waves of Dorsai jump troops now down on the ground, the pattern of Cletus’ battle plan began to make itself felt. He had set his Dorsais down in the jungle on the top of the bluffs on either side of both rivers upstream from the concentration of Neulander troops. Now, spread out in skirmish lines, the Dorsais began to open up on the rear of the Neulander troops. The Neulanders fought back, but withdrew steadily, as their force began to move down into the river valleys toward the town. They showed no tendency to turn and fight and no panic at being caught by small-arms fire from their rear. Up in their circling aircraft, Cletus and Marc kept in touch with their units on the ground by line-of-sight light-beam voice transmission.

  “We aren’t even slowing them down,” said Marc, his mouth a straight line as he observed the scene below in the multiple reconnaissance screens set up before them.

  “They’ll be slowed up later,” replied Cletus.

  He was very busy plotting the movements of the running battle below on the reconnaissance screen, even as he issued a steady stream of orders to individual small units of the Dorsai troops.

  Marc fell silent and turned back to examining the situation on the reconnaissance screens as it was developing under the impetus of Cletus’s orders. Before him the two main elements of the Neulander forces were like large fat caterpillars crawling down the inner edge of the valley troughs of the two rivers, converging as the rivers converged toward the single point that was the town of Two Rivers. Behind, and inland from the rivers, the Dorsai troops, like thin lines of tiny ants, assailed these two caterpillars from the rear and the inland sides. Not that all this was visible to the naked eye below the thick screen of jungle cover. But the instruments and Cletus’s plotting on the chart revealed it clearly. Under attack the caterpillars humped their rearward ends closer toward their front, bunching up under the attacks of the ants, but otherwise were undisturbed in their progress.

  Meanwhile, Cletus was extending his pursuing Dorsai troops forward along the inland side of each enemy force until the farthest extended units were almost level with the foremost troops of the enemy units they harassed. Occasionally they dented the Neulander lines they faced. But in case of trouble the Neulanders merely withdrew over the edge of the steeply sloping bluff and fought the Dorsai back over, what was in effect, a natural parapet. Not merely that, but more and more their forward-moving units were dropping below the edge of the bluff with a skirmish line along its edge to protect their march—so that fully 80 per cent of the enemy force was beyond the reach of the Dorsai weapons in any case.

  Cletus broke off abruptly from his work on the screens and turned to Marc.

  “They’re less than two miles from the upper edge of the town,” he said. “I want you to take over here and keep those Neulander forces contained all along their lines. Make them get down below the bluff and stay there, but don’t expose men any more than you have to. Contain them, but hold your troops back until you get word from me.”

  “Where’re you going, sir?” Marc asked, frowning.

  “Down,” said Cletus, tersely. He reached for one of the extra jump belts with which the aircraft was supplied and began strapping it on. “Put half a company of men on each river over on their jump belts and send them down the opposite side. They’re to fire back across the river into any exposed elements of the enemy as they go, but they are not to stop to do
it. They’re to keep traveling fast until they rendezvous with me down here.”

  He turned and tapped with his fingernail on the bend in the river below the town beyond which Wefer and his three Mark V’s were at work. “How soon do you estimate they can meet me down there?” he asked.

  “With luck, an hour,” answered Marc. “What’re you planning to do, sir—if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “I’m going to try to make it look as though we’ve got reinforcements into that town,” Cletus said. He turned and called up to the pilot in the front of the reconnaissance ship. “Cease circling. Take me down to just beyond the bend in the main river there—point H29 and R7 on the grid.”

  The aircraft wheeled away from its post above the battle and began to circle down toward the river bend. Cletus moved over to the emergency escape hatch and put his hand on the eject button. Marc followed him.

  “Sir,” he said, “if you haven’t used a jump belt in a long time—”

  “I know,” Cletus interrupted him cheerfully, “it’s a trick to keep your feet down and your head up, particularly when you’re coming in for a landing. Don’t worry—” He turned his head to shout to the pilot up front. “That patch of jungle just inside the bend of the river. Call ‘Jump‘ for me.”

  “Yes, sir,” the pilot called back. There was a moment’s pause and then he shouted, “Jump.” “Jump,” echoed Cletus.

  He punched the eject button. The emergency door flipped open before him and the section of decking beneath his feet flipped him abruptly clear of the aircraft. He found himself falling toward the tops of the jungle treetops, six hundred feet below.

  He clutched the hand control in the center of the belt at his waist, and the twin jets angling out from his shoulder tank flared thunderously, checking him in midair with a wrench that left him feeling as though his back had been broken. For a moment, before he could catch his breath, he actually began to rise. Then he throttled back to a slow fall and began the struggle to keep himself in vertical position with his feet under him.

  He was not so much falling as sliding down at a steep angle into the jungle below. He made an effort to slow the rate of his fall, but the sensitive, tricky reactions of the jump belt sent him immediately into a climb again. Hastily, he returned the throttle to its first, instinctive fall-setting.

  He was very near the tops of the taller trees now, and it would be necessary to pick his way between them so as not to be brained by a branch in passing or land in one of the deadly, dagger-like thorn bushes. Careful not to twist the throttle grip in the process, he shifted the control handle slightly this way and that to determine the safe limits of a change of direction. His first attempt very nearly sent his feet swinging into the air, but he checked the swing and after a moment got himself back into a line of upright descent. There was a patch of relatively clear jungle down to his right. Gingerly he inched the control handle over and was relieved as his airy slide altered toward the patch. Then, abruptly, he was among and below the treetops.

  The ground was rushing at him. The tall, jagged stump of a lightning-blasted tree, which he had not seen earlier because it was partly covered with creepers blending in with the green of the ground cover, seemed to leap upward at him like a spear.

  Desperately he jammed the handle over. The jets bucked. He went into a spin, slammed at an angle into the tree stump and smashed against the ground. A wave of blackness took him under.

  15.

  When he came to—and it may have been only seconds later, he was lying twisted on the ground with his bad knee bent under him. His head was ringing, but, otherwise, he did not feel bad. Shakily he sat up and, using both hands, gently began to straighten out his bum leg. Then there was pain, mounting and threatening unconsciousness.

  He fought the unconsciousness off. Slowly it receded. He leaned back, panting against the tree trunk, to catch his breath and use his autocontrol techniques. Gradually the pain in his knee faded, and his breathing calmed. His heartbeat slowed. He concentrated on relaxing the whole structure of his body and isolating the damaged knee. After a little while, the familiar floating sensation of detachment came to him. He leaned forward and gently straightened the knee, pulled up the pants leg covering it and examined it.

  It was beginning to swell, but beyond that his exploring fingers could not tell him what serious damage had been done it this time. He could sense the pain like a distant pressure off behind the wall of his detachment. Taking hold of the tree trunk and resting all his weight on his other foot, he slowly pulled himself to his feet.

  Once on his feet he gingerly tried putting a little of his weight on that leg. It supported him, but there was a weakness about it that was ominous.

  For a moment he considered using the jump belt to lift himself into the air once more, over the treetops and down to the river. But after a second, he dismissed the idea. He could not risk another hard landing on that knee, and coming down in the river with as much current as there was now was also impractical. He might have to swim, and swimming might put the knee completely beyond use.

  He unbuckled the jump belt and let it fall. Relieved of its weight, he hopped on his good foot to a nearby sapling about two inches in diameter. Drawing his sidearm, he shot the sapling’s trunk through some six feet above the ground, and again at ground level. Stripping off a few twigs from the length of wood this provided left him with a rough staff on which he could lean. With the help of the staff he began hobbling toward the river’s edge. He finally reached the bank of the gray, flowing water. He took the body phone from his belt, set it for transmission limited to a hundred yards and called Wefer on the Navy wavelength.

  Wefer answered, and a few minutes later one of the Mark V’s poked its massive, bladed snout out of the water ten yards in front of him.

  “What now?” asked Wefer, after Cletus had been assisted aboard and down into the control room of the Mark V. Cletus leaned back in the chair they had given him and stretched out his bad leg carefully.

  “I’m having a company of men, half on each side of the river, meet us here in about”—he broke off to look at his watch—“thirty minutes or so from now. I want one of your Mark V‘s to take them, a platoon at a time, underwater up to the downriver end of the town. Can you spare one of your machines? How’s the water level coming, by the way?”

  “Coming fine,” answered Wefer. “Those platoons of yours are going to find it knee-deep in the lower end of town by the time they get there. Give us another hour, and with only two machines I’ll have the river as deep as you want it. So there’s no problem about detaching one of the Mark V’s for ferry purposes.”

  “Fine,” said Cletus.

  He rode into the town with the last Mark V load of the ferried Dorsais. As Wefer had predicted, the water was knee-deep in the streets near the downriver end of the town. Eachan Khan met him as he limped into the command room of the Dorsai HQ in Two Rivers.

  “Sit down, Colonel,” said Eachan, guiding Cletus into a chair facing the large plotting screen. “What’s happening to the river? We’ve had to herd all the civilians into the tallest buildings.”

  “I’ve got Wefer Linet and some of those submarine dozers of his working downstream to raise the river level,” answered Cletus. “I’ll give you the details later. Right now, how are things with you here?”

  “Nothing but some long-range sniping from the forward Neulander scouts, so far,” said Eachan, coolly. “Those sandbagged strong points of yours were a fine idea. The men will be dry and comfortable inside them while the Neulanders will be slogging through ankle-deep water to get to them.”

  “We may have to get out in the water and do a little slogging ourselves,” said Cletus. “I’ve brought you nearly two hundred extra men. With these added to what you’ve got, do you think you could mount an attack?”

  Eachan’s face had never inclined to any large changes of expression, but the stare he gave Cletus now was as close to visible emotion as Cletus had seen him go.

&
nbsp; “Attack?” he echoed. “Two and a half—three companies—at most, against six or eight battalions?”

  Cletus shook his head. “I said mount an attack. Not carry one through,” he replied. “All I want to do is sting those two Neulander fronts enough so that they’ll pause to bring up more men before starting to go forward against us again. Do you think we can do that much?”

  “Hmm.” Eachan fingered his mustache. “Something like that… yes, quite possible, I’d think.”

  “Good,” said Cletus. “How can you get me through, preferably with picture as well as voice, to Marc Dodds?”

  “We’re on open channel.” Eachan answered. He stepped across the room and returned with a field phone.

  “This is Colonel Khan,” he said into it. “Colonel Grahame wishes to speak with Colonel Dodds.”

  He passed the phone to Cletus. As Cletus’s hands closed about it, the vision screen in the phone’s stem lit up with the image of Marc’s face, the plotting screen of the aircraft behind him. “Sir?” Marc gazed at Cletus. “You’re in Bakhalla?”

  “That’s right,” Cletus answered. “And so’s that company of men I had you send to meet me at the bend of the main river. Give me a view of the board behind you there, will you?”

  Marc moved aside, and the plotting screen behind him seemed to expand to fill the full screen of the phone. Details were too small to pick out, but Cletus could see that the two main bodies of Neuland troops were just beginning to join together on the sandy plain that began where the river bluffs on adjacent banks of the converging Blue and Whey rivers finally joined and ended in a sloping V-pointed bluff above the town. Behind the forward scouts, the advancing main line of the Neulanders was less than half a mile from the forward Dorsai strongpoints defending the town. Those strongpoints and the defending Dorsais would be firing into the enemy at long range, even now.