Sergeant Bai Chiang was not especially happy.
Yes, the defense of Martinsicuro had been much easier than he thought it would be. The Americans had barely made their presence known, and the ELA troops had only launched one real attack, which the defenders had easily beaten off, before his men received the evacuation order.
Yes, he and his men had largely been spared from doing any fighting during the long march—no one called it a "retreat," since they'd usually had to attack enemy forces in order to get somewhere—from Dubrovnik to Tehran, aside from a few ambushes here and there.
Yes, the forces that had managed to evacuate the Iberian peninsula had been consolidated into a reinforced brigade, with the various battalions based around grouping soldiers from units that were close to one another, which meant that he at least knew of, if not knew, most of the officers and noncoms in the battalion with him.
Yes, as a result, the consolidated units were actually coordinating semi-decently, which was not really normal for slapped-together units..
But he did not think that any of this made them good material to be the tip of the lance between Tehran and Ashgabat.
They had precious little heavy equipment, for one thing—the whole force, informally referred to as the "Iberian Dragons," had only a platoon of Overlords, and those only because their commander had committed several acts of insubordination to get them onto the evacuation flights from Barcelona and the ships from Pescara.
For another, two of the four combat battalions were comprised of men whose only commonality was that they were in the same division. He wouldn't want them on his flank unless they were dug-in and fighting the ELA. Only his battalion, which was still commanded by Major Wu, and was almost entirely comprised of men from the same brigade, and the fourth battalion, which was in the much situation, were ready for offensive action.
And now, they were going to take on Juhziz's Demo Traps, troops and vehicles, the latter two of which were all rigged to explode, fight their way through, and keep the highway usable. The only good thing about this was that, apparently, Juhziz refused to use anthrax. Claimed it was a perversion of the gift of life given by Allah or something, Bai hadn't really been paying attention at that point in the briefing.
But as his squad trundled down the highway in their Battle Crawler, he found himself fervently hoping that the opposition would be minimal. They'd crossed the Turkmenistani border about fifteen minutes ago, or so the driver had said, and he wondered if perhaps…
An explosion rocked the APC back slightly, bullets began to hit the sides, and that particular dream of his died as he yelled at his men to "Move!"
The doors slammed open, and within five seconds everyone was out and on the side of the road, trying to find some scrap of cover as Juhziz's men sprayed the convoy with bullets.
He looked around for the source of the fire, trying to keep his head low as rounds zipped by his head. He heard a strangled cry as Private Gao took a hit somewhere, and he hoped that it wasn't—there!
He nestled his rocket launcher into his shoulder and fired at the angle of the stone wall surrounding an orchard less than a hundred meters away from the road.
Stones, weapons, and men went flying, and the volume of fire coming towards his squad dropped noticeably.
He snorted. Idiots. You never packed in like that, not on this kind of battlefield.
Then a Gatling Tank began to fire over their heads towards where the rest of the fire was coming from, and he saw their chance.
"Squad, to the stone wall! By sections, go!"
They went, and while they were still a little ragged it was still a creditable performance. They arrived just in time to kill some of the GLA men who had recovered enough to try and shoot them, and he took a moment to decide what to do next.
He looked over at the rocky area the Gatling tank was firing at. That would keep Juhziz's men down, but they'd just wait the thing out. No, his men would need to attack, unless one of the other squads was available.
He looked around. They all seemed busy.
"Squad, to those rocks. Fire and maneuver. On me, move!"
As long as there wasn't a Demo Trap, he thought as he jumped the wall, his men should be fine.
Just after the second section's third bound, the GLA soldiers realized that they were about to be run out of position, and started moving in his men's direction.
Private Chang Guizhou, who had just gone to ground, and was the other Tank Hunter in the squad, came to one knee, fired, and so obviously missed that Bai planned to chew him a new—
The rocket slammed into a pillar of rock, which fell forward in a cloud of dust, partially on the GLA men, and Bai made a mental note to tell him that had been a smart move.
"Charge!" he yelled, and his men hurtled forward, including Chang. By the time the dust cleared, they were on the GLA position, and his men had bayonets and better training than their opponents.
It didn't take long at all to clear it out, and by the time they were done, the firing had stopped. As he led his men back to the road, he noticed that there were more GLA bodies and wrecks than Chinese, and he hoped that was an omen for the future.
It was still going to be a long way to Ashgabat.
Germain was not especially happy, largely because he was extremely bored.
The truth was that while he'd been to a lot of exotic places, he usually hadn't seen much of them—usually, he was sniping people, getting briefed or debriefed, training, or sleeping. Istanbul had been the exception rather than the rule.
Baku was the rule, even more so than usual. The Azeris were apparently playing all ends against the middle, the only exception being the GLA, which they feared and despised. What this meant was that while they were willing to host the strike force going after Juhziz, they were also determined to keep that fact as hidden as possible.
Which was why they were all crammed into a warehouse complex on the outskirts of the capitol city, waiting for the word to go.
The only good thing about it was that they were at least getting updates about the progress the Chinese had made, which gave them a better idea of when they would finally move.
However, the news was not especially encouraging on that front. Juhziz had pulled out of Iran, and the IRGC forces that hadn't been pulled into the Kermanshah cauldron had retreated from the road between Tehran and Turkmenistan.
As a result, the Chinese had faced little opposition until they crossed the border. Right now, though, they were apparently dealing with ambush after ambush, and their progress had slowed to a crawl.
All of which meant that they would probably be stuck here for at least another week, he thought moodily as he looked at the ceiling while trying to ignore the poker game going on ten feet away.
"Attention on deck!" he heard someone yell, and he scrambled to his feet as Colonel Burton entered the building.
"As you were," the old soldier said, "I have news. We're not the only ones going after Juhziz. Intel spotted some troops setting up ten miles away from his base yesterday, but we don't know who they are. Intel thinks it's the Chinese, but if it were I think they'd have attacked was soon as they found him." He looked around the room. "This does not change the mission, it just adds in something new we have to work around. Briefing at 2000. Dismissed."
As Burton left, Germain found himself hoping that this new force, whoever they were, wouldn't get to Juhziz before they did. He really didn't want to have spent all this time waiting for nothing.
He decided to join the poker game. At least that would give him something to do.
Luo Yu had no complaints about his present position. The division was third in the line of march, behind the two divisions put together from the survivors of the divisions from northern and western Europe. Let them deal with the GLA.
The past two weeks had been…interesting. Once his brigade had reorganized, General Li had managed to relieve what was left of the lead brigade of the division and the few fragments of the division in front of them that had managed to make it to their positions. Then, General Song had withdrawn the division to a good position just north of Qom and dug in. The Iranians had launched a few probing attacks, but they'd been badly bloodied each time. They'd left a screening force then, and pulled the rest of their men south to face Wu. That had turned out to be a mistake.
The moment General Song realized that Wu's offensive would succeed, he'd launched his own attack, with Yu's battalion in the lead.
The Iranians had gone down like millet before the sickle, and they'd secured Qom within two hours. When the lead elements of Wu's forces had arrived, there had been much rejoicing, and the Iranians in Kermanshah had been confused enough that they didn't manage to attack until the rearguard division had almost reached Qom.
The slaughter had been utterly one-sided. The Iranians didn't know how to use Chinese equipment to its full effectiveness, three days was more than enough time to dig the tanks in and set up Bunkers and Gatling Turrets with interlocking fields of fire, and the IRGC had come straight up the road from Kermanshah.
Total Chinese casualties had been around five hundred men, two Overlords, ten Battlemasters, and three Gatling tanks. One of those Battlemasters had been from his battalion, and he wished it hadn't been.
The Iranians had lost at least ten times as many men, however, and almost all of what was left of the equipment they had captured. Intel thought they had maybe a company's worth left, with not an Overlord among them.
He wasn't expecting his men's next fight to be as easy, though, because he knew why Wu had put those rag-tag, fragile divisions up front, instead of the good ones.
The Russians and the Indians awaited them, and they had had weeks to prepare. If Wu botched the maneuvering and the planning, the Chinese would be in the same position as the Iranians had been, just with heavier tanks and air support. They'd break through, but the cost would be high.
Then again, even if Wu did everything right, the cost would still be high, just not as high.
Right now, however, that was not his problem, he thought as he looked around at the desert and kept an eye and ear on the state of his battalion and another of each on the terrain around him.
His job was to get his battalion there intact, and then do his part for whatever plan Wu came up with.
He smiled. That was fine with him. Wu would get them home.
Wu would get them home.
To General Leang, the thought was utterly terrifying.
Worse, not only would he get them home, he would almost certainly get them home as organized, formed units, not fragmented remnants trying to escape their pursuers. Then, to complete the ascendancy, he would do so after defeating the IRGC, which had inflicted the second-worst military defeat China had suffered in decades—the worst, of course, being that inflicted by the League—and Russia and India, which had been China's rivals far longer than the Americans had.
That would be what would seal her fate if she didn't manage to play her cards well. If she did play them well, though, she could turn the honor and prestige his victories would bring about on Wu instead of her?
She paused for a moment. Did she want to destroy him? Couldn't she just, say, get him assigned to some prestigious but meaningless post, like the Taiwan garrison?
She shook her head. No. As long as he remained, the old men in the Politburo would see him as an alternative to her. He would replace her with no effort on his part at all—and that galled her more than all the rest.
Who should she start working on first?
Deng Jintao, she decided. Hu Xinping was panicky enough that starting with him would be counterproductive. Deng, however, was sober enough that if she managed to convince him, the rest of them would at least take the idea that Wu would try and use his victory as a springboard to take power seriously.
From there, it wouldn't be hard to plant a few bread crumbs for investigators to find. It might even be possible to get him to say something indiscreet about her and the Politburo-reports were that he had very carefully expressed reservations about Chinese policy in the puppet states and the Occupied Zone.
Yes, a little bit of that, and soon the general would be removed from the board. And, with the other three generals either dead or disgraced, there would be no one to supplant her until she wanted to retire. She needed to begin now, too. Her informants were telling her that the whispers were already beginning that perhaps she was not essential.
She picked up the phone and dialed a number. "May I speak with Secretary Deng, please?"
Black Lotus listened in on the conversation with a growing sense of disgust. Leang could have at least waited until Wu made it back to China before she started undermining his position with the Politburo.
This would not do. Fortunately, she had been gathering information on Leang for years, and so knew that she had certain contingencies in place.
She'd never felt the need to mention them to anyone-for one thing, they made excellent blackmail material if she ever needed it, and for another, she'd seen no reason to destroy one of the best military leaders China had had in decades.
She had, of course, made sure to set up tripwires that would notify her if Leang activated them.
Now that she knew what Leang was up to, however, she needed to start keeping a more careful eye on the Politburo. Fortunately, that wouldn't be hard—those old men knew nothing of electronic device discipline.
That, however, could wait for a little while. Right now, she needed to turn her attention to more pressing concerns—namely, infiltrating the Russian and Indian communications networks. The former had been easy to penetrate, although that hadn't surprised her. For all that they were good at cyberattack, their cyberdefense was risible, and their network would be hers whenever she wanted to make it so.
The Indians, however, had proven to be much more difficult. In fact, she'd barely been able to get into the systems they'd linked to the Russians. Their firewalls were thick, and their trackers were almost as good as the American ones that had hunted her people down after their attempted penetration of NORAD, which meant that she didn't have time to find a way to undermine them.
This would limit Wu's options, and hers, which was annoying but not fatal.
Getting into the enemy's information systems was also something that she could actually do something about it, unlike Leang's machinations, which when combined with the fact that she had to deal with it now meant she needed to make it her primary focus.
She only hoped Wu would be able to do the same thing when it came to breaking through the blockforce, and not be distracted by thoughts of what Leang was doing. She needed him to break through to China.
Wu Tsien was in what one of his friends at the Academy had to referred to as "battlethought." He wasn't entirely sure why he hadn't reached it before this point, but he really wasn't devoting any time to contemplating that, largely because his brain wouldn't let him.
This had happened to him before, at Dushband and Hamburg, so he knew what was going to happen. Everything was going to be focused on defeating the enemy in front of him, with no thought for any other considerations.
The march to Ashgabat was going far better than he expected. The patched-together lead brigades were taking heavier casualties and moving slower than their more cohesive counterparts would have, but they were breaking through all the same, and he anticipated taking the city within two days.
Once they made it there, the intelligence indicated that the only thing remaining in their path, aside from a small force in Bukhara, would be the Russian and Indian troops who had cut them off from any resupply from home. That still left the question of which way they should go.
There were three options. The first was to go to the north, the second down the center, and the third was to go to the south.
The third he had dismissed almost immediately. Yes, it was the unexpected choice, being the indirect route. He had no desire to go through Afghanistan, and the roads between Bukhara and Dushband were a sick joke for any force larger than a brigade. Further, the Indians seemed to have spent their time well, and while they were having difficulty getting supplies through what had been Pakistan, he had no desire to try fighting his way through Dushband.
The first and second options were more appealing, although he really should group them as two branches of the same option, since they both involved taking Samarkand.
That was where the Russians and Indians had linked up, and while the two countries had always been close, seams between different units were always a vulnerable spot, even when the units were from the same country. Between those of different countries-well, he remembered one exercise when he'd managed to catch the seam between a Chinese and a Mongolian unit. The breakdown had been impressive.
That Black Lotus had managed to hack the Russian communication network made the possibilities even better. If she could mess with their transmissions, the Chinese could exacerbate the inevitable difficulties that arose when soldiers who had different first languages tried to talk to each other.
That left the question of where to go after that, though. The central route would take them through Kokand to either Bishkek or Kashgar, while going to the north would take them through Tashkent and Symkent to Bishkek. Once they got to Bishkek, they would have to push through Almaty to Ili-and once there, he anticipated, they would be home free. No one wanted to actually invade China.
Going to the north, while more direct than the south, was still an unexpected option, and he had a lower opinion of Russian capabilities than many of his fellow generals, especially the older ones, still influenced by their memories of the border wars back in the 60s.
China had grown since then, no longer relying purely on masses of poorly-armed infantry and light artillery to overwhelm the enemy, and the Russians had not improved the quality of their troops or tactics much from those days, from what he could tell. Based on the reports from Bishkek, said quality might have gotten worse.
The center, however, gave some other opportunities. He could probably continue to exploit the communications and coordination issues that would ensue between the Russian and Indian forces. It was also a more direct route.
However, it was also much more defensible than the northern route, due to the terrain and the fact that the road from Andijan to Bishkek was far too narrow for comfort.
For that matter, if he went to the north, Black Lotus could probably crash the Russian networks completely. It would also make it far more difficult for the Indians to interfere with the march-Tashkent was little more than a hundred kilometers north of Khujand by air, but that could make a lot of difference. And, if the Russians couldn't communicate, the Indians would have to do their targeting on the fly, which would increase the risk of friendly fire.
He smiled thinly. That would worsen relations between the two countries, for a certainty.
Yes. Samarkand, Tashkent, possibly Bishkek, and then Almaty.
Diversion? Yes. Launched second-they would expect his first attack to be the diversion. How far to try and push?
He looked at the map. Two divisions, weaker ones. That would be enough. Angren, Namangan, Bishkek. That would make it look like he was feinting to the north, then going through the center. The Indians would hit them, but he suspected they would survive. He might want to take Khujand, though.
Yes. That should do it. As long as his rearguard was past Khujand by the time the Indians really pushed for Tashkent, his men should be out of their reach.
Now. How was he going to take Samarkand?
Jarmen Kell sat atop a ridge and waited.
He wasn't sure what he was waiting for, besides perhaps the order to go ahead and begin the attack, but he was waiting for something.
Getting into the area had been one of the easiest infiltrations he'd ever done-certainly easier than the one onto the American West Coast. The Azeris had turned a blind eye to the border crossing, the transit through their country, and their loading and leaving from the port at Lankaran-Arslan had explained the situation, and they had nearly fallen over themselves in their eagerness to get Juhziz out of the way. The man had a serious grudge against the Azeri government, and having him separated only by the Caspian Sea was cold comfort to the men in Baku.
Not that Kell cared, especially, except as it affected the mission.
They'd then gone north from Lankaran, hugging the Azeri shoreline until they were nearly at the Azeri-Russian border, and then turned east towards Kazakhstan, landing twenty kilometers south of a small town called Kuryk.
From there, they'd split up into smaller groups and made their way here, dodging what few patrols Juhziz had put out and any civilians they saw. The latter had been more of a problem than the former, for all the groups-the demolitions expert had thrown nearly everything into blocking the Chinese retreat, for reasons Kell did not understand.
Again, not that he cared, except as it affected the mission.
Well, it also offended his sense of craftsmanship. If you were going to do something, you should do it well. Then again, Juhziz had always been the impatient type. The only time he really exercised care was when he was building his bombs. He'd always tended to substitute size of explosion for care in placement, which was understandable when time was short, but less so when you could take things a little slower.
That was yet another reason he liked working with Arslan. He understood these things.
At any rate, they had managed to get here without incident, less than five kilometers from Juhziz's headquarters, and so far had not seen a single one of his soldiers come anywhere near them.
Not that he minded-even if they managed to kill whoever came here before they got a message off, missing troops would certainly be noticed and looked for-but it offended his sense of craftsmanship. He would have had someone checking this area every day.
Indeed, it had been almost a week, and the only sightings of Juhziz's men had been from the patrols and sentries he'd sent out.
There was also, however, a complication to consider.
The Americans.
He hadn't been surprised when Arslan had contacted him with the news that they were sending a strike team-after all, they wanted Juhziz dead as well.
It would make their mission more difficult, though, if they had to work around Colonel Burton and his men, particularly destroying Juhziz's files. If he'd thought they would be at all organized, he'd have told the men to remove and then burn only the things that could come back on the ELA.
Given what he remembered about the man's headquarters, however, he was certain that the only way to be sure would be to destroy all the files, and possibly the entire headquarters.
That last would not be hard. The man liked having his explosives very close at hand.
The question now was how, if they showed up, he could use the Americans while making sure that his men were the first in. And, preferably, taking out the files while getting as few of his and Burton's men killed as possible.
He would really rather not repeat that fight with Burton.
He brought up his mental map of Juhziz's base. Now, where could he use some demo and Pathfinders?
General Rodall Juhziz was an extraordinarily unhappy man. Absolutely nothing had gone right in his plans. Nothing!
Well, that was an exaggeration. His plan to bleed the Chinese relief force had gone quite well, with minimal casualties to his men and some truly spectacular successes.
After that, however, things had all gone wrong. The IRGC had betrayed him as well as Kassad, although he hadn't suffered nearly as badly as the Prince, as evidenced by the fact that he was still alive.
Even so, that had still cost him precious men and supplies. The Russians and Indians had also proved resistant to his overtures, issuing shoot on sight orders for his men, even.
And then, instead of giving up, this General Wu had decided to fight his way back to China.
That had been the deciding factor. Wu had been the one who had shattered the GLA twice, first in China and Tajikistan, and then in Europe. He would not let him pass, and he would show the world that if the GLA had chosen him instead of Deathstrike, he would have beaten that Chinese puppy.
And that wasn't happening. Wu was attacking with scratch forces made up of survivors of broken units, and Juhziz's men were still being slaughtered the moment they came out to fight in the open.
He shuddered to think of what would have happened if they'd faced whole and complete Chinese forces, and he yearned to tell his men to stand down and withdraw
But he could not. Honor would not permit it, and to retreat from this would destroy any chance of rebuilding. Better to bleed the Chinese while losing his men than to retreat in ignominy and let them pass unmolested. As long as the hard core remained to serve as a foundation, the GLA could rise again, as it should be.
Not with Kassad's puling about stealth and shadows, or Thrax's meddling with Allah's gift of life, or Deathstrike's megalomania, or Arslan's willingness to compromise the cause for his own gain.
It would be dynamite and fire that would reduce the arrogant West and East to rubble, and allow his people to take the place that they deserved, and bring all the world into the Dar-al-Islam.
Allah would permit nothing else.