Coke tapped the cutter, then tossed the sheet across the counter to the clerk. “It says my new assignment is Category Ten Forty-seven,” he said as the clerk scanned the document. “That’s survey team, isn’t it?”
The clerk nodded. “Yessir,” she said. “You’ll be assessing potential customers for field force deployments.”
She didn’t understand Major Coke’s laughter. “Isn’t this what you were expecting, sir?” she asked as she slid back the hardcopy.
“What I was expecting …” Coke explained, “ …after the way I screwed up my last assignment on Auerstadt …”
He was smiling like a skull, as broadly and with as little humor.
“ …was that they’d fire my ass. But I guess the Assessment Board decided I couldn’t get into much trouble on a survey team.”
He began to laugh again. Despite the obvious relief in Coke’s voice, the sound of his laughter chilled the clerk.
Earlier: Auerstadt
There was a party going on in the extensive quarters of General the Marquis Bradkopf, National Army commander of Fortress Auerstadt. Next door in the Tactical Operations Center, Major Matthew Coke of the Frisian Defense Forces was trying to do his job—and General Bradkopf’s job—through a real-time link to the pair of combat cars in ambush position thirty kilometers away.
The combat cars were named Mother Love and The Facts of Life. They and their crews were Frisians; and the sergeants commanding them were, like Coke, former members of Hammer’s Slammers, the mercenary regiment whose ruthless skill had transformed Colonel Hammer into Alois Hammer, President of Nieuw Friesland.
“We’re getting major movement into Hamlet 3, sir,” said Fourfour—Sergeant-Commander Dubose in Mother Love, stationed for the moment on a dike south of the three hamlets called Parcotch for administrative purposes. “Nearly a hundred just from the direction of Auerstadt. Most of them are carrying weapons, too.”