Chapters (20)
“I do not believe you could have received orders to that effect right now.”
“I received them months ago, at the National Day reception at Élysée Palace. The president personally informed me of how the French army should conduct itself under the present conditions.”
Baker finally lost his temper. “You bastards haven’t changed a bit since de Gaulle’s time!”2
“Don’t make it sound so unpleasant. If you won’t leave, I will stay here without my retinue as well. We will fight and die honorably together on the snowy plain. Napoleon lost here too. It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Rousselle said, gesturing with his French-made FAMAS rifle.
A silence.
“Calibrate to two thousand meters, fire!”
Baker turned slowly to face the frontline commanders in front of him. “Relay these words to the American soldiers defending these lines: We didn’t start out as an army dependent on computers to fight our battles. We come from an army of farming men. Decades ago, on Okinawa, we fought the Japanese foxhole by foxhole through the jungle. At Khe Sanh, we deflected the North Vietnamese soldiers’ grenades with shovels. Even longer ago, on that cold winter night, our great Washington himself led his barefoot soldiers across the icy Delaware to make history—”
“Calibrate to fifteen hundred meters, fire!”
“I order you, destroy all documents and excess supplies—”
“Calibrate to twelve hundred meters, fire!”
General Baker put on his helmet, strapped on his Kevlar vest, and clipped his 9 mm pistol to his left side. The grenade launchers went silent; the gunners were shoving the grenades into the barrels. Next sounded a mess of explosions.
“Troops,” Baker said, looking at the Russian tanks spread in front of them like the veil of death. “Bayonets up!”
The sun faded in and out of the thick smoke of the battlefield, throwing shifting light and shadow onto the snowy plain as the battle raged.
1 A simplified explanation of the electronic battle vocabulary:
Frequency hopping: The transmitter switches carrier frequencies according to a pattern possessed by the receiver.
Direct-sequence spread spectrum: The signal is distributed across a wide range of frequencies to make eavesdropping and jamming difficult.
Adaptive nulling system: An antenna array that nulls out signals coming from the direction of enemy jamming, allowing it to communicate with ally antennae in other directions.
Burst transmission: Transmitting data at a high rate over a short period of time using a wider-than-average frequency range.
Frequency agility: The signal is capable of rapidly and continuously changing frequency to avoid jamming.
2 In 1966, General de Gaulle withdrew all French armed forces from the NATO integrated military command, a serious blow to NATO’s Cold War efforts at the time.
SEA OF DREAMS
TRANSLATED BY JOHN CHU