The Weapon - Exodus - part 13
By Diana the Valkyrie
Delaying tactics


You can imagine, I was pretty worried about the situation. It was a race
against time. The hostiles were due to arrive a day or two from now, and the
evacuation would start a couple of days after that. Since I couldn't speed up
the evac, the thing was to slow down the arrival of the force heading towards
us. Wendy had helped a lot there, but we were still a couple of days short.
Wendy knew I was worrying so much that I wasn't getting to sleep, trying to
think of a way out of this hole, and she whispered to me "George, you're going
to be a mess tomorrow unless you get some shut-eye." "I know, love, but I keep
running my brain round and round in little circles." "That's not helping. You
need a good night's sleep, and then in the morning you'll have loads of
ideas." "Yeah, but I'm not feeling sleepy." "I can fix that," she said. "I
know, but really, Wendy, I'm not in the mood ..." "I bet I could get you in
the mood." "Uh." "Oh yes I can." "Mmm." "Oh yes I can." "Unh." "See? I told
you I could."

She looks pretty damn human, but she isn't, there's just no two ways about it.
She does a good imitation of the way a woman looks, and the way a woman moves,
speaks and thinks, but every now and then, you get into a direct collision
with the essential non-humanness of her. Sex was usually one of these. It
wasn't that she had three breasts, or anything obvious like that. It was that
she seemed to have muscles in places that women don't, and she was capable of
gripping pretty hard with them. Come to think about it, she could probably
castrate a man quite easily. Not that she would, of course. This is what
Duncan called her "Mixmaster", the "juice squeezer", and various other similar
expressions. Not to mince words, she had a grip like a vice, and although she
used it very gently, she also used it very insistently. Plus, her feel for the
state of mind of her sexual partner meant that she could get you in exactly
the state she wanted, and then keep you there until she was ready to let you
explode. And it was the fallout from that explosion that left me so relaxed
and boneless that sleep was a state that was about a millimeter away.

. . .

She was right. I woke up the next morning full of ideas. "Wendy, fly to Yokata
Air Force Base, that's near Tokyo, and pick up all the vodka they can provide
you with, I'll get Marston to pay for it. Then leave bottles of booze all
along the bandits' marching route." She flew off, I phoned Marston and got him
to contact the Tokyo PX. "Get it all on a pallet, plastic-wrapped and sealed,
I'm sending my flying fork-lift truck over to pick it up." I wanted at least a
thousand bottles of vodka for those guys. Aren't I a nice guy? Free booze.
Because if there's anything that screws up an attack, it's soldiers getting
their hands on booze and getting plastered on it. Sure, it wouldn't stop them,
but it would certainly slow them down, and it would cause at least some
casualties. Because for my purposes, I was just as happy for them to be drunk
and passed out, as I was for them to be real casualties. Even happier,
actually, because it meant that I could use Wendy to make this happen.

I left it an hour, then I phoned him again. "I want you to round up ten tons
of lead. It doesn't matter the form; lead pipe, lead sheet, anything." "Why?"
"Those hostiles are about to do a whole lot of goldbricking," I explained.

Wendy came back from her barmaid job; she reported that they seemed to be
quite keen on the bottles she'd left out for them. The officers were trying to
keep control, but a lot of the men had swapped the water in their canteens for
vodka. And that was great, because vodka not only makes you drunk, it gives
you a raging thirst.

The lead wasn't ready yet, so I sent her off to do one of the other big things
that delays an army. Mud. Mud, mud, glorious mud, there's nothing quite like
it for cooling the blood and slowing the march. I told her to simply do what
she did at Melbourne; dump six inches of rain all along the area they were
travelling through. That much rain in such a short time would cause swollen
rivers, flooding, and mud, mud, mud.

By the time she came back from dumping water, the lead was ready, so I sent
her back to Tokyo to pick that up. I told her to mold it into one kilogram
bricks, and put a very thin later of the gold she'd gotten from the sea water
over the lead. Then stamp it with "99.99% fine" and "US Treasury" and a
hallmark, and put small piles of the bricks in place where the advancing
column could find them. Even if they only picked up a third of it, I reckoned
that humping three tons of lead along with them would slow them down nicely,
plus they'd probably start dumping part of their military load in order to
make way for the "gold" bricks.

That evening, as dusk fell, I got Wendy to fly me out to see how they were
doing. We'd certainly delayed them, but not as much as I hoped. It looked like
they were about 24 hours from our first line of defence, and we were at least
three days from the start of the evacuation. This was going to be tight.

When we got back to the village, I shared a bowl of rice with Lan Ho, and told
him the bad news. "Soon they will have to leave the main road and take to the
paths. Then we can start a guerrilla harassment. I'm familiar with this style
of warfare, from ... a while ago," he said. Lan Ho would set up ambushes along
their path; the object was not so much to kill them, it was more to make them
advance more slowly and carefully. Delay delay delay. We also dusted the
foliage in front of our main defensive line with heroin powder; I reckoned
that if the hostiles snorted in some of that, they might be less interested in
reality for a while.

Next day, Lan Ho's guerrillas set out to go into battle, and I sent Wendy out
to tell them where to expect the enemy to appear. When she'd done that, I sent
her over to the airfield, for two reasons. Firstly to reassure our refugees,
who had now been waiting patiently for some days, and were probably picking up
rumours about the oncoming forces. And secondly, I wanted her to dig a trench
around the perimeter of the airfield, to give us a defensive position in case
we had to mount a last-ditch battle.

When she'd done that, I sent her out again to spot where the enemy had gotten
to; I felt that we were very lucky to have our armoured flying bulldozer. She
came back and reported that they were getting close to our main defensive
lines, so I got Lan Ho to send the kites up. But this time we put up all our
manned kites, and the pilots were carrying the Molotovs and the sprayers.