The Debt Collectors War

Chapter 63

Ellie threw a smoke grenade into the space between the two buildings, just to add a little confusion. She threw another up into the guttering of the house’s roof, hoping someone might see billowing smoke and be distracted, thinking there was a fire.

She had plenty of grenades to waste. They were small, the size and weight of shotgun shells. She had twenty of them on her, enough she didn’t need to be economical. She had the plain white-smoke grenades she was using now, and several other types as well, grenades with red and green coloured smoke for marking wind direction for helicopters, and a few that made whistles and sirens and pulses of flashing light, mostly used as a distraction. A collection of different types was useful to have around, just in case, and Ellie had several.

She threw two grenades, making a considerable amount of smoke, and then she kept moving. She walked along behind the garage, her submachine gun raised, covering the two windows she could see. She glanced upwards occasionally, checking the roof, and glanced around behind herself as she walked as well, but mostly she looked ahead and towards the centre of the compound, the direction from which danger would probably come.

Once, as she glanced around, Ellie noticed Sameh take off her cap, and drop it beside herself, and then shrug off her jacket too. Sameh kept moving as she did, switching her submachine gun from one hand to the other as she pulled her arms out of the sleeves. They didn’t need their disguises any more, Ellie supposed, and removing the jacket meant Sameh could move more freely, and access equipment inside the pockets and on the harness of her tactical armour too. Sameh dropped the jacket and kept walking, and Ellie decided to do the same. She pulled her own jacket off as quickly as she could, the same way Sameh had, tugging at it, switching her submachine gun from one hand to the other, while still covering the windows and gaps between the buildings. She dropped the jacket, and then took off the cap too, and kept moving.

She kept walking. She felt confident. They were badly outnumbered, but they were also well-equipped and trained and very good at this kind of operation. Training and practice counted for a lot. Ellie knew that she and Sameh could shoot straight, and weren’t afraid, and were very familiar with a situation like this. As well, they had surprise, and speed, and could operate with Tactical Agility, which was the currently popular corporate warfighting-theory buzzword, but which also actually made some sense, too.

Tactical Agility said that Ellie and Sameh, because they were outnumbered and had no fixed tactical plan, could stay fluid and fast-moving and keep their enemy off balance. It said that they ought to deliberately not plan their way through this battle, and should instead react to the evolving situation as it evolved, deciding second-by-second what to do. Doing so would be to their advantage, because they retained flexibility and so the reactive initiative, while the militia, with greater numbers, would be forced to plan in order to coordinate and cooperate with one another, and in doing so would sacrifice the ability to actually respond.

That need to plan was the weakness of all larger combat formations, Tactical Agility held. Increasing numbers of people allowed you to deliver greater firepower and force to the enemy, but simultaneously caused a diffusion in that firepower and force, lost to the friction of organization and planning. Once a squad became more than four or five people, or became more dispersed than could be seen and spoken to simultaneously, then that squad were forced to plan, and stick to its plans, however rudimentary, and those plans locked them into a set course of action and prevented them actually responding to events. Planning trapped you, Tactical Agility said, and made you sluggish and easier to defeat. Planning also wasted critical resources. It wasted time and effort and concentration and focus. Planning wasted all of those, because once combat began, the plan fell apart, and all the effort spent on planning became wasted. Worse, the plan could actually be dangerous, because people tended to stick to their plan long after it should have been abandoned. They lost sight of their actual mission, their most important objectives, for the sake of resolving small-scale, immediate crises like capturing a doorway or a building or a ditch. By avoiding distractions like overly-elaborate battlefield plans, Tactical Agility said Ellie would be able to pay more attention to their larger, more important, strategic goal, that of finding the missing kid.

Ellie didn’t completely accept everything that Tactical Agility doctrine claimed, and she didn’t especially like the way these little trends took over so quickly in military circles, but she still paid attention, and read what everyone else read, because sometimes they had some sensible ideas.

Now, in this situation, she was fairly sure that something of what Tactical Agility said would be useful here. If nothing else, remembering to concentrate on the missing kid, and not the combat she might be involved in at any given moment, that was a useful thing to keep in mind. Not planning at a tactical level was sensible here, Ellie thought, so it was what she was actually going to try and do.

She hadn’t planned, and wouldn’t. She wouldn’t plan tactically, and would remain agile, and would respond to what the militia did, and keep her options open. That meant she was actually doing what current military theory said she ought to do, and in an odd way, knowing that also made her feel confident.

She felt very confident. She felt sure this whole compound full of disorganized debtors couldn’t do a thing about it if Ellie decided to kill them all.

Which perhaps she would have to do, in the end.