Over the course of a couple of weeks, the desert outpost filled with personnel. Soldiers were shipped in by helos and bulk transports, and on arrival were rapidly assigned to billets in two long barracks blocks. Officers and other ranks alike shared spaces to eat and sleep, with little formality or ceremony. The Mess was an air-conditioned demountable right in the middle of the cluster of buildings. The open space at one end of the fenced area became a motor pool full of ponderous utility trucks, nimble patrol vehicles, and even a CH-112K cargo helicopter modified for special operations use with extra fuel tanks and guns and sensors out the wahzoo. Danny was particularly pleased to find four Longline fast-attack buggies, rigged up just like the one they’d used on Earth II.
JDF Buffalo quickly became a very busy patch of desert, crawling with soldiers. All of them had the burly, haggard look of special operators wearied by long campaigns in unfriendly territory. Even in a relatively ‘slow’ period of the war, Special Forces units could expect to be kept constantly busy. This, however, was what they lived for, and morale was high; everyone chatted and laughed with everyone, regardless of rank or background, and the informal messing and barrack arrangements helped the operators to bond together quickly. Within a month, there were over a hundred personnel on-site, including Company HQ and various embedded support units. Crash settled nicely into the same familiar routine of logistics and supply. Jock was having a ball devising new and frighteningly creative ways to camouflage explosives and firearms. His first masterpiece was a chocolate snack bar with an explosive filling and an integral delay fuse. The coating was even made of real chocolate that he’d melted down and re-poured with the help of the camp ‘bait-layers’ (i.e. cooks). It was scarily realistic, too, and contained enough of a charge to punch a man-sized hole in a concrete wall. Colonel Fuller, the new Commanding Officer, almost ate the demonic thing. The newly-minted Master Chief Petty Officer had no intention of being demoted for letting his CO eat a bomb, so he gently warned Col. Fuller of the contents.
“What do you mean, MacAlpin? This had better not be a joke.”
“No joke, Colonel, it’s a wee brick o’ C4 wi’ a layer o’ chocolate onna the outside. Trust me, ye dinna want ta bite it, sir.”
That same afternoon, for safety’s sake, he and one of the Combat Engineers took some sandbags and walked about a hundred metres out from the gate to safely detonate the charge. They set the four sandbags in a square around the choccy bar, set off the two minute delay fuse, and walked about twenty metres away. Sure enough, the report from the blast was enough to make even some of the SAS troopers jump. Jock and Sergeant Harris walked back with the leaking sandbags on their shoulders and their fronts caked with red desert dust. Both of them looked like their beards had turned solid. Sam Kelly met them at the front gate. The stern expression on his face couldn’t hide the gleam in his eyes. “Master Chief, can I have a word?”
Harris made himself scarce, and Jock walked with Sam back to the workshop out near the motor pool.
“Choccy bar?” asked Sam.
“Aye. It was brilliant.”
“Should have warned me, I’d have come with you!”
In the absence of drill and parade, every waking moment was devoted to training. Every special unit had a different way of doing things, so a lot of that training time was used for learning and relearning tactics and techniques, to make one homogenous tactical skillset. Seminars were held for topics ranging from the best way to extract a team by helicopter, to how to conduct snatch-and-grab missions on ‘high value targets’. Amongst it all, constantly underpinning their training, was marksmanship practice. Everyone from the bait-layers to the quartermasters (“Q-bastards”) to the top-tier operators logged hundreds of hours and thousands of rounds on an open range set up outside the fence. On several occasions, the designated snipers among the group were taken up in the helo and given some practise at shooting from aircraft.
After three months of practise, day and night, the Third Independent Company was put to an operational readiness review by visiting officers from Special Operations Command. They passed easily, and cheers echoed around the camp and across the desert.
Brigadier Wallis personally shook the hands of Lt.Cmdr Casey and the two Kelly brothers, congratulating them on clearing the first hurdle. He reminded them, however, that the real test was yet to come: deployment.
Life on the Fringes 