Hero by Joel Rosenberg Page B

were going to stay configured this way for even a day or two, Shimon was going to ask Peled for some recommendation on what do about personnel, and Peled hadn't the slightest idea what to tell him.
    SOP was to promote from below—and that would be fine for S4, any damn fool could run supply—but who would he get for S3? Peled was acutely conscious that he was good at carrying out someone else's plan, not drafting his own, and he needed a good S3 and deputy S3 or the battalion would be stepping on its dick the next time guns started going off all around them.
    At least they were all operational now. Fuck this administrative shit.
    Possibly he could raid the Goren's training detachments for some officers. Maybe; he'd have to think about it.
    He didn't know what to do about the personnel problem, but Mordecai Peled had always gone by the simple rule of if you didn't know what to do next, figure out what to do now.
    Establishing and clearing a defensive perimeter was easy and clean, and besides, Cohen could use the practice of moving a company, even a platoon-sized company, through the slimy woods. There was every indication that that would come in handy.
    This was supposed to be a simple cadre and command job: finish the training of a division made of green recruits and recycled officers and noncoms—mostly misfits who had burned out in the line. The senior staff—battalion-level staff and up—would take that division into the field for ten days of combat and then turn it all over to their Casa deputies.
    It still could be a cadre and command job, but Peled had a suspicion about that. He hadn't liked the look in Shimon's eye. Shimon didn't keep Mordecai Peled around as chief of staff because he needed a buffer between himself and his top officers; Shimon wanted a spare combat commander handy, somebody whose mind as well as his reflexes could function when it all hit the fan.
    And, maybe, who could supervise the cleanup afterward.
    Mordecai Peled sighed, then returned to work, under the watchful gaze of the two Distacamento Fedeltà onlookers.
    The next body was clearly dead; the right foot was blown clear off, and it had bled out. He chalked an x on it and moved on.
    One of the unchalked Freiheimer bodies wasn't visibly injured enough, although it was lying face down and it had soiled itself. Probably dead—the only thing more amazing than how much punishment a human body could take without dying was how little damage could kill—but nobody under Peled's command had ever been killed by a supposedly dead man. Seeing to that wasn't a particularly ugly job, not compared with what you sometimes had to do, but it was disagreeable enough that Peled didn't want to delegate it, not when he could do it himself.
    He thumbed his Barak back to single-shot and mechanically raised it to his shoulder. The front sight ring had broken loose during the fight, but the body was only two meters away; even without working sights, he should be able to put a bullet in a spine at that distance.
    "Haifa Twenty to All Hands," he said on All Hands One, override mode. "Barak rifle, firing one."
    He squeezed the trigger, and was rewarded by a jerk, a bang and a gout of flying flesh and gore. But just to the right of the spine, dammit.
    You're getting old, old man. Couldn't even kill a dead man right.
    Still, while the hole was bloody, it wasn't bleeding. There was no heart pumping; Peled had just killed another dead man.
    He thumbed his rifle back to safe and handed it to his clerk/driver/bodyguard, who slung it over his own shoulder. He was still able to work his stylo and notebook, although he did look a bit hunched over.
    Peled pulled on his blood-spattered field gloves as he knelt at the corpse's side. He drew his knife. "White male, brown-haired, apparently," he said, slashing down at a hunk of hair, then examining the roots carefully as he laid the scalp open to white bone. "True dark." One of the others had had dyed hair.
    He slashed off the