Free In the Valley by Jason Lambright Page B

set his sights from the beginning on measuring up to them. After all, Team 1.69 was just another unit, and he had been in lots of units.
    Paul just hadn’t been in a unit that set the bar as high as this one. Paul would later thank his lucky stars that the team had such strong leadership. If the colonel and Mike set the bar high, it was because the mission, as Paul was to find out, demanded a high level of proficiency.
    The force had to help the Pan-American Federation and the Euro bloc govern dozens of worlds across nearly three hundred light-years of space. Usually, diplomacy and local police forces were enough to stabilize the hodgepodge of competing interests and ethnicities. Sometimes the local forces were overwhelmed by conflicts that arose on the worlds, and they needed help, especially when dissident factions began to accumulate significant power bases. This is where the force came in.
    Not every world had a large force garrison, nor could every world have one. The larger units of the navy and force infantry tended to be on worlds bordering Pan-Asian systems of influence, just in case things went in the pot. Technically, the Pan-Asians and Pan-Americans were at peace with one another and had been for a long time. But being technically at peace did not mean one side or the other did not provide some covert support to the other side’s dissidents.
    Worlds that were lightly garrisoned but had strong regional dissident movements tended to have Special Forces personnel who would train local police and military units in counterinsurgency. But there were only so many SF units around to shoulder the load, and nearly every world had some kind of dissident presence: hence units like Paul’s, where regular line troopers would be brought in to conduct the “FID” mission (foreign internal defense).
    Force doctrine taught that such ad-hoc units, given a halo-extension combat-advisor course, would be adequate for low-intensity, counterinsurgency warfare. Of course, Force HQ also tended to help the process along by salting combat-advisor teams with Special Forces and Ranger personnel when HQ perceived that the threat level might escalate.
    This practice explained the manning of Team 1.69, Force Military Advisor Team to the Juneau Army. There were twelve guys to one battalion of indigenous soldiers. Generally spoken, a line battalion of planetary forces consisted of between five and eight hundred soldiers. The battalion the team would be advising had about six hundred men on the rolls at any given time.
    After Paul, the colonel and Mighty Mike had hit the ground; the other guys slated for the team showed up on transports in the following month as onesies and twosies. Force HQ had briefed the colonel that FMAT 1.69 would be advising a Juneau Army infantry battalion with three line companies, so the colonel broke his team into four cells. One cell would be administrative and command.
    The colonel was the obvious choice to lead the command cell. He reserved the right to attach himself to the other cells at any time if it looked like there was going to be a cool mission. When the colonel said “cool mission,” he really meant stuff blowing up and general ensuing mayhem. The colonel had an odd sense of humor—and a bulletproof sense of duty.
    The colonel was of average height, average looks, and average build. His swarthy looks and black hair blended in with the background easily, and he was definitely not the muscle-bound, ‘roid-raging Special Forces character of military fiction. The colonel was 100 percent mission focused. People who crossed him lost every time.
    Another soldier, Green, showed up. He was an armored infantry line officer with a strong aside as an intel guy. The colonel tapped him to be the team “fox” (the colonel’s lingo for “the intelligence specialist”) and put him in the command cell. Green was tall and pale and had a head like a bullet; he was a solid soldier, usually soft-spoken, and came off as