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this weapon; make my bed; kill them all, Dov; open that door; get my lunch; ignore the pain, Dov; gut this bastard like a trout for me, Dov; be very strong for me; Dov.
    Dov had done all that, and all that was fine. All that was the way it was supposed to be.
    Relax—no.
    Turning like a turret, he looked around the crowded compartment.
    In the seats behind him and Avram, Shimon and Yacov Sher were engaged in a discussion about some flimsies, punctuated by an occasional peremptory tap of Shimon's finger against the sheets. The aisles were crammed with buttpacks and backpacks, weapons of the operationals, either held or lashed in place. The rest of the gear, along with the administratives' weapons, was stowed below, in the ring of baggage carriers above the buses' rubberized skirts.
    And, as usual, the virgins watched the scenery wide-eyed, while most of the veterans slept. It was a conditioned reflex: a seasoned soldier sleeps when and where he can. It didn't matter that this was a cadre job. A reflex isn't a reasoned judgment.
    At the thought of sleep, Dov almost yawned. But he decided that he wasn't tired and didn't need to yawn, so he didn't. He had gotten enough sleep on the way down, and he never needed much. There wouldn't be much he'd have to do here, but at least there was some point in staying alert.
    Reflexively, he licked his knuckles to be sure they weren't gritty—they weren't—and then rubbed at his eyes.
    He looked past Avram, through the mesh, out the window again. Not a military road, or at least not a good one. The brush wasn't cleared more than two meters on each side of the ditch running along the bare dirt road.
    Not bad, though, for a civvy wheel road, although it was hard to see a lot of it, what with the fans kicking up dust.
    A military road should have been more direct, carving its way more urgently through the countryside. Ditch-edged roads were okay for fans, although you'd have to be careful riding a tracked vehicle down one if you wanted some speed.
    Not bad for buses or merkavas, but it would be dangerous for the tracked vehicles: they could get themselves stuck too easily. If the bus slipped over into the ditch, it would just slide to the bottom, perhaps riding a bit higher on its air cushion as it rattled from side to side. No problem, there, but a wheeled vehicle would likely break an axle, and a tank would surely throw a track. A tank with a bad track was like an infantryman with a broken leg: too often you had to leave it behind.
    It wasn't a bad road, but it wasn't really a fan road: the curves were unbanked; the bus had to slow at each turn for fear of going over the high side.
    Again, the bus slowed and swung gently through another bend.
    "Mountains there are the Rosso Magginines; most of the fighting's on the Piano Amiata, just beyond." Avram bit his lip for a moment. "If I was Generalleutnant Müller, I'd be thinking a lot about how the Casas have to get a hundred kilos per man up and through the Rosso Magginine passes every day."
    "Eh?"
    "I was just saying that I don't like those numbers," Avram said, pursing his lips judiciously. "Two of their fat divisions are about forty thousand men, total. Figure four thousand tons per day. Local trucks can haul about, what? Twenty tons, maybe? That's two hundred trucks up, each day. Three hundred, once they bring the new division online."
    Dov grunted, as though he followed. Or cared. Numbers weren't his responsibility. They were too complicated. Leave it for logisticians like Avram. Worrying wasn't his department, not about this. It was good to worry about the right things, but a waste of energy to worry about the wrong things. So Dov would leave all the worrying to Uncle Shimon.
    All Dov had to do was take care of what Shimon told him to. It had worked that way for twenty-five years, and not a day had passed in that time that Dov hadn't marveled at how perfectly it worked.
    Just do what Uncle Shimon said and the rest of the universe fell