Stephen Coonts - Combat

A dozen yards below the eastern crest of the saddleback, Mary May angled her team into a jagged rock formation that jutted from the scree slope like a miniature castle. “Okay, guys,” she said, unslinging the Javelin reload she carried. “Go to ground and set overwatch. I’m going up to take a look around.”

“You want me to come too, Five?” Lee Trebain asked from the pocket of shadows he’d claimed.

“Nah, just cover me,” she replied, thumbing the takedown stud for her SABR. Disassembling the big weapon into its three primary components, she set aside the grenade launcher and locked the sighting module directly onto the grab rail atop the receiver of the carbine. The repeatedly drilled act took only seconds.

“You sure you don’t want me up there?”

“For Pete’s sake, Lee, I’m only going to be about forty darned feet up the hill,” Mary May snapped back in an aggravated whisper, locking out the carbine’s folding stock. “I don’t need anyone breathing down my neck. Just watch my back.”

Mary May removed an anti-IR cape from a harness pouch. Drawing the foil-lined camouflage cloth around her, she secured it with a silent, “stealth” Velcro neckband and drew the hood over her helmet. Crawling out of the rock outcropping, she snaked her way upslope on knees and elbows. In a few moments she was at the crest.

Still prone, she eased herself ahead the last few feet, then froze in place. The gut of the pass lay below her.

For the next several minutes she lay unmoving, slowly and deliberately scanning the terrain below and across from her. The barren, steep-sided ridges and precipitous ravines reminded her strongly of the Dakota badlands back home. Deliberately she toggled in the night vision visor of her helmet between thermographics and photomultiplier, seeing what each sensor view had to offer.

Her helmet visor had more to offer than just enhanced vision. It also served as a Heads-Up Display for her other systems. A graphics compass rose scrolled across the bottom of her vision field, giving her an instantaneous bearing on anything she observed. Time and radio-frequency hacks glowed in the corners of her eyes and, as she turned her head, threat arrows pulsed redly, aiming down at every known and plotted hostile position in the area, graphics prompts giving her the range to target.

A look back over her shoulder revealed a trio of blue arrows hovering over the rock formation downslope. Her own team, their location microburst transmitted to her Leprechaun B navigation system from the GPS receivers of their own Leprechaun units.

And in the distance, and drawing steadily farther away, another trio of blue arrows, the troop vehicles and their crew en route to this night’s destiny. The only other “blues” within a two-hundred-mile radius. Mary May shivered in spite of the growing pocket of body heat trapped beneath the IR cape and returned her attention to the pass below.

One of the Algerian scout tracks was parked within her field of vision, the residual heat signature of its armor beginning to fade with the chill of the desert night. A dazzling point of thermal radiation burned close abreast of it, however, possibly a small fuel pellet stove. Given the steam plume rising above it, someone must be heating water for tea or coffee. Spectral green shadows huddled close about it, Algerian soldiers warming their hands in the stove glow and maybe thinking of the night’s watch or about home.

Other luminescent forms hovered away from the stove, one in the track’s turret, two more on station above and below the vehicle hide. Sentries , she thought, staring out into the dark.

Mary May started to ease back below the ridge crest when suddenly she caught more movement in her visor. She froze in place like a startled lizard.

On the barren ridge across from her, a line of four small cyan dots bobbed slowly along.

Lifting her hand up to her helmet, Mary May flipped up her night-vision visor, blinking for a moment in the onrush of true darkness. Then she lifted and aimed her carbine, not to fire but to utilize the magnification and imaging of its more powerful sighting module. The pressure of her thumb on a handgrip stud zoomed her in on target.

An Algi patrol. Each of those Algerian BRM-30s carried a fourperson scout team, just like her own, and one such team was conducting a security sweep along the high ground beyond the pass. And if there was a patrol over on that side, likely there was one somewhere over on this side as well.

The other scouts looked up as Mary May slid back into the shelter of the rock pile. She flicked aside her helmet’s lip mike, deactivating her squad radio, then spoke in a whisper. “Here’s how we’re going to work it, guys. The Algis are deployed below us along about a kilometer of the pass floor. Nate, you and Johnny work your way to the south end of the pass, staying out of sight below the crest of this saddleback. You have the Javelin and you take out the heavies at the pass mouth. Kill the Tunguska first! Got that? From down in the bottom of this canyon, the Centauros and the BRMs will have trouble elevating their main armament high enough to engage us up here. The quad 30s on that antiair vehicle could saw the top of this ridge right off though. It goes first!”

“He’s first blood, Five,” Grey Bird’s soft reply came back.

“Okay, Lee and I will work our way north. We’ll take out the two northernmost BRMs with the grenade launchers, each of us engaging one of the tracks. All initial attacks will be coordinated with Lieutenant Bolde’s move on the main body of the Algerian division. We get into position and we wait for the LT to give us the word to open fire. Until we get that word, we are strictly hide and evade. Nobody, and I mean nobody, fires a shot for any reason!

“Once the music starts, the two teams will work in toward each other, picking off the remaining Algi elements as the shots present themselves. These rocks will be our rendezvous point for fallback and extraction. Lock it in.”

Fingers touched keypads, calling up and storing GPU fixes in personal navigation systems.

“Set, Five.”

“Got it.”

“Same.”

“Right. Watch your backs. Make your kills. Get back here. That’s the show. That and one other thing. We may have some company up here tonight.”

Like an infantryman hunkering under cover, ABLE retracted its suspension and sank behind the shelter of the low dune, BAKER and CHARLIE going to ground a quarter of a kilometer off on either flank. Electronic Countermeasures masts unfolded and suspiciously sampled the ether.

The interior of the cab was silent except for the tick and creak of contracting metal and the purr of the systems fans. “Any sign of a ground-scan radar on this side?” Bolde inquired over his shoulder.

“Negative. Just two big air-search systems well off to the east and west,” Shelleen replied. “Mobile SAM batteries covering the laager sites. I’m getting tastes of a constant-wave datalink though. They might have a scout drone up.”

“We’ll watch for it. Rick, you take tactical security while we plot the strike.”

“Doin’ it, LT,” Santiago acknowledged. Accessing the sensors in the commander’s cupola via one of the driver’s station telescreens, he began a deliberate scan of the surrounding environment.

Bolde assumed control of ABLE weapons pack, elevating the boom to its maximum fifty-foot extension for a high-ground overview of their selected objective.

The lead Algerian mechanized battalion had deployed on an open gravel pan, straddling the Taoudenni caravan trail roughly four kilometers beyond Saber section’s position. The three maneuver companies were in laager at the points of a two kilometer triangle, the base oriented to the south with the Headquarters Company in the center. Each company position was a weapon-studded island in the desert, creating a mutually supporting archipelago of firepower.