Stephen Coonts - Combat

So you think you’re good, Jeremy Bolde, good enough to take your life into your hands this night. But how about these six other lives you’ll be carrying? Does your surety stretch that far? It had better, for when this battle is over, whatever remains will be your responsibility.

“Right. Stand by for conversion to direct linkage control. I’ll take BAKER . You’ve got CHARLIE . Stand by for turbine start. All units!”

“Turbine start armed on drones.”

“ABLE ready to light off, LT.”

Bolde typed the ***ALL SABER ELEMENTS***COMMENCE ENGAGEMENT NOW*** command into the scout team datalink and poised a finger on the transmit key. “Good luck to us all, ladies and gentlemen,” addressing those who were present and those who were not. “May we all be discussing this over a cup of coffee come morning. Open fire!”

Flame geysered from the backs of the gun drones. Twelve rounds per vehicle, launching at half-second intervals, a spreading fountain of destruction. The Common Modular Missile rounds, configured for an artillery-fire mission profile, climbed almost vertically until booster burnout. Then guidance fins snapped out of the main stages and dug into the air. Arcing over the Algerian armored formation, the missiles pitched nose down, hunting for targets.

The infrared sensors in the noses of the antivehicle rounds scanned for a specific geometric size and shape on the ground. One that matched that of the prey assigned to them. The antipersonnel rounds steered in via Global Positioning System fix, the proximity fuses in their warheads concentrating on their altitude above ground. As each missile locked in, its main engine ignited, blasting it through the sound barrier and down out of the sky.

The antipersonnels detonated while still a thousand feet in the air. Each “beehive” warhead burst to release a spreading conical swarm of needle-nosed and razor-finned flechette darts, thousands of them, in a supersonic steel rain, a titanic shotgun blast sweeping the open ground clean of life.

The antivehicle rounds arrived a split second later, before the standing dead even had a chance to fall to the earth. Flaming pile-driver strokes that crushed and destroyed.

The targeted fuel tankers popped like bursting balloons, sprayed diesel flaming as the warheads exploded deep in their guts. Likewise the headquarters tracks lurched, belching fire and shredded flesh out through their doors and hatches. The command personnel whose task it was to coordinate a defense, perished before they even knew an attack was under way.

And amid the chaos and confusion, no surviving sentry immediately noted the three small thermal plumes that hazed into existence out in the desert night, the one turning away and the two closing the range.

The charge had been sounded.

From his firing position between the two boulders, Lee Trebain dropped his grenades in around the Algerian scout track, being exceedingly careful not to place them too close to the parked vehicle. From personal experience, Trebain knew what the first instinct of a fighting vehicle crewman was when suddenly placed under attack. Saddle up and get under armor!

Trebain had no desire to interfere with that instinctive reaction. Not yet.

The turret of the scout track swiveled around and up-angled, ripping off a 30mm reply to his volley of grenades. The autocannon shells tore a gash across the slope twenty meters below his position, kicking up dust and stinging stone fragments. Hot damn! Mary May had called it right! They couldn’t fire up out of the gorge!

The turret gun raved off another long futile burst, covering the figures scrambling aboard through the vehicle’s lowered tailgate. Through the thermographic sights of the SABR, Trebain saw a luminous green mist belch from the track’s exhaust as the engine kicked over, the ramp beginning to close.

Now! Now was the time to take them!

Trebain ejected the empty clip from the grenade launcher and slammed the fresh magazine of antivehicle shells into its place. Holding the death dot of his sights on the turret of the Algerian scout track, he again pulled the trigger.

Like many armored fighting vehicles, the Algerian BRM had reactive armor panels scabbed to its hull and turret. Made up of sheets of low-grade plastic explosive sandwiched between two thin metal plates, reactive armor defeated shaped-charge antitank warheads by exploding upon the impact of the warhead, the counterblast “defocusing” the warhead’s detonation, leaving the protected vehicle undamaged.

Unfortunately for the Algerians, each reactive panel only worked once.

Lee Trebain rapid-fired the six rounds in his launcher magazine, the SABR’s recoil thumping his shoulder. The first two grenades kicked reactive panel flares off the BRM’s turret. The next four drilled cleanly through steel.

The holes punched by the grenades were only the diameter of a pencil. Each puncture, however, spewed a supersonic jet of flaming gas and molten metal into the confined space of the track’s interior. One such jet, as hot and destructive as the fire blade of an acetylene torch, slashed across the ammunition tray of the turret gun.

The BRM shuddered to a halt. Its deck hatches blew open and a protracted series of detonations flickered and reverberated within the vehicle, like a string of firecrackers dropped into a trash can. Afterward nothing emerged from the vehicle except for a growing plume of smoke.

Trebain became aware of more explosions around him. Some were nearby and echoing sharply through the canyon. Other heavier blasts rolled in from the northern horizon, a skyline that now glowed an angry flickering orange.

Trebain backed crablike out from between the two boulders and slid a few meters down the reverse slope of the saddleback. Hugging the ground, he flipped his night-vision visor back down. Warily he scanned his environment as he dug a fresh 20mm clip out of a harness pouch.

Running footsteps sounded behind him and he whipped around, freezing his trigger pull as he caught the blue flash in his Heads-Up Display. Mary May dropped beside him a moment later. “How’d you make out?” she demanded.

“Clean house. Track and crew. How ‘bout you?”

“Same. That’s two down. Let’s go see how the other guys are doing.”

“Right behind you, Five.”

A half klick to the south, Nathan Grey Bird’s finger closed around the Javelin launcher’s second trigger.

The hollow thump of the launching charge followed, kicking the missile out of the tube. The missile itself did not ignite until it was well clear of the launcher and the operator both. Flaming away in a highcurving trajectory, it dived on its target from above, the one angle of attack unshielded by either reactive armor or heavy steel.

The Tunguska exploded spectacularly, bursting 30mm shells intermixing with flaming rocket fuel. “Ayeee!” Grey Bird screamed. “I count coup! Feed me, white man, I’m on a roll!”

“Loading!” Johnny Roman slammed the next missile into the smoking breech of the launcher, then rolled aside. “Round loaded! Clear!”

The launcher barked again and the second round burned across the sky, wobbling slightly as it hunted for the heat signature of its target, stabilizing again as it found what it sought. The more distant of the pair of Centauro tank destroyers lifted off the ground on a pad of flame, its turret blowing off and flipping away.

“That’s two! Keep ’em coming!”

Above the crackle of ammunition heat firing in the burning wrecks, screams and shouts echoed up from the pass mouth along with the sound of cranking diesels. The Algerians were reacting to the attack. Wildly and without coordination, but that would come swiftly as the shock effect wore off. Grey Bird and Roman had only seconds of clear time remaining.