Stephen Coonts - Combat

The second Centauro was the closest of their three targets, immediately below them at the foot of the steep slope that led down into the pass mouth. They’d saved it for last because it would be the easiest snap shot. Nate locked the launcher into direct-fire mode as Johnny slammed the last Javelin into the tube. Springing to his feet and aiming downward, Grey Bird acquired the target in his helmet sight and squeezed the trigger.

At that instant, the Centauro ’s driver, reacting to the sure and certain knowledge that a moving target is harder to hit, slammed his eight-wheeled mount into gear and floored his accelerator. The tank destroyer lurched forward, not swiftly enough to escape the homing missile fired at it, but enough to divert its impact point. The Javelin clipped the flank of the Centauro ’s turret and a reactive armor panel detonated, swatting the missile aside. Undamaged, the tank destroyer roared out of its field revetment, its turret gun traversing and elevating.

Roman and Grey Bird could only stare at each other and at the empty launcher.

“Uh-oh.”

“To which I can only add ‘Oh shit’! Let’s get out of here!”

Below, the Centauro ’s driver rammed the front wheels of his vehicle up the slope, giving his gunner the extra angle he needed to engage the ridgeline. An instant after the two scouts had thrown themselves back down the opposite slope, a 105mm round gouged a notch in the hill crest, the concussion and battering spray of stone fragments sending both men sprawling into the jumble of broken rock that covered this section of the saddleback.

They would become grateful for that momentarily.

Dazed, and with his ears ringing, Grey Bird lifted his head. “Johnny, you okay?” he yelled.

“Yeah. Nate.” A familiar but equally groggy voice replied over the squad circuit. “What do we do now?”

“We crawl back and get those other two Javelin rounds, that’s what we do. Then we kill that damn tank destroyer before the Five and the LT find out how bad we screwed up.”

Grey Bird started to pull himself upright. He spotted Johnny’s “friendly” prompt in his helmet visor, pointing down into a boulder field a short distance to his left. However he also spotted an ominous, unmarked green glow downhill at perhaps a hundred meters.

“Algis! Down!”

Assault-rifle fire spattered his rocks a split second after he dived back behind them. With his own carbine still slung over Johnny’s shoulder, Grey Bird yanked his Beretta out of his belt holster. A handgun was a poor second in any kind of a serious firefight but at the moment it was far better than nothing.

A short chopping burst of 5.56 NATO sounded from off on his left. “I got four of them spotted, Nate,” Roman reported. “They’re trying to work a skirmish line up toward us. They must be one of those Algi scout teams the Five warned us about.”

Behind their position, another shell ripped into the ridgeline, showering the two pinned troopers with a fresh barrage of stone fragments. Grey Bird burrowed closer to the jagged rock he lay upon.

“You know something, white man?” he said, spitting a mouthful of grit aside.

“What?”

“All of a sudden I’m developing this great feeling of empathy for General Custer.”

Jeremy Bolde’s hand closed around his console joystick, and suddenly he was looking through BAKER ’s cybernetic eyes, the imaging from the onboard cameras feeding into the Heads-Up Display of his helmet.

You could maneuver and deploy gun drones via microburst transmissions over a datalink, in effect issuing suggestions to the onboard artificial intelligences. Actual combat, however, required a human telepresence. It was as if he rode the back of the charging steel beast in the ultimate video game gone real.

The system was configured to trackfire mode; the cart-wheel sights of the booster gun hovered in front of his eyes. Wherever he aimed those sights, so would the drone steer itself. Data hacks glowed around the perimeter of his vision: speed, ammunition, vehicle systems status, and ahead glowed a small forest of hostile target arrows stabbing downward accusingly at the enemy. His forefinger tightened on the throttle trigger and a flick of his thumb lifted the safety cover off the firing switch, triggering the hot gun warning tone.

“Right through the middle, Brid,” he murmured. “I’ll work left to right. You have right to left. Engage.”

“Engaging,” the quiet one-word reply returned over the interphone.

Bolde laid his sights on the first silhouetted armored fighting vehicle as he might have aimed a target pistol and pressed the thumb button.

Two kilometers away, the first round cycled into BAKER ’s booster gun. It wasn’t a shell in a conventional sense, rather it was a slender “kinetic kill” dart encased in a sabot sheath, a simple finned crowbar of superdense inert uranium encased in a superhard tungsten steel alloy.

The dart itself carried no propulsive powder charge. Instead, injectors spewed a metered dose of a liquid explosive propellant into the breech chamber behind the round. Ignited by an electric arc, the incandescent gas of this initial detonation hurled the dart on its way as with a conventional cannon. However as the projectile accelerated down the barrel, secondary injectors spaced down the length of the smoothbore cannon tube fired in sequence, building the breech pressure and pushing the dart to a velocity far higher than could be obtained from a conventional weapon.

Three rounds were fired in as many seconds, an X of blue-white flame spewing from the cannon’s muzzle brake.

Downrange, an Algerian T-72 died. Neither its reactive armor nor the heavier steel beneath were enough to save it. The tungsten-anduranium darts passed through the tank’s hull like heated needles through butter. The passage converted kinetic energy into heat and instead of solid projectiles, jets of metallic plasma exploded into the tank’s interior, burning at the temperature of a star’s surface.

Bolde swung his sights onto the next target in the laager. Shock and surprise had done their parts. Now they must rely on speed, wreaking as much havoc as they could before the Algerians recovered.

The vehicles around the laager perimeter flared like the candles on a birthday cake as the fire streams of the two gun drones converged. Over the intercom link Jeremy could hear Bridget Shelleen’s whispered supplication with each press of her trigger key.

“Lord and Lady … Hold your hands above us this night … Grant pardon for these lives we must take … Grant peace to those we must slay …”

“Scout lead! We got trouble here!”

Mary May paused in her jogging run and dropped to a crouch beside a stone slab. Lee Trebain following her lead an instant later. “Go, Nate. What’s happening?”

“We’re blown,” the Indian trooper rasped back over the squad circuit. “We been nailed by an Algi patrol.”

“Tac situation? Are either of you hit?”

“We’re under good cover, but pinned. Four hostiles on our front. Johnny and me are both okay, but we can’t maneuver. We bitched the strike and one of the Centauros is still operational. It has the ridgeline covered behind us. We can’t fall back.”

“Oh, jeez! We’re hearing small-arms fire from the south. That must be you guys. Can you hold?”

“For a while, Five.”

“Understood,” Mary May acknowledged. “We’ll be up with you as soon as we can. Hang in.”

“We don’t have all that much choice,” Grey Bird replied with wry grimness.

Trebain had been monitoring the same series of transmissions, and now he scrambled. “The guys are in trouble. Let’s go!”