Stephen Coonts - Combat

Suddenly the image from BAKER ’s cameras blurred under a concussive impact. A pattern of red-and-yellow system warning flags blazed in front of Bolde’s eyes and he caught the impression of the world rolling over onto its side, then the datalink broke and his HMD fuzzed into static.

“Hell!” Bolde tore up his useless visor. “We just lost BAKER !”

“I saw him go out,” Brid reported. “Direct hit with a tank round. Dead one. Orders?”

Bolde dialed up the self-destruct code on BAKER ’s crisis menu and beamed it off, hoping there was a functional receiver to catch it. “Disengage! Show’s over! Get CHARLIE out of there. Put him under autonomous control and head him for the extraction point, then kill our transmitters. Rick, balls to the wall and clear the area! We’ve pushed it about as much …”

Beyond ABLE ’s windscreen, the desert exploded.

Mary May skidded down the unstable slope to the sprawled form amid the slide rubble. Lee shouldn’t be moved after a fall such as he had sustained, but he was also three-quarters of the way down to the pass floor and lying on an open hillside. Algerians had pulled back around the next bend in the gorge, but they would be probing again soon.

Grabbing on to his harness, she dragged Trebain a few yards crossslope to a clump of thorny brush. It wasn’t much, but it was all the cover immediately available. Dividing her attention between the canyon floor and her wounded trooper, she made a fast assessment of Trebain’s condition.

He was unconscious but breathing. The ballistic plate shielding his right shin had shattered from a direct hit, but the bullet itself had been turned. The leg was rapidly darkening with a massive bruise, and Mary May suspected the limb wasn’t going to be much good for a while. Trebain’s body armor had also shielded him from the worst effects of his fall. Beyond a concussion and a sizable collection of bangs and abrasions he appeared intact. A good thing as there wasn’t much she could do at the moment beyond applying a few jets of aerosol disinfectant.

As she completed her inspection, she heard him moan softly.

“Hush, Lee. You’re okay,” she said quietly.

“Mar … Five … what happened?”

“You took one on the armor and fell down the wrong side of the hill. How’s your leg feel?”

“My leg … Christ! I can’t even feel if it’s still attached!”

“It is,” she replied, stretching out beside him. Peering out beyond the brush clump, she established her firing position. “It’s just numb from the shock. Enjoy it while it lasts. I’ll bet you’ve got one heck of a bone bruise there.”

“I can’t even get it to move.” Trebain shook his head, becoming more aware of his environment. “Shit! How in the hell are we going to get back up to the extraction point!”

He started to sit up but Mary caught him by the shoulder. “Stay down. We could have Algis moving in on us again. I’m not sure how we’re going to get out of here yet, but we are. You’re going to be okay, Lee. Nobody’s leaving you behind. You got my word on it.”

The thermal lobe and glare from the burning Algerian track kept overloading her night brite visor. Mary May flipped it up for a few moments and rested her grainy eyes with a look up at the cool star-speckled blackness of the desert sky. Beside her, she heard a soft, dazed chuckle. “Shit! And all this friggin’ time I’ve been worrying about taking care of you.”

Distractedly she reached back and patted Trebain on the shoulder. “We take care of each other, guy.”

Flipping her visor down again, she keyed her Leprechaun transceiver onto the voice-channel link with the command vehicle. “I’d better let the lieutenant know we’ve got problems … Scout Lead calling Saber Six. Flash Red. Do you copy?”

She repeated the call three times. There was no answer.

ABLE ’s hull rang like a beaten oil drum, and shrapnel sparked and howled off of her armor plating. For an instant her crew stared down at the ground through her windshield as the concussion of the multiple shell bursts lifted her tail into the air. Then the cavalry vehicle crashed back onto her eight wheels.

“Incoming!” Santiago bellowed, fighting with the wheel to stave off a rollover.

“Oh really? You think?” Shelleen commented through gritted teeth, clinging to the grab bar above her workstation.

Bolde reached across to the driver’s console and slapped the belly rack release, kicking out another set of Jabberwocky decoys. “Brid. Verify that the transmitters are down! Rick. Hard left! Get us out from under the next pattern!”

The driver replied by skidding ABLE through a minimum-radius turn that locked the frame levelers to their stops, shooting the cavalry vehicle off at right angles to their prior course. Instants later, chain lightning played across the desert and man-made thunder roared as eight heavy howitzer rounds tore up the ground where they would have been. The Algerian table of organization was artillery heavy, the divisional commander having over eighty tubes and launchers at his disposal. He was employing this awesome sledgehammer now to eliminate the gadfly that had dared to sting his command. The gadfly’s only recourse was flight.

“Rick, hard right!”

ABLE swerved again, sprayed gravel roaring in the wheel wells. Flooring his accelerator, Santiago resumed the dash south for the hill range. But again there came the wail and slam of an incoming salvo, the cavalry vehicle barely scurried clear of the shells dropping in its tracks.

A rapid rhythmic thumping came from back aft as the shrapnel-torn rubber sheathing stripped from one of the tires. The wheel held together; its multiple layers of steel and Kevlar cording could withstand more damage then even a conventional metal tank tread, but a limit would be reached … soon.

“Dammit! They’re tracking us! Brid, are you sure we’ve got cold boards!”

“Positive,” she called back. “We are not emitting, and the threat board is clear. No laser or radar paints or locks!”

“Then there’s got to be a drone eyeballing us! Find it! Rick, shuck and jive! Buy us some time!”

Bolde called up the weapons pack on his controller, heating up the pair of CMM surface-to-air rounds that were always carried ready for use in the box launchers. Elevating and indexing the mount, he began searching for the Algerian’s airborne spy.

“I verify a drone,” Brid yelled. “I’m getting a datalink trace.”

“Can you jam it?”

“I’ll need a minute to analyze and match the jitter pattern.”

“We don’t have a minute.”

Another salvo dropped in on ABLE . Again they didn’t hit behind but around the fleeing cavalry vehicle and only the luck of the draw prevented a direct hit. With the range established the Algerian gunners would switch to anti-tank scatter packs for their next volley.

Wildly, Bolde swept the IR sights of the sensor group across the sky. There! Off to the west, the sight crosshairs acquired a smear of ruddy heat against the cold stars. The Algerian recon drone was running roughly three klicks out and paralleling their course, targeting for the enemy Artillery regiment.

A flick of his thumb set the tracking lock and a rock forward on a coolie-hat switch zoomed the camera in. Bolde got a momentary impression of the skeletal frame of a miniature helicopter, internally lit by the glow of its rotary engine.

There was only the momentary impression because he was already squeezing the trigger that sent both of the antiair CMMs on their way. The last imaging sent to the Algerians by their drone was two wobbling fire trails converging on it from out of the night.