Tom Clancy - The Bear and the Dragon

All set, sir,” Colonel Ardan reported.

“Okay, we’ll wait to see how Angelo’s doing.”

“Your screen is right here,” Captain Williams told the senior officers. For him it was like being in a skybox at a football game, except that one team didn’t know he was there, and didn’t know the other team was on the field as well. “They’re within three klicks of the enemy’s first line of outposts.”

“Duke, tell Angelo. Get it out on the IVIS.”

“Done,” Masterman replied. The only thing they couldn’t do was cross-deck the “take” from the Dark Star drone.

SABRE Six was now in his Bradley instead of the safer Abrams main-battle tank. He could see better out of this one, Giusti judged.

“IVIS is up,” the track commander called. Colonel Giusti ducked down and twisted around the gun-turret structure to see where the sergeant was sitting. Whoever had designed the Bradley hadn’t considered that a senior officer might use it-and his squadron didn’t have one of the new “God” tracks yet, with the IVIS display in the back.

“First enemy post is right over there, sir, at eleven o’clock, behind this little rise,” the sergeant said, tapping the screen.

“Well, let’s go say hi.”

“Roger that, Colonel. Kick it, Charlie,” he told the driver. For the rest of the crew: “Perk it up, people. Heads up. We’re in Indian Country.”

How are things up north?” Diggs asked Captain Williams.

“Let’s see.” The captain deselected Marilyn Monroe and switched over to the “take” from Grace Kelly. “Here we go, the leading Chinese elements are within fifteen klicks of the Russians. Looks like they’re settled in for the night, though. Looks like we’ll be in contact first.”

“Oh, well.” Diggs shrugged. “Back to Miss Monroe.”

“Yes, sir.” More computer maneuvers. “Here we are. Here’s your leading cavalry element, two klicks from John Chinaman’s first hole in the ground.”

Diggs had grown up watching boxing on TV. His father had been a real fan of Muhammad Ali, but even when Ali had lost to Leon Spinks, he’d known the other guy was in the ring with him. Not now. The camera zoomed in to isolate the hole. There were two men there. One was hunched down smoking a cigarette, and that must have ruined the night vision of one of them, maybe both, which explained why they hadn’t seen anything yet, though they ought to have heard something … the Brad wasn’t all that quiet …

“There, he just woke up a little,” Williams said. On the TV screen, the head turned abruptly. Then the other head came up, and the bright point of the cigarette went flying off to their right front. Giusti’s track was coming in from their left, and now both heads were oriented in that general direction.

“How close can you get?” Diggs asked.

“Let’s see …” In five seconds, the two nameless Chinese infantrymen in their hand-dug foxhole took up half the screen. Then Williams did a split screen, like the picture-in-picture feature of some television sets. The big part showed the two doomed soldiers, and the little one was locked on the leading Bradley Scout, whose gun turret was now turning a little to the left … about eleven hundred meters now …

They had a field phone in the hole, Diggs could see now, sitting on the dirt between the two grunts. Their hole was the first in the enemy combat outpost line, and their job would have been to report back when something evil this way came. They heard something, but they weren’t sure what it was, were probably waiting until they saw it. The PLA didn’t have night-vision goggles, at least not at this level, Diggs thought. That was important information. “Okay, back it off.”

“Right, sir.” Williams dumped the close-up of the two grunts, returning to the picture that showed both them and the approaching Brad. Diggs was sure that Giusti’s gunner could see them now. It was just a question of when he chose to take the first shot, and that was a call for the guy in the field to make, wasn’t it?

“There!” The muzzle of the 25-mm chain gun flashed three times, causing the TV screen to flare, and there was a line of the tracers, streaking to the hole-

— and the two grunts were dead, killed by three rounds of high-explosive incendiary-tracer ammunition. Diggs turned.

“GUNFIGHTER, commence firing!”

“Fire!” Colonel Ardan said into his microphone. Moments later, the ground shook under their feet, and a few seconds after that came the distant sound of thunder, and more than ninety shells started arcing into the air.

Colonel Ardan had ordered a TOT, or time-on-target barrage, on the regimental command post behind the small pass that the Quarter Horse was driving for. An American invention from World War II, TOT was designed so that every round fired from the various guns targeted on the single spot on the map would arrive at the same instant, and so deny the people there the chance to dive for cover at the first warning. In the old days, that had meant laboriously computing the flight time of every single shell, but computers did that now in less time than it took to frame the thought. This particular mission had fallen to 2nd/6th and its eight-inchers, universally regarded as the most accurate heavy guns in the United States Army. Two of the shells were common impact-fused high-explosive, and the other ten were VT. That stood for “variable time,” but really meant that in the nose of each shell was a tiny radar transponder set to explode the shell when it was about fifty feet off the ground. In this way, the fragments lancing away from the exploding shell were not wasted into the ground, but instead made an inverted cone of death about two hundred feet across at its base. The common shells would have the effect of making craters, immolating those who might be in individual shelter holes.

Captain Williams switched Marilyn’s focus to the enemy command post. From a high perspective the thermal cameras even caught the bright dots of the shells racing through the night. Then the camera zoomed back in on the target. By Diggs’s estimation, all of the shells landed in less than two seconds The effects were horrific. The six tents there evaporated, and the glowing green stick figures of human beings fell flat and stopped moving. Some pieces separated from one another, an effect Diggs had never seen.

“Whoa!” Williams observed. “Stir-fry.”

What was it about the Air Force? General Diggs wondered. Or maybe it was just the kid’s youth.

On the screen, some people were still moving, having miraculously survived the first barrage, but instead of moving around (or of running away, because artillery barrages didn’t arrive in groups of only one) they remained at their posts, some looking to the needs of the wounded. It was courageous, but it doomed most of them to death. The only one or two people in the regimental command post who were going to live were the ones who’d pick winning lottery tickets later in life. If there were going to be as many as two, that is. The second barrage landed twenty-eight seconds after the first, and then a third thirty-one seconds after that, according to the time display in the upper-right corner of the screen.

“Lord have mercy,” Colonel Ardan observed in a whisper. He’d never in his career seen the effect of fire in this way. It had always been a distant, detached thing to the cannon-cocker, but now he saw what his guns actually did.

“Target, cease fire,” Diggs said, using tanker-talk for It’s dead, you k illed it, find another one. A year before in the sands of Saudi Arabia, he’d watched combat on a computer screen and felt the coldness of war, but this was infinitely worse. This was like watching a Hollywood special-effects movie, but it wasn’t computer-generated animation. He’d just watched the command section of an infantry regiment, perhaps forty people, erased from the face of the earth in less than ninety seconds, and they had, after all, been human beings, something this young Air Force captain didn’t seem to grasp. To him it was doubtless some sort of Nintendo game. Diggs decided that it was probably better to think of it that way.