David Drake - The Forlorn Hope

They had twenty seconds.

Pavel cried out as he bounced on the pressed-metal step. The soldier holding him dragged the little man a pace further from the truck, then kicked him. "Does that help you listen?" the Rube demanded. "Does that?"

Sergeant Mboko had improvised the delay switch with sand and a ration can. When the can was flipped over, the sand ran out until it no longer had enough weight to depress the switch which had originally flashed the headlights while it was held down. Now the switch waited to send current to an electrically-primed blasting cap in the back of a thirty-kilogram shaped charge.

The Republican soldier spat and turned from Hodicky. He faced Quade, half his size and as bedraggled as a cat caught in a rainstorm.

"G-go, Pavel," Quade said. Blood droplets jeweled the cracked scabs on his taut right arm.

"You want some of this?" the Rube shouted. He waved the butt of his rifle in the smaller man's face.

Quade ignored the weapon. He leaped for the Republican, gripping him by both biceps. The man screamed. Quade's fingers compressed his muscles as if they were clay in a potter's hands.

Pavel Hodicky was dizzy with pain. He had not felt the boot hit him. It had been lost in the hot rush of his lower spine hitting the cab step. Even as Quade spoke, Hodicky was rolling through a red blur. He was not rational enough to be scrambling toward the trench-or even scrambling away from the imminent blast. He was simply moving because his last conscious awareness had been of the need to move. The ground dropped away beneath him.

Another of the guards cried out. The man Quade held was gasping and staggering backwards. Dark-clad soldiers were leaping to their feet with curses. The two nearest men were battering at Quade with their gun butts.

Quade wrenched his head back with a gurgle of triumph. His opponent fell away as if propelled by the blood jetting from his throat. A Republican screamed again and fired with his rifle almost touching Quade's back.

The soldier trying to hold Quade from the other side gaped down at his left arm. A bullet had struck the elbow and disintegrated, amputating the limb within the sleeve. Quade turned toward the man who had killed him. Shock has no effect on a berserker. The black-haired Federal had ceased to be human seconds before the shots ripped his heart and lungs to pulp.

Quade gripped the gun muzzle with his left hand. He reached for his killer with his right. His snarl was silent because he had no diaphragm to drive the sounds. The blood on his teeth was not his own. The Republican shrieked and turned away just as the world dissolved in a red flash.

For all its simplicity, the shaped-charge principle was discovered by accident. An engineer tested a small block of explosive by detonating it against the side of a safe. The safe was not structurally injured. In its steel side, however, was stamped in mirror-writing the logo of the explosives manufacturer. The logo had been impressed in the block, and on detonation the gases propagating along the sides of that shallow impression were focused at their mid-point. They struck the safe with greatly-multiplied force, stampingthemselves into plating which would have resisted the impact of much larger unfocused blasts.

Shaped charges were gleefully adopted by the military as soon as armor became a commonplace of war again in the Twentieth Century. If the face of the explosive were hollowed into a long, conical throat, the blast could be focused in a pencil-thin jet of unimaginable intensity. A thirteen-kilogram charge could blast a hole through fifty centimeters of hardened steel. Sergeant Mboko, with practically unlimited quantities of explosives to work with, had molded his charge from a full thirty-kilogram case. Even with the imprecisions involved in such a field expedient, Mboko's weapon could have ripped through any practical thickness of steel armor.

Unfortunately for the mercenaries, the sapphire core of the Terran armor would shrug off a jet of white-hot gas that vaporized metallic armor.

Unfortunately for the Republicans, Albrecht Waldstejn had allowed for that when he made his plans.

The supply truck blew up with a deep red flash. Quite apart from its focus, the thirty kilograms of explosive were comparable to the bursting charge of a large shell. The rear half of the vehicle disintegrated. The cab and some shredded remnants of the body lurched forward, crumpling with the acceleration. The trench that sheltered Private Hodicky was two meters deep. Despite that, the shock wave slammed him from one end to the other. The men struggling at ground level were killed instantly by the unimpeded blast, even before the shrapnel tore their hurtling corpses. The face of Jirik Quade was smiling with perhaps as much happiness as it had ever shown in life.

Instead of the tank's invulnerable frontal armor, Mboko's shaped charge was directed toward the skirts around the plenum chamber. The drive fans were buried in the floor of the vehicle, out of the way of possible assault. They had enough extra power to keep the tank floating on its air cushion even if there were some holes in the heavy steel skirts that focused the cushion downward. What happened this timewas not merely a few holes.

Centimeter-thick steel vaporized like ice in a gas flame. A ragged twenty-centimeter circle was gone from the bow skirt. Almost the entire rear skirt ballooned away. The jet, spreading but still powerful, had punched the metal there after traversing the hollow length of the plenum chamber. Brush flared at the touch of white-hot gases. The tank driver had started to lift his vehicle immediately before the explosion. Now the tank lurched to the ground again. Though its drive units were undamaged, they could not pressurize a plenum chamber that gaped like a barn in a whirlwind. The fans roared, whipping the nearby brush into a sea of orange flames.

The armored personnel carriers were protected by the tank from any serious effects the blast might have had on them. Inside the APCs, men were bounced against equipment and each other; but both the vehicles and their complements remained combat ready.

Waldstejn and his companions had done their part. The rest was up to the Company.

Churchie Dwyer knew the APC was close. They had heard it returning as a lookout from the direction the column had taken. He had been cursing as he recovered from the pounding the tanks had given him, and this too was reason to curse. But it was also reason to lie still and pray that their cover remained adequate.

The look-out vehicle had approached at a leisurely pace. That might, of course, have meant that it was taking its time to get into a perfect firing position from which to rake the trench. The pair of mercenaries could not even bump up the lip of their cover sheet to watch. They lay on their bellies with their heads toward the approach to the valley. If they tried to turn around now, they would be seen unless the Rube driver was blind. All they could do was to listen to the fans and feel their sheet quiver above them from air spilled from the plenum chamber.

Even so, when the huge blast in the valley signaled them to action, Churchie was shocked to find that the side of the personnel carrier was within arm's length of him. That meant that if somebody dropped the sides, the two mercenaries would be knocked silly without anybody knowing they were there.

The APC was starting to lift from an idle. Dwyer fired. He was trying to angle his shot forward toward where he thought the driver must sit. The muzzle blast rebounded from the flat side with stunning force. The steel puckered inward where his projectile had struck it. The hole in the center was rimmed with lips of metal white-hot from the impact. The APC started to rise. Churchie fired again, letting the vehicle's incipient turn change the angle for him. Then his partner began to rake the personnel carrier with fully-automatic fire.