Уильям Дитц - Into the Guns

Здесь есть возможность читать онлайн «Уильям Дитц - Into the Guns» весь текст электронной книги совершенно бесплатно (целиком полную версию без сокращений). В некоторых случаях можно слушать аудио, скачать через торрент в формате fb2 и присутствует краткое содержание. Город: New York, Год выпуска: 2016, ISBN: 2016, Издательство: ACE, Жанр: prose_military, sf_postapocalyptic, на английском языке. Описание произведения, (предисловие) а так же отзывы посетителей доступны на портале библиотеки ЛибКат.

Into the Guns: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

Предлагаем к чтению аннотацию, описание, краткое содержание или предисловие (зависит от того, что написал сам автор книги «Into the Guns»). Если вы не нашли необходимую информацию о книге — напишите в комментариях, мы постараемся отыскать её.

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Legion of the Damned® Novels and The Mutant Files comes the first novel in a post-apocalyptic military science fiction series about America rising from the ashes of a global catastrophe…
On May Day, 2018, sixty meteors entered Earth’s atmosphere and exploded around the globe with a force greater than a nuclear blast. Earthquakes and tsunamis followed. Then China attacked Europe, Asia, and the United States in the belief the disaster was an act of war.
Washington D.C. was a casualty of the meteor onslaught that decimated the nation’s leadership and left the surviving elements of the armed forces to try and restore order as American society fell apart.
As refugees across America band together and engage in open warfare with the military over scarce resources, a select group of individuals representing the surviving corporate structure makes a power play to rebuild the country in a free market image as The New Confederacy…

Into the Guns — читать онлайн бесплатно полную книгу (весь текст) целиком

Ниже представлен текст книги, разбитый по страницам. Система сохранения места последней прочитанной страницы, позволяет с удобством читать онлайн бесплатно книгу «Into the Guns», без необходимости каждый раз заново искать на чём Вы остановились. Поставьте закладку, и сможете в любой момент перейти на страницу, на которой закончили чтение.

Тёмная тема
Сбросить

Интервал:

Закладка:

Сделать

Victoria slid in beside Gatlin. A pintle-mounted 7.62 machine gun was located in front of her. Victoria strapped in, ran a radio check, and held on as the DPV took off. Open country, which was to say tank country, lay to either side of the two-lane highway. There wasn’t much to see other than grass and an occasional bush.

Gatlin could literally run circles around the tanks if he chose to but knew better than to enter their line of fire. That forced him to go more slowly than he would have preferred. It wasn’t long before some obstacles appeared in the distance. Three trucks were positioned to block the highway. Why? So the gringo s would drive between the vehicles, or circle around them. But the tank commanders were smarter than that. They fired, cars exploded, and IEDs went off. Debris was thrown high into the air, only to come twirling down again.

Gatlin uttered a personal war cry and stomped on the gas. The DPV surged forward, bumped through the ditch next to the road, and turned, so Victoria could fire on the men who were hidden next to the ambush site. Hot casings flew sideways as she fired the 7.62. Bodies fell, the DPV bounced over one of them, and Victoria felt all powerful until an RPG exploded twenty feet ahead of them. Gatlin swore as a fragment of metal hit his left hand, and blood began to flow.

Then it was time to turn east again and catch up with the tanks. Victoria took a moment to check the screen mounted between them and saw that they were about to enter Bola Chica Village. That was where the Space X control center was located. The Zapatas had control of it but not for long. The plan called for the trucks to drop two platoons of infantry outside the village, and Victoria expected them to take it back in less than an hour. In the meantime, she, along with the rest of the task force, would continue to the launch site. Unfortunately, the Russian Kashtan system would be waiting for them when they arrived.

According to the literature, the turret could engage shore targets. But did the people manning the weapons system know that? And what were they doing? Had the Zapata techs been ordered to sit there and scan the sky for Apaches? If so, they might waste time deciding what to do when ground targets appeared. Time her tanks could use to attack. That was Victoria’s plan, and she was staking lives on it, hers included.

The tanks were rolling east at their top speed of 45 mph, and Victoria wished they could go faster. But that was impossible. So all she could do was hold on as the DPV bounced across open country south of the tanks. The second dune buggy was doing the same up to the north.

As the tanks began to close in on the launch site, Victoria gave orders for the drones to swing wide rather than run head-on into the metal hail that the Kashtan battery could throw up. Then she got on the horn to the captain in command of the trucks following behind. “Snake-Six actual to Bravo-Six. Order your drivers to pull over and unload your troops. Bring them forward but use cover. There’s no telling what that weapons system is going to do. Over.”

The infantry officer already had his orders, but Victoria didn’t know him personally, so she wanted to make sure he understood the need to hang back at first. Because if the people in the turret were prepared to engage shore targets, the 30mm rotary cannons would rip the troops to shreds. “This is Bravo-Six,” the officer replied. “Roger that, over.”

“There it is!” Gatlin shouted over the engine noise, as a thicket of radio towers appeared up ahead. Victoria was thrown against her harness as he turned the wheel to avoid running into a marshy estuary. Victoria spotted the grounded ship as the DPV bounced onto the road, and Gatlin put his foot down. The destroyer’s bow was higher than it should have been because of the upward slope of the beach. And that was a good thing because it meant the 30mm cannons couldn’t be brought to bear on the launch site!

But the feeling of jubilation was short-lived as the Kashtan battery came to life and fired two missiles. They flashed out of their tubes, accelerated away, and were soon lost in the low-lying clouds. They’re gone, Victoria told herself. The tanks are too close for the rockets to hit.

That was when a missile fell from the sky and landed on top of the lead tank’s turret. There was a massive explosion, and the M-1 was transformed into a pile of burning scrap. A series of secondary explosions destroyed what remained of the machine. Victoria had been wrong, terribly wrong, and she felt a sense of shame.

The next missile missed the second tank but not by much. And the near miss blew a storage shed to smithereens. The tank commander was firing by then, and Victoria saw a flash as one of the 105mm shells hit the destroyer’s bow, but it wasn’t enough. Two missiles fell on the Abrams in quick succession, all but obliterating the sixty-ton machine.

Most of Victoria’s offensive capability had been destroyed—and she felt her stomach flip-flop as she shouted into the mike. “Get in close! They won’t be able to put missiles on us there… See the ladders? We’ll do this the hard way.”

Gatlin was driving around the road that circled the facility. Tires screeched as the DPV entered a controlled skid. Then he jerked the wheel to the right and launched the patrol vehicle up and over the dune that lay between the facility and the beach. The DPV took to the air, landed hard, and threw sand as Gatlin stood on the brake.

Victoria hit the harness release as the second dune buggy stopped next to them. “Everybody out!” she ordered. “Follow me!”

Geysers of sand jumped up all around Victoria and Gatlin as they ran, and the men on the destroyer’s main deck fired down on them. But in spite of Victoria’s order, Poston had chosen to stay behind. He brought the vehicle’s pintle-mounted 7.62mm machine gun to bear on the men at the railing and fired a long, sweeping burst. Zapatas fell like tenpins. And that gave Victoria and Gatlin the opportunity to reach the extension ladders that stood against the ship.

More defenders appeared as the threesome began to climb, but the newly arrived Zapatas were forced back, as Poston continued to fire. Victoria felt the ladder tremble under her boots and paused to lob a grenade up onto the deck above. She heard a loud bang, followed by a scream.

Gatlin had made it to the top of his ladder by then, and when Victoria glanced over at him, she saw the bloody bandage on his left hand. He’d been wounded, and she’d forgotten. But there was no time for guilt as he fired his pistol one-handed, and a Zapata fell back out of sight. Then Victoria was up and over, with Tarvin right on her heels as both women arrived on the bloody deck. Bodies lay everywhere… And when one of them moved, Victoria put three bullets into it.

Gatlin was ahead of them at that point, having climbed a ladder closer to the bow. He kept his back to the superstructure as he made his way forward. Rather than step out into the open, he took a peek around the corner. “The turret is all buttoned up,” he announced over the radio.

“Then let’s open it up,” Poston said, as he arrived. “This should do the trick.”

Victoria saw that he was carrying a satchel charge. She watched him set the timer, step up, and sling the pack around the corner. Would the explosion destroy the turret? Or destroy the turret and the ordnance stored below? If so, that would kill them all.

There were two seconds of silence followed by an explosion so powerful that it shook the entire ship and nearly knocked them down. But there were no secondary explosions. And, after congratulating herself on being alive, Victoria went forward, ready to fire. There weren’t any targets. The Kashtan turret was little more than a smoking lump of twisted metal. “She-it,” Gatlin said happily. “That was sweet.”

Читать дальше
Тёмная тема
Сбросить

Интервал:

Закладка:

Сделать

Похожие книги на «Into the Guns»

Представляем Вашему вниманию похожие книги на «Into the Guns» списком для выбора. Мы отобрали схожую по названию и смыслу литературу в надежде предоставить читателям больше вариантов отыскать новые, интересные, ещё непрочитанные произведения.


Отзывы о книге «Into the Guns»

Обсуждение, отзывы о книге «Into the Guns» и просто собственные мнения читателей. Оставьте ваши комментарии, напишите, что Вы думаете о произведении, его смысле или главных героях. Укажите что конкретно понравилось, а что нет, и почему Вы так считаете.

x