Ice War (28 page)

Price watched as a line of tanks slid past, the rear guard. The bridging units were next. Monster swung the machine into a turn, drifting like a sprint car.

“Here we go,” Barnard said, pulling on the cables to operate the de-icing. “Is it working?”

“Yes,” Wall said. From his position in the rear gun turret he had the best view of the liquid spraying onto the ice.

An explosion hurled huge shards of ice into the air behind them as one of the tanks finally realised that there was a cat among the pigeons. More explosions sounded as other tanks joined in, but the firing was wild, the radar-controlled guns unable to lock on. The Angels’ hovercraft was too fast, too stealthy. The tank guns fell silent.

“Watch out for rotorcraft,” Price yelled.

Even as she said it, one of the Bzadian slow movers appeared, skimming along the ice between the rows of SAM batteries.

Wall began to fire from the right rear turret and sparks flashed on the armour of the rotorcraft.

Foot soldiers on T-boards appeared behind them, angling in on their trail. Coil-gun rounds clattered off the shield of Wall’s turret and he ducked down instinctively before getting back on his gun and letting off a long burst that had the Bzadian soldiers diving for cover.

Price, in the top turret, swung the twin heavy machine guns around to the left at a snowmobile that was angling across their path. She must have hit the vehicle’s fuel tank as there was a fiery explosion and bits of the machine scattered across the ice.

Wall’s guns were chattering constantly as the Bzadian craft poured in from the right-hand side, but Price saw that more were swinging around in front of them.

Ahead, a two-man snowmobile skidded to a halt, the rear soldier bringing a missile launcher to his shoulder. She swung her guns towards them and pulled the trigger, but heard only a click, followed by a whirr as the automatic reloader began to change out the ammunition case.

“Wall! Missile team! Ten o’clock!” she shouted.

Glancing back, she saw that Wall could not bring his gun to bear; he was blocked by the huge fan. Still her gun whirred and clicked and now the missile launcher was trained directly on them.

There was a flurry of snow around the two men and she thought the missile had fired, but there was no streak of light towards them, no impact. Her guns came back online as the flurry subsided and she could see that the missile team was down, the launcher lying uselessly on the ice.

Behind them, disappearing into the fog of the battle, she caught a glimpse of a tall man in furs, his head masked by the skull of a white wolf. Then he was gone.

More Bzadian rotorcraft gunships flowed in. Price took aim at the closest one and saw the front windscreen explode. The machine dipped, hit the ice, bounced up and went spinning off into the distance.

Two more took its place.

“Watch out!” she yelled, and Monster swung the machine around in a tight curve, sweeping in and around the SAM batteries to their right.

The sudden change of direction confused the Bzadians, and a snowmobile, screeching around to match them, bounced up off a hump in the ice, hurtling through the air at a rotorcraft. There was a flash and a ball of fire and blackened bits of wreckage spun off in all directions.

Monster returned the craft to its original course.

Price glanced back, trying to judge how far they had come. She estimated they were almost halfway there. A burst of shots slammed into her turret and a mule kicked her in the chest. She fell backwards and when she picked herself up she saw that her armour was shattered. One more shot like that and she was dead.

She nestled her shoulders into the stocks of the twin machine guns and exploded a snowmobile that had just appeared in front of her.

[MISSION DAY 3, FEBRUARY 18, 2033. 1245 HOURS LOCAL TIME]

[BERING STRAIT, ALASKA]

“We’re not going to make it!” Wall yelled as a wave of snowmobiles swept in from the right. The side windows starred then shattered. The Tsar ducked down below the controls, but Monster stayed where he was, steering the hovercraft right at their attackers as Price emptied her magazines at them.

One snowmobile exploded, a second narrowly avoiding the debris, but now the vehicles were scattering in every direction.

“What the hell?” Price yelled.

The Tsar picked himself up and examined the scopes. “It’s the cavalry!” he shouted.

Screaming out between the rows of SAM batteries were fast-attack hovercraft, spitfires.

Sidewinders were flying into the Bzadian ranks, leaving a tangled ball of cotton-like smoke trails in the air.

Other units emerged, Vipers. As Price watched, one got close enough to a command tank to launch its weapon. The sticky bomb flew straight out at the tank, clinging to the rapidly spinning surface. It unwound the reel of det cord in less than a second, the cord wrapping itself around and around the tank.

The crump of the explosion was like a thump in the chest and at first she thought it hadn’t worked. But half a second later the armoured hull of the tank, warped by the explosion, shook itself to pieces in front of them.

The de-icing unit was scraping over the ice behind the hovercraft. Price was acutely aware that if the hoses were damaged, they would be wasting their time, and probably their lives.

Barnard was at the side door, which was open, and at regular intervals hurled C4 packs out onto their trail. Glancing back, Price saw the packs like a row of ants behind them, gradually sinking as the fluid melted the ice underneath.

Around them was a whirling circus of Bzadian and human craft. The air was full of tracers and bullets. As the bridging units moved forwards, the Bzadian command tanks had a clearer field of fire, and explosions rocked them from both sides.

The Angels raced through the maelstrom on a hovercraft that was starting to disintegrate around them. The bulletproof glass of the side windows was gone and the rubber air cushion was peppered with shrapnel holes.

“How’s the de-icing going?” Price called back to Wall.

“It’s not working,” Wall said, looking at the trail behind them.

“It has to work,” Price said.

Or had she thrown all their lives away for nothing?

“It’s not working,” Wall said again.

Behind them, the massive tracks of the bridging units were rolling across the slush-filled trench the Angels had cut in the ice. It wasn’t deep enough or wide enough, or the units were just too fast for it, but as Price watched, more and more of the huge bridgers rolled across the gap.

“We’re not finished yet,” Barnard said.

A series of explosions rippled along the trench, spraying slush into the air as the C4 packs exploded.

One of the bridging units was caught by a blast and lifted into the air, shunted sideways, slamming back down into the ice apparently undamaged. Otherwise there was little effect. The bridging units continued their march towards the front lines.

“Incoming!” The Tsar yelled.

A rotorcraft was heading right for them. It fired and Monster dodged to the left as an explosion blasted ice and snow over them.

A spitfire screamed out from behind a SAM unit, veering onto the tail of the rotorcraft. A missile leaped a short distance and the rotorcraft exploded. But already there was another one, this one right behind the spitfire, which shuddered under the impact of heavy guns.

Price poured fire into the rotorcraft and had the satisfaction of seeing it shudder and dip, the front edge catching the ice and flipping it over. It disintegrated in a tangle of broken metal. The spitfire, completely out of control, was spinning in circles, before embedding itself in a crushed pile of ice. It did not move again.

Several of the Bzadian bridging units had already crossed the trap that the Angels had so carefully laid and were passing through the lines of the SAM batteries. More followed and Price could see that they had wasted their time. It was too late. It hadn’t worked.

Then a fearsome sound split the air, louder even than the explosions of shells and the boom of the tank guns.

The ice on the far side of the channel shuddered and began to dance, shivering as if cold. All of the fluid in the trench drained away in an instant, leaving a narrow chasm in the ice, an artificial canyon where none had been before.

The edge of the ice sheet started to sink under the combined weight of the bridging units and SAM batteries.

Seeing what was happening, the bridgers increased power, a roar coming from all along the line as they tried to drive away from the crack behind them.

More and more the ice dipped, the edge disappearing down into the water. As it did so, the angle of the ice sheet increased and the heavy Bzadian machines started to slip as they tried to climb the icy slope.

The SAM units began to slide backwards first, then the bridging units. As they got close to the edge of the ice sheet, Price heard more of the tremendous cracking sounds and it was clear that the icefloe was breaking in two, the weight at the back too much for the middle. It gave way in a rush. The ice tilted up sharply and none of the Bzadian vehicles had a chance.

Huge spouts of water erupted as the bridging units and most of the SAM batteries slid down the near vertical slope into the black water of the sea.

Wilton opened his eyes.

The windscreen was shattered and the cold, subarctic wind whistled in through the empty space in the front of the cockpit.

The spitfire was dead.

So, as far as he could tell, was Anderson. She was slumped sideways in her seat and there seemed to be a lot of blood on the side wall.

He looked at his fingers and saw that they were covered in ice. He clapped his hands together to dislodge it, but couldn’t feel anything in his fingers. The skin on his hands was a blotchy patchwork of white, yellow and red.

He found the starter switch on the control panel and pressed with a nerveless thumb. To his surprise, the engine started immediately, and soon warm air was blowing up around him. It was fighting the wind and the wind was winning, but it was better than nothing.

The main screen lit up, showing damage to the craft. Apart from the windows, the spitfire was in good condition. The front gun was gone, but the remaining sidewinder missile seemed to be active.

The heartbeat indicators lit up. According to the sensors, he was still alive. So too was Anderson, although her heart rate was slow and erratic.

With frozen fingers, he switched the heaters to full although it seemed to make little difference. He flexed his hands and was relieved to find that they still worked, despite the numbness of the skin.

He rubbed them together in front of an air vent, trying to get some feeling back.

In the cockpit, Anderson grunted once, a half-choked cough, and the heartbeat monitor on the control panel paused, restarted, then stopped flashing altogether. His own heartbeat continued to flash, a tiny beacon of hope.

A large hovercraft rushed past just to his left. It was taking fire and sparks were flying from armoured panels. It showered Wilton with snow as it passed. It was the Angels. It had to be.

“Hi, guys,” he called, knowing they had no way of hearing him.

He laughed as the craft slewed from side to side in evasive manoeuvres, machine guns firing from two turrets.

“Go on, get out of here,” he yelled out. “I never liked you anyway.”

He began to laugh again, but stopped because it hurt his chest and the icy air burned his lungs.

They were almost there, almost free, only one Bzadian tank remained between the Angels and a wide open plain of ice.

And then the tank began to fire.

It was barely a hundred metres away from the Angels’ hovercraft.

The tank rocked as the main gun lashed out three times in quick succession.

The hovercraft was heading towards the tank, running sideways across its path. The first shell overshot its nose by a good six metres, ricocheting off the hard ice and exploding in the distance.

The second shot did all the damage, passing through the rubberised skirt of the vehicle and out the other side before exploding on the ice.

The nose of the hovercraft disintegrated and the entire machine flipped up, pointing skywards. The propeller at the rear shattered and spat itself across the ice as the cage that surrounded it was crushed.

The hovercraft continued to slide across the ice, on its tail, before toppling over backwards and landing on its roof, facing the direction it had come from. Even now its momentum kept it sliding until it came to a rest directly in front of the tank.

Wilton waited for the next shot. The one that would finish them off. But it didn’t come. Instead, the tank began to move. At first Wilton couldn’t understand what it was doing, then he realised. The commander of the tank intended to ram the broken hovercraft.

“Guys!” Wilton shouted, grabbing at the controls.

There was a moment’s pause as the air cushion inflated and strained to break the grip of the ice, but then with a cracking sound, he was moving. But something was wrong with the fan and he had to steer hard right to go forwards. There were scraping noises from below, but he was moving.