Out of the Dark (24 page)

•  •  •  •  •

Force Hammer’s Abrams snorted up the incline in a sudden bellow of acceleration. For all its massive size, the M1A2 was capable of almost seventy kilometers per hour—forty-five miles per hour—on a road and almost fifty kilometers per hour even cross-country. In point of fact, with the engine governor (which had been installed primarily for crew safety reasons) removed, it was capable of over
sixty
miles per hour on an improved surface, and it had a power-to-weight ratio of 24.5 horsepower per metric ton. That might not sound like much compared to the typical family sedan, but it was forty percent higher than the ratio the speedy World War II T34 had enjoyed, and that gave it an astonishing acceleration rate and nimbleness—not to mention power to spare, even on a sharp grade. Now Gutierrez’s tanks ripped clear of their overhead concealment, shedding their cocoons of tarps and cut greenery like water. The camouflage went spinning away on the hurricane breath of their turbine exhausts, their broad tracks ground through the dry soil, smashing trees and shrubbery contemptuously aside, throwing up rooster tails of dirt and crushed vegetation, and they rose, like Leviathan sounding from the depths, until their turrets just topped the ridgeline.

The Old Man’s timing had been impeccable, a corner of Gutierrez’s mind noted. He might not have had his displays up, but it was obvious he still had his instincts.

“Target. APC. One o’clock. Sabot,” he announced, designating the target with his own sight.

“Target!” the tank’s gunner replied as he acquired the target and his laser rangefinder registered on it.

“Sabot up!” the loader announced. It was a confirmation this time, actually. There was no need to load; they’d started with a sabot round up the pipe.

“On the way!”

The entire massive vehicle lurched to the recoil of the 120-millimeter M256 Rheinmetal smoothbore. An incredible geyser of flame and propellant gases ripped the night apart, totally destroying the night vision of anyone looking at it. The muzzle blast of the M256 was violent enough to create a blast and over-pressure danger zone for exposed personnel a hundred and sixty-five feet
behind
the tank when it was fired, and a fan-shaped swath of dried leaves and drought-browned grass burst into flame along
the ridge crest in its path. A fragment of a second later, the subcaliber M829A3 long-rod spent-uranium penetrator, carbon fiber sabot shed, impacted less than two inches from the gunner’s point of aim at a velocity of over eighteen hundred meters per second, twice the muzzle velocity of the enormously lighter bullet from an M16.

Armor that would have stopped arrows from any longbow ever made never had a chance against a round designed to disembowel the latest Russian main battle tank. The same penetrator continued onward to rip into the APC directly
beyond
it, and as both of them erupted in a blinding orange and white gush of flaming fuel, Emiliano Gutierrez made a mental note that he could save the sabot rounds for
heavy
targets. HEAT would work just fine, at least on the wheeled vehicles.

Then the other eleven tanks opened fire, as well.

•  •  •  •  •

“Take them down!” Sergeant First Class Eduardo Hidalgo snapped, and three FIM92F Stinger antiair missiles launched from the two AN/TWQ-1 Avengers of his air defense section.

The Stinger had first been fielded over thirty years earlier, but in its current upgrade it was still one of the best MANPAD—Man-Portable Air-Defense—missiles in the world. The Avenger was a Humvee-mounted system with a gyro-stabilized air defense turret which carried two four-missile Stinger pods. The Up-Gun Avenger had replaced the right-hand missile pod with an MP3 .50-caliber machine gun, and a further upgrade had substituted the same M242 Bushmaster 25-millimeter cannon the Bradley mounted for the .50 caliber. Hidalgo had been pissed off when the Up-Gun version was disallowed for Second Brigade and they’d been ordered to remount the second missile pod, because he’d really wanted the additional ground firepower for battery defense in a war where air attack was unlikely, to say the least. Now, though. . . .

All three Stingers slashed straight towards targets hovering at an altitude of less than seven hundred feet, and those targets never even bobbled in midair, far less tried to evade. Two of his three birds scored direct hits, their targets disappearing in brilliant bubbles of light, like lightning in the darkness. The third Stinger passed within inches of
its
target, its proximity fuse activated, and the Shongair drone tumbled out of the sky.

•  •  •  •  •

Harshair stared at his displays in horrified disbelief.

The carnage exploding across his direct-view displays was terrible
enough, but the ones tied to his forward RC drones had gone suddenly and abruptly blank. In all his years campaigning for the Empire, no enemy had ever managed to destroy one of his drones. He’d had them break down on occasion—not even imperial equipment was perfect—but he’d
never
had one simply knocked out of the sky!

And he still hadn’t had
one
knocked out of the sky, the tiny corner of his brain which wasn’t paralyzed in shock told him in a preposterously calm mental tone. No, he’d had
three
of them knocked out of the sky—simultaneously.

One of his assistants, responding to bone-deep training despite her own shock, started punching in commands to transfer the command vehicle’s viewpoint to other drones, but she didn’t seem to be having a lot of success, that same tiny corner of Harshair’s awareness noted.

•  •  •  •  •

There was A reason the Shongair sensor tech was having trouble finding another drone.

At almost the same instant SFC Hidalgo’s Avengers had taken down the three lead drones, a second section of Avengers, three kilometers farther west, hidden in the fields behind Force Furnace, blew four more drones which had been covering Harshair’s column’s southern flank out of the night. And moments after that, individually deployed Stinger teams hidden in the rugged mountains
north
of the A77 roadbed with the original, shoulder-fired launchers had opened fire on the drones on
that
side of the column.

In the space of barely twenty-five seconds, Alastair Sanders’ battalion had put out every one of Brigade Commander Harshair’s aerial eyes.

•  •  •  •  •

Wild exultation, tinged with more than a little awe, flared through Captain Gutierrez. The vista before him was unbelievable.

At least thirty vehicles gushed flame and smoke in a solid sea of fire, and that sea spread wider every moment as tendrils of blazing fuel snaked out from the central carnage. Bodies—some of them already on fire, as well—vomited out of the hatches of demolished vehicles, and strings of 25-millimeter tracer streaked out from the infantry’s Bradleys’ Bushmasters. Whenever one of those strings touched an alien vehicle, that vehicle exploded, and what his Abrams’ main guns did was far, far worse.

“Hammer Five, Five Actual,” an impossibly calm voice said in his helmet earphones. “Advance. Give them the boot!”

“Five Actual, Hammer Five. Wilco, Sir!”

The landlines had disintegrated when his vehicles advanced; he was on the radio now, and he hoped like hell no orbiting starships were listening in. But there was no time to worry about that.

“All Hammers, Hammer Five. Advance!”

The massive Abrams tanks and smaller, lighter Bradleys crossed the crest of the road and drove straight into the madness.

•  •  •  •  •

The Shongair vehicle crews had never imagined anything like it.

They’d never confronted anyone with weapons capable of matching their own. Once in a while an arrow or thrown spear managed to find an open viewport and sneak inside. And they’d lost vehicles occasionally to improvised ambushes, when the local aborigines managed to surprise them at close range, swarm over them, pry open hatches and get at their hapless crews with hand-to-hand weapons. Some of those aborigines had been clever enough to arrange pits or other traps which had disabled or immobilized their vehicles. And some of their vehicles had been destroyed when they were forced to abandon them in the field because of breakdown or when one of their firebases had been temporarily overrun and the local aborigines had known to set their fuel tanks on fire. They’d even—on very rare occasions—encountered aborigines clever enough to manufacture what humans would have called “Molotov cocktails” out of captured Shongair fuel.

But they’d never met anyone with vehicles as combat capable as their own. Never. And as the holocaust which had enveloped the head of their column lapped back around its flanks, some of them lived long enough to realize that they still hadn’t. That the despised humans’ vehicles were far
more
combat capable than their own.

It wasn’t really their fault. This wasn’t the kind of battle they’d been trained to fight. Not the kind of combat their vehicles had been built to survive or their doctrine had been framed to confront.

Eight of the armored regiment’s GEVs battled their way out of the wild confusion of APCs trying to flee in every direction. Five of them took direct hits from 120-millimeter guns and promptly disintegrated. Two more were threshed into flaming wreckage by the jackhammer fire of Alpha Company’s Bradleys.

The eighth lasted long enough to fire its own turreted laser at “Ferdinand,” Gutierrez’s number five Abrams.

The Shongairi had no way to realize it (yet), but their energy weapons were actually shorter-ranged in atmosphere than the human tanks’ main guns. That wasn’t a factor in this case—both combatants were well inside their opponent’s range envelope. But whereas Ferdinand’s spent-uranium penetrator punched cleanly through the GEV’s frontal armor, igniting a fierce conflagration which blew the alien vehicle apart moments later, the GEV’s laser wasn’t powerful enough to blast its way through the depleted uranium-augmented Chobham armor of the tank’s glacis. It would have been more than sufficient to breach Ferdinand’s thinner
side
armor, and its transfer energy managed to shatter a sizable area of the frontal plate’s surface area, but it didn’t have the power or the pulse duration to actually breach it.

Now the horrifying, thundering monsters came straight for the rest of the Shongairi in Harshair’s column, grinding contemptuously through or over the flaming carcasses of their dead comrades’ vehicles, trampling the wreckage underfoot, and the entire brigade began to come apart.

•  •  •  •  •

Over the last four or five years, the Army’s entire fleet of Abrams had been upgraded to TUSK status by the installation of the Tank Urban Survival Kit developed after Iraqi Freedom. Their side armor had been fitted with additional reactive armor, and slat armor had been fitted to protect them against rocket-propelled grenades and other shaped charge weapons fired from behind them. Neither of those features were particularly critical at the present moment, but TUSK also included a remote weapons turret armed with a .50-caliber machine gun in place of the original open-mount, exposed .50 at the commander’s hatch. Now, as the tanks ground forward, those heavy machine guns thundered, spitting their hate even as the main guns continued to seek out and destroy vehicles and the 7.62-millimeter machine guns mounted coaxially with those main guns stitched fist-sized exit wounds through individual Shongairi, whose body armor was approximately as effective as so much straw against them.

Yet dreadful as the tanks’ harvest was, the far lighter Bradleys were almost as bad. And even as they advanced, the mortar vehicles behind them—guided by the continuous overhead surveillance of the UAVs the Shongairi still didn’t realize were there—began to pound the middle and rear of the column, as well. The M298 mortar, adapted from the Israeli Army, had a maximum range of almost four and a half miles. In the first minute, it could fire sixteen thirty-pound rounds, each with a lethal radius of over seventy
feet. Thereafter, as barrel heat became a factor, it had a sustained rate of four rounds per minute.

•  •  •  •  •

Once more, the Shongairi had never experienced anything like it. They had mobile mortars of their own, the heaviest of which had almost half again the range of the weapons firing at them, and they’d used those weapons with devastating effect against opponents in the past. But no one else had ever dropped mortar bombs on
them,
and troopers who were veterans of a score of past skirmishes fled in screaming panic as the incandescent bubbles of high explosive and white-hot steel fragments marched through their ranks.

•  •  •  •  •

“Furnace Five, Five Actual. Engage. Anvil Five, Five Actual, advance to Point Carson and engage at will.”

“Five Actual, Furnace Five. Wilco.”

“Five Actual, Anvil Five. Rolling.”

The responses came back over the landline net, and Captain Michael Wallace’s Force Furnace—four more Abrams from his own Charlie Company’s first platoon, and the four Bradleys of Captain Achilles Adamakos’ Bravo Company’s second platoon—opened fire from camouflaged positions three and a half miles west of Force Hammer in the neat, irrigated fields south of the river. They were barely three hundred meters from the roadway, and the camouflage with which they’d been draped flew away, flaming, on their muzzle flashes as they opened a merciless fire on the previously unengaged flank of Harshair’s column. At that range, even a .50-caliber machine gun was fully capable of penetrating the armor of a Shongair personnel carrier, and the heavier weapons picked off the larger, more heavily armored GEVs with dreadful precision.

The carnage was incredible, and at the same moment, dismounted infantry teams armed with Javelin antitank launchers opened up from the mountains north of Force Furnace, reaping a dreadful harvest as still more of Harshair’s armored regiment’s GEVs exploded in fountains of flame.