Steel Gauntlet (21 page)

The tank lurched when the dead driver fell onto his controls, then rolled forward and slammed into the rear of the medium tank in front of it. Tortured metal shrieked and gears ground loudly as the medium being pushed tried to reverse, but the TP1 was too heavy and powerful, and the medium lacked the power to stop the heavy tank that was slowly shoving it toward the next one in line.

Other tanks started swiveling on their treads, trying maniacally to turn in the narrow space so they could shoot back, but the space was too narrow for them to turn or to get any momentum to bull through the walls that hemmed them in.

“Want me to try for the command tank?” Stevenson asked. The hatch the dumb guy had stood in was still open.

“Think you can get into it?”

“I can try.” At nearly three hundred meters, it would be very difficult to strike the lip of the open hatch at an angle that would ricochet plasma into the tank crew compartment.

“Do it.”

Stevenson carefully took aim and pressed the firing lever. A stream of plasma bolts so close together that they looked like a stream of fire shot out of the muzzle of the assault gun and splattered on the turret.

Almost immediately, the other assault gun added its stream of plasma at the command tank. Between them, they managed to get enough fire on the open hatch to overheat and ignite the oxygen inside it. The tank swerved wildly, stuttered, then sat still, looking almost deflated.

“Cease fire,” Bass ordered. “I think you killed it.” He clapped Stevenson on the back.

One TP1 was dead. Two more had their crews killed, and maybe enough of their controls and electronics were fried to keep them from being used again without major repairs. A medium tank was slowly being mangled between two TP1s. It was beginning to look like the assault squad was winning its battle against the tank platoon. Then the farthest visible tank fired its gun at the wall in front of it and crashed through the weakened structure. Inside the building it found space to turn around, and came back out with its gun pointed toward the Marines.

“Time to get out of here,” Bass said. They ran. Over the command circuit Bass heard Vanden Hoyt ordering the rest of the Marines away from their positions. They headed for the rendezvous point. It wouldn’t take the remaining tanks long to escape the trap now, and the Marines only had one rocket left.

“Are they bottled up?” Hyakowa asked when the two killer teams rejoined the unit.

“We killed ours,” Leach reported. “They aren’t getting out that way in a hurry.”

“Same here,” Ratliff said.

Hyakowa looked at them in the dawn light. He could see them in part because he knew how to look at a man in chameleons. He could also see Ratliff and Dean because where the fire had singed their uniforms, the chameleon effect wasn’t working anymore.

“You look like you were in more of a firefight than you bargained for.” Ratliff shrugged. “That’s the hazards of firing a rocket inside a structure.” Amazed at the calm understatement, Dean looked at him. If they’d been a little slower getting out of that room, or if the angle of the shot had been a little different, they might have been burned to death.

“Now, again, are they trapped?”

Schultz spat to the side. No fighter worth the name is ever trapped for long.

The two men looked at each other, wondering if the tanks really were trapped. “For a little while,” Leach finally said. Ratliff nodded agreement.

Hyakowa’s mouth twitched. “I hope for long enough. I managed to get contact with a flight of Raptors, long enough to give them the coordinates. They said they’ll check it out on their way back from their strike at the spaceport. If they’ve got any ordnance left, they’ll use it on those tanks.” Schultz spat again. From the sounds of the battle in the direction of the spaceport, he didn’t think the Raptors would have anything left.

“We can’t dwell on it,” Hyakowa said. “We still have to get back to the company. Here’s where we’re going.” He transmitted the HUD map with the overlay he’d made showing their route. “Let’s move it out.”

CHAPTER 16

The advance of the 493rd Battalion of the First Tank Brigade against the Oppalia spaceport ground to a halt by mid-morning. The first wave of six hundred Marines of the 34th FIST had been quickly reinforced by the FIST’s remaining four hundred Marines. Not long after came the 13th FIST and its thousand Marines. The thousand infantrymen, supported by twenty Raptors that were able to fly unimpeded by the badly mauled Diamundean air forces, had killed or damaged fifty-one of the battalion’s 133 tanks. Afraid to launch a direct assault against the Marine positions, the survivors hunkered down under cover and turned their engines off so the Marine infras couldn’t spot them.

If the tankers had known that the infantrymen of the two FISTs were down to twenty-seven Straight Arrows and had no other tank-killers, that sixteen of the Marine Raptors were sitting idle at an expeditionary airfield waiting for resupply of ordnance, and the four Raptors still in the air only had enough power left in their cannons to take out three tanks, they might have been bolder. The Marines of 34th FIST had lost a hundred men killed, another thirty or more wounded. Thirteenth FIST’s casualties were a little lighter. Plasma weapons tend to kill, and most of the Marine casualties were the result of fire from plasma weapons.

It’s a fact: a properly trained and equipped infantryman can go mano a mano with a tank and have a reasonable chance of coming out on top; a thousand infantrymen without tank killers are just so much mincemeat for eighty-two tanks.

But Major Kleidsdale didn’t know the Marines were improperly equipped to take on an armored battalion, much less a full brigade, so he ordered his tankers to take cover. And he gave his tankers orders to make full use of all passive vision devices and to concentrate their fire on Marines carrying rockets. He hoped the Marines would get bored and come looking for his battalion. While his staff wracked their brains trying to come up with a better plan, Kleidsdale listened in on the brigade’s tactical net.

The 19th and 225th FISTs were in full control of the seaport after mangling the 552nd Battalion.

Lieutenant Colonel Namur was holding the 687th Battalion in reserve, waiting for one of the other battalions to make a breakthrough that the reserve battalion could exploit. Lots of luck, Kleidsdale thought. The 552nd had faced all four FISTs as they came over the beach and was in even worse shape than the 493rd. Kleidsdale switched to the command net to see what he could learn of the situation on the rest of Diamunde and wished he’d done that earlier.

The rest of the First Armored Division, the Fifth and Eighth Tank Brigades, had mounted up and were on their way to Oppalia! In another hour, two at the most, relief and reinforcements would arrive. The division, Major Kleidsdale was sure, could defeat the Marines. He turned off the radio and assembled his staff. Had he continued listening for a few more minutes, his staff meeting might have proceeded a bit differently.

“Hellcat Flight, this is Hellcat Lead,” said Lieutenant Commander Ragrun, commanding officer of VFA 112, “check in.”

“Hellcat One,” came the voice of Lieutenant Cehawk, the Hellcats second in command

“Hellcat Two,” chimed in Lieutenant Brush.

One by one, in order, the sixteen pilots of VFA 112 reported in. Using all of their vision-enhancing and emission-detecting devices to aid in their search, the Hellcats’ Raptors were flying in combat formation at angels thirty, looking for Diamundean aircraft to engage and destroy. During the four hours they’d been flying they saw sign of many bogies, but none were flying. Every Diamundean aircraft they spotted was on the ground, crashed and shattered by them over the past couple of days. They thought the Marines on the ground in Oppalia should be having an easy time of it with nothing more than a few tanks to worry about.

“Hellcat Flight,” Ragrun said, a chuckle bouncing under his words, “we’ve been given a change of orders. Higher-higher thinks we bounced all the baddies and are wasting our time up here.” He paused a couple of beats to give his pilots a chance to laugh at his wit, then continued, “The First Armored Division has been observed moving out of its base. Higher-higher thinks the spam-cans are on their way to bother our mudpuppy brothers on the ground in Oppalia.” He paused again, pleased with his choice of words.

“We are to intercept and convince them they don’t have invitations to that particular party.”

“Turkey shoot!” exclaimed Lieutenant (jg) Dule.

“Bunny hop!” from Ensign Prowel.

“Stand by for tacmap.” Ragrun tapped a series of buttons on his tactical control panel and transmitted the overlay map to his squadron, showing them where they were and where they were going. The pilots acknowledged receipt of the map data.

“Close on me,” Ragrun said, more businesslike. “Prepare to board the express elevator to the ground floor.”

The pilots laughed and cheered. After four hours of looking for bogies that had already been shot down, going after spam-cans that couldn’t shoot back sounded exciting.

Captain Hormujh stood tall in his commander’s position, hips level with the turret hatch of his Teufelpanzer One. His Company B, 261st Tank Battalion, Eighth Tank Brigade, First Armored Division, was given the honor of leading the division to the rescue of the besieged First Tank Brigade in Oppalia.

Impatient, he positioned himself behind his company’s lead squad instead of between the lead and middle platoons, as was usual in a tank company column. He wanted more direct control of the point than a company commander normally had. He was in a hurry to get to Oppalia and begin the counterattack. In his opinion, the First Tank Brigade had always been overrated. He thought the Eighth was the best in the whole Diamundean Army. Had the Eighth been in Oppalia when the Confederation Marines came ashore, he believed, no rescue would need to be mounted. And, of course, he thought Company B of the 261st was the best tank company in the entire army. He’d stake his life on it. In his haste to get to Oppalia to demonstrate that superiority, he had already increased the interval between his company and Company A from two hundred meters to a kilometer and a half.

The pass through Rourke’s Hills was less than two kilometers ahead. Rourke’s Hills was an ancient mountain range, eroded down to ridges and hills that rose mere hundreds of meters at its greatest heights.

Most of the littoral plain between the hills and the sea was buildup from that erosion. In a straight line, the pass through Rourke’s Hills was fifteen kilometers long. The way the road twisted around the remnant mountains, the passage was closer to thirty kilometers. Aside from his impatience to get to Oppalia to begin the counterattack, Hormujh wanted to get through the pass as fast as possible. The Confederation Navy had full control of the air, and it flew the same kind of aircraft the Confederation Marines did.

Intelligence reported Marine Raptors attacking and destroying ground targets, some of which might have been tanks—the intelligence reports were fuzzy on that point. If the Marine Raptors could attack and destroy tanks, the navy Raptors probably could as well, though he suspected the navy pilots weren’t as good at attacking ground targets as the Marines were. Regardless, if Raptors came, he didn’t want to be in the pass when they arrived.

“Baker Two-one, this is Baker Papa,” he said into his communicator. “Speed it up, we don’t have all day here.”

A few hundred meters ahead the lead tank sent up swirls of dust as it accelerated to ninety kilometers per hour. The interval between Company B and the rest of the First Armored Division increased more rapidly. Captain Hormujh decided to disable the battalion circuit on his communicator before the battalion reassembled. That way he could claim he never got the order to slow down that was coming at him now from the battalion command.

The Hellcats had plummeted to angels two and were cruising in a tight, bomber formation north over Rourke’s Hills. There were several passes through the ancient mountains, but one pass was on an almost direct line from the First Armored Division’s base and the port city of Oppalia. The string-of-pearls had detected the division headed toward that pass. The Hellcats were to fly directly to the pass, then make a starboard turn and head inland until they intercepted the division’s van, then blow the hell out of it.

“Stand by to hang right in two mikes. Mark,” Lieutenant Commander Ragrun said into his squadron circuit. “Confirm.”

“Hang right in one fifty-five,” Lieutenant Cehawk said.

“Starboard flip in one fifty,” said Lieutenant Brush.

“Go right in one-four-five,” came from Lieutenant (jg) Dule. Prowel confirmed. At five second intervals the pilots confirmed receipt of the order. The Hellcats were forty-five seconds from their next maneuver when Ensign Hagg, the most junior and last member of the squadron to reply, gave his acknowledgment. The squadron flew on at four hundred knots.

“On my mark, peel right,” Ragrun said half a minute later. He began counting down to the turn.

“...three, two, one. Mark!”

The Raptors of VFA 112 peeled off to the right onto an eastern heading.

“Tally ho!” Lieutenant (jg) Blackhead suddenly cried.

“Fish in a barrel,” Ensign Cannion shouted simultaneously.

Below them, traveling at a high speed through the pass, were forty or fifty tanks.

“Angels four, turn about,” Ragrun ordered, no humor in his voice. The pass was narrow here and had frequent turns. If the Hellcats were going to strike the tank column below them, they’d have to be very careful not to wipeout themselves. “Orbit,” he ordered as soon as the squadrons had reversed their direction of flight and gained altitude.

“Flight one, recon,” Ragrun ordered. He tipped his wings and dropped out of the orbiting formation with Lieutenant Brush on his wing. “Throttle back,” he told Brush. Both pilots reduced speed to two hundred knots. Ragrun dropped into the pass and cut his airspeed even further. He glanced up and grimaced when he saw rock slopes extending a couple of hundred meters above him, then he lowered his eyes and kept his attention riveted on the channel he was following. Here, not much more than a hundred meters above the roadway, the pass was barely seventy meters wide. He had almost no maneuvering room. Brush flew a few meters to his left rear, his eyes locked on the near point of Ragrun’s left wing; he’d follow that wing tip as precisely as he could.