Steel Gauntlet (9 page)

“Ten, One. I have red light. You.” The pilot didn’t actually see the color, he was firing from behind a hill and read the data transmitted to his instruments from satellites.

“Hopper One, that’s it. Fire.”

There was a second’s hesitation, then the pilot said, “Ten, what are you doing? I lost the light.” Claypoole swore at himself. The drone had made a sudden turn, almost ninety degrees, and lost the color Claypoole’s laser beam was painting it with. Quickly, he found his target again and hit it with the red laser light.

“I have red,” the hopper pilot said.

“You have the target.”

“One Hellspawn out.”

Claypoole instinctively gripped the laser pointer tighter—and lost his target when the drone took another sharp turn.

“Find it, find it, find it!” the pilot shrieked. He could slow the missle slightly, but if it lost the target for more than a second or two, it probably wouldn’t have time to lock back on again.

Frantically, Claypoole found the drone and resighted.

“Got it!” the pilot shouted. “Keep it painted.”

The drone sped in a straight line to the west, and Claypoole managed to track it, keeping the beam of light on the target. Suddenly, the drone stopped and went into reverse, causing Claypoole’s aim to slide off. Appalled, through the sight he saw the Hellspawn pass through the space the drone would have been in if it hadn’t stopped.

“You’re dead,” Sergeant Bojanowski called out. “Next victim.” He turned to Ensign Vanden Hoyt and said quietly, “You know, if that drone had a real driver instead of a controller who could see what your lance corporal was doing, that would have been a clean kill.” After two weeks of classroom and field training, with very little more sleep than Gunny Thatcher had said they’d have, the exhausted Marines of Company L reassembled in the company classroom for a briefing from their trainers.

“None of you are a danger to take over my job,” Sergeant Bojanowski said. “But every one of you has the experience of painting a moving target so well that a hopper can hit it with a Hellspawn. Every one of you can talk to a flight of Raptors and rain fire on a target. You’ve all got the experience, and that experience will likely save some of your lives where you’re going.” He paused for a moment and let his gaze wash over the tired men he was addressing. “Something nobody told you before now is my last duty assignment was on Arsenault—as an instructor at air controller school. You’ve learned more and performed better during the last two weeks than any of the classes I taught there. You did it on less sleep than those students had, and you had to divide your attention between what I was teaching you and what Corporal Henry was teaching you.”

Bojanowski stood erect. “Marines, well done! I hope you get a liberty call before you mount out.

You’ve earned one hell of a drunken night in town.” He stepped aside and Thatcher nodded to the artilleryman.

Corporal Henry took front and center. He seemed lost in thought for a moment, then said, “The only thing Sergeant Bojanowski said that I can’t is that he’s served as an instructor at artillery school. You did an outstanding job. If I was on a gun crew, I wouldn’t be worried about following aiming instructions from anyone in Company L. And when I get back to the battery, I’m going to pass the word that you know your shit.”

Gunny Thatcher stepped forward. He looked at the two trainers for a long moment before addressing them. “Gentlemen, if anybody had told me two weeks ago that every man jack in this company would be as proficient today at calling in air and artillery as they are, I wouldn’t have believed them. I am personally going to see to it that your commanders know what an outstanding job you did.” He cracked a brief smile. “The Marines of Company L appreciate a job well done.”

“Three cheers!” someone called from the back of the classroom.

The Marines jumped to their feet and shouted in unison, “Aarugh! Aarugh! Aarugh!” They burst into laughter while the last “aarugh” was still echoing off the walls, and hurtled catcalls at their instructors.

“Thank you,” Thatcher said as the cries of his Marines died down. “I know you have to get back to your units for your own preparations for this mount-out.” He watched as the two walked down the center aisle of the classroom, shaking out-stretched hands and exchanging compliments with the Marines of Company L. As soon as they were gone, he called for the company’s attention.

“You look pleased with yourselves, and you should be. You did extremely well in your training. You also look like you need about twenty-four hours sleep. But you aren’t going to get it, not now. Now you have to find out just what we’re going to be facing.” He noted with satisfaction how serious everyone became. “You’re probably all wondering who the gunner is,” he said, and indicated the warrant officer, who had done nothing more than observe during the previous two weeks, and who still hadn’t been introduced. “This is Gunner Moeller. He’s a historian from Headquarters Marine Corps. His job is to teach us all about armor, antiarmor tactics, and about the other weapons we’ll use to kill tanks.” There were a few sounds of disbelief. “What’s a historian got to do with it?” someone asked.

Thatcher cocked an eyebrow. “Nobody uses armor anymore. It’s too vulnerable to man-portable antiarmor weapons, and too expensive to replace. The Fleet no longer has any experience or expertise in armor or the tactics to defeat it. We need a historian because they’re the only people who know enough about the subject to teach us what we need to know to face armor and live to tell about it.” He turned to the slender, slightly stooped warrant officer and nodded. “Gunner.” Warrant Officer Moeller looked distracted as he walked toward the trid controls. Almost absently, he reached out a hand to turn it on. “This is an M1D7 Super Abrams from circa 2050.” The three-dimensional image of a monstrous vehicle appeared and began revolving. “It stood four meters high, was twelve meters long, and six meters wide. The M1D7 Super Abrams weighed more than sixty tons, and had armor strong enough to enable it to ignore any weapon short of a tactical nuke. It carried a crew of four, and sixty rounds for its 120mm main gun. The Super Abrams had a top speed of one hundred kph. It burned diesel fuel at the rate of eight liters per kilometer. Its weight was so great it could only maneuver on paved roads or stony ground with solid understrata, and could safely cross only a small portion of the bridges on the face of the Earth. It was too heavy for nearly any airlift available at the time.

The logistical train it required was such that an armored battalion could only field sixty tanks.” Gunner Moeller spoke in a drone and didn’t seem to notice the drooping eyelids and nodding heads in his audience. “Still, despite its limitations, the Super Abrams was so awesomely powerful that it was the strongest and most desired land-war fighting weapon on Earth.” The tank’s image was replaced by that of a foot soldier aiming an ornate tubelike object that rested on his shoulder. “Until the infantry came up with this...” Moeller reached to the trid’s controls and twisted the volume dial to full just as the soldier in the image fired his weapon. The loud blast shocked most of the men back to attention. The louder blast when the image switched to an M1D7 being hit and killed by the rocket made all of them jump.

Moeller chuckled. “Got you!” He continued in a livelier voice, “Now that I’ve got your attention, that was an M-72 Straight Arrow. It was man-portable, relatively cheap, and could kill an M1D7 Super Abrams, the tank that could withstand anything short of a tactical nuke. The Straight Arrow was the reason the M1D7 Super Abrams was the last main battle tank anybody developed and fielded. Lance corporals and below, who can tell me why?”

The right arms of almost all the junior men in the company shot up. All of them shouted out answers.

Some of the answers were right.

CHAPTER 7

The gist of Warrant Officer Moeller’s lecture on the history of tank warfare was that the first armored vehicles that could be called “main battle tanks” were fielded in the early part of the twentieth century during what was then called the “Great War.” The first ones were basically mobile pillboxes. They mounted a couple of machine guns and had thick enough armor to stop bullets, hand grenades, and smaller artillery fragments. In short order some of them began carrying small-caliber cannons. To the infantrymen who couldn’t stop them with their rifles and machine guns, they were rolling hell. So the infantry developed tank traps that reduced their mobility, and explosive charges that could knock them out of a fight even if they couldn’t kill them. The reaction of the tankers was to develop bigger, tougher, faster, more maneuverable tanks. By the time the Great War ended, the tanks being fielded by all the participants were true monsters compared to those in the earliest stages of the war.

But tank development didn’t stop there. Over the next twenty years the major powers of Earth continued to develop bigger, stronger, tougher, faster, more maneuverable tanks, so by the time the Second World War began, the most militarily underdeveloped of the major powers had tanks that could easily defeat the strongest tanks from the previous war. Infantrymen really hated that. When you’re armed with a rifle and maybe a rifle grenade, there’s simply no way you can expect to survive against a twenty-five-ton chunk of armor carrying a 75mm cannon and a couple of machine guns. So the infantry came up with a gizmo called a bazooka—or other names, depending on which of the great powers did the naming. One rocket from a bazooka could kill any tank in the world. Tankers hated that. So they made bigger, stronger, etcetera tanks to defend against the bazooka.

Tank development continued after World War II. It got to the point where nearly every national leader wanted an army of tanks to call his own, whether his country had any real use for them or not. At most, there were only a half-dozen nation-states with the development and manufacturing capability to come up with newer and better tanks, and each vied with the others in the international arms market to convince those countries that didn’t have that capability that theirs were the very biggest, strongest, toughest, fastest, and most maneuverable tanks available, and that the lesser countries—of course, they didn’t call them that, “developing countries” became the polite catch phrase—should buy tanks from them. And buy they did.

In the latter part of the century the leader of an insignificant desert nation, highly impressed with his tanks, decided to conquer his neighbors. What’s the point of having all those tanks if you’re not going to use them, right? So this desert war chieftain invaded the smallest and weakest of his neighbors, convinced that the rest of the world would see the size of his tank army and quail at the very thought of intervention.

He was very wrong. The small, weak neighbor he invaded was a major source of the world’s supply of petroleum. The world at that time ran on petrochemicals, and nobody wanted this particular war lord to control a significant portion of the supply. So most of the developed world went to war against him.

The war lord’s opponents didn’t bring as many tanks to the fray as he had, but as it turned out, that was quite all right. He’d believed the sales hype of the wrong major power, and his tanks simply couldn’t stand against the tanks made by the other major powers. The war was over four days after the allied forces crossed the border.

At that point Gunner Moeller inserted a side note, partly bragging, partly a comment on how infantry kept getting ahead of tanks. The immediate lineal ancestor of the Confederation Marine Corps was the United States Marine Corps. Those Marines, like Confederation Marines, were primarily infantry, with strong organic air support, moderate artillery, and very little armor to call their own. The U.S. Marines sent two divisions and one air wing into the war. In three days’ fighting, the Marines, mostly infantry, defeated ten infantry and five armored divisions and cleared enemy forces out of a third of the small country.

Moeller then returned to the major history lecture.

Infantry antitank weaponry and tactics also continued to develop. By the end of the century, a U.S.

Marine infantry battalion had the weapons and tactics to defeat an armor battalion from almost any army in the world. The best tank in the world then was the M1A Abrams. It was the only tank that a well-equipped infantryman couldn’t go mano a mano with and have a reasonable expectation of victory.

But the infantry kept working on the problem, and in response the tankers with the M1A Abrams had to come up with a better tank in order to survive a fight against foot soldiers.

The result, a couple of generations later, was the M1D7 Super Abrams. That tank cost more than two fighter-attack aircraft; it took more than two hundred men to service, supply, maintain, and operate a four-tank platoon. It cost more to keep one M1D7 in the field than it did an entire company of infantry, and it was so heavy it could operate on less than twenty percent of the world’s land surface. But it was proof against any weapon short of a tactical nuke, so it was widely loved and coveted.

The infantry, which had spent almost a century and a half developing ways of defeating armor, wasn’t going to stand for that. They came up with the M-72 Straight Arrow.

The Straight Arrow had a reloadable launcher that fired rockets weighing ten kilograms each. Those rockets could punch their way through the side or rear armor of an M1D7 Super Abrams and explode inside, killing the crew and setting off any ammunition it was carrying. Tankers were totally baffled. The only way they could defend against the Straight Arrow was to build their tanks with even more armor plating on the sides and rear. But that made them bigger, heavier, slower, and more costly to build and maintain. Moreover, it reduced their usability to a mere ten percent of the Earth’s land surface. Some earlier developments in armor design didn’t necessarily increase the weight of tanks, but had changed configurations to prevent antitank weapons from penetrating. The tankers tried that route, but it didn’t work. The only thing they were able to come up with that kept a Straight Arrow from punching through the armor and exploding inside the tank was to honeycomb the armor so much that the warhead met insufficient resistance to set it off. Which made the tanks vulnerable to other weapons. Besides, if a Straight Arrow hit that honeycombed armor, it would go in one side and out the other, probably hitting and killing a crewman on its way, and generally spewing enough molten metal from its passage inside the tank that it injured or killed the crew, fried a goodly part of its electronics, and maybe set off its ammunition supply. Whatever, the tank was killed or disabled even if the warhead didn’t explode inside it.