Combat

by Stephen Coonts

  Grey Bird plugged the connector lead from the missile launcher’s firing unit into his helmet’s remote jack and a targeting reticle snapped into existence in the center of his field of vision. Choosing the Javelin’s “ballistic engagement” option, he eased up onto his knees. The boxlike firing unit with its handgrip nestled against the side of his head, the connected launcher tube swiveled to angle down his back, its muzzle pointing to the sky. Turning his head slightly, he set the death pip of the sight on the top of the turret of the Algerian antiair track.

  Nathan felt his lips peel back in a feral grin. Back in Idaho, his sister had never been happy with his decision to go career Army. Intensely into American Indian activism, she had felt he was selling out his heritage by joining the service that had defeated his people. And she had been extremely unhappy when he had chosen the cavalry as his preferred branch.

  Nathan had pointed out in reply that their ancestors had been some of the best mounted warriors the world had ever seen. What greater heritage did he have except as a cavalryman?

  She had retired grumbling before he’d had the chance to mention that the regimental assignment he’d been given was to the Seventh. Hoya, she was going to go through the roof on that one.

  Grey Bird eased down the first trigger, giving the missile its initial look at its target.

  “All CMMs designated and the scout teams are in position,” Bridget said quietly. “No detected changes in tactical environment. Ready to engage on your command, Lieutenant.”

  Bolde swallowed with deliberation before replying. All of the preparations, all twenty-five years of them, were over.

  So you think you’re good, Jeremy Bolde, good enough to take your life into your hands this night. But how about these six other lives you’ll be carrying? Does your surety stretch that far? It had better, for when this battle is over, whatever remains will be your responsibility.

  “Right. Stand by for conversion to direct linkage control. I’ll take BAKER. You’ve got CHARLIE. Stand by for turbine start. All units!”

  “Turbine start armed on drones.”

  “ABLE ready to light off, LT.”

  Bolde typed the ***ALL SABER ELEMENTS***COMMENCE ENGAGEMENT NOW*** command into the scout team datalink and poised a finger on the transmit key. “Good luck to us all, ladies and gentlemen,” addressing those who were present and those who were not. “May we all be discussing this over a cup of coffee come morning. Open fire!”

  Flame geysered from the backs of the gun drones. Twelve rounds per vehicle, launching at half-second intervals, a spreading fountain of destruction. The Common Modular Missile rounds, configured for an artillery-fire mission profile, climbed almost vertically until booster burnout. Then guidance fins snapped out of the main stages and dug into the air. Arcing over the Algerian armored formation, the missiles pitched nose down, hunting for targets.

  The infrared sensors in the noses of the antivehicle rounds scanned for a specific geometric size and shape on the ground. One that matched that of the prey assigned to them. The antipersonnel rounds steered in via Global Positioning System fix, the proximity fuses in their warheads concentrating on their altitude above ground. As each missile locked in, its main engine ignited, blasting it through the sound barrier and down out of the sky.

  The antipersonnels detonated while still a thousand feet in the air. Each “beehive” warhead burst to release a spreading conical swarm of needle-nosed and razor-finned flechette darts, thousands of them, in a supersonic steel rain, a titanic shotgun blast sweeping the open ground clean of life.

  The antivehicle rounds arrived a split second later, before the standing dead even had a chance to fall to the earth. Flaming pile-driver strokes that crushed and destroyed.

  The targeted fuel tankers popped like bursting balloons, sprayed diesel flaming as the warheads exploded deep in their guts. Likewise the headquarters tracks lurched, belching fire and shredded flesh out through their doors and hatches. The command personnel whose task it was to coordinate a defense, perished before they even knew an attack was under way.

  And amid the chaos and confusion, no surviving sentry immediately noted the three small thermal plumes that hazed into existence out in the desert night, the one turning away and the two closing the range.

  The charge had been sounded.

  From his firing position between the two boulders, Lee Trebain dropped his grenades in around the Algerian scout track, being exceedingly careful not to place them too close to the parked vehicle. From personal experience, Trebain knew what the first instinct of a fighting vehicle crewman was when suddenly placed under attack. Saddle up and get under armor!

  Trebain had no desire to interfere with that instinctive reaction. Not yet.

  The turret of the scout track swiveled around and up-angled, ripping off a 30mm reply to his volley of grenades. The autocannon shells tore a gash across the slope twenty meters below his position, kicking up dust and stinging stone fragments. Hot damn! Mary May had called it right! They couldn’t fire up out of the gorge!

  The turret gun raved off another long futile burst, covering the figures scrambling aboard through the vehicle’s lowered tailgate. Through the thermographic sights of the SABR, Trebain saw a luminous green mist belch from the track’s exhaust as the engine kicked over, the ramp beginning to close.

  Now! Now was the time to take them!

  Trebain ejected the empty clip from the grenade launcher and slammed the fresh magazine of antivehicle shells into its place. Holding the death dot of his sights on the turret of the Algerian scout track, he again pulled the trigger.

  Like many armored fighting vehicles, the Algerian BRM had reactive armor panels scabbed to its hull and turret. Made up of sheets of low-grade plastic explosive sandwiched between two thin metal plates, reactive armor defeated shaped-charge antitank warheads by exploding upon the impact of the warhead, the counterblast “defocusing” the warhead’s detonation, leaving the protected vehicle undamaged.

  Unfortunately for the Algerians, each reactive panel only worked once.

  Lee Trebain rapid-fired the six rounds in his launcher magazine, the SABR’s recoil thumping his shoulder. The first two grenades kicked reactive panel flares off the BRM’s turret. The next four drilled cleanly through steel.

  The holes punched by the grenades were only the diameter of a pencil. Each puncture, however, spewed a supersonic jet of flaming gas and molten metal into the confined space of the track’s interior. One such jet, as hot and destructive as the fire blade of an acetylene torch, slashed across the ammunition tray of the turret gun.

  The BRM shuddered to a halt. Its deck hatches blew open and a protracted series of detonations flickered and reverberated within the vehicle, like a string of firecrackers dropped into a trash can. Afterward nothing emerged from the vehicle except for a growing plume of smoke.

  Trebain became aware of more explosions around him. Some were nearby and echoing sharply through the canyon. Other heavier blasts rolled in from the northern horizon, a skyline that now glowed an angry flickering orange.

  Trebain backed crablike out from between the two boulders and slid a few meters down the reverse slope of the saddleback. Hugging the ground, he flipped his night-vision visor back down. Warily he scanned his environment as he dug a fresh 20mm clip out of a harness pouch.

  Running footsteps sounded behind him and he whipped around, freezing his trigger pull as he caught the blue flash in his Heads-Up Display. Mary May dropped beside him a moment later. “How’d you make out?” she demanded.

  “Clean house. Track and crew. How ‘bout you?”

  “Same. That’s two down. Let’s go see how the other guys are doing.”

  “Right behind you, Five.”

  A half klick to the south, Nathan Grey Bird’s finger closed around the Javelin launcher’s second trigger.

  The hollow thump of the launching charge followed, kicking the missile out of the tube. The missile itself did not ignite until it was well clea
r of the launcher and the operator both. Flaming away in a highcurving trajectory, it dived on its target from above, the one angle of attack unshielded by either reactive armor or heavy steel.

  The Tunguska exploded spectacularly, bursting 30mm shells intermixing with flaming rocket fuel. “Ayeee!” Grey Bird screamed. “I count coup! Feed me, white man, I’m on a roll!”

  “Loading!” Johnny Roman slammed the next missile into the smoking breech of the launcher, then rolled aside. “Round loaded! Clear!”

  The launcher barked again and the second round burned across the sky, wobbling slightly as it hunted for the heat signature of its target, stabilizing again as it found what it sought. The more distant of the pair of Centauro tank destroyers lifted off the ground on a pad of flame, its turret blowing off and flipping away.

  “That’s two! Keep ’em coming!”

  Above the crackle of ammunition heat firing in the burning wrecks, screams and shouts echoed up from the pass mouth along with the sound of cranking diesels. The Algerians were reacting to the attack. Wildly and without coordination, but that would come swiftly as the shock effect wore off. Grey Bird and Roman had only seconds of clear time remaining.

  The second Centauro was the closest of their three targets, immediately below them at the foot of the steep slope that led down into the pass mouth. They’d saved it for last because it would be the easiest snap shot. Nate locked the launcher into direct-fire mode as Johnny slammed the last Javelin into the tube. Springing to his feet and aiming downward, Grey Bird acquired the target in his helmet sight and squeezed the trigger.

  At that instant, the Centauro’s driver, reacting to the sure and certain knowledge that a moving target is harder to hit, slammed his eight-wheeled mount into gear and floored his accelerator. The tank destroyer lurched forward, not swiftly enough to escape the homing missile fired at it, but enough to divert its impact point. The Javelin clipped the flank of the Centauro’s turret and a reactive armor panel detonated, swatting the missile aside. Undamaged, the tank destroyer roared out of its field revetment, its turret gun traversing and elevating.

  Roman and Grey Bird could only stare at each other and at the empty launcher.

  “Uh-oh.”

  “To which I can only add ‘Oh shit’! Let’s get out of here!”

  Below, the Centauro’s driver rammed the front wheels of his vehicle up the slope, giving his gunner the extra angle he needed to engage the ridgeline. An instant after the two scouts had thrown themselves back down the opposite slope, a 105mm round gouged a notch in the hill crest, the concussion and battering spray of stone fragments sending both men sprawling into the jumble of broken rock that covered this section of the saddleback.

  They would become grateful for that momentarily.

  Dazed, and with his ears ringing, Grey Bird lifted his head. “Johnny, you okay?” he yelled.

  “Yeah. Nate.” A familiar but equally groggy voice replied over the squad circuit. “What do we do now?”

  “We crawl back and get those other two Javelin rounds, that’s what we do. Then we kill that damn tank destroyer before the Five and the LT find out how bad we screwed up.”

  Grey Bird started to pull himself upright. He spotted Johnny’s “friendly” prompt in his helmet visor, pointing down into a boulder field a short distance to his left. However he also spotted an ominous, unmarked green glow downhill at perhaps a hundred meters.

  “Algis! Down!”

  Assault-rifle fire spattered his rocks a split second after he dived back behind them. With his own carbine still slung over Johnny’s shoulder, Grey Bird yanked his Beretta out of his belt holster. A handgun was a poor second in any kind of a serious firefight but at the moment it was far better than nothing.

  A short chopping burst of 5.56 NATO sounded from off on his left. “I got four of them spotted, Nate,” Roman reported. “They’re trying to work a skirmish line up toward us. They must be one of those Algi scout teams the Five warned us about.”

  Behind their position, another shell ripped into the ridgeline, showering the two pinned troopers with a fresh barrage of stone fragments. Grey Bird burrowed closer to the jagged rock he lay upon.

  “You know something, white man?” he said, spitting a mouthful of grit aside.

  “What?”

  “All of a sudden I’m developing this great feeling of empathy for General Custer.”

  Jeremy Bolde’s hand closed around his console joystick, and suddenly he was looking through BAKER’s cybernetic eyes, the imaging from the onboard cameras feeding into the Heads-Up Display of his helmet.

  You could maneuver and deploy gun drones via microburst transmissions over a datalink, in effect issuing suggestions to the onboard artificial intelligences. Actual combat, however, required a human telepresence. It was as if he rode the back of the charging steel beast in the ultimate video game gone real.

  The system was configured to trackfire mode; the cartwheel sights of the booster gun hovered in front of his eyes. Wherever he aimed those sights, so would the drone steer itself. Data hacks glowed around the perimeter of his vision: speed, ammunition, vehicle systems status, and ahead glowed a small forest of hostile target arrows stabbing downward accusingly at the enemy. His forefinger tightened on the throttle trigger and a flick of his thumb lifted the safety cover off the firing switch, triggering the hot gun warning tone.

  “Right through the middle, Brid,” he murmured. “I’ll work left to right. You have right to left. Engage.”

  “Engaging,” the quiet one-word reply returned over the interphone.

  Bolde laid his sights on the first silhouetted armored fighting vehicle as he might have aimed a target pistol and pressed the thumb button.

  Two kilometers away, the first round cycled into BAKER’s booster gun. It wasn’t a shell in a conventional sense, rather it was a slender “kinetic kill” dart encased in a sabot sheath, a simple finned crowbar of superdense inert uranium encased in a superhard tungsten steel alloy.

  The dart itself carried no propulsive powder charge. Instead, injectors spewed a metered dose of a liquid explosive propellant into the breech chamber behind the round. Ignited by an electric arc, the incandescent gas of this initial detonation hurled the dart on its way as with a conventional cannon. However as the projectile accelerated down the barrel, secondary injectors spaced down the length of the smoothbore cannon tube fired in sequence, building the breech pressure and pushing the dart to a velocity far higher than could be obtained from a conventional weapon.

  Three rounds were fired in as many seconds, an X of blue-white flame spewing from the cannon’s muzzle brake.

  Downrange, an Algerian T-72 died. Neither its reactive armor nor the heavier steel beneath were enough to save it. The tungsten-anduranium darts passed through the tank’s hull like heated needles through butter. The passage converted kinetic energy into heat and instead of solid projectiles, jets of metallic plasma exploded into the tank’s interior, burning at the temperature of a star’s surface.

  Bolde swung his sights onto the next target in the laager. Shock and surprise had done their parts. Now they must rely on speed, wreaking as much havoc as they could before the Algerians recovered.

  The vehicles around the laager perimeter flared like the candles on a birthday cake as the fire streams of the two gun drones converged. Over the intercom link Jeremy could hear Bridget Shelleen’s whispered supplication with each press of her trigger key.

  “Lord and Lady … Hold your hands above us this night … Grant pardon for these lives we must take … Grant peace to those we must slay …”

  “Scout lead! We got trouble here!”

  Mary May paused in her jogging run and dropped to a crouch beside a stone slab. Lee Trebain following her lead an instant later. “Go, Nate. What’s happening?”

  “We’re blown,” the Indian trooper rasped back over the squad circuit. “We been nailed by an Algi patrol.”

  “Tac situation? Are either of you hit?”


  “We’re under good cover, but pinned. Four hostiles on our front. Johnny and me are both okay, but we can’t maneuver. We bitched the strike and one of the Centauros is still operational. It has the ridgeline covered behind us. We can’t fall back.”

  “Oh, jeez! We’re hearing small-arms fire from the south. That must be you guys. Can you hold?”

  “For a while, Five.”

  “Understood,” Mary May acknowledged. “We’ll be up with you as soon as we can. Hang in.”

  “We don’t have all that much choice,” Grey Bird replied with wry grimness.

  Trebain had been monitoring the same series of transmissions, and now he scrambled. “The guys are in trouble. Let’s go!”

  “Like I said, we’ll get to them as soon as we can.” Mary May started back up to the ridge crest. “We still have four Algi scout tracks down in that canyon we have to take care of.”

  “Hey, Mary May. Nate and Johnny are in trouble!”

  “Darn it, Lee. I know it!” she snapped over her shoulder. “But the lieutenant and Miss Shelleen and everybody will be in trouble if we let those tracks bust out! Now load antiarmor and come on!”

  Trebain swore under his breath and followed.

  The growl of engines and the squeak and chatter of tracks echoed up from the pass floor. The Algerian BRMs were on the move. Rolling north at a fast walking pace, they had their scout teams deployed as flank guards. Warily, the Algerian mobile troopers advanced, scanning the walls of the pass on either side. There would be no surprising this bunch.

  Lying side by side, Mary May and Trebain watched them advance. “How we working this?” Trebain growled.

  “You kill that lead track. I’ll peel the infantry.” Mary May flipped her visor up and settled her eye to the sighting module of her SABR. “One magazine, then pull back fast. On my mark. Three … two … one … shoot!”

  The two grenade launchers barked out their vest-pocket artillery barrage. The lead BRM flared and exploded under Trebain’s fire stream while Mary May walked a string of laser-ranged airbursts down the left-hand column of dismounted flankers.