The surviving Algerian infantry scattered and went to ground. Their earlier-gen night-vision goggles picked up the muzzle flashes on the ridge crest and assault rifles began to crackle an angry response. The surviving BRMs reversed gear and backed up the roadway like a trio of startled crayfish. In the turret hatches, the track commanders swiveled their deck machine guns in line with the threat and opened fire, hosing streams of greenish tracers into the night.
“Lee, fall back!” Mary May rose to a half crouch, intent on dropping the last shell in her clip in on the second track in line.
“Mary, get down.” Trebain lunged to his feet, grabbing for her harness. Then the bullet hail was chopping up the stone around them. Mary May flipped backward off the crest in a credible parachute landing roll. Trebain tried to follow but a 7.65 NATO round took his right leg out from under him. The ballistic plate covering his shin deflected the slug but the limb went numb from ankle to hip.
Lee fell forward in a sprawl. He felt himself start to slide. Good God Almighty, he was falling down the front face of the ridge! He clawed at the crumbling slope, trying for a hold, but he only succeeded in making himself tumble. Caught in the midst of a miniature landslide, Lee lost his grip on his weapon. Stars burst behind his eyes as he found himself battered away from consciousness.
“Brid, cut across the laager and then engage the command company! We’ll use the fires for thermal masking.”
“I’m with you.” The contralto reply remained cool and focused.
“Rick. Drop Jabberwockys and commence disengagement! Head for the extraction route.”
“Doin’ it, LT!”
ABLE swerved and accelerated, jinking across the pans like a broken-field runner, her belly racks thumping as the first Jabberwocky beacon kicked clear. Inside the cybernetic world of his battle helmet Bolde’s eyes flicked over to the time display, counting seconds. The three S’s had done as much as could be hoped for and soon the Algerians would be reacting, violently, to this assault.
The danger now lay in the fact that Saber section had revealed itself by radiating. The continuous-wave datalinks that now connected the command vehicle with its fighting drones could be detected and locked in on by radio direction finders. Because of the jitter frequency technology used, it wouldn’t be easy, but given enough time, a minute or two, the Algerian Electronic Warfare battalion would have a fix on them. Once that happened, the word would be flashed to the division’s artillery regiment and hellfire and damnation would rain from the sky.
The Jabberwocky decoys, small, high-discharge radio transponders that produced a false signal similar to ABLE’s emissions signature, could buy them a little more combat time. So would staying on the move and not presenting a fixed target for the direction finders.
The question was, just how much.
BAKER and CHARLIE raced through the perimeter of the shattered Algerian mechanized company. Not a single vehicle remained intact, and flames leaped from the torn hulks. There were still men alive, though, a few stunned survivors, and mostly they fled or cowered in the presence of the angular, multiwheeled demons that had come howling in from the desert. A few, though, still strove to resist.
Bolde caught the backflash of a rocket launch out of the corner of his eye. Some thirty meters to the left, an Algerian infantryman crouched in the shelter of a wrecked BMP, the tube of a light antitank weapon at his shoulder and leveled at BAKER. Caught by surprise there was nothing that Bolde could do. However, with light-swift electronic reflexes, the gun drone defended itself.
Thermal sensors recognized the exhaust flare of the rocket and the onboard AIs triggered the Claymore reactive panel in line with the threat. A more sophisticated cousin of conventional reactive armor, the Claymore panel exploded, its front face fragmenting into thousands of small tungsten cubes. Sprayed into the path of the incoming rocket, they chewed the projectile apart in midair. And not the rocket alone, the expanding wave of shrapnel reached out and engulfed the missile man as well.
Moments later the drone tore out through the far side of the laager perimeter and Bolde executed the turn in toward the Algerian Headquarters Company. There was a logic to Bolde’s charge directly through the enemy encampment. Any infrared sight aimed at the gun drones from the central enemy position would be blinded by the heat aura thrown off by the blazing hulks of their first kills. Any enemy gunner seeking to engage them would also be presented with the quandary of having his own troops in his line of fire.
The drone’s 35s raved on. The last of the communications and command vans died. The mortar carriers and ammo hogs of the Algerian heavy-weapons section exploded, the glare momentarily overloading the videolinks. Wild missiles tore loose from the disintegrating antiair vehicle, jittering madly across the sky. Bolde became aware of a squealing warning tone and a pulsing red flag in his vision field. Barrel overheat! The drones had expended almost half of their two-hundred-round base load, and their titanium-lined gun tubes were going incandescent.
Damnation! Just when they were getting some real work done!
“Brid, deploy smoke! Execute breakaway! Come right to one two zero!”
Multispectral smoke canisters thumped out of secondary projectors, burying the drones in a synthetic fogbank, and the two vehicles turned away from the havoc they had produced, racing back into the undamaged darkness of the night.
Bolde called up a command on BAKER’s ordnance menu, releasing a blast of chill carbon dioxide gas down the barrel of the drone’s main gun. “Brid, execute a thermal purge. We’re going in again.”
There was a warning edge to Shelleen’s reply. “Lieutenant, may I remind you that we’ve been radiating continuously for almost five minutes.”
“You may, Miss Shelleen, but I want one more Algi company torn up. We’ll hit the one to the southeast. Come left to zero eight zero and engage as you bear!”
The drones described a dusty curve across the desert toward their next objective, bucketing over the sand ripples in the plain.
This time it was different. This time the Algerians had been given the opportunity to recover from the initial CMM strike. Tank guns spewed fire and tracer streams snaked along the ground. Bolde weaved and swerved his robotic command, snapping off countershots as his sights aligned. One Algerian vehicle burst into flames. A second, a third …
Suddenly the image from BAKER’s cameras blurred under a concussive impact. A pattern of red-and-yellow system warning flags blazed in front of Bolde’s eyes and he caught the impression of the world rolling over onto its side, then the datalink broke and his HMD fuzzed into static.
“Hell!” Bolde tore up his useless visor. “We just lost BAKER!”
“I saw him go out,” Brid reported. “Direct hit with a tank round. Dead one. Orders?”
Bolde dialed up the self-destruct code on BAKER’s crisis menu and beamed it off, hoping there was a functional receiver to catch it. “Disengage! Show’s over! Get CHARLIE out of there. Put him under autonomous control and head him for the extraction point, then kill our transmitters. Rick, balls to the wall and clear the area! We’ve pushed it about as much …”
Beyond ABLE’s windscreen, the desert exploded.
Mary May skidded down the unstable slope to the sprawled form amid the slide rubble. Lee shouldn’t be moved after a fall such as he had sustained, but he was also three-quarters of the way down to the pass floor and lying on an open hillside. Algerians had pulled back around the next bend in the gorge, but they would be probing again soon.
Grabbing on to his harness, she dragged Trebain a few yards crossslope to a clump of thorny brush. It wasn’t much, but it was all the cover immediately available. Dividing her attention between the canyon floor and her wounded trooper, she made a fast assessment of Trebain’s condition.
He was unconscious but breathing. The ballistic plate shielding his right shin had shattered from a direct hit, but the bullet itself had been turned. The leg was rapidly darkening with a massive bruise, and Mary May suspected the
limb wasn’t going to be much good for a while. Trebain’s body armor had also shielded him from the worst effects of his fall. Beyond a concussion and a sizable collection of bangs and abrasions he appeared intact. A good thing as there wasn’t much she could do at the moment beyond applying a few jets of aerosol disinfectant.
As she completed her inspection, she heard him moan softly.
“Hush, Lee. You’re okay,” she said quietly.
“Mar … Five … what happened?”
“You took one on the armor and fell down the wrong side of the hill. How’s your leg feel?”
“My leg … Christ! I can’t even feel if it’s still attached!”
“It is,” she replied, stretching out beside him. Peering out beyond the brush clump, she established her firing position. “It’s just numb from the shock. Enjoy it while it lasts. I’ll bet you’ve got one heck of a bone bruise there.”
“I can’t even get it to move.” Trebain shook his head, becoming more aware of his environment. “Shit! How in the hell are we going to get back up to the extraction point!”
He started to sit up but Mary caught him by the shoulder. “Stay down. We could have Algis moving in on us again. I’m not sure how we’re going to get out of here yet, but we are. You’re going to be okay, Lee. Nobody’s leaving you behind. You got my word on it.”
The thermal lobe and glare from the burning Algerian track kept overloading her night brite visor. Mary May flipped it up for a few moments and rested her grainy eyes with a look up at the cool star-speckled blackness of the desert sky. Beside her, she heard a soft, dazed chuckle. “Shit! And all this friggin’ time I’ve been worrying about taking care of you.”
Distractedly she reached back and patted Trebain on the shoulder. “We take care of each other, guy.”
Flipping her visor down again, she keyed her Leprechaun transceiver onto the voice-channel link with the command vehicle. “I’d better let the lieutenant know we’ve got problems … Scout Lead calling Saber Six. Flash Red. Do you copy?”
She repeated the call three times. There was no answer.
ABLE’s hull rang like a beaten oil drum, and shrapnel sparked and howled off of her armor plating. For an instant her crew stared down at the ground through her windshield as the concussion of the multiple shell bursts lifted her tail into the air. Then the cavalry vehicle crashed back onto her eight wheels.
“Incoming!” Santiago bellowed, fighting with the wheel to stave off a rollover.
“Oh really? You think?” Shelleen commented through gritted teeth, clinging to the grab bar above her workstation.
Bolde reached across to the driver’s console and slapped the belly rack release, kicking out another set of Jabberwocky decoys. “Brid. Verify that the transmitters are down! Rick. Hard left! Get us out from under the next pattern!”
The driver replied by skidding ABLE through a minimum-radius turn that locked the frame levelers to their stops, shooting the cavalry vehicle off at right angles to their prior course. Instants later, chain lightning played across the desert and man-made thunder roared as eight heavy howitzer rounds tore up the ground where they would have been. The Algerian table of organization was artillery heavy, the divisional commander having over eighty tubes and launchers at his disposal. He was employing this awesome sledgehammer now to eliminate the gadfly that had dared to sting his command. The gadfly’s only recourse was flight.
“Rick, hard right!”
ABLE swerved again, sprayed gravel roaring in the wheel wells. Flooring his accelerator, Santiago resumed the dash south for the hill range. But again there came the wail and slam of an incoming salvo, the cavalry vehicle barely scurried clear of the shells dropping in its tracks.
A rapid rhythmic thumping came from back aft as the shrapnel-torn rubber sheathing stripped from one of the tires. The wheel held together; its multiple layers of steel and Kevlar cording could withstand more damage then even a conventional metal tank tread, but a limit would be reached … soon.
“Dammit! They’re tracking us! Brid, are you sure we’ve got cold boards!”
“Positive,” she called back. “We are not emitting, and the threat board is clear. No laser or radar paints or locks!”
“Then there’s got to be a drone eyeballing us! Find it! Rick, shuck and jive! Buy us some time!”
Bolde called up the weapons pack on his controller, heating up the pair of CMM surface-to-air rounds that were always carried ready for use in the box launchers. Elevating and indexing the mount, he began searching for the Algerian’s airborne spy.
“I verify a drone,” Brid yelled. “I’m getting a datalink trace.”
“Can you jam it?”
“I’ll need a minute to analyze and match the jitter pattern.”
“We don’t have a minute.”
Another salvo dropped in on ABLE. Again they didn’t hit behind but around the fleeing cavalry vehicle and only the luck of the draw prevented a direct hit. With the range established the Algerian gunners would switch to antitank scatter packs for their next volley.
Wildly, Bolde swept the IR sights of the sensor group across the sky. There! Off to the west, the sight crosshairs acquired a smear of ruddy heat against the cold stars. The Algerian recon drone was running roughly three klicks out and paralleling their course, targeting for the enemy Artillery regiment.
A flick of his thumb set the tracking lock and a rock forward on a coolie-hat switch zoomed the camera in. Bolde got a momentary impression of the skeletal frame of a miniature helicopter, internally lit by the glow of its rotary engine.
There was only the momentary impression because he was already squeezing the trigger that sent both of the antiair CMMs on their way. The last imaging sent to the Algerians by their drone was two wobbling fire trails converging on it from out of the night.
Bolde observed the flash of the missile kill. “Brake hard! Now!” he bellowed.
ABLE’s wheels locked up and her tail came around as she broke loose and slithered to a halt, broadside on. And then submunitions shells burst overhead and the desert hissed and sparkled as hundreds of deadly little antiarmor bomblets rained out of the sky just beyond the stalled Shinseki.
“Might as well just let her sit, Rick,” Bolde continued calmly. “If they still have us acquired, we’ll never get out from under the next one.”
The only sound the soft steady-state whine of the turbines. Bolde, Shelleen, and Santiago sat unspeaking in the darkness, thinking their own thoughts and counting the seconds. When fifteen had passed, the next salvo fell … half a mile away along the course they had been following. The next dropped at twice that range as the thwarted Algerians stabbed blindly into the dark. Bridget Shelleen chuckled softly at the wonder of being alive.
Bolde released a breath that he had been holding for what seemed to be an amazing length of time. “Rick, get us out of here. Brid, advise Mary May that we’re disengaging and tell her to head for the extraction point. Fun’s over, people, let’s go home.”
At a solid 60 K an hour, ABLE and the CHARLIE drone roared south toward the looming refuge of the El Khnachich range. Bolde kept ABLE’s weapons pack trained aft as they fled, scanning their back trail for signs of enemy pursuit or activity.
Beyond the burning wrecks of the battalion they had decimated, the Algerian division was reacting like a kicked ant’s nest. Thermal blossoms dotted the night as hundreds of vehicle engines kicked over, the neat pattern of laager sits dissolving as unit commanders strove to regroup into combat formation. Flares and flashes of gunfire danced around the perimeter as gunners blazed at ghosts in the darkness or even engaged in “blue on blue” duels with their own side.
Bolde grinned. This kind of battlefield hysteria could do more damage to the enemy in the long run than his own direct assault. The smile rapidly dissipated as Brid spoke up from her station. “We’ve got major problems with the scout team. They’ve got the Algerian recon company immobilized with about half of the elements destroyed, but they�
�re pinned down as well. They can’t get back to the extraction point.”
“Get me a direct link with Mary May.”
“Not possible. She’s too far down in the pass and we’re radio blocked. All we have is a relay through Nate and Johnny on the squad circuit.”
Bolde twisted around in the command chair. “What in the hell is she doing down in the pass?”
“Lee Trebain apparently took a bad fall down into the cut. Mary May is with him but he’s been injured too badly for them to get back up to the ridgeline.”
“What about Nate and Johnny? Can they get to them?”
“Again not possible. Nate and Johnny are pinned down by an Algerian patrol at the southern end of the pass about a kilometer away. They haven’t taken hits yet, but they can’t move. Both fire teams are requesting instructions.”
Requesting instructions. The polite military term for begging the CO for a fast miracle. Bolde lifted his wrist to his mouth and wiped away the salty dust caked on his lips. This was his run. He’d set this plan up, and his people had every right in the world to expect that he would get them out the other side of it. Simple statements like, “I misjudged” or “I overlooked something” were not an option. Her face outlined by the screen glow, Brid Shelleen looked at him, calmly, expectantly.
“Brid, tell the scouts to hang on and stand by. We’re coming to get them. Then pull CHARLIE back in with us. Rick, new game plan. Forget the route over the saddleback. We’re going out through the pass.”
Through the SABR’s infrared sights, Mary May picked out a ghostly pale sphere hovering a few inches off the ground, the face of an Algerian trooper. Gingerly he was crawling forward to peer around the turn of the pass, hugging close to the rubble along the edge of the roadway. The face was there for a moment and then gone as the trooper ducked back.
Flicking the selector setting to AIRBURST Mary May rested the sight crosshairs just above the point where the Algerian had disappeared and squeezed the SABR’s trigger.
Combat Page 37