Designated Targets — Axis Of Time Book II
Page 28
“Of course,” the PM replied warily.
“Were you not disturbed by the actions of that young female officer? The Australian? It seemed to me that she lost her head completely when she opened fire on those men in the water.”
MacArthur could tell he’d scored a small victory when Curtin didn’t reply immediately.
“Prime Minster?”
“I had an opportunity to speak to Captain Willet about that matter, General. She assured me that Lieutenant Lohrey’s actions were in no way out of the ordinary. Not as far as their rule book is written, anyway.”
The PM’s voice carried a suggestion of sadness.
“It was an ugly business, General. Very ugly. But you’re a soldier, and I don’t doubt that you’ve seen just as bad, if not worse. I’m afraid that, given the emergency we face, I cannot find it in my heart to condemn either Lohrey or Willet. And of course, they still operate under their own rules of engagement, so no legal question will arise from the incident. But you are correct if you think me troubled by it. I’ve been kept up-to-date on the progress of the counteroffensive, and while I shed no tears for the Japanese, I wonder what became of our two countries that they evolved into such pitiless societies.”
MacArthur hadn’t been expecting that at all. He found himself caught flat-footed for a moment, unable to reply.
He had followed the debate at home, the pros and cons of allowing Kolhammer to run his little fiefdom as a separate country, if only for a limited time, but the hysteria surrounding that decision was largely a matter of Sunday school morals—an argument about the bedroom, not the battlefield. Still, Curtin must have taken his silence as an invitation to continue.
“The press is already running stories from those reporters who are embedded with Jones about the summary executions they’re carrying out. It plays very well with the public, of course. They’ve got the blood up. But that’s what worries me, General. We’re supposedly fighting this war to secure ourselves against barbarism, not to embrace it. I accept the fact that those enemy officers who were responsible for the crimes against my people must die for what they have done. But this business of simply dragging them out into the street and shooting them in the head smacks of gangsterism, don’t you think? It’s a long way removed from what Lieutenant Lohrey did in the rush of battle, when she thought her mission and her comrades were imperiled.”
MacArthur shooed away an aide who appeared at the door. Curtin had tapped into some of his own, very strong misgivings. Whilst he had welcomed the incredible power of Jones’s MEU and Colonel Toohey’s Armored Cavalry units, he had to admit that he found some of their procedures to be deeply disturbing.
“I don’t know that we’re in a position to judge them, Prime Minister. It’s not simply a matter of supporting your allies. They’ve been at war for twenty years. Can you imagine what your people, what mine would be like, after fighting with the likes of Tojo and Hitler for that length of time? Not much different, I would assume.”
A sigh came through the handset. “You’re right, of course. I had just hoped that things might be different in the future.”
“That’s a pipe dream, Prime Minister, I’m afraid.”
“Let’s hope not,” Curtin replied.
20
BUNDABERG,
350 KM NORTH OF THE BRISBANE LINE,
SOUTHWEST PACIFIC AREA
The M1A3 Abrams was a man-killer.
Colonel J. “Lonesome” Jones thanked the good Lord that he had never had to face anything like it.
The models that preceded it, the A1 and A2, were primarily designed to engage huge fleets of Soviet tanks on the plains of Europe. They were magnificent tank busters, but proved to be less adept at the sort of close urban combat that was the bread and butter of the U.S. Army in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. In the alleyways of Damascus and Algiers, along the ancient cobbled lanes of Samara, Al Hudaydah, and Aden, the armored behemoths often found themselves penned in, unable to maneuver or even to see what they were supposed to kill. They fell victim to car bombs and Molotovs and homemade mines. Jones had won his Medal of Honor rescuing the crew of one that had been disabled by a jihadi suicide squad in the Syrian capital.
The A3 was developed in response to attacks just like that one, which had become increasingly more succesful. It was still capable of killing a Chinese battle tank, but it was fitted out with a very different enemy in mind.
Anyone, like Jones, who was familiar with the clean, classic lines of the earlier Abrams would have found the A3 less aesthetically pleasing. The low-profile turret now bristled with 40 mm grenade launchers, an M134 7.62 mm minigun, and either a small secondary turret for twin 50s, or a single Tenix-ADI 30 mm chain gun. The 120 mm canon remained, but it was now rifled like the British Challenger’s gun.
But anyone, like Jones, who’d ever had to fight in a high-intensity urban scenario couldn’t give a shit about the A3’s aesthetics. They just said their prayers in thanks to the designers. The tanks typically loaded out with a heavy emphasis on high-impact, soft-kill ammunition such as the canistered “beehive” rounds, Improved Conventional Bomblets, White Phos’, thermobaric, and flame-gel capsules. Reduced propellant charges meant that they could be fired near friendly troops without danger of having a gun blast disable or even kill them. An augmented long-range laser-guided kinetic spike could engage hard targets out to six thousand meters.
The A3 boasted dozens of tweaks, many of them suggested by crew members who had gained their knowledge the hard way. So the tank commander now enjoyed an independent thermal and LLAMPS viewer. Three-hundred-sixty-degree visibility came via a network of hardened battle-cams. A secondary fuel cell generator allowed the tank to idle without guzzling JP-8 jet fuel. Wafered armor incorporated monobonded carbon sheathing and reactive matrix skirts, as well as the traditional mix of depleted uranium and Chobam ceramics.
Unlike the tank crew that Jones had rescued from a screaming mob in a Damascus marketplace, the men and women inside the A3 could fight off hordes of foot soldiers armed with RPGs, satchel charges, and rusty knives—for the “finishing work” when the tank had been stopped and cracked open to give access to its occupants.
Lycombing gas turbines drove the seventy-five-ton brute a top speed of sixty kph, which was a touch slower than its forebears. But again, it was an unusual day when the driver got to put her into top gear and go wild. Mostly the A3 crawled through dense warrens of third world slums, pulverizing mud brick walls, smashing through the ground floors of low-rise buildings, crushing cars—and occasionally people—beneath its treads.
Not today, though.
Today the six Abrams of the Eighty-second MEU charged through light scrub, mowing down saplings and bursting through old wooden fences as they led an armored stampede toward the last line of Japanese defense. They led twelve older, reduced-capability M1A1-Cs of the Australian Second Cavalry, and twenty-six Light Armored Vehicles and “Bushpig” AASLAVs of the combined mobile forces.
It was a hell of a rough ride, but Jones was enjoying it thoroughly, watching the tanks on flatscreen while strapped into the battalion command LAV some three hundred meters behind the leading edge of the advance. Every vehicle was hooked into the Cooperative Battle Link and directed by a Distributed Combat Intelligence, working within operational parameters set by the U.S. and Australian commanders. The turret on one of his A3s swung thirty degrees to the left and fired a 120 mm round of XM1028 Canister at a platoon-sized group of the enemy, which emerged from the smoking ruins of a wooden cottage. More than a thousand tungsten balls, expelled from the container as the shot left the gun’s muzzle, swept over the Japanese like an evil wind, reducing them to pink mist and bone fragments.
He saw a Japanese Type 94 “tankette” literally shredded into metal chips as four separate 30 mm chain guns took it under fire. It flew to pieces, the disintegrating steel plate perversely reminding him of leaves blown from a tree in a high wind.
His helmet banged into
the padded ceiling as the LAV dipped and bumped and leapt up again with a series of grinding crunches. It wasn’t firing any of its weapons, but the vehicles around it had begun to pop smoke and antipersonal munitions from their grenade launchers. Two Hellfire missiles streaked away from an Australian Bushpig, lancing out to destroy a couple of small field guns popping away on a hill just ahead of them.
Jones took in video and sensor feeds from dozens of sources. To the untrained observer, it was just violent chaos, but to him every image, every moment was another note in a deadly overture.
Even from his position, buttoned up tight in the LAV, the noise of the assault was colossal. The snarling of the command vehicle’s engine, the crash and crunch of every impact as they smashed though the light bush and leapt over small gullies, the savage thunder of coaxial machine guns, autocannon, and mortar bursts.
A drone picked up a company-sized movement to the west, where a hundred or more men emerged from where they had hidden in a creek. The DCI alerted human sysops, who needed no warning. Two speeding A3’s traversed their main guns and unloaded canister. The Japanese, however, were protected from the hypervelocity tungsten swarm by the fall of the creek bed. Their reprieve lasted all of one second.
While as they remained crouched where they couldn’t be engaged by direct fire, the next two tanks in line brought their guns to bear as they bounced along at forty kilometers per hour. Simultaneous muzzle flashes preceded a massive distortion effect on the screen.
The tanks had fired high-impulse thermobaric shells.
Two blips flashed across nine hundred meters in the blink of an eye. The shells contained a slurry of propylene oxide mixed with a finely powdered explosive. As simple microchips in the warheads registered that they had reached the target, they cracked open and dispersed their contents over the heads of the enemy infantrymen. The soldiers had a split second to see the bright orange cloud, but no time to escape before small incendiary fuses sparked a titanic blast. At the epicenter, temperatures soared to 3,000 degrees Centigrade and overpressure reached 430 psi.
The men, the plant life—in fact, every living thing and most of the inanimate objects within the blast area—ceased to exist. Even the air was incinerated, creating a vacuum that pulled in more burning fuel and loose objects from a wide margin around the point of impact. Anyone who might have survived—even momentarily, by dint of having been entirely submerged—would have encountered the true meaning of hell, having been simultaneously flash-boiled, asphyxiated, and cooked from within as the blazing fuel–air mix penetrated all nonairtight objects.
As the first echelon approached the edge of the city, collapsing crude concrete bunkers with single-shot penetrators or the jackhammer effect of concentrated chain gun fire, attack helicopters roared overhead, autocannon and rocket pods working the increasingly target-poor environment. Rather than swooping and turning to rake at the enemy in their normal “bird of prey” routine, however, they swept right on over the town and out toward the open prison compound.
“Go! Go! Go!”
Mitchell and McLeod dashed forward, following the pathfinder beacons that overlay the real-world landscape in their powered goggles. Seventy thousand feet above them, a Big Eye drone tracked the SAS men via biolocator chips implanted in their necks, checking their progress against a hastily programmed software model of the killing ground around the prison camp.
The model had been adapted from a tourist holomap that the Distributed Combat Intelligence found within the personal files of a sailor on board HMAS Ipswich. Fleetnet was a treasure trove of such data—previously unremarkable, but now proving to be of tremendous tactical importance.
Neither Mitchell nor McLeod had time to waste thinking about such things. They were racing across open ground, sucking in great drafts of foul-smelling air, their legs pumping like pistons. Cascades of tac net overlay turned the world into a shifting mosaic of computer-generated imagery. Arrunta gunships whirled overhead, identified as friendlies by the bright blue rectangles that floated around them and turned green a second before long streaks of fire spat out of nose-mounted autocannon.
The stream of fire destroyed a small wooden cabin, which had been designated by a red flashing box, but which now turned gray and inert.
As they ran, this was their whole world, a mandala of electronic projections designed to make sense of the murderous insanity swirling around them. Both men knew that the other members of their section were very close, perhaps near enough to call out and be heard. But in reality, they were utterly alone, with one goal, to reach the bunker ahead, outlined in flashing red, before the time hack in the bottom left-hand corner of their goggles reached zero.
They had thirty-three seconds.
“Go! Go! Go!”
Mitchell’s personal weapon coughed three times, killing a sentry who rose up without warning from a pile of dead bodies.
Thirty-one seconds.
They both leapt a tangle of barbed wire. As Mitchell sailed clear of the obstacle, the vision of a dead child passed over his eyes, like reflected text on a computer screen. The body bloated. Skin blackened and split. A filthy teddy bear clutched in the dark claw of a tiny hand.
Twenty-nine seconds.
The earth trembled underfoot as an immense explosion destroyed an ammunition dump two klicks away. Data flashed on their Heads-Up Displays and was gone before the aftershock had dissipated.
Twenty-six seconds.
They were almost at the bunker entrance. Another sentry.
McLeod fired first. Three hypervelocity caseless ceramic bullets smacked into the man, shattering his breastbone, releasing tendrils of nanonic razor teeth inside his chest, which in turn released an airborne wave of gore as the augmented rounds tore his upper torso to pieces.
Twenty-four seconds.
Mitchell fired into the yawning black entrance of the bunker. A flash-bang.
Their goggles briefly dimmed against the blinding light. Momentum and memory carried them forward until vision was restored. But just for a second, and then they were inside the bunker, and the small constricted space was rendered in the lime-green glow of low-light amplification.
Twenty-two seconds.
“Get down! Get Down!” Mitchell shouted.
Women and children screamed.
Howled.
Screeched and cried like trapped and dying animals.
Two Japanese soldiers flailed about with fists and clubs. One died as his head disintegrated. The other flew backwards into the sandbagged wall, a giant smoking hole where his heart had once beaten.
The SAS men switched to single shots now.
Twenty seconds.
“Get down on the fucking floor, now!”
Mitchell counted eight enemy soldiers. Still blind. He and McLeod picked them off, one by one.
Seventeen seconds left.
“Right. Get up. Get out. Run toward the light. Go-go-go!”
He had to push some of the women to get them started.
Two children, small girls of indeterminate age, had gone fetal in a corner. McLeod picked them both up as Mitchell put another round into an enemy soldier who tried to push himself up off the dirt floor.
Fifteen seconds.
Mitchell left first, weapon at the ready. Two other section members had joined them to hurry the civilians away.
“Move! Move! Over here!”
Fourteen seconds.
McLeod appeared. Somebody helped him with one little girl.
They all began to run through the firestorm and digital turmoil toward a slit trench.
Nine seconds.
McLeod dropped down in time to see another trooper cut the throat of a guard who had been hiding on the floor of the trench.
Eight seconds.
They made it with time to spare.
Seven.
Six.
Five.
Four.
Three . . .
Hellfire rockets destroyed the bunker three seconds early.
General Masaharu Homma knew profound shame. He had failed his men and his emperor. He had expected to hold out for at least a week, but had lasted less than an hour.
Less than an hour.
He stood, trembling, in the open window on the second floor of the building where he had hoped to make his last stand. He still would, but he understood now what a futile gesture it would be. He wished that a stray round or a sniper would relieve him of his disgrace. The demonic noise of pitched battle had fallen back to the sound of scattered, pitiable skirmishes, most of which ended the same way: with that peculiar ripping snarl of a barbarian’s rifle as it snuffed out another life.
He could hear the dull chop of their wingless aircraft. The sound seemed to swirl everywhere around him. And now he understood that the high-pitched whine belonged to their tanks.
There wasn’t much of his command left. Some of the staff officers had barricaded themselves in on the lower floors and piled up a sizable cache of rifles and grenades. Somebody had even salvaged a Type 97 antitank rifle from somewhere. There were a handful of reports from Luzon and Singapore that it was the only thing short of cannon fire that could punch through the mysterious padded armor worn by the Emergence barbarians. Perhaps they might take one or two with them.
Most likely they would all die in some bizarre cataclysm, such as the firebomb that had annihilated Wakuda’s company down by the riverbank.
As he stood at the window, peering into the harsh tropical light, two of the eight-wheeled armored cars rumbled into the street. The turrets traversed with a humming sound he could hear even over the noise of small-scale fighting. The long barrels came to a halt when they had lined up on his building.