by Tom Kratman
"Ah . . . fuck. Get me Reilly on the horn."
D-Day, Rako-Dhuudo-Bandar Cisman highway, Ophir
"Yes, we identified the problem and I've got a handle on it, boss," Reilly answered. "Yes, it's a shitty, greasy, sloppy handle, but I've got a handle."
Man, I hate being nagged.
Sergeant Abdan reported in, "First tank entering the KZ."
Reilly finished up, "And I got to go now. Busy, doncha know. Send the dustoff our way, would you? We're probably going to need it."
The radio spouted, "Alpha Six, One-Six. First tank at Checkpoint Three . . . "
Lana, wearing NVGs, watched the long steel snake slither through the kill zone with a mix of eagerness and fear. Some of the fear was for her life and health, true. More of it, though, was in the form of, Lord, God, don't let me fail.
In this she wasn't so very different from any of the others peering in at the sight of the massacre they hoped to make.
Though she didn't have to whisper-the tanks made more noise than she could hope to-still she did. "Gunner . . . eleven o'clock . . . gunner . . . ten o'clock . . . gunner . . . eleven o'clock."
With each command, Viljoen deftly spun the traversing wheel that also held his firing button. A certain tone crept into her voice, that same combination of fear for self and fear for self-image.
"Relax, Lana," Viljoen said. "It's . . . well, I won't say it's a piece of cake, but I will say you're as ready and as able as anyone I ever served with."
"Well, thanks a lot, lover," Dumisani piped in.
"I never served with you in combat, you black bastard. You were on the other side." Viljoen hesitated for a moment; he wasn't normally the maudlin sort. Then he added, "Dumi, if you were ever down range of my gun . . . I'm awfully glad I missed."
"What are you talking about?" the Zulu said. "You hit my tonsils every time."
"Asshole!"
"And sometimes that, too."
Lana couldn't help herself; she started to laugh.
Which was the point of the exchange, Viljoen thought. As Dumi understood. As he understands damn near everything.
***
Reilly felt his heart pounding with the sheer wicked joy of impending combat. It had been a long time, and every minute since the last had seemed like a pointless eternity. From behind the screen his driver and James had thrown up, as if through a veil, he watched the foremost approaching behemoth grow closer . . . and closer . . . four hundred meters . . . three hundred . . . two hundred.
"Guns up!" he sent over the general frequency. He couldn't see it but somehow he felt eight major antiarmor systems rising from the ground. A quick glance left and right showed Nagy's engineers manning machine guns and RPGs.
"One-six up . . . ATGMs up . . . Mortars, hanging."
One-fifty. One hundred.
"Company . . . FIRE!"
Major Maalin, riding in the fifth tank back, the one right after the gap, scanned left and right. He couldn't see a lot; the moonlight cast shadows on the low scrub and rocks that tended to conceal more than the moon illuminated.
Of course, if I could just have convinced uncle Gutaale that being able to see at night was at least as important as having a twenty-fourth tank . . . but, noooo, he wanted the image more than the reality.
Nominally, Maalin's command consisted of one large, very large, tank company, and two infantry companies that were in theory going to get wheeled armored personnel carriers someday. For now, the company he had with him made do with riding on top of the tanks. Yes, it would sting if the tanks' guns fired.
The major had lost cellular communication with his uncle's office nearly an hour ago. There were broad patches of the country that the phone service simply couldn't reach. Indeed, if his cantonment hadn't been atop a hill, Maalin rather doubted he'd have any service at all. Certainly the town to the west and lower down, Rako, had no service at all.
And, of course, the tanks' radios didn't reach. And didn't I complain about that, too? "One less tank, uncle," I said. "One less tank and we can get night vision devices, longer range radios, and even some more training ammunition." But, nooo, he didn't understand the importance of those things.
And can he or his flunkies give me a spot of reconnaissance? A little intelligence on what lies ahead? No. That's why I have one tank platoon forward; maybe they can find out something at not too great a cost.
I swear . . .
Maalin's silent complaints stopped when he saw two bright flashes, perhaps two kilometers away, or maybe three-it was hard to tell at night and no one had ever taught him the flash-to-bang formula anyway.
For several seconds, he couldn't see anything related to those flashes. Then he saw something, two smaller ones that seemed to be nearing him. Those lights danced in bright circles. He was about to call for evasive action-a "Sagger Dance," western armies would have called it-when there was a much larger flash ahead, followed in just over a second by a substantial boom. Half a second after that something flew by his head, spitting small flames out the side.
What happened to that-missile, it must have been-Maalin didn't know. He was too busy trying to make sense of the fire that seemed to come all at once, from everywhere. He heard sharp cracks all around his tank, and the sound of bronze ricocheting from steel, as the infantry he had boarded started to fall and crumple around the turret.
Shit, he thought.
Then another explosion, close by, went off by the side of the road. He saw the infantry on the tank ahead simply swept off, as if by a large broom. The tank commander, who had been riding unbuttoned, came apart in shreds of cloth and flesh. When Maalin heard the same kind of explosion behind him, he didn't even look. Since he was alive and some of his infantry still on his tank, he knew the one behind him had been similarly brushed off.
Directional antipersonnel mines. Those, too. Fuck.
While Dumi was still bringing the Eland up to hull down from turret down, Lana saw one of the missiles fired by Harvey's antitank section fly by a few hundred meters to her front before it buried itself in the rocks with a thunderous crash.
"Shitty Russian workmanship," she muttered, before breaking into the routine, "Gunner, HEAT, Tank, Eleven o'clock."
The gun crested the edge of the wadi, Viljoen made a minute correction to range and elevation, and then the road in front of her lit up with the strobelike muzzle flashes of her gun, and five others.
She was mesmerized by the display.
"Hit!" Viljoen said. There was no response. "Lana! HIT! Reload!"
"Wha . . .? What?"
"Reload, dammit."
"Ah, shit, sorry," she said. Automatically, she dropped her commander's seat a few inches, and bent to extract another round from the rack behind her. The few seconds she'd wasted meant she couldn't vacuum load but had to take the time to ram the shell all the way in.
"Up," Lana called, then stuck her head back out the commander's hatch just in time to see Viljoen smack another hollow charge shell into the engine compartment of the tank he'd first hit. The thing erupted in flames. Almost immediately thereafter, a great burst of fire emerged from all around the enemy turret, which sailed into the air like a rocket, fire blossoming all around and underneath it.
"That's a kill," Lana announced, as once again she stooped over to feed Viljoen's greedy gun.
She managed to get her head up again in time to see that at least four of the enemy tanks were burning. In the firelight, silhouetted, she saw dismounts racing toward her.
"Gunner! Machine Gun! Infantry!"
"I see them, Lana," Viljoen said, as his coaxial machine gun began to chatter. He spun his hand crank, sweeping fire across the line of dismounts sprinting for their position. In Mendes's field of view some of the infantry were bowled over while others dove for the dirt.
Something flew by overhead. Lana felt the wind of its passage and then the shockwave from behind as it exploded somewhere to her right rear. She looked and saw a tank making a minute adjustment. The muzzle of its smok
ing cannon looked to be a mile wide.
"Turret fucking down, Dumi!" she screamed. She felt the Eland shudder, then shift backwards in a hurry. She also felt herself being thrown face forward. And then she felt . . .
Like any good combat vehicle driver, and Dumi was by no means bad, the Zulu already had the gearshift in reverse and his foot on the brake. As soon as Lana called out, he slid his foot off the brake and mashed the gas. Gear and wheels shrieking, the Eland flew back at better than twenty miles an hour. On the wadi's sloping floor, it sank out of view of the surface.
Then Lana screamed, "Owww! Oh, shid! Muh fuggin' NODE. You addho', Dumi; you broke muh fuggin' NODE!"
Over Lana's pained shrieking, the crew heard Abdan say to the platoon leader, "Sir, time to charge."
"Lana?" Viljoen asked.
She shook her head. God, that hurts. "Fug id! Charge!"
The main gun was loaded and so didn't need her for now. Nose throbbing, Lana stood in the Eland's hatch, her shoulder pressed against the stock of the pintle-mounted machine gun. The gun's stock sank up and down with the movement of the Eland. At the same time and to the same cause, her blood rose and fell, raising and dropping the level of pain from her shattered nose. As bad, every thump of a wheel over a rock or over the lip of the wadi was transmitted instantly to the sundered cartilage, ruptured blood vessels, and pulverized bone.
With a double thump, and a barely suppressed groan from Lana, the Eland emerged from the wadi into a scene of fire and smoke, fallen bodies and people running in confusion and terror. Along the road heavy vehicles sat, abandoned, or burned their souls away in the night breeze. Those were the obvious ones. Others, still alive and trying desperately to fight back, were less obvious.
In the few hidden moments in the wadi, the scene had changed in important ways. Targets and threats once seen had moved. New ones had appeared. Pain or not, Lana's eyes scanned for the tank that had driven her Eland down into the wadi for safety. She spotted it not far from where it had fired at her car. Screamed, "Gunner, HEAT, Tank!" into her microphone, she tugged the machine gun to line up on her enemy.
"Where, Lana?" Viljoen demanded.
"Ten o'clock . . . follow my tracers," she answered. Her finger stroked the trigger, sending a stream of lead, one in five with a glowing tail, in the general direction of the T-55. She hit nothing, not even the tank and certainly not the commander in its hatch with the terrified grimace across his face.
Viljoen couldn't see the tracers in his sight until he had spun the turret well to the left. The target was moving, even as its turret traversed to reacquire the old threat. Viljoen fired, missed, and cursed, "goddamittofuckinghell."
Lana let go the machine gun, dropping down once again to cram a round of 90mm into the gun. It was as well that she did. Moments later the target fired, missing high right through the space her body had occupied a split second before. She felt the muzzle blast and she felt the wind of the round's passage over her head.
Popping her head back up, Lana ordered, "Hard left, Dumi! Clode into it. Viljoen, can you spin dat t'ing faster dan he can traverde?"
"Betcher ass," the Boer replied, pride in self and determination in mission plain in his voice.
"I am bedding my add!"
The T-55's commander may not have seen or understood what Lana and her crew intended. The effect, however, was the same as if it did. While the Eland closed as quickly as Dumi could force it to, its turret swinging as fast as Viljoen could spin his gunner's wheel, the tank's turret likewise turned. If the tank's commander had been experienced and well-trained enough to order his driver into a hard pivot steer, or if the driver had understood on his own, the Eland and her crew might have lost the race. As it was, the car and the tank danced around each other, their turrets straining to line up for a killing shot.
The advantage the Eland had was Viljoen's strength and experience. The advantage the tank had was that its hydraulic traverse wouldn't tire as, eventually, the Boer must. There was only going to be one shot at it.
"Target!" Viljoen exhulted, pressing the trigger. The Eland rocked sideways from the recoil of the 90mm. Mere meters ahead, the hollow charge shell impacted on the thinner side armor of the turret, just behind the commander's hatch. There was a flash as the shell exploded, a portion of its power forced into the metal cone at its nose. The cone collapsed, then transformed into a gas-more of a plasma, really-that shot forward, melting its way through the armor. The T-55 stopped dead in its tracks, smoke beginning to pour from every open orifice. Flames followed the smoke.
Lana popped up again, taking control of the machine gun. In her NVGs she saw the T-55's driver, scrambling out of his cramped hatch. She cut him down, then resumed her scanning. "Gunner, HEAT, Tank . . . "
Reilly didn't have a turret. He didn't even have a machine gun since James was on that, laughing his ass off while he bowled over Ophiri dismounts by the twos and threes.
Instead, he had eyes and a radio. With his eyes he counted nine burning tanks. An explosion and a burst of flame caused him to amend that to, No, ten of the motherfuckers. Four to go. And who knows how many dismounts?
Another dual flash, muzzle and target, almost made him add, Eleven and three. A closer look told him that last wasn't a tank; it was one of his own infantry carriers coming apart at the seams.
How many did that cost me? Two anyway, machine gunner and driver. And maybe three or four. Shit. Hopefully Lana . . . Reilly just cut that thought off at the root.
"Is my fucking dustoff on the way yet?" he asked of the Merciful.
An RPG landed short, blowing up on the ground a couple of meters in front of Maalin's tank. The explosion rattled both the tank and the major. From whence it came, Maalin had no clue; the things seemed to come from everywhere and to land pretty much anywhere. He didn't have any night vision, though his panicky gunner did. The gunner simply gibbered when the major asked him to report.
At least the enemy seemed to have fired off all their directional mines. Maalin wasn't sure how much difference that made; tracers from what seemed to him to be about a dozen or more machine guns lanced across the road from all directions. To add to the confusion, mortars shells-or maybe they were artillery; Maalin didn't have the experience to say-walked up and down the road, exploding in bright flashes followed by dark, evil smoke and sending their shards through flesh to rattle off armor.
Even without night vision, the major could see tanks burning both ahead of and behind him. By those flickering lights he saw bodies and parts of bodies. One, in particular, caught his attention, where a probably panicking tank had run over a certainly panicking infantryman, crushing the latter like a grape.
Moans and screams arose from every side. Maalin heard pleas for mercy and pity in his own tongue.
"Allah, have mercy," Major Maalin prayed. "Deliver me from this nightmare." He doubted that mercy would be forthcoming. This was the kind of nightmare he was also reasonably sure he wasn't going to awaken from.
He was getting no reports that made sense. As near as Maalin could determine from the radio, he had one platoon leader with no tanks but his own, two more tanks with no platoon leaders, a bunch of scattered, frightened-out-of-their-wits infantry more interested in getting out of what was now obviously a preplanned kill zone than in striking back, and a couple more tanks under his exec chasing some light vehicles somewhere to the west.
And now the enemy vehicles were in among his own, taking advantage of their maneuverability, size, and speed to move faster than his tanks' turrets could traverse.
There was one chance. It was hard to take it, but Maalin really couldn't see much choice. "Surrender," he sent out over the radio. "Get out of your vehicles and walk with your hands up." He said much the same to his own crew, then ripped off his tanker's helmet, a Russian job of pads and mesh with electronics running through it.
"Surrender!" he shouted to his own infantry. "Drop your arms and put up your hands. Surrender!"
In his NVGs Reilly saw the
gesture. "Cease fire," he commanded. "Cease fire, I said, goddammit," he repeated when he also saw a machine gun from his own side chop down several Ophiris. The word passed from his radio to the others, and then by word of mouth. In a few minutes, the firing stopped. Only then did he see a much larger number of the enemy rise from the ground, putting up their hands. "Prisoner teams out."
"James, grab the radio. Follow me. Bring the translator."
Finding the senior officer remaining among the enemy's tanks wasn't particularly hard. It was just a matter of counting radio antennae, all pretty well lit by the fires of burning tanks. At least that's how Maalin assumed his foe found him.
"You are the commander?" the white enemy asked through an interpreter.
"I was," Major Maalin said.
"You have two tanks to the west, chasing a few of my vehicles. Order them here, and to surrender."
"And if I refuse?"
Reilly jerked a thumb over his shoulder to where his own infantry were collecting up the beaten enemy and herding them out onto the main wadi floor. "Then all your men here go into a ditch and get shot, along with yourself. Then we'll hunt those tanks down and kill them anyway. But I don't have time to fuck around, so you get a chance to save their lives, and the others'."
It was a hard world, and a cruel one, Maalin knew. He didn't doubt this . . . Well, American, I suppose he is, and if half the stories told of that vicious people are true, he'll carry out his threat. Murderers, it is said, the lot of them, whatever pious platitudes their government may put forth for public consumption.
"One moment, please?" he asked, as he scrambled up the side of his tank, reached in, and took out a radio mike. What he said, Reilly didn't know, though it didn't seem to alarm the translator.