At almost the same instant SFC Hidalgo’s Avengers had taken down the three lead drones, a second section of Avengers, three kilometers farther west, hidden in the fields behind Force Furnace, blew four more drones which had been covering Harshair’s column’s southern flank out of the night. And moments after that, individually deployed Stinger teams hidden in the rugged mountains north of the A77 roadbed with the original, shoulder-fired launchers had opened fire on the drones on that side of the column.
In the space of barely twenty-five seconds, Alastair Sanders’ battalion had put out every one of Brigade Commander Harshair’s aerial eyes.
• • • • •
Wild exultation, tinged with more than a little awe, flared through Captain Gutierrez. The vista before him was unbelievable.
At least thirty vehicles gushed flame and smoke in a solid sea of fire, and that sea spread wider every moment as tendrils of blazing fuel snaked out from the central carnage. Bodies—some of them already on fire, as well—vomited out of the hatches of demolished vehicles, and strings of 25-millimeter tracer streaked out from the infantry’s Bradleys’ Bushmasters. Whenever one of those strings touched an alien vehicle, that vehicle exploded, and what his Abrams’ main guns did was far, far worse.
“Hammer Five, Five Actual,” an impossibly calm voice said in his helmet earphones. “Advance. Give them the boot!”
“Five Actual, Hammer Five. Wilco, Sir!”
The landlines had disintegrated when his vehicles advanced; he was on the radio now, and he hoped like hell no orbiting starships were listening in. But there was no time to worry about that.
“All Hammers, Hammer Five. Advance!”
The massive Abrams tanks and smaller, lighter Bradleys crossed the crest of the road and drove straight into the madness.
• • • • •
The Shongair vehicle crews had never imagined anything like it.
They’d never confronted anyone with weapons capable of matching their own. Once in a while an arrow or thrown spear managed to find an open viewport and sneak inside. And they’d lost vehicles occasionally to improvised ambushes, when the local aborigines managed to surprise them at close range, swarm over them, pry open hatches and get at their hapless crews with hand-to-hand weapons. Some of those aborigines had been clever enough to arrange pits or other traps which had disabled or immobilized their vehicles. And some of their vehicles had been destroyed when they were forced to abandon them in the field because of breakdown or when one of their firebases had been temporarily overrun and the local aborigines had known to set their fuel tanks on fire. They’d even—on very rare occasions—encountered aborigines clever enough to manufacture what humans would have called “Molotov cocktails” out of captured Shongair fuel.
But they’d never met anyone with vehicles as combat capable as their own. Never. And as the holocaust which had enveloped the head of their column lapped back around its flanks, some of them lived long enough to realize that they still hadn’t. That the despised humans’ vehicles were far more combat capable than their own.
It wasn’t really their fault. This wasn’t the kind of battle they’d been trained to fight. Not the kind of combat their vehicles had been built to survive or their doctrine had been framed to confront.
Eight of the armored regiment’s GEVs battled their way out of the wild confusion of APCs trying to flee in every direction. Five of them took direct hits from 120-millimeter guns and promptly disintegrated. Two more were threshed into flaming wreckage by the jackhammer fire of Alpha Company’s Bradleys.
The eighth lasted long enough to fire its own turreted laser at “Ferdinand,” Gutierrez’s number five Abrams.
The Shongairi had no way to realize it (yet), but their energy weapons were actually shorter-ranged in atmosphere than the human tanks’ main guns. That wasn’t a factor in this case—both combatants were well inside their opponent’s range envelope. But whereas Ferdinand’s spent-uranium penetrator punched cleanly through the GEV’s frontal armor, igniting a fierce conflagration which blew the alien vehicle apart moments later, the GEV’s laser wasn’t powerful enough to blast its way through the depleted uranium-augmented Chobham armor of the tank’s glacis. It would have been more than sufficient to breach Ferdinand’s thinner side armor, and its transfer energy managed to shatter a sizable area of the frontal plate’s surface area, but it didn’t have the power or the pulse duration to actually breach it.
Now the horrifying, thundering monsters came straight for the rest of the Shongairi in Harshair’s column, grinding contemptuously through or over the flaming carcasses of their dead comrades’ vehicles, trampling the wreckage underfoot, and the entire brigade began to come apart.
• • • • •
Over the last four or five years, the Army’s entire fleet of Abrams had been upgraded to TUSK status by the installation of the Tank Urban Survival Kit developed after Iraqi Freedom. Their side armor had been fitted with additional reactive armor, and slat armor had been fitted to protect them against rocket-propelled grenades and other shaped charge weapons fired from behind them. Neither of those features were particularly critical at the present moment, but TUSK also included a remote weapons turret armed with a .50-caliber machine gun in place of the original open-mount, exposed .50 at the commander’s hatch. Now, as the tanks ground forward, those heavy machine guns thundered, spitting their hate even as the main guns continued to seek out and destroy vehicles and the 7.62-millimeter machine guns mounted coaxially with those main guns stitched fist-sized exit wounds through individual Shongairi, whose body armor was approximately as effective as so much straw against them.
Yet dreadful as the tanks’ harvest was, the far lighter Bradleys were almost as bad. And even as they advanced, the mortar vehicles behind them—guided by the continuous overhead surveillance of the UAVs the Shongairi still didn’t realize were there—began to pound the middle and rear of the column, as well. The M298 mortar, adapted from the Israeli Army, had a maximum range of almost four and a half miles. In the first minute, it could fire sixteen thirty-pound rounds, each with a lethal radius of over seventy feet. Thereafter, as barrel heat became a factor, it had a sustained rate of four rounds per minute.
• • • • •
Once more, the Shongairi had never experienced anything like it. They had mobile mortars of their own, the heaviest of which had almost half again the range of the weapons firing at them, and they’d used those weapons with devastating effect against opponents in the past. But no one else had ever dropped mortar bombs on them, and troopers who were veterans of a score of past skirmishes fled in screaming panic as the incandescent bubbles of high explosive and white-hot steel fragments marched through their ranks.
• • • • •
“Furnace Five, Five Actual. Engage. Anvil Five, Five Actual, advance to Point Carson and engage at will.”
“Five Actual, Furnace Five. Wilco.”
“Five Actual, Anvil Five. Rolling.”
The responses came back over the landline net, and Captain Michael Wallace’s Force Furnace—four more Abrams from his own Charlie Company’s first platoon, and the four Bradleys of Captain Achilles Adamakos’ Bravo Company’s second platoon—opened fire from camouflaged positions three and a half miles west of Force Hammer in the neat, irrigated fields south of the river. They were barely three hundred meters from the roadway, and the camouflage with which they’d been draped flew away, flaming, on their muzzle flashes as they opened a merciless fire on the previously unengaged flank of Harshair’s column. At that range, even a .50-caliber machine gun was fully capable of penetrating the armor of a Shongair personnel carrier, and the heavier weapons picked off the larger, more heavily armored GEVs with dreadful precision.
The carnage was incredible, and at the same moment, dismounted infantry teams armed with Javelin antitank launchers opened up from the mountains north of Force Furnace, reaping a dreadful harvest as still more of Harshair’s armored regiment’s GEVs exploded in fountains of
flame.
Another mile west from Force Furnace’s position, still on the south side of the river, Captain Adamakos’ Force Anvil snorted its way up out of the dust wallows of its half-buried hides, shedding the dirt-covered tarps which had been spread across its units’ positions. The other two platoons of Captain Wallace’s armored company and the first and third platoons of Adamakos’ own mech infantry company had been hidden on either side of a dirt track that branched off from the main road another mile west of Wallace’s position and ran south across a bridge. That bridge wasn’t remotely strong enough to support an Abrams, or even a Bradley, but the water level was comfortably within the vehicles’ fording depth and the engineers had carefully surveyed the riverbed, locating the only two potholes which might have mired one of them.
Now the eight tanks and eight infantry Bradleys, accompanied by four of the six M3A3 cavalry Bradleys of the two reconnaissance troops which had been attached to the battalion, charged along the dusty track at almost fifty miles per hour. Huge billows of dust spurted up from their spinning tracks, silver and black in the light of the rising moon, but none of the terrified, stunned Shongairi already trapped in the battalion’s fire sack even noticed. They were too busy writhing and dying under the fire of the battalion’s other two combat teams.
• • • • •
Alastair Sanders watched from the circling UAV as Force Anvil smashed into the tail of the Shongair column, and his eyes were bleak. Adamakos’ guns were trained to his left, towards the column’s westernmost end, belching their hate in fiery lines of tracer from the Bradleys and enormous muzzle flashes from the tanks as they raced for the river. Both the Abrams and the Bradley had fully stabilized main gun systems, capable of scoring first-round hits while traveling at full speed in rough terrain, and no more than a handful of Shongair vehicles at the very rear of the column escaped into the night.
Then Force Anvil crashed across the river without even slowing, hurling up immense sheets of muddy water. The tanks and Bradleys churned up the farther bank, swung sharply to their right, and advanced to meet Force Hammer as Gutierrez’s command ground into the Shongairi from the east.
The night was no longer dark. It was illuminated with hideous brilliance by the flames spewing from his battalion’s victims, and vicious bursts of machine-gun fire cut down desperately fleeing Shongairi. Some of the aliens scuttled towards the beckoning shelter of the rugged hillsides north of the road, only to encounter his deployed, dismounted infantry in fire teams built around machine guns and riflemen who cut them down with lethal precision. There was no mercy in the battalion’s personnel, no hesitation, and this was a veteran unit. It knew exactly what it was doing, and Alastair Sanders felt a fierce, cold, exultant pride in his personnel.
“All force commanders, Five Actual,” he said. “Lantern. I say again, Lantern.”
Acknowledgments came back, and his “Blue Tracker” displays came to life, showing him—and them—the positions of every friendly unit. Perhaps some orbiting starship would pick them up . . . but it seemed unlikely what was already going on down here could be missed forever, and he wanted no blue-on-blue “friendly fire” incidents.
• • • • •
Brigade Commander Harshair Was frantic. Every time he deployed one of his RC drones, the infernal humans shot it right out of the air, depriving him not simply of reconnaissance but of any communication with higher authority. He was on his own, and it was impossible to make any sense out of the garbled, gabbled scraps of frantic combat chatter he was picking up. The only thing he knew was that he and his brigade had rolled straight into Cainharn’s own hell.
They’re primitives! Barbarians! his brain gibbered. They don’t even have interplanetary spacecraft, far less supralight capability! They can’t be doing this! It can’t be happening!
Yet it was. The direct vision displays showed him those terrible “primitive” behemoths driving straight towards him from the east like Cainharn’s demons, and his blood ran cold as the blinding lightning bolts of muzzle flashes stabbed through his shattering brigade. They were grinding disabled vehicles—and troopers, alive or dead—under those broad “primitive” treads of theirs, and their accuracy was impossible to credit. They were firing—on the move!—at least as accurately as his own GEVs could have, and his vehicles had never been designed to resist that kind of fire. They might as well not have been armored at all, he thought sickly, as he watched wheeled APCs trying to climb the hills north of the road in desperate futility.
Then one of those “primitive” cannon swiveled in his direction, a laser pulse established the exact range, an M830A1 High Explosive Armored Tearing shaped-charge projectile impacted on the frontal armor of his command vehicle, and the final fate of his brigade became a moot point, so far as he was concerned.
• • • • •
Lieutenant Colonel Alastair Sanders watched carefully as Force Anvil met Force Hammer. Friendly fire casualties were a CO’s worst nightmare in the middle of a roaring holocaust of destroyed vehicles like this even with the best datalink and electronic IFF gear in the world. But he’d trained his people hard in maneuver warfare—especially night attacks—ever since he’d first assumed command of the battalion, and tonight that was paying off hugely.
Despite all of that, though, he was astounded that they hadn’t already been wiped out. There was no way the commander of the force his battalion had just spent twenty-five cataclysmic minutes reducing to wreckage could have failed to get out a situation report! And surely if the Shongairi could take out carrier battle groups at sea, they could take out land-bound vehicles! Yet they hadn’t. Were the alien starships simply holding their fire in hopes of not killing any of their own surviving personnel? Hoping they could still recover survivors from the massacre?
Well, if that’s what they’re hoping, they’re going to be disappointed, he thought grimly, surveying the thickly heaped, mostly smoldering and charred alien bodies strewn along the roadway. Occasional shots continued to ring out as here and there one of those bodies stirred, and he bared his teeth at the sight. On the other hand, if they’ve just been holding their fire until we clear the area, we’re about to find that out.
“All units, Five Actual,” he said. “Execute Bug-Out.”
All along that hellish, blazing stretch of road, Abrams tanks pulled to the shoulder. Their crews bailed out, leaving the JBCP links up and switching on every other bit of electronic gear which had been shut down throughout the battle to keep them company. They climbed into or on top of the Bradleys which came grinding through the flame-wracked wreckage to collect them . . . and which had just shut all of their emissions down. Infantry teams streamed down out of their hillside positions, and every Bradley and MRAP of the battalion went hurtling along the A77 roadway deeper into Afghanistan.
Sanders hated leaving those tanks and their combat capability behind, but he had no illusions about what the sort of kinetic bombardment that took out entire capital cities could do if they ever locked on to him. Besides, difficult as it was to believe, they’d shot out virtually their entire main gun ammunition supply killing Shongairi, and he had no idea where he might find replacement ammo. So he turned the tanks into the most powerfully radiating decoys he could come up with and left them at the site of destruction while all of his other vehicles, radios completely shut down, raced for safety.
• • • • •
They got almost a hundred kilometers farther into Afghanistan, and they’d split into a dozen different groups as planned, dropping off parties on foot to scatter and go to ground in the best concealment they could find, before the bombardment Sanders had feared found them.
Three Bradleys and thirty-two percent of his personnel survived the vengeful follow-up strikes.
Lieutenant Colonel Alastair Sanders was not among them.
. XVII .
Rob Wilson’s head came up as he heard the crunch of tires on gravel and the sound of an engine working hard in four-wheel drive mode. Once u
pon a time, that wouldn’t have concerned him, but this was no longer once upon a time, and he casually checked the .40 caliber HK USP in the ballistic nylon holster on his right hip as he stepped to the front door of the cabin.
Both of the coal-black German shepherds who’d been drowsing in the patches of sunlight coming in the front windows raised their heads, ears pricking, and Dave Dvorak looked up from the book he’d been reading to the four children in a sort of fallback to more normal times. His own head cocked, eyes going momentarily distant as he listened, and then he handed the book to Maighread and stood up. He crossed to the window to the right of the cabin door and quietly took down the AR-10 rifle from the rack above it. He pulled back the bolt to check the chamber, then let it come forward again, feeding a .308 round, and set the safety.
The shepherds came to their feet and headed for the door, beginning to growl softly as they sensed the tension of their humans. Merlin—the male and the larger of the two at a hundred and two pounds—started to push by Wilson’s legs onto the porch, but a quiet command from Dvorak stopped him. The big dog stood with his head at Wilson’s knee, his slightly smaller mate Nimue on the human’s other side, while both of them listened as intently as the two men.
The kids got very quiet, their eyes going huge, and Sharon and Veronica went over and sat down with them, gathering them into their arms while the men looked out to where the driveway came out of the trees.
Neither of them said anything, but the heavy-duty gate closing off the driveway had been chained and padlocked shut, and they hadn’t issued any invitations. . . .
An SUV poked its nose out of the dense shadows of the tree-enclosed driveway, and Dave felt himself relaxing at least a little. The vehicle wore the colors of the National Park Service, and the red-haired man behind the wheel bore a pronounced family resemblance to Sharon and Rob.
He glanced at Wilson and saw his brother-in-law’s physical tension ease a bit. Then Wilson glanced at him, twitched his own head at the doorway, and stepped out to greet their visitor. Dvorak watched him go . . . but he didn’t put down his rifle.