Peña pushed the shell away from his arm and glared at Jones, yelling above the din without using his CVC mike, “Aye! Jones, get that chingadera down you fricken idiot!” Peña jerked his left thumb over his shoulder.
Red-faced at forgetting to deploy the heavy cloth backstop that absorbed the initial energy of an ejecting round and kept it from bouncing around the inside of the tank, Jones moved to untie it.
Alexander would have preferred engaging the APC with a HEAT (High Explosive, Anti-Tank) round but common practice was to always have a more powerful armor-piercing fin-stabilized discarding sabot-tracer (sabot, for short) round in the breach and ready to go. Using a depleted uranium “Staballoy” sabot round against an APC was a waste and if the round hit a non-vulnerable spot, it might have passed harmlessly through the vehicle.
Jones tugged at one of the backstop’s straps when Alexander saw movement to the right. He swung the turret to the right and lined up the gun with the target. This time he yelled with a little less urgency and a little more professionalism, “Gunner! HEAT! APC!”
This APC was almost a mile away at the end of the runway to the east. Peña lased the target with the AN/GVS-5 laser rangefinder. The tank’s computer took the information from the laser and calculated the distance to the target. Other information was automatically fed into the computer and calculated as welclass="underline" wind speed, direction and air density, the type of round and its trajectory, and the droop of the gun barrel due to repeated firings and or temperature. The tank did all this for its crew in less than a second, adjusting the barrel’s elevation so that the round would impact within a few inches of where Sergeant Peña put the reticle.
Jones stopped what he was doing and smashed his right knee against the ammo compartment blast door knee switch. The door slid open, revealing almost half of the 50 rounds that were stored in the back of the M1’s turret. Jones selected a HEAT round. He grabbed it by its base with his left hand, pulled it out, and flipped it over in one smooth motion, ramming the 40 pound round home up the breech and fluidly following through to avoid being caught by the quickly closing breechblock. Jones yelled, “Up!” and his knee came off of the knee switch, causing the door to slide shut in a second. It sounded like a vault door closing. It would easily sever a careless finger or hand left in its path.
Alexander was already scanning for his next target when he said, “Fire!”
Peña said, “On the way!”
The HEAT round burst out of the gun tube and arced towards its target (HEAT rounds are much slower and heavier than sabot rounds). The HEAT round’s spike and switch assembly (about a six inch long probe) struck the APC’s sloped hull. This initiated an explosion in the conically shaped main charge. The explosion heated and compressed the charge’s metal liner, forming a jet of metal moving at about 24 times the speed of sound. This round too was overkill for an APC’s modest armor. The three crew members and anything else capable of being oxidized began to burn violently in less than a blink of an eye.
The 105mm shell casing bounced crazily around the crew compartment. Peña roared at Jones, “Shithead, I’m going to kill you!”
Jones reached for the dampener and finally untied it. It rolled down like a scroll and hung limp, ready to receive and temper the next blow from an ejecting shell casing.
Alexander again saw movement, this time to the left. As his chest was exposed to the battlefield (nametag defilade as tankers call it), he slammed the hatch down over his head just as he saw the backblast of an anti-tank guided missile taking off, no doubt headed for Traveller.
The operator of the wire guided missile with a large HEAT warhead barely had time to stabilize the missile’s flight path and guide it to the target. The missile flew high and detonated against the wall of the terminal building 500 meters to the tank’s rear.
Feeling calmer and more confident, Alexander decided to personally engage the thin-skinned APC that had just fired upon him and his crew. He telescoped the commander’s hatch up a few inches to the “open protected” position and peered out of the crack. He lined his .50 caliber machine gun up to the target using one hand to spin the .50 cal around from the safety of inside the tank. Using a hand dial, he lowered the machine gun’s elevation and pulled the dial. The heavy machine gun rewarded him with a steady beat of four rounds per second. He fired low and to the right. One slight adjustment and his rounds hit home. Many of the half-inch thick rounds penetrated the armor, wounding the driver and killing the TC. The incendiary rounds soon set the APC smoldering. Flames soon began to shoot out of the vehicle, resting not ten feet from its still burning cousin. Alexander clenched his jaw, there, that made up for the wasted sabot round.
He looked around for another target. He looked into his tank’s thermal imaging system (TIS) tube picture tube and started scanning at three-power. There, what’s that, just to the left of the burning APC at the end of the runway just beneath the lip of the apron? Alexander flipped the TIS to ten-power and looked again. The smooth arc of a turret top, its outline broken by its heavy machine gun mount, revealed itself as white hot against a cooler black background in the super heat sensitive scope. The TIS’ incessantly chattering cooling system coursed liquid nitrogen through its veins to cool its sensors and optics. It could detect temperature differences of less than one degree Fahrenheit. Just as he was confirming his suspicions about an enemy tank trying to creep up to a hull down position (a position from which the tank’s hull is protected, usually by terrain, and only its turret shows — making for a very small target), Alexander saw the heat signatures of two more tanks roll up to the right. “Gunner, sabot, three tanks, left tank first!” the colonel called.
Jones clicked open the blast door, grabbed one round and slammed it home. He clicked his mike on and said, “Up!” The blast door closed.
Alexander said, “Fire!”
Peña lased, called, “On the way!” and squeezed the trigger.
Knowing there were other tanks out there, as soon as Peña fired, Jones opened the blast door and reloaded, saying, “Up!”
The crew was calming down and moving towards a deadly efficiency. Training and adrenaline began to grip the four men. After 90 seconds of combat, the American tankers had fired their main gun eight times and used the .50 caliber once. Three Chinese tanks and five APCs lay burning as testimony to the Americans’ speed and accuracy. Other than some scratched paint from a few machine gun rounds, the M1 was untouched.