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.