Carefully, Eric nudged his rifle through the last screen of tall grass and sighted through the x4 integral scope. The view leaped out at him. Half a thousand meters of cleared fields stretched around the village, more downslope to the north, bare and brown in the spring, still sodden from melting snow. The fields themselves were uneven, steeply sloped, studded with low terraces, heaps of fieldstone, walls of piled rock: much of it would be dead ground from the town. Closer to the tumbled huddle of stone houses were orchards, apple and plum, and walled paddocks for sheep.
Distantly, he was aware of his body’s reaction, sweat staining the field jacket down from his armpits, blood loud in his ears, a dryness in his mouth. He had seen enough combat to know what explosive and flying metal did to human bodies. The fears were standard, every soldier felt them—of death, of pain even more. Stomach wounds particularly, even with sulfiomide and antibiotics. Castration, blinding, burns; a life as a cripple, a thing women would puke to see . . . Draka officers were expected to delegate freely and lead from the front; a Centurion had a shorter life expectancy than a private. Almost without effort, training overrode fear, and his hands were steady as he switched to field glasses.
Standard, he thought. The village might have been any of a thousand thousand others in High Asia, anywhere from Anatolia to Sinkiang: flat-topped structures of rough stone with mud mortar, some plastered and white-washed, others raw, sheds and narrow twisted lanes. The military “highway” went straight through, with the burnt-out wreckage of a Russian T-34 standing by the verge on the northern outskirts, the blackened barrel of its cannon pointing in silent futility down toward the plains. There was a square, and a building with onion domes that looked to have been a mosque, before the Revolution, then until last fall a Soviet “House of Culture.” There were a few other modernish-looking structures, two nondescript trucks in German army paint, more horse-drawn vehicles parked outside.
Movement; chickens, an old woman in the head-to-toe swathing of Islamic modesty . . . and yes, figures in Fritz field gray. He switched his view to the outskirts, almost hidden in greenery: spider holes, wire, the houses with firing slits knocked into their walls . . . it wasn’t going to be a walkover.
He reached a hand behind him and Sofie thrust the handset into his grasp. Senior Decurion McWhirter and the five troopers waited behind her. He clicked code into the pressure button and spoke: “Marie.”
“Targets ranged, teams ready.” Along the firing line, hands clutched the grips and lanyards; a hundred meters behind, she stood with her eyes pressed to the visor of a split-view rangefinder. The automortar crews waited, hands on the elevating screws, loaders ready with fresh five-round clips.
“Tetrarchy commanders.”
“In position.”
Eric forced himself to a half-dozen slow, deep breaths. Hell, he thought. Why don’t I just tell them I’m going for a look-see and start walking to China? Because it would be silly, of course. Because these were his friends.
“Well, then.” He cased the binoculars, hooked the assault sling of his rifle over his head, watched his wrist as the second hand swept inexorably around to 0530. When he spoke, his voice was quiet, conversational.
“Flare.”
It went up from the observation post with a quiet pop and burst two hundred meters up. Magnesium flame blossomed against the innocent blue of the sky, white and harsh. Plop-whine, the first mortar shells went by overhead, plunging downward into the pink froth of apple blossom along the edge of the village: thump-crash fountains of black earth and shattered branches, steel and rock fragments equally deadly whirling through the air. Crash-crash-crash-crash without stopping; the new automortars were heavier, on their wheeled carriages, but while the ammunition lasted, they could spray the 100mm bombs the way a submachine gun did pistol bullets. Century A’s teams had been practicing for a long time, and their hands moved reloads in with steady, metronomic regularity.
From either side, the heavy machine guns erupted, controlled four-second bursts arching toward the smoke and shattered wood on the town’s edge. Red tracer flicked out, blurring from the muzzles, seeming to float as it approached the roiling dust of the target zone. The firing positions here at the treeline overlooked the thin net of German defensive posts, commanded the roofs and streets beyond. They raked the windows and firing slits, and already figures in SS jackets were falling.
“Storm storm!” the officers’ shouts rang out. The Draka infantry rose; they had shed their marching loads and the lead sticks were crouched and ready. Now they sprinted forward, running full-tilt, bobbing and jinking and weaving as they advanced. A hundred meters and they threw themselves down in firing positions; the assault rifles opened up and the light rifle-calibre machine guns. The second-string lochoi were already leapfrogging their positions, moving with smooth athlete’s grace. The operation would be repeated at the same speed, as many times as was necessary to reach the objective. This was where thousands of hours of training paid off—training that began for Draka children at the age of six to produce soldiers enormously strong and fit. Troops that could keep up this pace for hours.
And the covering fire would be accurate—sniper accurate, with soldiers who could use optical scopes as quickly as those of other nations did iron sights.
“BuLala! BuLala!” The battle cry roared out, as old as the Draka, in a language of the Bantu extinct for more than a century: Kill! Kill!
The return fire was shaky and wild—the slow banging of the German Kar 98 bolt-action rifles, then the long brrrrrtttt of a MG 34. The line of machine-gun bullets stabbed out from a farmhouse on the outer edge of the village. Draka were falling. Seconds later, one of the 120mm recoilless rifles fired.
There was a huge sound, a crash at once very loud and yet muffled. Behind the stubby weapon a great cloud of incandescent gas flared—the backblast that balanced the recoil. Saplings slapped to the ground and leaf litter caught fire, and the ammunition squad leaped to beat out the flames with curses and spades. But it was the effect on the German machine-gun nest that mattered, and that was shattering. The shells were low-velocity, but they were heavy and filled with plastique, confined by thin steel mesh. The warhead struck directly below the muzzle of the German gun, spreading instantly into a great flat pancake of explosive; milliseconds later, the fuse in its base detonated.
Those shells had been designed for use against armor, or ferroconcrete bunkers. The loose stone of the farmhouse wall disintegrated, collapsing inward as if at the blow of an invisible fist. Beyond, the opposite wall blew outward even before the first stones reached it, destroyed by air driven to the density of steel in the confined space of the house. The roof and upper floor hung for a moment, as if suspended against gravity. Then they fell, to be buried in their turn by the inward topple of the end walls. Moments before, there had been a house, squalid enough, but solid. Now there was only a heap of shattered ashlar blocks.