Michael took a deep breath to quell an attack of nerves. He had a right to be nervous; they were surrounded by thousands of Hammers. He gripped the sidestick controller in his left hand and eased it forward. The Aqaba lurched ahead, forcing him to push the stick left. The tank swung around, narrowly missing a startled marine who appeared from nowhere. It was harder in real life than on the simulator, Michael realized. He sent the tank zigzagging through the packed ranks of Hammer heavy ordnance. His erratic steering produced a great deal of shouting and fist waving. He ignored it and brushed the Hammers aside. The rest of the tanks followed behind, a crazy conga line of heavy armor.
“Sorry about that,” Shinoda said. She’d overcontrolled and driven her tank over the back end of a mobile missile battery. The maneuver sent a passing officer into paroxysms of rage. Assault rifle in hand, he ran alongside the tank, shouting at it to stop. External hull-mounted microphones picked up his voice. The torrent of abuse racketed around the inside of the tank.
“Tank Three,” Michael said to Kleber. Even if the Hammers hadn’t woken up to the fact that five of their Aqabas were being stolen, they soon would. “Shoot that mouthy asshole.”
“Three, roger.”
Michael watched as Kleber fired a short burst from one of his tank’s machine guns. The rounds picked the man up and tossed him away to one side.
“Nice shooting, Kleber,” Michael said. “All tanks, fire at will.”
There was only the briefest of pauses before the 95-millimeter autoloading gun on Michael’s tank crashed into life. It sent a hypervelocity round ripping effortlessly through a cluster of thin-skinned mobile air-defense batteries, then another and another before one got lucky and smashed into a missile warhead. The explosion that followed was close, violent. The Aqaba was punched bodily to one side. Not even bothering to select a target, Michael traversed the gun, firing as he went. Its rhythmic metallic crash was joined now by machine guns flaying the air around any Hammer stupid enough to stick his head up while grenade launchers dropped infrared absorbing smoke to protect their flanks. The column roared through the ordnance park and smashed through the perimeter wire. They turned hard right and accelerated in a headlong rush for the bridge across the Oxus River. Behind them, tumbling columns of smoke climbed away from the blazing wreckage of MARFOR 21’s heavy ordnance reserves.
Still the Hammers seemed paralyzed by events. Nobody tried to stop the tanks. They kept moving and smashed aside anything that got in their way. They let 95-millimeter guns loose at anything even remotely like a worthwhile target, right down to a small all-terrain vehicle full of what Michael hoped was Hammer brass. The furious barrage of fire scattered marines in all directions; only a handful had the presence of mind to fire back, an exercise in futility.
The marine in charge of the checkpoint at the massive bridge spanning the Oxus River was as brave as he was foolish. Flanked by a pair of Sampan antitank missile batteries that would have done the job for him if he had be bothered to take the time to think-until rounds from Kleber’s and Mallory’s tanks tore their guts out-he stood in the middle of the road, hand raised. His marines, smarter and much less brave, did not wait to see what would happen, hurling themselves out of the oncoming tanks’ path. At the last moment, the man woke up to the fact that no amount of arm waving would stop an Aqaba. In a convulsive, panic-stricken leap, he hurled himself to one side, only to be caught by the tank’s leading edge, his body tossed clean over the parapet and into the water far below, the tank’s microphones picking up his despairing scream as he fell to his death.
They were almost halfway across the bridge by the time the Hammers decided to take the problem seriously. Hostile fire alarms shrieked inside the Aqaba. The holovid screen looking down the bridge flared white as the tank’s fire-control system responded to a cluster of incoming Sampan missiles. The attack was over in seconds. Defensive lasers slashed the missiles out of the air; their warheads exploded to send missile debris ricocheting off the hull in a cacophony of metallic whanging that made Michael’s ears ring. The noise did not let up. The tank’s 95-millimeter gun tracked the missiles back to their launch point. It poured rounds into the missile battery. Again the screens whited out as a power plant lost containment, the blast smashing men and ordnance aside as the five tanks roared past and into the night.
Across the bridge, Michael swung the Aqaba left onto the road to Kumasi, the hull now reverberating as they took fire. Light cannon, Michael reckoned, and there’ll be worse to come and soon.
“Engage autofollow,” he shouted. He punched instructions into the master panel to tell the tank to take the road to Kumasi. Now the rest would follow wherever the lead tank went. “Kleber, get the hatch open; everyone stand by to bail out.”
The hatch opened with a crash. It was bedlam outside. The noise of tracks on the road and the pounding of incoming cannon fire were overwhelming. “Hold on,” Michael shouted. He slammed on the brakes. The tracks screamed in protest as the tank slid to walking pace. “Go, go, go!”
None of them hesitated, diving through the hatch after their packs and personal weapons. Delabi was the last to go. The instant she vanished, Michael mashed the throttle onto the stops, locked the controls, and followed, rolling and tumbling to a pain-filled halt that left him staring up into the sky, stunned and unable to move.
“Come on, sir,” Shinoda said, dragging him to his feet. “We need to get out of here.”
Groggy, Michael forced himself to follow Shinoda. They ran hard for the cover of the trees. In the distance, the rumble of ground-attack landers was clearly audible. The night sky to the northeast flickered red and white as the NRA and the Hammers traded artillery fire.
Tuesday, October 12, 2404, UD
Outside Cooperbridge, Commitment
“I think we’re hooked in,” Shinoda said, “so stand by … Okay, the link’s up. We’re into ENCOMM … and we have the latest OPSUM.”
Michael skimmed the high-level summaries, pleased to see that the battle for McNair was going well for the NRA, and no wonder. The Hammers’ planetary councillors were still refusing to release the marine divisions they needed to keep a lid on civil unrest; UNMILCOMM was not getting the reserves it needed to contain a rampaging NRA.
If I were Chief Councillor Polk, Michael said to himself, I think I’d be making plans to get as far away from Commitment as I could.
He turned his attention to the mass of data summarizing the disposition of NRA and Hammer units along what ENCOMM was now calling the Yallan Salient, both happy and concerned to see that the 120th had been pulled out of the line and into reserve. There’s only one reason for that, he thought. Anna’s battalion has been taking heavy punishment.
Michael burrowed down into the OPSUM. He located Team Victor; Hartspring was still in Cooperbridge. He closed the OPSUM. But one thing bothered him; it had been bothering him for a while.
The Hammer of Kraa’s survival, the fate of billions, the future of humanspace-they all hung in the balance. Compared with that, Team Victor was an irrelevance. So why did ENCOMM always know exactly where it was? Michael was no expert, but he knew how fast changing, how chaotic combat was, and good as the NRA’s intelligence system was, surely it wasn’t that good. He was missing something; he was sure of it.
Shinoda broke his train of thought. “I see Team Victor hasn’t moved,” she said. “I’ll get the team ready to move out.”
“Hold on for a second,” Michael said. “I’ve been thinking about things.”