“Wilco,” the sergeant answered, settling into final firing position and confirming that his sights were set on the now-motionless God King’s chest. His finger took up the slack in the trigger quickly. Then the sergeant continued applying the steady pressure taught to him long ago in a Negev desert sniper course.
The explosion, when it came, came as a surprise.
The God King, just coming to full alertness, felt a horrid jolt that ran from one side of its body to the other and sent waves of shock and pain across its torso. It kept to its feet for the moment, but just barely. Twisting its head to look down at the side from which it thought the first shock had come, the Kessentai was surprised to see a small hole gushing yellow blood. Turning the other way the God King was shocked to see a plate the size of a double fist torn roughly from that side. The God King felt suddenly sick at the image of the damage wrought on its own body.
Its knees buckling, the mortally wounded Kessentai slumped to the floor of its tenar, whimpering like a nestling plucked from the breeding pens for a light snack. Pilotless, the tenar followed its default programming and settled gently to the ground, its bulk causing the frozen grass and soil to crunch below it.
As soon as the sound of Rosenblum’s shot carried to him, the waiting Benjamin gave his “clacker,” the detonator for the claymore, a quick squeeze followed by another.
The first squeeze had been sufficient however, as it was in almost every case. A small jolt of electricity raced the short distance down the wire to the waiting blasting cap. This, tickled into life, exploded with sufficient power — heat and shock — to detonate its surrounding load of Composition Four plastic explosive.
The C-4 shattered the resin plate containing the ball bearings. Though these did not entirely separate, indeed at least one piece that took off down range consisted of thirteen ball bearings still entrapped together, not less than three hundred projectiles of varying weight and shape were launched.
The near Posleen had its two front legs torn off almost instantly and took further missiles in its torso. It fell to its face. The slightly farther one, facing inward, was struck by one missile in its haunches and another two in its neck. Both shrieked with surprise and pain. The further Posleen took off, bleeding, at a gallop.
From either side of Benjamin came two more explosions. He could only hope that those claymores did their work well.
Little Maria Walewska, eleven years old, was trying to sleep, fitfully, against her mother’s warmth. The girl was not awakened by the sound of the alien’s flying machine, whining down to rest about twenty meters away, nor even by the distance muffled shot that was the cause of that.
Instead, it was the five distinct flashing explosions that came from the other side of the guarded human “encampment” that brought her from her fitful sleep.
Maria turned her little head in the direction of the explosions, but could see nothing. Something, many things, passed overhead, sounding like a flight of angered bees.
Then she heard the screaming of her guards as the bees descended to strike.
“Human soldiers!” Benjamin screamed repeatedly as he ran forward, submachine gun at the ready. He had his doubts that the words would be understood, was pretty sure — in fact — that they would not be, since they were spoken in Hebrew. But, understood or not, surely the Poles could distinguish human speech from alien and draw the correct conclusion.
Benjamin’s first burst of fire went into the nearest of the Posleen guards, the one missing both legs. Its head came apart in a blooming flower of yellow bone, teeth and blood.
To either side of Benjamin the two other Israeli soldiers likewise screamed as they ran. They, too, fired at any Posleen they crossed, seemingly dead or seemingly hale.
It was called, “taking no chances.”
“Let’s take our chances and run for it,” shouted a standing Pole. Without waiting for encouragement the Pole took off to the north. He had not run a dozen meters before one of the guard’s railgun rounds exploded his chest. That example was enough to make all who saw fall to the ground and cling tight to Mother Earth.
Nestled against the earth, as soon as Rosenblum saw the God King’s body reel from his shot and the sled begin to settle he turned his attention to other, still-standing, Posleen. Automatically, his right hand stroked the straight pull bolt to chamber another round. The machine gun team, engaging from Rosenblum’s left front, was bowling over the Posleen on that side of the encampment. Many of them, he saw, acted as if they had been wounded and stunned. Despite their erratic movements, the machine gun team scythed them down.
“Well, volume of fire is their mission, after all,” Rosenblum muttered. “But precision is mine.”
Whereupon, the sergeant settled his sights “precisely” upon a Posleen guard, then lifting its weapon to shoot at the Poles.
Maria and her mother stared helpless, wide-eyed, and open-mouthed as one of their captors, one already bleeding from a roughly torn hole in its chest, lifted its weapon to spray them. They kept that stare even as the Posleen was struck again by something that traveled with a sharp, menacing crack overhead.
Taking a .338 Lapua from straight on, the alien was thrown back on its haunches, dead in that instant.
Benjamin stopped not an instant while donating a staggering, disoriented, alien a killing burst from his submachine gun. Still shouting “Human soldiers!” at the top of his lungs, he soon reached the edge of the cluster of humans at the center of the encampment. From here on out, he knew, he would have to control his fire more carefully. He shouted out as much to dimly perceived Israelis to either side of him.
Reaching the center of the human circle, Benjamin heard one more crack pass overhead — Sergeant Rosenblum in action. The line of tracers the machine gun had been drawing across his front on the far side of the Poles suddenly ceased. Benjamin looked around frantically for other signs of alien resistance but saw none.
He queried into his radio, “Any of them left?”
The radio answered, “Rosenblum here. I see none standing… Machine gun team. I think we got them all… Bar Lev here… none standing… Tal… scratch one last on this side.” Benjamin heard a final burst, Tal’s last victim, off to his right.
He issued a final command, “Perimeter security… Rosenblum come on down,” before settling, exhausted, on his weary, black clad, Israeli ass.
Under the moonlight, a little blond Polish girl stood before him, her hand outstretched as if wanting to touch her deliverer, though fearing to.
Benjamin smiled and took the girl’s hand. Then he stood, picking the girl up, and called out, again in Hebrew unintelligible to the Poles, “To whom does this little girl belong?”
Maria’s mother, though still in a degree of shock, came over and took her from Benjamin. She turned away, briefly, before turning back with a sob and throwing her arms around her Hebrew deliverer. Benjamin patted the woman, in no very intimate way, before disengaging.