plain. The 76mm guns boomed, and gouts of snow and ice showed where canisters scored hits. The wave of vehicles remorselessly moved against their thin line.
As Paul sighted the next enemy, machine gun bullets hammered nearby into the pressure ridge. Chips of ice sprayed, one of them stinging Paul’s cheek as it furrowed across. An exploding grenade flashed nearby, hissing its shrapnel over them.
“Down!” shouted Paul, who dove behind the pressure ride and hugged the ice. Red Cloud did the same. They crawled, moving away from their sled and tube-launcher. Each found a depression and froze. Paul did so because he remembered Bullard’s words.
“With these suits, you hide and freeze like a possum. They’ll never see you until you pop up later and cut them down from behind.”
Soon, the approaching hovers roared with deadly sound. The gliding machines were almost on top of them. Then a hovertank went into high gear as it whined with power, lifting higher as it topped over the pressure ridge.
Paul trembled as fear washed through him. He had his vow, but he didn’t want to die. He wanted to live, call Cheri later and talk to Mikey. He wanted to go home. What their side needed out here was more soldiers armed with grenade launchers, heavy machine guns and recoilless rifles. Then they would have obliterated these hovertanks. How had the Chinese commander known they just had TOWs? How had he known the best tactic was to smash through?
Enemy machine guns hammered nearby and hovertank guns thundered. It must be a slaughter.
With a wrenching effort of will, Paul peeked up. The sight surprised him. The hovertanks were spread over a large area, but some had grouped together. Their guns roared, and canister shells exploded against the pressure ridge sixty feet away. Hot tracer machine gun rounds also blasted at the raised ice mound that ran for miles in either direction.
Red Cloud also looked up. The two exchanged glances.
The hovertanks blew a path through the pressure ridge. Big sleds with ski-mounts in the front and tracks in the back burst through the openings. Some of the sleds were obvious tankers. Others must carry ammo and the last were infantry carriers.
“Let’s wait until they pass,” Paul said.
Red Cloud answered by hugging the ice again. Paul followed his example. This wasn’t like Quebec. There, if you lay on the ice for any amount of time you began shivering. Here, their winter suits kept them warm because of the thermal heaters built into them.
Paul checked his watch. Less than fifteen minutes had passed. The sounds of the hovertanks and sleds lessened as the rearguard rapidly moved away.
“Now!” shouted Paul. He jumped up, ran to the sled and put his shoulder against it. Surprisingly, it had survived intact. In seconds, Red Cloud was helping him, grunting and heaving. They turned it, and Red Cloud loaded up another missile. Paul sighted, grinning fiercely in his enclosed helmet. He pressed the firing stub.
The seconds ticked by. An orange fireball was his reward. It lit up the night in a whoosh of flame that towered higher than he could believe.
“We must have gotten one of their fuel vehicles!” Paul shouted.
Another ATGM hissed in flight, the bright contrails showing its path. Canister shells exploded in the ice several hundred yards away. The racing TOW missile lurched and harmlessly smashed into the pack ice. The Chinese had slain its operators.
Red Cloud loaded their last missile.
Paul sighted and fired, but this one missed. Fortunately, the range had already gotten too far for the Chinese to fire back.
In a matter of a few more minutes, the enemy was simply a field of bright specks. It didn’t take long until the Arctic night blanketed the world with its darkness. The only bright points were the burning hovers and sleds behind them. It put a thick stink of oily smoke in the air.
The Chinese had burst through their net, taking losses, but far from being stopped.
As that thought settled in, Paul said, “We’re stuck out on the ice again.”
“Maybe we were meant to die out here,” Red Cloud said. “Maybe our fate lies here.”
Paul thought about that. Finally, he said, “Our sled has a little motive power. Let’s go see who else is left alive. Then we’ll start traveling for Dead Horse.”
Red Cloud peered at him through his ballistic glass visor. The Algonquin looked tired, although his eyes seemed harder, more determined than ever. He nodded.
“Unless you want to help fate and stay out here to die,” Paul said.
“No. I will fight to live and live to fight.”
“Sounds good,” Paul said. He himself fought to fulfill a vow and to survive long enough to make things right with his ex. He could see now that he hadn’t tried hard enough with Cheri. He would woo her again. He would…if he could make it home.
“Ready?” asked Red Cloud.
“Yeah. Let’s go.”
General Shin Nung swore viciously as another bomber zoomed out of the Arctic sky, launching its missiles. First, a Red Arrow slammed into the American aircraft, causing an explosion in the sky. Then a nearby hovertank exploded, killing it and the nine soldiers riding outside the vehicle.
That’s when the American artillery began pounding the location. The shots created great flashes of light on the horizon. Those flashes showed where Dead Horse, Alaska was, their key objective. As the shells screamed down, exploding over the tundra, Nung’s command hover shuddered and shell fragments rattled against the vehicle’s armor.
Nung swore. He was in a foul mood. He had been ever since the deadly TOW2 missiles had struck his force out on the ice. It had been a costly battle, a nasty surprise. Only fifty-one hovertanks had made it past Cross Island and to the North Slope. Every time he thought about those flashing missiles hitting another hovertank—
Nung struck his armrest again. He had to put that battle behind him and concentrate on here. Technically, they had made it to the oilfields outside of Dead Horse. If Nung had desired, he could have begun blowing the wellheads. What he wanted was Dead Horse, though, the enemy airbase and garrison stationed there. Once he had Dead Horse, the victory would be his.
If he had air cover, the few America jets couldn’t have rushed down at his vehicles in a near suicidal frenzy. The helicopters couldn’t have shot their Hellfire missiles at his sleds. The hovertanks had destroyed most of airborne attackers, but at a bitter cost. The combined total of enemy assaults had destroyed nearly half of his original attacking vehicles.
He kept thinking
He shook his head. War wasn’t a matter of
“Go in by lances!” Nung shouted into the microphone. “Infantry, follow on ski.”
Dead Horse was on a flat tundra plain surrounded by American bunkers and command posts. The enemy had mortar-teams and artillery inside the town. Nung had speed, tired hover-pilots and cold soldiers. There wasn’t any finesse to the assault.
The smallest formation among the hovertanks was a lance: three vehicles. Three hovertanks would stop on the cold tundra to provide over-watch fire, tracking, plotting and shooting at anything that moved. A different lance sped to an outcropping, using every fold in the terrain to escape destruction. From the hovertanks slid off Chinese infantry. Some set up mortars and began peppering the Americans.
Then a shell found Nung’s hover. The scream of twisted metal began it. The vehicle slewed wildly and with a terrific thud crashed against a snow bank. Nung grunted as he slammed against his restraints. Groggily, he looked around. The communications officer was dead, his head a bloody mess. The pilot’s arm was broken as the man sobbed quietly.
