anymore and I will kill you.” His grip tightened, crushing Patel’s windpipe until he had to struggle to breathe. “Now, which is it to be?” Michael went on, letting go. “And make up your mind quickly. I’ve got better things to do.”
Patel’s face crumpled in defeat as he dragged air back into his lungs. “Okay, okay,” he croaked, his newfound courage gone. “I’ve got to run systems tests on all six tanks. We have to make sure the depot hasn’t sent us any duds. Once that’s done, I shut them down and go back to the wharf for the next load.”
“How long?”
“The testing’s automated, so a couple of minutes each.”
Michael swore. He’d promised Ho he would give him an hour; he still had a good thirty minutes left.
“Do the tests but call in a defect. Make it one that’ll take at least half an hour to fix. Understood?”
“Sergeant Miyashita won’t be happy.”
“A defect’s a defect. It’s not your fault.”
“Maybe not, but he’ll still kick my ass.”
“That can’t be helped.”
Patel sighed a sigh of resignation. “I don’t think I’ve got much choice,” he said.
“Not if you want to stay alive, no, you don’t.”
“Okay … Wharf, Tank One.”
“Where the fuck are you, Patel? I need you down here now!”
“Sorry, sarge. Tank Three’s still showing problems on its auxiliary power control module. I’ll have to replace it.”
“You useless dipstick,” Miyashita shouted. There was a moment’s silence, and Michael held his breath, praying that Patel wasn’t told to leave it for later. “Fix it,” the man said finally, “but fast, understood?”
“Yes, sarge.”
“Why do you put up with it?” Michael asked when the circuit went dead.
Patel shrugged. “It’s the way things are.”
“They don’t have to be. Come with us.”
Patel stared at Michael. “You’re NRA, right?”
“We are.”
“My corporal says the NRA is winning this war.”
Michael’s eyes opened in astonishment. “He said that?”
“He did. Haven’t seen him since. He did a runner. He was the tenth this week. So is it true … that we’re losing, I mean?”
“You want an honest answer to that?”
“Hah!” the man snorted. “That’d be a change.”
“I think we’ll win, but it’s still too early to be sure.”
“That’s what I think.”
“So come with us.”
“No,” Patel said, shaking his head. “I can’t do that. My two brothers are in the marines. DocSec would shoot them.”
Michael didn’t doubt it. DocSec was big on guilt by association. “We’ll have to tie you up and dump you, then,” he said.
Patel managed a lopsided grin. “Just don’t hit me too hard.”
Michael grinned back. “No more than we have to, Marine Jonah Patel. And you can tell them that we belted you the moment you got into this thing.”
“Oh, don’t worry. I will. Just let me wipe the holovid records before you do.”
Kleber and Delabi climbed back into the Aqaba. “The poor bastard’s sleeping like a baby,” Delabi said. “His head will hurt like hell when he wakes up.”
“Better that way than having it kicked in by DocSec,” Michael said. “Positions everyone. Last questions … no? Right, report when ready to roll.”
One by one, Michael’s team brought their tanks online and reported in. “Right, folks,” Michael said. “We need mayhem and lots of it. Wait until I give the word, then shoot at anything that crosses your path, but air-defense assets are a priority, so go for them if you can. Let’s go.”
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
