deep. Given Maury's aggressive approach, Fitzduane would not have been surprised by an angry response, but the Magnavox man showed restraint.
'I know more about my field than most,' he said quietly. 'I hope that will be sufficient for you gentlemen. As I understand it, your application relates to FAVs. Perhaps we can take it from there. It might be helpful if you work from first principles.'
Fitzduane caught Kilmara's eye and made an almost imperceptible gesture. Kilmara took the point and cut in.
'Don, my unit came into being as a counterterrorist force,' he said. 'Subsequently it was expanded to have an offensive capability. That meant we needed to deploy heavier firepower to deal with armor and other special situations, and pretty soon we ran into problems. Quite simply, our Rangers, no matter how physically fit, could not carry the weight of weaponry and equipment which we considered necessary to do the job. I am sure you now the figures.'
Shanley nodded. 'A fit soldier is supposed to carry only about one-third of his body weight if he is to remain combat capable – say, sixty pounds odd. In practice, by the time you have added spare ammunition and the modern tools of his trade, the guy – or girl these days – is staggering under a hundred pounds or more. That restricts his mobility and he tires faster. Worse again, he still is not carrying what is required in combat today. The days of a rifle and sixty rounds of ammunition are long gone. Now he is laden with four hundred rounds of ammunition, antitank weapons, explosives, claymores, laser range finders, and-' he smiled – 'thermal sights. And there is more. Radio batteries are a real curse. And then there is his NBC kit.'
'You've got the picture,' said Kilmara. 'A single special-forces soldier has never been better equipped or more potentially lethal in the history of warfare, but he cannot carry what he needs.
'Well, I tossed the problem out to Colonel Fitzduane. Hugo has a talent for this kind of thing.'
Fitzduane could see that Maury was getting hooked.
'Back in World War Two,' said Fitzduane, 'my father was one of the founding members of the SAS in North Africa. Stirling's idea was to raid behind German lines using heavily armed jeeps.'
'Did it work?' said Shanley. 'As I understand it, the German Army in North Africa was heavily armored. Jeeps against armor does not seem much of a deal.'
'A few dozen SAS destroyed more German aircraft on the ground than the entire Allied Desert Air Force, which contained thousands of men,' said Fitzduane. 'As to armor, the idea was not to go head to head. In those days, you couldn’t destroy a tank with anything you could carry in a jeep. But jeeps were faster and they could hide. And they were devastating against light armor and trucks. As a tactic it worked brilliantly.'
'But surely the casualties were heavy?' said Shanley.
Fitzduane shook his head. 'Ironically, you were a lot safer in the SAS than the regular army. It was a case of brute force versus speed, maneuverability, firepower, and brainpower. Anyway, with the SAS experience in the back of my mind, I started exploring the idea of a fast, light unarmored vehicle equipped with light but powerful weapons. And pretty soon I was pointed this way. The U.S. Army might have gone heavy, but some people were pushing at the envelope.'
'Chenowth,' said Maury. 'They made the dune buggies that did so well in the Baja. The U.S. Army formed an experimental division and started playing with converted Chenowths equipped with grenade launchers and TOW missiles and the like. It was political dynamite, because field evaluation showed that a fast attack vehicle, a FAV – which was what they called these things – could, in many cases, outkill not just armored fighting vehicles, but also tanks. I've heard kill rates like nine to one and four to one.'
Fitzduane nodded. 'It gets complicated when you are talking combined arms, because armor does not operate in a vacuum. Add helicopters into the equation and FAV's might not have done so well. Also, the Abrams tank and the Humvee programs were well advanced and big money was involved, and no one wanted to lose them. So, for all practical purposes, the FAV experiment was killed. I hear the marines bought a few, and the SEALs certainly took them on board with success, but major development, which was what the program needed, never happened. It should have, because FAV funding would have been chicken feed in comparison to most military programs, but it didn't. That's the trouble with inexpensive programs. There is not enough money in them.'
Kilmara smiled. 'Well, since we don't have any real budget by American standards, we picked up on the U.S. experience and some work in the U.K. and produced our own machine, but decided to try a slightly different direction. Both the Chenowth and the Saker are wheeled vehicles, excellent for some terrains but no good in marshy ground or snow.
'But we don't have the money to have different vehicles for different conditions, so we decided to go for an unarmored high-speed tracked machine that could do most of what the Chenowth and Saker could do but could operate worldwide. Sand, mud, rocky shale, snow, ice, marshy ground – the Guntrack can go just about anywhere. The intention is to equip it with enough firepower to knock out a tank and handle any immediate aerial threat, and it is the weapons aspect that we are still working on. Want to see it, Don?'
Shanley was not used to generals being this informal. He was a courteous man by nature and had found that around the U.S. Army, a crisp 'Sir' did not go amiss. 'Yes, sir!' he said.
Kilmara looked at him. 'We're an informal culture these days in Ireland,' he said. 'First names are normal. I'm Shane. He's Hugo, and he-' he indicated Maury – 'I think he is mellowing.'
'Maury,' said Maury. He was looking downright agreeable.
Fitzduane slipped in the video.
The group turned toward the screen.
The terrain was rocky undulating ground covered with outcrops of heather and patches of rough grass. In the background there was a line of hills under a lowering sky that was a surreal mix of menacing clouds and shafts of light.
It was a bleak but dramatic landscape that encompassed an extraordinary variation of shape and line and shade and color. It was stunningly beautiful, and Shanley suddenly realized that this was not just some foreign land.
This was where his roots lay. This had once been home.
A dark shape appeared in the distance. It was hard to make out the details. The silhouette was low and indistinct. The vehicle approached following a zigzag course and across land that would have been impassable in a wheeled vehicle. The sound track suggested it made surprisingly little noise.
The vehicle came closer and drove parallel past the camera so it could be seen in profile. As it did so, it could be seen that although the tracks were riding over rocks and a generally uneven surface, the upper portion of the vehicle was virtually stable.
The driver locked one track and the Guntrack did a 360-degree turn on its own axis and then came to a complete halt.
It was like nothing either Don or Maury had ever seen. It was a small, low black box on tracks with a wedge-shaped front and what looked like folded-up forklift prongs on the rear. A driver and a gunner equipped with twin 5.56mm Minimi machine guns sat in the front.
The vehicle was steered by left-hand drive. To the right of the front gunner, a Stinger antiaircraft missile was clipped into position. Behind the two front seats was a gunner with an M19 belt-fed 40mm grenade launcher mounted on buffered soft mount attached to a turret ring. As they watched, the rear gunner's station rose on a hydraulic mount to give him a wider field of fire. The entire station then rotated 360 degrees. It then retracted and a slim mast mounting a miniature FLIR monitor rose up and panned in a circle.
'The Guntrack,' said Fitzduane, 'is the vehicle that the Irish Rangers are beginning to use for special operations. It is not armored in the traditional sense, but it is made from a special plastic that will withstand small-arms fire, and the tracks are a Kevlar and artificial rubber blend. Hell of a good power-to-weight ratio. Accelerates like a rocket and does up to eighty-five miles an hour with a full payload. The weapons fitted can, of course, be varied, but fully equipped with something like you see, it should cost no more than five percent of a tank. As to maintenance, if I can exaggerate just a little to make a point, it can be maintained by the three-man crew with their Swiss Army knives.'
The video continued for another fifteen minutes as the camera focused in close-up on individual aspects. Everything from fuel consumption to changing an engine was covered. In fact, it was the attention to detail that was most impressive and ingenious.
The fuel tank, for instance, was of a honeycomb design that could be penetrated by an incendiary round
