hatch shut, vowing not to look outside anymore.
They were the forty-third tank in a single-file line of 253 of them. As Zen had told them, their mission was to perform a flanking maneuver to get into the WestHem rear area. And, as Belinda had pointed out, there was no way to do that in a conventional manner without passing through the impenetrable WestHem line. So they were going with the unconventional, a plan that was considered impossible for tracked vehicles of any kind and especially tanks, to accomplish. They had entered the nearer peaks of the Sierra Madres Mountains and were slowly working their way westward by climbing and then descending, turning and then turning back, passing over ground that had never been trod upon by humans let alone driven upon by vehicles.
'Coming up to the top,' Belinda said, watching as the tank in front of her disappeared from view. She checked her map display and saw that immediately after starting back down she would have to turn right to a heading of two-eight-four, which would keep her on an even narrower and steeper sloped stretch of the mountain instead of sending her over a cliff.
'I don't remember them telling us we would have to climb fucking mountains when I signed up for the tank corps,' Xenia said, sitting back in her seat and keeping her eyes tightly shut.
'I know what you mean, X,' Zen replied. 'I mean, getting fried by a WestHem laser is one thing. At least it's over quick. Falling off a cliff and tumbling five hundred meters down... well... that's something else.'
'Can you guys shut your asses?' Belinda barked at them. 'I really need to concentrate for this next part.'
They shut their asses. Belinda gave them a little bit of acceleration as the slope before her momentarily increased to forty-three percent. The front of the tank rose up, so all she could see was sky for a second, and then it suddenly nosed downward as she went over the rise and started downward. She saw immediately why she needed to make the right turn. There was nothing but a sheer drop-off directly in front of her. Her own stomach did a few flip-flops but she forced herself to wait until the navigation carrot on her screen swung to the right. When it did, she pushed the T-bar to the left, slowing up the right tread enough so the left tread could push her through the turn. She felt the entire tank slide a little to the left, towards the drop-off, and she goosed the accelerator just a bit, pulling them through it. The slide stopped but the tank, now traveling downhill on a thirty-eight degree slope, started to pick up an alarming amount of speed. She braked as harshly as she dared, slowing them before they could run into the tank in front of them. She only hoped the tank behind them would do the same.
It did and they slowly worked their way down a twisting, turning area of drivability until they were in the narrow gorge below.
'Okay,' Belinda said, 'we've scraped through that one. We're gonna drive four klicks through this gorge and then we got one more climb and one more descent before we get back into the foothills.'
'So you're saying we might actually make it there in one piece?' Xenia asked.
'We might,' she said. 'This last one looks like the toughest of all though.'
'I'm surprised we made it this far,' Zen said. 'I thought they were fuckin' dusted when they told us we would drive through the mountains. I guess the mapping software we got from Air Ops was pretty good shit after all.'
The mapping software he was talking about was the same software the Mosquitoes and the Hummingbirds used to wind their way through these same mountains. It had been developed over the past twenty years and even beyond and was based on countless surveys by laser and radar equipped satellites that had mapped every square centimeter of the mountain ranges with every point measured for exact altitude and slope. This information had been meant to assist pilots and systems operators to plan their flight routes through the area without hitting the large, immovable object known as the ground. It had never been intended to assist ground vehicles in traversing those same mountains but, when turned to the task, and with the assistance of several super-computers in the possession of the MPG, it had done just that, plotting a continuous route in which the slope, width, and rate of climb or descent was within the parameters in which a main battle tank could operate. That route was a twisting, turning snake and some of the passes — such as the one they'd just traversed — were right on the margin of passable and impassable, but it had been deemed possible and the mission had been given the green light.
It would have been easier, of course, to simply travel through the smaller foothills at the base of the mountains. There would have been more room to maneuver, the paths wider and less steep, the ultimate distance much shorter, which would have left a much wider safety margin of fuel and oxygen remaining for their actual mission. But the foothill approach was quickly ruled out due to detection concerns. There was simply too many places where the WestHem marines in the field might have spotted the column of tanks as they'd passed by, too much possibility that the dust they raised with their treads — even though it was being minimized by their slow speed — could have billowed up enough to be spotted.
They reached the end of the gorge and turned to the south, following a cut where a Martian stream had once drained. They began to climb, bumping over rocks, occasionally sending little landslides downward to clatter on the tanks below. Halfway up they turned back to the east, following a tributary of that former stream for half a kilometer before turning back to the south again up a steep slope to a ledge that overlooked the gorge on the other side. The pace here was particularly slow, less than two kilometers per hour but slowly, softly, they made it up and over — the clearance between the path and the drop-off less than a meter now.
The column went down the other side, winding and twisting back and forth until they reached a raised plateau that would have been a meadow had it been on an earthly mountain range. The tanks began to assemble into columns and rows once again. When the assembly was complete, the shut their engines off and powered everything but their communications gear down. Ahead of them was a gap between two of the Sierra Madres foothills. Beyond that was the Valley of Death, as the WestHem marines had come to call it.
Zen looked at his mapping software one last time before powering it down. They were two kilometers from the valley, sixteen kilometers west of the Martian main line of defense. As far as he could tell, they had arrived here completely undetected. On his enemy forces screen — which was constantly updated by encrypted satellite transmissions sent out from MPG headquarters in New Pittsburgh, he could see that the main thrust of the marine's forces were gathered just beyond the Red Line. That would soon change.
'What now?' Belinda asked, unstrapping her restraints and opening the hatch above her head.
'Now,' Zen said, 'we maintain strict radio silence except for inter-tank communications, and... we wait.'
'That is what we do best,' Xenia said.
'I have a question?' Belinda asked.
'What's that?' Zen replied.
'General Jackson never gives names to operations, right?'
'Right,' Xenia said.
'So why did he decide to name this one 'Operation Hannibal'?'
Ten kilometers east of the Eden main line of defense
1500 hours
Captain Callahan was feeling the familiar nervousness he remembered so well from the first phase of the war. He was sitting in the command seat of his APC and the booming of artillery fire from the Martian positions went on and on outside, sometimes far away, sometimes close enough to rock the APC on its springs and send a pattering of shrapnel against the armor. It was relentless and had been for the past six hours, making him wonder just how many 150mm shells those Martians had. But it wasn't the artillery that was bothering him, it was the Mosquitoes and the special forces teams hiding in the hills.
Two hours ago they had suddenly lost interest in killing the artillery guns and had gone back to their normal tactic of targeting the APCs. Since then, every five minutes or so, three or four would be exploded by laser shots from these platforms, killing everyone inside. There was nothing that could be done about this. The troops could not dismount because of the artillery fire and the APCs could not move around even if that would have done any good. They were stuck here, sitting and waiting, hoping that the specter of random death would not fall upon the vehicle they were currently sitting in.
Callahan was confident that his APC would not be specifically targeted for destruction because it was one of the command APCs. Strict orders that were said to have originated from General Browning himself stated that absolutely no communication that was not urgent in nature would be transmitted from any APC. This would keep the special forces teams from zeroing in on the officers. But that random chance — that possibility that one of those aircraft or one of those hidden, ghostly AT holders would happen to pick his APC — worried him greatly.
