and reactive matrix skirts, as well as the traditional mix of depleted uranium and Chobam ceramics.
Unlike the tank crew that Jones had rescued from a screaming mob in a Damascus marketplace, the men and women inside the A3 could fight off hordes of foot soldiers armed with RPGs, satchel charges, and rusty knives—for the “finishing work” when the tank had been stopped and cracked open to give access to its occupants.
Lycombing gas turbines drove the seventy-five-ton brute a top speed of sixty kph, which was a touch slower than its forebears. But again, it was an unusual day when the driver got to put her into top gear and go wild. Mostly the A3 crawled through dense warrens of third world slums, pulverizing mud brick walls, smashing through the ground floors of low-rise buildings, crushing cars—and occasionally people—beneath its treads.
Not today, though.
Today the six Abrams of the Eighty-second MEU charged through light scrub, mowing down saplings and bursting through old wooden fences as they led an armored stampede toward the last line of Japanese defense. They led twelve older, reduced-capability M1A1-Cs of the Australian Second Cavalry, and twenty-six Light Armored Vehicles and “Bushpig” AASLAVs of the combined mobile forces.
It was a hell of a rough ride, but Jones was enjoying it thoroughly, watching the tanks on flatscreen while strapped into the battalion command LAV some three hundred meters behind the leading edge of the advance. Every vehicle was hooked into the Cooperative Battle Link and directed by a Distributed Combat Intelligence, working within operational parameters set by the U.S. and Australian commanders. The turret on one of his A3s swung thirty degrees to the left and fired a 120 mm round of XM1028 Canister at a platoon-sized group of the enemy, which emerged from the smoking ruins of a wooden cottage. More than a thousand tungsten balls, expelled from the container as the shot left the gun’s muzzle, swept over the Japanese like an evil wind, reducing them to pink mist and bone fragments.
He saw a Japanese Type 94 “tankette” literally shredded into metal chips as four separate 30 mm chain guns took it under fire. It flew to pieces, the disintegrating steel plate perversely reminding him of leaves blown from a tree in a high wind.
His helmet banged into the padded ceiling as the LAV dipped and bumped and leapt up again with a series of grinding crunches. It wasn’t firing any of its weapons, but the vehicles around it had begun to pop smoke and antipersonal munitions from their grenade launchers. Two Hellfire missiles streaked away from an Australian Bushpig, lancing out to destroy a couple of small field guns popping away on a hill just ahead of them.
Jones took in video and sensor feeds from dozens of sources. To the untrained observer, it was just violent chaos, but to him every image, every moment was another note in a deadly overture.
Even from his position, buttoned up tight in the LAV, the noise of the assault was colossal. The snarling of the command vehicle’s engine, the crash and crunch of every impact as they smashed though the light bush and leapt over small gullies, the savage thunder of coaxial machine guns, autocannon, and mortar bursts.
A drone picked up a company-sized movement to the west, where a hundred or more men emerged from where they had hidden in a creek. The DCI alerted human sysops, who needed no warning. Two speeding A3’s traversed their main guns and unloaded canister. The Japanese, however, were protected from the hypervelocity tungsten swarm by the fall of the creek bed. Their reprieve lasted all of one second.
While as they remained crouched where they couldn’t be engaged by direct fire, the next two tanks in line brought their guns to bear as they bounced along at forty kilometers per hour. Simultaneous muzzle flashes preceded a massive distortion effect on the screen.
The tanks had fired high-impulse thermobaric shells.
Two blips flashed across nine hundred meters in the blink of an eye. The shells contained a slurry of propylene oxide mixed with a finely powdered explosive. As simple microchips in the warheads registered that they had reached the target, they cracked open and dispersed their contents over the heads of the enemy infantrymen. The soldiers had a split second to see the bright orange cloud, but no time to escape before small incendiary fuses sparked a titanic blast. At the epicenter, temperatures soared to 3,000 degrees Centigrade and overpressure reached 430 psi.
The men, the plant life—in fact, every living thing and most of the inanimate objects within the blast area— ceased to exist. Even the air was incinerated, creating a vacuum that pulled in more burning fuel and loose objects from a wide margin around the point of impact. Anyone who might have survived—even momentarily, by dint of having been entirely submerged—would have encountered the true meaning of hell, having been simultaneously flash-boiled, asphyxiated, and cooked from within as the blazing fuel–air mix penetrated all nonairtight objects.
As the first echelon approached the edge of the city, collapsing crude concrete bunkers with single-shot penetrators or the jackhammer effect of concentrated chain gun fire, attack helicopters roared overhead, autocannon and rocket pods working the increasingly target-poor environment. Rather than swooping and turning to rake at the enemy in their normal “bird of prey” routine, however, they swept right on over the town and out toward the open prison compound.
Mitchell and McLeod dashed forward, following the pathfinder beacons that overlay the real-world landscape in their powered goggles. Seventy thousand feet above them, a Big Eye drone tracked the SAS men via biolocator chips implanted in their necks, checking their progress against a hastily programmed software model of the killing ground around the prison camp.
The model had been adapted from a tourist holomap that the Distributed Combat Intelligence found within the personal files of a sailor on board HMAS
Neither Mitchell nor McLeod had time to waste thinking about such things. They were racing across open ground, sucking in great drafts of foul-smelling air, their legs pumping like pistons. Cascades of tac net overlay turned the world into a shifting mosaic of computer-generated imagery. Arrunta gunships whirled overhead, identified as friendlies by the bright blue rectangles that floated around them and turned green a second before long streaks of fire spat out of nose-mounted autocannon.
The stream of fire destroyed a small wooden cabin, which had been designated by a red flashing box, but which now turned gray and inert.
As they ran, this was their whole world, a mandala of electronic projections designed to make sense of the murderous insanity swirling around them. Both men knew that the other members of their section were very close, perhaps near enough to call out and be heard. But in reality, they were utterly alone, with one goal, to reach the bunker ahead, outlined in flashing red, before the time hack in the bottom left-hand corner of their goggles reached zero.
They had thirty-three seconds.
Mitchell’s personal weapon coughed three times, killing a sentry who rose up without warning from a pile of dead bodies.
They both leapt a tangle of barbed wire. As Mitchell sailed clear of the obstacle, the vision of a dead child passed over his eyes, like reflected text on a computer screen. The body bloated. Skin blackened and split. A filthy teddy bear clutched in the dark claw of a tiny hand.
The earth trembled underfoot as an immense explosion destroyed an ammunition dump two klicks away. Data flashed on their Heads-Up Displays and was gone before the aftershock had dissipated.
They were almost at the bunker entrance. Another sentry.
McLeod fired first. Three hypervelocity caseless ceramic bullets smacked into the man, shattering his breastbone, releasing tendrils of nanonic razor teeth inside his chest, which in turn released an airborne wave of gore as the augmented rounds tore his upper torso to pieces.
Mitchell fired into the yawning black entrance of the bunker. A flash-bang.
Their goggles briefly dimmed against the blinding light. Momentum and memory carried them forward until vision was restored. But just for a second, and then they were inside the bunker, and the small constricted space was rendered in the lime-green glow of low-light amplification.
