“Good enough. Take one of the water cans as well and cache it somewhere, just in case. Bravo six knows you’re up here. If something Murphys on us, and we don’t make it back for pickup, trigger a beacon and lie low. The regiment will get you out.”
Mary May grinned through the black-and-brown camouflage paint that covered her face. “I’m not worried, sir. I always leave the dance with the guy who brought me.”
Bolde grinned back. “We’ll make that our beautiful thought for the day, Five. Take off.”
“Yes sir. See you later guys.”
“Adios, Five. Watch your ass out there.”
“Blessed be, Mary May.”
Jorgenson moved aft to the scout bay. A brief rattle of equipment followed a whispered command and the tail ramp whirred down. Boots scuffed on antiskid decking, then crunched on gravel and a cool puff of outside air traveled up the passageway from the rear of the vehicle. The tail ramp closed again and a single whispered word issued from the radio link.
“Clear.”
In the starlight beyond the windshield, four patches of shadow trickled up the right-hand slope of the saddleback. The three remaining in ABLE cab found themselves acutely aware of their intensified aloneness.
Bolde spoke in the darkness. “You journeyed this night, Brid. What do the spirits of this place have to say about us?”
“The old ones who dwell here wish us neither good nor evil,” the Wiccan warrior replied levelly, her face underlit by the glow of her console screens. “They do not know us. They will judge us by our actions and then make their decision.”
“Then let the judgment begin. Okay, Rick. Column forward!”
The only sound over the scout team’s tactical circuit was the rasp of heavy breathing caught by the helmet lip mikes. It was a half mile climb to the top of the saddleback ridge that overlooked the pass, mostly a thirty-to-forty-degree assault up loose shale and crumbling sandstone. Sometimes the hill was manageable by leaning into the slope, at others a clawing scramble on hands and knees was required.
Boots sank in and slid back ten inches for every twelve gained. Clutching fingers gashed on jagged stone and the dust quenched the flowing blood. Lungs burned and legs ached beyond all conditioning.
Johnny Roman and Nathan Grey Bird bore the primary burden of the Javelin launcher and Johnny considered himself the luckier half of the team. He only bore two reload round canisters and their carbines. Nat had taken the burden of the launcher itself.
The Jav was a good old piece that could still do a thorough job on most anything that might be encountered on the battlefield. But the price paid for that kind of firepower was weight. A Javelin launcher with a missile preloaded in the tube weighed fifty pounds. Johnny wryly acknowledged that you couldn’t kill an armored fighting vehicle with something you could carry in your hip pocket.
The other fire team didn’t have it all that much better either. He could see Mary May and Lee Trebain laboring farther ahead upslope. They were tricked out for grenadier work with SABRs slung across their backs and half a dozen spare magazines each of 20mm grenade and 5.56mm NATO to feed the over-and-under barrels of the twin gun systems. All that plus another Javelin reload each.
All in all, each member of the scout team was humping the near equivalent of his or her own weight up that night black ridge.
Beside Johnny, Nate Grey Bird’s feet slithered out from under him and he went facefirst into the slope with a muffled curse. He started to slide backward and Johnny grabbed out for him, snagging his harness.
“You okay, Nate?”
“Yeah, I’m okay,” the fiercely whispered reply came back. “It’s just that this goddam piece of sewer pipe won’t pack worth shit. It keeps throwing me off!”
“You want me to take it for a while?”
“No, I’m okay. It’s only a little way to the crest now. I’m gonna take a breather for a second.”
“Good idea.”
The two troopers collapsed against the slope, striving to catch their breath long enough to take a swig from their water packs.
“When I get back to Purdue to finish my degree, you know what I’m going to do?” Johnny said after a minute.
“I dunno. What you gonna do, white man?”
“I’m going to write a paper. A combined science and philosophy paper about how environment and situation can affect the theoretically immutable laws of physics.”
“I don’t get you.”
“It’s like this. Climbing this damn hill, it feels like we’re lugging every damn weapon in the world on our backs. But over on the other side, when the shooting starts, I suspect it’s going to feel like we’re hardly carrying anything at all.”
A dozen yards below the eastern crest of the saddleback, Mary May angled her team into a jagged rock formation that jutted from the scree slope like a miniature castle. “Okay, guys,” she said, unslinging the Javelin reload she carried. “Go to ground and set overwatch. I’m going up to take a look around.”
“You want me to come too, Five?” Lee Trebain asked from the pocket of shadows he’d claimed.
“Nah, just cover me,” she replied, thumbing the takedown stud for her SABR. Disassembling the big weapon into its three primary components, she set aside the grenade launcher and locked the sighting module directly onto the grab rail atop the receiver of the carbine. The repeatedly drilled act took only seconds.
“You sure you don’t want me up there?”
“For Pete’s sake, Lee, I’m only going to be about forty darned feet up the hill,” Mary May snapped back in an aggravated whisper, locking out the carbine’s folding stock. “I don’t need anyone breathing down my neck. Just watch my back.”
Mary May removed an anti-IR cape from a harness pouch. Drawing the foil-lined camouflage cloth around her, she secured it with a silent, “stealth” Velcro neckband and drew the hood over her helmet. Crawling out of the rock outcropping, she snaked her way upslope on knees and elbows. In a few moments she was at the crest.
Still prone, she eased herself ahead the last few feet, then froze in place. The gut of the pass lay below her.
For the next several minutes she lay unmoving, slowly and deliberately scanning the terrain below and across from her. The barren, steep-sided ridges and precipitous ravines reminded her strongly of the Dakota badlands back home. Deliberately she toggled in the night vision visor of her helmet between thermographics and photomultiplier, seeing what each sensor view had to offer.
Her helmet visor had more to offer than just enhanced vision. It also served as a Heads-Up Display for her other systems. A graphics compass rose scrolled across the bottom of her vision field, giving her an instantaneous bearing on anything she observed. Time and radio-frequency hacks glowed in the corners of her eyes and, as she turned her head, threat arrows pulsed redly, aiming down at every known and plotted hostile position in the area, graphics prompts giving her the range to target.
A look back over her shoulder revealed a trio of blue arrows hovering over the rock formation downslope. Her own team, their location microburst transmitted to her Leprechaun B navigation system from the GPS receivers of their own Leprechaun units.
And in the distance, and drawing steadily farther away, another trio of blue arrows, the troop vehicles and their crew en route to this night’s destiny. The only other “blues” within a two-hundred-mile radius. Mary May shivered in spite of the growing pocket of body heat trapped beneath the IR cape and returned her attention to the pass below.
One of the Algerian scout tracks was parked within her field of vision, the residual heat signature of its armor beginning to fade with the chill of the desert night. A dazzling point of thermal radiation burned close abreast of it, however, possibly a small fuel pellet stove. Given the steam plume rising above it, someone must be heating water for tea or coffee. Spectral green shadows huddled close about it, Algerian soldiers warming their hands in the stove glow and maybe thinking of the night’s watch or about home.
Ot
her luminescent forms hovered away from the stove, one in the track’s turret, two more on station above and below the vehicle hide. Sentries, she thought, staring out into the dark.
Mary May started to ease back below the ridge crest when suddenly she caught more movement in her visor. She froze in place like a startled lizard.
On the barren ridge across from her, a line of four small cyan dots bobbed slowly along.
Lifting her hand up to her helmet, Mary May flipped up her night-vision visor, blinking for a moment in the onrush of true darkness. Then she lifted and aimed her carbine, not to fire but to utilize the magnification and imaging of its more powerful sighting module. The pressure of her thumb on a handgrip stud zoomed her in on target.
An Algi patrol. Each of those Algerian BRM-30s carried a fourperson scout team, just like her own, and one such team was conducting a security sweep along the high ground beyond the pass. And if there was a patrol over on that side, likely there was one somewhere over on this side as well.
The other scouts looked up as Mary May slid back into the shelter of the rock pile. She flicked aside her helmet’s lip mike, deactivating her squad radio, then spoke in a whisper. “Here’s how we’re going to work it, guys. The Algis are deployed below us along about a kilometer of the pass floor. Nate, you and Johnny work your way to the south end of the pass, staying out of sight below the crest of this saddleback. You have the Javelin and you take out the heavies at the pass mouth. Kill the Tunguska first! Got that? From down in the bottom of this canyon, the Centauros and the BRMs will have trouble elevating their main armament high enough to engage us up here. The quad 30s on that antiair vehicle could saw the top of this ridge right off though. It goes first!”
“He’s first blood, Five,” Grey Bird’s soft reply came back.
“Okay, Lee and I will work our way north. We’ll take out the two northernmost BRMs with the grenade launchers, each of us engaging one of the tracks. All initial attacks will be coordinated with Lieutenant Bolde’s move on the main body of the Algerian division. We get into position and we wait for the LT to give us the word to open fire. Until we get that word, we are strictly hide and evade. Nobody, and I mean nobody, fires a shot for any reason!
“Once the music starts, the two teams will work in toward each other, picking off the remaining Algi elements as the shots present themselves. These rocks will be our rendezvous point for fallback and extraction. Lock it in.”
Fingers touched keypads, calling up and storing GPU fixes in personal navigation systems.
“Set, Five.”
“Got it.”
“Same.”
“Right. Watch your backs. Make your kills. Get back here. That’s the show. That and one other thing. We may have some company up here tonight.”
Like an infantryman hunkering under cover, ABLE retracted its suspension and sank behind the shelter of the low dune, BAKER and CHARLIE going to ground a quarter of a kilometer off on either flank. Electronic Countermeasures masts unfolded and suspiciously sampled the ether.
The interior of the cab was silent except for the tick and creak of contracting metal and the purr of the systems fans. “Any sign of a ground-scan radar on this side?” Bolde inquired over his shoulder.
“Negative. Just two big air-search systems well off to the east and west,” Shelleen replied. “Mobile SAM batteries covering the laager sites. I’m getting tastes of a constant-wave datalink though. They might have a scout drone up.”
“We’ll watch for it. Rick, you take tactical security while we plot the strike.”
“Doin’ it, LT,” Santiago acknowledged. Accessing the sensors in the commander’s cupola via one of the driver’s station telescreens, he began a deliberate scan of the surrounding environment.
Bolde assumed control of ABLE weapons pack, elevating the boom to its maximum fifty-foot extension for a high-ground overview of their selected objective.
The lead Algerian mechanized battalion had deployed on an open gravel pan, straddling the Taoudenni caravan trail roughly four kilometers beyond Saber section’s position. The three maneuver companies were in laager at the points of a two kilometer triangle, the base oriented to the south with the Headquarters Company in the center. Each company position was a weapon-studded island in the desert, creating a mutually supporting archipelago of firepower.
Bolde zoomed in on the nearest laager. The Algerians had learned a few things about desert fighting over the years. They had abandoned the old heavily structured Soviet doctrine in favor of the more flexible and efficient Western-style mixed combat team. One three-tank platoon mated with two four-track infantry platoons. All of the AFVs were parked nose outward in a hundred-meter-wide radial pattern that faced their heaviest protection and armament toward any potential threat.
There would be a sentry posted in every one of those vehicle turrets and a shell or ammunition magazine fed into every gun action. As Bolde looked on, one of the tanks panned its main tube warily across the horizon.
Once upon a time, it had been a Russian-made T-72. However, as Bolde recalled from his technical briefings, little remained that was actually “Russian” barring the bare hull and suspension.
A lightweight Japanese turbocharged diesel had replaced the original power plant, and a Korean-produced copy of a German-designed 120mm smoothbore had been fitted in the turret, replacing the cranky 125mm main gun. A revised velectronics suite had been manufactured in Taiwan, the reactive armor jacketing had come from a factory in Brazil, and the redesign and rebuild had taken place in an Egyptian armaments works.
The end result was an international battlefield “hot rod” considerably more efficient and deadly than the machine that had first rolled out of a Soviet foundry thirty-plus years before. Similar performance upgrades had been applied to the ex-Soviet BMP Infantry Fighting Vehicles of the infantry elements as well.
Again, located in the center of the position, were the unit headquarters tracks and a covering antiaircraft vehicle. Also present were a pair of massive semitankers and a number of smaller deuce-and-a-half utility trucks. The logistics group was up, bearing with it the fuel, food, water, and ammunition that would be needed for the next day’s march. Figures worked around the parked vehicles, unrolling fueling hoses and unloading stores, no doubt thankful for the night’s cool.
A swift scan of the other company sites indicated that similar replenishment operations were going on there as well. The timing was right, and the Gods of Battle were smiling.
“Brid, we’ve got sixteen rounds of antivehicle and eight of antipersonnel in the drone silos. You program the AVs. I want one dropped in on each of the fuel tankers and the command vehicles. I’ll take the APs.”
Overlooking the pass, Nathan Grey Bird and Johnny Roman struggled on against the burden of both the rugged terrain and their augmented munitions load. They were still several hundred meters short of their firing position. Time was growing tight, and the ridgeline looked even more broken ahead of them.
“Hey Nate,” Johnny wheezed. “Hold up. I got an idea.”
“Such as?”
“Such as, why don’t we cache a couple of these spare Jav rounds here so we can move faster. We’ll be working back this way again. We can just pick ‘em up when we’re ready to use ’em.”
“Damn, white man! I’m proud of you! You’re starting to think like an Indian. Let’s do it.”
Farther to the north along the saddleback, Lee Trebain peered cautiously through his firing slit between two boulders. The youthful Texan could see his designated target on the floor of the pass below him. His position was good, the BRM-30 had been backed into the slope between a couple of crude stacked-stone fighting positions. Its tail ramp was down, and Trebain could intermittently make out movement both inside the track and in the gun pits.
Moving with silent care, he verified that a clip of smart rounds was in the grenade launcher of his SABR and that the magazine of 5.56 NATO was well seated in the carbine section. Then he slipped a seco
nd clip of 20mm antiarmor projectiles out of a harness pouch, setting them where they could be grabbed in an instant. He’d worked out just exactly how he was going to do this thing. All he had to do was to stay ready for the word.
Trebain tried to keep focused, but he couldn’t keep from glancing away toward the north. Toward that next blue friendly arrow glowing in his visor display.
She wasn’t moving anymore. She must be set, too. And she had to be all right, right? She was on the squad circuit and she could have yelled for help if something had blown. And there hadn’t been any gunfire, and, besides, Mary May could take care of herself.
But then, damn it all entirely, wasn’t the guy supposed to look after a girl? That’s the way it always been where he’d grown up and the instinct was hard to shake, even when the girl was two inches taller than you were and had three grades of seniority. Lee closed his eyes and shook his head, trying to clear it of a confused jumble of emotions and images. He snapped them open them again when the audile prompt of the tactical datalink sounded in his helmet earphones. The glowing line of a communication was scrolling across the bottom of his vision field.
***SABER 6 TO ALL SABER ELEMENTS***STAND BY TO ENGAGE***ACKNOWLEDGE READINESS STATE***
Lifting his hand to his helmet, Lee tapped the transmit key at the base of his lip-mike boom, giving his go signal. Flipping his visor up, he settled the SABR against his shoulder and peered through the sighting module. Safeties off. Weapons selector to GRENADE. Mode selector to POINT DETONATION. Finger on trigger.
Lee Trebain’s mind was suddenly as cold and clear as a mountain spring.
The same message flashed before the eyes of Nathan Grey Bird and Johnny Roman just as they threw themselves flat on the overlook above the mouth of the pass. Below them, at the foot of a steep scree slope, was a quarter-mile-wide plateau notched into the range side and the fighting positions of the Algerian blocking force. They’d made it, but just barely.
“Johnny, let the LT know we’re in position! Then get those reloads ready!”
“Doing it, Nate.” Roman blipped the acknowledgment, then popped the end caps off the first of the two spare Javelin canisters.
Combat Page 35
