“Equipment check,” he yelled over the noise.
Each paratrooper patted and pulled at the man in front him, checking for faults that might kill a man before he had a chance to fight.
“Sound off!”
They counted themselves down, halting temporarily at the ninth man, as two windows shattered and somebody screamed.
“It’s Dietz. He’s gone.”
The puking kid was dead.
The count continued, as the men on either side of Dietz cleared his body from the lineup.
Albrechtson called out that he was clear as the red light turned green.
He grabbed the frame of the exit and thrust himself out. He felt the shock of hitting the airstream at speed and heard the zip-zip-zip of bullets passing by his head. His chute deployed, and his boots swung up with the jerk of interrupted momentum.
It was peaceful then, dropping through the autumnal sky, no longer trapped in the corrugated metal coffin. He could see the airfield below, and the gliders dropping gracefully toward their landing zone.
But his stomach lurched as he searched the sky for the transports that were carrying his Fallschirmjäger. There were so few left. He knew they’d taken casualties before the escorts had driven off or—more likely—destroyed their attackers. But it seemed as though only a handful of 52s had made it through.
As he glided down, Albrechtson frantically searched for his binoculars, a small pair of Zeiss glasses he kept in a breast pocket. He found them, then nearly dropped them, before finally managing to turn them toward the target. He expected to find massed flak batteries down there. Or evidence of a squadron that had been missed by the Abwehr. There was no sign of either. Yet half his command had already been destroyed.
This was going to be like Crete all over again.
Prince Harry calculated that about 210 paratroopers had popped chutes overhead. Trooper Akerman said 220. Bolt put his money on around two hundred.
“We’ll count them afterwards,” Harry decided as he fixed a microlight targeting dot on the chest of a descending paratrooper.
“A fiver on the result.” Bolt just wouldn’t let it go.
The German appeared at a virtual distance of ten meters in Harry’s goggles, although he was actually a good four hundred meters away. Harry exhaled slowly and applied smooth, even pressure to the trigger, until his rifle kicked back with a loud, flat bang.
In one of those post-Transition ironies, the venerable German firm of Heckler and Koch had manufactured his weapon, an M12 carbine. Made entirely of composites, it was a lightweight assault rifle of the old school. It didn’t electronically fire caseless ceramic ammunition, instead feeding 5.56 mm augmented bullets from a thirty-six-round magazine, and 20 mm programmable grenades from an in-line stacker.
The German, who had been holding tightly to his risers, scanning the ground as it rushed toward him, jerked as the round hit. Harry didn’t bother to put another shot in. He was firing shredders, which disassembled themselves inside the target before emerging at 940 meters per second, dragging about a kilogram of human tissue behind them.
He squeezed off another three shots as the troopers on either side of him did the same. The airfield defenders banged away enthusiastically with a variety of weapons, mostly Lee Enfield rifles and Tommy guns.
The crackle of small arms from Fitzsimons’s three squads reached them. A glider broke up as a Bofors crew took it under direct fire.
“Nasty,” hissed Bolt.
But the sheer weight of the German assault began to tell. Paratroopers made it to the ground and disengaged their chutes, running for cover. Some tumbled and spun, as the snipers began to pick them off. Even so, small groups of three and four, then larger parties of eight or nine survivors banded together and went to work.
“Over there, sir,” Bolt cried as an antiaircraft redoubt came under assault. Five Germans charged it, firing rapidly, one of them hosing down the position with a Schmeisser.
“Bugger,” Harry said as the volume of incoming fire stepped up a notch. Rounds whistled close by, kicked up clods of dirt, and occasionally thumped into the chest or splattered the head of a ’temp in the slit trench. He tried to draw a bead on the paratroopers who’d taken over the big gun, but they were at least seven hundreds meters away. His first shot burst a sandbag; the next caromed off the gun itself. He dialed up his sniper team on tac net.
“Angus, Stevo. You need to get busy, or you’re going to get chopped into dog meat.”
“Sorry, Skip,” came Fontaine’s reply. “I can’t get a clear shot at them.”
Harry examined the AAA site again. Pulling in as much as he could. The Germans zoomed in to fill his visual field. But it was difficult to stay focused, since every movement of his head was amplified a hundredfold. Bullets chewed up the sandbags, and one struck a paratrooper in the shoulder, but they stuck to the job of trying to get the gun depressed far enough to use it as a weapon against his people.
Harry was turning that over in his mind when Trooper Bolt suddenly pushed him down.
The ground seemed to shake with a volcanic eruption.
“The runway charges!” he cried.
Harry peeped up in time to see tons of dirt and broken bodies and the smashed up remains of a couple of gliders dropping back to earth. Four more gliders tried to avoid the crater, but it was too late. They went in nosefirst, with a bone-jarring crack and the crunch of splintered wood.
The Prince made a few quick calculations. “Fire the claymores, Andy.”
Bolt did as he was ordered, even though no Germans were approaching. Two of the antipersonnel mines had been set close to the runway and had gone up with the demolition charges. The other six fired with a thunderclap and instantly peppered three of the wrecked gliders with thousands of steel balls.
“Fix bayonets!” yelled Harry.
He heard the rasp and click of nearly two dozen old-fashioned bayonets, as his own men quickly fitted their sawback fighting knifes.
“Follow me, gentlemen. Let’s clean them out.”
The war cry started amongst the ’temps, a guttural sound building into a full-throated highland scream as they charged across the grass toward the shattered gliders and deep, smoking holes excavated by Bolt and Akerman’s shaped charges. Harry flipped his selector to three round bursts as he ran, snapping the M12 up to finish off a few lonesome parachutists who were still wafting down to the ground.
He heard the muffled whump of a grenade launcher. It was Bolt, sending a frag into the shallow pit where the glider with the least amount of damage had finished up. A German soldier had been emerging shakily from a huge tear in the rear of the plane, and he was blown back inside.
Whump. Whump.
Twin explosions split the glider into three sections, and Harry flipped his weapon to full auto, sending a stream of 5.56 mm into the crippled airframe. The industrial hammering of the other M12 assault rifles, the crash of grenades and small arms, all served to isolate Harry, almost cocooning him from the wider battle. But he had to press on, to get close enough to that Bofors pit to bring it under fire by grenade launcher.
He heard Akerman grunt and drop. A flashing red icon on his HUD told him the trooper had fallen off the tac net. He was dead. Harry didn’t have time to check on why. A lucky shot, perhaps.
He held the M12 level now, the point of his bayonet leading him into the no-man’s land of the ruined airstrip, the screams of berserkers all around.
They’d done it.
Albrechtson wanted to hug the men who’d risked all to capture that antiaircraft gun and turn it on the Tommies. They raked the tree line on the little hill where the enemy had deployed at least three of four separate sections to pour fire down on his men.
The Bofors mount had a direct line of sight that allowed them to target only half the ridgeline, being partially blocked by a crashed glider and a burning British truck. But the explosive ordnance had a dramatic and immediate effect, anyway, shredding the cover and chewing up huge gouts
of soil and turf on that part of the hill that it could engage.
The volume of fire from that area dropped away almost completely.
Three more gliders touched down in the safety of the next field, and with only a handful of casualties, most probably from a sniper. Those men disembarked at a run.
A perimeter was established, and they began to work on the British flank, targeting those defenders who were protected from the ack-ack gun. He recognized the sweet sound of an MG42, so much like ripping cloth.
A second Spandau opened up.
A sergeant rolled into the small crater where Albrechtson had taken shelter. He had six other paratroopers with him, to add to the five the colonel had gathered together. Almost the makings of a platoon. If they could just—
“Get up!” he barked at them. “Now!”
A second German came at Harry as he struggled to withdraw his bayonet from the first, who was still thrashing about like a speared trout. He squeezed off a round, using the recoil and the hydrostatic shock to help him wrench free the blade.
But it was too late. He couldn’t possibly turn around in time. His attacker was crazed. Eyes rolled back in his head, frothing at the mouth, tendrils of ragged flesh and khaki swinging from the bloodied spike that was attached to his Mauser.
Harry turned his hips, taking himself out of the line of attack and simultaneously parrying the bayonet thrust with the muzzle of his M12. He summoned a kiai from deep within his gut. The focused war shout directed his energies and disrupted the flow of his would-be killer. Without thought, without aim, he snapped out a side kick, driving his boot into and through the most vulnerable point, the German’s kneecap, with all the force he could muster, pivoting on his other leg to deliver extra torque.
He felt and heard the joint disintegrate with a sickeningly wet crunch.
The man dropped, screaming, until the butt of Harry’s carbine smashed into the bridge of his nose with such power that it destroyed the sinus cavities and caved in the frontal lobes. He was dead before he’d fallen all the way to the ground.
Men tore at each other like animals. So closely enmeshed were attackers and defenders that Harry couldn’t fire his weapon normally, for fear of killing one of his own. Combatants shrieked and howled and sank their teeth into each other’s throats. In the midst of this psychotic delirium, he and the other SAS man stood out for their economy of movement, and the efficiency with which they dispatched their victims. A knife-hand strike to the throat, a twisting lock that snapped the head free of the spine, the thumb driven into an eye socket, to distract before a fighting knife severed the carotid artery and windpipe.
With two decades of the close-quarter fighting between them, from the Tora Bora Mountains to the alleyways of Surabaya, they drew on a wealth of memory and experience about how best to kill a man when he’s close enough to exhale his last ragged breath into your face.
A sledgehammer hit him in the shoulder, knocking him to the ground. He thought he heard the rifle shot a second later, but of course that couldn’t be so.
Harry hit the ground and rolled. The pain of the impact was enormous and crippling, even though he’d been saved by the reactive matrix weave of his body armor. Burnt earth, coppery with blood, filled his mouth. When the world stopped spiraling about him, he rolled onto his back, his pistol in hand. A German officer was standing ten feet away, frantically working the bolt on his rifle.
The Prince’s arm was numb with shock. He had to tell his fingers to squeeze the trigger, cursing them as they refused to obey him.
The German raised the rifle.
Harry felt like his teeth might shatter, so hard was he biting down with the effort of just trying to pull the damned trigger.
The gun jumped, and the German spun into the ground.
Harry felt the familiar tingle of spinal inserts as they began squirting their contents into his nervous system. Some feeling returned to the arm; renewed energy coursed through his body. He levered himself up.
Two shots sounded nearby, then silence. Or at least relative silence. The Bofors gun still pounded away over the compressed roar of the German machine guns, which reminded him a lot of the old American M60. As he got to his feet, he saw the cost of the ground they had taken. There were no Germans left alive, but only six of his men remained, including Bolt, who had taken a bullet in the mouth and was now missing half his jaw. He was down, feet splayed, his back leaned up against the severed tail section of a German glider. His eyes had the far-away look that told of a massive drug dose washing through his system.
Harry was still stunned and trying to gather his wits when he realized he could hear the dull thud of rotor blades. Two contrails whooshed directly overhead, followed by the crump of detonation as a pair of Hellfire missiles stuck home.
The chopper was back, the earsplitting mechanical stammer of its autocannon a symphony of deliverance.
35
HMS TRIDENT, ENGLISH CHANNEL
“I can’t believe this,” Halabi said. “What a bloody dog’s breakfast.”
She was strapped into her command chair. Indeed, everyone in the stealth cruiser’s CIC was secured at their stations against the violent, high-speed course changes with which the Trident’s Combat Intelligence guided them through the battle for the English Channel.
The main display teemed with thousands of contacts, friendly and hostile. The quantum processors and software of the Trident’s Nemesis Battlespace Management System was busy collecting, analyzing, and disseminating terabytes of data every second. Posh broke down the attack into manageable chunks of information not just for the thirty-five dedicated sysops on board the Trident, but also for hundreds of newly trained shore-based officers who were laser-linked to the ship via the drones, which floated safely at the edge of the stratosphere.
As they watched, a wall of blue triangles moved across the computer-generated map of Suffolk toward the main German lodgment. Four larger, slower icons trailed behind them.
“Are those the Specter variants, Mr. Howard?”
“Aye, ma’am. But they call them Cyclones here.”
Halabi nodded. Two of her engineers from the ship’s Air Division had worked as advisers on the project, the fitting out of four Douglas Dakotas as gunships with electric miniguns firing out of two rear windows and the side cargo door. Each gun had been hand-tooled at a small factory in Scotland, and all used components stripped from various ships of the Multinational Force. Like their “forebear,” the AC 47 gunship of the Vietnam War era, the Cyclones carried more than twenty-four thousand rounds of ammunition, and could plow up an area the size of a football field in a few seconds.
Halabi keyed in a request for a live feed from the Big Eye, with a footprint over the area.
Before she had a chance to take advantage of the feed, however, her weapons sysop called out. “Coming into range for launch on the Tirpitz group, ma’am.”
She didn’t need to request vision of the German battleship and its escorts, forging into the Channel. One panel of the main display had been devoted to their primary target all along. She heard the jackhammer of the Trident’s Metal Storm pods as they lashed out at an air threat that had broken through the protective screen of 303 Squadron. A quick check revealed that they were down to 4.5 percent of their war stocks.
It was getting very tight.
“Targets designated, Captain.”
Halabi scanned the main display, looking for the main body of the British Home Fleet that was moving down from the north to engage Admiral Raeder.
“Launch,” she ordered.
She heard the ignition of the missiles in their silos, but could feel nothing because of the ship’s extreme speed and the violence of the maneuvers the CI was using to protect them.
Deck-cams showed the last of her combat maces lifting away on white exhaust plumes. As soon as they cleared the tubes, the CI threw the ship into a tight turn, the Metal Storm pods drumming away again. Halabi checked the threat boards: 163 German aircraft
were attempting to sink her, although it looked like some of them had broken off in a hopeless attempt to intercept the sunburn missiles that were now accelerating away to the east.
Her second defensive sysop, Lieutenant Anne Davis, reported that the laser packs were now “nonfunctional.”
“Thank you, Ms. Davis. Comms, how are Three-oh-three doing?”
“Down to sixty percent strength, ma’am. RCAF Four-oh-one and Two Squadrons are set to arrive in three minutes.”
Metal Storm roared out again, reducing its stocks to 4.3 percent.
Halabi was beginning to feel decidedly uncomfortable. Her last offensive weapons were speeding away at Mach 6. Her ability to defend the ship and its crew was degrading with every minute that passed.
A sudden lurch to starboard nearly wrenched her shoulder out.
“Sorry, ma’am,” said her countermeasures chief, Lieutenant David Loomes. “Posh detected a torpedo launch. Dolphins away.”
Down beneath the waterline on the port-side hull, bay doors slid open and two black lozenges spat out into the foam skirt that surrounded the ship when the Super-Cavitating System was engaged. Seeker heads powered up, aqua-jets engaged, the Tenix-ADI Dolphin’s own SCS came online, and the weapons shot away from the Trident at a speed of 280 knots.
Twenty-three seconds later, there came a dull thud from the speaker system at the subsurface threats station as the first Dolphin intercepted the U-boat that had fired on them. With a final burst of acceleration, the superhard, nonexplosive warhead simply punched through the thin skin of the submarine, exiting the hull on the other side, leaving two gaping holes.
The sound of the torpedo intercept didn’t register against the incredible amount of background noise, but the Nemesis arrays recorded a kill and then reported that both Dolphins were seeking new targets.
Designated Targets — Axis Of Time Book II Page 47
