The gunners in the bunkers knew the Marines were coming, they’d watched through their infra scopes as the amphibians reformed into two ranks and turned north. Namur’s men knew the Dragons would have to drop speed to negotiate the slope. They thought they’d have time to take careful aim as the Dragons topped the slope, and be able to blow their targets away before they were level again. They hadn’t counted on the speed of the Marine vehicles. Only four of the six bunker guns got shots off before the Dragons were too close for them to shift their aim. Only one of the four hit a Dragon with a high explosive round.
Overhead, the hopper flight carrying Company K continued toward its landing zone. Above the hoppers five of the ten attack craft in the flight of Raptors continued with them. The other five peeled out of formation and flew an aiming run over the defenses before circling around to come back with their cannons belching fire.
The nine surviving Dragons opened fire with their guns, firing as much to confuse the enemy as to hit targets. In seconds they were passing through the still moving TP1s. The tanks slewed about, tried to bring guns to bear on the rapidly moving targets. But the Marines were too mixed up with the tanks and bunkers; none of the tankers could find a target where a miss wouldn’t hit one of their own. The tanks slewed more, attempting to find open targets. Drivers responding to their tank commanders’ excited orders yanked and twisted steering yokes and stomped on accelerators in attempts to ram the Dragons. But the Dragons were faster and more agile and managed to avoid the tanks as they sped through them and headed for the safety of the twisting roads through the nearby industrial area.
By then, guns blazing, the second wave of Dragons had topped the slope and was roaring toward the defenders. The Marines weren’t concerned about hitting friendly targets—they were using plasma weapons; the Dragons had their shields up, they wouldn’t be hurt by a shot from one of their own. Of course, the plasma guns wouldn’t do a lot of damage to the tanks either, but they could blind the tanks, burn off their antennas and sensors, fracture their periscope glass and camera lenses. And the plasma could get inside the bunkers. The second wave killed two of the bunkers, then was among them and the tanks, following the first wave inland. The second wave of Dragons barely missed the Marines who piled out of the one Dragon that was hit. And two of the tanks, trying to ram Dragons, collided with a thunderclap.
The shaped-charge round that had hit the Dragon was designed to take out medium tanks. It blew through the relatively light armor of the left front of the Dragon, burst through the thin panel separating the crew cab from the troop compartment, cut a diagonal across the right forward corner of the troop compartment, and detonated when it impacted the starboard wall of the vehicle. Most of its explosive blast and the molten metal it spewed forth went beyond the Dragon to spend itself harmlessly in the open. But the shell didn’t pass through harmlessly. A flying chunk of shrapnel ripped a chunk out of the base of the driver’s neck, and another piece gouged a deep furrow in Corporal Duguid’s arm. More shrapnel tore into the control panel and disabled the vehicle. Four infantrymen in the troop compartment were injured, and Corporal John Keto was killed outright when the round plunged through his chest on its way to the starboard wall.
“Find a target and kill it,” Duguid snapped at the unharmed gunner as he slapped a field bandage onto his wounded arm. He then turned to try to save the life of his driver.
“Everybody out!” Hyakowa knew the Dragon was dead as soon as he felt the way it swerved when it was hit. He pounded the heel of his hand against the panic button at the side of the closed exit ramp to open it and was out before the ramp hit the ground. The uninjured Marines and one of the wounded were right behind him.
“Spread out!” Hyakowa shouted. As soon as he saw they were following his orders, he looked beyond the downed Dragon to the line of defenders and swallowed. The second line of Dragons was speeding through the bunkers and tanks, the first wave disappearing down the streets and around the corners of the nearby industrial section of the city. A quick glance told him that two of the bunkers were dead. But he saw far too many tanks, none of which looked any worse than inconvenienced by the damage inflicted by the Marine light armor. As he watched, the Dragon he’d come ashore in killed a third bunker. “Oh, hell,” he muttered. He knew that was going to bring fire. “Over the edge,” he commanded on his comm unit. Glances to his sides showed man-sized splotches of red flowing toward the top of the slope and the cover it offered. He dashed back to the Dragon to check for wounded and get any survivors out.
PFC MacIlargie, though wounded himself, was half carrying Lance Corporal Van Impe out. “Keto’s dead,” MacIlargie gasped “Everybody else is out. I patched Van Impe up.”
“What about the crew?”
MacIlargie shook his head.
Hyakowa looked into the Dragon. “Get him to cover,” he ordered. He ran forward.
“We’re fighting,” Duguid snarled at him. He didn’t think his driver was going to make it. “Get out of here, mud-Marine.”
Hyakowa backed off and headed for his men.
Behind him another shaped-charge round slammed into the Dragon. Its gun stopped firing.
Then the five Raptors swooped back down, cannons flaring.
Five bolts from one cannon, so close together that they looked like a stream of fire, struck the top of the engine compartment of one tank. The force of the impact knocked the turret loose and tipped it forward like a jauntily worn cap. Then their heat enveloped the ammunition compartment and set off the sixty-odd rounds in it. The heavy vehicle burst apart, chunks of armor flung about like papier-mâché. The multiton turret tumbled into the air and crashed down on top of another tank, bending its cannon out of shape.
The second Raptor melted a hole through the side of a tank. The acrid smell of molten metal was joined by the stench of burnt flesh from the crewmen who didn’t live long enough to realize they were being burned to death. Three more tanks died in flames before the Raptors began to orbit for another run.
Five tanks were dead, a sixth helpless with the loss of its cannon barrel, and two others were damaged from their collision. The company commander knew that his mission had failed, the Dragons had gotten through. He also knew that if his tanks stayed in the open, another run from the Raptors would kill more of his tanks—and his tank commanders couldn’t take the chance of standing out of their turrets to use their antiaircraft weapons. He ordered a retreat with all speed. The tanks were back among the industrial buildings before the Raptors could hit them again. The Raptor commander called off the second firing run before all of his birds had fired at the bunkers. The Raptors had another mission: defend the Dragons. They flew off to complete that mission.
Hyakowa listened to the departing Raptors, then cautiously raised his head to look above the lip of the slope. Four of the bunkers were obviously dead. The other two were just as obviously still alive. He slid back down before any of the remaining defenders could spot him through their infra scopes. Quickly, he took stock. He had nineteen Marines including himself. Three were wounded, one too badly to fight, maybe too badly injured to move. The rest of the company had moved inland. The next wave of Marines was half an hour off, if it even came ashore at this point. The two remaining bunkers were too strong for his Marines to assault—unless he wanted to kill them with Straight Arrows. But the two squads only had six of the rockets, and firing them would surely bring unwanted company—and he needed to preserve the six antitank weapons for use against tanks, not against bunkers that could be bypassed. He had no choice—no matter how badly Van Impe was injured, they had to move, they had to rejoin the company on their own.
He turned on his squad leader’s situation HUD and flicked on the map overview. The map showed the streets of New Kimberly to scale and ground elevations in schematic. His position was marked with a blue circle, the company’s destination was a blue X. A few red dots marked enemy disposition. He ignored the red dots; he wasn’t going to depend on the HUD to tell him where
the enemy was. He’d checked the map display before the wave of Dragons reached the shore. It hadn’t shown enough red dots in the entire city to make up an armored company, let alone a company waiting to meet them at the shore. He scanned the map seeking a route that might give them a chance of reaching the rest of the company without losing more men. He saw several routes that weren’t too roundabout. The most difficult part would be getting off the rocky slope without being spotted by the defenders in the two bunkers—or by any tanks that might still be around.
He turned off the HUD and looked around inside. Even though the infra didn’t show details, he could tell that every man, except the unconscious Van Impe, was looking at him as the senior man to tell them what to do, where to go.
He heard a voice call from the Dragon.
“Nobody stopped to check for survivors?” Captain Conorado asked when his communications man, Corporal Escarpo, gave him the platoon commanders’ reports: First and second platoons and the assault platoon made it through all right. One Dragon, with third platoon’s two blaster squads, was stopped and presumed killed at the beach.
Escarpo’s shrug went unseen in the predawn dark. How was he supposed to know?
Conorado was silently swearing at himself. He should have known at the time that one of the Dragons was hit. He should have given the order himself to check for survivors. This was a failure on his part; Marines were never supposed to leave their own behind. No time for self-recriminations now, Companies L and M had to reinforce Company K and secure the spaceport. Company K was already engaged with enemy armor. Thunder rolled toward the Marines of Company L—the roar of Straight Arrows firing, the blast of main battle tank guns, the ear-splitting shriek of Raptors swooping low to fire their cannons, the stuttering of Dragon and hopper cannons, the louder blasts of tanks exploding. Less than a kilometer ahead the night strobed brilliantly with the flashes of plasma bolts and the explosion of tank rounds, sometimes punctuated by bigger blooms of light as killed tanks erupted.
“Sir,” Escarpo said. “F Three wants the actual.”
Conorado accepted the offered handset with one hand and flipped up his infra with the other so he could snug the earpiece under his helmet. “Lima Actual here, go Foxtrot Three,” he said crisply.
“Lima Actual,” came back the voice of the FIST operations officer. Conorado could hear explosions behind the voice, explosions that reached him through the air a split second later. The FIST headquarters was closer to the fighting than he was. “Another company of bad guys is approaching rapidly from the southeast. Move your company to intercept and stop them. Details follow. Do you copy? Over.”
Conorado toggled on his HUD. Colored lines and dots appeared etched in the air in front of his eyes, put there by his small belt computer, which received the data transmission from HQ and recorded it. He focused on the circled blue dots that represented his company and the circled red dots that indicated the approaching enemy. “Roger, Foxtrot Three, I see them. Over.” Part of his mind was already calculating the route the company would take to intercept the tanks.
“Kill them, Captain.”
“Roger, Three. Do they have infantry support? Over.”
“Not that we know. Foxtrot Three out.”
Conorado gave the handset back to Escarpo. “Not that we know,” the operations officer had said. That told Conorado there was a serious intelligence breakdown. The intelligence officer should know details like that and pass them on to operations. Conorado didn’t have time to worry about foul-ups higher up. He flicked on his commanders’ circuit and spoke to his platoon commanders and sergeants. “We’re moving out this way.” He traced three lines on the map display on his belt computer. The computer immediately transmitted the data to the HUD displays of his senior men. “First platoon, your route.” He made the center line blink. “Second platoon, yours.” The line on the right blinked. “Assault platoon and headquarters group.” The leftmost line blinked. “Third platoon, accompany first. Move now.” He started out himself. Around him the other Marines of the company HQ group also began heading toward their interception point. Through his infra he saw the men of the assault platoon advancing ahead of him. “Everybody see the red dots? Armor. We don’t know what kind. It may or may not have infantry support. We’re going to kill them before they can join the main fight.”
Conorado’s HUD showed the blue dots of his company split into three groups that followed the three lines. He turned it off.
One hundred men with small arms, antipersonnel guns, and twenty-four Straight Arrow antitank weapons were on their way to intercept and kill forty-five tanks. He repressed a shiver.
Chapter 14
“We went six blocks,” Schultz reported. “Didn’t see or hear anything.” He stood in a recessed doorway half a kilometer from the landing beach, facing Sergeant Hyakowa. Dean huddled next to him.
“You’re sure nobody’s coming that way?” Hyakowa asked the men he’d sent ahead to scout their route.
Schultz didn’t say anything. He thought the predawn light was bright enough for Hyakowa to see his ‘That’s a dumb question’ look. He had no way of knowing whether someone out of his hearing or sight might be moving to cut across the route he’d taken. But he and Dean—Hyakowa had insisted that Schultz not go alone—had gone out by one street and come back by another. They hadn’t found anything to indicate enemy presence in the immediate vicinity or moving their way.
Hyakowa looked at Dean, who nodded, agreeing with Schultz. The senior squad leader cocked his head and listened to the distant sounds of battles, fights they’d been hearing since before they got off the landing slope. One, the first one they heard start, sounded like it was at the spaceport—at least it was in that direction and could be the right distance. “Lead the way,” Hyakowa said, then flicked on his squad and squad leaders circuits. His squad leader’s radio had three groups of frequencies: one was selective and allowed him to talk to his own squad, either all of them at once or a few of them selectively; on another he could talk directly to the other squad leaders in the platoon; the third went up to the platoon and company command. He hadn’t been able to raise anyone on the platoon or company frequencies.
Between interference caused by the buildings around them and electronic interference, he wasn’t able to transmit or receive much more than a hundred meters. He flicked on both the squad all-hands and the squad leaders circuits. “Let’s move it out, people,” he said. “The rest of the company needs us.” He dropped his infra back into place to watch the two squads begin their movement.
Schultz moved close to the buildings on one side of the narrow, winding access road they were following through a light industrial area. Dean and Corporal Leach, their fire team leader, paralleled him on the other side of the road. Then came the second fire team, Ratliff, Chan, and Godenov. Dornhofer brought up the squad’s rear with MacIlargie, whose wound wasn’t severe enough to prevent him from walking and using his weapon. Second squad followed them, carrying Van Impe and Duguid on two litters. They had hidden the bodies of Corporal Keto and the two dead Dragon crewmen in a building—Hyakowa thought that none of the people who normally worked in this area would come to work today, not with all the fighting going on in the city. He was willing to leave the dead hidden to be taken care of later, but there was no way he would leave a wounded Marine behind. Sergeant Eagle’s Cry and PFC Clement, the other walking wounded Marine, formed the rear point.
Satisfied that the two squads were moving out in as good order as possible under the circumstances, Hyakowa fell in behind Ratliff.
Company L barely got into position before the van of the oncoming armored company reached them. The vehicles, fifteen TP1s, thirty medium tanks, and an armored staff car, came barreling in two columns down the middle of the broad boulevard leading from the city proper to the spaceport. Any infantry that might be accompanying the tanks couldn’t keep up with them. Second platoon, on Company L’s right flank, didn’t wait for orders from Captain Conorado.
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“First squad,” the second platoon commander coolly ordered over his platoon command circuit, “fire one Sierra Alfa, kill the nearside lead tank. Second squad, fire one Sierra Alfa, kill the tank behind the leader. Platoon, pull back as soon as Sierra Alfas are fired.”
Second platoon was spread out in a colonnade of monuments and ornamental trees that shielded travelers on the boulevard from the ugly sight of the industrial area between it and the port. The trees afforded little protection from the guns of the tanks, but the monuments were heavy and close enough together to prevent the tanks from mounting an orderly charge. The industrial area began less than fifty meters behind the colonnade, a warren of small and medium three and four-story buildings plunked down wherever was convenient or where there was space. Streets wended mazelike through them. If the tanks could be enticed to follow the Marines into the warren, they could be isolated and picked off one at a time. Maybe.
Two Straight Arrows fired almost simultaneously. The first squarely hit the TP1 leading the near column. The huge tank bucked violently and skittered out of control toward the far side of the boulevard, slamming into and knocking over a medium tank in the far column before skidding to a stop with its sides bulging, seams burst, turret canted. The medium tank that was second in the near column lifted several inches off the pavement then crashed back down, broken and dead. A second later it erupted as its ammunition cooked off. The closest following tanks were moving too fast to stop before they piled into the dead tanks ahead of them. The drivers twisted their steering yokes and stomped their drive petals to maneuver between and around the wrecks. One medium tank spun almost a complete 360 degrees before it skidded off the roadway and slammed into a monument. The impact shattered the ferrocrete base and toppled the bronze statue on top of it onto the tank’s engine cowling, where it hit with a thud that shook the vehicle. A second medium slid sideways into the back of the medium killed by the Straight Arrow. A TP1, whose driver wasn’t able to see the knocked-over medium tank in time, slammed into the damaged tank and began climbing over it. The medium shrieked and partly collapsed beneath the monstrous weight. The TP1’s treads came fully off the pavement and it stalled. The remaining tanks managed to avoid the growing pileup.
Steel Gauntlet Page 14
