Terms of Enlistment (12 page)

“Bravo One-One, first fire team is in position,” Baker says into his helmet mike.

“I know, nimrod. We’re thirty yards to your right. I can see you,” Sergeant Fallon’s reply comes back over the squad channel, and we all chuckle.

“Listen to that shit,” Hansen says. There’s a steady crackling of gunfire coming from the city beyond the gates of the embassy. I can see empty streets, illuminated by yellow streetlights. The area around the embassy looks like a business zone, shuttered
shops and deactivated marquees. “Wonder if they have any good bars around here,” I say.

“Wanna go out and look for one? I got my universal credit card right here.” Stratton hefts his rifle.

I open my mouth for a smart-ass reply, but now we hear engine sounds from the end of the street beyond the embassy gate, and everybody gets back to the business of finding cover. This sounds like an old combustion engine, the kind they used to put on heavy equipment. I can feel the pavement vibrate with the low drumming of the far-off engine.

“This can’t be good,” Hansen says.

“The drop ships are loading up the civilians right now,” Sergeant Fallon says. “Anything comes around that corner that looks more dangerous than a street sweeper, you take it the fuck out.”

There’s activity at the far end of the street. The blunt snout of an armored vehicle appears, and we watch as it turns the corner, taking out a trash container and a shop marquee in the process. It’s a battle tank, one of the old models that run on tracks. It stands much higher than a modern tank, and instead of a modular weapons mount, it has a round armored turret that looks like a frying pan turned upside down, and a cannon that’s almost as long as the tank itself. It’s a rolling antique, but if they have ammo for that big gun, it can still dish out a world of hurt.

“Fuck me,” Baker says. “Get out of line of sight, people.”

We don’t need the encouragement. The planters are good protection against small-arms fire, but not against a tank cannon.

“Priest, get the anti-armor missiles up here.”

There’s more engine noise coming from the end of the street. Another tank turns the corner in a cloud of diesel smoke. A third one follows, and it has soldiers in uniforms and body armor following in its wake. The tanks fan out in a line across the width of the street, and then a fourth tank rumbles around the corner and takes its place in the formation.

“Super, a whole freakin’ tank platoon. Sarge, we need some more AT guys up here.”

“On the way,” Sergeant Fallon says.

Priest swaps his rifle for the anti-armor launcher and takes the dust caps off his launcher tube.

“Grayson, cover Priest. Make me some scrap metal.”

Priest dashes off to the front wall, and I follow, rifle at the ready. He follows the protection of the wall until he’s at the gate, and then peers around the corner to gauge the advance of the hostile armor platoon. As his computer parses the information, we see four red icons on our map overlays where Priest spots the enemy tanks.

Priest flicks the launch button cover with his thumb, and winks at me. Then he steps back from the wall, and aims the launcher tube into the air. There’s a muffled “pop” as the expeller charge ejects the missile from the tube, and then the missile’s own motor kicks in with an undramatic hiss that sounds like Priest is firing a really big bottle rocket. The missile shoots up into the night sky.

“One Mississippi, two Mississippi…” Priest says, and then there’s an earth-shattering
bang
on the other side of the wall. One of the red tank icons on my screen blinks out of existence. Priest peeks around the corner again and hastily pulls his head back.

“
Uh-oh
. That pissed ‘em off, I think.”

The tanks open up with machine guns. There are chips of concrete flying as their bullets hit the corner where Priest fired his missile, and we retreat along the wall, away from the gate.

We’re twenty yards from the gate when the wall of the embassy shakes, and part of it comes bursting into the compound in a cloud of concrete dust. The earphones in my helmet automatically filter the sound of the explosion, but even with the electronic noise filter, the explosion is almost deafening. When I look over my shoulder, there’s a hole in the wall that’s only slightly smaller than a garage door.

“Figures that we get here just before the shit hits the fan,” I shout to Priest, who laughs as he readies his second anti-armor rocket.

“That’s what we
do
, man. We’re the fire brigade.”

Then he fires his second missile into the sky, and a few heartbeats later there’s another explosion, this one closer than the first one. Another red tank icon flashes and disappears from the tactical map. A few hundred feet to our right, where Bravo Team and Sergeant Fallon have taken up position, someone fires another missile. I watch as the missile, barely longer than my arm, swiftly rises into the sky on a thin jet of brightly burning propellant.

A third tank explodes with a thunderclap. This explosion is practically on the other side of the wall now. The fourth tank guns its engine, and I can see its headlights illuminating the pavement on our side of the gate.

“One coming through the gate,” I shout into the TacLink. Out of the corner of my eye, I see the muted flashes of two more missile launches from the area where Third and Fourth Squads have taken up position.

The gate comes out of its hinges with a bang as fifty tons of armor crash into it. The red-and-white traffic barrier sails through the air, tumbling end over end. The tank roars into the compound, machine gun blazing away at nothing in particular. From behind, Priest grabs my battle harness and pulls me back into cover.

“Watch out,” he says.

The tank veers slightly to the right to avoid running over the guard house and getting itself entangled. The turret starts turning in our direction.

Then a flash lights up the night sky a few hundred feet above the tank, and I can see the warheads of the incoming Sarissas streak down. They tear into the roof of the tank, right behind the turret, and the tank disintegrates.

The explosion shakes the ground beneath my boots and knocks me off my feet, back into Priest. There are chunks of armor pelting the concrete traffic barrier that serves as our cover. All over the gate plaza, I can hear bits and pieces raining down onto the pavement. The cannon of the tank bounces off the wall of a nearby building, and tumbles back onto the street with a loud metallic clatter.

When the steel rain has stopped, I peer over the top of our cover. There’s not much left of the enemy tank—just the bottom part of the chassis, a few road wheels, and a length of broken tread. Amazingly, the explosion that ripped the tank into shrapnel didn’t even scratch the road beneath.

“We have incoming infantry,” Sergeant Fallon shouts over the squad link. “To the wall, and find a cozy spot.”

My team rushes back to the hole in the wall left by the one tank shell the enemy armor column managed to get off. I go prone behind a low piece of the wall, and peer over the lip. Instantly, the TacLink updates with at least two dozen red symbols marking enemy infantry. The closest group of them is charging the gate at a run, and they’re less than twenty yards away. I raise the muzzle of my rifle, and draw a bead on the last soldier in the column.

“
Engaging
.”

I press the trigger, and my rifle spits out a half dozen armor-piercing flechettes. My salvo hits the trailing soldier in the midsection, and he drops instantly. I can see little puffs of material where my flechettes tear through his outdated body armor. I shift my aim to the next soldier, but before I can pull the trigger, Priest and Hansen open up next to me with short bursts, and the enemy soldier goes down.

Then the lead group of attackers is in the dead spot to my right, where the wall blocks my line of sight as they continue toward the gate. I duck behind the concrete ledge of the broken wall as incoming fire is spraying chips of concrete into my face.

Hansen and Priest duck as well, but not before Priest takes two rounds to his battle armor that knock him off-balance. He crashes to the ground, rolls onto his back, and scrambles away from the wall opening.

“Sons of bitches can actually shoot,” he says. I can see two gray smears on the chest of his armor, where the enemy rifle rounds disintegrated on the hard shell.

Baker takes a grenade from his battle harness, pops the safety cover, and chucks the grenade through the wall opening.

“Flashbang out,” he shouts.

Flashbang grenades are not very effective against troopers in modern battle armor. The noise from the explosion gets filtered out by our helmet-mounted earphones, and the visors of our helmets automatically shield us from the flash. To troops without modern gear, however, a flashbang explosion is like looking into a nuclear detonation while getting ice picks rammed into the eardrums.

The grenade on the other side of the wall goes off with a crash that makes the firing of the tank main gun earlier sound like someone lit a wet firecracker. The flash momentarily turns the area in front of the embassy into the surface of the sun, millions of candlepower units burning out every unprotected retina in a thousand-yard radius. The firing from the enemy soldiers ceases instantly.

“Up and at ‘em,” Baker says. He steps back to the hole in the wall, raises his rifle, and starts picking off targets.

We join in.

Over at the gate, Second Squad is doing likewise. There’s an entire infantry platoon deployed in front of the embassy, but they’re mostly blind and deaf now, and we have eighteen TA troopers on the line, all networked with each other, sharing target data and threat vectors. The road in front of the embassy turns into the Seventh Circle of Hell as thousands of flechettes from computer-controlled rifles sweep it clear of any living
presence. Some of the enemy soldiers are behind good shelter, parked vehicles and metal refuse containers, but a few rifle grenades turn cover and covered alike into smoking ruins.

This is not a fight, it’s a rout. The enemy soldiers are so far out of their league that it feels like we’re a bunch of professional boxers beating up a schoolyard full of asthmatic grade school kids. Behind us, two drop ships ascend into the night sky with their engines at full thrust. A few moments later, the other two ships follow.

“Drop ships are skids up,” Sergeant Fallon shouts. “The clock is ticking. Fifteen minutes round-trip.”

“We’ll try to hang on, Sarge,” Stratton replies.

After a few minutes, there’s nothing left to shoot at out there. The street is littered with bodies and wrecked vehicles. Little fires are flickering where grenades have set flammable stuff ablaze. There’s an acrid smell in the air, the burned propellant of thousands of caseless rounds.

“Cease fire, top off those rifles, and watch your zones.”

I pull the partially expended magazine out of my rifle and check my magazine pouches for a fresh one. There are four pouches on the front of my harness, and each held a two hundred and fifty round magazine when I stepped out of the drop ship. I don’t recall reloading my rifle during the fight, but now two of my pouches are empty. I’ve blown through more than half my combat load in just five minutes of frenzied shooting, over seven hundred rounds of ammo. The hand guards of the rifle are hot to the touch.

“Fucking shooting gallery,” Priest says, rubbing the spot on his battle armor where the enemy rifle rounds left their marks. “Dumb as hell, waltzing down the road like they’re on fucking review or something.”

“I’ll take ‘em dumb,” Hansen shrugs as she reloads her rifle with a smooth and practiced motion.

I know that the soldiers we just killed had capable weapons of their own, and that any of their shots could have scored a lucky hit and switched my lights off for good. Still, the whole engagement felt little different from a range exercise, pop-up targets that just drop without a fuss when you drill them with a salvo.

The sound of a rifle shot rolls across the street, a deep boom that sounds nothing like the hoarse cough of our flechette rifles. Over by the gate, where Second Squad has taken up position, one of the TA soldiers falls. We all take cover once more.

“Sniper,” one of the guys from Second Squad calls out. “Shop window at the end of the street.”

A new tactical symbol appears on my TacLink screen. In my field of vision, I can see the red diamond shape projected onto the location of the enemy sniper, even though there’s a solid wall between us. The enemy rifle booms again, and the bullet punches a hole into the wall of the guard house, where a Second Squad trooper has taken cover.

“That’s a hell of a caliber,” Priest observes. Next to him, Hansen readies her grenade launcher, and I decide to follow suit. I open the breech of the grenade launcher, take a grenade out of my harness, and stuff it into the launcher tube.

We both step away from the wall to give our launcher muzzles some clearance, and then line up the launcher sights with the red diamond marker showing the enemy sniper’s location.

“Fire in the hole!” Hansen shouts, and we both pull our triggers.

The recoil from the launcher is brisk, and I have to take a quick step back to keep my balance. The report from the launcher is muffled, like hitting a pillow with a wooden bat. Our grenades arc over the wall and toward the sniper’s position.