The Forlorn Hope (22 page)

The five further seconds which Jensen waited were as long as any block of time he could remember. He held his shoulder weapon tightly by its grip and barrel shroud. Jensen was not very good with the individual weapon, not like he was with the splendid automatic cannon he had abandoned. At this range, it would serve very well, though, if no stray round or ricochet—

The grenade went off ninety centimeters from Jensen's head. Then the world exploded.

*   *   *

The field expedient the Company had chosen to set off the daisy-chain was simple and effective. An ordinary mini-grenade would be set off next to a blasting cap, which would in turn be crimped into the first link of det cord. Concussion of the grenade would set off the lead azide primer in the cap, and the initiation cycle would proceed in normal milli-second course.

The problem was that the grenade itself had a five-second fuze. The tank, the target which
had
to be in the killing zone, had dialed on full power by the time it reached the daisy-chain—and passed it.

The ring of explosives went off like a read-out dial around the streak the shaped charge had already burned across the landscape. The individual blasts were squat and black and so huge that they completely hid the train of det cord that spurted between them at almost ten kilometers per second. To the mercenaries posted higher in the valley, there was a perceptible delay between the first case to detonate at the northern tangent of the ring and the last on the south toward which the blasts raced in mirror image from either side. The delay was in no sense significant.

Most of the explosives were wasted. Only three of the cases had any real effect on the Republican column. The remainder blew the ground into a gigantic funerary wreath, strewing brush and pulverized soil harmlessly over a square kilometer. There had been no assurance of where the Republicans would come from; and there would have been three cases, ninety kilos of plastic explosive, adjacent to any column which approached the bait.

The third armored personnel carrier blew straight upward, flattening and opening like a steel flower. Its self-sealing fuel tanks ruptured and were wrung like sponges by the blast. The sprayed fuel ignited in a great orange banner. It drifted north and started to settle before it burned out. Plating and the heavier contents of the vehicle tumbled over the black tendrils. The gun turret, squarely above the case of explosives, hung thirty meters in the air for the fraction of a second while inertia struggled with gravity. Then it fell back into the crater which gaped to receive it.

The fourth APC flipped over on its right side under the impact of blasts in front and to either flank. The angle it had taken in the hedgehog formation determined the details of its fate. Its fans shrieked. They were spinning at full throttle without the brake of an air cushion now that the plenum chamber was sideways. Several mercenaries on the south slope found the hubs irresistible bull's-eyes. The fan motors began to dissolve in cascades of blue sparks.

By contrast, the second personnel carrier was skidded twenty meters forward. Its nose grounded, then bucked upward when the rear drive fans lost all power. Heavy screens prevented trash from being sucked into their ducts, but the cubic meters of dirt excavated by the daisy-chain flooded the rear intakes and cut off the air flow completely. The vehicle began to wallow. Its driver and most of its infantry complement—those still alive—had been battered unconscious by the see-saw impacts. Like its overturned sister or the windows of an abandoned house, its defenselessness drew redoubled fire.

If the Republican tank had been directly over a charge the way the third APC had been, the tank would have been surely disabled and very possibly destroyed. Its mass and five meters grace saved it from either occurrence. Gimmicks had failed. Only stark courage remained.

*   *   *

Shock waves travel faster through ground than through air. When the daisy-chain went off, the little creek froze in a pattern of tiny white-caps at the intersections of the profusion of ripples. The floor of Lieutenant ben Mehdi's shallow trench bounced him up as he had not quite chosen to do willingly. Twenty meters away, the front elevation of the second tank was back-lit by the explosives it had just cleared.

The red flash was momentary, but not even the huge mass of the tank could ignore the blast entirely. The looming bow nosed down. Its skirt plowed a furrow four meters wide in the soil and brush. The grate-covered intakes along the upper deck sneered at ben Mehdi for an instant. All the anti-personnel charges ringing the hull went off together.

The crackling discharge was inaudible, but a diagonal line sawed off flanking foliage like wind sheer over a sand dune. The dirt rolling in front of the low skirt spewed higher, shot through the blue-white light like static electricity. Then the stern slammed down, the tank slewed, and tonnes of choking grit swept across it and ben Mehdi.

The Lieutenant fought upright in grim terror. His face-shield trapped air for his lungs, but the mass that blanketed him was lethal and blinding. The weight slipped away as ben Mehdi rose. The heat and grimy prickling remained. The first thing that the mercenary saw as soil cascaded off his face-shield was the tank, bucking and howling and broadside, less than three meters away.

The tank's skirt was crumpled. That increased the difficulties posed by the choked intakes. The driver was expert, however. First he had deliberately grounded his vehicle. He was clearing his fan ducts with short bursts where full power would have burned out the drive motors.

“Come on!” roared somebody else. Beside Lieutenant ben Mehdi loomed Gunner Jensen. He had lost his helmet again. His face and bare torso were gray with dust.

They ran toward the bellowing vehicle together. Jensen's left hand was on the Lieutenant's shoulder, but ben Mehdi was being guided rather than pulled. His own mind had disconnected itself in the maelstrom. Its hopes and prayers were void.

Jensen used his companion's shoulder as a post when he leaped to the deck of the tank. Ben Mehdi staggered. The vehicle was rocking from side to side. Shrieking, the turret began to rotate though the laser itself was silent. Beside the Lieutenant, the armor rang and a crater the size of a demitasse splashed out of the steel. The inner face of the crater gleamed with its new osmium plating. That was a molecular film of the projectile. It had vaporized with the steel as kinetic energy became heat in a microsecond.

The Sergeant fired down into a fan duct. His body recoiled upward as if he were riding a jack hammer, once, twice, and there was a shower of blue sparks from the intake as the laser tube brushed Jensen off in a flurry of limbs.

Lieutenant ben Mehdi acted with the passionless intellection of a computer. It was all he had, now that Jensen had stirred him into motion. Ben Mehdi ducked, craning his right arm and his grenade launcher up over the tank's deck. The pocked armor burned where his chest pressed against it. As the steel surged and air pumped down the intake past his weapon, ben Mehdi fired. The contact-fuzed grenade burst on the grating, lifting the mercenary's weapon but not tearing it out of his grasp. The tank's own armor protected his flesh, and the centimeter or so belled from the muzzle of the launcher tube did not impair its effectiveness. The Lieutenant thrust the weapon back and fired again. This time the blast was on the drive motor itself. The searing crackle of a short circuit extended the explosion.

When a second red light winked from his control panel, the Republican driver plunged into the panic he had resisted until then. He rammed the throttle forward and held it there, though the four rear intakes were still clogged. Even with the damage of its plenum chamber, the tank managed to skid sideways in a triumph of over-engineering. Ben Mehdi was knocked down. Jensen scrambled away from the steel Juggernaut. Then three fans failed explosively. The tank ground to a halt. It was alive, but it would be immobile until it could be hauled to a dock capable of repairing something built more massively than a starliner.

*   *   *

Sporadic shots were still being fired. All the armored personnel carriers were wrecked or burning. The few surviving Republican infantrymen were throwing down their rifles, praying to be allowed to surrender.

Captain Albrecht Waldstejn was not fully conscious. His hands were pressed against the ground, but he did not have enough coordination to push himself up to a kneeling position. “Got to move before they spot us again,” he was whispering. “Got to go where they won't be looking.…”

CHAPTER NINE

“Look, baby,” said Churchie Dwyer on the vehicle-to-vehicle push, “it's all one with me. But if you people don't come out now, you don't get asked again.”

The interior lights of the lead tank were on. The mercenary could not claim that it was the darkness of the fighting compartment that made him claustrophobic. Dwyer did not like it, though, even with both hatches wide open. Mrs. Dwyer hadn't raised any turtles, no sir. A bunker was bad enough, and bunkers weren't usually targets three and a half meters high.

The commander of the other tank responded with a volley of what were literally curses. The Rube officer took delight—or at least, such pleasure as anything gave him at the moment—in cataloguing the torments due Dwyer and the rest of the Company in Hell. Just fine, the gangling trooper thought. He snapped off the radio. There were some people whom it was more than a business to blow away, and a lot of them on Cecach seemed to wear taupe uniforms. Churchie levered himself up and stood on the tank commander's seat. His head stuck out in the open air again that way. “All right, Del,” he shouted. “Let's do it.”

The Rube gunner stared nervously at Churchie from the other seat in the turret. He had waved a rag from his own hatch instead of trying to drag his CO clear and button the tank up. That had saved his ass, but he was obviously uncertain as to whether or not it would stay saved. For the moment, his mercenary captors needed him to identify controls in the disabled tank. That was a short-term proposition.

Trooper Dwyer bumped his knee on the turret controls. “Goddam if I know why anybody serves in a coffin like this,” he grumbled in Czech to the prisoner in the seat below. “Only goddam thing I can see they're good for is shooting the hell out of other tanks—and we can't even do that since some dickhead put a couple rounds through the laser.”

“I, I'm sorry,” the gunner said. He nodded his head as if the bruise on his forehead had not left it throbbing in agony. The prisoner would have agreed or apologized in response to anything the mercenary said to him. Not only had the gunner seen the bodies outside before his captors ordered him back within the tank, he could also smell the men who had been aboard APCs which had burned.

Churchie craned his neck to watch Del. The job had fallen to Dwyer because he spoke enough Czech and he was not involved in further planning the way Hummel and ben Mehdi were. It would be a relief when it was over, but that ought to be soon.

The crew of the second tank refused to be reasonable, and they had a bow gun which still worked even though it did not bear on anything in particular. The Rubes could watch Del Hoybrin dragging the power cable toward them from their captured consort, twenty meters away, but there was nothing they could do about the fact. For that matter, if they even thought about it at all it was probably to make sure they were not touching metal.

Del clamped the cable to the stub of the second tank's radio antenna. The big man waved to Churchie, then ran back to cover behind the captured vehicle.

Churchie dropped back into the turret. “All rightie, sweetheart,” he said to the captive gunner, “you do it.” Frightened but willing to do whatever he was asked, the Republican flipped a switch on the control panel between the two seats.

The tank generator could be used to supply six-hundred volt DC current through a reeled cable at the stern of the vehicle. The tanks' fusion bottles made the heavy vehicles useful power sources for units in bivouac. Now it gave the Company a means of eliminating die-hards whom they could not reach otherwise.

When the captive gunner threw the switch, all the instruments in the second tank flickered and the electrically-primed ammunition for the bow gun detonated. There were about a hundred and fifty rounds in the metal loading drum. When they all went off together, the driver's hatch blew open and the huge turret lifted its trunions from the track on which they rotated.

Inside the captured tank, the explosion was only a thump. Churchie Dwyer raised himself again to look at the results. Gray smoke was boiling out of the fore-hatch and around the turret base of the other vehicle. There were no screams from the crew; nor, of course, were there survivors. Del Hoybrin was watching as he waited for further directions. “Right,” said Churchie to his prisoner. “Up and out, baby. You just earned yourself the chance to be tied up and left at the pit head, what's left of it.”

The Republican obeyed, using the hydraulic lift on his seat instead of clambering out as if it were part of an obstacle course. He had a sick expression on his face.

“Cheer up,” said Dwyer as he swung his own legs clear. He gestured toward the other tank. The smoke from its hatch was now black and occasionally touched with the flames which were cremating the bodies within. “Think of the alternatives, hey?”

*   *   *

“That was Black One at the pit head,” said Communicator Foyle. “They've secured all the prisoners and they're following on.”

Albrecht Waldstejn had a radio helmet, now, but he had made no response to Sergeant Hummel's call. He did not respond to Foyle's prompting, either. The savior and by God commanding officer of the Company was trudging ahead in a daze. The Communicator touched him on the shoulder. “Sir?” she said.

“I'm all right!” the Cecach officer snarled. When he turned toward the contact, he stumbled. There was a curse from the line of troopers behind as they bunched. A stretcher bearer stumbled in turn.