Lana leaned back sharply as the armored car rolled into the wadi. Its tail swung a few degrees to the left, not entirely out of control but not entirely in it, either. The rolling slide down gave her a distinctly unpleasant feeling, not dissimilar to being in a freefall elevator.
Except the ground here is so much more real, she thought. She had a sudden, horrifying vision of the gun digging into the wadi floor and the Eland doing a pole vault over it.
She began to order, "Viljoen, nine . . . " before she saw that the gunner was already swinging the muzzle farther to the left.
The rear wheels spun for a moment, kicking up rocks. Feeling the back of the thing going out of control, Dumisani took his foot off the brake and reapplied the gas. The spinning wheels threw more gravel and sand to the rear, as the Eland plunged down.
Lana felt herself being thrown side to side in the commander's hatch. For a moment she thought the thing would flip. Heart in her mouth she almost screamed for the driver to simply stop. Self-discipline stopped her from that. Barely.
At the bottom of the long slide, the angle of the ground under the front wheels changed, causing that end to bounce upwards. Again, barely, Lana managed to stay in her position. This was repeated when the rear wheels struck.
Then, to the Israeli woman's vast relief, Dumi was able to apply the brakes for a moment before cutting right and moving out again on the wadi floor. He had to move quickly, too, because the next Eland in line was already cresting the lip of the wadi.
Adonai, Lana thought, if that was so terrifying, what am I going to do when the bullets start flying?
By sections and platoons the company spread out in its ambush configuration, reporting in to Reilly as each position was reached.
First to report were Peters and the mortar section, about four kilometers back. That one was simple: "Guns up."
Next was the scout section, its three Ferrets strung out to the west at roughly one thousand meter intervals, two north of the road and one, the farthest out, south of it. These hunkered down in hide positions, plentiful among the deeply cut wadis, while the commanders got out, slung radios on their backs, and crawled to where they could see the road but still not be seen.
The two sections of turreted Elands didn't go as far as the scouts had. Instead, they followed the deep main wadis several hundred meters then began looking for side cuts. These were plentiful and steep, if not nearly as steep as the major wadis' sides were. Into these side cuts the vehicles pulled until the gunners reported that they could see the road. At that point the drivers went into reverse and backed up until there was a fair certainty that the bulk of the vehicles would be hidden. To make sure that was so, each commander and driver then dismounted and put a camouflage screen in front of their Eland. Lastly, they bent and tied the whip antennae down.
The infantry platoons took advantage of the lay of the ground, as well. It was a predictable peculiarity of a wadi system that feeders into the main wadi would be at an angle to it, corresponding to the lay of the ground. Into these feeders the turretless infantry carriers pulled. The dismounted men then trooped along the sides of the feeder, confirming they had a good line of sight to the road. They began setting up directional antipersonnel mines, even as the squad RPG gunners laid out rounds on the ground for easy access and reload.
The AT section, under Harvey, took up a position farther east, well behind the infantry lines.
Once everyone had reported, "In position," or some variant on that, Reilly and James dismounted and walked up the road through the entire kill zone. Yeah, it's a risk, Reilly thought, but still better than having an enemy tank not in somebody's field of fire. The troops adjusted their firing positions from there, reported what they had, field of fire-wise, to their leaders, and then hunkered down again behind cover. Once Reilly had confirmation that the entire KZ was covered by fire, he called the Merciful and said, "Let loose the jarheads of war."
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Cruelty has a Human Heart
And Jealousy a Human Face
Terror, the Human Form Divine
And Secrecy, the Human Dress
The Human Dress, is forged Iron
The Human Form, a fiery Forge.
The Human Face, a Furnace seal'd
The Human Heart, its hungry Gorge.
-William Blake, "A Divine Image"
D-Day, five and a half miles north-northeast of Nugaal, Ophir
Plaster from the bullet-shattered ceiling was still raining down as men, some armed, others not, began stumbling into the hallway. Some rubbed sleep from their eyes. Most were, at best, half dressed. The two Americans with Terry on the second floor fired at all armed men as they appeared. Sure, maybe the accountant who was the prime target had come out with a rifle but if Stauer didn't like it, he could do the thing himself.
Once those flurries of fire were done with, Terry thundered through his interpreter: "THE ACCOUNTANT WILL SURRENDER HIMSELF NOW OR EVERYONE IN THIS COMPLEX DOWN TO THE LAST BABY SUCKING THE LAST TIT WILL BE PUT TO DEATH!"
"Say it again," Terry ordered the translator. "Only this time put a little insane hysteria into it."
"THE ACCOUNTANT WILL SURRENDER HIMSELF NOW . . . "
Even as those words thundered an altogether different kind of thunder, this one accompanied by a sort of lightning, began in the grounds outside and on the lower floor.
Graft, the machine gunner on the gate, snugged his Pecheneg's stock a little closer to his shoulder as soon as he heard firing commence inside the palace. His scope was trained on the sole door from the barracks into the grassy compound.
The Pecheneg was yet another among the remarkable series of innovations and improvements attributable to the Russian, formerly Soviet, arms industry. The thing was, at core, a PKM machine gun, modified with a heavier, radially ribbed barrel, with a sleeve around the barrel through which cooling air was drawn. The barrel, itself, was nonchangeable in the field. This didn't matter so very much as the cooling arrangements allowed the gun to fire up to six hundred rounds in one continuous burst without overheating. No other single barreled, air-cooled machine-gun, meant to be fired from the ground, could boast this, though the First World War's Lewis Gun might have come close.
Graft proceeded to put that nearly to the test. As the ready squad from the barracks piled out of the door in a confusion of arms and legs and rifles, he trained on the foremost, depressed the trigger, and walked his six hundred and fifty rounds a minute across the squad, then back again. Some of his targets fell immediately. Others did a version of the ballistic ballet, there on the grass. A few screamed and someone began to cry.
Some of those felled tried to crawl away, but Graft was having none of that. Lifting his shoulder slightly to depress the muzzle, he fired three more bursts at the crawling men, stopping each in his own blood trail. In his scope Graft saw sprays of blood and chunks of flesh fly up from the shattered bodies.
‘God, I missed this," Graft said, just as grenades began going off in the first floor rooms of the small palace, driving glass shards out onto the courtyard. "Good hunting and no limit."
Semmerlin snickered as he heard Graft's machine gun chattering behind him. Be my turn soon.