He nodded his head, putting a pillow on a table of his own then stopped. “Hold it, does that mean… ?”
“Yep.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope.”
“What about… ?”
“The whole football squad?”
“Yeah. And… ?”
“Half the other guys in school?”
“Yeah.”
“None of them wanted to admit to the rest that I was a tease.”
“Really?” he asked and guffawed.
“Fuck you. I wasn’t a tease. I told them all up front that I wasn’t that kind of girl. Most of ’em figured they could change my mind, but they were wrong. Now I wish I hadn’t held out.”
“Well,” said Tommy, setting up a command-detonated claymore by the door, “I’d love to help you out and all, but all things considered I think we should concentrate on what we’re doing.”
“Yeah, what are you doing?” she asked, placing her Galil on the table, pointed out the window.
“Well, the plan is we fire a few rounds from here for glory and boogie out the back door, run into Alesia’s and get to our firing point there, right?”
“Right.”
“The problem is, I don’t think we’ll have enough time to get in position in Alesia’s. We need something to slow the horses down. Voilà, the claymore. It’s a command-detonated mine that can be pointed at the enemy. Then when you’re ready to blow it,” he pulled the clacker out of his cargo pocket, “you hook this up, clack it three times and BOOM!”
“Oh, okay. Then when are we going to blow it up?”
“As we enter Alesia’s. I’ll run the detonator line back there and as we run through the door I’ll set it off. That should slow them down a few seconds at least. Then we get into position, fire a few more rounds for glory, run down to the basement and hide in the tunnel. With any luck they’ll lose the trail when I detonate the other claymore I set up in Alesia’s.”
“Why do you clack it three times?” she asked, holding out her hand for the device.
“Just to be sure,” he said, handing it over and looking out the window.
“Okay, so the wire…” There was a sudden massive boom and both of the teenagers slapped hands over their ears moments too late.
“Fuckin’ ’ell!” shouted Tommy as a second and third massive explosion erupted.
“What was that?” shouted Wendy through the ringing in her ears.
“The first thing was a sonic boom, a jet, had to be a Peregrine…”
“A what?”
“A ground-attack version of the Rapier Stealth Fighter.”
“Oh,” she said, understanding not a word of the explanation.
“The other two, I don’t know what they were.”
“Did they blow up the Executive Building already?”
“No. If we’re above ground when that goes up we won’t have to worry about wondering what the sound was. We’ll be dead. And those explosions came from the wrong direction. Actually, one of them was probably the fighter eating a plasma round.”
“Okay. If they got a fighter in here, does that mean help might be on the way?”
“No. The reason I think it was an F-22 is that’s the only thing that might have survived to get this far. The Posleen are murder on aircraft.”
“Oh. Damn.”
“Yeah.” He looked out the window. “So now we wait. It’s supposed to be the worst part.”
“Even worse than getting wounded? That’s what really scares me.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“You? You’re not scared of anything.”
“Yeah, I am. I’m scared of being just bad enough wounded that I’m conscious when the horses get to me. That or being captured alive. You heard about their pens?”
“Yeah. That scares me too.” She got a thoughtful look on her face. “Umm…”
“Yeah. No problem.”
“You know what I was going to say?”
“Well, it was probably going to be that old saw about, ‘if they’re goin’ to take me alive…’ And the answer is, ‘okay.’ ”
“Okay. Thanks… What about you?”
“I’d appreciate it,” he said and paused. “Oh, my,” he said mildly.
“What?” she started and then she heard it approaching.
The sound was a freight train of the gods, tearing the firmament asunder with its roar. All nine of the sixteen-inch, two-ton rounds rumbled over the town with a thunder to drown the Hellbound Train. The culmination was a relatively anticlimactic sound like millions of firecrackers in the direction of the distant mall.
“Fuckin’ A!” shouted Tommy, “ICM!”
“What?”
As the Volkswagen-sized shells rumbled over the town, their nose cones began to open and release their submunitions. Each submunition, about the size and shape of a softball, was an onion of destruction. Surrounding the central ball of explosive was layer after layer of notched steel wire and white phosphorus. As the munitions spun gently through the air, a cocking mechanism was engaged by the inertial force. When the cocking mechanism reached a certain point, after some seven hundred spins, the weapon was armed. A moment after impact, the hammer released.
As the bomblets arrived in fan-shaped sprays they first bounced back into the air then detonated individually, giving the weapon its characteristic firecracker sound. Across the length and breadth of the highway interchange, the ground flashed white.
The weapons were designed to detonate at head height on a person, so across the mass of Posleen thousands of grenades began to explode. The explosions hurled the centaurs aside, tearing their yellow bodies asunder, but the worst effect was from the shrapnel. Each bomblet released thousands of tiny bits of metal, each traveling faster than a bullet and along with these bits of shrapnel traveled burning white phosphorus.
The phosphorus and steel wire smashed into the bodies of centaurs throughout the Posleen swarm with terrific effect. Thousands of the Posleen normals were killed, along with their God King commanders, as they drove forward towards the beleaguered defenders of Fredericksburg. Those that were not killed outright were horribly wounded by flying steel and the phosphorus that refused to extinguish even after penetrating the bodies.
The first salvo eliminated the last remnant of Aarnadaha’s brigade, which had swept across the mall area only to be decimated at the I-95 interchange. They had paused, fatally, to regroup in the shadow of the melted Quarles Gas truck and were swept away on the tides of destruction. And another salvo followed, and another.
“What are those?” Chief Wilson asked Charlie company’s first sergeant, pulling back her Nomex head cover to hear better.
“Artillery,” answered the first sergeant, not looking up from the circuit he was installing. “What I don’t know is where the hell it could be coming from. And it’s big, too. At least as big as one-five-five, sounds like larger.”
“It is,” said Lieutenant Young, joining the conversation as he arrived from the bunker. “I think it’s one of those converted battlewagons they refurbished.”
“Damn,” laughed the NCO, “with fuckin’ sixteen-inch ICM, those Posties are gonna be Post Toasties.”
“Yeah,” smiled Lieutenant Young grimly, “between this an’ that, these fuckers are at least gonna know they’ve been kissed!”
“Change of mission, boyos,” said Captain Kerman over the squadron channel. “Fredericksburg is still holding out. We’re going to be going in as ground support, adding our weight to the North Carolina’s broadside. In addition, set your ground support radios to settings 96-35 and 98-47. Those are the ground support settings for the engineer unit in Fredericksburg. They may try to contact us. If they come over the radio, don’t try to respond, we won’t have time, just let it uplink.