“Where the hell did that spike come from?” Raynor asked, as the rangers hurried to obey Tychus’s orders.
“I don’t know,” Tychus answered grimly, as his cigar waggled up and down. “But I’ll bet we’re gonna find out.”
Ottmar and his Snakeheads were sitting atop a low ridge that ran east to west across the plain. The mineral stripper was clear to see about a mile ahead. Thanks to information provided by the Hellhound pilot, not to mention the thick black smoke, the fugitives had been easy to locate.
Ottmar panned the battlefield with his field goggles. Eight combat four-wheeled light attack vehicles (LAVs) led the charge. In keeping with the Komando’s motto, “Move fast and strike hard,” each LAV was armed with a fixed gun and was large enough to carry two armored soldiers. The four-wheelers could travel at speeds up to sixty miles per hour over a reasonably flat surface. That made them perfect for scouting, quick raids, and rat hunts like this one.
Two sloths followed close behind. Repurposed to function as tanks, the sloths had once been huge earth movers to which large caliber cannons had been fitted in place of dozer blades, along with lighter slugthrowers for anti-personnel use. Metal plates had been welded all around the circumference of the machines and were angled wherever possible in order to deflect incoming projectiles.
The rest of the unit, including the command vehicle, the comm-truck, the supply hog, the fueler, and the men required to defend them were almost ten miles to the rear. Having lost their battle with the Hellhound, both of the captured APCs were burning. The fighter, which was running low on fuel, was on its way back to base.
As the tanks fired on the stripper, the resulting explosions were little more than tiny flashes of light against the machine’s vast gray bulk. “Snake-One to all units… . Save your ammo,” Ottmar ordered. “The Confeds are inside that monster by now. Over.”
That was when the driver of the LAV to Ottmar’s right jerked spastically and a distant crack was heard. Then, with a ponderous dignity, the Snakehead fell sideways onto the ground. A sniper had seen an open visor and taken his shot. The rats had teeth!
The number two man on the right-hand LAV was behind the controls by then as Ottmar twisted his throttle and sent his attack vehicle surging forward. The key was to get in under the beast, kill any guards who might be waiting there, and fight their way upward. A simple matter, really—and one he would take pleasure in.
Ward could see the oncoming LAVs and knew what they hoped to accomplish, as he left the shadows and lumbered out to stand at the very center of the huge opening. Quad rocket launchers sat atop Ward’s squared-off shoulders, and a Kel-Morian gauss cannon was cradled in his arms. This was the moment he’d been waiting for, and there was a smile on his lips as targeting data scrolled across his HUD.
“Ward!” Tychus yelled over the comm. “Get your dumb ass back over here! That’s an order!”
But Ward couldn’t hear anything other than the sound of his wife calling their children in to dinner, and the music of their laughter, followed by a series of explosions as the Hellhounds bombed his village. He staggered as incoming fire sparkled against his armor, but was only marginally aware of the danger as he chose each target with care. Once the process was complete, Ward was careful to brace himself against what he knew was going to be a massive recoil. There was a satisfying whoosh as all eight of the rockets left their launchers at once, locked onto the heat generated by the targets they had been assigned to, and corkscrewed across the sky. The gauss cannon was up and firing by that time, an LAV exploded, and Ward gave thanks. He was a happy man.
Ottmar figured the man who stood legs apart at the very center of the opening was either very brave or very foolish—not that it made much difference, because in a moment he was going to be very dead!
Then he saw the flash of rockets being fired, the vapor trails they made, and knew what would happen next. There was little more than a couple of seconds in which to think about Hana, the children, and the brown lizard before a rocket blew Foreman Kar Ottmar and the man seated behind him to bloody bits.
Not all of the eight rockets found their targets, but five of them did, and that was sufficient not only to blunt the Snakehead attack, but to leave the survivors without sufficient transportation.
Ryk Kydd, who was up on the processor’s stern observation deck, could see the stranded KMs and the burning vehicles. He was very unforgiving. Three shots rang out—and three Kel-Morians fell.
But the sloths were still in commission, as were three LAVs, and they were damned hard to hit as the four-wheelers wove in and out.
Ward was shooting at the sloths with the gauss cannon, but he was out of rockets, and it was a waste of time. But he stood there blasting away until Tychus dashed out into the opening and tackled him. Nobody other than Tychus would have been strong enough to snatch an armored man off his feet and push him to safety, even as the beneficiary of his kindness threatened to kill him.
Then the enemy was inside the tunnel as two four-wheelers entered, firing as they came. Two rangers threw up their hands and went down as a hail of spikes punched holes through their body armor.
But their short-lived success was over as Raynor pulled out from behind a parked truck and followed the LAVs toward the other end of the tunnel and the daylight beyond. The vulture’s grenade launcher made a steady chugging sound as it lobbed grenades straight ahead.
Raynor wasn’t very skilled with the weapon since he’d never had an opportunity to fire one before, but it turned out that he didn’t have to be, as one of the four-wheelers took a direct hit, and the second ran into a pair of explosions that sent it skidding out of control. Black smoke whipped past as the vulture carried him around the wreckage and out into the open area beyond.
Meanwhile, as the first sloth came to a halt beneath the stripper’s massive bulk, Harnack was there to greet it. He was wearing goggles, and carrying a captured shotgun as he dropped onto the vehicle’s rear deck from a catwalk above.
There was a loud clang as the top hatch opened and fell against steel. That was the moment when the Kel-Morian saw Harnack’s face grinning down at him. Harnack’s grenade fell inside, rattled as it fell into the compartment below, and wound up just a foot away from the reserve ammo locker.
Harnack jumped off and was fifty feet away by the time the ammo blew. The explosion also damaged the second sloth, which continued to shake convulsively as rounds cooked off inside the wreckage.
Only two of the LAVs were still operational at that point, and both of them made a run for it, as half a dozen Avengers arrived on the scene and attacked them from the air. Both vehicles were destroyed in a matter of seconds.
Suddenly all sorts of orders were coming in as ten dropships appeared and began to land one after another. The first dropship to touch down disgorged eight armored soldiers, who immediately went to work rounding up the POWs.
Meanwhile, Tychus, Raynor, and Harnack began to make their way out from under the gigantic crawler. Moments later Kydd, Zander, Ward, and Doc fell in behind them. Together they walked out of the tunnel and into the sunlight beyond. The job was almost finished—but there was one more thing to do. Find the rest of the Kel-Morian attack group and kill them.
Thanks to the tracks the sloths and the LAVs had left behind, it wasn’t all that difficult to find the rest of Foreman Ottmar’s Komandos. The unit’s support vehicles plus two LAVs had taken shelter under a protruding rock shelf where they would be in the shade and invisible from above.
It was a pretty good hiding place, all things considered, but not good enough to protect the KM soldiers from the heat-seeking missiles fired by a pair of Avengers, or the troops that landed shortly thereafter. The fueler was on fire, the comm-truck was badly damaged, and bodies lay scattered all about. “Check the bodies to make sure they’re really dead,” Tychus ordered. “And we are taking prisoners, so mind your manners.”