Both sides fired flares, and their surroundings lit up in green light. Wang Ran looked through his scope at the yellowish haze ahead of them, the dust cloud kicked up by tank #105 to their forward left. All of a sudden the yellow dust in his field of vision turned red with flickering firelight. The scene cleared up and he saw #108 slow down, trailing smoke and fire, and then it was far behind them. Ahead to the right another tank was on fire, and was also left behind. At no time did he hear the two tanks get hit. Suddenly a column of dust was kicked up straight ahead of them, and they ran directly into it, stones and shell fragments clattering on the tank’s outer armor. The shot, a high-speed fin-stabilized armor-piercing round, had fallen short of the target. Now his tank was at the head of their formation, and Wang Ran heard in his earpiece the voice of the lieutenant colonel in command of their battalion, from her command vehicle: “Targets sighted directly ahead! Fire at will!”
More bullshit. Just like in the previous engagements, in the crucial moment they never provide you with the information you want. They’re just a distraction. Now the tank slowed down, evidently so he could fire. Wang Ran looked ahead through his viewfinder, and in the light of the flares he saw first the dust clouds blocking out the sky over the horizon, and then, at the base of the cloud, he saw the black dots. He adjusted the focus until the Abrams tanks resolved, and his first impression was that they were nothing like what he had seen in photographs, where they looked as powerfully sturdy as two square iron ingots bolted together. Here, trailing long dust clouds behind them, they looked smaller.
He caught one in the crosshairs, and then pressed the button to lock it, turning the M1A2 into a magnet to attract the 120 mm smoothbore cannon, so that no matter how the tank pitched or rocked, the barrel would remain stubbornly trained onto its target like a compass needle. He pressed the fire button and saw the spurt of fire from the barrel and the dust kicked up ahead of them by the vented air. Then off in the distance the shell exploded in fire and smoke. It was a clean explosion, no dirt, and Wang Ran knew it was a hit. The tank continued to advance, trailing smoke, but he knew that it wouldn’t make it very far before it stopped.
He moved the crosshairs to capture another target, but then from outside the tank came a deafening noise. His helmet and earphones had excellent noise-shielding, but he knew it was a loud noise because it rocked his entire body numb. The viewfinder went dark, and his legs suddenly felt burning hot, like the time when he was young and his father carried him into a hot tub. But the heat turned scorching, and he looked down at the inferno he was now standing in: flames were everywhere in the lower part of the cabin.
The extinguishers went on automatically, filling the cabin with fog and suppressing the fire. Then he realized that a black, branch-like object beneath his feet was twitching. A fire-scorched arm. He grabbed the arm, not knowing whether it belonged to the driver or the loader, but neither would have been so lightweight. He quickly learned the reason: he had pulled up just the upper half of a body, blackened all over, the lower part of the chest still in flames. His hand shook, and the half torso slipped down again. He still couldn’t make out who it was, or why the hand was still moving. He opened the hatch and climbed out as fast as he could. The tank was still moving forward, and he rolled off the back and crashed heavily to the ground, surrounded by clouds of smoke from the tank he had just exited.
After a breeze cleared the smoke, Wang Ran saw his tank at a standstill ahead of him. The smoke had ebbed, but flames were spurting from the interior. It had been hit by a shaped charge, he now knew, one designed to cut through armor by concentrating explosive energy into a high-temperature jet, turning the tank into a furnace. He moved backward, passing a number of other burning tanks, and his burned trousers dropped in shreds from his legs. He turned around at the sound of a dull thud behind him; his tank had exploded and was now a ball of thick flame and smoke. Now he felt an intense pain in his legs and sat right down on the ground, surrounded by explosions and fires, beneath flickering southern lights dulled by the thick smoke in the night sky. He felt the chill wind, and then the colonel instructor’s words echoed in his mind once again:
“…group engagements are more complicated. Now, our tank group and the enemy’s can be thought of in mathematical terms as two matrices, and the entire course of battle as the multiplication of these matrices…”
Bullshit. Complete bullshit. Even now Wang Ran had no idea how matrices were multiplied. Surveying the battlefield, he carefully counted the number of destroyed tanks on each side. The relative damage rate needed to be calculated.
Three days later, and still dragging his injured leg, Wang Ran got into a third tank, this time as driver. They reached the match location before it was light. More than a hundred tanks were parked along a long brick wall for the wall-smashing game, waiting for the start command. When the command came, they and their opponents, parked behind a parallel wall ten meters beyond theirs, would push the walls over and attack each other. The event required fast reflexes, and the key to victory lay in the attack formation, not shooting skills since there was basically no need to even aim when it came time to shoot. Their instructors back in the Common Era would never have imagined that their students would be firing upon enemy tanks at a distance of just a few meters, much less that the command to shoot would be issued by a Swiss judge, surveying the battle from a helicopter far overhead.
For the next several hours, that wall was all of the outside world Wang Ran could see through the tank’s forward window. It flickered between indistinct and crystal clear as southern lights danced overhead. He inspected it in minute detail, down to the last fracture of every brick and the shape of every segment of still-wet cement, enjoying the interplay of light and shadow on the wall from the aurora australis that he couldn’t see. He discovered for the first time that the world had so many things to enjoy, and he made a decision: If he made it out of this game alive, he would enjoy every inch of the world around him as if it were a painting.
His earpiece broke its five-hour silence with the command to attack. The voice came so suddenly, right in the middle of his careful study of the pattern of cracks in the thirteenth brick in the fourth row up, that he froze for a second. But just one second, and then he slammed the accelerator and sent the giant steel beast leaping forward to smack down the wall alongside the other tanks. As bricks scattered and dirt flew, he realized he was already in the enemy’s armored formation. In the brief, chaotic battle that followed, the constant noise of smoothbore cannon fire and exploding shells, blinding flashes outside, the turret above him spinning rapidly, and the ammo loader grinding away as the smell of propellant filled the cabin, he knew that the gunner had only to fire as quickly as possible in all directions with no need to even aim. The firing frenzy lasted less than ten seconds, until there was a thunderous noise and the world exploded before his eyes.