‘Well, Ben, we’re going downtown to pick up some friends. If we do it right, we’ll get a big pat on the back.’ Wilkes chose not to add that if things went to hell there’d be faeces on the fan.
‘Which direction, sir?’ Benyamin asked.
‘You got a map of this city?’
‘Better than that, sir.’ The young man touched his screen several times and a similar screen in front of Wilkes flashed into life. On it was a colour road map of Ramallah with the tank’s location on it illustrated by a small tank icon. Cute. Stuck to the armour plate by his shoulder with Blu-tack was a collection of pictures of naked women torn from various sources, positioned around a buxom brunette suggestively riding the Merkava’s gun. Wilkes shook his head — the interior of the tank was no different to any other male workplace he’d been in.
‘GPS,’ Benyamin said by way of explanation.
Wilkes hit the transmission button. ‘Lieutenant Colonel, this is Tom Wilkes. I have a tank. Put me up on the system.’
‘Tom, where…?’ Baruch was momentarily confused, but Wilkes had chosen his words well, and the colonel grasped the Australian’s intent. He yelled at the technicians who relayed the frequency.
‘You got that, Ben?’ asked Wilkes.
‘Yes, sir. Seatbelt.’
‘What?’
‘Your seatbelt, sir.’
‘Oh,’ said Wilkes, vaguely surprised. He shrugged and buckled in. ‘And the name’s Tom, okay?’
‘Yes, sir…Tom.’
Several frames suddenly appeared on the screen, one atop the other. Wilkes moved them around with a trackball beside the screen. Benyamin did the same. The target building was one right turn and two hundred metres away. Benyamin touched his screen and the road ahead was captured by the TSS and projected onto separate monitors in the ubiquitous green of augmented light.
Wilkes heard Baruch ask him several questions but he ignored him. He was still working out in his own head exactly what he was going to do with the tank once he got it into position. The situation at the target building had stabilised somewhat, but only temporarily. The terrorists attempting to take the ground floor had been beaten back. But Dragon Warrior had picked up reinforcements in the vicinity, making their way to the battle with, doubtlessly, more RPGs. The Zefas were powerless, unless the terrorists had the bad sense to try again to take up positions on the rooftop giving the helicopter gunships a clear shot. Samuels’ men — the ground blocking force — had been slaughtered to a man. Glukel’s troop was gradually being whittled down. From the screen display he could see that four were wounded, two seriously. The soldiers were also running low on ammunition and resupply was not an option. Lieutenant Colonel Baruch had assembled an assault team from scratch, made up of nearby Israeli Defence Force soldiers on various security details, but they would be walking into a firestorm. Whoever these enemy soldiers were — Hezbollah or Hamas — they were not lying down without a fight. Samuels had been right.
‘What have you got — what sort of rounds?’ Wilkes asked.
Benyamin was well and truly on side now. The information coming in on his touch screen from the UAVs and helos presented a desperate picture. His eyes were now wide in their sockets, his mouth dry with the adrenalin rush. ‘Sir, we have APFSDS and HEAT multipurpose rounds, plus assorted anti-personnel and HE rounds.’
The armour-piercing fin-stabilised discarding sabot round would have been perfect if they were up against tanks, APCs or hardened bunkers. But a high-explosive anti-tank round, basically a high-explosive shaped charge, would clear the building in one massive blow.
‘Given ’em HEAT?’
‘That’d be my choice, sir.
‘Well, get it loaded.’
Benyamin slowed the Merkava, swung it round the right-hander then gunned it. The tank’s 1500 horsepower General Dynamics GD833 diesel thrummed as it launched the tank’s thirty tonnes down the road. The going was tough. The gap between the buildings was too narrow to allow the tank to pass freely between them. The left side of the tank ploughed into several buildings, causing them to cave-in as it charged through. Benyamin worked the touch screen. ‘Two rounds in the hopper, sir. One to do the job, and one for luck.’
‘Got an ETA?’ asked Wilkes.
‘Thirty seconds give or take, sir.’
Wilkes increased the magnification on the forward view. The target loomed large. Benyamin switched to infrared. The hot lead and tracer exchanges between the two buildings could be seen clearly, as could the burning Humvees out front.
Machinery clanged beside Wilkes as the HEAT round was automatically pushed into the gun’s breech. An orange glowing diamond appeared on the building about to be reduced to landfill. Benyamin moved it around with the trackball. ‘I think the ground floor, sir. Give our people across the road some protection. But I’d give them some warning.’The Israeli tried to lock the gun on target but the street was too narrow, so he widened the angle by smashing the tank through an adjacent building. Benyamin brought the gun to bear again, this time with better results. Its stabilising system took over, automatically making minute corrections in all axes, compensating for the tank’s movement, to ensure the round, once launched, hit the spot.
‘Roger that,’ said Wilkes. ‘Lieutenant Glukel, Tom Wilkes.’
‘I hear you,’ yelled the lieutenant, partially deaf from the ordnance exploding all around her.
‘Get some cover now,’ said Wilkes.
‘What?’
‘Gotcha, Tom,’ said Atticus. ‘Whatever you’re gonna do, buddy, do it fast. No ammo…wounded.’
‘You’ve got a five countdown.’ Wilkes counted back from seven until he reached five. He turned off the radio and finished the countdown in his head: four…three…two…one. Wilkes yelled, ‘FIRE!’
The Merkava leapt as the HEAT round erupted from the gun. An instant later, a massive percussion wave swept over the tank. Benyamin stood on the anchors and the Merkava skidded to a halt sideways, clipping a building and knocking out a large corner of it. Wilkes was almost thrown out of his seat and was grateful for the seatbelt. All went strangely quiet, and then a pitter-patter sound emanated from the hull like a light sun shower on a tin roof. Wilkes looked about, unsure of the noise.
‘It’s raining, sir,’ explained Benyamin. ‘Concrete.’
Wilkes checked the monitor. Sure enough, chunks of concrete, stone and bricks were striking the road all around the tank. A large ‘thunk’ gently rocked the Merkava, and Wilkes, with the help of the TSS, watched a three-metre corner section of a wall tumble off the tank’s turret and onto the road. The dust had a while to settle but the cameras, in light-augmented mode, revealed a hole where once a building stood.
‘Bloody hell,’ said Wilkes quietly.
Benyamin nodded. ‘Yeah. Cool, huh?’
Kadar viewed the surf suspiciously, but the joy that seemed to possess everyone who swam between the peaks was infectious. He dived in and struck out for the green water beyond the white, beyond the breakers where the waves lined up like soldiers, obedient to the orders of some invisible drill sergeant. Kadar rose as the first wave in a set lifted him up, its energy encouraging him to catch the next. As the wave passed, it set him down gently in its trough. But then the following wave approached, bigger than the first. It sucked him through the water as it neared, dragging him up its towering face. For a moment he was poised on its crest. He looked down and saw that there was no water on the reef below, just the points of the coral reef with one small fish flopping and twitching between its jagged fingers. The face of the wave became concave and Kadar saw the wave for its true self: a malignant force with a conscious and grim determination. He looked down on the reef below as if from the roof of a four-storey building and saw his death. The lip of the wave curled under, taking him with it. It drove him into the reef and rolled him over those jagged peaks.