"Wow," said Carbury. He was sucking in his belly so that he could lean toward Screen #3 without pressing the veteran's shoulder. "Exactly what is it that's happening, Sergeant? They, ah, they aren't updating me very regularly."
Des Grieux rotated his chair counterclockwise. The back squeezed Carbury against the turret basket until the lieutenant managed to slip aside.
"It's all right there," Des Grieux said, pointing toward the map display on Screen #1."He's got Broglie held on the left—"orange symbols toward the western edge of the display "—but that's just sniping,no way they're gonna push Broglie out of ground that rugged."
He gathered spit in his mouth, then swallowed it. "The bastard's good," the veteran muttered to himself. "I give him that."
"Right," said Carbury firmly in a conscious attempt to assert himself. Strategy was a major part of the syllabus of the Frisian Military Academy."So instead he's putting pressure on the right flank where the terrain's easier—"
Not a lot easier, but at least the hills didn't channel tanks and combat cars into a handful of choke points.
"—and there's only the Thunderbolt Division to worry about." Carbury frowned. "Besides the Hashemites themselves, of course."
"You worry about the towel-heads," Des Grieux said acidly. He glared at the long arc of yellow symbols marking elements of the Thunderbolt Division.
Though the enemy's eastern flank was anchored on hills rising to join the Knifeblade Escarpment well beyond the limits of the display, the center of the long line stretched across terrain similar to that in which Task Force Kuykendall waited. Gullies; scattered shrubs; hard, windswept ground that rolled more gently than a calm sea.
Perfect country for a headlong armored assault.
"That's what he ought to do," Des Grieux said, more to himself than to the intruding officer. He formed three fingers of his left hand into a pitchfork and stabbed them upward past the line of yellow symbols.
On Screen #3 at the corner of his eye, an image flashed into a cyan dazzle as another main-gun bolt struck home.
"Umm," said Carbury judiciously. "It's not really that simple, Sergeant." His manicured index finger bobbed toward the left, then the right edge of the display. "They'd be enfiladed by fire from the Legion, and even the Thunderbolts have anti-tank weapons. You wouldn't want to do that."
Des Grieux turned and stared up at the lieutenant. "Try me," he said. The tone was unemotional, but Carbury's head jerked back from the impact of the veteran's eyes.
Screen #3 showed a distant landscape through the sights of a combat-car tribarrel. The image expanded suddenly as the gunner dialed up times forty magnification. The target was a—
Des Grieux's attention clicked instantly to the display. Freed from the veteran's glare, Carbury blinked and focused on the distant scene also.
The target was a Thunderbolt calliope, shooting upward from a pit that protected the eight-barreled weapon while it knocked incoming artillery shells from the air. The high ground which the combat car had gained gave its tribarrels a slanting view down at the calliope four kilometers away.
The line-straight bolts from a powergun cared nothing for distance, so long as no solid object intervened. A five-round burst from the viewpoint tribarrel raked the gun pit, reducing half the joined barrels and the crew to ions.
That would have been enough, but the calliope was in action when the bolts struck it. One of the weapon's own high-intensity 3cm rounds discharged in a barrel which the Slammers' fire had already welded shut.
A blue-white explosion blew open the multiple breeches. That was only the momentary prelude to the simultaneous detonation of the contents of an ammunition drum. Plasma scooped out the sides of the gun pit and reflected pitilessly from rockfaces several kilometers away.
As if an echo, three more of the Thunderbolt Division's protective calliopes exploded with equal fury.
The Slammers' toehold on the eastern hills wasn't the overture to further slogging advances on the same flank: it was a vantage point from which to destroy at long range the artillery defenses of the entire hostile center.
"Good Lord," Lieutenant Carbury gasped. He leaned forward in amazement for a closer view. Des Grieux shoved Carbury back with as little conscious volition.
H271's artificial intelligence switched its viewpoint to that of a jeep-mounted infantry tribarrel.Six red streaks fanned through the sky above the narrow wedge of vision, a full salvo from a battery of the Slammers' rocket artillery.
Powerguns fired from the hills to the west.Some of Broglie's defensive weapons had retargeted abruptly to help close the sudden gap in the center of the line. That was dangerous, though, since Hammer's other two batteries continued to pound the flanks of the enemy position.
Broglie's powerguns detonated two of the incoming shells into bright flashes and smears of ugly smoke. The help was too little, too late: the other four firecracker rounds popped open at preset altitudes and strewed their deadly cargo widely over the Thunderbolt lines.
For the moments that the anti-personnel bomblets took to fall, nothing seemed to happen. Then white light like burning magnesium erupted over four square kilometers. Hair-fine lengths of glass shrapnel sawed in all directions. The coverage was thin, but the blasts carved apart anyone within a meter of an individual bomblet.
Lieutenant Carbury jumped for the hatch, aiming his right boot at the back of the tank commander's seat but using Des Grieux's shoulder as a step instead. "Remote that feed to my tank now, Sergeant!"the lieutenant shouted as he pulled himself out of H271's cupola.
Des Grieux ignored Carbury and keyed his intercom. Flowers had better be wearing his commo helmet. "Driver!" the veteran snarled. "Get your ass aboard!"
On Screen #3, another salvo of anti-personnel shells howled down onto the Thunderbolt Division's reeling battalions.
Powerguns snapped and blasted at a succession of targets on H271's right-hand screen. For the past several minutes, the real excitement, even for Des Grieux, was on the map display on the other side of the fighting compartment.
The Hashemites and their mercenary allies were getting their clocks cleaned.
The AI's interpretation of data from the battle area cross-hatched all the units of the Thunderbolt Division which were still on the plain. A few minutes of hammering with firecracker rounds had reduced the units by twenty percent of their strength from casualties—
And to something closer to zero combat efficiency because of their total collapse of morale. The battle wasn't over yet, but it was over for those men and women. They retreated northward in disorder, some of them on foot without even their personal weapons. Their only thought was to escape the killing zone of artillery and long-range sniping from the Slammers' powerguns.
Half of the Thunderbolt Division remained as an effective fighting force on the high ground to the east—the original left-flank battalions and the troops which had retreated to their protection under fire. Even those units were demoralized, but they would hold against anything except an all-out attack from the Slammers.