The iridium shell glowed white. Nothing else remained of the tank destroyer or its crew.
Des Grieux laughed with mad glee. "Have to do better 'n that, Broglie!" he shouted as he slid his aiming point down the slope. He fired every time the hollow pipper covered an undamaged vehicle.
There were seventeen 20cm rounds remaining in H271's ready magazine. Each bolt turned a lightly armored truck or APC into a fireball that bulged steel plates like the skin of a balloon. The last two half-tracks Des Grieux hit had already been abandoned by their crews.
Artillery fire slackened, though Des Grieux's tribarrel snarled uninterruptedly skyward. A delay-fused armor-piercing shell struck short of H271 and punched five meters through the hard soil before going off. The explosion lifted the tank a hand's breadth despite the mass of rock overburden, but the vehicle sustained no damage.
Screen#1showed a killing zone south of the Escarpment,where fleeing troops bunched and the Slammers maneuvered to cut them apart. Because the powerguns were deadly at any range so long as they had a sight line, every knob of ground Hammer's troops took cut a further swath through far-distant enemy positions.
When the Legion and Thunderbolt artillery directed its fire toward Des Grieux, the cupola guns of the tanks were freed to kill. The process of collapse accelerated as tanks and combat cars took the howitzer batteries themselves under direct fire.
Des Grieux waited. H271's fighting compartment was a stinking furnace. Empties from the rapidly fired main gun loosed a gray haze into the atmosphere faster than the air conditioning could absorb it. The tank chuckled mechanically as it replenished the ready magazine from storage compartments deep in its armored core.
Fuel fires lighted the slope all the way to the Notch. Hashemite, Sincanmo, and Thunderbolt vehicles—all wrecked and burning. Flames wove a dance of victory over a landscape in which nothing else moved.
Hundreds of terrified soldiers were still alive in the wasteland. The survivors remained motionless. Incoming artillery fire had ceased, giving Des Grieux back the use of his tribarrel. He used it and H271's night vision equipment to probe at whim wherever a head raised.
Des Grieux waited as he watched Broglie's two tank destroyers.
They were no longer the rear guard for the Central Sector refugees. The tank destroyers moved up to the Notch at a deliberate pace which never exposed them to the guns of the panzers south of the Knifeblade Escarpment. Always a cunning bastard, Broglie . . . .
Ammunition in a supply truck near the bottom of the slope cooked off. The blast raised a mushroom-shaped cloud as high as the top of the Escarpment. Two kilometers away, H271 shook.
The battle was going to be over very soon. The Thunderbolt Division's horrendous butcher's bill gave its commander a legitimate excuse for surrendering whether his Hashemite employers did so or not. The bodies heaped on both sides of the Notch would ransom the lives of their fellows.
It occurred to Des Grieux that he could probably drive H271 away, now. Incoming shells had done a day's work for excavating equipment in freeing the tank from his deliberate rockfall.
There wasn't anyplace else in the universe that Des Grieux wanted to be.
Screen #1 showed the tank destroyers pausing just south of the Notch. A 15cm bolt stabbed across the intervening kilometers and vaporized a portion of the mesa's rim. Sonic echoes of the plasma discharge rumbled across the plain below.
Des Grieux blinked, then understood. When the Slammers in Task Force Kuykendall moved out, they'd abandoned the sensor pack they'd placed on the butte. H271 wasn't connected to the pack, but Broglie didn't know that.
And trust that clever bastard not to miss a point before he made his move!
Des Grieux chuckled through a throat burned dry by ozone and the other poisons he breathed. His hands rested lightly on the two joysticks. The pippers were already locked together, solid in circle, where they needed to be.
The left-hand tank destroyer backed, then began to accelerate toward the Notch at high speed. The other Legion vehicle moved forward also, but at a relative crawl.
The right-hand tank destroyer had made the one-shot kill on the tiny sensor pack two kilometers away.
It happened the way Des Grieux knew it would happen. The tank destroyer rushing through the left side of the Notch braked so abruptly that its skirts rubbed off a shower of sparks against the smooth rock. The other tank destroyer, Broglie's own vehicle, continued to accelerate. It burst into clear sight while H271's gunner was supposed to be concentrating on the target ten meters to the side.
But it was Des Grieux below, and Des Grieux's pippers filled with the mass of iridium that slid into the sight picture. His tribarrel and main gun fired in unison at the massive target.
The interior of H271 turned cyan, then white, and finally red with heat like a hammer. The shockwave was not a sound but a blow that slammed Des Grieux down in his seat.
The cupola was gone. Warning lights glowed across Des Grieux's console. Screen #3 switched automatically to a damage-assessment schematic. The tribarrel had vaporized, but the main gun was undamaged and the turret rotated normally the few mills required to bring the hollow pipper onto its remaining target.
Luke Broglie was very good. He'd fired a fraction of a second early, but he must have known that he wouldn't get the additional instant he needed to center his sight squarely on the tank turret.
He must have known that he was meeting Slick Des Grieux for the last time.
Broglie's vehicle was a white glow at the edge of the Notch. The other crew should have bailed out of their tank destroyer and waited for the Hashemite surrender, but they tried to finish the job at which their colonel had failed.
Three 15cmbolts cut the night, two shots before the tank destroyer had a sight picture and the last round thirty meters wide of H271. Des Grieux penetrated the tank destroyer's thick glacis plate with his first bolt, then sent a second round through the hole to vaporize the wreckage in a pyre of its own munitions.
They should have known it was impossible to do what Luke Broglie couldn't manage. Nobody was as good as Broglie . . . except Slick Des Grieux.
Des Grieux could see both north and south of the Knifeblade Escarpment from where he sat on top of the burned-out tank destroyer. Smudgy fires still burned over the sloping plain where the Slammers' artillery and sharp-shooting powerguns had slashed the Hashemite center into retreat, then chaos.
Clots of surrendered enemies waited to be interned. Thunderbolt Division personnel rested under tarpaulins attached to their vehicles and a stake or two driven into the soil. The defeated mercenaries were not exactly lounging: there were many wounded among them, and every survivor from the punished battalions knew at least one friend who hadn't been so lucky.
But they would be exchanged back to their own command within hours or days. A mercenary's war ended when the fighting stopped.
The Hashemite survivors were another matter. They huddled in separate groups. Many of their trucks had been disabled by the rain of anti-personnel bomblets which the armor of the mercenary half-tracks had shrugged off. The Hashemites' personal weapons were piled ostentatiously at a slight distance from each gathering.
That wasn't necessarily going to help. Sincanmo irregulars were doing the heavy work of interning prisoners: searching, sorting, and gathering them into coffles of two hundred or so to be transferred to holding camps. The Slammers overseeing the process wouldn't permit the Sincanmos to shoot their indig prisoners here in public.