The six tubes of the battery of Frisian rocket howitzers firing in support of the operation could each put a shell in the air every four-plus seconds during the first minute and a half. Reloading a hog’s ammunition cassettes was a five-minute process for a trained crew, but that wouldn’t matter today. The hundred and twenty ready rounds were sufficient to absolutely pulverize the target.
The second, third, and fourth salvos mixed contact-fuzed high explosive with cluster munitions, firecracker rounds. The outer casing of the latter shells opened a hundred meters in the air with a puff of gray smoke, raining down submunitions. Bomblets burst like grenades when they hit, carpeting a wide area with dazzling white flashes and shrapnel that drank flesh like acid.
Because the glass-fiber shrapnel had little penetrating power, the firecracker rounds were mixed with HE to blow off roofs and other light top cover. From a distance, the exploding submunitions sounded like fat frying. The effect on people caught in a firecracker round’s footprint was also similar to being bathed in bubbling lard.
“C’mon, c’mon, c’mon!” the left gunner called, hammering the heel of one hand on the fighting compartment’s coaming.
The two cars of 3d Platoon—understrength, so Currant was accompanying them—were to the immediate right, fifty and a hundred meters distant, approaching Tagrifah from the south. High Hat lurched repeatedly, throwing Barbour against the coaming. His clamshell armor spread the impact, but he still felt it.
Currant’s driver kept the skirts close to the ground so as not to spill air from the plenum chamber as he accelerated the heavy vehicle. The meadow wasn’t as smooth as the barley fields to the west and north of the village. Sometimes what looked like simply a flowering shrub turned out to be a rocky hillock against which the steel skirts banged violently.
Incoming shells drew red streaks across the pale dawn, plunging down at the targets Barbour had pinpointed in and around the village. The grove of deciduous trees swayed and toppled over. Rounds going off in the soil beneath the trees rippled the surface violently enough to tear their roots loose.
The whole mass heaved again in a gush of dirt and black smoke. Foliage and shattered branches flew skyward. A shell had detonated explosives stored in tunnels beneath the grove.
When the trees fell, Barbour should have gotten a glimpse of the village. All he could see were a few poles lifting above a roil of dust and smoke. In the far distance, the combat cars of 1st Platoon tore across the green barley, spewing plumes of chopped grain from beneath their skirts.
The fields and meadows serving the village weren’t fenced. Three boys chatted on a knoll, watching the goats for which they were responsible.
The boys jumped to their feet to watch the first salvo scream in. When the combat cars appeared, two of the boys ran back toward the village, while the third threw himself face down and covered his head with both hands.
The local goats had long black-and-white hair. They circled in blind panic as the armored vehicles charged through them. The animals’ mouths were open to bleat, but the sounds were lost in the shrieks and explosions of the artillery prep.
A goat sprang to the right, then tried to turn back to the left when it realized it had underestimated the combat car’s speed. It tumbled directly in front of High Hat’s bow skirts. The 50-tonne vehicle rode over the beast without a noticeable impact.
The shellfire stopped abruptly. The enormous howl of High Hat’s fans, driving the vehicle and supporting it on the bubble of air in the plenum chamber, was quiet by contrast.
As the pall of smoke and dust drifted lower across Tagrifah, High Hat roared past the running goatherds. One of the boys knelt, flinging his arms out and pressing his face in the dirt as a gesture of supplication. His companion simply stared at the huge vehicles. Tears ran down his cheeks.
Barbour looked back at the boys. He had to turn his whole body, because the back-and-breast armor held his torso rigid.
The combat cars braked as they neared the remains of the grove which had sheltered the south side of the village. Thirty-centimeter treeboles were scattered like jackstraws. They lay across one another, heaved up on the support of unbroken branches.
Barbour thought the tangle was impenetrable; the cars would have to go around. Captain Currant had a brief exchange over the intercom with her driver.
High Hat slowed to a crawl. The driver’s head vanished within his separate compartment in the forward hull. The hatch cover clanged over him.
The car butted into a treetrunk, skewing it forward and sideways. The roots, dripping clods of yellow clay, locked with those of another fallen tree and jammed firm.
The fans howled louder. Dirt rippled up around High Hat’s skirts. Air pressure was excavating the ground under the plenum chamber. The combat car shuddered, then leaped ahead, tossing fallen trees to left and right.
Munitions in the tunnel beneath the grove had shouldered the surface aside when they exploded. High Hat dipped into the long crater, blasting the loosened soil into the air. The car continued up the far side at a fast walking pace.
Tendrils of foul black smoke, the residue of stored explosives, rose where the combat car passed. Barbour thought he saw a human arm, but it could have been a twisted root instead.
The village Barbour had targeted was a ruin almost as complete as that of the grove.
A few minutes earlier, a casual observer would have taken Tagrifah for a harmless place, typical of this region of Kairouan. Even a patrol of the Frisian mercenaries in the pay of the Boumedienne government would probably have passed on, accepting the black looks and turned backs of the inhabitants as the normal due of an occupying army.
Robert Barbour had identified the village as a Kairene regimental headquarters without, until this moment, coming within fifty klicks of the place.
A few figures moved within the settling dust; women, an old man. A goat nosed a ripped grain sack with apparent unconcern for the raw wound on its left thigh.
With the fans at low speed, Barbour could hear scores of voices wailing. It was hard to believe so many people remained alive.
The houses of Tagrifah were wooden, raised a meter off the ground by stone foundations. Each crawl space served as a fold for the family’s goats. Most of the foundations had collapsed from a combination of airbursts and the ground’s rocking motion when delay-fuzed rounds went off beneath the surface.
“Via, Bob!” Captain Currant said, clapping her passenger across the shoulders. “It’s a walkover! You’re a fucking genius!”
Barbour had spent five years with the FDF, specializing in technical intelligence. He’d often surveyed the results line units obtained from his targeting information, but this was the first time he’d been in at the kill.
Literally at the kill.
“Didn’t leave us much to do,” the left gunner remarked. He turned and flashed Barbour a broad grin. “Which suits me just fine.”
“It wasn’t me,” Barbour muttered. “It was the artillery.”
He was holding the grenade launcher which Mamie Currant had handed him when he climbed aboard her car. He hadn’t fired such a weapon since he’d gone through training so many years before.
As the wing gunner had said, there was nothing in Tagrifah left to fire at.
“Don’t sell yourself short, Bob,” Currant said. “Popping shells off into the brown doesn’t do a curst bit of good. You told them where the targets were, and by the Lord! You did a great job.”