Reeves checked his link when their systems rebooted with the engine start, but he got a “NO SIGNAL” error message. He tapped the diagnostic button, watching his screen roll through some test displays until it finished with the reassuring message “PASS: NO FAULT DETECTED.”
“That’s odd,” he said. “No link into Brigade. Hey Gunny,” he called up to Corporal Holmes, who manned the 90mm main gun in the turret. “Everything squared away up there?”
“Locked and loaded, sir,” said Holmes. No problems here.”
Reeves normally took out one of the standard Dragon 300s with the Bushmaster 25mm gun, but this one was the up-gunned 90mm variant, and he decided to make it his ACV for this mission. The Corporal had aspiration of making Gunnery Sergeant when they shipped over, and so after a few months in the saddle here, Reeves waved his right hand in the sign of the cross over the man and pronounced him the new Gunnery Sergeant, saying no one would care a lick about his unsanctioned field promotion.
“Put the main turret on strike mode,” he said.
That would send a signal pulse back to Brigade indicating that his vehicle was armed and ready to fire. They would receive back one of three lights: green to authorize the action with a weapons free signal, yellow to hold fire and stand by, red for weapons tight. Reeves wanted to see if that signal link was operating.
“What’s the verdict?” he asked.
“The jury is still out, sir. I get no signal return, not even an indication the message was received.”
Reeves didn’t like that. What was going on with Brigade? His next option would be to break radio silence and send a direct call back to the HQ troop on the HF system. It would annoy one of the Colonels, but it was all encrypted and secure nonetheless. He reached for his communications handset, adjusting the fit of his earphones.
“1/12 Lancer to Brigade HQ. Lieutenant Reeves here. Please respond, over.”
There was no answer back, and after repeating his hail three times he began to get a bad feeling about the situation. What was going on here? Could there have been an incident he was not aware of, involving special weapons? Was Cobb right with that reading off the NBC module advising on the threat of EMP? Electromagnetic pulse was always a danger in the modern day warfighting environment. Their vehicles were hardened, but that was not entirely foolproof. He had seen his own vehicle flutter and die. Maybe they had the same trouble and were booting everything back up again. The weather wasn’t a factor, even though Tobruk was 375 miles east. Might they have a sand storm or some other complication affecting reception?
Reeves could think of no other reason why they should fail to get through, and the real reason was far from his awareness or comprehension—the presence of the USS Knight in Tobruk Bay.
The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. Time was balancing her books. It was not able to simply pull the collective mass of Kinlan’s Brigade forward and put it back where it belonged. That was beyond her means. Things often fell backwards in time when a hole opened, almost as if a strange kind of Time Gravity was pulling at them—but they did not move forward easily in the same manner.
What Mother Time could do, however, was push open the door between the time of that detonation in 2021, and the place where that strange teardrop object sat shuddering and glowing in the wardroom of the USS Knight. Time could not pull Kinlan and his machines out, but it could let Satan through the hole that opened, made bigger and more yawning by the awesome explosive power of that 500 kiloton warhead.
If Reeves had been looking out the hatch and over his shoulder, he might have seen that strange flash on the horizon, almost too far off to be noticed. But there at Tobruk the effects were more than noticed—they were catastrophic. A warhead that size was 25 times bigger than Little Boy and Fat Man, the weapons that had flattened Hiroshima and leveled Nagasaki. It was the size of the US Ivy King bomb test, which was the most powerful pure fission bomb ever detonated, though even that was dwarfed by the Russian Tsar Bomba detonation, a different kind of bomb that was a hundred times more powerful.
The entire force of Satan’s wrath did not come through that gaping hole in time, but the penetration was enough to wreak havoc. Tobruk, as it was known to all those who had fought and passed through that port town, no longer existed. Kinlan’s Brigade, all cuddled up to the southern shore of Tobruk Bay to receive the fuel O’Connor had promised, no longer existed either. The lower jaw of the harbor was broken, smashed, and a massive crater formed from the very low altitude detonation. A sea of earth and sand was first blown in all directions, then the raging cascading waters of the sea swept into the crater, and beyond into the desert. When those waters receded, they clawed back thousands of tons of sand, shattered earth and debris, eventually covering all that remained.
The Brigade was now scattered about the floor of that undersea crater, the heavy armor of those blasted Challenger IIs buried under tons of collapsing earth, silt, and soot. In places, the twisted barrel of an artillery piece jutted through the debris deep beneath the sea, its broken remains a testament to the folly of those who think to wield power. It was as if a star had fallen here, and no man survived its searing wrath.
Lieutenant Reeves would never again make contact with the HQ Troop. His single Dragon 300-L90 was now the sole remaining nerve center of the mighty 7th. It was ironic that the Brigade had made its storied entry into this war at the edge of the Sultan Apache oil production center in the deep desert to the south, and now it would make its unhappy departure because it was waiting right at the location of the main oil terminal at Tobruk in 2021.
They were all gone, the Mercians, the Highlanders, the Scots Dragoons. Reeves did not know it then, but he and his men were now the last of the Mohicans, he and the single battalion of Gurkhas that had shipped out to the Pacific long ago. He had that Dragon 300-L90, nine more Scimitars, three Warriors, a pair of FVS Tracked mortar carriers, three Challenger IIs, two fuel trucks, and one ammo truck.
Churchill’s magic wand was suddenly gone.
Part VIII
Ozymandias
Chapter 22
O’Connor continued his advance, with the 44th Home Counties Division turning off the main coastal road and heading inland to Nofilia. He had intended that a stronger British Division would then move on up the Via Balbia, but he first sent the independent 1st Tank Brigade along the road, with the 44th Recon Battalion detached as a scouting unit. The 4th Indian Division was next in line, but it also turned off the main road, intending to eventually deploy south of the 44th near Nofilia. This meant the main advance would be little more than a road clearing operation by that 1st Tank Brigade until the 51st Highlanders came up.
Over the next several days, the 8th Army slowly flowed west into the land abandoned by the Germans. The advance up the Via Balbia saw 51st Highland Division reached As Sultan, just nine kilometers from the positions of the 164th Light in their blocking position along Wadi Hiran. O’Connor had finally found his enemy again and began formulating his plan of attack. The Highlanders would lead the assault on the coast, and right behind them, like a great steel battering ram, would come the infantry tanks of 1st Tank Brigade, with 46 Shermans and over 40 Matildas rigged out as special armored engineering tanks to breach wire and mines.