Combat

Excerpts from The New Ways of War: Politico-Military Evolution in the Opening Decades of the Twenty-first Century.

Professor Christine Arkady,

University of Southern California Press, 2035

Much to the consternation of the international community, the African race wars raged on into the new millennium, but not in the format of the old black and white South African conflict. African and Afrikaner came to accommodations with comparative rapidity following the end of apartheid in the 1990s. Replacing it was a new, ominous, and growing confrontation between black and brown.

In a great arc across the African Sahel from the Atlantic to the Sudan, an almost continuous series of border clashes and minor insurgencies sputtered and flared between the Arabic-Moorish nations of North Africa and the Black African states of the Sub-Sahara. Fueled by racism, newborn nationalistic pride and old tribal enmities, and fanned by self-seeking political leaders and Islamic radicals, the potential for an open conflagration loomed large within the region.

The flash point came in the fall of 2021. The Islamic Republic of Algeria, the new primary troublemaker among the northern tier Arabic states, began beating the drum of Jihad against Mali, its immediate neighbor to the south. Taking up the cause of a small Mali-based group of Tuareg separatists with a sudden and suspicious vociferousness, the Algerians launched a major military buildup along the Mali border, all the while calling for a “liberation of our Muslim brothers from the black animists.”

This in the face of the fact that the vast majority of Mali’s population was also Islamic, albeit of a decidedly more moderate cast than the Revolutionary Council in Algiers.

Mali, in and of itself, was no great prize for any would-be conqueror. Wracked by drought and desertification, it was a strong contender for the title of the poorest nation on Earth. In a strategic military sense, though, it represented a pearl beyond price for any potential empire builder coveting Northwestern Africa. The largest of the West African states, Mali is set in the literal heart of the region. Every other nation around the West African periphery is vulnerable to an invasion staging out of Malian territory.

Reacting to that threat, and to the pleas for assistance from the Malian government, the West African Economic Federation deployed counterforces into Mali in the first major regional security operation ever launched by that fledgling organization. However, although willing, the WAEF combat units were woefully outnumbered and underequipped to face the armored juggernaut being assembled by the Algerians. Chairman Belewa of the Federation Board of Unity, an intensely realistic statesman, dispatched an urgent request for military assistance to both the United States and France.

France replied with a Force d’Intervencion task group built around the First Regiment Etranger d’Cavalerie. The United States deployed the Second Army Expeditionary Force with two attached elements: the Thirteenth Aviation Brigade (Support) and the Seventh Cavalry Regiment (Armored Strike).

It was hoped that the presence of the Legionnaires and the Garryowens on the ground in Mali would serve as a trip-wire deterrent to Algerian military adventurism.

The hope proved to be false.

The Western Sahara 300 Km North-Northwest of Timbuktu 1454 Hours, Zone Time; October 28, 2021

Lieutenant Jeremy Bolde rode in ABLE’s open commander’s hatch with the balanced ease born of long practice. His wiry, well-muscled form flowed with each jolt and lurch of the big Shinseki armored fighting vehicle in much the same way as a skilled rider moved with the trail pacing of his horse. In that portion of his mind not involved with his focused and deliberate scanning of the surrounding terrain, the words of a song from the old army circled past, his sun-cracked lips pursed in an unheard whistle.

Abruptly, the shrill alarm tone of the threat board squalled in the earphones of his helmet. At the same instant, Bolde felt ABLE swerve sharply beneath him as his driver, Specialist Third (Vehicle Operations) Rick Santiago locked the wheel over in an instinctive turn-and-accelerate evasion.

Bolde hit the seat control selector with the palm of his hand, dropping himself down through the commander’s cupola and into the cab beside Santiago, the hatch lid thudding closed over his head.

“What do we have?” he demanded.

“Our point drone was just painted by a ground scan radar,” Warrant Officer First (Velectronics Operations) Bridget Shelleen reported crisply from behind Bolde’s shoulder.

“Any indication of a targeting acquisition?”

“I don’t think so.” The intense little redhead leaned into the drone operations station on the starboard cab bulkhead, her fingers dancing across the keypads as she pumped a series of commands into the datalinks. “CHARLIE was just cresting a dune line when he was blipped. I’ve reversed him back into the radar shadow. Contact broken. With the luck of the Lord and Lady, they’ll think he was a dust transitory.”

“How about us, Brid? Are we still clean?”

“No painting indicated. CHARLIE is running about ten klicks out ahead of us. We’re still below the scan horizon of whatever is out there.”

“Right. Recall CHARLIE. Low speed. Minimize dust plume. Rick, find us a hide. We’re going to ground.”

“Doi’ it, LT,” ABLE’s wheelman yelled back over the whir and rumble of the wheels. “We got a qued off to the left. I just gotta find us a go-down.”

At eighty kilometers an hour, the armored cavalry vehicle roared along parallel to a dry wash. Such queds were one of the few, rare terrain variances to be found amid the broad expanses of sand-and-gravel fesh fesh plain that predominate in northern Mali.

Driving right-handed, Santiago used his left to manipulate the settings of the ride control panel, backing off the air pressure in ABLE’s eight massive Kevlar-belted tires from HARD SURFACE to ALL TERRAIN and dialing a few extra inches of ground clearance into the suspension.

Ahead he saw a point where the qued bank had collapsed, giving him a steep but usable access ramp to the ravine floor. “Okay going down. Hey, back in the scout bay! Hang on! Rough ride!”

He braked hard, swung the wheel over, and avalanched his vehicle down the crumbling slope. The suspension sprawled and angled, autoconforming to the terrain and keeping ABLE’s twenty-two tons centered over her wheelbase. Tire cleats dug in, then slipped, and the big war machine slither-crashed to the floor of the twenty-meter-wide dry streambed in an explosion of dust and sprayed earth, the pneumatic seats of her crew bouncing hard against their stops. Santiago leaned on his accelerator and ABLE lunged forward again, the eight-by-eight drives scrabbling for traction in the sand.

Another avalanche could be seen in the sideview mirrors. BAKER, Saber section’s second gun drone, waddled down the slope after the command vehicle, its onboard artificial intelligences obediently station-keeping in their tactical default mode.

“How far you want me to work up the wash, LT?”

“Get us clear of our entry point.” Bolde computed artillery spread patterns in his mind, judging clearances. When they’d put two bends in the streambed between themselves and the spot where they had disappeared from surface view, he nodded to his driver. “Okay, Rick, shut down and power down!”

ABLE shuddered to a halt, her turbines fading out with a whispering moan. A metallic hiss followed as the cavalry vehicle hunkered closer to the ground, her suspension lowering into a vehicular crouch.

In the forward compartment, an instinctive stream of orders flowed from Bolde.

“Brid, raise the sensor mast and go to full passive scan. I want a threat review! Rick, prep the Cypher for launch. Mary May! Deploy your ground pickets!”

“Yes sir,” Spec 5 (Ground Combat) Mary May Jorgenson yelled from the scout team bay back aft. “Ramp going down. Scouts, set overwatch! Go!”

The tail ramp thudded open, and boots rang on aluminum decking.

Even as he issued his commands, Bolde personally involved himself in the security of the laager point. Accessing onboard fire control through the commander’s station, he assumed direction of ABLE’s primary weapons pack.

In road mode, the boom mount of the weapons pack normally rode angled back over the stern of the cavalry vehicle like the cocked stinger tail of a scorpion. Now it straightened and extended, lifting the twin box launchers of the Common Modular Missile system above the lip of the wash. The telescopic lenses of a target-acquisition sensor cluster peered from between the launchers, as did the stumpy barrel of a 25mm OCSW (Objective Crew Served Weapon). Much like the attack periscope of a submarine, the weapons mount began a slow and deliberate rotation, scanning the horizon.

Scowling, Bolde watched the camera image pan past on his master display. Nothing moved out across the desert except for the perpetual heat shimmer. To the north, toward the rippling dune line, a single thin streak of dust played along the ground. A blue computer graphics arrowhead hovered over it, however, designating a friendly. CHARLIE drone returning from his point probe.

As the camera turned to the south, more friendly activity was revealed. A figure clad in desert camouflage snaked over the edge of the qued. Carrying his SABR (Selectable Assault Battle Rifle) over his forearms, Specialist Third Nathan Grey Bird snaked across a narrow stretch of gravel in a fluid infantry crawl, vanishing into a low clump of rocks with a deft alacrity that would have brought pride to the heart of his Shoshone-Bannock warrior ancestors.

Specialist Second Johnny Roman had his outpost established on the opposite bank of the qued and Specialist Second Lee Trebain could be seen through ABLE’s Armorglas windshield, establishing a sentry point farther ahead along the wash floor. Sensor systems were all well and good, but the “mark one eyeball” was still the hardest sensor in the world to fool. Saber section would not trust its security to electronics alone, not while one Lieutenant Jeremy Bolde commanded.

Bolde disarmed the weapons pack and allowed the boom to retract back into travel mode. Arming off his bulky HMD helmet, he replaced it with the dust- and sweat-stained cavalry terai that had been riding atop the dashboard, settling the hat over his short-trimmed, sandy hair at the precisely proper “Jack Duce” angle. The black slouch-brimmed Stetsons had been revived by the new cavalry as their answer to the berets of the Ranger and Special Forces regiments, a distinctive badge of branch individuality. The difference was that the Airborne units looked upon their signature headgear as being, for the most part, ceremonial. The Cav looked upon theirs as essential field equipment.

“Pickets are out, Lieutenant. Ground security set.” Mary May Jorgenson came forward from the scout compartment through the narrow passage between the two mid-vehicle powerbays.

Man-tall and broad-shouldered for a woman, Mary May was one of the elite few female personnel to match the rigorous physical parameters required by the Army for a Ground Combat Specialist’s rating. Yet for all of her inherent and repeatedly proven toughness, there was still a large degree of the mellow Nebraska farm girl in her blue-eyed and lightly freckled countenance.

Wearing BDU trousers and a flak vest over a khaki tee shirt, she carried an M9 service pistol on her right hip. However the 9mm Beretta automatic was carried in a left-handed holster, butt forward in the old dragoon’s draw. She, too, wore a battered terai cocked low over her brows.

“What’s up, Lieutenant?” she inquired, leaning back against the rear bulkhead. “Are we in contact?”

“With something,” Bolde replied, rotated his seat so it faced the systems operator’s station. “How about it, Brid. What do we have out there?”

“A single battlefield-surveillance radar,” the systems operator replied, her attention still focused on the telepanels of her console. “With our mast up, I’m receiving an identifiable side lobe from it. Emission ID file indicates a Ukrainian made Teal/Specter system …. Multimode … About five years old … And it matches a unit type known to be in Algerian service.”

She sat back in her seat and looked across at Bolde. “We are indeed in contact with the enemy, sir. And given the emission strength and beam angle, the unit must be operating from an elevation.”

“Hell!” Bolde permitted himself the single short curse. “They beat us to the pass.”

Terrain defines the battlefield. Unfortunately, for all intents and purposes, northern Mali doesn’t have any. No rivers, no mountains, no forests, no swamps. Just extensive, arid plains of baked earth and fesh fesh intermittently blanketed by the migrating sand dunes of the Sahara.

The one exception was the El Khnachich range. A line of low, rugged hills arcing from east to west, midway between Algerian border and Timbuktu, it was the sole high ground in an ocean of flatness.

The Taoudenni caravan track, the closest thing to a road that existed in this part of the world, ran southward through a pass in the range. For centuries, the Taoudenni track had been a link joining Algeria with the Niger River valley. Thirty-six hours before, when the Algerian army had stormed across the undefended and indefensible Mali border, one entire mechanized division had been vectored down this beaten sand pathway, its mission to seize that route southward into Mali’s fertile heartland.

In a countermove, Troop B, First of the Seventh had been ordered north from its patrol base in Timbuktu to meet the thrust, a fanged and venomous mouse charging an elephant. For the first time in modern human history, the hills of El Khnachich were important.

The systems operator called up a tactical map on her main display. The hill range and the pass lay perhaps twenty-five kilometers ahead on the section’s line of advance. Blue IDed unit hacks glowed near the bottom of the map, indicating the position of Saber section’s dispersed elements. A single hostile target box pulsed in the southern mouth of the pass.

“Darn!” Mary May yanked off her hat and slid down the bulkhead to sit on the pebbled rubber antiskid of the vehicle deck. “I thought the noon sitrep said that the Algies were still watering up at Taoudenni oasis.”

“The bulk of the division was,” Bolde grunted, his angularly handsome features impassive. “But they were already starting to push their lead elements south. I suspect they rammed some fast movers forward to play King of the Hill. Any sign they’ve got anything over on our side yet, Brid?”

The SO shook her head, her firefall of hair brushing the back of her neck. “Nothing’s indicated. CHARLIE didn’t spot anything, and I’m not picking up any tactical communications on the standard Algerian bands. If they have any units fanning out on this side of the slope, they’re running an extremely tight EMCON, and that’s not like them. We’ll have to go eyes up to be certain, though.”

“Then let’s do it. Get off a contact report to Bravo six then put up the Cipher. I want to see what we have crawling around out there.”

The Cipher reconnaissance drone was literally a flying saucer. Or perhaps to be even more precise, a flying doughnut, a flattened discoid aeroform four feet in diameter with two contrarotating lift fans in its center. A puff of compressed air launched it out of its docking bay on ABLE’s broad back. Bobbling in a hover for a moment over the dry wash, it autostabilized then darted away to the north, skimming an effortless ten feet above the desert’s surface.

The drone rotated slowly as it flew. The television camera built into the rim of its sturdy stealth composite fuselage intently scanned the surrounding environment, the imaging being fed back via a jitter frequency datalink to its mother station in ABLE’s cab. There, in turn, a slender hand on a computer joystick clicked a series of waypoints onto a computer-graphics map, guiding the little Remotely Piloted Vehicle on its way.

On the main screen, the rusty red wall of the Khnachich range rose above the dune lines.

“I’m not seeing anything moving out there,” Mary May commented from her position, seated cross-legged on the deck.

“Nothing as big as an armored column at any rate.” Bolde glanced at the ECM threat boards. “And nobody is emitting except for that one radar on the high ground. Brid, take the drone out to the west a ways and then take it up to the ridgeline. We’ll move it back east along the crest and have a look down into that pass.”

Shelleen nodded her reply, her expression fixed and intent on the drone-control readouts.

Even at the Cipher’s best speed, it took over a quarter of an hour to maneuver the drone into its designated observation position. At one point, as the RPV climbed the jagged stone face of the hill range, the video image on the display flickered and the datalink inputs faded as line of sight was broken between the drone and its controller. Instantly, Shelleen’s hands flashed across the keypads, rerouting the links through one of the flight of Long-Duration Army Communications drones orbiting over the Mali theater at a hundred thousand feet.

The imaging smoothed out and Bolde rewarded his SO with a slight, appreciative nod of his head.

In due course, the drone’s position hack on the tactical display and the image on the television monitor indicated that the drone was approaching the gut of the pass. Shelleen eased the RPV to a hover just below the crest of the last saddleback. “No closer,” she advised, “or they’ll hear the fans.”

“Okay. Blip her up. ‘Then we shall see’ as the blind man said.”

The systems operator tapped a key. Twenty miles away, the drone’s motor raced for an instant, popping the little machine an additional hundred feet into the air. For a few seconds before dropping back out of sight below the lateral ridge, the RPV’s sensors could look down into the mouth of the pass.

“Oh yeah,” Mary May commented. “They beat us here all right.”

Bolde reached forward for the monitor playback controls and froze the image.

It was the usual multinational hodgepodge of military equipment that had become commonplace in the post — Cold War Armies of the Third World.

The previously detected Teal/Specter radar track and its generator trailer sat parked in the center of the road. Mounted on the hull of a BMP 3 Armored Personnel Carrier, the radar unit’s slablike phasedarray antenna swung deliberately in a slice-of-pie scan of the desert below.

Backed deeper into the cut behind it, deftly positioned to blast any radar-hunting fighter-bomber or gunship making a pass on the Teal/ Specter unit, was a massive, tracked antiair vehicle, its rectangular turret bristling with multiple autocannon barrels and missile tubes. A Russian 2S6M Tunguska or, more than likely, an Indian-produced copy of the same.

Then there were Scylla and Charybdis, a pair of eight-wheeled Otobreda Centauros parked out on either flank of the pass entry. The longtubed 105mm cannon mounted in the turrets of the big Italian-built tank destroyers angled downward, covering the narrow road that switchbacked up from the flats.

In the face of the day’s heat, the Algerian crews swarmed around their vehicles, concealing them not only with visual-sight camouflage netting, but also with RAM antiradar tarpaulins and anti-infrared insulation. Stone defensive revetments were being stacked up as well, indicating that this was more than a brief stretch-and-cigarette stop.

“Okay, Brid. Walk us over the pass. Let’s see what else they have down there.”

“What else” proved to be half a dozen more armored fighting vehicles dispersed along the winding floor of the pass. Tracked and lowriding, with the Slavic design school’s distinctive flattened “frying pan” turret shape mounted aft of center, their crews were hard at work digging them in as well.

“Six Bulgarian BRM-30 scout tracks and a pair of Centauros,” Mary May commented. “That’s a full Algerian Recon company. The radar rig and the Tunguska would be mission attachments.”

“The question being just what that mission is.” Bolde slid out of his seat and hunkered down on the deck beside the system operator’s chair to get a clearer view of the station displays. “Brid, take us north a little more. I want to get a view of what’s happening on the other side of this ridge.”

“Not a problem,” she replied, setting the new waypoint.

It wasn’t. In another minute or two the drone went into hover again, offering its masters a panoramic vista of the plains to the north of the El Khnachich. The caravan road was a pale trace across the desert floor. Clustered about it, perhaps fifteen kilometers beyond the hill range, a number of massive dust plumes rose into the air.

“There’s the rest of your division,” Shelleen commented, “or a goodly chunk thereof.”

“Agreed,” Bolde replied slowly, “but not in road column. It looks like they’re dispersing.”

“They are, LT,” Santiago added. The driver had swiveled his seat around, joining the ad hoc command conference. “From the look of that dust kick-up, you got a series of company-sized detachments peeling off the main road and fanning out.”

“Yeah.” Mary May nodded up from the floor. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say those guys were dispersing to go into a night laager.”

Bolde glanced down at his head scout. “Why do we know better, Mary May?”

The young woman shrugged. “Because they’ve no reason to stop and lots to keep going, Lieutenant. You never halt on the near side of a low river ford or a clear mountain pass. It might not be low or clear the next day when you want to move again.”

“Yeah. That’s how we’d do it. But then the gentleman who’s running that outfit may not necessarily play by the same rules that we do.” Bolde let his voice trail off as he contemplated possibilities.

“Probably,” he said after a half minute’s pause, “that Algi division is strung out along a good seventy — eighty kilometers of the Taoudenni road about now. They’re stuck with staying on it because their logistics groups are still using trucks instead of high-mobility all-terrain vehicles. They can’t move too fast for that same reason. That caravan route is literally just a camel trail.

“Now, a lot of Third World commanders still aren’t too comfortable with large-unit operations after nightfall. Let’s also say that the Algi general running this outfit is a conservative and cautious kind of guy, again like a lot of Third World commanders.

“He’s got night coming on, a replenishment coming up, and he knows that there’s likely U.S. and Legion Armored Cav out here hunting for him. The idea of being draped across this range of hills with some of his maneuver elements on one side and some on the other come oh dark hundred might not appeal to him too much.”

“It wouldn’t to me either,” Shelleen noted thoughtfully. “There are things a raider could do with a situation like that.”

“Indeed there are, Miss Shelleen,” Bolde agreed, lifting an eyebrow. “And I was hoping to try some of them out tonight. Unfortunately, our Algerian friend appears to be playing it safe. He’s run a fast recon element out ahead to secure this pass. That will do a couple of things for him. For one, it’ll plug up the obvious route another mechanized unit would have to take to get at his main. For another it will give him an observation post on the high ground.

“That battlefield radar will give him early warning of any major force moving in from the south. If one shows up, he can engage at long range with artillery, spotting from the pass mouth. He knows he’s got way more tubes and rails on this side of Mali than we do, so he’ll have the edge in any potential gun duel.

“So covered, he figures he can safely fort up overnight north of the pass to regroup and resupply. Come first light, when he doesn’t have to worry so much about being bushwhacked, he can push his entire division rapidly through the choke point of the pass. Once he’s got his maneuver battalions out into open country again, he can trust in his massed firepower to bust him through any light-force screen we can throw in front of him.”

Bolde’s planning staff exchanged glances, wordlessly discussing their leader’s analysis. Bridget Shelleen voiced their findings. “That very well could be what we’re seeing here, sir. The question is, what are we going to do about it?”

“What indeed. What indeed.” Bolde accessed a secondary screen on the workstation, filling it with a graphics-map tactical display of the immediate region. He added an overlay showing Saber section’s position as well as that of the known hostile units. Using the console touch pad, he drew in the potential laager sites of the remainder of the Algerian division. Then he considered once more.

Minutes passed and Mary May Jorgenson stirred restlessly from her seat on the deck plates. “It wouldn’t be too much trouble to mess up that recon outfit in the pass. My guys and I could get up on the ridges overlooking their positions and laser designate for our CMMs. We could take ’em out, no problem.”

“Yeah, we could do that,” Bolde replied slowly. “But how much would that gain us or cost the bad guys? We could kill that recon company, all right. But is that our best potential shot? If we are serious about slowing the Algis down, we’ll have to maximize our strike effect. We’ll have to nurse as much bang out of our buck as is conceivable, even if it means stretching the sensibility envelope to a degree.”

“L’audace, l’audace, toujours, l’audace,” Shelleen murmured.

“Precisely. The problem is that we are down here—” Bolde’s fingertip touched the blue position hack at the bottom of the map display—“and all the really good stuff is up there.” His finger climbed up the map to the Algerian laager zone. “Tonight, the Algis are going to be in static positions, refueling and rearming. Their logistics groups are going to be up forward and intermixed with their maneuver battalions. That’s when they will be at their most vulnerable and when we could do the most damage.

“Thing is, the Algis are playing it smart. They’ve read their copy of Jane’s All the World’s Weapons Systems and they’re going to ground far enough back from this hill range so that we can’t toss anything over the rocks at them. If we want to hurt them, really hurt them, we’ll have to get over on that north side with them, and they can’t know we’re there until it’s too late.”

Bolde looked back over his shoulder at his driver. “How about it, Rick? Can you get us over these hills without using the pass?”

The lean and moustached Latino gave a slight shrug. “It’s gonna depend on the surfaces and gradients, LT. Miss Shelleen, could you show me the slope profile on that stretch of range ahead of us?”

“Coming up.” Pad keys rattled.

A new overlay appeared on the tactical display, a mottled red, yellow, and blue transparency draped across the contour lines of the map. This was a gauging of the slopes and angles of the El Khnachich range as laser and radar surveyed by a Defense Mapping Agency topographical satellite cross-referenced with the cross-country performance capacity of the Shinseki Multi-Mission Combat Vehicle family.

“Yeah, we got somethin’ here.” Santiago levered himself out of the driver’s seat and crowded in with the others around the workstation. “See,” he indicated in interlocking sequence of yellow and blue areas on the map. “It looks like I can get us over that next saddleback to the west of the pass. The grades look good anyway.”

“How about surfacing?” Bolde inquired.

“I kept an eye on the visuals we were getting from the drone. It looks like we got some shale-and-gravel slopes and some boulder fields, but nothing we can’t beat.”

“And how about the Algis? Do you think they might suspect somebody could crawl through that hole?”

A faintly condescending smile tugged at the driver’s lips. “Treadheads always have a problem believing what a Shinseki can do, LT. The Algerians don’t have a vehicle that could get over that saddleback. I’m willing to bet that they’ll figure we don’t either.”

Santiago straightened and took a step back, collapsing into the driver’s seat again. “The problem is, sir, while I think I can get us over that sucker, I’m not going to be able to do it fast. Especially if I have to be sneaky while I’m doing it.”

“How about if you don’t have to be sneaky? We’ll be tiptoeing going in, but we’ll be pretty much running flat out when we extract. Can you get us back out over this route before the Algis can zero us?”

Santiago held out his hand, palm down, and rocked it in an ominously so-so manner. “The main force isn’t what’s sweating me, LT. My beast and I can outrun pretty much anything that moves on treads if we get half a chance. What I’m worried about is that recon company up in the pass. They can’t cut us off moving laterally along the ridge. Like I said, their vehicles can’t hack the climbing. But if they move fast enough, they could either drop down out of the pass and intercept us short of the hills as we fall back, or they could be waiting for us over on the other side. It wouldn’t take much. They’d only have to hold us in place for a couple of minutes, just long enough for their pursuit forces to close up and engage and … fiiit!”

Santiago drew his thumbnail across his throat, matching graphic action to graphic sound.

“A valid point, Rick,” Bolde replied, rocking back on his heels. “To secure our line of retreat, we’re going to need to give that recon company in the pass something else to think about. Mary May, you were talking about taking those guys out. Do you think you and your team could do the job without the direct support of the vehicles?”

The young woman tilted her head down so that the brim of her hat concealed her eyes and her expression as she thought. When she lifted her head again, she looked composed and confident. Only a faint reddening of her lower lip indicated how she had bitten it. “No problem, Lieutenant. We’ll have the terrain and the surprise factor. We can keep ’em busy.”

“Okay then. Brid, recall the Cipher.” Bolde glanced around the cab of the command vehicle, meeting his troopers’ eyes as he spoke. “Here’s how we’re going to do it. We’ve got some pretty good cover here, so we’ll lie doggo for the rest of the afternoon. We’ll keep the pass under observation, run some mission prep and get a little rest. If the Algis do go to ground and if we have the same tactical situation come nightfall, we’ll develop an Ops plan. We all good with this? All right, then let us proceed.”

The remaining hours of the afternoon passed in a breathless shimmer of heat, the smears of shade produced by the walls of the qued a priceless commodity beneath the torchblast of the sun. The expanse of desert around the vehicle hide remained empty, barring the passage of a herd of rare Saharan gazelles. As they materialized out of the mirage fields, their delicacy and grace stood in stark contrast to the harshness of the land.

The only hint of war came when two pairs of frost-colored contrails climbed above the horizons, one pair coming from the north, the other from the south.

They met and tangled lazily in the desert zenith, sparks of sunflame glinting from cockpit canopies and banking wingtips. One by one, over a period of a single minute, the snowy streamers of yarn terminated, turning dark and arcing toward the earth below, or ending abruptly in a smoke blotch against the milky azure sky.

The lone survivor turned away to the south. Bolde and his troopers watched for any sign of a descending parachute but all that was seen was the tumbling flicker of falling metal fragments.

Tired of its day’s brutality, the sun drifted below the horizon.

Jeremy Bolde typed the words onto the flatscreen of the communications workstation, located on the left-side bulkhead behind the driver’s seat. Reaching forward, he tapped the transmit key. Instantly, his sentence was encrypted and compressed down into a microburst transmission too brief to be fixed on by a radio direction finder. Tightbeamed up from the dish antenna atop ABLE’s cab, the blip transmission was received by a station-keeping relay drone and then fired downward again to the Bravo Troop command vehicle some two hundred miles away to the southeast.

Awaiting the response, Bolde tilted the console seat back, the creak of the chair mount loud against the only other two sounds in the cab, the low purr of the air-conditioning and the quiet snoring of Rick Santiago. ABLE’s driver had his own seat tilted back to its farthest stop and his terai tipped down over his eyes, raking in a few precious minutes of sack drill. Even when ABLE was in laager, Rick could generally be found lounging behind the cavalry vehicle’s wheel, an aspect of the almost symbiotic relationship he had developed with his massive armor-sheathed mount.

Bolde was pleased his driver could get some rest. He wished he could do as well. Maybe later.

Then the answer to his query flashed back on his screen, erasing any thought of sleep.

The datalink transmission continued hastily.

There wasn’t anything else to do except to type

A secondary screen on the console lit off, indicating that a data dump was under way from the troop command vehicle carrying intelligence updates, refreshed battlemaps, and weather projections, the sole aid their CO could dispatch.

Bolde secured the transmitter and retracted the roof antenna. For a long moment, he studied the last glowing lines on the communications screen. After a moment, he chuckled with soft self-derisiveness. What was that line George C. Scott had said in Patton? The one just before El Guettar, “All of my life I have dreamed of leading a large number of men in a desperate battle.”

Well, while he had no large number of men, the desperation level was certainly adequate. Brid Shelleen, with her somewhat “different” worldview would say that he had created this moment and this situation for himself. He had asked and the universe had given.

For he, Lieutenant Jeremy Randolph Bolde, had dreamed of being a warfighter, not merely a soldier, or a career army officer, but a combatant. For as long as he could recall, Bolde had hungered for what Patton had called the “sting of battle,” for the chance to test himself in the ultimate crucible.

Such concepts and attitudes were decisively not “PC” these days, not even within the Officers’ Corps, or within his own old Army family. But they had smoldered on deep down in his belly where he lived, and they flared hot and bright now.

Hail, Universe! If this night is your gift to me, I thank you for it.

Bolde called up a large-scale tactical map on the big screen. Tilting the seat back, he studied the display, absorbing each terrain feature and deployment point.

They would be overwhelmingly outnumbered, but that was almost an irrelevancy. Classically, cavalry almost always fights outnumbered. But then again, the cavalry trooper almost always had three good allies ready to ride at his side: speed, shock, and surprise. Utilize them properly, and they could go a long way toward leveling the odds. He must use them in precisely the right way tonight.

Also, while the modern armored cavalry section was, pound for pound and trooper for trooper, the most tactically powerful small military unit in history, he must dole that power out one critically metered spoonful at a time to maximize its effect against the enemy. Definitely a most interesting exercise.

Without Bolde realizing it, his lips pursed and a whispering whistle drifted around the command cab.

Mary May Jorgenson stood beside CHARLIE in the twilight, putting the gun drone through a systems check cycle. As with the section command vehicle, CHARLIE was an MM15 Shinseki Multi-Mission Combat Vehicle configured for armored cavalry operations, a sleekly angular boat-shaped hull the size of a large RV, riding on eight man-tall tires. Unlike ABLE, it carried a decisively different payload of systems and weapons. CHARLIE, and his brother BAKER, were the dedicated stone killers of the team.

Configured for robotic operation, CHARLIE’s cab windshield and crew gunports had been plated over. Squat sensor turrets were mounted in the driver’s and commander’s hatches, giving the drone a slightly froglike appearance. A low casemate had been fitted atop the aft third of the hull, the mount for a Lockheed/IMI 35mm booster gun. The slender, jacketed tube of the hypervelocity weapon extended the full length of the drone’s spine to a point five feet beyond its nose.

Using the trackball on the remote testing pad, Mary May tested the fifteen-degree traverse and elevation of the booster gun, then cycled the chain drive of the action, carefully keeping the magazines and propellant tanks on safety. Her head tilted in the dimming light, she critically listened to the clatter of the rotary breech mechanism, trusting her own judgment as well as the pad displays.

The blip of another key tested the twelve CMM artillery rounds slumbering in their vertical-launch array in the drone’s forward compartment. The touch of a third verified the readiness of the Claymore reactive panels scabbed onto CHARLIE’s composite armor skin. Checks done. Boards green. Mary May unjacked the remote pad from the drone’s exterior systems access. They were ready to rock.

Boots crunched on the gravel of the qued as Nathan Grey Bird trudged up from BAKER’s parking point. Her assistant scout leader had been running an identical testing cycle of the second drone. “How’s Mr. B looking, Nate?” Mary May inquired.

“Pretty much good,” the stocky, bronze-skinned trooper replied. “One of the secondary link aerials was acting sort of shorty, so I replaced it. And that first wheel motor on the right side’s leaking oil again. I topped it up and we’ll be okay for tonight, but for sure we got a busted seal on that unit.” Mary May nodded. “I’ll write it up. The next time we see the shop column, we’ll get it pulled.”

“Whenever that might be.” Grey Bird grinned, white teeth flashing. “We pulling out soon?”

“The LT says as soon as we hit full dark. I’d say that’ll be inside the hour.” Mary May passed Grey Bird her testing pad. “Secure that for me, will you, Nate. Then go on up to ABLE and kill some rations. We’ll eat, then switch off on picket with Johnny and Lee so they can get a not-on-the-move meal, too.”

“You got it, Five. You comin’ along now?”

“In a minute. Save me the pizza MRE if Rick hasn’t already snagged it out of the box.”

Mary May caught up her carbine from where it leaned against one of CHARLIE’s wheels and started back down the wash. Warrant Officer Shelleen had walked down the draw a few minutes before, and the scout wanted to verify that everything was all right with her. Or at least that was the excuse Mary May gave herself.

In actuality, she was motivated by a continuing and nagging curiosity about Saber’s systems operator. When Mary May had elected to join the Army, one of her reasons had been to see new things and meet new people. Never in her wildest imaginings however had she ever visualized herself serving beside a genuine, spell-casting, card-carrying witch.

A smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. She never mentioned Warrant Officer Shelleen’s religious preferences in any of her letters home. Mary May’s family were all hard-shell Lutheran, and she didn’t need Uncle Joseph and Aunt Gertrude writing their congressmen.

Mary May lightened her footsteps as she approached the shallow bay in the wall of the wash that she had seen Warrant Officer Shelleen enter, not desiring to disturb, yet aware that she might. In the growing shadows she noted a slender figure kneeling on the sand of the qued floor, facing away to the south. A palm-sized splash of diesel oil burned bluely on the ground before her, and the silver-hafted dagger the SO carried lay on the sand at her knees, its blade aimed at the heart of the flame. Bridget Shelleen’s arms were uplifted shoulder high, and her head was lowered, a soft whispered pattern of words escaping from her lips.

Mary May hesitated, a ripple of unease touching her, the discomfort sometimes felt by the average person when in the presence of a truly and genuinely devout individual.

Shelleen’s whisper faded away and the whicker of the wind in the wash was the only lingering sound. For a long minute, the systems operator continued to kneel, statue-still. Then, gracefully, she leaned forward and scooped up a double handful of sand and poured it over the patch of flame. Lifting the dagger from the ground, she made a decisive gesture with it as if she were slashing through some invisible line or thread that surrounded her. The blade disappeared into her boot sheath and the redhead rose and turned to face Mary May, her movements an effortless catlike flow.

Unnerved at so suddenly finding herself regarded by those large and level green eyes, Mary May asked with a forced lightness, “Casting a spell on the Algis, Miss Shelleen?”

A wisecrack wasn’t at all what she had wanted to say but she’d had to do something to recover her equilibrium.

“Oh no,” Shelleen replied with a calm seriousness. “The Law of Return would make that a very bad idea.”

“The Law of Return?”

“Yes. One of the root laws of all magic,” the systems officer replied, picking up her flak vest and pistol belt from where she had set them aside. “‘So as you conjure, so shall you receive back fourfold.’ Invoking a negative conjuration, a black magic if you will, against the Algerians could come back and hit us far harder than it would the enemy. I was only addressing the Lord and the Lady, asking them for strength, protection, and wisdom for us all this night.”

Mary May tilted her head questioningly. “You mean like you were only praying?”

“Essentially.” Shelleen smiled back.

The two women started back up the ravine to the vehicle hide through the deepening shadows. Overhead, the first star seeped through the darkening blue of the sky.

“War,” Mary May asked eventually. “Can I ask you something?”

“Why not?”

“Well, the word is that you were once a model in New York or something. How did you ever become … a soldier?”

Again, “soldier” wasn’t what she’d meant to say, but that’s how it had come out. The warrant officer shot her a knowing glance and smiled again.

“Yes, I did have the start of a modeling career once,” she replied, slinging her flak vest over her shoulder. “I also had the start of a very unhappy, meaningless, and self-destructive life. So I started to look around for something to hold on to. Eventually, I found the beliefs of my Celtic ancestors, Wicca or Paganism as it is known to some. It was something that worked for me, giving me a degree of peace although not of contentment.

“I continued my studies and, upon my becoming a priestess, I elected to confront my destiny once and for all. I undertook a time of fasting and spiritual seclusion, a spirit quest as it is called by the American Indian. During it, I asked for the Lady to show me the path I should be following during this stage of my life.”

“Did she?” Mary May asked, intrigued in spite of herself.

Shelleen nodded. “She did. She came to me as the Lady of the South Wind, armor-clad, the guardian and the woman warrior. I had my answer. So, I went back to New York, fired my agent, tore up my contracts, and joined the Army.”

She smiled a sudden impish grin. “And yes, there are any number of people who think that I have gone totally and completely insane.”

Mary May chuckled. “A lot of my family think the same thing about me. What do you think now? Was it the right call?”

Bridget Shelleen paused just short of ABLE’s tail ramp and swept her arm around the vehicle hide. “Here, I find I am centered,” she replied, looking into the scout’s face. “Here, for the first time in my life, I can say that I am exactly where I’m supposed to be. If you can do that, I suppose you aren’t doing so badly.”

Mary May Jorgenson could not disagree.

The South Face of the El Khnachich Range Three-quarters of a Mile West of the Taoudenni Caravan Road 2335 Hours, Zone Time; October 28, 2021

The only illumination within the cab came from the glow of the instrument displays, that odd gray-green unlight that is compatible with night-vision systems. The only light beyond the sloped windshield issued from the cold and distant stars.

At the walking pace of a healthy man, the three vehicles of Saber section ground upward toward the saddleback, the two gun drones trailing ABLE nose to tail, like obedient circus elephants. Normal operating doctrine called for an unmanned vehicle always to be out on point, cybernetically scouting and taking the initial risk. However, the rugged irregularity of this night’s drive mandated that a human intelligence break the trail.

As ABLE hunched and clawed her way upslope, Rick Santiago relished the feel of handling the big war machine. As a kid back in Arizona, there wasn’t a tractor pull, off-road race, or monster truck bash within a hundred miles of Wickenburg that he hadn’t attended. By the time he’d graduated from high school, he’d built up both a perilously hot Ford F150 pickup and a terror-of-the-desert reputation.

Unfortunately, few job prospectuses listed driving crazy in the dirt as a prime desired attribute.

Then came the day when an enterprising Army recruiter brought a transport variant of the Shinseki Multi-Mission Combat Vehicle to a hill climb outside of Yuma. Rick and a lot of other young people stood by in awe as that magnificent eight-wheeled monster shamed some of the best ATVs and 4X4s in the Southwest, Rick had filled out his enlistment papers that day, sitting in the Shinseki’s cab.

“Okay, people,” Lieutenant Bolde murmured over the helmet intercom. “We’re getting in close. Column stealth up and go to batteries.”

Miss Shelleen replied with a soft verbal acknowledgment as she dialed the command into the drone datalinks. Rick answered by clicking a switch sequence. The breathy whine of ABLE’s twin turbogenerator sets faded away, leaving only the purr of the multiple drive motors and the crunch of the mountain rubble beneath the mushy all-terrain tires.

The key to the Shinseki’s amazing flexibility and performance was its composite electric-drive system. Two lightweight UMTec 1000 ceramic gas turbines spun a pair of electrical generators. The generators pumped power into the banks of rechargeable iron-carbide batteries under ABLE’s deck plates, and these batteries, in turn, fed the 150-horsepower radial electric-drive motors built into the hubs of each ground wheel. No gears, no clutch, no driveshaft, just instant power on demand.

There were other advantages as well. Spinning constant speed at their most efficient RPM setting, the turbines drew the maximum power potential from each liter of fuel consumed. And for those times, such as now, when stealth was at a premium, the turbines could be shut down. Operating on battery power alone, the armored cavalry vehicle’s thermal and audile signatures were greatly reduced.

Through his night-vision visor, Santiago noted a change in ground texture ahead. A shale patch on the hillside angled down to the left. He eased the all-wheel steering over, hunting uphill for better traction.

But not quite far enough.

Rick felt the hill shift beneath ABLE, the deck slewing and tilting as loose shale slid away beneath the left-rear tires. The cavalry vehicle lurched, threatening to twist crosswise and slide in the beginning of its own avalanche. Santiago’s foot rocked forward on the accelerator, slamming 1200 horsepower into the ground. ABLE responded like a hardspurred cow pony. Lunging upgrade, she scrabbled to solid ground, tire cleats paddlewheeling in the stone fragments.

Rick Santiago grinned into the night. ¡Hijole! And they’re paying me for this! “You’re gonna want to edge the drones over to the right a few yards, Miss Shelleen,” he called back to the systems station. “We got a little patch of soft stuff here.”

And then they were at the crest of the saddleback with only the downslope and a great darkness before them. Bolde cycled through the vision modes of his helmet visor and surveyed that darkness. By standard light, there was only the starblaze of the sky and the black horizon line of the not-sky. By switching to the night brite option, he could use the starlight to make out another great expanse of gravel pan and sand dune stretching out from the northern face of the range.

Here and there, well out into the desert, were also occasional flickers and flares of transitory illumination. Bolde recognized them as light leaks caught by his photomultipliers: dashboard glow, lantern gleam escaping through a gap in a tent door, a sloppily used flashlight. Hints of the presence of a bivouacking army.

It was not until he switched from the gray world of the night brite vision to the glowing green one of the thermographic imager that all was made clear. Glowing cyan geometries like the patterns on a snake’s back stretched across the horizon. Other individual dots of light and stumpy luminous caterpillars crept and crawled between them.

This was the infrared portrait of an army at rest. Each geometric was a company-sized laager point, each dot of light the signature of a parked armored fighting vehicle. The steel hulls stood out as they radiated the heat absorbed during the day back into the chilling night. No doubt the Algerians had anti-IR tarps deployed, but insulation could only do so much against the vivid thermal contrasts of the Sahara environment.

The moving green points of light would be liaison and supply vehicles bringing up the food, the fuel, and the thousand and one other things an army on the march required. They were like the red corpuscles of a bloodstream, carrying oxygen to the muscles of a limb, giving it strength. And as with a bloodstream, if that flow was cut off, gangrene and death would rapidly follow.

“Column … halt,” Bolde said lowly.

ABLE crunched to a stop, BAKER and CHARLIE following suit in robotic obedience.

“Okay, Mary May. We’re at drop point. Your people set to take a walk?”

The scout leader moved forward to crouch beside Bolde’s seat, her tall and rangy frame bulked out by full field gear.

Curved ballistic plates of bulletproof ceramic had been slipped into the plate pouches in her BDU shirtsleeves and trouser legs and snugged tight with Velcro strap-tabs. An interceptor flak vest shielded her torso as a combat helmet protected her head. In addition to its integral squad radio and night-vision system, spring-wire leads connected the helmet’s HUD (Heads-Up Display) with the SINCGARS Leprechaun B communications and navigation system clipped to Mary May’s load-bearing harness and to the BattleMAC tactical computer strapped to her left forearm.

This night she would be carrying thirty-five pounds of body armor and personal electronics alone, without the consideration of weapons, ammunition, incidentals, and the gallon of water in her MOLLE harness reservoir. Such was the reason females were still rare within the Ground Combat Specialists’ rating. Even in the twenty-first century, the foot soldier still required a healthy dose of pack mule in their genetic makeup.

“Set, LT,” she replied. “Ready to go down the ramp.”

“Acknowledged, Five. You’ve got the drill. Get into position. We’ll coordinate the strike and recovery as the situation develops. You’ve got the satellite beacons with you?”

“Two of them, yes, sir.”

“Good enough. Take one of the water cans as well and cache it somewhere, just in case. Bravo six knows you’re up here. If something Murphys on us, and we don’t make it back for pickup, trigger a beacon and lie low. The regiment will get you out.”

Mary May grinned through the black-and-brown camouflage paint that covered her face. “I’m not worried, sir. I always leave the dance with the guy who brought me.”

Bolde grinned back. “We’ll make that our beautiful thought for the day, Five. Take off.”

“Yes sir. See you later guys.”

“Adios, Five. Watch your ass out there.”

“Blessed be, Mary May.”

Jorgenson moved aft to the scout bay. A brief rattle of equipment followed a whispered command and the tail ramp whirred down. Boots scuffed on antiskid decking, then crunched on gravel and a cool puff of outside air traveled up the passageway from the rear of the vehicle. The tail ramp closed again and a single whispered word issued from the radio link.

“Clear.”

In the starlight beyond the windshield, four patches of shadow trickled up the right-hand slope of the saddleback. The three remaining in ABLE cab found themselves acutely aware of their intensified aloneness.

Bolde spoke in the darkness. “You journeyed this night, Brid. What do the spirits of this place have to say about us?”

“The old ones who dwell here wish us neither good nor evil,” the Wiccan warrior replied levelly, her face underlit by the glow of her console screens. “They do not know us. They will judge us by our actions and then make their decision.”

“Then let the judgment begin. Okay, Rick. Column forward!”

The only sound over the scout team’s tactical circuit was the rasp of heavy breathing caught by the helmet lip mikes. It was a half mile climb to the top of the saddleback ridge that overlooked the pass, mostly a thirty-to-forty-degree assault up loose shale and crumbling sandstone. Sometimes the hill was manageable by leaning into the slope, at others a clawing scramble on hands and knees was required.

Boots sank in and slid back ten inches for every twelve gained. Clutching fingers gashed on jagged stone and the dust quenched the flowing blood. Lungs burned and legs ached beyond all conditioning.

Johnny Roman and Nathan Grey Bird bore the primary burden of the Javelin launcher and Johnny considered himself the luckier half of the team. He only bore two reload round canisters and their carbines. Nat had taken the burden of the launcher itself.

The Jav was a good old piece that could still do a thorough job on most anything that might be encountered on the battlefield. But the price paid for that kind of firepower was weight. A Javelin launcher with a missile preloaded in the tube weighed fifty pounds. Johnny wryly acknowledged that you couldn’t kill an armored fighting vehicle with something you could carry in your hip pocket.

The other fire team didn’t have it all that much better either. He could see Mary May and Lee Trebain laboring farther ahead upslope. They were tricked out for grenadier work with SABRs slung across their backs and half a dozen spare magazines each of 20mm grenade and 5.56mm NATO to feed the over-and-under barrels of the twin gun systems. All that plus another Javelin reload each.

All in all, each member of the scout team was humping the near equivalent of his or her own weight up that night black ridge.

Beside Johnny, Nate Grey Bird’s feet slithered out from under him and he went facefirst into the slope with a muffled curse. He started to slide backward and Johnny grabbed out for him, snagging his harness.

“You okay, Nate?”

“Yeah, I’m okay,” the fiercely whispered reply came back. “It’s just that this goddam piece of sewer pipe won’t pack worth shit. It keeps throwing me off!”

“You want me to take it for a while?”

“No, I’m okay. It’s only a little way to the crest now. I’m gonna take a breather for a second.”

“Good idea.”

The two troopers collapsed against the slope, striving to catch their breath long enough to take a swig from their water packs.

“When I get back to Purdue to finish my degree, you know what I’m going to do?” Johnny said after a minute.

“I dunno. What you gonna do, white man?”

“I’m going to write a paper. A combined science and philosophy paper about how environment and situation can affect the theoretically immutable laws of physics.”

“I don’t get you.”

“It’s like this. Climbing this damn hill, it feels like we’re lugging every damn weapon in the world on our backs. But over on the other side, when the shooting starts, I suspect it’s going to feel like we’re hardly carrying anything at all.”

A dozen yards below the eastern crest of the saddleback, Mary May angled her team into a jagged rock formation that jutted from the scree slope like a miniature castle. “Okay, guys,” she said, unslinging the Javelin reload she carried. “Go to ground and set overwatch. I’m going up to take a look around.”

“You want me to come too, Five?” Lee Trebain asked from the pocket of shadows he’d claimed.

“Nah, just cover me,” she replied, thumbing the takedown stud for her SABR. Disassembling the big weapon into its three primary components, she set aside the grenade launcher and locked the sighting module directly onto the grab rail atop the receiver of the carbine. The repeatedly drilled act took only seconds.

“You sure you don’t want me up there?”

“For Pete’s sake, Lee, I’m only going to be about forty darned feet up the hill,” Mary May snapped back in an aggravated whisper, locking out the carbine’s folding stock. “I don’t need anyone breathing down my neck. Just watch my back.”

Mary May removed an anti-IR cape from a harness pouch. Drawing the foil-lined camouflage cloth around her, she secured it with a silent, “stealth” Velcro neckband and drew the hood over her helmet. Crawling out of the rock outcropping, she snaked her way upslope on knees and elbows. In a few moments she was at the crest.

Still prone, she eased herself ahead the last few feet, then froze in place. The gut of the pass lay below her.

For the next several minutes she lay unmoving, slowly and deliberately scanning the terrain below and across from her. The barren, steep-sided ridges and precipitous ravines reminded her strongly of the Dakota badlands back home. Deliberately she toggled in the night vision visor of her helmet between thermographics and photomultiplier, seeing what each sensor view had to offer.

Her helmet visor had more to offer than just enhanced vision. It also served as a Heads-Up Display for her other systems. A graphics compass rose scrolled across the bottom of her vision field, giving her an instantaneous bearing on anything she observed. Time and radio-frequency hacks glowed in the corners of her eyes and, as she turned her head, threat arrows pulsed redly, aiming down at every known and plotted hostile position in the area, graphics prompts giving her the range to target.

A look back over her shoulder revealed a trio of blue arrows hovering over the rock formation downslope. Her own team, their location microburst transmitted to her Leprechaun B navigation system from the GPS receivers of their own Leprechaun units.

And in the distance, and drawing steadily farther away, another trio of blue arrows, the troop vehicles and their crew en route to this night’s destiny. The only other “blues” within a two-hundred-mile radius. Mary May shivered in spite of the growing pocket of body heat trapped beneath the IR cape and returned her attention to the pass below.

One of the Algerian scout tracks was parked within her field of vision, the residual heat signature of its armor beginning to fade with the chill of the desert night. A dazzling point of thermal radiation burned close abreast of it, however, possibly a small fuel pellet stove. Given the steam plume rising above it, someone must be heating water for tea or coffee. Spectral green shadows huddled close about it, Algerian soldiers warming their hands in the stove glow and maybe thinking of the night’s watch or about home.

Other luminescent forms hovered away from the stove, one in the track’s turret, two more on station above and below the vehicle hide. Sentries, she thought, staring out into the dark.

Mary May started to ease back below the ridge crest when suddenly she caught more movement in her visor. She froze in place like a startled lizard.

On the barren ridge across from her, a line of four small cyan dots bobbed slowly along.

Lifting her hand up to her helmet, Mary May flipped up her night-vision visor, blinking for a moment in the onrush of true darkness. Then she lifted and aimed her carbine, not to fire but to utilize the magnification and imaging of its more powerful sighting module. The pressure of her thumb on a handgrip stud zoomed her in on target.

An Algi patrol. Each of those Algerian BRM-30s carried a fourperson scout team, just like her own, and one such team was conducting a security sweep along the high ground beyond the pass. And if there was a patrol over on that side, likely there was one somewhere over on this side as well.

The other scouts looked up as Mary May slid back into the shelter of the rock pile. She flicked aside her helmet’s lip mike, deactivating her squad radio, then spoke in a whisper. “Here’s how we’re going to work it, guys. The Algis are deployed below us along about a kilometer of the pass floor. Nate, you and Johnny work your way to the south end of the pass, staying out of sight below the crest of this saddleback. You have the Javelin and you take out the heavies at the pass mouth. Kill the Tunguska first! Got that? From down in the bottom of this canyon, the Centauros and the BRMs will have trouble elevating their main armament high enough to engage us up here. The quad 30s on that antiair vehicle could saw the top of this ridge right off though. It goes first!”

“He’s first blood, Five,” Grey Bird’s soft reply came back.

“Okay, Lee and I will work our way north. We’ll take out the two northernmost BRMs with the grenade launchers, each of us engaging one of the tracks. All initial attacks will be coordinated with Lieutenant Bolde’s move on the main body of the Algerian division. We get into position and we wait for the LT to give us the word to open fire. Until we get that word, we are strictly hide and evade. Nobody, and I mean nobody, fires a shot for any reason!

“Once the music starts, the two teams will work in toward each other, picking off the remaining Algi elements as the shots present themselves. These rocks will be our rendezvous point for fallback and extraction. Lock it in.”

Fingers touched keypads, calling up and storing GPU fixes in personal navigation systems.

“Set, Five.”

“Got it.”

“Same.”

“Right. Watch your backs. Make your kills. Get back here. That’s the show. That and one other thing. We may have some company up here tonight.”

Like an infantryman hunkering under cover, ABLE retracted its suspension and sank behind the shelter of the low dune, BAKER and CHARLIE going to ground a quarter of a kilometer off on either flank. Electronic Countermeasures masts unfolded and suspiciously sampled the ether.

The interior of the cab was silent except for the tick and creak of contracting metal and the purr of the systems fans. “Any sign of a ground-scan radar on this side?” Bolde inquired over his shoulder.

“Negative. Just two big air-search systems well off to the east and west,” Shelleen replied. “Mobile SAM batteries covering the laager sites. I’m getting tastes of a constant-wave datalink though. They might have a scout drone up.”

“We’ll watch for it. Rick, you take tactical security while we plot the strike.”

“Doin’ it, LT,” Santiago acknowledged. Accessing the sensors in the commander’s cupola via one of the driver’s station telescreens, he began a deliberate scan of the surrounding environment.

Bolde assumed control of ABLE weapons pack, elevating the boom to its maximum fifty-foot extension for a high-ground overview of their selected objective.

The lead Algerian mechanized battalion had deployed on an open gravel pan, straddling the Taoudenni caravan trail roughly four kilometers beyond Saber section’s position. The three maneuver companies were in laager at the points of a two kilometer triangle, the base oriented to the south with the Headquarters Company in the center. Each company position was a weapon-studded island in the desert, creating a mutually supporting archipelago of firepower.

Bolde zoomed in on the nearest laager. The Algerians had learned a few things about desert fighting over the years. They had abandoned the old heavily structured Soviet doctrine in favor of the more flexible and efficient Western-style mixed combat team. One three-tank platoon mated with two four-track infantry platoons. All of the AFVs were parked nose outward in a hundred-meter-wide radial pattern that faced their heaviest protection and armament toward any potential threat.

There would be a sentry posted in every one of those vehicle turrets and a shell or ammunition magazine fed into every gun action. As Bolde looked on, one of the tanks panned its main tube warily across the horizon.

Once upon a time, it had been a Russian-made T-72. However, as Bolde recalled from his technical briefings, little remained that was actually “Russian” barring the bare hull and suspension.

A lightweight Japanese turbocharged diesel had replaced the original power plant, and a Korean-produced copy of a German-designed 120mm smoothbore had been fitted in the turret, replacing the cranky 125mm main gun. A revised velectronics suite had been manufactured in Taiwan, the reactive armor jacketing had come from a factory in Brazil, and the redesign and rebuild had taken place in an Egyptian armaments works.

The end result was an international battlefield “hot rod” considerably more efficient and deadly than the machine that had first rolled out of a Soviet foundry thirty-plus years before. Similar performance upgrades had been applied to the ex-Soviet BMP Infantry Fighting Vehicles of the infantry elements as well.

Again, located in the center of the position, were the unit headquarters tracks and a covering antiaircraft vehicle. Also present were a pair of massive semitankers and a number of smaller deuce-and-a-half utility trucks. The logistics group was up, bearing with it the fuel, food, water, and ammunition that would be needed for the next day’s march. Figures worked around the parked vehicles, unrolling fueling hoses and unloading stores, no doubt thankful for the night’s cool.

A swift scan of the other company sites indicated that similar replenishment operations were going on there as well. The timing was right, and the Gods of Battle were smiling.

“Brid, we’ve got sixteen rounds of antivehicle and eight of antipersonnel in the drone silos. You program the AVs. I want one dropped in on each of the fuel tankers and the command vehicles. I’ll take the APs.”

Overlooking the pass, Nathan Grey Bird and Johnny Roman struggled on against the burden of both the rugged terrain and their augmented munitions load. They were still several hundred meters short of their firing position. Time was growing tight, and the ridgeline looked even more broken ahead of them.

“Hey Nate,” Johnny wheezed. “Hold up. I got an idea.”

“Such as?”

“Such as, why don’t we cache a couple of these spare Jav rounds here so we can move faster. We’ll be working back this way again. We can just pick ‘em up when we’re ready to use ’em.”

“Damn, white man! I’m proud of you! You’re starting to think like an Indian. Let’s do it.”

Farther to the north along the saddleback, Lee Trebain peered cautiously through his firing slit between two boulders. The youthful Texan could see his designated target on the floor of the pass below him. His position was good, the BRM-30 had been backed into the slope between a couple of crude stacked-stone fighting positions. Its tail ramp was down, and Trebain could intermittently make out movement both inside the track and in the gun pits.

Moving with silent care, he verified that a clip of smart rounds was in the grenade launcher of his SABR and that the magazine of 5.56 NATO was well seated in the carbine section. Then he slipped a second clip of 20mm antiarmor projectiles out of a harness pouch, setting them where they could be grabbed in an instant. He’d worked out just exactly how he was going to do this thing. All he had to do was to stay ready for the word.

Trebain tried to keep focused, but he couldn’t keep from glancing away toward the north. Toward that next blue friendly arrow glowing in his visor display.

She wasn’t moving anymore. She must be set, too. And she had to be all right, right? She was on the squad circuit and she could have yelled for help if something had blown. And there hadn’t been any gunfire, and, besides, Mary May could take care of herself.

But then, damn it all entirely, wasn’t the guy supposed to look after a girl? That’s the way it always been where he’d grown up and the instinct was hard to shake, even when the girl was two inches taller than you were and had three grades of seniority. Lee closed his eyes and shook his head, trying to clear it of a confused jumble of emotions and images. He snapped them open them again when the audile prompt of the tactical datalink sounded in his helmet earphones. The glowing line of a communication was scrolling across the bottom of his vision field.

Lifting his hand to his helmet, Lee tapped the transmit key at the base of his lip-mike boom, giving his go signal. Flipping his visor up, he settled the SABR against his shoulder and peered through the sighting module. Safeties off. Weapons selector to GRENADE. Mode selector to POINT DETONATION. Finger on trigger.

Lee Trebain’s mind was suddenly as cold and clear as a mountain spring.

The same message flashed before the eyes of Nathan Grey Bird and Johnny Roman just as they threw themselves flat on the overlook above the mouth of the pass. Below them, at the foot of a steep scree slope, was a quarter-mile-wide plateau notched into the range side and the fighting positions of the Algerian blocking force. They’d made it, but just barely.

“Johnny, let the LT know we’re in position! Then get those reloads ready!”

“Doing it, Nate.” Roman blipped the acknowledgment, then popped the end caps off the first of the two spare Javelin canisters.

Grey Bird plugged the connector lead from the missile launcher’s firing unit into his helmet’s remote jack and a targeting reticle snapped into existence in the center of his field of vision. Choosing the Javelin’s “ballistic engagement” option, he eased up onto his knees. The boxlike firing unit with its handgrip nestled against the side of his head, the connected launcher tube swiveled to angle down his back, its muzzle pointing to the sky. Turning his head slightly, he set the death pip of the sight on the top of the turret of the Algerian antiair track.

Nathan felt his lips peel back in a feral grin. Back in Idaho, his sister had never been happy with his decision to go career Army. Intensely into American Indian activism, she had felt he was selling out his heritage by joining the service that had defeated his people. And she had been extremely unhappy when he had chosen the cavalry as his preferred branch.

Nathan had pointed out in reply that their ancestors had been some of the best mounted warriors the world had ever seen. What greater heritage did he have except as a cavalryman?

She had retired grumbling before he’d had the chance to mention that the regimental assignment he’d been given was to the Seventh. Hoya, she was going to go through the roof on that one.

Grey Bird eased down the first trigger, giving the missile its initial look at its target.

“All CMMs designated and the scout teams are in position,” Bridget said quietly. “No detected changes in tactical environment. Ready to engage on your command, Lieutenant.”

Bolde swallowed with deliberation before replying. All of the preparations, all twenty-five years of them, were over.

So you think you’re good, Jeremy Bolde, good enough to take your life into your hands this night. But how about these six other lives you’ll be carrying? Does your surety stretch that far? It had better, for when this battle is over, whatever remains will be your responsibility.

“Right. Stand by for conversion to direct linkage control. I’ll take BAKER. You’ve got CHARLIE. Stand by for turbine start. All units!”

“Turbine start armed on drones.”

“ABLE ready to light off, LT.”

Bolde typed the ***ALL SABER ELEMENTS***COMMENCE ENGAGEMENT NOW*** command into the scout team datalink and poised a finger on the transmit key. “Good luck to us all, ladies and gentlemen,” addressing those who were present and those who were not. “May we all be discussing this over a cup of coffee come morning. Open fire!”

Flame geysered from the backs of the gun drones. Twelve rounds per vehicle, launching at half-second intervals, a spreading fountain of destruction. The Common Modular Missile rounds, configured for an artillery-fire mission profile, climbed almost vertically until booster burnout. Then guidance fins snapped out of the main stages and dug into the air. Arcing over the Algerian armored formation, the missiles pitched nose down, hunting for targets.

The infrared sensors in the noses of the antivehicle rounds scanned for a specific geometric size and shape on the ground. One that matched that of the prey assigned to them. The antipersonnel rounds steered in via Global Positioning System fix, the proximity fuses in their warheads concentrating on their altitude above ground. As each missile locked in, its main engine ignited, blasting it through the sound barrier and down out of the sky.

The antipersonnels detonated while still a thousand feet in the air. Each “beehive” warhead burst to release a spreading conical swarm of needle-nosed and razor-finned flechette darts, thousands of them, in a supersonic steel rain, a titanic shotgun blast sweeping the open ground clean of life.

The antivehicle rounds arrived a split second later, before the standing dead even had a chance to fall to the earth. Flaming pile-driver strokes that crushed and destroyed.

The targeted fuel tankers popped like bursting balloons, sprayed diesel flaming as the warheads exploded deep in their guts. Likewise the headquarters tracks lurched, belching fire and shredded flesh out through their doors and hatches. The command personnel whose task it was to coordinate a defense, perished before they even knew an attack was under way.

And amid the chaos and confusion, no surviving sentry immediately noted the three small thermal plumes that hazed into existence out in the desert night, the one turning away and the two closing the range.

The charge had been sounded.

From his firing position between the two boulders, Lee Trebain dropped his grenades in around the Algerian scout track, being exceedingly careful not to place them too close to the parked vehicle. From personal experience, Trebain knew what the first instinct of a fighting vehicle crewman was when suddenly placed under attack. Saddle up and get under armor!

Trebain had no desire to interfere with that instinctive reaction. Not yet.

The turret of the scout track swiveled around and up-angled, ripping off a 30mm reply to his volley of grenades. The autocannon shells tore a gash across the slope twenty meters below his position, kicking up dust and stinging stone fragments. Hot damn! Mary May had called it right! They couldn’t fire up out of the gorge!

The turret gun raved off another long futile burst, covering the figures scrambling aboard through the vehicle’s lowered tailgate. Through the thermographic sights of the SABR, Trebain saw a luminous green mist belch from the track’s exhaust as the engine kicked over, the ramp beginning to close.

Now! Now was the time to take them!

Trebain ejected the empty clip from the grenade launcher and slammed the fresh magazine of antivehicle shells into its place. Holding the death dot of his sights on the turret of the Algerian scout track, he again pulled the trigger.

Like many armored fighting vehicles, the Algerian BRM had reactive armor panels scabbed to its hull and turret. Made up of sheets of low-grade plastic explosive sandwiched between two thin metal plates, reactive armor defeated shaped-charge antitank warheads by exploding upon the impact of the warhead, the counterblast “defocusing” the warhead’s detonation, leaving the protected vehicle undamaged.

Unfortunately for the Algerians, each reactive panel only worked once.

Lee Trebain rapid-fired the six rounds in his launcher magazine, the SABR’s recoil thumping his shoulder. The first two grenades kicked reactive panel flares off the BRM’s turret. The next four drilled cleanly through steel.

The holes punched by the grenades were only the diameter of a pencil. Each puncture, however, spewed a supersonic jet of flaming gas and molten metal into the confined space of the track’s interior. One such jet, as hot and destructive as the fire blade of an acetylene torch, slashed across the ammunition tray of the turret gun.

The BRM shuddered to a halt. Its deck hatches blew open and a protracted series of detonations flickered and reverberated within the vehicle, like a string of firecrackers dropped into a trash can. Afterward nothing emerged from the vehicle except for a growing plume of smoke.

Trebain became aware of more explosions around him. Some were nearby and echoing sharply through the canyon. Other heavier blasts rolled in from the northern horizon, a skyline that now glowed an angry flickering orange.

Trebain backed crablike out from between the two boulders and slid a few meters down the reverse slope of the saddleback. Hugging the ground, he flipped his night-vision visor back down. Warily he scanned his environment as he dug a fresh 20mm clip out of a harness pouch.

Running footsteps sounded behind him and he whipped around, freezing his trigger pull as he caught the blue flash in his Heads-Up Display. Mary May dropped beside him a moment later. “How’d you make out?” she demanded.

“Clean house. Track and crew. How ‘bout you?”

“Same. That’s two down. Let’s go see how the other guys are doing.”

“Right behind you, Five.”

A half klick to the south, Nathan Grey Bird’s finger closed around the Javelin launcher’s second trigger.

The hollow thump of the launching charge followed, kicking the missile out of the tube. The missile itself did not ignite until it was well clear of the launcher and the operator both. Flaming away in a highcurving trajectory, it dived on its target from above, the one angle of attack unshielded by either reactive armor or heavy steel.

The Tunguska exploded spectacularly, bursting 30mm shells intermixing with flaming rocket fuel. “Ayeee!” Grey Bird screamed. “I count coup! Feed me, white man, I’m on a roll!”

“Loading!” Johnny Roman slammed the next missile into the smoking breech of the launcher, then rolled aside. “Round loaded! Clear!”

The launcher barked again and the second round burned across the sky, wobbling slightly as it hunted for the heat signature of its target, stabilizing again as it found what it sought. The more distant of the pair of Centauro tank destroyers lifted off the ground on a pad of flame, its turret blowing off and flipping away.

“That’s two! Keep ’em coming!”

Above the crackle of ammunition heat firing in the burning wrecks, screams and shouts echoed up from the pass mouth along with the sound of cranking diesels. The Algerians were reacting to the attack. Wildly and without coordination, but that would come swiftly as the shock effect wore off. Grey Bird and Roman had only seconds of clear time remaining.

The second Centauro was the closest of their three targets, immediately below them at the foot of the steep slope that led down into the pass mouth. They’d saved it for last because it would be the easiest snap shot. Nate locked the launcher into direct-fire mode as Johnny slammed the last Javelin into the tube. Springing to his feet and aiming downward, Grey Bird acquired the target in his helmet sight and squeezed the trigger.

At that instant, the Centauro’s driver, reacting to the sure and certain knowledge that a moving target is harder to hit, slammed his eight-wheeled mount into gear and floored his accelerator. The tank destroyer lurched forward, not swiftly enough to escape the homing missile fired at it, but enough to divert its impact point. The Javelin clipped the flank of the Centauro’s turret and a reactive armor panel detonated, swatting the missile aside. Undamaged, the tank destroyer roared out of its field revetment, its turret gun traversing and elevating.

Roman and Grey Bird could only stare at each other and at the empty launcher.

“Uh-oh.”

“To which I can only add ‘Oh shit’! Let’s get out of here!”

Below, the Centauro’s driver rammed the front wheels of his vehicle up the slope, giving his gunner the extra angle he needed to engage the ridgeline. An instant after the two scouts had thrown themselves back down the opposite slope, a 105mm round gouged a notch in the hill crest, the concussion and battering spray of stone fragments sending both men sprawling into the jumble of broken rock that covered this section of the saddleback.

They would become grateful for that momentarily.

Dazed, and with his ears ringing, Grey Bird lifted his head. “Johnny, you okay?” he yelled.

“Yeah. Nate.” A familiar but equally groggy voice replied over the squad circuit. “What do we do now?”

“We crawl back and get those other two Javelin rounds, that’s what we do. Then we kill that damn tank destroyer before the Five and the LT find out how bad we screwed up.”

Grey Bird started to pull himself upright. He spotted Johnny’s “friendly” prompt in his helmet visor, pointing down into a boulder field a short distance to his left. However he also spotted an ominous, unmarked green glow downhill at perhaps a hundred meters.

“Algis! Down!”

Assault-rifle fire spattered his rocks a split second after he dived back behind them. With his own carbine still slung over Johnny’s shoulder, Grey Bird yanked his Beretta out of his belt holster. A handgun was a poor second in any kind of a serious firefight but at the moment it was far better than nothing.

A short chopping burst of 5.56 NATO sounded from off on his left. “I got four of them spotted, Nate,” Roman reported. “They’re trying to work a skirmish line up toward us. They must be one of those Algi scout teams the Five warned us about.”

Behind their position, another shell ripped into the ridgeline, showering the two pinned troopers with a fresh barrage of stone fragments. Grey Bird burrowed closer to the jagged rock he lay upon.

“You know something, white man?” he said, spitting a mouthful of grit aside.

“What?”

“All of a sudden I’m developing this great feeling of empathy for General Custer.”

Jeremy Bolde’s hand closed around his console joystick, and suddenly he was looking through BAKER’s cybernetic eyes, the imaging from the onboard cameras feeding into the Heads-Up Display of his helmet.

You could maneuver and deploy gun drones via microburst transmissions over a datalink, in effect issuing suggestions to the onboard artificial intelligences. Actual combat, however, required a human telepresence. It was as if he rode the back of the charging steel beast in the ultimate video game gone real.

The system was configured to trackfire mode; the cart-wheel sights of the booster gun hovered in front of his eyes. Wherever he aimed those sights, so would the drone steer itself. Data hacks glowed around the perimeter of his vision: speed, ammunition, vehicle systems status, and ahead glowed a small forest of hostile target arrows stabbing downward accusingly at the enemy. His forefinger tightened on the throttle trigger and a flick of his thumb lifted the safety cover off the firing switch, triggering the hot gun warning tone.

“Right through the middle, Brid,” he murmured. “I’ll work left to right. You have right to left. Engage.”

“Engaging,” the quiet one-word reply returned over the interphone.

Bolde laid his sights on the first silhouetted armored fighting vehicle as he might have aimed a target pistol and pressed the thumb button.

Two kilometers away, the first round cycled into BAKER’s booster gun. It wasn’t a shell in a conventional sense, rather it was a slender “kinetic kill” dart encased in a sabot sheath, a simple finned crowbar of superdense inert uranium encased in a superhard tungsten steel alloy.

The dart itself carried no propulsive powder charge. Instead, injectors spewed a metered dose of a liquid explosive propellant into the breech chamber behind the round. Ignited by an electric arc, the incandescent gas of this initial detonation hurled the dart on its way as with a conventional cannon. However as the projectile accelerated down the barrel, secondary injectors spaced down the length of the smoothbore cannon tube fired in sequence, building the breech pressure and pushing the dart to a velocity far higher than could be obtained from a conventional weapon.

Three rounds were fired in as many seconds, an X of blue-white flame spewing from the cannon’s muzzle brake.

Downrange, an Algerian T-72 died. Neither its reactive armor nor the heavier steel beneath were enough to save it. The tungsten-anduranium darts passed through the tank’s hull like heated needles through butter. The passage converted kinetic energy into heat and instead of solid projectiles, jets of metallic plasma exploded into the tank’s interior, burning at the temperature of a star’s surface.

Bolde swung his sights onto the next target in the laager. Shock and surprise had done their parts. Now they must rely on speed, wreaking as much havoc as they could before the Algerians recovered.

The vehicles around the laager perimeter flared like the candles on a birthday cake as the fire streams of the two gun drones converged. Over the intercom link Jeremy could hear Bridget Shelleen’s whispered supplication with each press of her trigger key.

“Lord and Lady … Hold your hands above us this night … Grant pardon for these lives we must take … Grant peace to those we must slay …”

“Scout lead! We got trouble here!”

Mary May paused in her jogging run and dropped to a crouch beside a stone slab. Lee Trebain following her lead an instant later. “Go, Nate. What’s happening?”

“We’re blown,” the Indian trooper rasped back over the squad circuit. “We been nailed by an Algi patrol.”

“Tac situation? Are either of you hit?”

“We’re under good cover, but pinned. Four hostiles on our front. Johnny and me are both okay, but we can’t maneuver. We bitched the strike and one of the Centauros is still operational. It has the ridgeline covered behind us. We can’t fall back.”

“Oh, jeez! We’re hearing small-arms fire from the south. That must be you guys. Can you hold?”

“For a while, Five.”

“Understood,” Mary May acknowledged. “We’ll be up with you as soon as we can. Hang in.”

“We don’t have all that much choice,” Grey Bird replied with wry grimness.

Trebain had been monitoring the same series of transmissions, and now he scrambled. “The guys are in trouble. Let’s go!”

“Like I said, we’ll get to them as soon as we can.” Mary May started back up to the ridge crest. “We still have four Algi scout tracks down in that canyon we have to take care of.”

“Hey, Mary May. Nate and Johnny are in trouble!”

“Darn it, Lee. I know it!” she snapped over her shoulder. “But the lieutenant and Miss Shelleen and everybody will be in trouble if we let those tracks bust out! Now load antiarmor and come on!”

Trebain swore under his breath and followed.

The growl of engines and the squeak and chatter of tracks echoed up from the pass floor. The Algerian BRMs were on the move. Rolling north at a fast walking pace, they had their scout teams deployed as flank guards. Warily, the Algerian mobile troopers advanced, scanning the walls of the pass on either side. There would be no surprising this bunch.

Lying side by side, Mary May and Trebain watched them advance. “How we working this?” Trebain growled.

“You kill that lead track. I’ll peel the infantry.” Mary May flipped her visor up and settled her eye to the sighting module of her SABR. “One magazine, then pull back fast. On my mark. Three … two … one … shoot!”

The two grenade launchers barked out their vest-pocket artillery barrage. The lead BRM flared and exploded under Trebain’s fire stream while Mary May walked a string of laser-ranged airbursts down the left-hand column of dismounted flankers.

The surviving Algerian infantry scattered and went to ground. Their earlier-gen night-vision goggles picked up the muzzle flashes on the ridge crest and assault rifles began to crackle an angry response. The surviving BRMs reversed gear and backed up the roadway like a trio of startled crayfish. In the turret hatches, the track commanders swiveled their deck machine guns in line with the threat and opened fire, hosing streams of greenish tracers into the night.

“Lee, fall back!” Mary May rose to a half crouch, intent on dropping the last shell in her clip in on the second track in line.

“Mary, get down.” Trebain lunged to his feet, grabbing for her harness. Then the bullet hail was chopping up the stone around them. Mary May flipped backward off the crest in a credible parachute landing roll. Trebain tried to follow but a 7.65 NATO round took his right leg out from under him. The ballistic plate covering his shin deflected the slug but the limb went numb from ankle to hip.

Lee fell forward in a sprawl. He felt himself start to slide. Good God Almighty, he was falling down the front face of the ridge! He clawed at the crumbling slope, trying for a hold, but he only succeeded in making himself tumble. Caught in the midst of a miniature landslide, Lee lost his grip on his weapon. Stars burst behind his eyes as he found himself battered away from consciousness.

“Brid, cut across the laager and then engage the command company! We’ll use the fires for thermal masking.”

“I’m with you.” The contralto reply remained cool and focused.

“Rick. Drop Jabberwockys and commence disengagement! Head for the extraction route.”

“Doin’ it, LT!”

ABLE swerved and accelerated, jinking across the pans like a broken-field runner, her belly racks thumping as the first Jabberwocky beacon kicked clear. Inside the cybernetic world of his battle helmet Bolde’s eyes flicked over to the time display, counting seconds. The three S’s had done as much as could be hoped for and soon the Algerians would be reacting, violently, to this assault.

The danger now lay in the fact that Saber section had revealed itself by radiating. The continuous-wave datalinks that now connected the command vehicle with its fighting drones could be detected and locked in on by radio direction finders. Because of the jitter frequency technology used, it wouldn’t be easy, but given enough time, a minute or two, the Algerian Electronic Warfare battalion would have a fix on them. Once that happened, the word would be flashed to the division’s artillery regiment and hellfire and damnation would rain from the sky.

The Jabberwocky decoys, small, high-discharge radio transponders that produced a false signal similar to ABLE’s emissions signature, could buy them a little more combat time. So would staying on the move and not presenting a fixed target for the direction finders.

The question was, just how much.

BAKER and CHARLIE raced through the perimeter of the shattered Algerian mechanized company. Not a single vehicle remained intact, and flames leaped from the torn hulks. There were still men alive, though, a few stunned survivors, and mostly they fled or cowered in the presence of the angular, multiwheeled demons that had come howling in from the desert. A few, though, still strove to resist.

Bolde caught the backflash of a rocket launch out of the corner of his eye. Some thirty meters to the left, an Algerian infantryman crouched in the shelter of a wrecked BMP, the tube of a light antitank weapon at his shoulder and leveled at BAKER. Caught by surprise there was nothing that Bolde could do. However, with light-swift electronic reflexes, the gun drone defended itself.

Thermal sensors recognized the exhaust flare of the rocket and the onboard AIs triggered the Claymore reactive panel in line with the threat. A more sophisticated cousin of conventional reactive armor, the Claymore panel exploded, its front face fragmenting into thousands of small tungsten cubes. Sprayed into the path of the incoming rocket, they chewed the projectile apart in midair. And not the rocket alone, the expanding wave of shrapnel reached out and engulfed the missile man as well.

Moments later the drone tore out through the far side of the laager perimeter and Bolde executed the turn in toward the Algerian Headquarters Company. There was a logic to Bolde’s charge directly through the enemy encampment. Any infrared sight aimed at the gun drones from the central enemy position would be blinded by the heat aura thrown off by the blazing hulks of their first kills. Any enemy gunner seeking to engage them would also be presented with the quandary of having his own troops in his line of fire.

The drone’s 35s raved on. The last of the communications and command vans died. The mortar carriers and ammo hogs of the Algerian heavy-weapons section exploded, the glare momentarily overloading the videolinks. Wild missiles tore loose from the disintegrating antiair vehicle, jittering madly across the sky. Bolde became aware of a squealing warning tone and a pulsing red flag in his vision field. Barrel overheat! The drones had expended almost half of their two-hundred-round base load, and their titanium-lined gun tubes were going incandescent.

Damnation! Just when they were getting some real work done!

“Brid, deploy smoke! Execute breakaway! Come right to one two zero!”

Multispectral smoke canisters thumped out of secondary projectors, burying the drones in a synthetic fogbank, and the two vehicles turned away from the havoc they had produced, racing back into the undamaged darkness of the night.

Bolde called up a command on BAKER’s ordnance menu, releasing a blast of chill carbon dioxide gas down the barrel of the drone’s main gun. “Brid, execute a thermal purge. We’re going in again.”

There was a warning edge to Shelleen’s reply. “Lieutenant, may I remind you that we’ve been radiating continuously for almost five minutes.”

“You may, Miss Shelleen, but I want one more Algi company torn up. We’ll hit the one to the southeast. Come left to zero eight zero and engage as you bear!”

The drones described a dusty curve across the desert toward their next objective, bucketing over the sand ripples in the plain.

This time it was different. This time the Algerians had been given the opportunity to recover from the initial CMM strike. Tank guns spewed fire and tracer streams snaked along the ground. Bolde weaved and swerved his robotic command, snapping off countershots as his sights aligned. One Algerian vehicle burst into flames. A second, a third …

Suddenly the image from BAKER’s cameras blurred under a concussive impact. A pattern of red-and-yellow system warning flags blazed in front of Bolde’s eyes and he caught the impression of the world rolling over onto its side, then the datalink broke and his HMD fuzzed into static.

“Hell!” Bolde tore up his useless visor. “We just lost BAKER!”

“I saw him go out,” Brid reported. “Direct hit with a tank round. Dead one. Orders?”

Bolde dialed up the self-destruct code on BAKER’s crisis menu and beamed it off, hoping there was a functional receiver to catch it. “Disengage! Show’s over! Get CHARLIE out of there. Put him under autonomous control and head him for the extraction point, then kill our transmitters. Rick, balls to the wall and clear the area! We’ve pushed it about as much …”

Beyond ABLE’s windscreen, the desert exploded.

Mary May skidded down the unstable slope to the sprawled form amid the slide rubble. Lee shouldn’t be moved after a fall such as he had sustained, but he was also three-quarters of the way down to the pass floor and lying on an open hillside. Algerians had pulled back around the next bend in the gorge, but they would be probing again soon.

Grabbing on to his harness, she dragged Trebain a few yards crossslope to a clump of thorny brush. It wasn’t much, but it was all the cover immediately available. Dividing her attention between the canyon floor and her wounded trooper, she made a fast assessment of Trebain’s condition.

He was unconscious but breathing. The ballistic plate shielding his right shin had shattered from a direct hit, but the bullet itself had been turned. The leg was rapidly darkening with a massive bruise, and Mary May suspected the limb wasn’t going to be much good for a while. Trebain’s body armor had also shielded him from the worst effects of his fall. Beyond a concussion and a sizable collection of bangs and abrasions he appeared intact. A good thing as there wasn’t much she could do at the moment beyond applying a few jets of aerosol disinfectant.

As she completed her inspection, she heard him moan softly.

“Hush, Lee. You’re okay,” she said quietly.

“Mar … Five … what happened?”

“You took one on the armor and fell down the wrong side of the hill. How’s your leg feel?”

“My leg … Christ! I can’t even feel if it’s still attached!”

“It is,” she replied, stretching out beside him. Peering out beyond the brush clump, she established her firing position. “It’s just numb from the shock. Enjoy it while it lasts. I’ll bet you’ve got one heck of a bone bruise there.”

“I can’t even get it to move.” Trebain shook his head, becoming more aware of his environment. “Shit! How in the hell are we going to get back up to the extraction point!”

He started to sit up but Mary caught him by the shoulder. “Stay down. We could have Algis moving in on us again. I’m not sure how we’re going to get out of here yet, but we are. You’re going to be okay, Lee. Nobody’s leaving you behind. You got my word on it.”

The thermal lobe and glare from the burning Algerian track kept overloading her night brite visor. Mary May flipped it up for a few moments and rested her grainy eyes with a look up at the cool star-speckled blackness of the desert sky. Beside her, she heard a soft, dazed chuckle. “Shit! And all this friggin’ time I’ve been worrying about taking care of you.”

Distractedly she reached back and patted Trebain on the shoulder. “We take care of each other, guy.”

Flipping her visor down again, she keyed her Leprechaun transceiver onto the voice-channel link with the command vehicle. “I’d better let the lieutenant know we’ve got problems … Scout Lead calling Saber Six. Flash Red. Do you copy?”

She repeated the call three times. There was no answer.

ABLE’s hull rang like a beaten oil drum, and shrapnel sparked and howled off of her armor plating. For an instant her crew stared down at the ground through her windshield as the concussion of the multiple shell bursts lifted her tail into the air. Then the cavalry vehicle crashed back onto her eight wheels.

“Incoming!” Santiago bellowed, fighting with the wheel to stave off a rollover.

“Oh really? You think?” Shelleen commented through gritted teeth, clinging to the grab bar above her workstation.

Bolde reached across to the driver’s console and slapped the belly rack release, kicking out another set of Jabberwocky decoys. “Brid. Verify that the transmitters are down! Rick. Hard left! Get us out from under the next pattern!”

The driver replied by skidding ABLE through a minimum-radius turn that locked the frame levelers to their stops, shooting the cavalry vehicle off at right angles to their prior course. Instants later, chain lightning played across the desert and man-made thunder roared as eight heavy howitzer rounds tore up the ground where they would have been. The Algerian table of organization was artillery heavy, the divisional commander having over eighty tubes and launchers at his disposal. He was employing this awesome sledgehammer now to eliminate the gadfly that had dared to sting his command. The gadfly’s only recourse was flight.

“Rick, hard right!”

ABLE swerved again, sprayed gravel roaring in the wheel wells. Flooring his accelerator, Santiago resumed the dash south for the hill range. But again there came the wail and slam of an incoming salvo, the cavalry vehicle barely scurried clear of the shells dropping in its tracks.

A rapid rhythmic thumping came from back aft as the shrapnel-torn rubber sheathing stripped from one of the tires. The wheel held together; its multiple layers of steel and Kevlar cording could withstand more damage then even a conventional metal tank tread, but a limit would be reached … soon.

“Dammit! They’re tracking us! Brid, are you sure we’ve got cold boards!”

“Positive,” she called back. “We are not emitting, and the threat board is clear. No laser or radar paints or locks!”

“Then there’s got to be a drone eyeballing us! Find it! Rick, shuck and jive! Buy us some time!”

Bolde called up the weapons pack on his controller, heating up the pair of CMM surface-to-air rounds that were always carried ready for use in the box launchers. Elevating and indexing the mount, he began searching for the Algerian’s airborne spy.

“I verify a drone,” Brid yelled. “I’m getting a datalink trace.”

“Can you jam it?”

“I’ll need a minute to analyze and match the jitter pattern.”

“We don’t have a minute.”

Another salvo dropped in on ABLE. Again they didn’t hit behind but around the fleeing cavalry vehicle and only the luck of the draw prevented a direct hit. With the range established the Algerian gunners would switch to anti-tank scatter packs for their next volley.

Wildly, Bolde swept the IR sights of the sensor group across the sky. There! Off to the west, the sight crosshairs acquired a smear of ruddy heat against the cold stars. The Algerian recon drone was running roughly three klicks out and paralleling their course, targeting for the enemy Artillery regiment.

A flick of his thumb set the tracking lock and a rock forward on a coolie-hat switch zoomed the camera in. Bolde got a momentary impression of the skeletal frame of a miniature helicopter, internally lit by the glow of its rotary engine.

There was only the momentary impression because he was already squeezing the trigger that sent both of the antiair CMMs on their way. The last imaging sent to the Algerians by their drone was two wobbling fire trails converging on it from out of the night.

Bolde observed the flash of the missile kill. “Brake hard! Now!” he bellowed.

ABLE’s wheels locked up and her tail came around as she broke loose and slithered to a halt, broadside on. And then submunitions shells burst overhead and the desert hissed and sparkled as hundreds of deadly little antiarmor bomblets rained out of the sky just beyond the stalled Shinseki.

“Might as well just let her sit, Rick,” Bolde continued calmly. “If they still have us acquired, we’ll never get out from under the next one.”

The only sound the soft steady-state whine of the turbines. Bolde, Shelleen, and Santiago sat unspeaking in the darkness, thinking their own thoughts and counting the seconds. When fifteen had passed, the next salvo fell … half a mile away along the course they had been following. The next dropped at twice that range as the thwarted Algerians stabbed blindly into the dark. Bridget Shelleen chuckled softly at the wonder of being alive.

Bolde released a breath that he had been holding for what seemed to be an amazing length of time. “Rick, get us out of here. Brid, advise Mary May that we’re disengaging and tell her to head for the extraction point. Fun’s over, people, let’s go home.”

At a solid 60 K an hour, ABLE and the CHARLIE drone roared south toward the looming refuge of the El Khnachich range. Bolde kept ABLE’s weapons pack trained aft as they fled, scanning their back trail for signs of enemy pursuit or activity.

Beyond the burning wrecks of the battalion they had decimated, the Algerian division was reacting like a kicked ant’s nest. Thermal blossoms dotted the night as hundreds of vehicle engines kicked over, the neat pattern of laager sits dissolving as unit commanders strove to regroup into combat formation. Flares and flashes of gunfire danced around the perimeter as gunners blazed at ghosts in the darkness or even engaged in “blue on blue” duels with their own side.

Bolde grinned. This kind of battlefield hysteria could do more damage to the enemy in the long run than his own direct assault. The smile rapidly dissipated as Brid spoke up from her station. “We’ve got major problems with the scout team. They’ve got the Algerian recon company immobilized with about half of the elements destroyed, but they’re pinned down as well. They can’t get back to the extraction point.”

“Get me a direct link with Mary May.”

“Not possible. She’s too far down in the pass and we’re radio blocked. All we have is a relay through Nate and Johnny on the squad circuit.”

Bolde twisted around in the command chair. “What in the hell is she doing down in the pass?”

“Lee Trebain apparently took a bad fall down into the cut. Mary May is with him but he’s been injured too badly for them to get back up to the ridgeline.”

“What about Nate and Johnny? Can they get to them?”

“Again not possible. Nate and Johnny are pinned down by an Algerian patrol at the southern end of the pass about a kilometer away. They haven’t taken hits yet, but they can’t move. Both fire teams are requesting instructions.”

Requesting instructions. The polite military term for begging the CO for a fast miracle. Bolde lifted his wrist to his mouth and wiped away the salty dust caked on his lips. This was his run. He’d set this plan up, and his people had every right in the world to expect that he would get them out the other side of it. Simple statements like, “I misjudged” or “I overlooked something” were not an option. Her face outlined by the screen glow, Brid Shelleen looked at him, calmly, expectantly.

“Brid, tell the scouts to hang on and stand by. We’re coming to get them. Then pull CHARLIE back in with us. Rick, new game plan. Forget the route over the saddleback. We’re going out through the pass.”

Through the SABR’s infrared sights, Mary May picked out a ghostly pale sphere hovering a few inches off the ground, the face of an Algerian trooper. Gingerly he was crawling forward to peer around the turn of the pass, hugging close to the rubble along the edge of the roadway. The face was there for a moment and then gone as the trooper ducked back.

Flicking the selector setting to AIRBURST Mary May rested the sight crosshairs just above the point where the Algerian had disappeared and squeezed the SABR’s trigger.

At the trigger crossed its first detent in its pull, the SABR’s ranging laser produced an invisible pulse of coherent light that touched its targeting point and reflected back. The microprocessor in the SABR’s stock computed a range from that laser reflection and as the grenade launcher itself fired, an inductance coil wrapped around the launcher’s barrel transmitted that range to a microchip buried within the shell as it screamed down the tube.

The shell itself dispassionately counted out the distance in flight and, over the target, it detonated, spraying the environment with a handful of shrapnel.

The Algerian trooper did not return.

“What’s happening, Five?” Trebain asked.

“Nothin’ much. Just a snooper. How are you doing?”

The breath rasped in the Texan’s throat. “You were right about the leg. I liked it a lot better when it was numb. I’m trying to tell myself I’m just imagining it, but I think I got a couple of busted ribs, too.”

“That’s no fun. That happened to me once when I fell off a hayrack. As long as you’re breathing all right you’ll be okay. You want a hit of feel good?”

“No. I want to stay clear. Maybe I can do something … Mary May, maybe you’d better start thinking about getting out of here. Like you said. I’ll be okay.”

She rolled onto her side and looked back at Trebain. “What’s with you, Lee? Do you honestly think I’m going to run out on one of my guys? Get real!”

“Aw hell, Five. It’s just that … I don’t like the idea of the Algis getting their hands on you is all.”

Mary May nestled back behind her weapon stock. “Well, thanks, but I don’t like the idea of the Algis getting their hands on any of us. And that’s not going to happen. The lieutenant’ll get us out of this. One way or another.”

Almost as if by one of Brid Shelleen’s conjurations, a familiar and most welcome voice sounded in their helmet. “Saber Six to Scout Lead. Do you receive?”

Mary May almost broke the transmit key on her lip mike. “Roger that! We copy, Lieutenant!”

“Okay, Mary May. We’ve got the Cipher drone up and we’re relaying through that,” Bolde replied over the circuit. “We also have you and Lee spotted, not to mention our friends the Algerians. We see three BRMs around the bend in the pass about two hundred meters south of your position. Do you verify?”

“I verify, Lieutenant. I can hear their engines idling. We’ve hurt them pretty bad. I don’t think they’re exactly sure of what they’re up against yet.”

“Better and better. We’ll be up with you presently, but we’re going to need a little bit of assistance. What’s your ammunition state in regard to 20mm grenade?”

“Uh, six clips between Lee and me, counting the one in my weapon. Mixed antiarmor and smart round.”

“Excellent,” Bolde’s filtered voice replied with satisfaction. “When I give you the word, I want you to rapid fire it all down the pass in the direction of the Algis. Don’t worry about hitting anything in particular. Just make a lot of noise and keep their heads down. Then you and Trebain stand by to mount up fast. Understood?”

“Understood, sir.”

“Very well. Then let’s proceed. Stand by to commence firing … now!”

Mary May’s finger closed convulsively on the trigger. As rapidly as she could she hosed the bend in the canyon with high explosives, the sharp popping of the grenade bursts reverberating up and down the pass, the echoes building upon themselves. Ejected shell cases tinkled around her and the frame of the SABR grew warm and then hot as she poured fire through it. Lee, ignoring the pain of his fractured ribs, fumbled clips out of his own harness pouches, feeding her.

She was down to her last three rounds when two massive, dark shapes roared past on the floor of the pass. ABLE and CHARLIE running side by side and charging headlong for the bend in the canyon. Mary May realized that her barrage had been performing multiple functions. Not only distracting and suppressing any Algerian forward observers but blanketing the sound of Bolde’s charge through the pass. In a moment someone was going to be most unpleasantly surprised.

The cavalry vehicles vanished around the curve and the silvery glare of muzzle flashes reflected off the walls of the gorge, strobing with the orange of explosion flame. The hills trembled with the piercing crack of booster-gun fire, the thudding cough of grenade streams and the slam of Claymore panels.

And then silence and darkness and a single satisfied voice over the radio link.

“And some damn fools say cavalry is no good in the mountains.”

ABLE reappeared around the bend in the canyon. Rolling to a halt below Mary May and Trebain’s position, its tail ramp swung open. Before the vehicle had even come to a halt, however, Mary May had Trebain to his feet. Supporting him they slid-hopped down the slope toward home.

“See, Lee, I told you we’d get out.”

The only answer was a tightening of the arm around her shoulders. Mary May lugged the injured trooper into the scout bay and dumped him into one of the air seats spaced around the bulkheads. As she secured his safety harness, the tail ramp lifted, and ABLE rumbled ahead.

“Hey, Lieutenant,” she yelled forward. “There’s still one tank destroyer left at the mouth of the pass.”

“Understood, Five,” Bolde called back. “Miss Shelleen is sorting that gentleman out right now.”

Wired into CHARLIE drone’s remote cyber senses through her Helmet-Mounted Display, Brid Shelleen snaked the big robot through narrowing confines of the pass, keeping the throttle trigger pressed to its limits. The enemy knew of their presence and intent. There was no room left for subtlety, no more than there would be in a high-noon shoot out between two old Western gunfighters. Speed and precision would decide this last engagement.

For a split second Brid toggled across to the overhead tactical of the area around the pass mouth. The Algerian Centauro was off to the right of the roadway by about fifty meters, covering the exit and waiting.

She built the engagement sequence in her mind. Fire smoke grenades … Clear the pass entrance and pivot to the right … Switch to thermographics … Acquire the target … Take the shot … Do it now!

CHARLIE’s grenade throwers hurled a cluster of smoke bombs out into the open ground beyond the pass mouth, the drone plunging into the dense swirling haze produced by the bursting charges. Brid started to brake for the turn when, abruptly, a shadowy outline loomed in her visor.

The problem with any military plan of action rests with the fact that the enemy rarely consults with you concerning his own intents. The Algerian tank destroyer crew had apparently elected at that moment to cut across the entry to the pass. Their intent, no doubt, was to take a snap shot at their oncoming foe. Instead, they had found themselves engulfed in an unexpected smoke screen and had come to a halt directly in the path of the charging US vehicle.

Brid locked up CHARLIE’s brakes, but before she could halt the drone it had plowed headlong into the Centauro, centerpunching it between its second and third set of drive wheels.

She hit the firing button of the booster gun, but the three-round burst blazed futilely over her opponent’s deck. The casemate mount could neither depress nor traverse enough to engage this closer-than-point-blank target. She saw the tube of the Centauro’s 105 swing across her video field of vision, then caught the vibration as the gun barrel jammed out of line against CHARLIE’s hull. The Algerian gunners were caught in the same conundrum as she, unable to bring an effective weapon to bear.

Unable to reverse away from the deadlock, Brid opted for her only other alternative, she rocked her joystick hard forward and crushed the power trigger to maximum output.

CHARLIE shuddered, its massive tires clawing at the unyielding stone. Red and yellow systems overload warnings flared all around the periphery of Shelleen’s Helmet Mounted Display and a grinding vibration blurred the camera imaging. But CHARLIE began to gain ground.

As the deck tilted beneath him, the Algerian driver frantically and futilely attempted to break away but the five hundred horsepower of the Centauro could not match the twelve hundred of the Shinseki. Remorselessly the gun drone bulldozed the tank destroyer sideways and over, the Centauro’s wheels spinning helplessly, until the point of overbalance was reached.

With a final crash the Algerian vehicle went over onto its side. With the deadlock broken, Bridget backed CHARLIE off twenty meters and waited. The Algerian crew scrambled out of the hatches of their doomed vehicle, fleeing into the night, and she let them go with a prayer.

I thank you, My Lady, for granting me this option of mercy.

Then she tore open the belly of the tank destroyer with another booster-gun burst.

“The pass mouth is clear, Lieutenant,” she said, lifting her voice to the world outside of her helmet display.

Nate Grey Bird fed his last clip of 9mm into the butt of his Beretta. A lot of extremely odd noise had just come from over the ridge crest, and he sincerely hoped it was indicative of a relief-and-rescue operation.

“Nate, what’s your sitrep?” Lieutenant Bolde’s voice was coming in over the squad channel now.

“Pretty much the same, sir, except the Algerians are getting closer. They’re going to be in hand-grenade range pretty quick, and they have four throwing arms to our two.”

“That will be an irrelevancy here in a moment, Specialist Grey Bird. Roman, you still with us?”

“Yes sir!” Johnny’s enthusiastic response came back. “Right here.”

“All right, here’s the package. I have fixes on you and Nate as well as on the bad guys. In a second here I’m going to toss some CMMs over the ridgeline and onto the Algi positions. Crawl under your helmets because they are going to be close. After the rounds hit, the two of you fall back to the ridgeline and drop down to where we’re waiting. We’re parked almost underneath you.”

“Uh, begging your pardon, sir.” Johnny’s voice had lost a great deal of its enthusiasm. “But that descent is almost vertical. How do we get down?”

“The operative word here, Mr. Roman, is ‘almost.’ As for how you get down, I suggest you step off the edge and let gravity take its course. You can grow some new skin on your next leave. Dedigitate, gentlemen, we do not have a great deal of time here! Rounds on the way!”

Aimed almost vertically, the box launchers belched out their four pre-programmed missiles, the flame spraying over ABLE’s armored back.

“Rounds look good,” Brid reported from her workstation. “We have hits … Johnny and Nate are moving …”

“Right. Get CHARLIE moving, too, down and out onto the flats. Expedite!” Bolde swiveled the weapons pack around, intent on doing a little housecleaning. The Teal/Specter radar unit still sat at the edge of the plateau. Its crew had bailed out of the unarmed vehicle as the fighting had gotten close, and it was far too valuable an asset to leave intact.

Laying his sights on the generator trailer, Bolde demolished it with burst of 25mm from the OCSW. Elevating fire, he chewed away the antenna array and finally focused on the rear hull doors of the transporter track, caving them in and gutting the systems bay.

“Here they come!” Mary May yelled from the aft compartment. Turning his sights to the rear again, Bolde caught the last of Nate and Johnny’s wild slide down the slope face. They still had the Javelin launcher. Good men!

A sharp tack tack tack sounded against the windshield and bullet stars danced across the Armorglas. There were still Algerians out there trying to make a fight of it. Bringing the grenade launcher around, Bolde raked the stone outcropping across from their position, covering his last people home.

The ramp dropped and the deck rang as Johnny and Nate threw themselves and their equipment aboard. “In!” Mary May screamed.

Rick Santiago didn’t need a “go” order. All hands were thrown back in their seats as ABLE lunged forward at maximum acceleration.

Rick fought with the cavalry vehicle’s wheel as they tore down the first switchback below the pass. Dios! This thing is just a goat path! This grade will be hairy enough in daylight and at a sane rate of speed!

Beside him Lieutenant Bolde chanted a mantra. “Faster … Faster … Artillery … Faster!”

Artillery? Shit! Somebody up there in the pass must still have a working radio. They’d left a whole lot of really pissed off Algerians just on the other side of this hill range, and now they no longer had to worry about the presence of friendly troops!

ABLE tore into the next corner, broadsiding through it like a sports car, her outer set of tires more over the edge than on the road. Rick tore back his night-vision visor and slapped his palm down on the auxiliary panel, kicking on the headlights and running lights full beam. Screw stealth! He had to see!

One … two … three … four … five … six … interminable switchbacks, then a short down grade and then the gravel pans.

“Off the road!” Bolde’s yelled command rang in the confines of the cab.

Killing the headlights, Rick swung ABLE into the open desert. A dune loomed ahead, and the Shinseki didn’t as much drive over it as through it, blasting a bow wave of sand to either side. All eight wheels momentarily left the ground. She hit hard once and then concussion bounced her into the air again as the night cracked open and bloody orange light flooded in. There were no definable single explosions as much as a continuous ear-crushing thunder as the massed time-on-target barrage rained down on the Taoudenni caravan road.

Rick’s heart stalled in his chest. But after a moment he realized that they were steadily pulling away from the fire zone. The bombardment wasn’t swinging onto them but was only marching down the roadway. The Algerians were firing blind, raking the caravan route, a frustrated tantrum of high explosives hurled after a brazen and escaping enemy.

They were out. They were all out. Backlit by the shell bursts, Rick could even make out the battered silhouette of CHARLIE drone lumbering faithfully behind them. Then and there, Santiago made a pledge that the next time he got home, he would remember this night and he would go to church and light some candles. He would also go out and get really, really, drunk, but first, he would light the candles.

Over at the commander’s station, Lieutenant Bolde unsnapped the chinstrap of his helmet. Lifting its weight off with a sigh of relief, he ran a hand through his sweat-sodden hair. “Well, that wasn’t such a chore now, was it?”

45 Miles Southeast of the El Khnachich Range 0421 Hours, Zone Time; October 29, 2021

“You want me to push her for a while, Rick?”

“Nah, LT. I poured a little coffee down my throat, and I’m good to the replenishment point.”

“Just checking.”

Steel-splinter stars still gleamed overhead and the cracked cab hatches admitted a stream of pure, chill predawn air that blew away the stenches of powder and sweat and fear. Bolde and Santiago had the driving watch. The others caught what fragmentary rest they could.

Brid Shelleen drowsed intermittently in her workstation seat. Mary May lay on the deck beside her, her head pillowed on her flak vest. Aft, things were silent in the scout bay as well. Even Lee Trebain slept with the aid of a morphine ampoule.

Somewhere over the horizon, an Army heavy-lift quad-rotor was outbound to meet them. Aboard it would be fuel blivets and ammunition reloads and a flying squad from squadron maintenance to help repair their battle damage.

His injured man would be airlifted out to a field hospital for care. And maybe there would be hot A rations and a clean uniform and an extra liter of water for a bath. And maybe a chance to sleep. Maybe really sleep for several hours straight through.

Bolde grinned to himself. Luxury in the eyes of the field soldier. But not yet. Not yet. There were still things to be considered.

What had he done this night? What had he accomplished that had been worth the gamble of the lives of his people?

Destroying the Recon company had poked a sharp stick into the eye of the enemy. Worthwhile. The Algerian army was weak on logistics. There would be no replacements for those destroyed tankers. Another gain. And the attack on that Algerian mechanized battalion would have a cascade effect. Knock out one of a brigade’s three maneuver battalions and you cripple that brigade. Cripple one of its three maneuver brigades and you weaken the entire balanced structure of the division. A plus.

More importantly, though, was the time. It would take hours for the Algerians to re-form and resume replenishment. More hours for casualties to be dealt with and replacement supplies to be brought forward. More hours cautiously to probe forward and learn if any new and nastier surprises were set to be sprung.

Half a day bought? Maybe a day? It was enough. What was that rueful joke making the rounds within Third World military circles? If you are planning a war, best also plan to win it before the Americans can get there. The Algerian fait accompli had been blocked. Their aggression had been stalled. When they finally ventured south of the El Khnachich range, they’d find more than just a scattering of cavalry patrols waiting for them. They’d find an army.

Bolde slouched deeper into his seat. The risk and return had balance. It had been worth it.

Half-asleep at her workstation, Bridget Shelleen lifted her head as she heard a soft trilling whistle grow in the darkness. It had the lilt of the old country to it, and it took her a moment to place the melody over the rumble of the tires. When she did, she smiled.

GLOSSARY

Common Modular Missile System—The replacement-to-be for the US Army’s current TOW and Dragon antitank missile systems. An interchangeable family of warheads, guidance packages, and booster engines, CMM rounds can be assembled in the field to produce a number of differently missionformatted antiarmor and antipersonnel missiles. Capable of being launched from both Army land and air vehicles.

HMD (Helmet-Mounted Display)—An integral multimode imaging system built into the visor of a combat helmet. It can be used to present readouts of personal or Velectronics systems, as a video display for operating remotecontrolled vehicles and equipment via telepresence, or as an access to a virtual-reality environment.

Javelin—A shoulder-fired, infrared-guided, “fire and forget” antitank missile. The replacement for the Dragon ATM, the Javelin is just entering the US inventory at this time, making it a veteran weapons system by 2021.

Laager (modern usage) — A temporary camp for a unit of armored fighting vehicles in the field.

SABR (Selectable Assault Battle Rifle)—The projected next-generation weapons system for the US Army’s ground fighter. An assumed given in any twenty-first century conflict situation is that the American foot soldier is going to be massively outnumbered wherever he (or she) is going to be committed to battle. The concept behind the SABR is to give the individual US infantryperson the same enhanced firepower and survival advantages that precision-guided standoff munitions give his (or her) Air Force counterpart.

The SABR is a composite weapon, combining a 5.56mm Heckler & Koch G36 assault carbine with a six-round, clip-fed grenade launcher, the launcher firing a family of 20mm antivehicle and antipersonnel rounds, many of which will be cybernetically fused “smart” munitions.

Also mated to the weapon will be a multimode sighting system incorporating thermographic, night brite, and laser targeting technologies, giving the user the ability effectively to engage the enemy at all ranges and in all combat environments.

OCSW (Objective Crew Served Weapon)—The 25mm big brother to the SABR. Replacing the “Ma Deuce” 50 caliber machine gun and Mark 19 40mm “Chunker,” this vehicle- and tripod-mounted high-velocity grenade launcher will also be capable of delivering a wide variety of “smart” and “dumb” munitions.

RPV (Remotely Piloted Vehicle)—A remotely operated, robotic surface or aircraft.

MM-15 Shinseki Multi-Mission Combat Vehicle—An end result of Army Chief of Staff Eric K. Shinseki’s “Medium-Weight Force” concept. The replacement for the U.S. Army’s current force of heavyweight tracked tanks and Armored Personnel Carriers. The concept behind this family of wheeled Armored Fighting and Support Vehicles is that they are light enough to be airlifted rapidly to any global trouble spot. Yet, at the same time, they mount enough advanced technological firepower to deal with any potential crisis.

Track—Military slang. The term “track” might be used for any caterpillartreaded armored fighting vehicle other then a true tank or a self-propelled howitzer, e.g., “scout track”, “antiair track”, “command track,” etc.

Velectronics (Vehicle electronics)—A ground-combat vehicle’s battlefield sensors and onboard electronic-warfare systems. An increasingly critical factor in future conflict situations.

Author’s Note—Following the American Civil War, the Seventh U.S. Cavalry Regiment began using the old Irish ballad Garryowen as its distinctive signature march, an acknowledgment to the many Irish immigrants who served with both the regiment and with the frontier army as a whole.

So strongly did the regiment become linked with the song that they became known as the Garryowens, a designation the unit still wears proudly today.

JAMES COBB has lived his entire life within a thirty-mile radius of a major Army post, an Air Force base, and a Navy shipyard. He comments, “Accordingly, it’s seemed a natural to become a kind of cut-rate Rudyard Kipling, trying to tell the stories of America’s service people.” Currently, he’s writing the Amanda Garrett technothriller series, with three books, Choosers of the Slain, Seastrike, and Seafighter, published. He’s also doing the Kevin Pulaski suspense thrillers for St. Martin’s Press. He lives in the Pacific Northwest and, when he’s not writing, he indulges in travel, the classic American hot rod, and collecting historic firearms.