Steel Gauntlet Page 4

  “Because, Professor, you are available, and the fewer people involved in this operation the better,” Boxer growled. “Besides,” he added, “we’ve all read your books.”

  “Professor,” Secretary Berentus said, leaning forward and touching Benjamin lightly on his right knee, “if you can’t oblige us, we will understand, but let me assure you, your help is vital and we are begging for it. Hundreds, thousands, of our Marines and soldiers will die if we don’t do this right. We do not have the time to go to Dr. Post and convince him to help us. We need your decision right now.”

  Professor Benjamin stared silently at the others. Then he sighed. “Very well, gentlemen. You can count on me. When do I leave?”

  Secretary Berentus rose from his chair and pumped Benjamin’s hand vigorously. “This afternoon, Professor,” he replied.

  Benjamin stood, slightly bemused, absentmindedly shaking the Secretary’s hand. Then he turned to General Boxer. “Sir, I have studied war all my life, but I have never even held a weapon in my hands. Will I see these weapons used in real combat?”

  The Marine shifted nervously in his chair before answering. “Yes, Professor, there’s, uh, a good chance you might. But,” he added quickly, “there’d never be any danger to you personally, I can assure you of that.”

  Yes, Professor Benjamin thought, his pulse quickening, I bet: no more danger than Henry’s archers faced at Agincourt.

  The flight to Arsenault on the CNSS Sergeant Frank Crean took thirty days, standard. During that time Professor Benjamin was accorded flag-rank treatment.

  “Your mission,” Assistant Commandant Boxer explained before he left, “is to train Marine officers and NCOs in the use of the Straight Arrow and in antiarmor tactics. They, in turn, will spread out to the units scheduled to make the assault and train the men who will go up against St. Cyr’s forces. You may be required to accompany a follow-on assault element, just to be on hand if the task force commander needs any advice after the initial landing. For sure, we want you to be on the Fleet Admiral’s flagship during the preliminary invasion, in case your expertise is needed. You’ll go as a civilian adviser to the Fleet commander.”

  While on board the Crean, Benjamin received a full intelligence briefing on the Diamundian situation, especially concerning what was known about the armored force St. Cyr had managed to assemble. Unfortunately, St. Cyr had closed down all communication and commerce with the outside world once he seized power on Diamunde, so not many details were known about conditions there. Analysts believed he was consolidating his power and would soon ask for formal recognition from the Confederation. The Council of Worlds had concluded, after a heated debate, not to deal with the usurper, but to invade and oust him with military force. This was done over the strenuous objections of many Council members, particularly those afraid their financial interests on Diamunde would be threatened if the Confederation invaded.

  “He’ll be ready for us,” the briefing officer had said, “but what he doesn’t know is that we’ll be ready for him.” Professor Benjamin said nothing, but he hoped the briefer’s optimism was justified. But as a historian who had studied many military campaigns in past wars, he was fully aware that in battle nothing ever went as expected.

  He spent most of his time on the Crean studying his manuals, reviewing how the Straight Arrow worked, and rereading Guderian’s Panzer Leader, a book he’d been told Marston St. Cyr had studied thoroughly. Life on board a military naval vessel fascinated him, and when he had free time he wandered about the ship, talking to the crew. Just before he boarded the Essay to land on Arsenault, he’d been issued several sets of garrison utilities and told he would be required to wear them while training the Marines. Standing in his stateroom, gazing into the mirror at himself in Marine uniform, he felt a surge of pride. He actually looked tough in the utilities. My God, he thought, have I missed my calling in this life? He also wondered if he’d be able to keep them after the mission was over.

  On Arsenault, Benjamin was introduced to the officers and staff NCOs he would train. He was surprised at how warmly they greeted him. Many said they had read his books, which surprised him even more. And they really had, which flattered him very much. After teaching generations of reluctant scholars subjects they took only to get credit for graduation, he knew when someone had read a text. In time he was astonished at how closely these professionals had studied his books, as they sat around in the evenings, discussing how the Germans should have deployed their tanks at Kursk and the failure rate of the Straight Arrows at the Battle of Lake Mistassini.

  But his first lecture was the best of his career.

  Professor Benjamin took the podium. “Gentlemen,” he began, and coughed. “Excuse me, but your incomparable mess sergeant served us frogs’ legs for breakfast this morning and I must have a couple still stuck in my throat.” Several men laughed.

  “Gentlemen,” he tried again, “this is an M1D7 Super Abrams from circa 2049.” The huge vidscreen behind him came to life as the three-dimensional image of an armored behemoth roared down a dusty road. “The M1D7 was the direct descendant of the M1A1 developed by the automotive genius, Dr. Phill Lett, during the late twentieth century.” The charging tank froze on the screen and began to revolve. “We do not know the precise capabilities of the tanks St. Cyr has developed, but from surveillance and eyewitness accounts, we are pretty sure his main battle tank is going to be very much like the M1D7, with updated weapons and propulsion systems, of course. He has an inventory of lighter armored vehicles and they are a potent threat, but it’s the M1D7 we will concentrate on during the coming days. We do know that he calls them TP1s, which stands for Teufelpanzer, Model One. That’s German for ‘devil tank.’ Marston St. Cyr is a student of the German Army armor tactics employed during World War Two.”

  The assembled Marines were relaxed but paying close attention.

  “The M1D7 you see up there weighed 360,000 kilograms and had armor thick enough and strong enough to defeat any antitank weapon of its day. It stood four meters high, was twelve meters long, and six wide. Its 120mm main gun fired, among many others, an armor-piercing, fin-stabilized, sabot-discarding round made of depleted uranium. It could carry sixty of those rounds and had a crew of four. The tank had a top speed of one hundred kph and burned fuel—gasoline—at the rate of eight liters per minute. We do not know the consumption rate for the TP1 or anything about its propulsion system.

  “A concentration of bolts from heavy plasma weapons could eventually melt through the hull of one of these things, providing you could get one to stand still long enough, or not fire back until you’d finished slagging its armor plate. Likewise, your artillery would be effective, providing a gunner could get a direct hit on the relatively thin dorsal armor plates. You could take a track off with a lucky hit or a mine, but the tank would still be a dangerous stationary gun platform until someone came along to finish the job. In a fluid battlefield situation that might not happen soon enough. In actuality, the infantryman has nothing in his arsenal that can stop a monster like this—today.

  “So why did these tanks disappear from the battlefield?” Benjamin touched a control and the M1D7 was replaced by the image of a long black cylindrical object that looked like a huge writing stylus. “That, gentlemen, is why: the 75mm Straight Arrow light antitank weapon.

  “The Straight Arrow combined the features of several older man-portable antitank weapons with some ingenious modifications that completely changed mobile warfare. Those older weapons were the Soviet RPD-series 40mm antitank free-flight missile and the American 66mm light antitank weapon. Where the Straight Arrow improved on these weapons was its self-contained guidance system, longer range, and devastating destructiveness. The Straight Arrow had an effective range of one thousand meters, and at that range could penetrate over four hundred millimeters of rolled homogenous armored plate.

  “That baby,” his enthusiasm was building now, “could be fired over open sights as a direct-fire weapon, or its self-containe
d guidance system could be activated to launch a heat-seeking missile for indirect fire. It was muzzle-loaded and percussion-fired, but a short distance from the muzzle the rocket motor cut in, boosting the missile to a velocity of a thousand meters per second. The rocket was fin-stabilized. The penetrator rod was made of depleted uranium, two times denser than tungsten steel. When this hit the armor of a tank, its entire kinetic energy was concentrated in a spot about the size of your thumb. The penetrator turned white hot and punched through the plate, shedding its ‘skin’ as it passed through. But the skin followed the penetrator through the hole and dispersed inside the tank into white-hot granules twice as dense as steel, instantly igniting everything they touched. So even if the main round itself didn’t set off the fuel and ammo, the thousands of granules would. I don’t need to tell you what they did to the crew.”

  He paused. The room was completely silent now, each man’s eyes focused on the Straight Arrow, which dissolved suddenly into a tank rushing at great speed across a snowy ridge line. A bright finger of light flashed out of the left side of the screen and touched the turret of the tank. There was a brilliant bloom of white light as the round penetrated, and then the turret leaped into the air on a gout of flame. The mortally wounded tank ground erratically to a halt, burning intensely. The camera shifted then, looking down into the burned-out hulk through the hole where the turret had been. What had once been a man sat melted into the driver’s seat.

  The trid screen went blank. “Those films were shot by the Canadians at the Battle of Lake Mistassini in 2052. Gentlemen,” Professor Jere Benjamin concluded, forgetting momentarily who he was, “let’s go get ‘em!”

  Chapter 4

  Staff Sergeant Charlie Bass stretched luxuriously beneath the warm goose-down comforter that lay across Katrina’s oversize bed. During the night the sheets had become tangled and askew and pillows had fallen onto the floor, but the comforter was huge and warm and more than adequately covered their naked bodies. Beside him, Katrina shifted her position slightly and sighed in her sleep. Her thigh came to rest against his, and its warmth seeped into Charlie and aroused him again.

  Outside, the winds whistled shrilly about the buildings of New Oslo, driving tiny tendrils of snow across the rooftops; gusts whipped powdery snow ghosts into the air from the banks piled along the streets. Winter had only started in New Oslo, and already a meter of snow blanketed the capital of Thorsfinni’s World. The newly risen sun glowed dimly through the icy haze enfolding the awakening city as well-bundled citizens, cheeks bright from the subzero cold, hurried about their early morning tasks. But inside Katrina’s snug apartment, Charlie Bass was warm, satisfied, and happily looking forward to the coming days. Katrina had promised him that they’d take a trip into the nearby foothills of the Thorvald Mountains, where she would teach him how to ski. But he didn’t give a damn if he spent the rest of the week right there in that bed.

  Great Buddha’s golden balls, he thought, smiling and settling farther down into the luxuriously soft mattress beneath him, this woman has taken twenty years off my age! The tantalizing odor of fresh-brewing coffee wafted to him from the kitchenette. His stomach growled. In a few moments he’d awaken Katrina and, swaddled in comfortable robes, they’d enjoy the hearty breakfast the servo had prepared for them. Then, a leisurely bath as hot as they could stand it. Then... Charlie Bass smiled broadly. Good, clean fun.

  Best of all, almost, the prodigious quantities of beer he’d consumed the night before had not left him with a single trace of hangover that morning.

  The communicator strapped to his wrist shrilled. He bolted upright; the Confederation Marine Corps knew where he was and wanted him again. Beside him Katrina’s eyes opened slightly. “Vas?” she asked, a strand of silver-blonde hair bisecting her face as she rose up on one elbow. Her breasts drooped ponderously as she rose to a sitting position and smiled sleepily at Bass.

  Bass leaned back and crossed his wrist across his chest. “Staff Sergeant Bass here, sir,” he said resignedly.

  “Captain Meadows, military attaché at the Confederation Embassy, Staff Sergeant. Very sorry to interrupt you like this.” The captain’s voice sounded loud and clear in the small apartment. An unfamiliar anger at the Corps gripped Bass momentarily but he suppressed it at once.

  “Bad news, Staff Sergeant. You are to gather at once the men who came in with you and report to the embassy for return transportation to Camp Ellis.”

  “Do you know why, sir?”

  “No, Staff Sergeant. All I know is that 34th FIST is going on deployment.”

  “Aye aye, sir.” The communicator went silent.

  “Vat is it?” Katrina asked anxiously.

  Bass didn’t answer immediately. “Aw, we’ve got to return to Bronnoysund,” he said at last. A look of real disappointment crossed Katrina’s face. “We’re going somewhere,” he added.

  Katrina knew enough about the Marines’ mission on her world that she did not ask where. “Oh, Charlie, honey, ve hat plans...”

  “I know, Katie, I know,” Bass said. He kissed her lightly. “When we get back, I’ll have the skipper restore our R and R, and by Buddha’s big balls, you and me, we’ll do a month together! Okay?”

  Bass swung his legs over the side of the bed and put his feet on the floor. It was ice cold. The entire ambience of Katrina’s tiny apartment had been destroyed by that call. Already his mind was racing forward, how long would it take him to get dressed, how much time would it take to find Lance Corporal Schultz and the others? It would take them six hours’ flight time to get back to the 34th FIST’s garrison at Camp Pete Ellis. Sergeant Hyakowa and the other NCOs would already be getting the rest of the platoon ready back there even now. Where were they mounting out to this time? A desert world, a jungle world? His heart began to race. Charlie Bass was a professional Marine. Deployments, training, the myriad details required to administer and lead an infantry platoon, that’s what he did, and he was good at it and he loved it.

  “You muss leaf right now?” Katrina asked as she slid out the other side of the bed and into warm slippers.

  “What?” Bass asked, his mind already light-years beyond where they were sitting. She repeated the question. Bass hunched his shoulders against the cold in the room and scratched one foot with the other. His body was laced with the scars of old wounds. The most recent, a long gash down his left arm, was still livid. The skin-grafting did not require a surgeon, so even a corpsman could have removed the scars easily and painlessly, but Bass insisted on keeping them. He ran a finger thoughtfully down the outside of his left arm, feeling the long groove a knife blade had gouged there on Elneal the year before. “Yeah,” he answered. “But Katie—” He held up a finger and smiled broadly. “—not before breakfast, and a hot bath.”

  Every man in the 34th FIST was authorized one week rest and recuperation leave a year—R&R to most people, or I&I in unofficial Marine parlance, which stood for “intoxication and intercourse”—mission requirements permitting. Since the 34th was stationed on the very fringe of Human Space and subject to immediate deployment without prior notice, it was unit policy that no more than ten percent of the men could be on leave at any one time. Except for special reenlistment leaves, none was permitted offworld for any man assigned to the 34th.

  Men were selected for R&R by rotation from a roster maintained by the FIST F-1, or personnel officer. There were three sites on Thorsfinni’s World where the Marines were permitted to take this leave: Troms, a tiny resort town located near the equator, where in summer it often got warm enough to swim comfortably in the ocean and sometimes even get a tan on the narrow, rocky beaches; Bergen, a booming mining town about six thousand kilometers south and east of Bronnoysund; and New Oslo, the capital city of Thorsfinni’s World, in the northern temperate region on the other side of the planet. New Oslo had a population of over a million and some of the amenities of a modern city on one of the more developed worlds of Human Space.

  When the third platoon of L Compan
y got its chance to send eligible men on R&R, Staff Sergeant Bass, and Lance Corporals Schultz, Claypoole, and Dean, were selected. They had unanimously elected to spend their leave in New Oslo, where the women were warm, the beer was cold, and there were sights to see.

  “Best of all,” Schultz said as they settled in for the suborbital flight to New Oslo, “we won’t have to put up with this damned urban warfare crap for a week.” Since the battle in New Obbia on Elneal the year before, the Fleet operations officer had directed that the men of the 34th FIST get additional training in the techniques of city fighting. For weeks now they had practiced assaults and withdrawals in clever mock-ups of city streets and buildings constructed just for training purposes. Schultz was weary of running up and down narrow stairways and pulling “dead” Marines out of hallways. “We’ll never get to use any of this shit anyway,” he muttered.

  “Pipe down, Hammer,” Bass said. “You know the Corps always prepares for the last war it fought. Relax, enjoy the scenery.”

  The aircraft broke through the cloud cover over New Oslo at about three thousand meters. Simultaneously, as if some god were illuminating the city below for the Marines’ benefit, the sun broke through and bathed the metropolis in rays of weak winter radiance. Terraforming on Thorsfinni’s World had not been allowed to get out of hand as it had on other inhospitable planets in the Confederation. Even so, the ‘Finnis had left their cities and towns fully open to the elements instead of confining them within climate-control bubbles. The ‘Finnis had the technology to build the bubbles, they just didn’t want to. They had not only preserved the language of their distant Terran ancestors, but had also found a world whose rugged landscape and harsh winters replicated the Scandinavian climate their ancestors had come from, and they were going to keep it that way.