Steel Gauntlet Page 7

  “Dean”—Hyakowa drew his name out—“you’re still too boot to know how to look awake when you’re asleep. That’s why I’m going to make sure you get tested on something you slept through.”

  Dean’s brightening mood crashed back into darkness and despair.

  “Lima Three-five, Lima Three-five,” Dean said nervously into his helmet comm unit. “This is One-one-three.” The simple call signs identified Staff Sergeant Charlie Bass, the third platoon sergeant, as the recipient, and Dean, third man in the first fire team of first squad, as the caller. “I have targets. Request patch-through to Gun Control. Over.”

  “One-one-three, this is Lima Three-five. Roger your request for patch-through. Wait one.” For this first exercise, the radio call signs and procedure were kept simple and formal. Both men knew they wouldn’t be talking that way on the radio under fire.

  In a moment a new voice came over the radio to Dean, relayed through the platoon’s main communications net. “Lima Three-one-one-three, this is Gun Control. Over.”

  “Gun Control, this is Lima, uh, Three-one-one-three.” Dean had to think about his call sign—he’d never used one so long and involved. Then he forgot what he was supposed to say next.

  “What is your position, One-one-three? Over.” The artillery radioman obviously understood Dean’s confusion.

  Dean looked at the unfamiliar geo-position-locator. It was unfamiliar to him because the GPL was normally a squad leader’s equipment. The GPL was tied into a planet-girdling satellite system that gave his position within five meters. “I am at....” He read off the alphanumeric string that gave his map coordinates. Then he remembered what he was supposed to say next. “Target, earthwork structure.” He looked at the sod-covered earthworks that was his target through the range-finder shield on his helmet. “Azimuth, three-two-four. Range, one-one-zero-zero. Over.”

  “One-one-three,” Gun Control immediately read back the information. “Confirm. Over.”

  “Confirmed, Gun Control,” Dean said after he checked the numbers. He was concentrating on the mechanics of calling in artillery, and his radio procedure was slipping.

  “Lima Three-one-one-three, one spotter round on its way. Advise. Over.” Over the radio, Dean heard the blast of a howitzer firing.

  Dean peered intently at the target and began counting the seconds. He knew how far away the artillery was and how long it should take for a round to travel that distance. Still, he flinched in surprise when he heard the sharp crack of the supersonic round as it passed overhead, and almost simultaneously saw the flash of light and eruption of snow thrown up by the explosion. He quickly analyzed what he saw and compared it to vids he’d seen of artillery rounds hitting different surfaces. The way the snow flew up in a broad cone told him the round had been fused for explosion on contact and had gone all the way to the frozen dirt surface before it went off.

  “Gun Control, adjust,” he said excitedly. “Right one hundred. On my azimuth, up seventy-five.” His helmet’s range finder told him the round hit a hundred meters to the left of his aiming point and seventy-five meters short. “Fire one spotter.”

  “Right one hundred, up seventy-five,” the Gun Control radioman repeated. “One spotter on its way.”

  This time the sonic crack and simultaneous explosion didn’t make Dean flinch, though he was surprised that they occurred exactly when he expected. This round struck well within the kill radius of his aiming point.

  “Gun Control, you’re on target. Fire for effect. Over.”

  “Lima Three-one-one-three. This is Gun Control. We are on target. Fire for effect. Advise when target is destroyed. Over.”

  “Gun Control, Lima Three-one-one-three will advise when target is destroyed.”

  One round came downrange and hit within meters of the last. For this exercise, one round was all that would be fired to simulate a barrage. Dean stood, grinning proudly. The first time he’d ever called in artillery he’d hit his target with the second round.

  “Not too bad,” Corporal Miller said a few meters to Dean’s left rear. “Of course, if that was a moving target, you would have missed it completely.” Miller was more pleased than he let on, though. He knew that the artillerymen deliberately missed with their first round; Dean’s instructions had been precise enough that the first shot would have been metal on target if they’d been firing for real.

  On a different range a hundred kilometers to the south, Claypoole studied the drone that was his target. It was big and it was gray and it was scooting along the surface of the snow at a speed his range finder translated as more than one hundred kilometers per hour. He remembered what he’d been taught in the classroom, and knew that if the drone was traveling in a straight line, he could call anything down on it. But the drone was zigging and zagging, and once in a while threw itself violently into reverse. But it didn’t have any passengers, and its driver was safely operating it from a steady seat at a console inside a shelter a hundred meters to Claypoole’s rear.

  “Go to it, Lance Corporal,” Sergeant Bojanowski called from his observer position. “You’ve got to kill that baby before it kills you.”

  “Right,” Claypoole muttered. He didn’t know how he was going to manage. Well, here goes, he thought. “Fireball One,” he said into his radio. “This is Spotter Ten.” They were using a different communications protocol for air. “I have a target. Over.”

  “Spotter Ten, Fireball One. Go.” No airman, not even a hopper pilot, was going to use formal radio procedure—it wasn’t dashing enough.

  “My position...” Claypoole didn’t have the same nervousness about giving instructions that had bothered Dean, his worry was different. He rattled off his coordinates. “Target, MBT. Azimuth, one-seven-three. Range, six-five-seven-zero. Vector, zero-eight-six. Speed, one-zero-two. Maneuvering. Over.” He didn’t know where the hopper was. He couldn’t hear it, and suspected that even if he stood up and looked around, he wouldn’t see it. He had to give his and the drone’s relative positions so the pilot would know where to look for the target.

  The hopper pilot repeated the numbers, then said, “Orienting. Splash color.”

  Claypoole planted the laser pointer on his shoulder and sighted on the drone. Bingo, he nailed it on the first try! He tracked the movement of the drone and kept the beam of light on it.

  “Ten, One. I have red light. You.” The pilot didn’t actually see the color, he was firing from behind a hill and read the data transmitted to his instruments from satellites.

  “Hopper One, that’s it. Fire.”

  There was a second’s hesitation, then the pilot said, “Ten, what are you doing? I lost the light.”

  Claypoole swore at himself. The drone had made a sudden turn, almost ninety degrees, and lost the color Claypoole’s laser beam was painting it with. Quickly, he found his target again and hit it with the red laser light.

  “I have red,” the hopper pilot said.

  “You have the target.”

  “One Hellspawn out.”

  Claypoole instinctively gripped the laser pointer tighter—and lost his target when the drone took another sharp turn.

  “Find it, find it, find it!” the pilot shrieked. He could slow the missle slightly, but if it lost the target for more than a second or two, it probably wouldn’t have time to lock back on again.

  Frantically, Claypoole found the drone and resighted.

  “Got it!” the pilot shouted. “Keep it painted.”

  The drone sped in a straight line to the west, and Claypoole managed to track it, keeping the beam of light on the target. Suddenly, the drone stopped and went into reverse, causing Claypoole’s aim to slide off. Appalled, through the sight he saw the Hellspawn pass through the space the drone would have been in if it hadn’t stopped.

  “You’re dead,” Sergeant Bojanowski called out. “Next victim.” He turned to Ensign Vanden Hoyt and said quietly, “You know, if that drone had a real driver instead of a controller who could see what your lance corpora
l was doing, that would have been a clean kill.”

  After two weeks of classroom and field training, with very little more sleep than Gunny Thatcher had said they’d have, the exhausted Marines of Company L reassembled in the company classroom for a briefing from their trainers.

  “None of you are a danger to take over my job,” Sergeant Bojanowski said. “But every one of you has the experience of painting a moving target so well that a hopper can hit it with a Hellspawn. Every one of you can talk to a flight of Raptors and rain fire on a target. You’ve all got the experience, and that experience will likely save some of your lives where you’re going.” He paused for a moment and let his gaze wash over the tired men he was addressing. “Something nobody told you before now is my last duty assignment was on Arsenault—as an instructor at air controller school. You’ve learned more and performed better during the last two weeks than any of the classes I taught there. You did it on less sleep than those students had, and you had to divide your attention between what I was teaching you and what Corporal Henry was teaching you.”

  Bojanowski stood erect. “Marines, well done! I hope you get a liberty call before you mount out. You’ve earned one hell of a drunken night in town.” He stepped aside and Thatcher nodded to the artilleryman.

  Corporal Henry took front and center. He seemed lost in thought for a moment, then said, “The only thing Sergeant Bojanowski said that I can’t is that he’s served as an instructor at artillery school. You did an outstanding job. If I was on a gun crew, I wouldn’t be worried about following aiming instructions from anyone in Company L. And when I get back to the battery, I’m going to pass the word that you know your shit.”

  Gunny Thatcher stepped forward. He looked at the two trainers for a long moment before addressing them. “Gentlemen, if anybody had told me two weeks ago that every man jack in this company would be as proficient today at calling in air and artillery as they are, I wouldn’t have believed them. I am personally going to see to it that your commanders know what an outstanding job you did.” He cracked a brief smile. “The Marines of Company L appreciate a job well done.”

  “Three cheers!” someone called from the back of the classroom.

  The Marines jumped to their feet and shouted in unison, “Aarugh! Aarugh! Aarugh!” They burst into laughter while the last “aarugh” was still echoing off the walls, and hurtled catcalls at their instructors.

  “Thank you,” Thatcher said as the cries of his Marines died down. “I know you have to get back to your units for your own preparations for this mount-out.” He watched as the two walked down the center aisle of the classroom, shaking out-stretched hands and exchanging compliments with the Marines of Company L. As soon as they were gone, he called for the company’s attention.

  “You look pleased with yourselves, and you should be. You did extremely well in your training. You also look like you need about twenty-four hours sleep. But you aren’t going to get it, not now. Now you have to find out just what we’re going to be facing.” He noted with satisfaction how serious everyone became. “You’re probably all wondering who the gunner is,” he said, and indicated the warrant officer, who had done nothing more than observe during the previous two weeks, and who still hadn’t been introduced. “This is Gunner Moeller. He’s a historian from Headquarters Marine Corps. His job is to teach us all about armor, antiarmor tactics, and about the other weapons we’ll use to kill tanks.”

  There were a few sounds of disbelief. “What’s a historian got to do with it?” someone asked.

  Thatcher cocked an eyebrow. “Nobody uses armor anymore. It’s too vulnerable to man-portable antiarmor weapons, and too expensive to replace. The Fleet no longer has any experience or expertise in armor or the tactics to defeat it. We need a historian because they’re the only people who know enough about the subject to teach us what we need to know to face armor and live to tell about it.” He turned to the slender, slightly stooped warrant officer and nodded. “Gunner.”

  Warrant Officer Moeller looked distracted as he walked toward the trid controls. Almost absently, he reached out a hand to turn it on. “This is an M1D7 Super Abrams from circa 2050.” The three-dimensional image of a monstrous vehicle appeared and began revolving. “It stood four meters high, was twelve meters long, and six meters wide. The M1D7 Super Abrams weighed more than sixty tons, and had armor strong enough to enable it to ignore any weapon short of a tactical nuke. It carried a crew of four, and sixty rounds for its 120mm main gun. The Super Abrams had a top speed of one hundred kph. It burned diesel fuel at the rate of eight liters per kilometer. Its weight was so great it could only maneuver on paved roads or stony ground with solid understrata, and could safely cross only a small portion of the bridges on the face of the Earth. It was too heavy for nearly any airlift available at the time. The logistical train it required was such that an armored battalion could only field sixty tanks.” Gunner Moeller spoke in a drone and didn’t seem to notice the drooping eyelids and nodding heads in his audience. “Still, despite its limitations, the Super Abrams was so awesomely powerful that it was the strongest and most desired land-war fighting weapon on Earth.” The tank’s image was replaced by that of a foot soldier aiming an ornate tubelike object that rested on his shoulder. “Until the infantry came up with this...” Moeller reached to the trid’s controls and twisted the volume dial to full just as the soldier in the image fired his weapon. The loud blast shocked most of the men back to attention. The louder blast when the image switched to an M1D7 being hit and killed by the rocket made all of them jump.

  Moeller chuckled. “Got you!” He continued in a livelier voice, “Now that I’ve got your attention, that was an M-72 Straight Arrow. It was man-portable, relatively cheap, and could kill an M1D7 Super Abrams, the tank that could withstand anything short of a tactical nuke. The Straight Arrow was the reason the M1D7 Super Abrams was the last main battle tank anybody developed and fielded. Lance corporals and below, who can tell me why?”

  The right arms of almost all the junior men in the company shot up. All of them shouted out answers. Some of the answers were right.

  Chapter 7

  The gist of Warrant Officer Moeller’s lecture on the history of tank warfare was that the first armored vehicles that could be called “main battle tanks” were fielded in the early part of the twentieth century during what was then called the “Great War.” The first ones were basically mobile pillboxes. They mounted a couple of machine guns and had thick enough armor to stop bullets, hand grenades, and smaller artillery fragments. In short order some of them began carrying small-caliber cannons. To the infantrymen who couldn’t stop them with their rifles and machine guns, they were rolling hell. So the infantry developed tank traps that reduced their mobility, and explosive charges that could knock them out of a fight even if they couldn’t kill them. The reaction of the tankers was to develop bigger, tougher, faster, more maneuverable tanks. By the time the Great War ended, the tanks being fielded by all the participants were true monsters compared to those in the earliest stages of the war.

  But tank development didn’t stop there. Over the next twenty years the major powers of Earth continued to develop bigger, stronger, tougher, faster, more maneuverable tanks, so by the time the Second World War began, the most militarily underdeveloped of the major powers had tanks that could easily defeat the strongest tanks from the previous war. Infantrymen really hated that. When you’re armed with a rifle and maybe a rifle grenade, there’s simply no way you can expect to survive against a twenty-five-ton chunk of armor carrying a 75mm cannon and a couple of machine guns. So the infantry came up with a gizmo called a bazooka—or other names, depending on which of the great powers did the naming. One rocket from a bazooka could kill any tank in the world. Tankers hated that. So they made bigger, stronger, etcetera tanks to defend against the bazooka.

  Tank development continued after World War II. It got to the point where nearly every national leader wanted an army of tanks to call his own, whether his
country had any real use for them or not. At most, there were only a half-dozen nation-states with the development and manufacturing capability to come up with newer and better tanks, and each vied with the others in the international arms market to convince those countries that didn’t have that capability that theirs were the very biggest, strongest, toughest, fastest, and most maneuverable tanks available, and that the lesser countries—of course, they didn’t call them that, “developing countries” became the polite catch phrase—should buy tanks from them. And buy they did.

  In the latter part of the century the leader of an insignificant desert nation, highly impressed with his tanks, decided to conquer his neighbors. What’s the point of having all those tanks if you’re not going to use them, right? So this desert war chieftain invaded the smallest and weakest of his neighbors, convinced that the rest of the world would see the size of his tank army and quail at the very thought of intervention.

  He was very wrong. The small, weak neighbor he invaded was a major source of the world’s supply of petroleum. The world at that time ran on petrochemicals, and nobody wanted this particular war lord to control a significant portion of the supply. So most of the developed world went to war against him. The war lord’s opponents didn’t bring as many tanks to the fray as he had, but as it turned out, that was quite all right. He’d believed the sales hype of the wrong major power, and his tanks simply couldn’t stand against the tanks made by the other major powers. The war was over four days after the allied forces crossed the border.

  At that point Gunner Moeller inserted a side note, partly bragging, partly a comment on how infantry kept getting ahead of tanks. The immediate lineal ancestor of the Confederation Marine Corps was the United States Marine Corps. Those Marines, like Confederation Marines, were primarily infantry, with strong organic air support, moderate artillery, and very little armor to call their own. The U.S. Marines sent two divisions and one air wing into the war. In three days’ fighting, the Marines, mostly infantry, defeated ten infantry and five armored divisions and cleared enemy forces out of a third of the small country.