The Complete Hammer's Slammers: Volume 3 Read online

  “Sir . . .” said Barbour. He didn’t know how to continue.

  Tedeschi wouldn’t have given him the opportunity to go on anyway. “Look, what’s the problem?” he demanded. “Is it me? Do you have a problem with the way I run things here?”

  “Lord, no sir,” Barbour blurted. Tedeschi could have been back at Camp Able for all the effect he’d had on Barbour up till this moment. Lieutenants in the headquarters bureaucracy didn’t expect to have anything to do with commanding generals.

  “Then your section CO, Wayney,” Tedeschi pressed. “Trouble with her? Tell me, boy, tell me now.”

  “Sir,” Barbour said. Tedeschi was leaning forward, compressing his cocked leg and bringing his brutal, swarthy features threateningly closer to Barbour’s face. “Captain Wayney’s—she’s no problem, sir. She’s fine.”

  Captain Wayney wasn’t a brilliant intelligence technician. To tell the truth, she wasn’t even a good one. But she was far too good an administrator to get in the way of an underling who was brilliant. Wayney not only handed Barbour the tough ones, she let him run with his whims. The result had been a series of striking triumphs for the section which Wayney headed.

  “Look, I’ll make you a proposition,” Tedeschi said, leaning back a few centimeters. “You get an appointment on my personal staff. You report to nobody else, and I leave you the fuck alone. And you jump two pay grades to major. When this operation’s over, which I expect to take another six to nine months standard, you have the choice of accompanying me to my next posting—as a light colonel. Fair, Barbour?”

  Barbour stared up at Tedeschi. He didn’t know how to respond. The whole thing was beyond belief.

  Instead of reacting directly to the proposition, Barbour said, “Sir? Why are you doing this? There’s eighteen people in Technical Intelligence. You don’t need me.”

  Half of Tedeschi’s face smiled. “Right, eighteen,” he said flatly. “All of them can do thirty percent of what you do. Two of them can do about seventy percent. That a fair assessment, Lieutenant?”

  Barbour swallowed. If he’d thought about the question—which he hadn’t—he’d have figured that Hellfire Hank knew nothing about the operations of Tech Int. He was too busy running around in a combat car and biting the heads off Kairene guerrillas.

  Dead wrong.

  “Yes sir,” Barbour said. “Wellborn’s maybe better than that, but okay, that’s about right.”

  “And not a cursed one of them can do the rest of what you do, the magic part,” Tedeschi said, his voice like a cat’s tongue, rough but caressing nonetheless. “I said six to nine months standard to finish the job.”

  He slammed the heel of his right fist into his left hand, a sudden stroke and whop! that made Barbour flinch back. “I don’t need shooters, Lieutenant,” the general continued. “I got shooters up the ass, I got shooters better than me, and that’s plenty fucking good! The difference between six and nine is knowing where the bastards are to shoot. Do you see?”

  “Sir,” said Barbour miserably. “I can’t do that anymore. Target people to be shot. I can’t.”

  “Do you want people to die, is that it?” Tedeschi shouted, his face ramming closer to Barbour’s again. “If the operation goes the long way, it’ll boost our casualties by fifty percent. You know that, don’t you?”

  Barbour nodded. Again, there was nothing wrong with the general’s analysis. There was a pretty direct correlation between losses and the length of time people were running around, firing live ammunition.

  “Also about double the number of local wogs get greased,” Tedeschi added, “not that I give a flying fuck about that, but maybe you do?”

  “I don’t. . . .” Barbour said. “Sir, if I don’t do it, it’s not my responsibility. Sir.”

  “That last operation,” the general said, “blitzing the headquarters of the Seventy-Three Bee regiment—that was fucking brilliant. That’s the sort of thing I need to get this operation over, quick and clean. Right?”

  Barbour’s face formed itself into something between a smile and a rictus. He was afraid to speak.

  “Come on, Barbour,” Tedeschi said. He took the junior man’s chin between a thumb and finger that could crush nutshells. He tilted Barbour’s face to meet his hard blue eyes. “Tell me that you’re going to stay with me till the job’s done. Not for the promotion. For the job.”

  Barbour stood up carefully, lifting his chin out of the general’s grip. “Sir,” he said, staring at the wall beyond Tedeschi’s left shoulder, “I’m sorry, but I can’t do that job anymore.”

  Tedeschi slammed his boot back onto the floor. He wasn’t quite as tall as Barbour, but he had the physical presence of a tank.

  “I’d spit on you, Lieutenant,” the general said, “but you’d foul my saliva. Go to fucking Cantilucca, fuck around on a survey team. You’re not fit to associate with the people doing real work.”

  Tedeschi slammed out of the canteen.

  A few moments later, other officers returned to their drinks and belongings. They looked curiously at Lieutenant Robert Barbour, who remained where the general left him.

  Barbour was crying.

  Earlier Mahgreb

  The incoming shells screamed down on Lieutenant Robert Barbour

  like steam whistles pointed at his ears.

  They’re landing short!

  Barbour ducked in the fighting compartment of High Hat, the combat car in which he rode as a passenger. The regular crew, Captain Mamie Currant and her two wing gunners, didn’t react to the howls overhead. Barbour raised himself sheepishly as the first salvo hit beyond the grove 500 meters distant.

  Black smoke spurted. A sheet-metal roof fluttered briefly above the treetops. The blasts of the four shells with contact fuzes were greatly louder than the remaining pair which burst underground.

  “Party time!” cried the gunner at the left wing tribarrel. He waggled his weapon, but he obeyed Currant’s orders not to fire.

  Currant’s driver and the drivers of the other thirteen operational cars in her company—three were deadlined for repairs—gunned their vehicles out of the temporary hides where they waited for the artillery prep. The combiner screen beside Currant at the forward tribarrel showed the separated platoons closing in on the village of Tagrifah from four directions, but the crew—including the captain herself—was too busy with its immediate surroundings to worry about the rest of the unit.

  The six tubes of the battery of Frisian rocket howitzers firing in support of the operation could each put a shell in the air every four-plus seconds during the first minute and a half. Reloading a hog’s ammunition cassettes was a five-minute process for a trained crew, but that wouldn’t matter today. The hundred and twenty ready rounds were sufficient to absolutely pulverize the target.

  The second, third, and fourth salvos mixed contact-fuzed high explosive with cluster munitions, firecracker rounds. The outer casing of the latter shells opened a hundred meters in the air with a puff of gray smoke, raining down submunitions. Bomblets burst like grenades when they hit, carpeting a wide area with dazzling white flashes and shrapnel that drank flesh like acid.

  Because the glass-fiber shrapnel had little penetrating power, the firecracker rounds were mixed with HE to blow off roofs and other light top cover. From a distance, the exploding submunitions sounded like fat frying. The effect on people caught in a firecracker round’s footprint was also similar to being bathed in bubbling lard.

  “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon!” the left gunner called, hammering the heel of one hand on the fighting compartment’s coaming.

  The two cars of 3d Platoon—understrength, so Currant was accompanying them—were to the immediate right, fifty and a hundred meters distant, approaching Tagrifah from the south. High Hat lurched repeatedly, throwing Barbour against the coaming. His clamshell armor spread the impact, but he still felt it.

  Currant’s driver kept the skirts close to the ground so as not to spill air from the plenum chamber as he accelerated t
he heavy vehicle. The meadow wasn’t as smooth as the barley fields to the west and north of the village. Sometimes what looked like simply a flowering shrub turned out to be a rocky hillock against which the steel skirts banged violently.

  Incoming shells drew red streaks across the pale dawn, plunging down at the targets Barbour had pinpointed in and around the village. The grove of deciduous trees swayed and toppled over. Rounds going off in the soil beneath the trees rippled the surface violently enough to tear their roots loose.

  The whole mass heaved again in a gush of dirt and black smoke. Foliage and shattered branches flew skyward. A shell had detonated explosives stored in tunnels beneath the grove.

  When the trees fell, Barbour should have gotten a glimpse of the village. All he could see were a few poles lifting above a roil of dust and smoke. In the far distance, the combat cars of 1st Platoon tore across the green barley, spewing plumes of chopped grain from beneath their skirts.

  The fields and meadows serving the village weren’t fenced. Three boys chatted on a knoll, watching the goats for which they were responsible.

  The boys jumped to their feet to watch the first salvo scream in. When the combat cars appeared, two of the boys ran back toward the village, while the third threw himself face down and covered his head with both hands.

  The local goats had long black-and-white hair. They circled in blind panic as the armored vehicles charged through them. The animals’ mouths were open to bleat, but the sounds were lost in the shrieks and explosions of the artillery prep.

  A goat sprang to the right, then tried to turn back to the left when it realized it had underestimated the combat car’s speed. It tumbled directly in front of High Hat’s bow skirts. The 50-tonne vehicle rode over the beast without a noticeable impact.

  The shellfire stopped abruptly. The enormous howl of High Hat’s fans, driving the vehicle and supporting it on the bubble of air in the plenum chamber, was quiet by contrast.

  As the pall of smoke and dust drifted lower across Tagrifah, High Hat roared past the running goatherds. One of the boys knelt, flinging his arms out and pressing his face in the dirt as a gesture of supplication. His companion simply stared at the huge vehicles. Tears ran down his cheeks.

  Barbour looked back at the boys. He had to turn his whole body, because the back-and-breast armor held his torso rigid.

  The combat cars braked as they neared the remains of the grove which had sheltered the south side of the village. Thirty-centimeter treeboles were scattered like jackstraws. They lay across one another, heaved up on the support of unbroken branches.

  Barbour thought the tangle was impenetrable; the cars would have to go around. Captain Currant had a brief exchange over the intercom with her driver.

  High Hat slowed to a crawl. The driver’s head vanished within his separate compartment in the forward hull. The hatch cover clanged over him.

  The car butted into a treetrunk, skewing it forward and sideways. The roots, dripping clods of yellow clay, locked with those of another fallen tree and jammed firm.

  The fans howled louder. Dirt rippled up around High Hat’s skirts. Air pressure was excavating the ground under the plenum chamber. The combat car shuddered, then leaped ahead, tossing fallen trees to left and right.

  Munitions in the tunnel beneath the grove had shouldered the surface aside when they exploded. High Hat dipped into the long crater, blasting the loosened soil into the air. The car continued up the far side at a fast walking pace.

  Tendrils of foul black smoke, the residue of stored explosives, rose where the combat car passed. Barbour thought he saw a human arm, but it could have been a twisted root instead.

  The village Barbour had targeted was a ruin almost as complete as that of the grove.

  A few minutes earlier, a casual observer would have taken Tagrifah for a harmless place, typical of this region of Kairouan. Even a patrol of the Frisian mercenaries in the pay of the Boumedienne government would probably have passed on, accepting the black looks and turned backs of the inhabitants as the normal due of an occupying army.

  Robert Barbour had identified the village as a Kairene regimental headquarters without, until this moment, coming within fifty klicks of the place.

  A few figures moved within the settling dust; women, an old man. A goat nosed a ripped grain sack with apparent unconcern for the raw wound on its left thigh.

  With the fans at low speed, Barbour could hear scores of voices wailing. It was hard to believe so many people remained alive.

  The houses of Tagrifah were wooden, raised a meter off the ground by stone foundations. Each crawl space served as a fold for the family’s goats. Most of the foundations had collapsed from a combination of airbursts and the ground’s rocking motion when delay-fuzed rounds went off beneath the surface.

  “Via, Bob!” Captain Currant said, clapping her passenger across the shoulders. “It’s a walkover! You’re a fucking genius!”

  Barbour had spent five years with the FDF, specializing in technical intelligence. He’d often surveyed the results line units obtained from his targeting information, but this was the first time he’d been in at the kill.

  Literally at the kill.

  “Didn’t leave us much to do,” the left gunner remarked. He turned and flashed Barbour a broad grin. “Which suits me just fine.”

  “It wasn’t me,” Barbour muttered. “It was the artillery.”

  He was holding the grenade launcher which Mamie Currant had handed him when he climbed aboard her car. He hadn’t fired such a weapon since he’d gone through training so many years before.

  As the wing gunner had said, there was nothing in Tagrifah left to fire at.

  “Don’t sell yourself short, Bob,” Currant said. “Popping shells off into the brown doesn’t do a curst bit of good. You told them where the targets were, and by the Lord! You did a great job.”

  She gestured over the combat car’s bow. The driver had unbuttoned his hatch. “Like that,” she said. “That was the big one.”

  That had been a circular pit a meter deep, surrounded by a fence of tightly bound palings and covered by a thatch roof. A shell from the first salvo had plunged through the roof and exploded on the target hidden within—an 8-barreled powergun, a calliope.

  Calliopes could be used against ground targets, but they were designed to sweep shells and rockets from the sky. If this weapon and the three similar ones at the other cardinal points surrounding Tagrifah had been given time to get into action, they would have detonated all the incoming shells a klick or more short of the target. Company D would have had to fight its way into the village while flashes and dirty clouds quivered in the distant sky.

  From the outside, the structure around the gun pit looked like a small shed, suitable for drying vegetables or holding community-owned tools. There was nothing about the shelter to arouse hostile interest.

  The bodies of four Kairenes lay mangled among the calliope’s wreckage. The victims were a boy, two young women, and a man in starched green fatigues. The Kairene regular had been in the gunner’s seat, responding to an alarm from the calliope’s search lidar. When the shell went off, the civilians had been trying to drop the poles that supported the roof of the shelter. The calliope would have been in operation in another five seconds.

  Flight time for the 200-mm shells was less than seven seconds from the point at which they came over the calliope’s search horizon.

  Swatches of smoldering thatch lay around the shallow crater. The blast lifted the roof straight into the air, so fragments fell back over the same area in a burning coverlet.

  One of the Kairene women had been stunningly beautiful. Her unbound hair was a meter long. The blast had stripped all the clothing from her upper torso. Her legs and body from the waist down had vanished.

  The calliopes’ laser direction and ranging apparatus was a low-emissions unit which worked in the near ultraviolet. It had been difficult to detect, even when Barbour knew from other indications that somethin
g of the sort must be operating.

  Barbour had arranged for a utility aircraft fitted with broad-band detection instruments to overfly Tagrifah on an apparently normal hop between a Frisian firebase and a Boumedienne government post a hundred klicks to the west. The calliopes didn’t fire, but two of them switched from search to their higher-powered targeting mode to follow the aircraft. That gave Barbour their precise location.

  With those two in hand, he’d sent a van with a concealed high-gain antenna past Tagrifah at a kilometer’s distance. The remaining calliopes gave themselves away by the electromagnetic noise of their loading-chute motors, one per gun tube, which ran at idle when the weapons were on stand-by. Barbour triangulated by plotting the signals—any electromagnetic radiation was a signal for his purposes—on a time axis calibrated against the van’s route.

  It was a slick piece of work, not something just any tech spec could have managed. Barbour stared at the lovely, naked half-woman as High Hat passed.

  He’d accompanied the attack on a whim. Because Barbour was the only person familiar with the target, Command sent him to Firebase Desmond to brief the troops told off for the operation— Company D, 3d of the 17th Brigade.

  Barbour had met Mamie Currant during one of her visits to Frisian HQ in the capital, Al Jain. They’d gotten on well then, so it was natural for Mamie to suggest Barbour join the operation he’d set up in person, and natural for him to accept.

  Tagrifah was nothing new for Robert Barbour. This was exactly what he’d done for a living during most of the past five years. What was new was seeing it as it happened.

  A tribarrel fired on the other side of the village. Currant immediately keyed her commo helmet. Barbour wasn’t in the company net, but the firing wasn’t sustained. It couldn’t have been a serious problem.

  Barbour’s nostrils were filtered against the dust, but the smell got through regardless. Smoke, earth ruptured upward by shells, explosive residues. And death, mostly human, from fire and disemboweling and flaying alive.