Executive orders - Tom Clancy [624]
But why were the Americans advancing toward them?
COMMENCE FIRING AT four thousand meters, the company commander told his crews. The Abrams tanks were spread nearly five hundred meters apart in two staggered lines, covering a lot of ground for one mounted battalion. The TCs mainly kept their heads up and out of the vehicles for the approach phase, then ducked down to activate their own fire-control systems.
I'm on one, one gunner told his TC. T-80, identified, range forty-two-fifty.
Setting? the tank commander asked, just to make sure.
Set on Sabot. Loader, all silver bullets till I say different.
I hear you, gunner. Just don't miss any.
Forty-one, the gunner breathed. He waited for another fifteen seconds and became the first in his company to fire, and to kill. The sixty-two-ton tank staggered with the shot, then kept moving.
Target, cease fire, target tank at eleven, the TC said over the interphones.
The loader stomped his boot down on the pedal, opened the ammo doors, and yanked out another silver bullet round, then turned in a graceful move, first to guide, then to slam the mainly plastic round into the breech.
Up! he called.
Identified! the gunner told the TC.
Fire!
On the way! A pause. The tracer flew true. Right through the dot!
Commander: Target! Cease fire! Traverse right, target tank at one.
Loader: Up!
Gunner: Identified!
Commander: Fire!
On the waaaaay! the gunner said, squeezing off his third shot in eleven seconds.
It wasn't like reality, the battalion commander saw, really too busy watching to take his own shots. It was like an advancing wave. First the lead rank of T-80s blew up, just a handful of misses that were corrected five seconds later, as the second rank of enemy vehicles started to go. They started to return fire. The flashes looked like the Hoffman simulation charges he'd so recently seen at the NTC, and turned out to be just as harmless. Enemy rounds were marked with their own tracers, and all of their first volley fell short. Some of the T-80s got off a second shot. None got off a third.
Jesus, sir, give me a target! his gunner called.
Pick one.
Bimp, the gunner said, mainly to himself. He fired off a high-explosive round, and got a kill at just over four thousand meters, but as before, the battle was over in less than a minute. The American line advanced. Some of the BMPs launched missiles, but now they were being engaged by tanks and Bradleys. Vehicles exploded, filling the sky with fire and smoke. Now individual men were visible, mainly running, some turning to fire or trying to deploy. The tank gunners, with nothing large left to shoot, switched to the coaxial machine guns. The Bradleys pulled up level with the tanks, and they did the serious hunting.
The lead line of tanks passed through the smoking wreckage of the Immortals division less than four minutes after the first volley. Turrets traversed left and right, looking for targets. Tank commanders had their heads back up, hands on their top-mounted heavy machine guns. Where fire originated, it was returned, and at first there was a race to see who could kill the most, because there is an excitement, a rush to battle unknown to those who have never felt it, the feeling of godlike power, the ability to make a life-and-death decision and then enforce it at the touch of a finger. More than that, these Guardsmen knew why they were here, knew what they had been sent to avenge. In some, that rage lasted for some minutes, as the vehicles rolled forward, grinding along at less than ten miles per hour, like farm tractors or harvesting combines, collecting life and converting it to death, looking like something from the dawn of time, utterly inhuman, utterly heartless.
But then it began to stop. It stopped being duty. It stopped