Lucifer's Hammer - Larry Niven [283]
At the same time, hundreds of the enemy came out from behind rocks and folds of ground where they'd been hidden. They began firing at anything that moved. The trucks with their strange towers advanced to the stream edge, and some drove across meadows that should have been too swampy, except that during the night the Brotherhood had laid down tracks of fencing wire and planks to get them across the mud.
They went to the stream edge and the towers fell, making bridges across the stream. Brotherhood troops rushed toward the bridges, began swarming across. Other Brotherhood units concentrated fire on any Stronghold defenders who dared show themselves. Harvey heard the sharp whump! which he recognized from Vietnam: mortars. The mortar bombs fell among the rocks where Cox's ranchers hid, and each time they fell more accurately. Someone across the river was directing them, and he had good control: Wherever Cox's men tried to oppose the crossing, the mortars soon found them.
And more of the Brotherhood troops poured across the river. They fanned out and moved forward, along a line almost a mile wide, and Cox's forward troops either fell back or were overrun. Suddenly—it had taken no more than half an hour—the river line was gone, and Cox held only the ridge; and even there the relentless mortars and machine guns, far out of range of effective rifle fire, sought them out, pinned them down, while more Brotherhood troops advanced up the hills, hiding behind boulders, dodging and leapfrogging and always moving on …
"Ants!" Harvey screamed. "Army ants!" Now he knew. The cannibals couldn't be stopped. They'd been fools to think they could do it. And at the rate they advanced, Cox would lose most of his force. Already groups of men had begun to break and run, some throwing down their weapons, others grimly hanging on to them and stopping to shoot back at the enemy. But there was no organization to the defense any longer, and more and more saw it and thought only of saving themselves. There was no place to make a stand: Every position was threatened by a breakthrough at some other point, and these men had not fought together, lived together; they didn't have confidence that the man down the line wouldn't run and leave an opening for the yelling cannibals to pour through and cut them off forever.
A dozen men clung to the TravelAll, piled into it, hung on top or lay on fenders as Harvey drove away. Deer Creek, which Cox had expected to hold all day, perhaps even to break the Brotherhood and stop them permanently, had fallen in less than an hour and a half.
The rest of the morning was nightmare. Harvey could not find his truck; the only equipment he had left was in the TravelAll and only a few of Cox's ranchers were willing to help. Reinforcements from the Stronghold came finally, twenty men and women with more dynamite and gasoline and the chain saws from the truck, but they could never get far enough away from the advancing Brotherhood forces to do any useful work.
The Brotherhood tactics had changed: Now instead of fanning out and outflanking the defenses, they flooded forward trying to close; they wanted to keep the Stronghold force running, and now their general was willing to spend men to do it.
If Marie had not been with him Harvey would have run with the rest; but she wouldn't let him. She insisted they keep on with their mission, at least that they stop and light the fuses of the charges they'd set two nights before when they went forward. Once they delayed too long, and there was a crash; shattered glass from the rear window sprayed over them and the front windshield was smashed out as well. A .50 slug had passed all the way through the TravelAll, passed between them, missing them by inches. The next time they stopped, the ranchers who'd stayed with them abandoned the car.
Harvey yelled to Marie, "Why the hell are you so—" He didn't finish the sentence. He'd wanted to say "brave," but if he did, it meant he wasn't, that he was a coward. "—determined?"