"Yep."
It might have been marksman's instinct that brought the heavyset rocket gunner to her knees for a better aiming point, or a coldly calculated risk. A mistake, in either case; a machine-gun bullet punched her back just as her finger stroked the trigger.
The rocket lanced into the already holed personnel carrier five meters before the moving tank, slewing it around and actually clearing the road for the advancing SS armor.
"We'll never stop them now." Eric did not know who had made that statement, but there was no reason to doubt it; heading back into the bunker would be simply a slower form of death. Neal's heels drummed on the clinking rubble for an instant, then were still. The beams overhead had begun to burn, set alight by a stray incendiary round. Long and slim, the barrel of the lead tank's 88 was swinging around to bear on them.
"They'll never stop them," Trooper Huff said. There was nobody else alive on the rooftop across the laneway from Eric's position to hear her. She looked down at Meier's slumped body; if the burst had come up through the floorboards a few centimeters farther right, it would have struck her instead. As it was— She forced herself to look down at the wound in her thigh; there were bone splinters in the pulped red-and-purple wound, and the blood was runneling down past her clenched hands.
Shock was keeping out the worst of the pain, but that would come. If the blood loss did not kill her first; she estimated that at no more than two minutes, with unconsciousness in less.
The centurion was across the way, with five others. And Patton.
"Heavy," she muttered, fumbling at the dead trooper's body.
She had had an improvised antitank weapon with her, a bundle of unscrewed grenade heads strapped around an intact stick-grenade with a bungiecord.
Suicide system
, she thought: that was the nickname for it. "Scarcely applies nahw, do it?"
The journey to the edge of the roof was endless, her wet fingers fumbling with the tab of the grenade. She imagined, that she could hear it sizzling, once she pulled the button.
Up, use it
like a crutch, gotta see't' place dang thing
…
The second tank had an alert pair of eyes head-and-shoulders out of the hatch, with the pintle-mounted MG38 ready to swing; that was one reason for the inechelon formation. There is a natural tendency to fire too high when aiming up; still, the first round of the burst took Huff just above the nose, and left with her helmet and much of the top of her skull. The bundle of grenades dropped at her feet, harmless except to corpse and roof; the body twisted off the edge, turned once and landed broken-backed across the hull of the wrecked personnel carrier below. Blood and pink-grey brain dripped into the burning oil, hissing.
"They shot Huff! The dirty bastards shot Huffl" Parton's voice cracked. Then she was moving, fast and very smooth, scooping up the satchel charge, arming it, hurdling the low wall into the street and across it while bullets flicked sparks around her feet.
Less a dash than a long leap, screaming, a forward roll
through
the puddle of flame that surrounded the wreck. Still screaming as she vaulted with her uniform and hair burning onto the deck, three steps down it with the plating booming, over the body, diving into the air head-first toward the SS panzer. A shrieking torch that the green tracer slapped out of the air to fall beneath the treads. The satchel charge detonated.
Tank designers crowd their heaviest plating onto the areas that are likely to need it: the mantlet that holds the gun, the glacis plate at the bow, the frontal arc of the turret. Not much is left for the rear deck… or the bottom of the hull. The satchel charge held twenty pounds of plastique, confined between the forty-four ton weight of the tank and the unyielding ground.
Thin plating buckled as the globe of hot gas expanded; there was no
time
for it to go elsewhere. Pieces of it bounced through the fighting compartment, slicing, supersonic. Fire touched the wrenched-open cases of 88mm ammunition on the floor of the panzer, still nearly a combat load.
The first explosion bounced the tank onto its side and threw it across the road, a huge armored plug across the laneway. The second opened the hole in its belly into a splayed-out puncture wound, like a tin can left too long in the fire. Yet the hull barely moved; recoil balanced recoil as the turret and its basket blew out the other side of the vehicle, flying twenty meters down the laneway and demolishing a wall with its ten-ton weight. Surprise froze the Draka for a moment. Eric recovered first.
"Back down, back down, quick, go go
go
," he shouted, slapping shoulders and legs as they went by him, back toward the narrow opening at the rear of the room. Already, figures in camouflage uniforms were trying to edge past the blockage of the wrecked tank, and he snapped a burst at them. They fell; hurt or taking cover was impossible to say even at ten meters' distance as thick metallic-smelling smoke drifted across his eyes. The pain of the Holbars hammering against his raw shoulder brought him back to himself, and he slithered feet-first to the opening. Hands caught and assisted him; they half-fell into the welcome gloom, scrambling back beyond a dog-leg that kept them safe from a grenade tossed down their bolthole.
"Back to the radio room, this is it, it's over, we've got to tell Legion H.Q. and then get out. Split up and carry the word, south end and bug out to the woods,
move
, people." They paused for a single instant, dim gleams of teeth in faces negro-black with soot and dirt. "Good work," he added quietly, before spinning and diving through the next ragged gap. Fuckin' good."
Dreiser felt very lost in the dark tunnel. Everybody else had seemed to know what to do, even when the order went out to scatter; he clutched the precious tapes through the fabric of his jacket and lurched into a bank of stone jags. For a moment pain blinded him in the echoing dark, then hands gripped him and jerked him aside through an L-angle where one cellar joined another through an improvised passage. A palm clapped over his mouth, hard and calloused.
"Shuddup," hissed into his ear, as he was passed through another set of hands and parked against a wall. The American struggled to control his breathing, feeling his heart lurching between his ribs; that might have been a bullet or a dagger.
Fighting a feeling of humiliation as well: he was
tired
of being handled like a rag doll. The blackness was absolute, silence broken by dripping water and the distant explosions. Then hobnails rutching on stone, and closer a long, faint
schnnnng
sound, a bush knife being drawn from its sheath. Dreiser found himself holding his breath without concious decision.
A light clicked on: only a handlight, but blinding to dark-accustomed eyes. It shone directly into the faces of the two Germans who had turned the corner. They had been keeping close to the right-hand wall, facing forward; the Draka were on the left, across the two-meter width and parallel to their opponents. Nearest to Dreiser was the woman with the bush knife, reaching as the light came on. Her left hand jerked the SS
trooper forward by the blouse while the right thrust the two-foot blade forward, tilted up. Dreiser could see the German's face spasm, hear the wet slicing and grating sound as she twisted the broad machete blade and withdrew it in a wrenching, motion.
The next Draka was a man, tall enough to stoop slightly under the seven-foot roof. He merely slammed a fist forward as the German turned toward him; it connected with the SS man's face, and the Draka was wearing warsaps. Bone crunched under the metal-reinforced glove, and the German's helmet rang as his head bounced backward and rebounded off stone.
The third Draka had been kneeling nearest the L-junction. He dropped the light as his comrades struck, swept up his assault rifle, and fired. Dreiser blinked in puzzlement. The curve was sharp, there was no direct line of fire at the room beyond, and the paratrooper was firing
up
. Then the American followed the line of tracer up to the groined vault of the ceiling: continuous fire, long, ten-second bursts, the roar of the shots in the enclosed space of the cellar almost hiding the whining ping of the ricochets. His mind drew a picture of the narrow stone reach beyond the exit, bullets sawing back and forth… There were screams from around the corner now, and the sound of bodies falling, and blind crashing retreat. The morale of the SS men was growing shaky.
And no wonder
, Dreiser thought, wiping an arm across his face. The slightest misjudgment or ill luck and those metal wasps could have come bouncing back into this section of tunnel; that risk was why the fighting below was mostly cold steel or cautious grenades. The Draka gunman was shaking the empty drum out of his Holbars, snapping in a fresh one with a contented grin but leaving the bolt back to allow the chamber to cool. Darkness returned as he snapped out the light. There was a moaning, then the sound of a boot stamping on a throat, as unbearable as fingernails on slate.
"C'mon, Yank," one of them said. "We'll drop yo' at the aid station. Clear path from there to the south end. Lessn' yo' meets cousin Fritz, a'course."
My
morale would be shot, too, the correspondent's musing continued as he coughed raw cordite fumes out of his throat and stumbled along with the retreating troopers. The Draka were nearly as deadly as they thought they were, and they never gave up; hunting them down here would be like going blindfolded and armed only with a spear into a maze full of tigers.
Tigers with the minds of men.
"Nobody in here but the wounded!" Dreiser shouted, in German. The cellar beneath the mosque was the aid station; his post the only place a noncombatant could do any good. The darkness was thick with muffled noise, or the louder shouts of the delirious, but he had heard the SS men talking in the next chamber. And "grenade" was hard to miss. "We surrender!"
A cautious hand and head came through, flicked on a torch, speared Dreiser where he stood plastered against a wall,
zigzagged
briefly across the rows of bandaged figures.
"
Ja
,' the German barked over his shoulder, and another figure with a Schmeisser followed. Perhaps it was the dim glow, but the American thought he could see the strain of fighting in this warren on their faces, death waiting in cramped blackness like the inside of a closet. They straightened, relaxing.
"Hande hoche!" one said to the American, tucking the grenade back into his belt.
"I am an American war correspondent," Dreiser began. The burst of automatic fire caught him almost as much by surprise as it did the two SS troopers it smashed back against the stone.
The flashlight fell, bounced, did not break as it came to rest on the stomach of a staring red-headed corpse, lighting the expression of shocked amazement on her freckled face. The glow diffused quickly in the dusty air, but Dreiser could see a head that was a ball of bandage with a slit for the eyes, and the muzzle of the Holbars poking through the blankets that had concealed it. The head eased back down to its pack-pillow, and the assualt rifle dropped out of sight again.
"Keep…"a halt, and a grunt. "Keep 'em comin', Yank."
"No answer," Sofie said. She and Eric were alone now in what had been the command bunker, except for the corpse of the sapper in one corner. It
felt
abandoned, colder somehow, darker despite the constant blue glow and the flicker of lights from the radio at which the com tech labored. A burst of assault-rifle fire echoed on the stone, bringing their heads up.
"Scan the cohort and tetrarchy frequencies, then," he said, laying down his Holbars to load the bandoliers with extra drums.
"Quick."
Her fingers turned the dials; static, German voices, then snatches:
"Sir, sir, come in,
please
." A young voice, tight-held. "Sir, the centurion went out half an hour ago and didn't come back, I can hear them talking in Fritz outside the door, what'm I supposed to—" Shots, static.
"Fall back to the green line an' regroup, fall back—"
"
This is Palm One, Palm One, I've got Fritz armor coming at
me from north'n south both, I'm spikin mah guns and pullin
out, over
." A decisive click.
Sofie abandoned the radio, tearing off the headset and throwing it at the communications gear, turning to him with a snarl.
"That's
it
?" she said, her voice shrill. "That's
it
? It was all fo'
nothin
?"
"It's never for nothin', Sofie," he said gently. "We fight for each other; the job is what we do together." Sharply: "Now
move
, soldier!"
"
Shit
!" The obstacle was soft, and might once have lived. Eric tripped, and his hand came down into something yielding and wet. "Light, Sofie." They had to risk that; information was worth a brief stop. A click, and he was blinking down into the turned-up face of the old Circassian, the
Hadj
. Something had sliced halfway through his skull, something curved that pulled out raggedly and spilled the brain that had seen Mecca and spent fifty years in a losing fight to protect his people. The Draka recognized the signs: a sharpened entrenching-tool swung like an axe, not popular among the Domination's forces, who preferred the ancestral bush knife. He hoped it was not one of his who had killed the old man, in a moment of fear or frustration. Grunting, he knelt up and turned to look at Sofie.
And froze. The shovel gleamed beyond her head, held like a spear in a two-handed grip, point down and ready to chop into her back.
No firing angle
went through him, as he watched the reflected light ulint on the honed edges. But the weapon was trembling, and it had not fallen. Sofie saw the fear in his eyes, checked her turning motion before it began at his lips' silent command. He could see her face glisten, but the hand with the torch did not shake, or even move.
Slowly, slowly, Eric came to his feet.
No aggressive movement
, he thought, with a sudden huge calm. He could not afford to fail, and therefore he would not. Not now, or ever. Up, half-crouch, erect. There was a German behind her, standing rigid as a statue save for the trembling of the hands clenched on the haft of the spade. The underlit face quivered as well, lumps of muscle jerking under the skin, tears pouring down through dirt and soot, cutting clear tracks down from the wide-held eyes, a swath of bandage covering the back of his head. White all around the iris, pupils enormous, staring through time and space. It was eerie to hear words coming from that face; it was as if a statue had spoken, or a beast.