Designated Targets

As the first echelon approached the edge of the city, collapsing crude concrete bunkers with single-shot penetrators or the jackhammer effect of concentrated chain gun fire, attack helicopters roared overhead, autocannon and rocket pods working the increasingly target-poor environment. Rather than swooping and turning to rake at the enemy in their normal “bird of prey” routine, however, they swept right on over the town and out toward the open prison compound.

“Go! Go! Go!”

Mitchell and McLeod dashed forward, following the pathfinder beacons that overlay the real-world landscape in their powered goggles. Seventy thousand feet above them, a Big Eye drone tracked the SAS men via biolocator chips implanted in their necks, checking their progress against a hastily programmed software model of the killing ground around the prison camp.

The model had been adapted from a tourist holomap that the Distributed Combat Intelligence found within the personal files of a sailor on board HMAS Ipswich. Fleetnet was a treasure trove of such data—previously unremarkable, but now proving to be of tremendous tactical importance.

Neither Mitchell nor McLeod had time to waste thinking about such things. They were racing across open ground, sucking in great drafts of foul-smelling air, their legs pumping like pistons. Cascades of tac net overlay turned the world into a shifting mosaic of computer-generated imagery. Arrunta gunships whirled overhead, identified as friendlies by the bright blue rectangles that floated around them and turned green a second before long streaks of fire spat out of nose-mounted autocannon.

The stream of fire destroyed a small wooden cabin, which had been designated by a red flashing box, but which now turned gray and inert.

As they ran, this was their whole world, a mandala of electronic projections designed to make sense of the murderous insanity swirling around them. Both men knew that the other members of their section were very close, perhaps near enough to call out and be heard. But in reality, they were utterly alone, with one goal, to reach the bunker ahead, outlined in flashing red, before the time hack in the bottom left-hand corner of their goggles reached zero.

They had thirty-three seconds.

“Go! Go! Go!”

Mitchell’s personal weapon coughed three times, killing a sentry who rose up without warning from a pile of dead bodies.

Thirty-one seconds.

They both leapt a tangle of barbed wire. As Mitchell sailed clear of the obstacle, the vision of a dead child passed over his eyes, like reflected text on a computer screen. The body bloated. Skin blackened and split. A filthy teddy bear clutched in the dark claw of a tiny hand.

Twenty-nine seconds.

The earth trembled underfoot as an immense explosion destroyed an ammunition dump two klicks away. Data flashed on their Heads-Up Displays and was gone before the aftershock had dissipated.

Twenty-six seconds.

They were almost at the bunker entrance. Another sentry.

McLeod fired first. Three hypervelocity caseless ceramic bullets smacked into the man, shattering his breastbone, releasing tendrils of nanonic razor teeth inside his chest, which in turn released an airborne wave of gore as the augmented rounds tore his upper torso to pieces.

Twenty-four seconds.

Mitchell fired into the yawning black entrance of the bunker. A flash-bang.

Their goggles briefly dimmed against the blinding light. Momentum and memory carried them forward until vision was restored. But just for a second, and then they were inside the bunker, and the small constricted space was rendered in the lime-green glow of low-light amplification.

Twenty-two seconds.

“Get down! Get Down!” Mitchell shouted.

Women and children screamed.

Howled.

Screeched and cried like trapped and dying animals.

Two Japanese soldiers flailed about with fists and clubs. One died as his head disintegrated. The other flew backwards into the sandbagged wall, a giant smoking hole where his heart had once beaten.

The SAS men switched to single shots now.

Twenty seconds.

“Get down on the fucking floor, now!”

Mitchell counted eight enemy soldiers. Still blind. He and McLeod picked them off, one by one.

Seventeen seconds left.

“Right. Get up. Get out. Run toward the light. Go-go-go!”

He had to push some of the women to get them started.

Two children, small girls of indeterminate age, had gone fetal in a corner. McLeod picked them both up as Mitchell put another round into an enemy soldier who tried to push himself up off the dirt floor.

Fifteen seconds.

Mitchell left first, weapon at the ready. Two other section members had joined them to hurry the civilians away.

“Move! Move! Over here!”

Fourteen seconds.

McLeod appeared. Somebody helped him with one little girl.

They all began to run through the firestorm and digital turmoil toward a slit trench.