Designated Targets

In one of those post-Transition ironies, the venerable German firm of Heckler and Koch had manufactured his weapon, an M12 carbine. Made entirely of composites, it was a lightweight assault rifle of the old school. It didn’t electronically fire caseless ceramic ammunition, instead feeding 5.56 mm augmented bullets from a thirty-six-round magazine, and 20 mm programmable grenades from an in-line stacker.

The German, who had been holding tightly to his risers, scanning the ground as it rushed toward him, jerked as the round hit. Harry didn’t bother to put another shot in. He was firing shredders, which disassembled themselves inside the target before emerging at 940 meters per second, dragging about a kilogram of human tissue behind them.

He squeezed off another three shots as the troopers on either side of him did the same. The airfield defenders banged away enthusiastically with a variety of weapons, mostly Lee Enfield rifles and Tommy guns.

The crackle of small arms from Fitzsimons’s three squads reached them. A glider broke up as a Bofors crew took it under direct fire.

“Nasty,” hissed Bolt.

But the sheer weight of the German assault began to tell. Paratroopers made it to the ground and disengaged their chutes, running for cover. Some tumbled and spun, as the snipers began to pick them off. Even so, small groups of three and four, then larger parties of eight or nine survivors banded together and went to work.

“Over there, sir,” Bolt cried as an antiaircraft redoubt came under assault. Five Germans charged it, firing rapidly, one of them hosing down the position with a Schmeisser.

“Bugger,” Harry said as the volume of incoming fire stepped up a notch. Rounds whistled close by, kicked up clods of dirt, and occasionally thumped into the chest or splattered the head of a ’temp in the slit trench. He tried to draw a bead on the paratroopers who’d taken over the big gun, but they were at least seven hundreds meters away. His first shot burst a sandbag; the next caromed off the gun itself. He dialed up his sniper team on tac net.

“Angus, Stevo. You need to get busy, or you’re going to get chopped into dog meat.”

“Sorry, Skip,” came Fontaine’s reply. “I can’t get a clear shot at them.”

Harry examined the AAA site again. Pulling in as much as he could. The Germans zoomed in to fill his visual field. But it was difficult to stay focused, since every movement of his head was amplified a hundredfold. Bullets chewed up the sandbags, and one struck a paratrooper in the shoulder, but they stuck to the job of trying to get the gun depressed far enough to use it as a weapon against his people.

Harry was turning that over in his mind when Trooper Bolt suddenly pushed him down.

The ground seemed to shake with a volcanic eruption.

“The runway charges!” he cried.

Harry peeped up in time to see tons of dirt and broken bodies and the smashed up remains of a couple of gliders dropping back to earth. Four more gliders tried to avoid the crater, but it was too late. They went in nosefirst, with a bone-jarring crack and the crunch of splintered wood.

The Prince made a few quick calculations. “Fire the claymores, Andy.”

Bolt did as he was ordered, even though no Germans were approaching. Two of the antipersonnel mines had been set close to the runway and had gone up with the demolition charges. The other six fired with a thunderclap and instantly peppered three of the wrecked gliders with thousands of steel balls.

“Fix bayonets!” yelled Harry.

He heard the rasp and click of nearly two dozen old-fashioned bayonets, as his own men quickly fitted their sawback fighting knifes.

“Follow me, gentlemen. Let’s clean them out.”

The war cry started amongst the ’temps, a guttural sound building into a full-throated highland scream as they charged across the grass toward the shattered gliders and deep, smoking holes excavated by Bolt and Akerman’s shaped charges. Harry flipped his selector to three round bursts as he ran, snapping the M12 up to finish off a few lonesome parachutists who were still wafting down to the ground.

He heard the muffled whump of a grenade launcher. It was Bolt, sending a frag into the shallow pit where the glider with the least amount of damage had finished up. A German soldier had been emerging shakily from a huge tear in the rear of the plane, and he was blown back inside.

Whump. Whump.

Twin explosions split the glider into three sections, and Harry flipped his weapon to full auto, sending a stream of 5.56 mm into the crippled airframe. The industrial hammering of the other M12 assault rifles, the crash of grenades and small arms, all served to isolate Harry, almost cocooning him from the wider battle. But he had to press on, to get close enough to that Bofors pit to bring it under fire by grenade launcher.