The incoming shells screamed down on Lieutenant Robert Barbour like steam whistles pointed at his ears.
They're landing short!
Barbour ducked in the fighting compartment of High Hat, the combat car in which he rode as a passenger. The regular crew, Captain Mamie Currant and her two wing gunners, didn't react to the howls overhead. Barbour raised himself sheepishly as the first salvo hit beyond the grove 500 meters distant.
Black smoke spurted. A sheet-metal roof fluttered briefly above the treetops. The blasts of the four shells with contact fuzes were greatly louder than the remaining pair which burst underground.
"Party time!" cried the gunner at the left wing tribarrel. He waggled his weapon, but he obeyed Currant's orders not to fire.
Currant's driver and the drivers of the other thirteen operational cars in her company—three were dead-lined for repairs—gunned their vehicles out of the temporary hides where they waited for the artillery prep. The combiner screen beside Currant at the forward tribarrel showed the separated platoons closing in on the village of Tagrifah from four directions, but the crew—including the captain herself—was too busy with its immediate surroundings to worry about the rest of the unit.
The six tubes of the battery of Frisian rocket howitzers firing in support of the operation could each put a shell in the air every four-plus seconds during the first minute and a half. Reloading a hog's ammunition cassettes was a five-minute process for a trained crew, but that wouldn't matter today. The hundred and twenty ready rounds were sufficient to absolutely pulverize the target.
The second, third, and fourth salvos mixed contact-fuzed high explosive with cluster munitions, firecracker rounds. The outer casing of the latter shells opened a hundred meters in the air with a puff of gray smoke, raining down sub-munitions. Bomblets burst like grenades when they hit, carpeting a wide area with dazzling white flashes and shrapnel that drank flesh like acid.
Because the glass-fiber shrapnel had little penetrating power, the firecracker rounds were mixed with HE to blow off roofs and other light top cover. From a distance, the exploding sub-munitions sounded like fat frying. The effect on people caught in a firecracker round's footprint was also similar to being bathed in bubbling lard.
"C'mon, c'mon, c'mon!" the left gunner called, hammering the heel of one hand on the fighting compartment's coaming.
The two cars of 3d Platoon—understrength, so Currant was accompanying them—were to the immediate right, fifty and a hundred meters distant, approaching Tagrifah from the south. High Hat lurched repeatedly, throwing Barbour against the coaming. His clamshell armor spread the impact, but he still felt it.
Currant's driver kept the skirts close to the ground so as not to spill air from the plenum chamber as he accelerated the heavy vehicle. The meadow wasn't as smooth as the barley fields to the west and north of the village. Sometimes what looked like simply a flowering shrub turned out to be a rocky hillock against which the steel skirts banged violently.
Incoming shells drew red streaks across the pale dawn, plunging down at the targets Barbour had pinpointed in and around the village. The grove of deciduous trees swayed and toppled over. Rounds going off in the soil beneath the trees rippled the surface violently enough to tear their roots loose.
The whole mass heaved again in a gush of dirt and black smoke. Foliage and shattered branches flew skyward. A shell had detonated explosives stored in tunnels beneath the grove.
When the trees fell, Barbour should have gotten a glimpse of the village. All he could see were a few poles lifting above a roil of dust and smoke. In the far distance, the combat cars of 1st Platoon tore across the green barley, spewing plumes of chopped grain from beneath their skirts.
The fields and meadows serving the village weren't fenced. Three boys chatted on a knoll, watching the goats for which they were responsible.
The boys jumped to their feet to watch the first salvo scream in. When the combat cars appeared, two of the boys ran back toward the village, while the third threw himself face down and covered his head with both hands.
The local goats had long black-and-white hair. They circled in blind panic as the armored vehicles charged through them. The animals' mouths were open to bleat, but the sounds were lost in the shrieks and explosions of the artillery prep.
A goat sprang to the right, then tried to turn back to the left when it realized it had underestimated the combat car's speed. It tumbled directly in front of High Hat's bow skirts. The 50-tonne vehicle rode over the beast without a noticeable impact.
The shellfire stopped abruptly. The enormous howl of High Hat's fans, driving the vehicle and supporting it on the bubble of air in the plenum chamber, was quiet by contrast.
As the pall of smoke and dust drifted lower across Tagrifah, High Hat roared past the running goatherds. One of the boys knelt, flinging his arms out and pressing his face in the dirt as a gesture of supplication. His companion simply stared at the huge vehicles. Tears ran down his cheeks.
Barbour looked back at the boys. He had to turn his whole body, because the back-and-breast armor held his torso rigid.
The combat cars braked as they neared the remains of the grove which had sheltered the south side of the village. Thirty-centimeter tree boles were scattered like jackstraws. They lay across one another, heaved up on the support of unbroken branches.
Barbour thought the tangle was impenetrable; the cars would have to go around. Captain Currant had a brief exchange over the intercom with her driver.
High Hat slowed to a crawl. The driver's head vanished within his separate compartment in the forward hull. The hatch cover clanged over him.
The car butted into a tree trunk, skewing it forward and sideways. The roots, dripping clods of yellow clay, locked with those of another fallen tree and jammed firm.
The fans howled louder. Dirt rippled up around High Hat's skirts. Air pressure was excavating the ground under the plenum chamber. The combat car shuddered, then leaped ahead, tossing fallen trees to left and right.
Munitions in the tunnel beneath the grove had shouldered the surface aside when they exploded. High Hat dipped into the long crater, blasting the loosened soil into the air. The car continued up the far side at a fast walking pace.
Tendrils of foul black smoke, the residue of stored explosives, rose where the combat car passed. Barbour thought he saw a human arm, but it could have been a twisted root instead.
The village Barbour had targeted was a ruin almost as complete as that of the grove.
A few minutes earlier, a casual observer would have taken Tagrifah for a harmless place, typical of this region of Kairouan. Even a patrol of the Frisian mercenaries in the pay of the Boumedienne government would probably have passed on, accepting the black looks and turned backs of the inhabitants as the normal due of an occupying army.
Robert Barbour had identified the village as a Kairene regimental headquarters without, until this moment, coming within fifty klicks of the place.
A few figures moved within the settling dust; women, an old man. A goat nosed a ripped grain sack with apparent unconcern for the raw wound on its left thigh.
With the fans at low speed, Barbour could hear scores of voices wailing. It was hard to believe so many people remained alive.
The houses of Tagrifah were wooden, raised a meter off the ground by stone foundations. Each crawl space served as a fold for the family's goats. Most of the foundations had collapsed from a combination of airbursts and the ground's rocking motion when delay-fuzed rounds went off beneath the surface.
"Via, Bob!" Captain Currant said, clapping her passenger across the shoulders. "Its a walkover! You're a fucking genius!"
Barbour had spent five years with the FDF, specializing in technical intelligence. He'd often surveyed the results line units obtained from his targeting information, but this was the first time he'd been in at the kill.
Literally at the kill.
"Didn't leave us much to do," the left gunner remarked. He turned and flashed Barbour a broad grin. "Which suits me just fine."
"It wasn't me," Barbour muttered. "It was the artillery."
He was holding the grenade launcher which Mamie Currant had handed him when he climbed aboard her car. He hadn't fired such a weapon since he'd gone through training so many years before.
As the wing gunner had said, there was nothing in Tagrifah left to fire at.
"Don't sell yourself short, Bob," Currant said. "Popping shells off into the brown doesn't do a curst bit of good. You told them where the targets were, and by the Lord! You did a great job."
She gestured over the combat car's bow. The driver had unbuttoned his hatch. "Like that," she said. "That was the big one."
That had been a circular pit a meter deep, surrounded by a fence of tightly bound palings and covered by a thatch roof. A shell from the first salvo had plunged through the roof and exploded on the target hidden within—an 8-barreled powergun, a calliope.
Calliopes could be used against ground targets, but they were designed to sweep shells and rockets from the sky. If this weapon and the three similar ones at the other cardinal points surrounding Tagrifah had been given time to get into action, they would have detonated all the incoming shells a klick or more short of the target. Company D would have had to fight its way into the village while flashes and dirty clouds quivered in the distant sky.
From the outside, the structure around the gun pit looked like a small shed, suitable for drying vegetables or holding community-owned tools. There was nothing about the shelter to arouse hostile interest.
The bodies of four Kairenes lay mangled among the calliope's wreckage. The victims were a boy, two young women, and a man in starched green fatigues. The Kairene regular had been in the gunner's seat, responding to an alarm from the calliope's search lidar. When the shell went off, the civilians had been trying to drop the poles that supported the roof of the shelter. The calliope would have been in operation in another five seconds.
Flight time for the 200-mm shells was less than seven seconds from the point at which they came over the calliope's search horizon.
Swatches of smoldering thatch lay around the shallow crater. The blast lifted the roof straight into the air, so fragments fell back over the same area in a burning coverlet.
One of the Kairene women had been stunningly beautiful. Her unbound hair was a meter long. The blast had stripped all the clothing from her upper torso. Her legs and body from the waist down had vanished.
The calliopes' laser direction and ranging apparatus was a low-emissions unit which worked in the near ultraviolet. It had been difficult to detect, even when Barbour knew from other indications that something of the sort must be operating.
Barbour had arranged for a utility aircraft fitted with broad-band detection instruments to overfly Tagrifah on an apparently normal hop between a Frisian firebase and a Boumedienne government post a hundred klicks to the west. The calliopes didn't fire, but two of them switched from search to their higher-powered targeting mode to follow the aircraft. That gave Barbour their precise location.
With those two in hand, he'd sent a van with a concealed high-gain antenna past Tagrifah at a kilometer's distance. The remaining calliopes gave themselves away by the electromagnetic noise of their loading-chute motors, one per gun tube, which ran at idle when the weapons were on stand-by. Barbour triangulated by plotting the signals—any electromagnetic radiation was a signal for his purposes—on a time axis calibrated against the van's route.
It was a slick piece of work, not something just any tech spec could have managed. Barbour stared at the lovely, naked half-woman as High Hat passed.
He'd accompanied the attack on a whim. Because Barbour was the only person familiar with the target, Command sent him to Firebase Desmond to brief the troops told off for the operation—Company D, 3d of the 17th Brigade.
Barbour had met Mamie Currant during one of her visits to Frisian HQ in the capital, Al Jain. They'd gotten on well then, so it was natural for Mamie to suggest Barbour join the operation he'd set up in person, and natural for him to accept.
Tagrifah was nothing new for Robert Barbour. This was exactly what he'd done for a living during most of the past five years. What was new was seeing it as it happened.
A tribarrel fired on the other side of the village. Currant immediately keyed her commo helmet. Barbour wasn't in the company net, but the firing wasn't sustained. It couldn't have been a serious problem.
Barbour's nostrils were filtered against the dust, but the smell got through regardless. Smoke, earth ruptured upward by shells, explosive residues. And death, mostly human, from fire and disemboweling and flaying alive.
Tagrifah had a common well. The women congregated around it in the first dawn, drawing household water and exchanging gossip while adult males were still abed. Barbour hadn't targeted the well, of course, but one of the firecracker rounds strewed its trail of bomblets across the women and spilled them in a bloody windrow. Some of the corpses looked like bundles of rags rather than something once human; rags of predominantly red color.
One old woman, apparently unharmed, sat wailing in the middle of the carnage. Her blank eyes didn't react to the combat car, though the vehicle moved past close enough to stir her garments with the air vented beneath the skirts.
Mamie followed Barbour's eyes. She leaned close to him and said, "It's not us that did this, Bob. It's the sons of bitches who deliberately used civilians as a shield. We can't let them make up the rules for their own benefit."
"I know that," Barbour said. He didn't really know anything at all. He was pretending that he saw Tagrifah in a recorded image, with the camera lens between him and reality.
He pointed. "That was the headquarters," he said.
More accurately, the Kairene HQ had been concealed in a bunker beneath that, the mosque and the attached madrassah in which village boys were schooled in reading, writing, and the Koran. Girls as well as boys here in Tagrifah, and apparently a mixed class besides.
Kairouan had been settled three centuries ago from North Africa, where both Islam and Christianity had developed unique strains. Even so, Kairene society had departed to a surprising degree from its roots. Tagrifah could have been an interesting subject for study, before the shells hit.
The stone-built religious buildings had collapsed to rubble which barely filled the large bunker beneath. Gray smoke rose through the interstices of the jumbled stones. Mixed with the ashlars and broken roof beams were the bodies of the pupils, seated on the madrassah's floor at dawn to begin their lessons.
Some of the children were still moving. Captain Currant touched her helmet key again. Barbour heard the word "medics" in the request.
A preplanned operation like this probably had second echelon medical support laid on at the firebase already. The troops wouldn't need help, but the medics and their equipment would get a workout nonetheless.
The radio antenna serving the Kairene headquarters had run up the minaret. The vertical mast was still standing, pure and gleaming in the sunlight, though the building had crumbled around it.
The mast made a fitting monument for Tagrifah.
Barbour had initially identified the village as a hostile center because of the signals emanating from that antenna.
The Kairenes had limited themselves to burst transmissions: data collapsed into the smallest possible packets and spit out in a second or two instead of over minutes. They might as well have flown battle flags and set off fireworks for all the good their attempts at concealing their signals had done. They hadn't understood that they weren't dealing with hicks like themselves, they were facing the Frisians.
More particularly the Kairenes faced Lieutenant Robert Barbour. Barbour's tuned instruments not only pinpointed the source of the transmissions, they ran the packets through decryption programs which spat the information out in clear faster than the Kairene units in the field would be able to process it.
"It wasn't a mistake!" Barbour said. "Tagrifah was a regimental headquarters!"
"Curst right it was!" Mamie Currant agreed. "Look at there."
She gestured this time by waggling the muzzles of her tribarrel. A hand and arm clutching a 2-cm powergun extended from beneath a collapsed house.
The weapon wasn't of Frisian pattern, though it might well take the same ammunition. The Kairenes had been well equipped with small arms. They lacked artillery and armor, but they would have put up at least a good fight if the Boumedienne government had attempted to reduce them with its own forces.
Guerrilla bands with powerguns, familiar with the terrain and dedicated to victory, could wreak holy havoc with an invader's lines of communications. Boumedienne's troops would have flailed blindly, destroying random villages but taking disastrous casualties whenever they tried to move in less than battalion strength.
The money cost to Boumedienne of a Frisian brigade was considerable, but it was the difference between victory and the sort of bloody stalemate that is perhaps the only thing worse than losing a war. Tagrifah was proof the money had been well spent.
Four more combat cars approached from the east. The armored vehicles spun on their axes to extend the line on which 3d Platoon crawled through the village. The cars closed up. Another platoon was in sight to Barbour's left.
"Bunkers under every one of them?" Captain Currant asked/observed as she scanned the wreckage.
"Yes, that's right," Barbour agreed. The part of his mind that spoke retained its professional detachment.
In every instance, the foundations of the houses they passed had collapsed into a crater instead of mounding above ground level. Delay-fuzed rounds—there was no need for true penetrators, designed to punch through the plating and reinforced concrete of fortresses—had sucked the fieldstone foundations into the bunkers the houses had concealed.
Barbour had pinpointed the individual bunkers by having patrols set off small explosions in the ground, never closer than a kilometer from the village. Analyzing the hash of echo returns was more a matter of magic than science, despite the help Barbour's computers provided.
The results showed how perfectly he had succeeded. He wondered whether the villagers had built additional houses to conceal bunkers, or whether the Kairene military had limited their bunker locations to the existing buildings. Either way, there was a perfect equivalence.
The operation's planners had laid firecracker rounds down to follow the HE in order to catch soldiers stumbling from their shattered bunkers. It didn't appear that any Kairene regulars had made it that far.
Civilians lay individually and in groups near the doorways of their collapsed houses. An infant cried on the ground, between the bodies of its father and brother.
The car beside High Hat slowed. A gunner hopped from the fighting compartment, picked up the orphan, and remounted the vehicle.
Most of the dust had settled, but many of the house roofs burned sluggishly. Black smoke bubbled from the damp thatch. Occasionally the fans of a passing combat car would whip fires to bright flame, but mostly they remained glimmerings beneath an oily sludge.
The four-car platoon from the north of the village joined, bringing the company to full strength. Captain Currant spoke, switching her helmet from one sendee to another.
As a company commander, Mamie rated an enclosed command car with better communications gear and a specialist to run it. Like many other FDF officers, she preferred an ordinary combat vehicle.
Military doctrine for millennia had been that a commander's job was to command, not to fight. Aggressive officers had never accepted that formulation; and when the dust settled, the victorious side was normally the one whose officers were aggressive.
High Hat rotated 20°, then backed a few meters and settled onto its skirts. The remaining combat cars were shifting also, forming a tight defensive laager in what had been Tagrifah's open marketplace. The vehicles' bows faced outward, and their massed tribarrels were ready to claw.
They would have no target. Occasionally civilians blind with smoke and tears stumbled toward the laager. They ran as soon as the gleaming iridium shapes registered on their consciousness.
"There's a battalion of Boumedienne's boys coming on trucks," Currant explained to Barbour. "We'll wait for them, then head back to Desmond. There's nothing here the locals can't handle, now that we've done the real work."
She clapped Barbour on the shoulder again. "Now that you've done the real work, Bob. This one was all yours."
The dikes protecting Robert Barbour's mind crumbled, letting unalloyed reality wash over him. The smoke and screams and the stench of fresh entrails . . . .
It hadn't been an atrocity. It was a necessary military operation.
And it was all his.