Final impact

“I take the rear.”…then moved away to a presighted firing position twenty meters downslope. Ahmed Khan, carrying three reloads, followed him.

Ivanov uncapped his own tube and plugged the missile sensors into his goggles. A targeting grid sprang up in front of him. He heard Vendulka shoo away a couple of Chukchi fighters who had crept up to watch him use the wonder weapon.

“Flames,” she hissed, pointing at the back of the tube. “Move away or die.” That did it.

Ivanov settled into as comfortable a position as possible, crouching down ready to raise himself up. The opalescent glow of approaching headlights grew stronger on the sheer sides of the ravine below, and his goggles began to adjust to the changing conditions. A thin green line of light, invisible to the naked eye, reached out from the launcher. An Israeli-designed B600, it was accurate out to nine hundred meters, and he was firing from a range of only two hundred. Sergo had the harder shot, but Ivanov had learned that the Cossack, trained as a young boy to fire from horseback, had a much better aim than him. He’d turned the second launcher over to him without any qualms. His only regret was the small number of rockets they had left. After this engagement there would be no more.

On the other hand, I really don’t expect to survive this operation, so what does it matter?

The LampVision goggles dialed back to minimum amplification as the lead vehicle rounded the last corner below. It was an eight-wheeled armored personnel carrier, very much like an old BMP, but without the tracks. An identical carrier followed behind it. Ivanov had a good minute or so to examine the vehicle, setting his goggles to record. If these things were going to roll over Western Europe, any intelligence on them would be useful.

The grinding rumble of the armored vehicles was joined by the grunt of heavy trucks shifting through gears as they negotiated the slope. He counted three of them before another BMP appeared at the convoy’s tail end.

Raising himself up on one knee, he powered up the launch system and placed the laser point on the upper deck of his target just in front of the turret. The main armament appeared to be a small cannon and a rocket that rested on a rail directly above it. Probably something like the original Sagger missile. He wondered if it was wire-guided.

A chime in his ear alerted him to target lock. Waiting a few seconds to ensure that the last vehicle in the convoy had entered the killing box, he breathed out, and fired.

The high-explosive multipurpose missile ignited and leapt away on a bright cone of fire. Reactive optics in the LampVision system damped down the searing white light to protect Ivanov from temporary blindness. The soft lime green of artificial illumination returned as the warhead sped away.

In his peripheral vision he saw Sergo’s rocket lancing downrange at the same time. They hit almost simultaneously. The HEMP rounds featured a “crush switch” in the nose of the rocket, which determined in the microseconds after impact that it had struck a relatively hard surface. Rather than detonating immediately, the weapon’s processor chips delayed any reaction momentarily, allowing the warhead to penetrate its target, at which point it went off with a spectacular explosion that caused his night vision system to dim down for nearly two seconds.

He heard the cries of Chukchi, guttural and triumphant as they opened up on the convoy from both sides of the road. Vendulka slammed another rocket into the launcher and slapped him on the shoulder. “Clear!”

The targeting grid came up again, and he laid the designator on the second BMP, which had lurched to a halt. Its turret traversed wildly, seeking someone-anyone-at whom the gunner could fire.

BOOM.

They got off a shot, but the crew was firing blind. Ivanov pulled the trigger on the B600 as a single shell crashed into the slope two hundred meters to his left. Chunks of shattered rock and pebbles rained down around him. The second missile took off with a whoosh and speared into the troop carrier’s upper deck, with identical results. A massive flash and the thunder crack of detonation.

“To the rear,” Vendulka cried, fitting home the last rocket. “Airburst!”

As his optics came back online, Ivanov laid his sights on half a dozen infantrymen who’d spilled out of the BMP before he could hit it. Some had been knocked to the ground by the blast, but others were running to the trucks, shouting and trying to organize a counterattack. Automatic fire from the slopes lashed at the length of the stalled convoy. Ivanov readjusted his aim, choosing a canvas-topped truck. He pressed the selector for ANTIPERSONNEL and the last of his missiles snaked away.

It burst directly over the truck, spraying the ground with white phosphorous and hundreds of pieces of shrapnel. The screams of the wounded echoed through the valley as superhot beads of the incendiary chemical burned into them.