The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 3

“Also about double the number of local wogs get greased,” Tedeschi added, “not that I give a flying fuck about that, but maybe you do?”

“I don’t….” Barbour said. “Sir, if I don’t do it, it’s not my responsibility. Sir.”

“That last operation,” the general said, “blitzing the headquarters of the Seventy-Three Bee regiment—that was fucking brilliant. That’s the sort of thing I need to get this operation over, quick and clean. Right?”

Barbour’s face formed itself into something between a smile and a rictus. He was afraid to speak.

“Come on, Barbour,” Tedeschi said. He took the junior man’s chin between a thumb and finger that could crush nutshells. He tilted Barbour’s face to meet his hard blue eyes. “Tell me that you’re going to stay with me till the job’s done. Not for the promotion. For the job.”

Barbour stood up carefully, lifting his chin out of the general’s grip. “Sir,” he said, staring at the wall beyond Tedeschi’s left shoulder, “I’m sorry, but I can’t do that job anymore.”

Tedeschi slammed his boot back onto the floor. He wasn’t quite as tall as Barbour, but he had the physical presence of a tank.

“I’d spit on you, Lieutenant,” the general said, “but you’d foul my saliva. Go to fucking Cantilucca, fuck around on a survey team. You’re not fit to associate with the people doing real work.”

Tedeschi slammed out of the canteen.

A few moments later, other officers returned to their drinks and belongings. They looked curiously at Lieutenant Robert Barbour, who remained where the general left him.

Barbour was crying.

Earlier: Mahgreb

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 deadlined 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 submunitions. 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 submunitions 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.