Gerta grinned at her son’s indignation, although that had been a bit of a nerve-wracking surprise. There were fresh lead smears on the flanks of her war-car.
“At Santies, of course,” she said.
Granted, there was a bloody great Land sunburst painted on the rear deck of the war-car, but she knew from personal experience how hard it was to see anything accurately when you were doing a strafing run in combat conditions.
“Only thing more dangerous than your own artillery is your own air force, boy,” she said, slapping him on the shoulder. “Especially in a ratfuck like this where nobody knows where anyone is, including themselves.”
It’s a relief in a way, having nothing but a fight on my hands.
They turned a bend in the road. “And speaking of Santies—”
The eastbound road wound through rolling ground covered in olive groves. Men in brown uniforms were ahead of them, and two light-wheeled vehicles were on the gravel surface of the road. They had whip antennae bobbing above them. Some sort of command group, then.
“Driver! Floor it!” Gerta barked, pulling a grenade from a box clipped to the inside of the sloping armored side of the war-car.
He did. The five-ton vehicle was too heavy to actually leap ahead, but it accelerated, more slowly than a newer model with an IC engine; on the other hand, the steam was almost silent. The Santies noticed only just before Johan opened up with the forward machine gun, walking bursts across the men grouped around the hood of one of the light cars.
Gerta shouted wordlessly as the prow of the war-car rammed one vehicle aside, crumpling the frame and knocking it into the ditch. She tossed the grenade at the wreckage and followed it with a spray of pistol-caliber bullets from her machine carbine. Jumping with combat-adrenaline, her eyes picked out one face/body/movement gestalt as the man leaped for cover behind a rock. She fired, twisted, cursed as her son at the machine gun blocked her line of sight, grabbed at another grenade and threw it.
Return fire pinged off the riveted armor plates of the car, making the crew duck, and then they were past.
“Keep going!” she said, raising her head for a look.
* * *
“Jesus!”
Jeffrey raised his head, coughing in the plume of dust left behind by the turtle-shaped Chosen vehicle; some sort of six-wheeled armored car. As it turned the corner and zipped out of sight ahead, an arm appeared over the side of the hull with one finger extended from a clenched fist, and pumped in an unmistakable gesture.
Wounded men screamed. For an instant everyone else stayed frozen and flat to the earth, waiting for the follow-up.
“Keep moving!” Jeffrey said aloud. “That was a straggler.”
“Merde,” Henri muttered beside him, levering himself up with the butt of his rifle.
My sentiments exactly, Jeffrey thought as he took stock. Two regimental commanders out of it, and one of the priceless radios.
“Runner,” he said, “tell their seconds what’s happened, and that I have full confidence in them. Somebody get that fire out.” The wrecked car was sending licking flames and black smoke upward, just the sort of marker a cruising Land Air Service pilot would need. “And let’s get back to work,” he went on calmly.
His mouth was full of gummy saliva. That had been far too sudden, and far too close. A few of the faces that bent over the map with him were pale beneath their coating of summer dust, but nobody was visibly panicky.
The map showed the bulge of coastline that held the fort they were attacking. “We’ve just about closed the circle around the landward side,” he said. “Now, Colonel McWhirter, you’re going to dig in along this line and hold them off us. The partisans are doing a good job of slowing them down, but when they hit, it’ll be hard. The rest of us will press on the perimeter.”
“Going to cost,” someone commented. “They’re expecting us, by now.”
Jeffrey shrugged. “We’ll keep their attention. They don’t have much of a garrison there yet, mostly construction battalions. With a little luck, the Resort Brigade will do its job.”