“Not like having tribarrels pointing three ways, though,” Holman said. Dead right, even though she’d never crewed a combat vehicle before.
Albers looked up at her. “If you want,” he said, “you can slave either of the guns to the threat monitor. It’ll swing ’em as soon as it pops the alert.”
Deathdealer, Albers’ own tank, was parked next to the TOC. A tarpaulin slanted from the top of the skirts to the ground, sheltering the man beneath. “Via,” Wager muttered. “He’s racked out now?”
Birdie Sparrow’s right hand was visible beneath the edge of the tarp. It was twitching. Albers looked at the magnified screen, then laid his fingers over Wager’s on the dial and rolled the image away.
“Birdie’s all right,” the veteran driver said. “He takes a little getting used to, is all. And the past couple months, you know, he’s been a little, you know . . . loose.”
“That’s why they sent you back here with the blower instead of using some newbies for transit?” Holman asked.
Bent over this way, Holman had to keep brushing back the sandy brown curls that fell across her eyes. Her hair was longer than Wager had thought, and the strands appeared remarkably fine.
“Yeah, something like that, I guess,” Albers admitted. “Look, Birdie’s great when it drops in the pot like last night. Only . . . since his buddy DJ got zapped, he don’t sleep good, is all.”
“Newbies like us,” Wager said bitterly. Not new to war, not him at least; but new to this kind of war.
“I can see this gear can do everything but tuck me goodnight. But I’m bloody sure that I won’t remember what to do the first time I need to. And that’s liable to be my ass.” He glanced upward. “Our ass.”
Holman flashed him a tight smile.
“Yeah, well,” Albers agreed. “Simulators help, but on the job training’s the only game there’s ever gonna be for some things.”
Albers rubbed his scalp, grimacing in no particular direction. “You know,” he went on, “you can take care a’ most stuff if you know what button to push. But some things, curst if I know where the button is.”
It seemed to Hans Wager that Albers’ eyes were searching for the spot on the main screen where his tank commander lay shivering beneath a sunlit tarp.
When Dick Suilin was twenty meters from the motor pool, a jeep exploded within the wire-fenced enclosure. The back of the vehicle lurched upward. The contents of its fuel tank sprayed in all directions, then whoomped into a fireball that rose on the heat of its own combustion.
No one was in the jeep when it blew up, but soldiers throughout the area scattered, bawling warnings.
A few men simply cowered and screamed. One of them continued screaming minutes after the explosion.
Suilin resumed walking toward the entrance.
The combined motor pool held well over three hundred trucks, from jeeps to articulated flat-beds for hauling heavy equipment. The only gate in and out of Camp Progress was visible a block away. A pair of bunkers, massive structures with three-meter walls of layered sandbags and steel planking, guarded the highway where it passed through the wire, minefields, and berm.
The sliding barrier was still in place across the road. When the Consies came over the berm, they took the bunkers from behind. Satchel charges through the open doors set off the munitions within, and the blasts lifted the roofs.
The bunkers had collapsed. The craters were still smoldering.
One of the long sheds within the motor pool had been hit by an artillery rocket. The blast folded back its metal roof in both directions. Grenades and automatic weapons had raked and ignited some of the trucks parked in neat rows, but there were still many undamaged vehicles.
A three-tonne truck blew up. The driver jumped out of the cab and collapsed. Diesel from the ruptured fuel tank gushed around him in an iridescent pool. Nobody moved to help, though other soldiers stared in dazed expectation.
Two officers were arguing at the entrance while a number of enlisted men looked on. A lieutenant wearing the green collar tabs of Maintenance & Supply said in a voice that wavered between reasonableness and frustration, “But Major Schaydin, it isn’t safe to take any of the vehicles yet. The Consies have booby—”