FMP: The Second Raid is starting soon in Japan! It looks like it's going to continue where the original series left off, picking up with the Owaru Day by Day novels. Again, I urge everyone to go check these novels out. They're greatness.
Props as always to my wonderful beta reader, Lakewood. I'm still looking for other beta-ers! If anyone's interested, just shoot me an E-mail.
As I post this, I just saw that this fic has reached 994 hits, making it the most-read thing I've ever written. I'd like to say thanks to you for making it this far! I'm really starting to believe I'm good at this, enough to the point that I'm going to motivate myself to write even more and even better, hopefully by taking a writing workshop over the summer.
'course, my current passion is getting my motorcycle license and getting a fixer-upper bike... I'd love to spend the summer on the back of a Hayabusa, but maybe a nice little café racer would do for now.
Okay, enough babble. To keep pace with my current life, check out my website link in my profile. It goes to my Livejournal, which is friends-able.
On with the show!
10: In Death's Other Kingdom
The Sinai
Near the 31st Parallel
10:30 AM
The MITHRIL-appropriated jeep bounded over another sand dune, jarring its occupants as it crashed on a hardy, military-spec suspension. The tires bit into the loose sand, and the jeep tilted precariously towards the left.
"Mark, you're never driving again!" Gef yelled, grabbing desperately onto the handles of the pintle-mounted grenade launcher.
"This is why I'm glad the Ferrari only has two seats," Kenji shouted back over the roaring din of the engine and wrenching squeaks from the gearbox. "Only have two casualties."
"Enough outta the peanut gallery!" Mark responded as the jeep landed on all four wheels and heeled hard to the right as he struggled to stabilize it. "We don't know if the Egyptians or Israelis are gonna send in more tanks. It's been almost a full day since the leg disappeared, so we have to get our asses into gear!"
"General Patton speaks," Kenji shot to Gef.
"Aw, hell, we may already be too late! Tank at eleven o'clock!"
Mark slammed hard on the brakes as the jeep bounded over a dune; it skidded almost forty yards in the sand before it came to a full stop.
"It's a Magach-6 heading westbound," Gef reported after she managed to scan the horizon with her binoculars. "There's an M113 close to its right flank, probably a command track. It's SOP for a tank platoon. They're probably reinforcing out of the forward base at Bar Abad."
Kenji let out a low whistle. "I'm glad the general wanted you with us, Gef. Nothing beats someone who knows the area."
"Well, I'm glad you want me along too, Ken-chan," Gef teased, patting him on the shoulder and resorting to Japanese colloquialisms. She managed to get a blush out of Kenji from that one.
"I hate to break it up, kids, but we need to move onward," Mark interjected. "Gef, what's the order of battle for both sides?"
"Let's see..." Gef reached into her field pack and withdrew a folded, laminated sheet of paper. "This came off the MARSUPIAL at Fort Meade, sourced to a CIA operative in the Cairo embassy and a transmission from the Israeli Ministry of Defense to the Prime Minister. The Egyptians have mounted the full strength of their 12th Mechanized Infantry Division and are moving it to the front. The 141st Armored Regiment has been in the field since the initial photos were intercepted from Woomera, and it was their 1st Battalion of the 5th Brigade that fought it out with the Israelis. The 98th, 45th, and 14th Regiments are all about three days' march back, but when they're in the field, it's bad. Approximately three hundred tanks, four hundred APCs, three hundred and fifty towed and mobile artillery pieces, and ten thousand troops."
Mark and Kenji looked uneasily at each other.
"It gets better, boys." Gef flipped the page. "The Israelis have their 10th Armored Division waiting to counter it. Less numbers overall, next to no artillery support, so their field troops are going to get hammered until the IAF can commit themselves to the operation. Of course, the air bases around Tel Aviv and Bar Emet have been operating around the clock, and the Americans just dispatched eight C-5s out of Dover. They're going to ferry in some extra weapons for them. Maverick missiles, some laser-guided bombs, extra Apache helicopters, and other wonderful things."
"Wonderful." Mark drummed on the steering wheel as he watched the Israeli armored vehicles move westward. "How long do we have before this heats up, Gef?"
"The intercepts and photos indicate that both sides are back to their respective sides of the line," Gef paged through a few more sheets. "The Israelis have held back in their advances, and the Egyptians have had plenty of opportunities to push forward and counterattack. There's been radio traffic back and forth on both sides. It's anyone's guess."
"Let's not set them off," Kenji surmised. "We're in the same grid coordinate as the leg site, so it shouldn't be that far. Let's wait for this patrol to pass and keep a low profile as we move onward. That means no more stunt driving, Mark," Kenji finished with a sideways glare.
"Hey, the stealthy approach is a different game," Mark said with a laid-back smile as he shifted the jeep back into gear. He turned and moved the jeep off the dune skillfully, advancing behind a larger sand dune that lay between them and the tanks.
It took another three hours of advancing to a covering dune, waiting and scouting, advancing, waiting and scouting before they approached the first wreckage of an Egyptian T-62.
"In one piece," Mark boasted, patting himself on the back facetiously. "To think that we almost landed on one of the bastards, too."
Gef shook her head. "I'm glad they were able to get a jeep with a Star of David on it. That troop of Magachs was way too close for comfort."
The MITHRIL agents disembarked from the jeep as they approached the crater in question. Surely enough, there was no leg jutting out of it, just a hole in the sand; the shocks of nearby explosions had mixed with the high winds and uncovered some of the scorched remnants of the leg.
"There's still some fragments," Kenji reported, digging a handful of sand and sifting out the particulate Sinai desert sands. He held up a charred piece of metal, about an inch by an inch. Between the streaks of black burn marks, the surface of the metal was a dulled white.
"It's pretty light, even for the size." Mark took a piece from Kenji, tossing it between his hands, flipping it like a coin. "It doesn't feel like metal either."
Gef pulled her field gloves off and experimentally flicked it with her fingernail. It gave off a hollow tock sound, as if it was hollow.
"Triple-reinforced dry carbon fiber or hard fiberglass," she mused to herself in whispered Hebrew. "I knew something of that size would be too heavy to move if it was reinforced steel."
"Something wrong, Gef?" Kenji asked as he dug through the sand for more fragments.
Gef looked up and shook her head, her auburn ponytail brushing her neck, already sweating from the sun overhead. "No, I'm just wondering what the hell this stuff is. It doesn't feel like any metal I've ever seen."
"Looks like whoever took the leg cleaned the place up pretty thoroughly," Mark remarked, holding up a handful of odd-looking sand. "Take a gander at this stuff."
Kenji caught the odd-shaped bundle of sand that Mark handed to him, half-expecting it to explode in a sandy cloud. He was surprised to find out that it was a rather heavy lump of fused sand clusters and metal.
"This is..." He held it up to the sunlight, peering through it. "This is glass. Something was burning, and it melted the sand and metal together."
Gef took a closer look. "Yeah... maybe it came under fire. Artillery or tank rounds, probably. A grenade couldn't generate a big enough explosion to cause this."
"Aha!" Mark exclaimed, spotting some dull objects in the sand a few hundred yards off. "Shell casings, guys! Big ones!"
The agents walked over the dunes to make their way over to the empty shell casings. Sure enough, there were several.
That was the problem.
"Son of a bitch..." Mark and Kenji said simultaneously.
Five spent shell casings lay in the desert, spread out by about forty feet. Three bore what was obviously Hebrew letters, and the other two had Arabic writing on them.
"Gef, any thoughts?" Kenji lifted two of the heavy, empty metal shells, holding them up at eye level.
"Those are 115mm smoothbore rounds for a T-62," Gef read off of the supply origin and serial numbers from the Arabic-written shell. "Those are 105mm rounds for a Magach-6."
"So you're tryin' to tell me that an Egyptian and an Israeli tank got this close to each other?" Mark asked skeptically.
Gef shook her head. "These shells were at a similar depth in the sand. It's like they were fired at roughly the same approximate time. They're both pointing northwards at the Leapfrog leg site, too..."
Kenji shielded his eyes from the sun and looked towards the leg. "They were fighting side-by-side..." he said to nobody else in particular. "Fighting who?"
Mark and Kenji's eyes met.
"There has to be another one," Mark said as if responding to another unspoken question.
"He said that they had to be stopped..." Kenji trailed off, sharing a worried glance with Mark, when the roar of heavy diesel engines suddenly came into audible range...
"Tanks inbound, close on the left flank!" Gef called out, pulling Kenji down by the collar of his uniform. She reached out for Mark as an afterthought, but he was already on the ground, his Hydra in front and safety off. They made a mad dash back to their jeep, tearing away from the wreck. Mark spun the jeep around behind a dune after a harrowing, fast dash away from the wrecked leg.
There were five of them, not two hundred yards to their north. Three bore the red, white and black bars of the Egyptian flag, and two were the same Israeli tanks that had passed by earlier.
"Oh, shit..." Gef whispered, biting her lip, her eyes wide in a visceral, animal fear all too familiar to her. "Those Magachs don't stand a chance..."
"They don't if they were being fired upon," Kenji remarked, crawling up to peek above the lip of the sand dune. "They're dismounting from their tanks..."
Sure enough, the Egyptian T-62s had stopped moving about seventy-five yards from the Israelis, their engines whining on a high idle. From his low profile, Kenji could see the crewmen of the Egyptian tanks unlatch the circular turret hatches and emerge from the armored vehicles. He was too far off to hear anything, but there were faint sounds of greeting shouts on the wind.
"You're not going to believe this..." Kenji reached down with his right hand. "Gef, hand me your binoculars."
"What's going on?" Gef handed up the binoculars, more worry spreading across her face. She tightened her grip on her MP5, toy-like in comparison to the tanks' fearsome suite of heavy-caliber guns.
"One of the Egyptians just shook hands with an Israeli officer," Kenji reported, peering through the binoculars.
It was the next best thing to being right there, the Egyptian tanker's broad smile bright against his swarthy Arabic complexion. The Israeli officer, a full colonel of tanks according to a quick sidelong view of his rank patches, threw an arm around the Egyptian's shoulder. The two men laughed, the joke lost on Kenji.
"This is unbelievable," Mark shook his head, crawling up beside Kenji.
"I don't believe it for a second," Gef snapped angrily. "Let me see that."
Before he could hand them over, Gef had rushed up besides Kenji, violently snatching the binoculars from his hands. She propped herself in a half-kneeling pose, as if she was about to leap up and dash towards the tanks. As she put the binoculars up to her eyes, the clench in her jaw was obvious.
"Gef, get down!" Kenji yanked her down to the ground. The roar of the tanks' engines fired up again, rumbling at a low idle.
"They're probably on the move to the Leapfrog," Gef growled. "I don't suppose we've got any anti-tank weapons?"
Kenji held up two pineapple-shaped fragmentation grenades. "This is as heavy as it gets. Mark's Hydra can't penetrate tank armor."
The diesel engines kicked up in pitch, then roared into gear. Kenji risked a peek over the lip of the dune, and sure enough, the Egyptian T-62s had started moving towards the leg. The Magachs had formed up on the left and right, their turrets trained out and gunners in the hatches, searching for targets.
"So much for our investigation," Mark grumbled, watching the tanks move to the leg and being careful to stay low. His 'fro was contained under a floppy, tan "boonie" hat, and he had long since been quick to apply camouflage paint upon hitting the ground. "They're right at the leg, probably gonna poke around."
"We need something, anything. Gotta get some evidence somehow," Kenji surmised as the tanks encircled the leg, taking up guard positions. The engines throttled back down to idle; a few shouted words of Hebrew between the Israelis interspersed themselves with the crackle of tactical radios.
"They're taking up a circular formation around the wreck," Kenji reported. "One tank is breaking off eastbound, another west. Looks like a patrol."
"Cover the jeep, quick!" Gef ordered, breaking out the camouflage netting from the back of their appropriated spec-ops jeep. A few quick tucks had the entire small vehicle covered in the obtuse netting, a blended tan shape that faded into the sand.
The MITHRIL troops kept an eye on the patrolling tanks as the late afternoon sun started to sink into the sand in the distance.
"They've only got first-gen starlight scopes on those Magachs." Gef set down Kenji's rifle; its high-power scope served as an impromptu spotting and ranging scope. "We'll be fine into the night so long as we don't move around too much."
"They're not leaving, that's for sure." Kenji clambered down from the dune, squinting his eyes from looking towards the sunset. "I saw them setting up tents and a campfire."
"So we wait?"
"We report in," Mark chimed in. "It's coming up on 1845 hours."
Kenji rummaged in the back of the camouflage-covered jeep for their portable satellite communications terminal, a twenty-pound device that resembled a computer keyboard, five-inch thermal printer, and satellite dish sewn together by a drunken surgeon. He plugged a pair of headphones into a jack and aligned the dish along an east-west line.
"Got it." Kenji nodded when he heard the warbling carrier tone of Galadriel, MITHRIL's Eastern hemisphere communications satellite. "Compiling the message now."
TO: CINCMITHPAC
FM: SIGNET-4
RE: SIGNET RING FLDOPS
SIGNET-4 REPORTS DROP SUCCESS.
UPON ARRIVAL AT TARGET AREA, EVADED DETECTION BY EGYPTIAN/ISRAELI ARMOR
ARMOR IS WORKING IN CONJUNCTION. SIGNS POINT TO CONFLICT AGAINST UNKNOWN ENEMY, NOT REPEAT NOT BTWN EGY/ISR FORCES.
EGY/ISR DETACHMENT IS GUARDING TARGET AREA AND FURTHER INVEST. NOT REPEAT NOT POSSIBLE AT THIS TIME.
SIGNET-4 REQUESTS FURTHER OPORDERS.
-KM SENDS
Kenji keyed the red XMIT button, and after a moment, the thermal printer spat out a receipt with a date/time stamp and encryption group preamble. It only took twenty seconds for a return signal to bounce off the satellite and print out on the SATCOM terminal.
TO: SIGNET-4
FM: CINCMITHPAC
CC: CINCMITHCENT, CINCMITHEUR, CINCMITHLANT
(CNFRMD EUR/LANT FRM ARWEN 174548Z)
SIGNET-4 IS ORDERED TO REMAIN IN POSITION AND REPORT IN EVERY EVEN HOUR ON ALL ACTIVITY AT SITE.
CONTINUE EVADING CONTACT. DO NOT RPT DO NOT ENGAGE UNLESS FIRED UPON.
REINFORCEMENTS WILL BE DISPATCHED AT DISCRETION OF MITHCENT, GNL. SHABRA CIC.
KEEP IN CONTACT.
-AS SENDS
"Continue evading contact, remain in position," Mark scoffed. "Not like we can do much else until they get the hell outta here."
"Break out the rations?" Gef asked.
"Yeah, we should eat. I don't suppose we could build a fire to warm 'em up?"
"You suppose correct, Mark. Heating tabs or nothing."
"Aw, man, I-"
Mark's protest was cut short by a shout of alarm from the wreck site.
"Huh?" Kenji's ears perked up. "Anyone else hear that?"
The tanks' engines kicked into gear, drowning out the shouts in Hebrew and Arabic. As one unit, all the tanks switched on their powerful headlights. The desert, tinged with a red horizon from the twilight sun, was suddenly lit up. The wreck site was surrounded by a multimillion-candlepower corona as the tanks switched on their searchlightsfanned out and changed position, turning to an eastern axis.
"Smoke on the horizon, two o'clock!" Kenji called out, training out his infrared scope. "I see a tank wreck burning!"
"Yeah, I got it too," Mark interjected. "Can't see what got it. I'll check around the horizon now..."
Gef dashed back to the jeep, throwing off the camo netting and arming the Mark-19. "Let's get ready to move, boys," she yelled over the resounding whine of the tanks' diesels. "We gotta jet before whatever it is gets close."
"Something's moving out there!" Kenji yelled back. "I've got a fast-moving IR target, don't know how far out, moving from two to one o'clock!"
"Shit, where is it, Kenji!" Mark had to scream over a Magach-6 tank that passed them not thirty yards away. The agents froze in place as it moved onwards, its turret pointing away from them. The high-performance 750hp diesel screamed a single-note voice, like a rearing horse, as it turned at its highest power setting, catapulting the tank over the sands at a breakneck speed for such a huge vehicle.
"Close! Looks like just a couple of kilometers, and it's fast!"
Kenji saw it clearly, a bright blur in his IR scope. It glowed white, signifying a high temperature, but it was muddled, as if something was blocking it, jamming the signal. The blur moved quickly, as if it was alternating between running and jumping.
KATHOOM!The nearby Magach-6 fired off a round, the shell casing ejecting out the left side of its 105mm smoothbore cannon. Mark and Kenji quickly dropped their IR scopes and clapped their hands over their ears to drown out the noise, but all too late; it felt like a solid compression wave had blown into their eardrums.
"Psycho fuckin' Heebs!" Mark shouted. "Everyone okay?"
Kenji pulled his hands from his ears and checked them. "I've bled worse at rock concerts. This ringing isn't going away, though."
"Get in and let's get out of here!" Gef shouted. "Hurry up!"
"No, wait!" Kenji grabbed his IR scope and scanned his surroundings again. "That thing is still out there!"
"We can't stand up to something that can take out a fucking tank, Kenji!" Gef screamed at him. "Get in, now!"
"Shit!" Kenji swore, jumping into the passenger seat. "Mark, come on!"
"Be right there!" Mark grabbed his IR scope and trained it back out. "I see the motherfucker, too! Damn, what the hell IS that thing?"
"MARK!"
"Shit!" Mark ran to the jeep, starting the engine and jamming the clutch and shifter straight into first. The engine roared with power, suddenly kicking off the sand and throwing the MITHRIL agents back into the seats.
Just as they cleared the dune, an explosion rocked the Magach-6 not a few feet under them; the jeep was blown off-course in mid-air. It crashed down on its right side, two tires punctured from fragments and a transmission line lacerated, spewing dark-red fluid. The last thing Kenji saw before hitting his head and suddenly losing consciousness was an oblong, gigantic tan-painted shadow, with two glowing blue orbs at its apex and a red star emblazoned on its side.
To be continued...
Glossary
Dry carbon fiber/fiberglass: Carbon fiber is a very strong, highly expensive material. It is formed by interlacing reinforced carbon filament with plastic and bonding it together in a weaved pattern. Examples can be seen in automotive applications; quite often, tuner cars (Think 2Fast 2Furious) can have black parts which are actually carbon fiber. In most cases, carbon fiber can take the place of heavier fiberglass as a structural component, but higher-quality CF applications can match or exceed steel.
In a single-layer configuration, carbon fiber is not applicable as an armor or reinforcement, but at cutting-edge technology for the early '80s, simply reinforcing with multiple layers would not necessarily create a stronger armor. It would have to be refined, created, and built with a process that would greatly surpass science and technology at the time.
Israeli armored vehicles: The Magach-6 is basically a retrofitted export version of the American M60 Patton tank. Phased out in the mid-80s for the M1 Abrams, the M60 had seen service in Europe, and in some cases, Vietnam, before being semi-retired and set for export. In terms of performance, it is slightly inferior to the then-modern Soviet-bloc T-72 tank, but its armor, weapons systems, and crew were almost universally superior to their Soviet counterparts. Israeli Defense Force armor formations are still based on the Magach-6 and –7 variant, although domestic military industrial development is providing an alternative to the expensive-to-import Abrams.