"Leo Frankowski & Dave Grossman - The War With Earth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Frankowski Leo)

of my sensors were operating once more.
A quick look around told me that my seventeen subordinates were flying parallel to
me a half meter above the waves, in a line two kilometers wide. Our sonic shock waves
were kicking up huge rooster tails behind us.
A glance up told me that the artillery was not letting us down. Six thousand
launchers, scattered up to eight thousand kilometers away, were each firing fifteen rounds
in a time-on-target barrage, mostly to keep our opponents from noticing us too soon.
I was surprised to see that quite a few of the self-targeting smart shells were getting
through, and not being hit by enemy counterfire. The Earthworms were definitely not on
the ball. Having a stupid enemy is one of the things that every soldier dreams about, but
never believes can actually happen to him.
But to make proper use of an artillery barrage, you have to be willing to risk a few
casualties. You must hit the enemy while the last of your rounds are still incoming,
before he has a chance to look around and notice who is really killing him. Thus, to have
a fair number of our shells not be shot out of the sky was not entirely wonderful, but there
was nothing for it but to press on regardless. Maybe our shells were smart enough to tell
the good guys from the bad ones.
One could always hope.
I heard Lloyd yell "Tally Ho!" and open up with his rail gun before I spotted any of
the enemy myself. Then I saw that they were dug into some low dunes just past the
beach. The beach defenses were not shooting at our artillery shells, having apparently
been ordered to keep on the lookout for somebody exactly like yours truly. But the
temptation to keep your weapon pointed up, so that you could take out a shell that might
be coming straight at you was just too strong for those boys. Their muzzles were all
straight up, and not trained at us at all.
That was their fatal mistake.
My rail gun put a swarm of osmium needles, traveling at a quarter of light speed with
only three meters between them, across two hundred meters of the dunes, a split second
before Kasia on my left and Zuzanna on my right did the same. I saw a dozen Earth tanks
peel open like so many flowers blooming on a television nature program. They never got
a burst off at us, being too busy looking up at the incoming artillery, I suppose.
We went up and over the dunes, cutting a two-kilometer-wide swath through the
length of an island that was only four kilometers wide. General Sobieski hadn't been
much interested in capturing prisoners. He just wanted them gone from our planet. This
made things a lot easier.
Off to my right, one of the new recruits under Mirko went down in a spray of sand
and vegetation. He'd been a safecracker from Nova Split that everybody called Frenchy,
and I'd rather liked the kid, but there was no stopping for him, not now. As best as I could
tell, he'd been hit by one of our own artillery shells. It didn't explode, so its little brain
had probably been fried out by an enemy X-ray laser.
Just damned rotten luck.
A rolling artillery barrage preceded us as we cut through the island, but now, since
the dangerous period of breaking through their shore defenses was over, the exploding
shells stayed ahead of us by more than three hundred meters.
Five kilometers in, we came across a fair-sized base. Intelligence hadn't mentioned
anything like this! There looked to be thousands of troops running madly about. Infantry?
Why in hell would anybody bring infantry into a war zone?
Hundreds of tank turrets and artillery pieces were spinning toward us, and not a few
shoulder-held rockets were being brought up. There wasn't anything that we could do but
open up on them. We either had to take out their heavy weapons or get killed ourselves.