The Assault - By Brian Falkner Page 0,77

crushed remains.

The going was faster over the flat, open desert, but here there was nothing to hide behind. Chisnall veered the big machine from side to side, not wanting to give Yozi an easy, steady shot.

Wilton fired continuously but had no effect on the thick, spinning metal of the other battle tank.

But the enemy tank did not return the fire.

“Fast movers, eight o’clock,” Price said, her eyes on a radar screen. “Two of them.”

Chisnall glanced to the left. Two type ones, screaming in from the west, below the heavy rainclouds. Death from the sky. No tank hull could survive a direct hit from a Bzadian jet’s missile.

“LT!” Price yelled, pulling his attention back to the front.

Before them, rising out of the desert, was the ugly, multi-pronged shape of a Bzadian gunship. It was a three-sided attack, Chisnall saw, and there was no way out. Behind them, the tank; in front, the gunship; and high in the sky, silhouetted above Uluru, the two alien jets.

There was no chance to escape. No hope left. And no panic. He felt calm, perhaps because of the sheer hopelessness of the situation. Death was coming fast, and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.

“Been a good effort, team,” he said.

That was when Uluru began to dance.

It shuddered, as if terribly afraid, and fire burst out of the side of the rock, through the tunnel entrance. Another shaft of fire, like a man-made bolt of lightning, appeared at the top of the rock, in the cleft—the ventilation shaft. It was so powerful that even the clouds parted around it.

The entire top of Uluru seemed to rise up, as if drawing in a breath. Then the rock exhaled through the monorail tunnel, and all hell came with it. A billowing, fiery shock wave punched straight through the base behind them.

Buildings, vehicles, everything in its path, disappeared into the cloud of dust.

Even out in the desert, well out of the cone of destruction, inside a solid metal battle tank, Chisnall felt the force of the explosive anger.

Behind them, the second tank, closer to the outer edge of the blast, rocked on its suspension. Two figures on the back of the tank went flying, arms and legs cartwheeling through the air, slamming into the wet sand of the desert.

In front of them, the gunship rotorcraft shook and shimmied in the sky but held its position.

The fast movers were not so lucky. They were almost directly over Uluru when it blew. The upward blast of burning fuel hit one of the jets, spinning it like a football. It rolled sideways, clipping the tail of the other jet. For a second, it looked as though they would both recover. Then the first jet exploded, dissolving in a fireball, while the second, without a tail, spiraled into the desert.

Chisnall stared at the fire and dust pouring out through the openings in Uluru. The tank’s cameras saw the explosion, but his mind saw more. Much more. He saw the faces of the young mothers, impaled on their cots by snaking tubes, their dull eyes reflecting the white flare of the blast for a fraction of a second before they vanished forever.

The jets were gone, but it wasn’t over yet. In front of them, flashes came from the gunship. Rockets.

Chisnall shut his eyes, waiting for the impact.

“They’re firing too high!” Price yelled.

He opened his eyes and looked up to see the trails of the rockets passing over their heads—two of them. He twisted around and saw a brilliant flash as they both impacted, dead center, on the tank behind them. It exploded with a brilliant flash and a scream of rent metal, jagged hunks of tank rising in parabolic arcs before crashing down into the desert sand.

“They got the wrong tank!” Wilton yelled. “They got the wrong tank!”

“No, they didn’t,” Chisnall said.

He watched the rotorcraft sink to the ground in front of them. The transmitter on the tank’s desk continued to flash, identifying them. The pilot of the medivac craft had said a second craft would be coming for them. He had just neglected to say that that craft would be a gunship.

Chisnall turned the knob gently and rolled the big tank forward, pulling it to a halt just in front of the rotorcraft.

“We are Oscar Mike,” he said, jumping down into the well. “We are Oscar freaking Mike.”

As they ran across the open desert to the waiting rotorcraft, Chisnall glanced back at the burning hulk of the second tank.

Behind it, in