Dinosaur Wars: Earthfall by Thomas P Hopp
***
The remnants of Davis’s force raced southward, deep into the Beartooth Mountains on a winding two-lane highway, occasionally coming under fire from pursuing Kra. After several hours of cat-and-mouse, Davis’s Humvee crossed a bridge over a deep canyon. He said to his driver, “Pull out here.” The man halted the Hummer on the shoulder of a rising stretch of road that overlooked the bridge they had just crossed.
“I’ve been looking for a way to create a barrier between us and those things,” Davis explained to the driver. “This looks like it.” He stood in the gun opening and checked the area behind them through binoculars. Early summer predawn light illuminated a rugged landscape of granite cliffs and sparse mountain vegetation. Below him, back the way they had just come, the two-lane stone-and-concrete bridge spanned a ravine more than a hundred feet deep. The far-side approach was an exposed section of road dynamited from the granite of the canyon wall. On the near side, the road provided a natural semicircular firing position with trees and giant boulders where his force could take partial cover. As the last vehicle, a Bradley, came across the bridge with no Kra fighters in sight, Davis spoke into his radio hand mike.
“We’re not going to let them cross this bridge. I want it rigged for demolition in 60 seconds.” A group of soldiers dismounted from the Humvee nearest the bridge and scurried back onto the roadway carrying heavy ammo boxes. Climbing over the rock parapets of the bridge, they began attaching explosive charges to the buttresses on either end of the structure while two men reeled off a line of detonation wire leading back to the Humvee.
Watching them work, Davis considered his good fortune to have escaped the ranch with several dozen men and a handful of vehicles. The five Humvees had heavy machine guns mounted on them and the three Bradley armored personnel carriers were equipped with small but deadly 25mm turret cannons. He had observed, while pulling away from the ranch and rolling through Red Lodge, that the Kra respected their firepower. By sending an occasional salvo to the rear, his force had managed to keep the enemy at bay. But now, moving into the tortuous roads of the Beartooths, he worried that a flanking opportunity would present itself and the Kra would pin him down. Here, he hoped to eliminate that danger for good.
The squad leader waved, signifying that the explosives were set.
“Okay,” Davis called into the radio. “Detonate when ready.”
One of the men knelt over a detonator box and twisted the actuator handle.
Nothing happened.
He tried again. Nothing.
Davis pounded a fist on the top of the Humvee. “Get it fixed, pronto!” he called into the mike, and then he muttered to his driver, “What I’d give for just one tank.”
The man stood beside him in the gunner’s hatch. “Sir, should we move farther forward, out of the danger?”
Davis turned and looked him over. He was a young man with dried blood on the side of his face from a small wound of some kind. “No, son,” Davis replied. “This troop is all I’ve got left. There’s no purpose to a general without a force to command. I’ll stick close.”
At that moment a Kra fighter came into view on the far side and the mounted guns of the vehicles behind Davis opened up. Bullets sparked as they ricocheted off the surface of the Kra machine. A 25mm cannon round from a Bradley detonated against the machine’s canopy, staggering the walker but not taking it down. Dented but still dangerous, it backed away, lacing the area around the bridge with laser fire. Men scrambled for cover and a tree branch over Davis’s head burst into flame.
He called over the handset, “Have we got another detonator?”
“Negative, sir.”
A second Kra appeared and then a third, not on the roadway, but on a hillside overlooking the far side of the bridge. The machines took cover behind big boulders and soon were joined by two more Kra. All began firing at Davis’s vehicles. The rearmost Humvee exploded into a ball of flame.
Over the din of battle, Davis shouted into his radio, “Concentrate your fire on the explosives under the bridge. We’ve got to blow the darned thing.” A moment later the base of each bridge piling came alive with flying dust and dirt thrown out by a hail of bullets, but the charges still refused to explode. The Kra worked their way down to the bridge and came together in a phalanx formation, bristling with laser fire.
“Keep shooting,” Davis shouted. “We’re lost if they make it across.”
As the first Kra stepped onto the bridge, the nearest Humvee gunner clattered a stream of bullets over it but it pressed forward, feeling no effect other than a slight denting of its metallic skin. Then a round from a Bradley’s 25mm cannon struck a knee joint and took the fighter-walker down. The other four Kra gathered around it and raised a blinding hail of laser fire, concentrating on the Bradley that had done the damage. Taking multiple hits, the Bradley burst into flame.
Davis groaned. “Just one tank, God.”
Before he finished speaking, his driver tapped him on the shoulder and pointed. “There, sir! Just what you asked for.”
Roaring around the bend in the road behind the Kra was something that made Davis’s jaw drop: not another enemy, but—an Abrams tank! It came from behind the Kra without warning, rolled to within twenty yards of them, and halted for a clean shot with its 120mm cannon. The round hit a machine in the middle of the pack and it exploded. Arms and legs flew in all directions.
A voice came over the radio. “This is Fox Two, Lieutenant Abercromby, reporting for duty.”
“Halleluiah!” Davis shouted. “Get ’em, Crom.”
The tank’s gun roared again and a second Kra exploded. The other machines had by now identified the source of the threat and turned to face it. They sent a barrage of laser fire against the tank and its metal skin sputtered molten iron where the bolts struck. But its cannon fired again and a third Kra erupted in flame. Then, with three of the five enemy destroyed and another down, the tank’s engine raced and it rolled onto the bridge. A wild shot from the last standing Kra glanced off its turret but the tank kept coming. It rode up and over the downed Kra machine, crushing it to scrap. Then it piled into the final Kra, sending him reeling backward. The fighter-walker teetered momentarily at the edge of a stone parapet and then toppled backward off the bridge, tumbling head over heels into the depths of the canyon. A seconds later there was a thunderous rumble as the machine shattered on the rocks below.
The tank rolled forward to the near side of the bridge and Crom poked his head up through the command hatch to give Davis a thumbs-up. Davis raised his radio transmitter and was about to remind Crom about the explosives lashed to the bridge, but the lieutenant scarcely hesitated. Once his tank came to a halt on the near side, its turret wheeled around to target the far abutment.
One well-placed shot set off the whole train of explosives, sending billows of flame and black smoke out from under the bridge. For a moment the roadway trembled and the wreckage of the Kra machines lurched one way and the other over its surface. Then, ponderously, the bridge crumpled in the middle and fell into the gorge, the Kra machines spinning downward with it. Everything vanished into a whirlwind of dust as the wreckage thundered onto the rocks below. A cheer went up from the troops and Crom waved a victorious fist in the air.
Davis enjoyed the sound of the cheering for a minute. Then he got on the radio. “All right everybody, let’s get moving.”
As his driver fired up the Hummer and pulled out, Davis took stock of the remnant of his force as it fell in behind. He was down to two Bradley armored vehicles and four Humvees, but now he could add one Abrams tank.
He sat and said to his driver, “It’s not much of an army but it just might get us back to Colorado Springs.” Before the view was lost around a bend, he looked back across the ravine and saw several new Kra machines cautiously observing from cover. He said, “It’ll be a while before they find a way across that gap.”
As the column pressed forward on the long haul back through Wyoming and Colorado to NORAD, Davis took