several feet and slammed against their crumbling sandbag barricade.
Groping through the swirling smoke, Bledsoe looked around for Larabee. The sandbags had been scattered as though kicked by a playful giant; Larabee lay on his back where the blast had flung him, off the porch, down the steps, and several yards out into the Residence front lawn. The front of the Residence itself, never designed to take such punishment, had partially collapsed, a jagged tangle of brick and beam and splintered wood, licked about with flame. The upper stories and the rear of the large mansion were intact, but a few more direct hits by that tank and the whole structure was gonna come tumbling down.
Mexican troops were spilling from the three Bradleys now, troops better equipped than the civilians in the first wave had been, with modern assault rifles and kinevlar vests similar to what Bledsoe and Larabee were wearing. Gunfire popped and chattered; Bledsoe groped for his ATAR, dropped when the Abrams had fired, and knocked down three or four running figures. The smoke was getting thicker now, and it was difficult to acquire and hold a target. The full-auto fire from the wrecked front of the building seemed to be making the attackers cautious.
But they would be charging across the lawn and up the steps of the Residence any second now.
Bledsoe knew he didn’t have much time.
Rattlesnake One
TR-5 Peregrine transport/gunship Mexico City, República de México 1521 hours local time
“Landing alert, Lieutenant!” sounded in Fuentes’s headset. “Thirty seconds!” She could feel the transport’s nose coming up, could feel the change in pitch of the engines as they rotated to their straight-up, hover position.
“Roger that,” she replied.
“We can see the embassy now,” the Peregrine’s pilot added. “Looks like there’s a lot of shooting going on down there.”
Her pulse raced. Had war broken out officially, or was this just another “incident,” the kind that left widows and cripples in its wake? Had the Mexicans really been stupid enough to try a toe-to-toe slugfest with the United States?
Maybe they thought that with UN backing, they could win.
She punched in a combination on her wrist-top, then studied the low-res vid-feed from the TR-5’s nose camera as it flickered in pale black and white on her helmet display. The embassy’s broad, rooftop helipad was visible at the center of the picture; one of the AV-32s swept past her view from right to left, circling low, dropping smoke canisters that erupted in a dense, boiling gray-white fog around the embassy perimeter. There might be snipers nearby packing firepower heavy enough to bring down a Peregrine, and the smoke would hamper them when they tried to find a target. It would also screw up the enemy’s laser range finders. There was already a hell of a lot of smoke in the area; it looked like the front of the Residence might be on fire.
Two of the Peregrines, moving according to plan, were making for the helipad, where they would start taking off the embassy’s civilian staff. While a third circled the compound providing gunship support, the one carrying Fuentes’s platoon would deposit them in the compound between the Residence and the front gate. They would hold the embassy until all of the civilians were away, then hightail it back for their transports and haul-tail for the Gulf of Campeche.
“Snakebite, Basket. Be advised that we have hostile MBTs and AFVs in the AO.” A side window opened on the display, showing a freeze-frame image from a military satellite, looking down onto the embassy compound. Several vehicles were highlighted by winking red dots.
“Roger that.” Tanks and troop carriers. Things were a bit more complicated than they’d expected. Just frigging great!
But then, she thought, main battle tanks were why God had invented Marine air close-ground support.
United States Embassy
Mexico City, República de México 1521 hours local time
Bledsoe looked up as jet engines howled low out of the sky. The sheer relief, the release when he saw two Valkyrie AV-32 hoverjets sweeping low across the rooftops, sunlight glinting from their canopies, was enough to leave him weak and shaking. “Yeah!” he screamed at the sky. “Go! Go!”
The turrets of the Bradleys were pivoting to meet this new threat, but they were having trouble connecting with the targets. Vals were hard to see, even in broad daylight. Their active-camo hull coatings mimicked the surrounding colors of the sky almost as well as they absorbed radar, and with no vertical stabilizers on the flat upper surface, there was very little to catch the eye. When they dropped down low and started a head-on pass, they all but vanished, even if you knew exactly where to look.
The attack had at least distracted the Mexican troops for a few, precious moments. Bledsoe snatched at the chance, rising from his hiding place, sprinting across the scattering of sandbags, and throwing himself down across Larabee’s still form.
Larabee was still alive and breathing, though he had a nasty gash down the side of his head, and blood was pumping from a neat, round hole in his thigh, just above his left knee. Bledsoe grabbed an Ml first-aid kit and fumbled it open, extracting a sterile gauze pad and stuffing it onto the wound, trying to stop the bleeding.
Then the Bradley AFVs opened fire with their rotary cannons, hosing the sky with streams of red tracers, trying to drag down the oncoming Vals. Bledsoe never even saw the Valkyries return fire; the armored fighting vehicles simply began exploding in a quick one-two-three succession, flame and jagged black chunks of metal whirling into the air. Another blast rocked the Mexican tank. The concussions were deafening; Bledsoe covered Larabee with his own body, sheltering him as the explosions thundered and the Marine Valkyries streaked overhead.
He looked up, blinking into swirling smoke. Two more Vals were circling in the distance, as a quartet of TR-5 Peregrines angled in toward the Residence.
Time to get the hell out of Dodge. Rolling off his buddy, he gathered the unconscious Larabee into a fireman’s carry and started crawling back toward the embassy’s shattered front porch.
Rattlesnake Flight
TR-5 Peregrine transport/gunship Mexico City, República de México 1521 hours local time
In a swirling blast of deflected exhaust, two of the Peregrine gunships brought their noses up, tilt-jets howling as they swung to the upright, hover position, the aircraft barely moving as they drifted above the city streets in front of the embassy. A shoulder-launched rocket streaked skyward from the roof of the Sheraton; the aircraft’s active antimissile defense system, reacting with a computer’s superhuman speed, replied before the missile had traveled half the distance to the target, snapping back with a burst of radar-guided rotary cannon fire that detonated the SAM in an orange-black blossom of flame and smoke. The gunship’s main battery cut loose then, its Zeus high-speed cannon buzz-sawing into the roof of the structure with a cyclic rate of six thousand rounds per minute. Under that firestorm of depleted uranium penetrators mingled with 6.2mm high-explosive rounds and green tracers in a 7:2:1 ratio, the roof of the hotel literally disintegrated in a black cloud of whirling chips and fragments. Windows exploded, walls buckled, and much of the upper two stories of the structure crumbled into an avalanche of shattered masonry, glass, and stucco. The line of green tracers, so thick and solid-seeming it appeared to be a bright streak of dazzling green light, played briefly across the target zone, then winked out.
The tilt-jet Peregrines pivoted slowly, like hovering, airborne dragons searching for prey. Most of the mob had dispersed by now, though a number of bodies sprawled motionless
