Metal screamed louder than men could.Blue Three's skirts rode halfway up the shattered corpse of the rebel tank, fanning the flames into an encircling manacle. The Slammers driver twisted the hundred and seventy tonnes she controlled like a booted foot crushing an enemy's face into the gutter.
Cooter stood up. Shorty Rogers raised his head from the bow hatch, glanced around, and disappeared again.A moment later,
Blue Three backed away from the crackling inferno to which it had reduced its victim. Nothing else moved in the forest.
Dick Suilin's fingers were reflexively loading a fresh clip into his grenade launcher.
Task Force Ranson, consisting of one tank and four combat cars under Junior Lieutenant Brian Cooter,was within seven kilometers of the outskirts of Kohang when it received word that Consie resistance had collapsed.
The Governmental Compound within the city was relieved a few minutes later by elements of the 12th and 23rd Infantry Brigades of the National Army.
Dick Suilin looked at Kohang with eyes different from those with which he'd viewed the fine old buildings around the park and Governmental Compound only days before.
The stone facades were bullet-pocked now, but Suilin had changed much more than the city had during the intervening hours.
"Good thing we didn't have to fight through these streets," he said.
His voice was a croak from breathing powergun residues. He didn't know whether he'd ever regain the honey-smooth delivery that had been his greatest asset in the life of his past.
Tents had sprouted around the wheeled command vehicles in the central park fronting the Compound. There was a line of tarpaulin-covered bodies beside the border of shattered trees, but for the most part, the National Army soldiers looked more quizzical than afraid.
"Yeah," said Albers, now manning the right wing gun. He spoke in a similar rasping whisper. "Narrow streets and every curst one a' those places built like a bunker. Woulda been a bitch."
"We'd've managed," said Cooter.
The Compound's ornamental iron gates had been blown away early in the fighting. The makeshift barricade of burned-out cars which replaced them had already been pushed aside in the cleanup. Soldiers in clean fatigues bearing the collar flashes of the 23d Infantry stood aside as Task Force Ranson entered the courtyard.
