Read Online War Weapons by Craig Sargent - Free Book Online Page A

from every car, and as Stone glanced to the
     top of a monitor, he saw that more was coming every second. He could hear the slugs pinging off the armor of the tank, sharp
     little sounds that reverberated through the tank. He fired again, trying to sight up one of the command cars that was now
     coming dead on toward them only a few hundred feet off. The tank reeled back, and the huge shell flew out of the smoking barrel
     just feet above the ground. It missed the target Stone had aimed for—the lead car—with someone who must have been closely
     related to Genghis Khan standing on the hood, firing some kind of rocket grenade. But the shell streamed past the gang leader
     and slammed into the front end of a diesel truck cab. The front end disintegrated as if the hammer of Thor had descended from
     the heavens.
    Stone saw the war-painted man—in blood as far as Stone could tell through the video monitor—fire the long, tubular device
     he was carrying. Some sort of shell rocketed toward the Bradley and slammed right into its side, just a yard away from Stone.
     The entire tank shook, and every one of them, including Excaliber, went flying around the interior. Stone gripped the seat
     with both hands. In a second the tank settled and he could feel the heat of the explosion coming right through the titanium-armored
     wall.
    Things weren’t quite working out as he had hoped. The tanks were tough, but they couldn’t just let themselves stand there
     taking all the assorted slugs, grenades, and minirockets these blood-smeared mountain thuds could dish out. Stone sighted
     up on the bastard who was slamming another load into his launcher. The vehicles were streaming down from everywhere now, a
     solid sheet of them—rusted hulks with coughing engines, absolutely loaded with blood-coated men firing constantly. Again Stone
     missed what he had sighted, but the shell landed dead on through the windshield of an ancient Ford, wide tail fins and all.
     The man’s head disappeared inside, as did the entire car a second later, exploding out a curtain of steel and glass, slicing
     myriad cuts into men hanging on to the charging vehicles around it.
    One of the truck bodies from which the whole back had been stripped off, and a single high crow’s nest built up on it, suddenly
     caught Stone’s attention. The plywood cabin in the sky, a good twenty feet up, the foot-thick pole beneath it wired down to
     all four sides, glistened for a second with the reflection of steel, and Stone saw a small cannon muzzle poking through an
     opening. The bastards even had artillery. The thing roared, and the entire pole seemed to lean backward. Stone heard a blast
     to the right of him, and as the camera panned by, he saw that Bull’s tank was enveloped in flame. Phosphorus bomb.
    “Don’t panic,” Stone yelled into the mouthpiece, as he heard screams of raw terror coming over his headset from inside the
     blazing tank. “Listen to me, you bastards,” Stone shouted at the top of his lungs. “You’re self-contained in there. The flames
     can’t get to you—I swear to God. Bull, flip the ‘Internal Oxygen’ switch on the panel in front of you. You hear me, do it
     fast!”
    “Can’t—breathe,” a voice whispered back. “Can’t—”
    “The switch, the switch. Oxygen on!”
    “Yeah, I see it. There.” Then the voice died out. Shit, the specs said the Bradley could easily take a hit like that. But
     the specs had been wrong before, many times. If a whole tankload of them died already … The video scanned past the burning
     tank, and Stone saw that the flames were already dying down, but suddenly Foster was emerging from the top. The idiot had
     panicked and opened the hatchway. He closed it, or someone did from below, and the terrified manran to the edge of the tank
     to jump down. He had barely started his descent when slugs tore into him from every direction. A hundred rounds must have
     ripped into the flesh within two seconds,