Page 84 of Tom Clancy Line of Sight
The lead tank in the column was an M-84, a Serbian-produced variant of the Russian T-72, with a 125-millimeter smoothbore autoloading gun and a three-man crew, including the convoy commander, a captain in the regular Army of the Republika Srpska.
Both the captain and his gunner stood in the hatches despite the threat, however unlikely, of sniper fire. The cramped, uncomfortable turret was a particular torture for the six-foot-tall captain, especially when buttoned up. The turret’s primary purpose wasn’t crew comfort, but rather to house the tank’s autoloader, an ingenious Soviet design that reduced the crew size by twenty-five percent.
The autoloader could generate up to eight shots per minute, cycling the separate carousels of both charges and projectiles into the cannon’s breech in a seamless mechanical motion.When the autoloader operated, the captain felt like a midget riding inside a giant semiautomatic pistol, as toaster-sized propellant charges and arm-length explosive rounds clunked through the mechanism just inches from his shoulder. The crew compartment carried thirty-nine rounds of HEAT, armor-piercing and HE-frag shells.
Even when the gun wasn’t firing, the vehicle at cruising speed echoed with the deafening roar of the tank’s grinding steel tracks and the relentless V12 diesel engine. Pitiful electric fans hardly blew away the fumes, let alone the heat. The captain’s TKN-3 primary optical sight and two episcopes were barely adequate under combat conditions, and practically useless otherwise. Better to ride the hatch and risk getting shot than stay hot, blind, and deaf for hours for no good reason.
The captain confirmed his scout’s radio report and gave his gunner a thumbs-up. He turned around for another visual check on the convoy behind him. Thirty meters behind was the first of five FAP 2026 six-wheel-drive trucks loaded with heavily armed Serb White Eagles militia infantry, already infamous for their brutality against Muslim civilians. At least a third of the militia platoon were felons recruited straight out of prison, valued for their insatiable appetites for violence and mayhem.
The last vehicle in the convoy was another M-84 tank. It would be dark soon. If the village really was empty, they’d bivouac there tonight, and head out first thing in the morning after destroying it. Then they would proceed to assault the next village in the valley. With any luck, they’d cleanse the entire district of Muslims within the week. Poorly equipped and led, the Bosnian Army had put up virtually no resistance in the area.
You could hardly even call it a war, the captain mused, with forty-one tons of steel rumbling beneath him. His frontal armor could withstand direct hits by 105-millimeter tank guns and TOW missiles, neither of which the Bosniaks possessed in this region.
His tanks were invulnerable.
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The Chechen Sadayev crouched at the base of the pine tree, the heavy bulk of the RPG-29 “Vampir” rocket launcher supported on the folding tripod behind the pistol grip. At this close distance he could’ve tracked the lead Serb tank through the iron flip sights, but his eye was pressed against the rubber cup of the magnified PGO-29 glass optics for extra accuracy.
His finger slipped from the guard to the trigger.
And squeezed.
—
The pulled trigger ignited the electronic fuse of the PG-29V, a 105-millimeter tandem rocket with a shaped HEAT charge capable of penetrating 750 millimeters of homogeneous armor, far thicker than the frontal composite sloped plating of the M-84 tank, let alone its far thinner sides.
The gunner whipped around in his hatch at the familiar sound of the rocket motor launching in the woods to his left,and gazed in horror at the long plume of exhaust racing toward his tank.
The shaped HEAT charge slammed into the thin steel wall behind the wheels. The eruption produced a hypersonic jet of molten metal and flaming gases, cutting through the twenty-millimeter steel hull like a plasma laser, incinerating the driver’s atomizing corpse before his first scream.
The thirty-nine rounds of ammunition stores inside the hull ignited in a near-instantaneous chain reaction. The lower torsos of the gunner and commander were sheared away by the overpressure and shrapnel, but their upper bodies were still intact as the flaming turret cartwheeled high into the air before tumbling into the road with a thunderous clang.
—
The Serb tank commander in the rear of the column ducked instinctively back into his hatch when he saw the plume of rocket smoke racing out of the woods at the lead tank, shouting orders at the driver to break right, away from the trees.
The gunner, meanwhile, took the opposite tack and threw himself off the turret and onto the road, about the time a second HEAT round slammed into his vehicle. His act of cowardice saved his life, at least for another three seconds, when the white-hot shrapnel of the exploding tank shredded him like creamed chipped beef as he screamed in the dirt.
Some of the panicked White Eagles dove out of the trucks as they lurched off the road in a cloud of diesel fumes away from the nearby woods, racing for the relative safety of the tree line on the far side of the lush, green meadow.
Automatic-rifle fire erupted from the woods behind themnow, kicking up turf around the lumbering vehicles as they swayed and bounced on the soft grass.
WHAM!
Three of the trucks plowed into buried land mines. Flesh and canvas and steel erupted in a cloud of screams and boiling fire.
The remaining two trucks slammed their brakes just in time. The survivors leaped out of the cargo beds and bolted for cover as a hail of 7.62-millimeter bullets stormed into them, fired by the line of shouting mujahideen, rifles up, faces twisted with pious joy and battle rage as they charged out of the trees toward the broken Serb column.
Suddenly, a line of twenty-millimeter shells stitched across the surging wave of jihadis, breaking them open like clamming knives, spilling their butchered torsos into the pine needles in a spray of blood and shattered flesh.
The rotors of the Serb SA 341 Gazelle helicopter beat the air as it whirled around for a second pass with its GIAT M621 twenty-millimeter cannon, but its cabin-mounted 7.62-millimeter machine gun started pouring on the fire toward the trees. More jihadis fell as the Serbs gathered their courage, opening fire from prone positions across the road in the tall meadow grass.
The French-built Serb aircraft with its enclosed Fenestron tail rotor assembly swooped in a broad arc overhead to regain altitude and to draw a bead on the tree line.
—
Sadayev felt the overpressure of the metal-jacketed 7.62s buzzing past, cutting tree branches above his head and smashing trunks behind him.
