The M1A3 Abrams was a man-killer.

Colonel J. "Lonesome" Jones thanked the good Lord that he had never had to face anything like it.

The models that preceded it, the A1 and A2, were primarily designed to engage huge fleets of Soviet tanks on the plains of Europe. They were magnificent tank busters, but proved to be less adept at the sort of close urban combat that was the bread and butter of the U.S. Army in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. In the alleyways of Damascus and Algiers, along the ancient cobbled lanes of Samara, Al Hudaydah, and Aden, the armored behemoths often found themselves penned in, unable to maneuver or even to see what they were supposed to kill. They fell victim to car bombs and Molotovs and homemade mines. Jones had won his Medal of Honor rescuing the crew of one that had been disabled by a jihadi suicide squad in the Syrian capital.

The A3 was developed in response to attacks just like that one, which had become increasingly more succesful. It was still capable of killing a Chinese battle tank, but it was fitted out with a very different enemy in mind.

Anyone, like Jones, who was familiar with the clean, classic lines of the earlier Abrams would have found the A3 less aesthetically pleasing. The low-profile turret now bristled with 40 mm grenade launchers, an M134 7.62 mm minigun, and either a small secondary turret for twin 50s, or a single Tenix-ADI 30 mm chain gun. The 120 mm canon remained, but it was now rifled like the British Challenger's gun.

But anyone, like Jones, who'd ever had to fight in a high-intensity urban scenario couldn't give a shit about the A3's aesthetics. They just said their prayers in thanks to the designers. The tanks typically loaded out with a heavy emphasis on high-impact, soft-kill ammunition such as the canistered "beehive" rounds, Improved Conventional Bomblets, White Phos', thermobaric, and flame-gel capsules. Reduced propellant charges meant that they could be fired near friendly troops without danger of having a gun blast disable or even kill them. An augmented long-range laser-guided kinetic spike could engage hard targets out to six thousand meters.

The A3 boasted dozens of tweaks, many of them suggested by crew members who had gained their knowledge the hard way. So the tank commander now enjoyed an independent thermal and LLAMPS viewer. Three-hundred-sixty-degree visibility came via a network of hardened battle-cams. A secondary fuel cell generator allowed the tank to idle without guzzling JP-8 jet fuel. Wafered armor incorporated monobonded carbon sheathing and reactive matrix skirts, as well as the traditional mix of depleted uranium and Chobam ceramics.

Unlike the tank crew that Jones had rescued from a screaming mob in a Damascus marketplace, the men and women inside the A3 could fight off hordes of foot soldiers armed with RPGs, satchel charges, and rusty knives-for the "finishing work" when the tank had been stopped and cracked open to give access to its occupants.

Lycombing gas turbines drove the seventy-five-ton brute a top speed of sixty kph, which was a touch slower than its forebears. But again, it was an unusual day when the driver got to put her into top gear and go wild. Mostly the A3 crawled through dense warrens of third world slums, pulverizing mud brick walls, smashing through the ground floors of low-rise buildings, crushing cars-and occasionally people-beneath its treads.

Not today, though.

Today the six Abrams of the Eighty-second MEU charged through light scrub, mowing down saplings and bursting through old wooden fences as they led an armored stampede toward the last line of Japanese defense. They led twelve older, reduced-capability M1A1-Cs of the Australian Second Cavalry, and twenty-six Light Armored Vehicles and "Bushpig" AASLAVs of the combined mobile forces.

It was a hell of a rough ride, but Jones was enjoying it thoroughly, watching the tanks on flatscreen while strapped into the battalion command LAV some three hundred meters behind the leading edge of the advance. Every vehicle was hooked into the Cooperative Battle Link and directed by a Distributed Combat Intelligence, working within operational parameters set by the U.S. and Australian commanders. The turret on one of his A3s swung thirty degrees to the left and fired a 120 mm round of XM1028 Canister at a platoon-sized group of the enemy, which emerged from the smoking ruins of a wooden cottage. More than a thousand tungsten balls, expelled from the container as the shot left the gun's muzzle, swept over the Japanese like an evil wind, reducing them to pink mist and bone fragments.

He saw a Japanese Type 94 "tankette" literally shredded into metal chips as four separate 30 mm chain guns took it under fire. It flew to pieces, the disintegrating steel plate perversely reminding him of leaves blown from a tree in a high wind.

His helmet banged into the padded ceiling as the LAV dipped and bumped and leapt up again with a series of grinding crunches. It wasn't firing any of its weapons, but the vehicles around it had begun to pop smoke and antipersonal munitions from their grenade launchers. Two Hellfire missiles streaked away from an Australian Bushpig, lancing out to destroy a couple of small field guns popping away on a hill just ahead of them.

Jones took in video and sensor feeds from dozens of sources. To the untrained observer, it was just violent chaos, but to him every image, every moment was another note in a deadly overture.

Even from his position, buttoned up tight in the LAV, the noise of the assault was colossal. The snarling of the command vehicle's engine, the crash and crunch of every impact as they smashed though the light bush and leapt over small gullies, the savage thunder of coaxial machine guns, autocannon, and mortar bursts.

A drone picked up a company-sized movement to the west, where a hundred or more men emerged from where they had hidden in a creek. The DCI alerted human sysops, who needed no warning. Two speeding A3's traversed their main guns and unloaded canister. The Japanese, however, were protected from the hypervelocity tungsten swarm by the fall of the creek bed. Their reprieve lasted all of one second.

While as they remained crouched where they couldn't be engaged by direct fire, the next two tanks in line brought their guns to bear as they bounced along at forty kilometers per hour. Simultaneous muzzle flashes preceded a massive distortion effect on the screen.

The tanks had fired high-impulse thermobaric shells.

Two blips flashed across nine hundred meters in the blink of an eye. The shells contained a slurry of propylene oxide mixed with a finely powdered explosive. As simple microchips in the warheads registered that they had reached the target, they cracked open and dispersed their contents over the heads of the enemy infantrymen. The soldiers had a split second to see the bright orange cloud, but no time to escape before small incendiary fuses sparked a titanic blast. At the epicenter, temperatures soared to 3,000 degrees Centigrade and overpressure reached 430 psi.

The men, the plant life-in fact, every living thing and most of the inanimate objects within the blast area-ceased to exist. Even the air was incinerated, creating a vacuum that pulled in more burning fuel and loose objects from a wide margin around the point of impact. Anyone who might have survived-even momentarily, by dint of having been entirely submerged-would have encountered the true meaning of hell, having been simultaneously flash-boiled, asphyxiated, and cooked from within as the blazing fuel-air mix penetrated all nonairtight objects.