The driver was using all his skills just keeping the vehicle upright. Halfway down the slope and the enemy guns would find their range. Kennedy called a halt and the car skidded into a trough of flung shale. He adjusted his goggles and surveyed the attack. The escarpment was a knuckled promontory in a sea of smoke. A V of Jacksons ploughed forwards, their shells directed at the wide picket of enemy supplies. Heavy machine-guns sputtered ruin among the climbing formations of Japanese infantry. Within moments, the tanks had entered their thinning ranks. Ghost dancer mortars chased the rolling armour, creating a region of whirling shrapnel and sudden death. The first wave of dancers whooped and leapt, a surging blue crest of bared bayonets and metal-lashing gunfire. They broke upon the Japanese ranks and punched through. Serried cobalt arrowheads drove onwards, piercing the chaotic grey columns oftenemy infantry. The deformed shell of a Jackson was a blackened, corpse-ridden husk. A second Jackson, the target of multiple bazooka rounds, surfed a swell of pebbled sand.
