Midnight in the African Rift Valley is hardly a ti for sound sleep.
The scorching sun of the day has long sunk, replaced by an endless, suffocating darkness.
Lumar hid in the brigade-level command vehicle, drenched in sweat as if fished out of a cesspool.
Tonight is the crucial mont of his showdown with Song Heping, both decisive and life-threatening!
"Re...Report! Sir! Right flank! Right flank at the listone! A whole lot of governnt army infantry has erged!"
An aide removed his headset, his voice cracking with fear: "They're damn near frantically charging at our left rear flank's soft spot! At least a brigade! Charging...charging like mad dogs! It's a night raid! These bastards have a death wish! It's a suicide assault!"
Lumar, who had been in a state of high tension, jumped up from his chair as if a high-voltage current shot up his backside and dashed to the side monitoring screen.
On the screen, the infrared/micro-light images transmitted by the SAS-controlled high-altitude "Grim Reaper" drone, with a chilling calmness, were broadcasting hell live—
The listone slope, under the night vision lens, was emitting a ghostly grey-green glow.
That steep slope was now plastered with a shifting, writhing "tide of human flesh"!
The densely packed governnt army soldiers looked like malevolent spirits squeezed out from the seams of hell, climbing hand and foot upward while dodging the fatal bullets streaming down like bright lines in the night vision apparatus!
Bullets gnawed on the bare rocks, kicking up eye-piercing little sparks, resembling ghostly fires.
Figures continually seed to be hamred invisibly, rolling down the cliffs. Their shrill wails were swallowed up by even louder explosions just as they escaped their mouths.
At the foot of the slope, several governnt army BMP-1 infantry fighting vehicles and modified pickup trucks stood clearly against the backdrop. Their 73mm cannon barrels, along with heavy machine guns, spewed tongues of fire like mad, drenching the defending positions in steel and fla, pinning people down.
The reckless madness, the desperate fierceness, was more terrifying than any previous probing attempt!
"Damn it! How did these wretched maggots beco so brave?!"
Lumar cursed venomously from between his teeth; beyond the violated rage in his eyes was a deeper, overwhelming panic evoked by this sudden and all-out night raid.
Right flank listone.
That was the "Achilles' heel" of his defensive line, and the damn darkness made it all the more deadly!
If the left rear weakness is wedged by these bastards, it's equivalent to bisecting his troops. By then, his entire brigade will be surrounded and sliced up!
Lumar, as a commander who has attended military academy, wasn't stupid; he could see through the tactical intent clearly.
"SAS! SAS team! Imdiately confirm the situation on the right flank! Highest priority! Throw everything available to pound the right flank to death! Illumination rounds! Light up the east slope of listone like dayti! Use artillery fire to bomb those climbing bastards back to where they belong!"
He roared into the intercom, almost spraying spit onto the screen, calling for help from the special forces sent by his British patron.
"Air defense group! All air defense groups listen up! Night vision equipnt on full blast! Keep those damn MiGs from sneaking in amidst the chaos! Not a single mosquito should be let through!"
Orders like ice water instantly awakened the SAS guidance team at the rear hidden spots, always responsible for remote battlefield intelligence support and air defense interception.
These elite from London had their relaxed faces replaced imdiately with professional coldness. The green glow of the night vision goggles reflected expressionless faces.
"Caesar received. Advance to the right flank, performing surveillance and fire directing tasks. Repeat, advance to the right flank, maintain continuous monitoring."
The communication channel erupted with urgent and clear English, imbued with standard London-accented matter-of-fact calmness.
"All 'Javelin' shooters are in position, switch to night vision mode. Authorization to fire upon detecting MiG-23 heat signals. Over."
The SAS team leader's voice was as hard as iron, every word clear in the nightti communications.
Invisible maneuvers were completed in the darkness instantly.
Deployed around the command vehicle and at the high points of air defense positions, the eerie green beams from laser designators were forcibly oriented towards the right flank, a boiling arena of flesh and blood.
Individual air defense missile shooters vigilantly scanned the listone direction through night vision sights, beneath skies churned by tracer bullets, explosion flashes, and illuminating rounds.
anwhile.
The right flank listone high ground was now a complete nightti at grinder.
Soldiers of the Sena Governnt Army's 11th Brigade, under the brief illumination of the white glare of illuminations, or in the ominous green hue of night vision, pumled by Lumar's defending army's frenzied firepower from heights, were using their dying breath to scramble upward over the freshly cold corpses and severed limbs of their comrades in the chilling night.
The sharp whistling of bullets slicing through the air, the muffled thunder of shell explosions, the heart-wrenching wails of wounded soldiers, the hysterical shouts of officers, mingled with the blasts of rocks being shattered, rging into a bone-chilling death symphony, eerily chilling beneath the dead silent night sky.
"Charge! Charge! For Sena! God bless!"
A governnt army captain, face covered in blood and resembling a fiend under the illumination light, swung his pistol, his throat hoarse from shouting.
His efforts were re noise against the deafening battlefield cacophony.
Responding to him were the thudding sounds and abrupt dying screams of comrades constantly falling to bullets.
A mortar shell descended with its unique "whoosh—" sound into the crowd, a sudden flash of white light revealing the scattered burst of flesh, intestines, and searing chunks of mud and rock!
The choking sll of thick blood and pungent stench of innards wafted through the cold air, striking the senses.
A young soldier whose leg was blasted off, in the darkness after the flare died, futilely clawed at the cold stones with his hands, dragging his spilled intestines, letting out wails that sounded inhuman, until the crowd surging from behind trampled him into the darkness.
The lifeline of Lumar's defending army was an annular machine gun nest built with a heap of large gray rocks.
Two PKMs, two NSV "Rock" heavy machine guns, wove a deadly web of fire.
The machine gunners, wearing night vision goggles or simply firing by following the tracer rounds, had faces devoid of any human likeness, leaving only a numb instinct to kill.
The scorching shells, like dark golden urine, splattered from the ejection port, piling up into small mountains at their feet and steaming in the chilly night air.
The barrels glowed red-hot, glaringly bright in the night vision.
Bullets swept over the pitch-black hillside like water poured out, with tracer rounds drawing long, deadly red lines; wherever they swept, people fell in swathes like wheat being harvested.
The stone surfaces were sared with sticky darkened blood, looking like spilled ink at night, flowing down into streams along the grooves.
But the governnt army, those who weren't afraid to die, never stopped charging.
Nor could they stop, for behind them were Jiang Feng's rcenary enforcent troops.
Anyone who retreated was guaranteed a "gift" forged from 7.62mm caliber warheads.
Just behind the bloody battlefield, in a small depression offering a bit of wind protection, a dozen or so n in pitch-black combat uniforms stood like stone posts growing in the night.
They were the "Wolf Pack" enforcent team.
Their leader, Jiang Feng, was holding his thermal imaging sight, coldly watching the inferno ahead.
In the world of thermal imaging, the living were glaringly yellow-white, the dead were icy deep blue-black, and explosions were blinding white blotches.
His gaze held no anger or pity, only a cold calculation of the battlefield situation and the "harvest" efficiency, like playing a video ga.
In the thermal imaging view, on the far right flank, a small group of about twenty governnt soldiers were being crushed by a fire point spewing white light, their brightness rapidly decreasing.
This indicated that the losses on the governnt army's side were rapidly increasing.
Their montum for a charge had completely collapsed.
Among them, more than a dozen soldiers could no longer withstand the pressure of the Grim Reaper hovering above and, scrambling and crawling, suddenly turned around and ran down the mountain — those were the deserters who had lost their nerve!
"Target confird. Fourth sector from the right of the gray rock, deserters, fresh live targets, about fifteen."
Jiang Feng's voice ca from the throat mic, cold and flat, devoid of any human emotion, like a machine reporting numbers.
"Roger. Heat source locked, no escape."
In the earpiece, the deputy leader of the enforcent team sounded equally cold.
Jiang Feng lowered the thermal imaging device, his right hand slowly rising in the darkness, then, like a guillotine, he chopped down rcilessly.
"Take them out."
At his command, on the edge of the depression, three PKMs mounted behind sandbags and two SVD sniper rifles equipped with thermal scopes simultaneously spewed the Grim Reaper's fire!
Da-da-da-da-da—
The machine gun fire drew dense bright lines in the dark, instantly covering that zone of deserter heat sources.
The dense 7.62x54mmR high-power bullets, with air-ripping shrieks, fiercely drilled into human flesh.
The brightest figures at the head of the fleeing group suddenly plunged forward, "exploding" at their core in the thermal imaging, their brightness plumting, with high-temperature red dots representing blood and flesh splattering around.
The thermal signals of those in the middle were directly sliced in half, their upper bodies still pushing forward with force, while the warmth in their lower bodies turned cold and blue in an instant.
The sniper's point shots were even more ruthless, picking off those who were trying to find a place to hide or ran slowly.
In the thermal imaging, the brightest spots on the targets' heads or chests would pop and explode, and then the entire figure would rapidly darken, turning cold.
Screams, short and sharp amidst the gunfire, were imdiately drowned out.
In just a few seconds, those dozen or so bright living heat sources extinguished completely in the thermal imaging, turning into cold deep blue, the sa color as the rocky ground behind.
Scorching shell casings clattered onto the sandbags, sparking small fire puffs in the night, while the sll of gunpowder mixed with strong blood stench dispersed in the cold wind.
Jiang Feng, expression unchanged, raised the thermal imager again, his cold gaze sweeping over the cluster of thermal signals from attack units in other directions.
That silent death stare in the darkness was more terrifying than any roar.
The enforcent team standing here was an iron rule built from dead n's bones — charge forward, possible death; retreat backward, certain death!
Their gun barrels were the most direct enforcers of this rule in the night.
This small depression beca the boundary between the living and the dead, emitting a despair more suffocating than the artillery fire ahead.
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