The freezing rain continued to pelt the muddy low roof walls of Sector Three. But the nature of the enemy assault was undergoing a rapid, dangerous transformation.
Arthur Vance knelt on the fire-step beside Captain Varley. He peeked through an armored trench periscope toward the crest of Hill 88, eleven hundred yards to the north.
Through the periscope’s tuned crosshairs and the aligned filters of his brass sight monocle, Arthur analyzed the tactical disposition of Baron Korgan Rask’s forward artillery network.
On the crest of the hill, hidden beneath wet burlap camouflage netting and heavy sandbag stone retaining walls, sat two forward artillery watching posts. From these raised bunkers, spotters equipped with high-zoom stereoscopic rangefinders were tracking every movement in the commoner trenches, calculating wind shear and sky humidity before transmitting firing corrections via buried field telephone lines to three hidden eighty-tiny mortar pits dug into the reverse slope of the ridge.
Every forty seconds, those mortar pits lobbed high-explosive air-burst fragmentation shells into the comms trenches. The eighty-tiny rounds were fitted with delayed-action air-pressure fuses, exploding exactly fifteen feet above the wooden walkway planks to shower the trench floor with thousands of razor-sharp steel slivers. The barrage pinned the guard post down, preventing stretcher teams from evacuating casualties to Dugout Seven and threatening to slice through the rubber hoses of the chemical sump pumps.
