334: Chapter 334 Merkava Cemetery

The Brigade Commander's words during the pre-battle briefing were: "Any terrorist attempting a breakthrough from this direction will be blown into spare parts before they even get within effective range."

Now, those words from the briefing had become a joke.

As the sky began to brighten, seven out of twelve merkava tanks had already burned into piles of scrap metal. On the main road, the wrecks of three tanks lay in a triangular formation, their top armor blasted open with charred penetration holes, and the wreckage of active defense systems scattered everywhere. Another four lay paralyzed on the reverse slope positions on both sides of the road; one had its turret blown off entirely, stuck in the mud three meters away like an inverted Tombstone.

The remaining five were retreating, but their path back had been sealed off.

During the first wave of fire coverage from the "Blade of Dawn," Sinwar had specifically allocated three "Locust" drones loaded with thermobaric warheads to take out the bridges and command vehicles behind this company's defensive zone. Then, while the rockets were still sporadically exploding, a sortie detachment from the 2nd Brigade emerged from a tunnel, cutting off the tanks' retreat from the flank and rear—the tunnel entrance had once been a sewer maintenance manhole; when the tanks' thermal imaging swept over it, there was only dead silence. But beneath that silence were Death Soldiers.

The sortie detachment was equipped exclusively with improved Red Arrow-12 anti-tank missiles.

This weapon wasn't new. What was new was its combination: a new seeker head specifically targeting the blind spots of active defense systems; a new tandem warhead capable of tearing through the interception window of the "Trophy" system; and the people carrying it—Death Soldiers—who knew no fear, no hesitation, and would not abandon a flanking maneuver due to enemy machine-gun fire. A Death Soldier would wait until the most suitable angle appeared, then stand up and pull the trigger.

At this moment, three hundred meters west of the merkava wreckage, a two-man anti-tank team crouched in a half-collapsed concrete pipe. The gunner braced the launch tube against his shoulder while the loader observed the front through a monocular telescope.

"Target, merkava, speed fifteen kilometers, crossing a rubble pile, underbelly exposed," the loader's voice was devoid of emotion. "Pitch angle negative two degrees."

The gunner didn't respond. His breathing was steady, finger resting on the trigger, capturing the slowly moving steel silhouette through the optical sight. The merkava tank was using a rubble pile to perform an anti-missile evasive maneuver—when the hull pitched up, the angle of the upper glacis armor could increase the probability of armor-piercing shell ricochets, but it also briefly exposed the vulnerable underbelly.

The instant the hull climbed to the top of the rubble pile and the chassis completely left the ground, the gunner pulled the trigger.

The missile flew out of the concrete pipe trailing a thin fiber optic wire, entering from beneath the merkava's chassis at a nearly vertical angle of attack. The metal jet pierced the bulkhead between the engine compartment and the fighting compartment, detonating the ammunition inside.

The tank's turret didn't fly off—it simply slumped down, all hatches popping open simultaneously as thick smoke billowed from every crack, like a smothered furnace.

Nine seconds later, the loader marked a new kill record on the tactical tablet, the voice memo heartlessly concise: "Destruction confirmed. Method: Top-attack bottom penetration. ID confirmed: 401st Brigade, D Company, Vehicle No. 819. Five crew members, no signs of life. Continuing observation."

Similar scenes were repeating across other directions of the A7 Buffer Zone. Two other anti-tank teams from the 2nd Brigade were picking off the scattered merkava convoy one by one in the western ditches, while the 1st Brigade took advantage of the Iron Dome system's failure to hunt down armored vehicles accompanying the infantry with RPGs and remote-controlled roadside bombs. Infantry stripped of tank cover were partitioned among the ruins, sniped, or had their throats slit from behind by shadows emerging from tunnels.

Some soldiers had only just learned how to say "surrender" in Hebrew—they learned it from the Death Soldier instructors, who said it would come in handy.

At 7:20, a white flag rose over the last bunker in the A7 Buffer Zone.

Four thousand kilometers away, on the desert border where northern Yemen meets the southern part of the Squid Nation.

Houssa stood inside a command armored vehicle, looking through a periscope at the silhouette of an enemy outpost growing clearer on the horizon. Behind him, Chief of Staff Adil was issuing final coordination orders to the brigades over an encrypted radio.

"1st Mechanized Infantry Brigade, maintain current speed. 2nd Brigade, three degrees west, bypass the minefield marker zone. Artillery battalion, in five minutes, execute a creeping barrage on coordinate point 'Dune-7', impact points to maintain a five-hundred-meter safety distance from our vanguard."

This force striking from northern Yemen was organized as a reinforced mechanized infantry brigade, consisting of two improved T-72 tank battalions, two mechanized infantry battalions equipped with BMP-3 infantry fighting vehicles, a self-propelled artillery battalion, and a "Desert Cheetahs" special reconnaissance company composed of Death Soldiers.

Their mission was to tear through the border defenses of the Squid Nation's southern desert region in the shortest possible time, forming a pincer movement with Sinwar's forces from the Gaza direction. Houssa's original words in the pre-battle briefing were: "Sinwar will smash them from the top down, and we will stab them from the soles of their feet up. We'll make them hurt at both ends."

The Squid Nation's southern border defenses in this direction were not weak: a border infantry brigade reinforced with a merkava tank company and three Spike anti-tank missile systems. But their problem was—during the fire preparation phase of the "Blade of Dawn," all command nodes of this brigade had been wiped out by ballistic missiles launched from Persia, air defense radars had been knocked out by derivative strikes from Houssa's anti-ship missiles, and the Brigade Commander and Chief of Staff had been buried alive in an underground bunker by bunker-busters.

What the Squid Nation soldiers on the front line now faced was a mechanized infantry brigade with a complete organizational structure, smooth command, and absolute fire superiority.

When they saw the muzzle flashes of the first row of T-72s through the dust, some threw down their rifles and began to run.

9:00 AM.

Over sixty percent of the fixed positions on the Squid Nation's southern defensive line had been breached or abandoned. Sinwar's forces striking from the Gaza direction had reclaimed three Kibbutz settlements occupied by the Squid Nation before the ceasefire—including the original site of the Givati Brigade barracks, notorious for the Nablus incident.

As the mine-resistant armored vehicle Sinwar was riding in entered the outskirts of the settlement, he saw olive groves leveled by bulldozers, Hebrew insults spray-painted on walls, and abandoned school buses turned into shooting targets. He also saw Palestinian elders and children trickling out from the ruins—people who wouldn't have dared approach this area a week ago.

Sinwar did not get out. He lingered at the armored vehicle's observation window for a moment, then said to his adjutant, "Take that green, white, and black tricolor flag we brought back from the ceasefire talks yesterday and plant it on the checkpoint's flagpole."

The adjutant took the order and exited the vehicle. He brought no honor guard and no music; under the cover of a single Death Soldier, he climbed the flagpole base, which had been sheared in half by shrapnel, tore down the old flag and threw it to the ground, tied the Palestinian flag to the rope, and pulled it up, stroke by stroke. The wind was strong, and the flag unfurled with a snap in the morning breeze.

Sinwar watched the cloth pulled taut by the wind and said nothing. His headquarters was busy receiving the latest battle reports from the front: as of 9:45 AM, the 2nd Brigade's confirmed statistics were thirty-one merkava tanks destroyed, seven captured, over three hundred Squid Nation officers and soldiers taken prisoner, seven occupied settlements reclaimed, and full control over the original bases of three brigades in the Southern Military District. On the 1st Brigade's side, the front line had been pushed five kilometers into Squid Nation territory—a distance that didn't seem like much, but it meant enemy artillery could no longer reach civilian population centers in northern Gaza.