Patriot Dawn: The Resistance Rises (13 page)

His solution
to stopping the convoy was to wire up a couple of trees near to the right, or eastern, cut-off group with demolitions charges to bring them down over the road ahead of the convoy.

Each cut-off group had two AT-4
rockets and one SAW. From their position closer to the road they would have enfilade fire up and down the road, which meant more of a head on or rear end angled shot into the convoy than the kill group would have.

The sectors of fire of the two cut-off groups were de-conflicted so that they did not fire towards each other, but rather at an angle into the kill zone. 

There were another
two AT-4s in the kill group. The remaining two SAWs were situated at each end of the kill group.

The
Intel said that the convoy usually left Front Royal at dawn. That morning, Caleb got the signal from his left cut-off group an hour after dawn. He was controlling the triggers to the various demolition charges and claymores that they had, with the labeled triggers laid out in front of him.

The ambush would be initiated by the firing of the dem
olitions on the trees.

Caleb lay in the tree line as the convoy crept up the curve of the road at a steady convoy speed from the west. All his men were silent in position, ready with their weapons.

The convoy did in fact have the three Humvees, as well as three LMTV trucks and a central bus containing the main body of the newly trained regime storm troopers, the blue shirts.

As the convoy reached the middle of the killing area
Caleb sprung the ambush by firing the clacker on the tree demolitions; there was a loud concussion, severing and kicking out the bases of the two trees. They didn’t sway and fall like they would if they had been cut; they simply went smashing down across the roadway.

As the convoy came to a halt, the kill group erupted in a fury of small arms fire as they poured rounds down into the vehicles. Caleb hit the next clacker, firing
the array of six improvised claymores down by the roadway, at the bottom of the cut. The six brutal detonations hurled shipyard confetti into the convoy, ripping into the LMTVs and in particular tearing through the sides of the bus and wreaking carnage inside.

In the two cut-
off groups, the team leaders directed two men to fire the AT4s as their other man provided covering fire with the SAW. Each cut-off team targeted a Humvee at the front or rear of the columns, respectively, and having two AT-4s meant there was less chance of missing.

At each end of the ambush the rockets streaked into the escorting Humvees at about fifty meters range. The HEAT round on the warheads
detonated on the armored Humvees, melting the copper cone inside the warheads and sending a stream of molten metal into the vehicles, killing all inside.

T
he central armored Humvee was destroyed by AT-4s fired from up at the kill group, the first one clipping over the top of the vehicle and detonating in the median while the other smacked into the rear armored door and killed everyone inside.

The kill group continued to pour an ambush weight of fire into the trucks and the bus. The new Homeland
Corps personnel were fully trained and armed and some had got out of the vehicles and were fighting back. A number had got out of the bus and from some of the LMTVs, and they were taking cover on the other side of the roadway, in the median and behind some of the vehicles.

There was desultory fire coming back towards the kill group, but nothing too effective.

Caleb waited until he thought that most of the enemy was taking cover in the median. He had sited the claymores at an angle to sweep the area of cover where the verge met the roadway. He fired the claymores, the blast and shrapnel smashing into and flensing the remaining enemy.

After assessing the situation for a moment more,
Caleb grabbed his whistle and blew a long blast: ‘ceasefire, watch and shoot’.

The shooting stopped,
the order being passed verbally now down the line, and the kill group searched the roadway with their optics for any enemy movement. A few shots rang out here and there, enemy movement ended.

Caleb got up on one knee and blew the whistle in a series of short blasts, followed by voice, “Fight Through, Fight Through!”

As they had rehearsed, the kill group got up and skirmished forward down towards the killing area, moving as an extended line in buddy pairs under the control of the squad leader.

T
he idea was to fight through, sweeping the killing area and ensuring there was no enemy left. The cut-off groups provided flank protection while this happened.

The squad reached the road with Caleb in the center
of the formation; they double-tapped any enemy bodies they saw. They all got the same treatment, whether they looked dead or were trying to crawl away wounded.

Teams went into each vehicle, finishing off any bodies they saw. The bus was a charnel house. Once they had finished with the
vehicles and the bodies that had taken cover behind them, they skirmished up to the edge of the road where they could observe the windrow of bodies that had attempted to take cover there.

The kill group went static, a fusillade of fire rang out as they made sure the enemy was dead, and then Caleb gave the signal to withdraw. They skirmished back up to the top of the
embankment.

Once there, Caleb gave the order to withdraw. The cut-off groups peeled in back behind the kill group, checked in with him and then moved back to where Doc was waiting. Following th
em, the kill group peeled in to the center and moved back to the RV.

They
all grabbed their rucks, which had been laid out in order, and the squad leaders got accountability. All present, no injuries. Caleb gave the order to move and they set out at a rapid patrol pace in single file through the woods.

As the ambush had been sprung, the convoy commander in the center Humvee had managed to hit the panic button on the ‘blue force tracker’ navigation system, which utilized a satellite transponder to send an automated alert with their location to the Regional Tactical Operations Center (RTOC), located at the DHS Fusion Center in Richmond, Virginia.

             
Tyrone Woods was the Director of the Richmond Fusion Center. He was a political appointee, placed in charge of the region’s security by the Regime leadership. At the time when the alert came in, Director Woods was not in the RTOC, and after he received the call he hurried into work, driven by his security detail in a convoy of armored SUVs.

             
Woods was a veteran activist, a political bruiser, who had grown up in the gutter political environment of Chicago. He was adept at vote rigging and intimidation and exhibited naked unbridled ambition. This all made him a valuable asset to the Regime. He was a rabid racist, Muslim and communist; he hated white Americans. He saw them as the very evil at the heart of everything that was wrong with America.

In fact,
at the heart of it he hated America and wanted to be part of its destruction, bringing in the new order.             

Woods was big on the injustices of slavery, and it was slavery that was at the root of his hatred.
He railed against the injustices of slavery and the heritage of white western imperialism and colonialism. America was the new empire, subjugating the Islamic and third worlds.

America was the ‘Great Satan’.

He in fact had never been a slave, neither had his ancestors. In fact, his father had emigrated from Nigeria after his number had come up in the green card lottery. It was a little ironic, but Woods did not know that his father’s tribe in Nigeria had historically been responsible for capturing and selling into slavery many of the original people who had been shipped over to the American Colonies.

             
Woods hated the white majority in America. He wanted to see them broken and enslaved. He hated what he saw as the gun owning, constitution hugging ways of white Americans; their pickup trucks and Patriotism. He had no truck with the achievements and traditions of America, he wanted to see it all wiped clean. Such was the motivation of this racist, communist, ‘progressive’ bully.

             
By the time Director Woods arrived at the RTOC an unmanned drone was in the air, surveying the destruction of the ambush site. The burning vehicles and the bodies of the slain blue shirts were all too evident on the TV screens.

Woods was incandescent.

              “Find who did this. Use the drones. Bring in the hunter-killer troops. I want them dead. Kill them all.”             

The patrol had accomplished their mission, after lying in position overnight to ambush the convoy, and they moved rapidly away before continuing to patrol out on their route through the fall forest, headed south to their pick up point.

The previous
afternoon, they had identified a suitable patrol base on the map so that they could rest up and administrate themselves before continuing the extraction.

As they moved towards the area of the identified patrol base, the patrol was
not following a trail, but instead they were ‘hand railing’ a small creek, keeping it a hundred meters to their right as they moved.

The patrol leader, Caleb,
signaled for a hasty ambush and they broke track, moving off left at ninety degrees to their trail and then peeling back into a line covering the route they had come. They had not seen any evidence of a Regime tracker, but they took precautions all the same.

Once they had been in the hasty ambush for a few minutes, observing their back trail,
Caleb took a small party away and found a suitable patrol base in the deep cover of the trees. A buddy pair returned to the ambush party and led them into the occupation of the base.

Caleb
had decided to occupy in a linear formation, with the two squads parallel to each other in two lines, Alpha to the south side and Bravo to the north, headquarters between the two squads. There were two sentry posts, one at each end of the line, each squad responsible for one of the posts.

The patrol occupied the base in buddy pairs, with four p
airs per squad. As part of the work phase of the occupation each pair dug a ‘shell scrape’, a shallow twelve inches deep rectangular hole large enough for two men to sleep in with their rucks. Each pair faced out of the patrol base with interlocking sectors of fire allocated by the patrol leader.

A track plan was cleared behind the scrapes, with communications cord strung between the trees to allow for hand rail movement at night. A latrine was dug under the watchful eye of one of the sentry positions and each time it was used the fighter would pile a little dirt back in over his leavings, to cover it up and reduce smell.

Once the work phase was complete, the patrol went into routine. They were on hard routine after the ambush and this close to the enemy and there was no cooking on open flame. Weapons were battle cleaned and food was eaten cold, unless heated using the flameless MRE heater packs. Socks were changed and feet powdered.

Following evening stand-
to, in the dark, ponchos were put up over the scrapes. Throughout the night the sentry rotation went on. There were always two sentries at night per sentry position. Each man was woken ten minutes before his duty and he would quietly and without use of light put all his gear away in his ruck, save taking down the poncho.

All gear not in use was always stowed, in case of the need for rapid movement.

In the night it started to rain but by morning the rain had stopped. It was fall, and it was cold out there in the woods with a hint of the coming winter. The rain didn’t help, and it continued to drip down out of the trees long after the rain itself had stopped.

Prior to dawn, the sentries woke the patrol for stand to. In the cold pre-dawn the fighters crawled out of their bags and packed their gear away. They took down the ponchos and removed excessive warm clothing, donning their
tactical vests arrayed with their ammunition pouches.

It was cold, and some of them shivered uncontrollably as they adjusted to the temperature
outside of their sleeping bags. The worst part was putting on their cold sweat-damp helmets with wet chinstraps. Before dawn the patrol was silent, laid in their scrapes covering their sectors.

There was a light mist on the forest floor, with the rain dripping down out of the trees. Yes, they were cold wet and hungry, but that did not impact their morale. They would bitch and moan, but if they weren’t moaning, that was when you had to worry.

They were hardened fighters, with a deep motivation unaffected by the temporary hardships of their situation. Their morale was born of self-discipline, coming from a hard place deep inside, unbreakable.

The sky began to lighten but the dawn was delayed in the deep woods. The fighters shivered in their scrapes
and waited for the end of stand-to.

Bravo S
quad was covering the sectors to the north, where they had come from the previous day. Loud in the silence came the snap of a twig and they tensed, staring into the lightening forest. Slowly the silhouettes of a squad sized skirmish line came into view, maybe fifty meters away, as they came on through the woods.