Patriot Dawn: The Resistance Rises (16 page)

Jack thought for a moment.

“Look, I’ll do it. It was a hard enough training these guys and knowing I would not be going on operations with them. But I have to speak to Caitlin.”

That’s gonna be the hard part.

“Ok, head down and see her tonight. I will wait around here for a couple of days for your answer.”

Later, Bill got Jack together with Jim and briefed them about what he had heard on
the network so far. Apparently Texas was leading a group of southern States in a move to secede. There was also talk of an attempt to create an independent ‘free zone’ in the area of the ‘American Redoubt’ around Idaho and Wyoming.

Bill had heard that the group of southern States, led by Texas, was becoming known as the ‘Southern Federation’. He didn’t have clear details, but apparently
as the Federation had emerged there had been a lot of internecine fighting, betrayal, defections and just plain murder as allegiances were sorted out.

The National Guard
units in the region remained under their respective State control, but the active duty army units in the area had been obliged by the circumstances to figure out their loyalties, with massive defections of active duty troops based in Texas and the south to the Federation forces, not without bloodshed.

Jim commented that for any sort of insurgency to work against the Regime, it had to have the right ground. It had to be in some combination of forests, mountains, hills, swamps or similar slow going back country. If you tried to operate in the deserts or the great plains, that was tank country, mobile warfare count
ry, and you would be cut down by the more conventional and armored Regime forces.

This led them on to the attack helicopter threat. Bill let them know that MANPADs, which were shoulder fired surface to air missiles,
were simply not available. The Regime was keeping a tight lid on them, not needing them to counter any threat themselves, and knowing the threat they posed to the Regime’s air superiority.

None of the
Regime ground troops carried them: they did not need them to counter a threat and there was too much risk of them falling into Resistance hands. Jack reasoned that they may ultimately get hold of them through an allied group, such as from Texas if they could link up networks at some point.

They gave Bill their shopping list. In the absence of MANPADs, they wanted heavier caliber machine
-guns, such as 240s and .50cals, along with the tripods to mount them on. They also wanted Barrett .50 Cal sniper rifles and 81mm mortars to equip their mortar squads with. They needed the ammunition to operate these weapon systems, which would have to fall off the back of a truck somewhere.

Once the training progressed to the right point, these weapons systems would allow them to equip a dedicated fire support platoon.

Bill already had access to a lot of these weapon systems, stolen or looted and stashed away. Some he would have to procure, as well as the additional ammunition, through his network.

Jack took a trip down to Zulu that night. As he entered the dugout, softly lit with lanterns, he passed the partitioned section where Chavez’s family lived. He caught a glimpse of a Catholic shrine with a group of candles around it in the niche, and heard the soft sobbing of a woman.

I need to go see her, in a little bit.

Jasper came running out from his family area, wagging his tail and trying to lick Jack’s face.

“Down Jasper, down,” he laughed.

              At the sound of his voice, Sarah and Connor came running out to him, “Daddy, Daddy!” and he picked them up in his arms.

As Jack walked past the wooden partition into the family area,
Caitlin looked up from what she was doing at the table at him, smiled, and then sensed his mood and her face changed.

             
“Hi Hon,” she said, “What’s the matter?”

             
‘Hey, I missed you. And you guys too!’ he said, turning to the two kids with a smile. “Bill was here,” he continued, “Major Cassidy is gone.”

She looked at him,
her mind working.

“So, honey, I was thinking…” he started.

She made the connection in a flash.

“Oh no. No you don’t Jack Berenger, that wasn’t the deal.”

“Hon, they need me.”

“
We need you,” she replied.

“I know, I’m sorry, I promise I’ll be careful, but
this is something I have to do.”

“Damn it Jack, there is nothing truer than that I know you. I should have guessed. This is just typical.”

Jack stood there like a klutz, both kids in his arms. “Look Hon, I’m sorry.”

She turned back to the table, “It’s
FINE, don’t worry about it.

Clearly it wasn’t fine.

“Fine,” he said.

“Fine,” she said, face to the desk.

“Come on kids, let’s go for a walk.”

Later, the kids were sleeping and he was sitting at the table in their partitioned area when she came up behind him, put her arms around his neck, and her cheek onto his.

             
“I’m sorry Hon, I love you,” Jack said.

             
“I love you too. Just don’t get hurt.”

Chapter Eight

C
ome early January, the training was progressing well. Bill had sent the support weapons they had requested and they had begun to train a fourth platoon as a fire support element. They had two mortar squads with three barrels each. There were two machine-gun squads who had a choice of 240 or .50cal weapons depending on the task at hand. They also had several men trained up as .50cal Barrett rifle shooters.

Luckily amongst the veterans that had been recruited they had some with relevant experience,
either as machine-gunners or mortar men. This made the training process smoother and allowed them to identify trainers for these specialist weapons.

             
The training had been pretty tough through the winter, the harsh cold and wet was a constant challenge, exacerbated by barely adequate rations. As they had anticipated, some of those being trained had fallen off the course, either voluntarily withdrawing or being told they would be better elsewhere. A steady flow of new recruits had allowed them to reach the desired four platoon Company strength.

             
About fifty percent of the women had not made it through the training, finding jobs elsewhere within the organization but leaving a hard core behind, spread across the platoons. Some of the women, although not allocated to the fighting Company, had been kept as covert assets to be used by the IED cells or for covert recon tasks.

             
They had begun to deploy the four man IED/shooter teams. These teams would be taken out of the training for a week at a time, given IEDs and an area to operate in, to include several miles of road. They would deploy and conduct harassing IED operations on the routes used by Regime convoys and patrols, attempting to disrupt Regime movement through the Shenandoah Valley.

Jim had his metal shop up and running and was creating the off-route mines, otherwise known as explosively formed penetrators or EFPs. These were set at the side of the road and angled for a shot into a passing vehicle.  The explosives behind the copper cone would detonate and shoot an ‘incoherent spray’ of molten metal at the target, burn
ing through the armor with the molten slugs.

It was a
related process to the way a HEAT warhead or RPG worked, but with the difference that the EFP was set off the road away from the vehicle, whereas the RPG warhead detonated on the side of the vehicle and used the Monroe effect to fire a molten jet, or stream, through the armor.

             
The EFP was unstoppable by the Regime armored vehicles but the vital factor was accurate targeting. It had to fire at the right time and strike the enemy vehicle in the right place. The thing about EFPs was that, for example, one could strike through the cab of a vehicle, but leave everyone in the back unharmed. This is why they were often deployed as a targeted array of multiple devices in the Middle East, for maximum damage.

Jim
designed the initiation system straight from the briefs he had received and the examples he had seen of recovered devices while on deployment. The device would be triggered when a vehicle broke the beam of an infra-red (IR) ‘tripwire’ set across the road. The distance between this trip beam and the EFP itself determined where on the vehicle the device would hit.

In order to avoid striking the wrong vehicle, or civilians for instance, the beam would be turned on
by an observer using a remote device, from a distance. The Regime troops had not so far been deployed with electronic counter measure (ECM) equipment to disrupt such attacks, but as the IED campaign continued no doubt they would.

The
ECM protection created a bubble around the convoy within which the remote controlled devices would not work. This meant that for the EFP, timing was critical: it was to be switched on when the convoy was imminent, but not too late so the ECM would counter attempts to turn it on with the remote device. Initially, there were failures due to experimentation and inexperience.

The EFP was the key device th
at they deployed with. It had the advantage of being a hybrid of a remote controlled IED, but at the same time it was victim operated and the detonation was tied to the placement of the IR beam.

When the IED team deployed, it was more of a covert operation
than the more conventional side of the Resistance operations they were training for. They shed most of their overt irregular fighter garb and went as low profile as possible, equipment and battle belts with jackets and such.

The team
s would select a kill site within their allocated area of operations using whatever intelligence they had supplemented by their own recon. The two IED specialists would covertly place and camouflage the EFP by the side of the route and fall back to an OP where they could over-watch the device. The two shooters would usually be deployed in a separate location in order to provide early warning and cover for the withdrawal.

The teams took to taking the thermal ponchos on these OP missions with them, because they could set up and lay in the OP under the ponchos and avoid any aerial surveillance. As the campaign progressed through the month of January they started to see more and more ‘top cover’ flights by helicopters equipped with FLIR, forward looking infra-red. Sometimes these would be AH
(attack helicopters: Apaches), sometimes even just police surveillance helicopters. The Regime intent was to conduct a route clearance ahead of any convoys utilizing their FLIR equipment.

Through the
Resistance network and also from previous missions into the valley, the Company was building up a database of information on the valley, patterns of the Regime convoys and patrols, and also useful places to lie up. There were places that were known to be available, such as barns and sheds on the land of sympathizers, convenient wooded copses and the like, where IED teams could lie up while out on mission.

Along with t
he lay-up points, sometimes co-located or in separate areas, was a network of caches for food supplies that would be checked and refilled routinely by local sympathizers. This was working well for the Resistance, and maintaining the support of the people in the valley was essential.

Jack knew that if the attention of the Regime really began to focus on the valley, with detailed surveillance and Intel gathering assets, then some of this network would be exposed to reprisals.

For now, the Regime was not trying to occupy the valley, but rather use the I-81 as a main supply route and also conduct occasional patrols. So far there was no forward operating base (FOB) in the valley in order to establish a permanent presence. It would likely be coming, as the Regime spread its influence out of the zones. Pushing back against that was the mission of the Company.

It was only a matter of time before the Regime had to push into the rural areas and start to take control of food production, for its long term survival. That was
probably why the rural patrols and traffic control points, outside of the zones, had not so far insisted on the RFID chip, or the whole DHS registration that those in the FEMA zones had to do.

The Regime was motivated to
leave the farmers, the producers, alive. And they knew that the time was coming as the Regime gathered strength, when they would push out and try to gain further control of the contested sectors.

Sometimes the
IED operations would be a success, other times the devices would not even be initiated if the enemy failed to appear, and the ambush would be collapsed, the IED recovered and returned to Victor Foxtrot. With about thirty percent of missions resulting in a successful kill on a regime vehicle, the operations were gathering attention and the Regime focus on the valley was increasing.