Patriot Dawn: The Resistance Rises (21 page)

Caleb’s teams were moving fast, hit and run, leapfrogging from position to position, mainly under cover of the buildings, sometimes sprinting across open areas out of sight of the enemy where possible.

The Regime infantry company opposing Caleb’s platoon started to figure that the streets and open areas were killing grounds. They evolved again, and started to clear into buildings, adopting the approach of Caleb’s fighters. They started to breach and enter buildings, with the intention of fighting down the streets using the buildings as fire positions to provide shelter and also cover the advance of the armor in the streets below.

Again they were not well served by the lessons in Iraq and Afghanistan. The basics of urban warfare had been forgotten, replaced by SWAT style breach and entry techniques that were more suited to dawn arrest and search raids. They targeted buildings and started to stack up by the doors, to breach and use them as entry points. As they stacked ‘nuts to butts’ they were vulnerable to flanking fire from Caleb’s sharpshooters.

It was carnage.

The onslaught from all directions from Caleb’s fighters was causing casualties
among the Regime troops and bogging down the advance again. Fire was coming in from all directions and it started to cause a visceral reaction of terror and extreme violence from the embattled Regime forces. They started to fire wildly at any likely Resistance fire positions, in an attempt to gain ‘fire superiority’. They used the armored vehicles to pummel the buildings around them, smashing them to pieces.

As Caleb’s fighters withdrew in the face of this onslaught, they fired some of the buildings, adding to the confusion and the covering thermal smoke. In others they left booby traps. The Regime forces evolved again, and started to simply destroy buildings as they advanced.

The Regime infantry stuck to surviving buildings and the rubble, while the armored vehicles pummeled anywhere that was identified as a firing point. Mostly, Caleb’s fighters skipped out before the tank rounds started impacting. The Regime armor was even starting to bulldoze through some of the buildings, smashing them and negating the need for the infantry to breach and clear them.

The battle had been raging for several hours now and the Regime forces had advanced somewhere around a kilometer. It was now around midday. Jack was keeping his mortar team in cover – he could not bring down fire because his fighters were so closely engaged with the Regime columns. The air defense technicals were still distributed around the north west side of town in covered positions.

             
Jim and his logistics party were using the gators to move ammunition forward and bring casualties back. They had established exchange and collection points for each of the platoons and Jim was organizing runs between the warehouse and the forward positions.

Jack had ordered more houses to be fired and the town was covered in a pall of thermal smoke, adding to that from the fighting in the front areas, and it was obscuring the surveil
lance of the drones overhead.

             
There was a steady trickle of casualties coming back. Many were wounded from flying shrapnel and debris. Urban fighting took a toll, there were so many hazards involved in fighting in such an environment.  The fighters were a rough and tumble tough bunch, they had to be, and most of them fought on with the cuts, lacerations and minor wounds they received in the rubble and debris of the battleground.

Eye protection was priceless, as were protective gloves.

              Jim was moving forward from the warehouse on his gator when the call went up for incoming enemy aircraft. Two A-10 tank busters came roaring in from the north. The air defense controller started calling out target indications and the technicals were pulling out from their covered positions.

The A-10 is a slow aircraft and the two of them came roaring in over the town to be met by streams of tracer fire as the gunners on the technicals tried to
direct their machine-gun fire into the path of the oncoming aircraft.

             
The A-10s flew over, identifying targets, wheeled south of the town and came back over. One of them had seen Jim moving in his gator through the streets and roared towards him. The A-10 came in on a gun run, the sound of the burst from its chain gun was terrifying, like the sound of some primeval monster screaming in the sky. The rounds tore up the asphalt and caught Jim’s gator, tossing it and throwing him clear to lay senseless in the rubble of the street.

             
As the A-10 pulled up from its gun run, the slow flying aircraft was caught by a burst of 7.62 rounds through the side. The pilot lost control and the aircraft went smashing down into the town, detonating in a fireball of flame and black smoke. The second A-10 pulled up with a swarm of tracer rounds whipping past it, banked out and took off for home. A ragged cheer went up from the rebel fighters below.

             
Jim sat up, his head spinning from the concussion. He was covered in dust and dirt, his BDUs and tactical vest as well as his face. He pushed himself up and staggered back towards the warehouse, bleeding profusely from a scalp wound, the blood mingling with the dirt to mask his face.

             
Megan turned to see Jim approaching the aid station. He looked in a bad way. She grabbed his arm and led him to a chair. “What happened to you?” she asked.

             
“Got blown up.”

             
“Really, I never would have guessed. Let’s take a look at you.”

             
“Yea, just fix me up. I’ve got work to do. Couple of Motrin should do it.”

             
“I’ll be the judge of that, Jim Fisher.” The gentleness of her fingers as she examined him belied her cold tone.

             
“Ok, you’ve got a concussion and a laceration to your head. Judging by your thick skull you should be ok, but you really need to rest.”

             
“Yea, spare me the sarcasm, just put a band aid on it, give me a couple of painkillers, and I’ll be on my way.”

             
Megan cleaned and sutured his head wound, gently wiping some of the blood and grime from his face. “That ought to do it. You need to rest.”

             
Jim stood up. “Thanks. See you later.”

             
“I don’t think so Jim, you need to rest and….”

             
Jim had taken her face in his hands and kissed her on the lips. She tried to pull back, her hands on his chest, and she pushed him off, looking flustered.

             
“Anything to shut you up Megan,” he winked and walked off, a little unsteadily.

             
“Damn you Jim,” she said to his back, a little unconvincingly, her face red.

In Caleb’s sector, the fighters continued to fall back in the face of the ultra-violent firepower demonstration from the Regime armored Battle Group. They were not on the run; they were simply fire and maneuvering back, each element covering the other as they leapfrogged back through the buildings.

             
Caleb was using two squads, including Olson’s, as maneuver elements working in tandem to cover each other as they hit the enemy and moved back. The third squad was divided up. Caleb had the two IED pairs working under his direction to set booby traps in the face of the advancing Regime forces. The other two sharpshooter pairs were deployed independently to the flanks to harass the enemy with accurate small arms fire.

             
Caleb currently had each maneuver squad working back on each side of a street, consecutively covering each other as they attempted to stay ahead of the incoming MBT and AFV fire.  The squads were running fire positions for small arms fire as well as versions of the anti-armor ambush using enfilade fire from defilade positions. It was trickier now that the Regime infantry were dismounted.

To add to the chaos, the IED pairs were hastily setting devices such as EFPs and improvised claymores and running command
wires back to firing points. As the regime forces advanced, the Resistance fighters would detonate the devices, targeting vehicles and dismounted troops alike. It all added to the friction on the enemy, slowing their advance to a violent crawl.

Suddenly, there was a rapid situation change as a
Regime squad went left flanking and inadvertently cut off the sharpshooter pair which was in a house. The Regime squad started to breach and enter the building, looking to occupy it as a fire base.

Trapped inside were Jenny and Carl. Jenny was one of the women who had graduated the training and been identified as a natural shooter. She was twenty two years
old and a slim, athletic girl who had done well at the physical side of the training.

The
Regime squad breached through one of the windows with grenades into the interior, followed up by a team rushing in. They cleared the ground floor and started up the stairs. Jenny and Carl were upstairs and had put out a distress call to Caleb. As the Regime team pushed up the stairs in a stack, weapons covering their advance, Carl engaged them from the upstairs hallway with his M4. Jenny was back behind him, supporting him from an upstairs doorway.

A firefight erupted as the squad pushed up the stairs under cover of automatic fire, tossing grenades into the hallway, pushing Carl back before hitting him with rifle fire and killing him.

Jenny was fighting from the doorway, popping out to engage the heavily armored troops. The sheer weight of fire that was returned to her pushed her back into the room, where she was forced to take cover as the rifle rounds smashed through the walls, filling the room with dust and noise.

Jenny crawled into the far corner and turned to face the door, raising her rifle. She heard the sounds of footfalls in the hallway and the shouted orders of the soldiers back down by the stairs. She fired through the wall to where she thought she heard the enemy soldier. She heard a scream as her rounds hit home, followed by the thud of a body hitting the ground.

Shortly after, a grenade rolled through the door, bouncing into the room. It detonated, sending shrapnel flying, some of it shredding into her legs.

Jenny screamed as the troops
came rushing into the room. One of them shot her in the chest, the round stopped by her body armor plate as it knocked the wind out of her. They secured the room, dragging her weapons away, and the squad leader entered.

The velcro name tape on his armor said ‘Gameros’ and gave his rank as
Staff Sergeant. He had been a gang banger in southern California before joining the army and ‘making good’.

Gameros was a nasty piece of work.

“You fucking bitch, I’m gonna fuck you up good,” he said as he came towards Jenny. He dragged her up and started to beat on her, ripping her helmet off to punch her in the face. “Me an’ my boys gonna have some fun with you, bitch.”

Gameros started to rip her body armor off. He produced a knife and started to cut open her clothes. He tore open her shirt and started to violently fondle her breasts, laughing. The squad stood around, the battle raging outside, as they laughed.

Gameros ripped open her pants and tore off her underwear, ignoring the bleeding lacerations on her thighs. Jenny was done screaming and fighting, she was sobbing in despair as all hope drained away.

The squad
gathered; a couple in the room and the others outside in the hallway to watch. They neglected their security, lured in by the spectacle of Gameros and Jenny.

Olson had responded to Caleb’s urgent call and brought his squad stealthily into the building, moving through the ground floor
. He left one team downstairs to pull security while he took the other stealthily up the stairs.

Olson and
his team stood shoulder to shoulder at the top of the stairs and unloaded a fury of fire down the hallway into the unsuspecting enemy.

They pushed forward down the hallway, taking the enemy completely by surprise, smashing them with 5.56
mm rounds. As Olson rounded into the room, he caught sight of Gameros, holding Jenny, turned around to look at the doorway in shock. Olson shot him and pushed towards him, the rest of his team pushing into the room and gunning down the remainder of the Regime squad.

Olson pulled his knife and launched himself onto Gameros, stabbing and cutting,
thrusting the knife through the rapist’s neck into his jugular, a spray of blood pumping out as Olson continued to saw at his neck. Gameros’s final screams were no different in sound from those of a butchered pig as the blood pumped out of his severed carotid.

Olson stood, blood dripping off him, calling to one of his men to get a blanket and wrap the sobbing Jenny in it. They stopped to collect the gear
and weapons from the slain enemy, any equipment of value, in particular night vision goggles
,
before withdrawing. Gibbs carried Jenny in his arms.

They moved back into their positions ready to reengage the advancing
Regime forces, while Gibbs and McCarthy carried Jenny back to the casualty collection point.

Jack was coordinating the battle from multiple vantage points in the town center. He would routinely move his tactical headquarters; firstly to get better views of the various sectors of the battle, secondly to make it harder for Regime electronic warfare assets to fix his position.

Ned was working the communications and part of his role during lulls in
activity on the net was to put out disinformation. He found it amusing, using veiled speech in a way that Afghan fighters had done: phrases like “move the big thing up to destroy them” and “the time for the firestorm is here” etc.

Let the EW guys
try and figure that stuff out.

The shelling was worse in the
town center, the Regime forces assuming that was where the command nodes and main defenses were. Jack kept his guys off the roofs and several floors below the rooftops to be better protected while still able to see over the nearby rooftops to the battleground in the lower elevation residential areas.

There was an urgent call on the air defense net, a warning about fast movers from the north. Two fast jets came streaking down the valley at low level and buzzed the town, the sonic boom of their passage deafening. They
were too fast for the technicals, which were just emerging from their concealed positions. Some tracer fire followed the jets as they streaked off to the south.

The two jets turned several kilometers to the south and came back on a bombing run. Jack screamed into his radio, “Take cover, all units cover now!” as they came in. This time the gunners on the technicals were ready and a stream of tracer fire was reaching out from the town to the two jets as they came in from the south. I
t was a valiant effort, but the jets were too fast.

The target was the town center and the ma
in administrative buildings. The jets passed in sequence, both dropping five hundred pound bombs onto multi-level historical buildings in the town center.

The blast of the first bomb was huge. Jack and his tactical headquarters were
lying on the floor taking cover. As the second bomb went off sending a massive concussive wave through the area, Jack looked over at Ned, to see him looking back at him wide-eyed, and noted that bizarrely Ned was not in contact with the floor, but appeared to be hovering in the air just above it.

Craz
y.

As the jets passed on, Jack was up and looking out the window. The streets of the town center were choked in dust, a massive dirt and debris cloud reaching several hundred feet into the air and filling the chasm like streets with drifting dust.

The jets wheeled and came in for another pass, dropping two more bombs with similar effects. The massive amounts of dust they had created, adding to the general pall of smoke over the town, made visibility very hard and most of the technicals were unable to engage the fast jets. After their bomb drop, they came in for a couple of strafing gun runs, cannon rounds tearing into the town center, before roaring off back to the north.

Jack grabbed the radio and called for accountability. As the reports came in, he started to laugh. It was all a big
dog and pony show, the jets were massively impressive, but without having accurate targeting information, they had done very little damage to the Resistance forces.