Patriot Dawn: The Resistance Rises (25 page)

As Olson scanned across the scene, he took in a young girl curled up
naked on the bed and then his weapon lighted on a civilian in the corner of the room. He was sat knees to chest, naked, his hands over his ears, a pistol held in one of them. He was terrified, and any thought of resistance had passed with the fury of the assault on the room. Olson shot him several times. He was the newly assigned senior political Commissioner.

Olson scanned back to the girl on the bed. She looked around twelve years old,
half-starved and barely pubescent, her face bruised, tears running down her cheeks as she sobbed. Olson grabbed her arm and dragged her off the bed, throwing a blanket around her as they exited from the room.

As Olson returned downstairs, he scanned the room. He saw a ba
rtender and waitress hiding down behind the bar. Another waitress was sobbing over by the restrooms. There were windrows of bodies in the room, a pile over by the bar and several in the center of the room around the tables. Entangled among the Regime civilians and military, a couple of the escort girls lay dead.

Olson addressed them all, “Don’t
collaborate! Pass the message! Get out now!”

He pushed the
waitress by the restroom towards the door, his men doing the same with the others behind the bar. As the squad left, taking the girl, one of his men tossed two thermite grenades into the corners, setting the place on fire.

Outside, they jumped into two of the Humvees and drove away from the scene. The assault had taken three minutes. A block away, the QRF from the Government Center had not yet got into their vehicles.

Later, patrols found the two Humvees several miles from town, burning. There was no sign of Olson’s squad.

Two days lat
er, the girl was handed over to Megan at Victor Foxtrot for medical care. She had been victimized by the Commissioner. From the story, it appeared he liked young girls, the younger the better, and she was one of the latest that had been supplied to him. She had been repeatedly raped and beaten.

Her name was Juliet.
Her parents had been militia Patriots, ‘disappeared’ by the Regime, and she had been taken. Once the physical wounds had been treated, she was moved down to Zulu for some love and mental healing from the women.

As part of the defensive plans for Zulu, Jack needed a bug-out plan, an alternate location for the families if the base were ever to be compromised. He sent a reconnaissance team out to the west, with orders to look for a secure location deep in the forests as the trees and ridges marched westwards into West Virginia. He thought somewhere between thirty to fifty miles away from the current location would work well.

             
It took them a couple of weeks, but they came back with a good location, very similar in terrain to the current one. It was forty miles to the west, deeply forested and well hidden. But it also had access both by hiking trail and close enough access by a combination of country roads and fire roads. This meant that they could move their vehicles and heavier equipment there.

             
Jack sent the plant equipment away from Zulu to be loaded up and sent to the new location, along with a work party. His orders were simple: they were to dig in a basic version of the current base, so that if they had to evacuate to it they could get the families underground and out of the way of thermal surveillance. They were also to dig defensive foxholes around it. But other than that, there was not to be much else, nothing to attract the attention of any passing hunters, just some well hidden bunker entrances and foxholes.

Bill came on a visit and they sat and discussed the new defensive and evacuation plans for Zulu. Bill mentioned that he had sent a loyal man down to Texas to set up a liaison and they now had a secure coded communication link. Bill had a lot more updates on what was going on in the outside world.

             
Texas has seceded from the Union along with a block of southern States. They had taken with them their National Guard for those States as well as a large chunk of the active duty military that had either been based down in the southern States, where there was a large military presence, or had since defected from the Regime.

It appeared that the southern secession block consisted of a linear block of States based around: Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia.
It was known as the Southern Federation.

             
There were currently no open hostilities between the Regime and the southern block; after the initial fighting around the separation, it had become a hostile stand-off with demarcation lines drawn, the two sides facing each other, an uneasy truce punctuated by occasional limited hostilities. The Regime was not only busy with the Patriot Resistance in general, but also with the Resistance attempts to create another secession block in the ‘American Redoubt’ based around Idaho, Montana and Wyoming.

             
However, to Jack all that was almost to be expected, and was nothing compared to the big news. China had attacked the United States. The U.S. Pacific Fleet had been defeated and Hawaii annexed. There were rumors that the Chinese were planning an invasion of the Pacific coast, and perhaps even an allied Russian invasion of Alaska.

             
Part of the reason for the uneasy truce between the Regime and the Federation was the concern over this potential course of action. The Regime was moving assets west, and the Federation was massing forces in Arizona in order to defend against an invasion. However, there may have been a mutual enemy, but this certainly did not mean that the two sides were interested in working together.

The Regime still held the balance of military power by a
considerable advantage in combat power. The Regime had created several new strategic commands: a Pacific coast command (USPACOM) that operated west of the Rockies and was the primary defense against Chinese invasion; Atlantic Command (USATCOM) which included the eastern seaboard; and a central command (USCENTCOM) which included the Great Plains and northern central States.

Where a southern command would have been, was the southern block of secessio
n States, so elements of USCENTCOM and USATCOM were tasked with operations in the south of their areas to contain the Southern Federation. They also had to contend with the suppression of Patriot Resistance operations across their areas of responsibility.

There was a demarcation line that roughly followed the straight lines on the northern state borders, across the top of Arizona and New Mexico, cutting down across the northern Texas border, then splitting Arkansas and then
following the northern borders of Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia before splitting South Carolina to the Atlantic coast.

The demarcation line consisted of a demilitarized no-man’s land, along the north and south side of which the Regime and the Federation conducted defensive patrolling operations, with the main defensive positions covering Interstate access routes across the
demilitarized zone and major centers of population. It was a strategic game, but neither side could defend everywhere and with the Chinese and Russian menace added to the mix an uneasy stand-off continued.

The situation, with this threat to the United States now from enemies both foreign and domestic, was certainly a dislocation to Jack
’s thought process. It was odd to consider American soldiers being shipped west, from both the Regime and the Federation, in order to fight a foreign invader, while the Resistance fought the Regime, and it was only a matter of time before the Regime and Federation forces had to go at it.

However, the Regime was a domestic enemy of the American people and the Constituti
onal tradition of liberty. The Resistance would not attempt to get into bed with the Regime, even if the Regime would tolerate it. Better to allow the Chinese and Russian threat to bleed the Regime and draw heavy combat assets west of the Rockies. Once the Regime was dealt with, the Resistance and the Federation would then have to deal with any continuing foreign threat.

Chapter Twelve

F
ollowing Bill’s visit, Jack threw himself into planning for an attack on the Apache FOB at Bridgewater Airpark. It was evident that degrading the Regime attack helicopter capability in the valley would greatly benefit the freedom of movement of Resistance operations. Jack gathered his command team and started them planning their various pieces of the operation.

             
The FOB was situated in a rural area, farmland, south west of Harrisonburg. The I-81 ran north-south some three kilometers east of the FOB, as the crow flies.

             
The Regime forces had HESCO walled off a four hundred meter square area of the airpark. The access road, State Route 727, ran past the front of the FOB in a north west to south easterly direction. The FOB itself and the airstrip were between this road and a river to the north east, which ran roughly parallel to the road. There was a distance of about eight hundred meters between the road and the river behind the FOB.

             
From the north and east there were only two access points to get on to route 727 that ran past the front of the FOB. One was to the south east, where the river bent into a southerly direction. Here, three and a half kilometers from the FOB, the road dog-legged hard left to run north easterly along the edge of the river for four hundred meters before turning rapidly east and crossing a bridge before joining Route 11.

             
The other access point was also a bridge, three kilometers to the north west, where the 727 joined the 42 at a T-Junction. Three hundred meters north east of that junction the road crossed a bridge into Bridgewater.

             
The enemy had walled off the main area of the airpark where the buildings were. There was an entry control point (ECP) directly off the 727 on the south west side. The access road from the ECP ran north easterly into the compound and bisected the buildings inside the FOB, leading to some taxi and aircraft parking areas at the back.

Ther
e was also a grassed area inside the FOB on this north east side. The actual airstrip was behind the buildings and ran north west to south east, but it had been cut off by the HESCO wall on the north west side of the FOB.

             
There was also a secondary road that paralleled the one inside the base, running along the outside of the south east HESCO wall from the 727. Halfway along this south east perimeter there was a secondary ECP, directly off the road. The area surrounding the FOB was open fields with very free access for vehicles and fields of fire.

             
The south east half of the inside of the FOB consisted of some open parking areas, the open pan area to the north east out the back for aircraft parking, and a couple of large buildings. The closest building to the secondary ECP was a large L-shaped two story building that was being used as accommodation for the guard force. The long part of the ‘L’ ran parallel to the south east perimeter wall and the bottom part of the ‘L’ was on the south west end, pointing towards the secondary ECP.

             
The north west half of the base was dominated by a large aircraft hangar, roughly seventy five meters square. On the main ECP side of this hanger, facing the gate and close to the internal bisecting road, was a two story building that was being used as the squadron headquarters and pilot accommodation.

             
Jack and his team were studying the OP reports in detail, as well as the photos that had been taken.  There were guard bunkers on each corner of the FOB. The ECPs were on two sides, the south west and south east, and as such there were guard bunkers there also. There were also bunkers built halfway along the walls on the other two sides of the FOB.

The enemy guard bunkers were a cross between a raised bunker and a watch tower
, built on the HESCO wall out of additional HESCO bastions, sandbags and wooden beams. The area where the guards sat manning their machine-guns was quite open, a sandbagged timber roof held up by four corner pillars, thus allowing observation but also reducing the protection from incoming fire.

The two platoons of
Regime infantry were guarding the FOB and they were equipped with MRAPs, which they were not using in their static role. The vehicles were parked up in a motor pool close to their accommodation building. Two of them were being used as the ‘gates’ to the ECPs. They were parked across the road in the gap between the HESCOs, and driven out of the way if access was needed. The support machine-guns from the turrets on the MRAPs were mounted in the guard bunkers.

The Apaches were kept parked up on the pan to the north east side of the FOB, sometimes taken into the large hanger for repair and maintenance work.

The Resistance OP over-watching this Regime FOB was located eight hundred meters to the south west. Here, there was ridge covered in scraggly trees running in a north west to south easterly direction. The ridge overlooked the FOB and due to its elevated position could see beyond the HESCO wall. There was a draw between the ridge and the FOB, and behind the ridge to the west was an area concealed from view of the FOB. The ridge was accessible from vehicle navigable roads and trails from the west.