Patriot Dawn: The Resistance Rises (26 page)

The OP position, or in the vicinity of it
along the ridge, was an ideal location for a fire support base. Given that it was ideal to assault at a ninety degree angle to your fire support base; this would mean approaching and assaulting the base either from the north west or south east flanks, along the 727.

Jack also had his team, and Jim in particular, look at the two bridges and the photos that he had a recon patrol take of their structure. He needed to consider dropping the bridges
with demolitions to slow down any QRF moving to assist the FOB under attack.

Once his team had decided that the plan was viable, Jack gave it the go ahead and they moved into battle procedure. Warning orders were issued to get things in motion. There was task organization, administration, logistics, weapons, ammunition and vehicles to ready for the operation.

Jack decided against deploying down into the valley with a small recon team to conduct an additional commander’s reconnaissance. He did not want to risk compromise of the OP and he had sufficient information. He trusted the competence of his team. The OP would remain in place and the fire support base would link up with it prior to the operation. That would also allow passage of the latest information on Regime forces activities.

Jack gave his verbal orders around a scale model of the
Regime FOB and the surrounding area. The positions of his various elements were marked on the model and he was able to talk through the scheme of maneuver and the specific mission and tasks allocated to each of his subordinate elements.

The plan was for a night attack, going noisy at 0300hrs. This was the time of the enemy’s lowest ebb, when most of
them would be sleeping except for those on guard duty. The OP had also observed a pattern of life from the Apache squadron that they never conducted missions at this time. There was a window between around 0200hrs and the start of the next day’s operations at around 0500hrs when they seemed to do all they could to not be flying.

Jack wanted to catch the attack helicopters on the ground, because if they were airborne, things would go badly for his fighters. This was a go/no go
criterion for the attack and as such surprise must be absolute.

The idea was to
achieve surprise and concentrate force to fix the enemy on the FOB and destroy the helicopters in place. The priority was the destruction of the Regime Apache helicopters with the secondary objective of killing as many pilots, flight personnel and guards as possible.

The night of the raid, the various elements had infiltrated, in small packets by multiple routes and staggered times, lights off, into an assembly area to the west of the objective.

A courier pair went forward and linked up with the OP, gathering the latest reports. The operation was on radio silence; this would continue until
compromised or when the operation went noisy as planned. Then, radio silence would not matter beyond OPSEC on the net.

             
The fire support base consisted of the mortar and machine-gun squads. They were mounted in the pickups, which were not being used as firing platforms but simply to carry the heavy weapons and large amounts of ammunition needed for the operation. They moved up Route 698 from the west and then cut across the fields to a rally point in the dead ground west of the ridge. They were guided across the fields by a dismounted security party.

             
The mortar squads stopped in the low ground behind the ridge and set up their mortars, stacking the mortar bombs ready, with the vehicles close by for a further resupply. The mortar fire controller stayed with the machine-gun squads as they walked up the back side of the ridge, where they linked up with the rear group from the OP. Their ammunition carrying vehicles stopped short of the ridgeline.

             
The machine gun teams carried their 240s and .50cals up to the ridge, stopping short. They set up the tripods in the low positions and mounted the machine-guns on top. The gun teams carried the tripods with the guns mounted and stealthily moved into position atop the ridge. They carried first line scales of ammunition; the resupply would come from the vehicles which would be able to drive up closer once the raid went noisy.

             
The machine-gun teams set up on the ridge, their guns mounted on the tripods set low to the ground. The .50 Barrett sharpshooters also set up, as well as the mortar fire controller. The other MFC would be with the assaulting party, ready to call for fire or switch fire as necessary.

One of the key things about a night attack was the use of control measures to prevent fratricide. The Company had acquired limited amounts of night vision equipment, but not enough to rely on it
for everyone. The raid would have to go noisy with the use of white light. They were unable to use measures such as IR glint tape as the Regime forces did in conjunction with their NVGs, so they would use phase lines to initiate switch fire. They would also use cyalume sticks hung out of windows to mark the progress of the clearance as the fighters fought through the objective.

Concurrent to this
, a small party had moved up to the northern bridge and rigged it for demolition with explosives. The demolition had been planned and the team briefed by Jim, who had marked on the photographs exactly where the explosives needed to be placed. He had trained the demolition teams to be able to rig and drop the bridge. Once the bridge was rigged, the team sat in an over-watch position with the detonator attached to a command wire, waiting for the call.

To the south east, Jack had allocate
d 2
nd
Platoon the task of demolishing the bridge and providing flank protections. This was the most likely route that a QRF force would come if they moved from the Harrisonburg FOB with the intent of reinforcing the garrison at the Airpark.

The platoon rigged the
bridge for demolition and then set an ambush overlooking the four hundred meters of dogleg road that led from the bridge towards the Airpark. They were able to get in and conceal themselves amongst some farm buildings that sat atop a slope looking down towards the dogleg portion of the road, from the north.

The other t
wo platoons waited in the two dump trucks, along with Jack’s tactical headquarters, in cover on the road to the south west. They had remained in the assembly area while the fire support elements had pushed forward to occupy their positions on the ridge.

They had rig
ged the dump trucks for machine-guns. On the front wall of the armored truck bed were mounted two 240 machine-guns, and on the front ends of both sides were mounted two more, to make six mounted guns per truck. These guns were manned by a dedicated force, while the three squads of each platoon sat down in the back of the dump trucks. They had also fitted dozer blades to the front of the trucks, giving them a ramming capability.

Jack was in
the lead assault truck with his small tactical HQ including the MFC, and also Caleb’s 1
st
Platoon. Jim was in the second truck with a team of his demolitions guys and Alex Lambert’s 3
rd
Platoon.

As 0300
hrs approached, Jack moved the two vehicles containing his assault groups up to just short of the junction with Route 727, south of the FOB. It had been confirmed earlier while they in the assembly area, after the couriers had met up at the OP, that all eight Apaches were on the ground, no activity. The base was quiet. The assault force was one kilometer from the enemy FOB.

Jack got on the radio, “Juliet One F
ive, this is Zero Actual, send.”

The OP came back, “Roger, Alpha Golf,” the code that the birds were still on the ground, no activity.

“Tango, Tango, Tango,” Jack said into his radio, the agreed code that the operation was a go.

There was a pause, seeming like an eternity, as the silence persisted. Then, there was the detonation as a mortar round fired. An eternity later and there was a pop up in the sky as a parachute flare bloomed in the
darkness, bathing the enemy FOB in murky light.

Again, a couple of seconds delay as the gunners acquired their targets, before the fire base erupted in a wall of fire directed at the
Regime base. The gunners had been allocated specific targets to ensure that the base was effectively suppressed, and the Barrett shooters were aiming in particular at the guard bunkers to kill or suppress the enemy gunners.

The MFC up with the fire base called for fire from the mortars behind him in the low ground. Because they knew
both their and the enemy’s location the initial salvoes of mortar rounds were fairly accurate, adjusted by the MFC to primarily suppress the rear area of the FOB where the Apaches were, not primarily to potentially damage the aircraft, but to deter any flight crews from attempting to start them up and take off.

The enemy’s response was faltering. Fire was initially returned
from the bunkers facing the fire base, but the gunners were soon suppressed or killed and it dwindled. The bunkers on the other sides were struggling to bring their weapons to bear in the right direction. The QRF was deployed into stand-to positions and the troops sleeping in the accommodation were rudely awakened, hustled out of bed by screaming NCOs to take up fire positions.

Jack had planned for approximately five minutes of preparatory fire before moving the assault force, to suppress the guard bunkers and allow the mortars to
bed in and adjust fire on their targets. Five minutes later, the MFC on the ridge got on the radio and confirmed that the mortars were on target. Jack got on the radio and gave the code word for the assault force to move, for the benefit of both them and the fire support base.

As a response to J
ack’s radio order, the demolitions team to the north fired the charges, blowing out the structural steel underneath the bridge and sending it crashing down into the river. To the south, the flank protection platoon sat in their ambush position, watching their bridge. One door was closed, the other remained open.

The two assault trucks rolled down Route 727, heading north west towards the FOB. Jack was stood in the front of the truck bed between the central two gunners manning the 240s bristling out. He could see the red tracer arcing down from the ridge on the left, across the road and into the FOB on the right.

One round in every five was a tracer round and it was deceptively harmless as it
gracefully arced down into the objective, the sound a ‘tick, tick, tick;’ from the sonic crack of the rapid long bursts of the 7.62 guns and a slower deeper sound from the .50cals. It was like a laser light show, with tracer rounds sometimes ricocheting off the targets in the FOB and zipping off up into the night sky

The guns were in the sustained fire role mounted on the tripods and were firing long bursts into the
Regime FOB. Jack knew that the 240 gunners would be sat by the guns, their index finger and thumb the only contact as they pulled the trigger, sending the tracer down onto the enemy.

The mortar s
quads were putting up constant illumination rounds from one barrel while the others worked under the direction of the MFC stonking bombs into the Regime FOB. Jack could see the flash of the detonations in among the enemy buildings and hear the concussive ‘crump’, distinctive to mortars.

Short of the FOB the
assault trucks took a right turn out into the field and headed diagonally towards the secondary ECP in the south east wall. They were moving into ‘danger close’ range of the mortars but it was a calculated risk to keep the enemy suppressed while they breached the walls, and the platoons were protected by the steel sides of the assault trucks. As they took the right turn Jack called the phase line over the net to let the fire support know.

The trucks came line abreast and stopped out in the field two hundred me
ters from the wall, fifty meters apart. The machine-gunners opened fire on the FOB, suppressing the secondary ECP bunker and the one on the eastern corner. The two assault trucks then started to fire and maneuver in fifty meter bounds, one moving while the other covered, as the assault force closed with the enemy wall from the right flank.

As the two assault trucks advanced on the enemy, the mounted machine-guns poured bursts of red tracer fire towards the
Regime base, targeting in the main the guard bunkers and any muzzle flashes they could see in the semi-darkness of the mortar illumination flares. In return came the enemy fire, flicking over the top of the two assault trucks, red tracer coming back the other way, cracking overhead.

Occasionally,
the enemy fire would hit home, smacking into the armored sides and cab of the assault trucks, often ricocheting away into the darkness. Jacks gunners stood firm, firing at targets in the Regime FOB.

Just before the last bound of his truck to the secondary ECP, the MFC with Jack called for fire to switch to the north to suppress the far side of the base. With the other assault truck suppressing, Jacks truck accelerated towards the
secondary ECP, the gunners firing on the move. Just before they reached the MRAP blocking the gate, the truck slowed, Jack called “Brace, brace, brace!” and the assault truck hit the MRAP, gunning through and pushing the MRAP out of the way as they drove through the gate.