Patriot Dawn: The Resistance Rises (35 page)

Jack grabbed Cobb and asked if he was ok to use his squads to help carry the casualties, of which there were five who were on improvised stretchers unable to walk.
Cobb was ok with it and started to organize his men into teams to carry the stretchers. 1
st
Platoon took over their security duties.

Jack gathered his commanders and rapidly outlined the plan. It was a move
south in a company snake to the ERV. There was no more time to get any more complicated than that. The order of march was 2
nd
Platoon, tactical HQ, 3
rd
Platoon, the medical section with Jim and his logistics section, the 82
nd
platoon with the casualties and the rear guard provided by 1
st
Platoon.

Jack was moving everyone with a sense of urgency and just as
2
nd
Platoon started to head out of the ravine on the trail south the Regime forces appeared again in the woods to the north and were engaged by 1
st
Platoon.

1
st
Platoon suppressed the lead elements of the Regime force while the rest of the company started moving south along the trail as rapidly as possible. The casualties slowed them down.

Once the Company was clear, 1
st
Platoon broke contact again and moved south along the trail.

It was now evening time, still light because of the summer. They had been moving for about an hour. There had been no further contact, the two Regime companies somewhere further to the north.

             
What they did not know was that following the assault on to Victor Foxtrot, with the third Regime company finding it deserted, that company had been ordered to push west over the ridge and down into the valley. They had been tasked with ambushing the Resistance egress route as it went southwards from where the battle was being fought to the north.

             
As the valley went south it narrowed, gained in height and became more rocky and upland in nature. The Regime Company had pushed down into the valley and found the trail. On the slope just east of the trail was a linear rocky outcrop, back in the trees about fifty meters from the trail.

             
The outcrop formed a small cliff like feature, only about eight feet high that overlooked the trail down below. At this point the trail ran beside a rocky creek, just to the west of the trail.

The
Regime company had placed a hasty L-shaped ambush on the outcrop. Two platoons formed the kill group, lined up along the top of the outcrop, just back far enough to be in the cover of the trees and vegetation. The third platoon formed the blocking bottom arm of the ‘L’, across the trail to the south and facing the Resistance fighters as they walked south.

Unfortunately for Jack
’s Company, they were withdrawing in haste and using the trail. They also had not taken the precaution of putting out flankers along their line of march. They were bugging out as rapidly as they could.

As
2
nd
Platoon reached the far limit of the killing area, just before they hit the blocking force, all of 2
nd
platoon, tactical HQ and half of 3
rd
Platoon were in the kill zone.

Suddenly the quiet evening was torn apart by a massive weight of fire pouring into the kill zone. The elements in the ambush itself were overwhelmed by the
Regime forces fire and immediately sought cover by the side of the trail and in the creek itself.

The point squad of
2
nd
Platoon found themselves facing a cross-fire from ahead and to the left and had to orientate themselves to try and fight back. Some in the kill zone were hit, but it was hard to tell the numbers of casualties because everyone was instantly in cover after the initial bursts, now pinned down by the weight of fire.

The saving grace was that it had been a hasty ambush with small arms fire only, no claymores. The use of automatic fire to initiate the ambush also meant that much of the fire had been inaccurate, terrifying yes, but much of it passing over the heads of the
Resistance fighters down in the defile.

Trying to recover from the initial shock of the ambush those in the kill zone tried to rally to return fire as best they could, but many remained pinned by the weight of fire now striking all around them.

Jack had dived into cover behind some rocks at the stream edge and he now grabbed the radio and called out the direction of the ambush. Enemy fire was cracking overhead, smacking and zinging off the rocks, with ricochets occasionally whining and buzzing away.

The two platoons inside the kill zone were pinned down and it was essential to extract the
m from the ambush.

Val was leading her squad and found herself just on the edge of the kill zone as the ambush was sprung. Her squad hit the ground, the rest of her platoon ahead were in the
kill zone and pinned down. She saw the SAW gunner ahead of her hit and killed and she crawled up and grabbed the machine-gun from him.

Val heard Jack come over the net giving the ambush direction. She looked up and identified the enemy fire coming from on top of the linear outcrop to the left of the trail. She could also see that where she was the outcrop
faded out into the slope of the valley side, where the end of the enemy firing line was located. She looked back and saw Jim behind her squad, taking cover with the medical section, and back behind that was the 82nd platoon, dragging the casualties they were carrying into cover.

Val shouted, “Ambush left, left f
lanking! Let’s go!” and spurred herself into action. She stood, carrying the SAW and shouted to her squad, “Follow me!”

Val rushed forwards, he
r squad fanning out on either side of her. She stopped to brace herself and fire the SAW, using it like an oversized M16. She was trying to hit the ambush from the flank.

Jim instantly grasped the situation. He shouted to Megan to stay down and rushed after Val’s squad. He looked back down the trail to see the three squads from the 82
nd
platoon running up the trail towards him. Jim waved them on and kept running.

Val’s angle of assault was just too
acute to the ambush. The rush of her squad was seen by the gunners on the end of the Regime line and they switched fire towards the skirmish line as it came towards them. Val’s squad didn’t stop, they didn’t fire and move, they simply ran at the enemy firing, in their desperation to get to grips with them and rescue those in the kill zone.

One of her men was hit, then another, both going down. Val had the SAW firing from her hip in short bursts as she ran forwards, her squad fanning out on either side. Then, she was hit in the plate and knocked down.

The charge faltered and the man next to her ran to her aid. She rolled to her knees, got up and charged forwards into the enemy fire, hammering at them with the SAW, and then her head snapped back as a round smacked into her helmet, her blonde ponytail whipping around as she crashed to the ground. Jim came running through the middle of the squad.

“Let’s go!” he screamed as he charged the end of the
Regime line. The remainder of Val’s squad let out a shout of fury and followed Jim as he charged at the enemy, screaming as they came on.

Something changed psychologically at that moment. The
Regime gunners on the end of the line felt it. They panicked in the face of the onrushing screaming Resistance fighters, filthy in their mismatched gear, unkempt ‘mountain men’ beards and hair. The enemy on the end of the line broke as Val’s squad clawed their way up the end of the outcrop and onto the position.

It went hand to hand.

Jim expended his magazine, drew his handgun and laid about him with it until he emptied the magazine on that also. He ended up rolling on the ground with a big 240 gunner, smashing his head in with a rock snatched up from the ground.

Then, in a rush, Cobb and his three squads
poured in, hitting the Regime ambush line from the north and starting to roll them up. They pushed past Jim and the remainder of Val’s squad and started to fight down the line. The enemy was breaking and pulling back.

Jim
, on his knees, looked back to where Val had fallen. Megan was there, out in the open.

Don’
t you ever listen?

Megan
was treating Val, who appeared to have been concussed but was still alive. Jim shook his head.

Bloody heroine
, saved us, broke the enemy.

Back in the ambush kill zone Jack felt the pressure lift. The fire slackened. He stood
, calling “Fight through, Fight through! Move it, let’s go!” and advanced towards the ambush, firing. Around him a visceral yell went up and the fighters began to fight forwards in bounds, then simply charging the enemy ambush line.

All along the line the
will of the Regime forces broke and they started to fall back in the face of the assault, the rebel yell rising along the line of Resistance fighters. The Resistance Company had seized the moral component of the fight.

The charging fighters
reached the linear outcrop and scrambled up it, chasing the enemy back. The Regime NCOs were trying furiously to get control back over their troops and have them fight back towards the ridge and a rally point. Some of them succeeded and groups started to coalesce and fight back to safety.

Jack got hold of Caleb on the radio and told him to make sure he had security covered back down the trail to the north, in case the enemy companies arrived from that direction. With that thought in mind, Jack called a halt and had the platoons withdraw back to the ambush site.

The charge took some stopping, the shouts going up and down the line to pull back to the trail, some of the hotter heads taking a little longer to get the message.

The medical section had already been moving around the kill zone treating the casualties they could find. Jim was cutting about organizing again and they loaded the additional casualties onto ponchos and set off again for the ERV.

Val was walking, propped up on the shoulders of two of her squad members. She had a possible broken rib from the plate strike and a bloody crease down her temple where a round had passed through her helmet, clipped her head, and passed on. She was concussed and groggy but insisted on walking.

An hour later they reached the ERV without incident. Jack was very aware of being compromised and hit in the ERV so he acted with a sense of urgency.

Between the ambulance vans and the other vehicles there was enough transport to move the various wounded, including the walking wounded and the medical and logistics teams. Jim organized them quickly into small packets, loaded the vehicles and sent them away to the secondary ERV via different routes.

Jack then gathered the remainder, made sure they had the grid coordinates for the secondary ERV thirty five miles away, and told them to split down into four man teams and exfiltrate. They would meet at the secondary ERV to reconsolidate the company and rest up.

He stressed the need for stealth, using unobvious routes, and the use of the thermal ponchos. He split the Company into the basic components
of four man teams and they then bomb-burst out into the woods.

The Company was gone, fading like ghosts into the trees.

Back in the Fusion Center
RTOC, Director Woods was frustrated. The terrorists had just disappeared. The Reaper drone had picked up two pickup trucks racing away down a forest trail, and they had seen on the cameras the wounded laying in the back of the trucks, medics leaning over them.

             
Director Woods had given the order to engage and the two trucks had been destroyed by hellfire missiles, the explosions blooming across his TV monitor. The drone had then picked up a small group of terrorists moving through the trees, but the men below must have heard the drone overhead because they just simply disappeared from sight, including from the FLIR TI feed.

             
Woods had a date that night back at his compound with a hooker and a few lines of cocaine. All in all, it had not been a bad day. Although they had failed to annihilate the terrorist fighters, he had been able to orchestrate much death to two groups that he had a deep seated hatred for: the hick terrorists and the Army Rangers.

Ultimately, they were all cut from the same cloth, white supremacist
redneck Special Operations Forces veteran types, whichever side they were on. Once the Rangers had outlived their usefulness, they would be ‘disappeared’ into the reeducation camps as the revolution progressed and the Homeland Corps was ramped up to take over domestic military duties.

Director Woods’
s security team was made up of ‘Black Panther’ members who had remained loyal to him since his Chicago voter intimidation days. Two of them were with him in the RTOC, dressed in the blue fatigue uniform of the Homeland Corps ‘blue shirts’ with tactical vests and M4 rifles slung from their fronts.