Patriot Dawn: The Resistance Rises (6 page)

They set up the tent in the woods and still had plenty of propane to cook with before they would have to use
an open fire or the rocket stove. For the kids, it was another camping trip. They even got to watch a movie on the DVD in the Suburban. Caitlin concentrated on the kids while Jack and Andrew took turns with a roving watch throughout the night, accompanied by Jasper. The only thing the kids missed from their normal camping trips was an open fire.

             
Later that evening, when the rush was over and Sarah and Connor had gone to sleep, it was the quiet time. Jack noticed Andrew pacing nervously and he walked over to him, placing his hand on his shoulder and squeezing it reassuringly. Andrew looked at him and started to shake, and then he began to sob uncontrollably as the adrenaline come-down from the day’s events began to take over. He hadn’t stopped to think since the battle and the rush to evacuate, with the possibility of being chased or found. Now, he had time to reflect.

Jack
pulled him into his chest and held him, “Its ok son, you did great, you didn’t freeze, you did real good, I’m proud of you.”

Caitlin
came over and hugged them both, tears running down her face. She took Andrew and sat with him cradled in her lap as she comforted him, his soft sobbing more under control now. She gazed down at him under the fall of her blonde hair, just as she had when he was a baby. Jack took the watch.

How had it come to this?

The next morning they were up and packing at dawn.
Jack had worked out a route solely along minor back roads. I was a little circuitous and he thought they had about fifty miles to go. They had battle cleaned all the weapons during the night, one firearm at a time, and reloaded all the magazines. They wore their battle belts and Jack wore his tactical vest; they wore civilian clothes, jeans and outdoor boots, and had not yet put on the tactical and camouflage clothing that they had for the backwoods.

Jack
had a light jacket and put it on over his vest, so that at first glance in his car he would not appear to be kitted out. They all wore their handguns holstered on their battle belts and the rifles and shotguns were kept down resting by their legs so they were accessible but out of view. The idea was to move slowly so that they would not run into anything by surprise around a bend.

For this reason, and also so that they could get the kids out quickly if they had to, they did not use the child seats for Connor and Sarah.

              They had a couple of two way ‘walkie-talkie’ VHF radios that they kept in the cars, recharging in mounts plugged into the 12 volt cigarette lighter socket. Jack wanted to stay off the radio as much as possible. In case something happened and he did not have time to grab and talk on the radio they arranged that he would use the hazard lights and/or the horn to indicate any trouble ahead.

Caitlin
would stay a tactical bound behind and if Jack stopped she would reverse out to a safe spot, turn around, and wait for him to reverse out. If his vehicle was immobilized for any reason he would fight back on foot, with cover fire support from Andrew if possible.

The idea of going slowly was so as to not be taken by surprise and therefore they would hopefully be able to stop short of any trouble
, reverse back, turn around and drive away. Jack did not want to be ramming or attempting to drive through any ambush or road blocks: not only did this have the potential to be a catastrophic fail, but it would force Caitlin to follow through after him, unless they were to get split up, and this would put the kids in danger.

The vehicles were not armored in any way and high velocity rounds would pass through them like a knife through butter. The only effective protection to be had from the vehicles was from the engine block and the
metal parts of the wheels. The tires on the cars were also standard, not ‘run-flats’ and thus could be easily punctured, thus immobilizing the cars.

The drill for if they got stopped, maybe
as a result of their vehicles being immobilized or trapped under enemy fire, was to get out into cover on the opposite sides of the vehicles from where the fire was coming from. They would return fire and then use fire and the cover provided by the ground to move out of the enemy kill zone and escape. Caitlin would run close protection on the young kids, while Jack and Andrew provided covering fire and ‘leap-frogged’ out of the kill zone by bounds, working as a buddy pair.

             
The route they had chosen avoided obvious main thoroughfares and kept to the smaller back roads, sometimes going in the wrong direction in order to get to a junction to take a minor road heading the right way. They got into the countryside south of Manassas.

Whenever they drove over
a junction with a main road they saw evidence of the panic and the evacuation from the cities. Gas stations had run dry and were closed and many vehicles were abandoned by the side of, or even on, the road. Down the back roads there was less evidence of this, but there was still a trail of abandoned vehicles.

Occasionally they drove past parking areas that had become impromptu refugee camps, tents
or tarps set up back in the woods or people simply living in their cars. They did not get much interest from the hopeless eyes of many of these starving beaten people.

Sometimes they saw evidence of violence,
abandoned and occasionally burned out cars, bodies laid by the side of the road surrounded by the detritus of their looted possessions. They passed some groups of exhausted refugees, shambling along carrying their meager possessions, often pushing children in strollers also loaded up with what they could carry from their homes.

It seemed that, a month after the power
had gone out, much of the violence had already happened; leaving the survivors starving, hopeless and exhausted, prey to gangs.

They were passing through a mix of open fields and forested areas, typical of Northern Virginia, when they entered a wooded area where the road started winding a little more. Jack came around a right hand bend at about twenty five miles an hour and saw the roadblock ahead, about one hundred meters distance.

It looked like two military armored Humvees, parked on each side of the road
, staggered, so as to force vehicles to slow down; the turret mounted machine-guns facing opposite directions up and down the road. There were a couple of uniformed soldiers standing around.

Jack
stepped on the brakes and put the car into reverse, as he did so he saw the guard in the road shout, raising his weapon. The turret gunner popped his head up behind the armored glass shield and trained his weapon on Jack’s car. The troops at the roadblock opened fire.

The first burst from the turret gunner tore into the road in front of
Jack, ripping up the asphalt in a storm of noise and violent impact. Jack ducked his head, using the wing mirror to reverse towards the bend. Rounds came cracking through his windshield, leaving white snowballs and cracks in the glass as they passed through.

             
Caitlin had been following Jack as they drove along. Andrew was scanning out to the sides. She had closed up a little to Jack given the close nature of the road in the trees and she did not want to lose sight of him. The tactical bound had shortened.

Sarah
had started crying and Connor was asking for chocolate milk, which she didn’t have. She had turned in the seat to try and console the kids when Andrew yelled out. She turned, took in the sight of Jack stopped and the roadblock ahead, and slammed on the brakes.

The heavy
SUV with the trailer came to a slewing stop and she put it into reverse as Jack started to reverse back towards her, the sound of gunfire erupting from the roadblock. In her haste, she forgot the trailer, and as she reversed it jackknifed behind her, slamming into the tailgate, stopping her. She had only managed to get partially back round the bend, and was still in line of sight of the roadblock. She slammed her palm onto the car horn to alert Jack.

             
Jack saw the Suburban stopped in his rear view and turned the wheel to the right to angle the minivan across the road, stopping right there. He grabbed his rifle with one hand and opened the door with the other, rolling out into the road, slamming the door and popping up behind the hood of the car, by the wheel well. He brought his weapon up and started to engage the roadblock with rapid fire.

Without turning he shouted “
Contact front! Andy push out right! Cat, get the kids into the ditch!”

Andrew grabbed his rifle and sprinted out to the right. There was an embankment on the right of the road, on the inside of the bend,
overgrown by trees and covered in leaf litter. He scrambled up the slope, using one hand to steady himself, until he found a good tree to use as cover. He got down behind it; his rifle pushed out round the right side of the tree, and got a sight picture on the roadblock, opening rapid fire to support Jack down on the road.

Meanwhile,
Caitlin had exited out of the passenger side of the vehicle, opened the rear door, grabbed the kids and scrambled with them into the ditch on the right of the road. Jasper darted out of the vehicle and joined the kids in the ditch. She had forgotten her shotgun, so she ran back to the vehicle with high velocity rounds cracking past her, grabbed it, and ran back to the kids. She told them to crawl and they were able to move back in the ditch out of line of sight of the roadblock.

Jack
emptied a magazine, crouched into cover behind the wheel, removed the mag and put it into his dump pouch before grabbing another and reloading his M4. He glanced back, heard Andrew firing and saw that the kids had got out safe.

“Cover me, moving!” he screamed as he sprinted for the embankment, rounds slamming into the hood of the car and cracking overhead around him.

              What they really needed to do was get away. But the problem was that both their vehicles were now immobilized in the kill zone and under enemy fire. All their stores and equipment were on board and if they tried to head out on foot they would not get far.

Jack
got up behind Andrew, who was still firing, and shouted down to Caitlin “Cat, I’m gonna assault! Get the kids back into the woods and hide!” She looked back up at him with wide desperate eyes, her head shaking slowly from side to side.

He turned back to Andrew. “I
’m going right flanking, moving round to the right on the embankment. I’ll try and get into position above the Hummers to shoot down on them. Ok?”

Andrew nodded, took a bead on the turret of the nearest Humvee, and kept up his deliberate rate of suppressive fire.

Jack pulled back into dead ground away from the roadblock and moved around to the right, just out of sight on the other side of the slope. He pushed back up till he emerged on the summit behind a tree, looking down at the roadblock.

Both gun turrets were facing
down the road towards his vehicles and there were also a couple of guys in fire positions behind each Hummer. They were firing at his minivan and also into the surrounding woods, where they had not yet identified Andrews’s position. Andrew was well in cover using the slope and the tree, with just the muzzle of his rifle exposed. Jack was happy with that.

             
Jack pulled back and moved down to the furthest Hummer; he pushed back up into a position where he could see the two guys behind it and also down into the turret. His position was elevated enough that he had an angle into the armored turret where the gunner was standing.

He brought his weapon up and opened rapid fire into the turret, striking the
gunner in the back of the head and upper back; he then switched fire to the two at the back of the vehicle and shot them down, before switching fire again to the two at the back of the other Hummer.

A
s his buddy sprawled on the ground, one of the enemies realized what was going on, trying to spin and engage Jack. A last shout burst from the dying man as Jack unloaded the remaining rounds from his magazine into him.

The
remaining turret gunner was alerted and tried to disengage the lever to spin the turret but was not fast enough to track onto Jack as he launched himself headlong down the slope, dropping his magazine and putting on a fresh one as he ran.

Jack
ran to the rear of the hummer and the turret gunner could not track him, so he reached down and grabbed his M4 from inside the Humvee before standing up and trying to get an angle on Jack. Andrews’s bullet took the gunner in the base of his skull as he leaned up over the armored turret side, leaving him draped over the rim.

Jack
quickly checked the vehicles were clear and went to check the enemy bodies. He saw one of them crawling away from the rear Hummer, a blood trail on the road surface.

Jack
walked up to him, “Hey asshole!” he called and the guy rolled over onto his back, a handgun in his hand. Jack put his foot on the man’s wrist, trapping the pistol to the road, and pointed his M4 down at him.

He could
see the man was not dressed in army uniform, but in the blue tactical uniform of the FEMA Homeland Corps. The man’s ID badge was laying on his body armor where he had it hung around his neck. He was maybe mid-thirties, fat with his belly protruding from under his tactical vest, a goatee grown over his double chins.