He clicked, and a red dot appeared on the south side of the city. “Next day, August eleventh, patrol takes fire here. Nobody hurt, they just scratched the paint on a few vehicles. Our men never saw who did the shooting, and I’m only including it here because they say they were fired upon by at least two or three people based on the amount of incoming. Later that day,” he clicked and a red dot appeared half a mile east of the previous one, “a truck ran one of our checkpoints. It got shot up pretty bad. Took us an hour, but we found it inside a warehouse. Empty, when we found it. I’m only including this because the troops manning the checkpoint said it looked like the driver and passenger were masked and wearing armor.”
“August twelfth,” he clicked, and a red dot appeared on the city’s west side. “Patrol ambushed, and they booby-trapped an ammo box for the QRF, which should have fucking known better. Sorry, sir.” He also slid a glance at the taciturn Political Officer, but she had no comment. “Fourteen dead, six injured, an IMP and Growler destroyed. Goddamn waste.”
“Next day, a mile plus to the east, a patrol still looking for the group that ambushed the patrol heard some shots and rolled right up on an ARF squad. Took them by surprise. Seven terrorists confirmed dead, we suffered one dead and three badly wounded from a grenade. Unknown if they’re the same squad which ambushed the patrol the day before, but it seems likely, they used grenades there as well. An hour or two later, at the very south end of the city, there was a big turf war between some motorcycle gangs, or at least that’s what we were told by the locals. We had troops in the area that responded to the gunfire, but it was over before they got there. At least ten civilians dead. Not ARF involved, I don’t think, we don’t believe the ARF works with any of the gangs, but still, that’s a big dustup, which is why I’ve got it plotted. And that gets us current.”
Parker frowned as he stared at the map. “Okay, so what about losses to snipers?”
Chamberlain hit several buttons. The map widened to show the entire territory the Army was tasked with controlling. Yellow lights appeared all over the map, in and around the city as well as out in the rural countryside. “Eighteen sniper attacks, which resulted in twelve dead and two wounded. Only one of the snipers was killed. I can scroll through them chronologically, but the pattern seems totally random. This group here,” he reached up and moved his finger down a series of icons stretching from the suburbs into the city, “might be the work of the same sniper, but patrols turned up nothing. Of course, they were all buttoned up, so he had nothing to shoot at, but….”
“What about our SF sniper teams?” Parker asked. “Isn’t one of their responsibilities doing surveillance and acting as scouts? Calling out enemy movements? What the hell are they reporting?”
“Yes,” his S2 told him, “I’ve been in regular radio communication with them. Only one of the teams reported seeing any confirmed enemy movement. They scored two KIA on an ARF squad. They searched the bodies, but no intelligence was recovered. Those four sniper teams, since they’ve been operating in the city, have reported fifty-nine KIA.”
“Fifty-nine?” Parker said incredulously. “Fifty-nine in four days and that’s not major enemy activity? Why wasn’t I told about this?”
“Um, sir,” Cooper said, “only those two that I just mentioned are confirmed enemy combatants. The rest were just citizens spotted with guns or body armor. Mostly guns. And curfew violators. In fact, the majority of their kills were residents ignoring the curfew.”
“Jesus Christ!” Parker threw his hands up. He was shouting. “We’ve got four SF scout/sniper teams out there and all they’re doing is popping idiots with guns and people out after dark?”
His Political Officer cleared her throat. “Possession of firearms and body armor is illegal,” his S7 reminded him. “Under martial law we have the legal right to shoot violators on sight. Same with people violating the curfew. Or looters. Or rioters. Not only is it legal, it seems to me to be a moral imperative, to reinforce proper obedience to the laws of the state.”
“I know that. You don’t think I fucking know that?” Parker paused, took a deep breath, and tried to calm down. “Sorry. And I’m not saying they shouldn’t. But I wanted them here, in the city, to actually hunt down and shoot the goddamn enemy soldiers who have been running around the city killing my men. And I told Barnson exactly that.”
“From what I’ve gleaned talking to those teams, Sir,” Chamberlain told him, “it seems that General Barnson impressed upon them he wanted more of a scorched earth approach. Take out anyone with anything that even looks like a weapon. Enforce the curfew. Put the fear of the God, and the Army, back into the city.”
“Well, while they’ve been terrorizing the locals with their Saturday Night Specials, the ARF has been chewing the shit out of us.” He did the math in his head. “We’ve lost thirty-three people, but almost half of those were in that one ambush. Confirmed terrorist kills twenty-five, if we count everybody in that apartment tower and our two measly sniper kills.” He wasn’t counting the rest of the sniper team kills, shooting people in the city who had guns or were out after dark seemed more like culling the herd of the stupidest animals than actual combat. “That’s high, even for this time of year. I don’t like those numbers one fucking bit. Gentlemen?” He looked around the room.
“I don’t know if this uptick portends some major offensive or not, or if this is some kind of slapdick ARF offensive, but I want random patrols doubled. Night patrols, too. If they’re out there, up to something, I want to flush them out, and hit them hard. You stay on top of things, and if anything happens, any sniper shots, any confirmed enemy contact, some three-legged stray mangy dog barking arf arf arf, I want to be made aware of it immediately. Am I clear?”
The sun was down and the sky filling with stars when most of the squad left the safety of the building and slipped through the gap in the metal fence. Renny was still up on the roof with Jason. Once the man had clambered up there with his powerful rifle and glassed the giant junk yard, he’d crawled across the roof to one of the metal vents and found, as he suspected, that he could talk to Ed inside without having to raise his voice.
“I can see most of one side of that junk yard office,” he told Ed, his hands and stomach burning on the hot tarpaper covering the roof, nose against the metal vent. “A few windows and doors, but nothing moving, there or anywhere else in the lot. Rangefinder says it’s almost three hundred yards exactly, which is nothing for this scope.” Or his rifle, for that matter.
“How well does it work in the dark?” Ed’s voice was faint, but clear.
“Not bad, actually.” On lower magnification it could actually gather light, and he could see more with it than he could his naked eye.
“You stay up there, I want you to cover our asses when we walk over. And Jason can cover your ass. You see something you don’t like, you let us know somehow, I don’t care if you have to put a shot over our heads or between us.”
“Gotcha.”
George had spun the drone in circles five hundred feet over the area, close enough to see all the detail possible but high enough its rotors wouldn’t be heard. Neither he nor the other people watching the drone camera’s feed on the provided tablet had spotted anything of concern. So, when the sun set, the men had checked their gear and headed out.