“We’re well aware,” George told the man.
“Roadside IEDs won’t do shit unless you’re talking hundreds of pounds of explosive or more. Any IED or EFP powerful enough to defeat the armor on a Toad wouldn’t be man-portable. The only real weak spots on a Toad are on the top—the top of the turret and on the back deck. An RPG with an AP warhead or these Spikes will penetrate both. The turret is a juicier target, you hit that and you’re pretty much guaranteed to take out the crew. The back deck behind the turret is a viable target as well, but you’re not guaranteed a kill on the tank if you hit it there. Main gun rounds are stored back there, and even if you can get a secondary detonation there is an armored door between the ammo and the crew compartment to keep the blast from killing them. The engine cover is back there, but even if you score a direct hit on the engine the Toad has its EPU, Emergency Power Unit, which will run for a while, and while it’s running the tank can drive and shoot. Still, you kill the engine on a Toad, they’re not getting any replacements. Even if it can still continue to fight right then, once the EPU is out of juice that Toad is out of the war.”
He smiled. “So, back deck good, top of the turret even better. The only problem is hitting those vulnerable spots. You can’t see the top of the Toad from the ground, and no good commander should send tanks into a city without shitloads of infantry support in Growlers, IMPs, whatever, so before you can even deal with the Toads you’ve got to take out everything and everyone else first. Unless you can somehow sneak in behind it. On that note, the main gun of a Toad can angle upwards thirty-one degrees…”
As he spoke Julius looked at the men before him. He hadn’t been quite sure what to expect out of the infamous dogsoldiers, but this wasn’t it. One kid, and half of the others too old for fighting. These men didn’t look like soldiers, they looked like people who’d already lost a war. Except… they didn’t act like it. They might have been dirty and tired and stank, and wore dirty jeans and tennis shoes and baseball caps that Julius would throw into a burn barrel if they’d belonged to him, but none of the men, or women, were spent or broken. Far from it. They seemed to have good weapons discipline, but whether or not they’d stand and fight when things got really really bad… that was something he’d have to wait to find out. Then again, who’s to say they hadn’t already seen worse?
Julius gestured at the big SAW gunner with the tattooed arms, wearing shorts and a fucking Hawaiian shirt of all things. “Mark, was it? Step on up, let me run you through this. We’ll go slow at first, until you think you’ve got it, then at speed.”
“If you haven’t met her yet, this is Sergeant Sarah Weaver,” Morris told the men of Theodore. “She’ll be accompanying you on the mission. Another two of my people will be with Flintstone, so with nine apiece your two squads will number eighteen.”
“Gentlemen,” she said, looking around the room. She nodded at Early, who smiled back at her.
“Hmm,” Ed said, staring at Morris, who didn’t quite understand the look, or the questioning sound.
“You an intelligence wonk?” George asked her pointedly. “You ever been in the field? Ever fired a gun?”
“Mostly I’m logistics,” she told him. She’d been expecting the question for some time. “Support. Infrastructure for cells such as yours. And I’m good at it. But I was in the wrong place at the right time and fought in the Battle of Beech Grove last spring. I was only there to set up contact protocols for some of our cells left behind when the ARF pulled back. Then the local ARF commander surprised us by rolling right back in in an attempt to retake the city, and the Tabs did a counter-offensive and tried to crush them. I was right in the middle of that.”
“Armor and infantry?” Mark asked her. Everyone in the city had heard of that battle, as that was the closest the “real war” had ever gotten to the city. 250 miles away in a straight line. Rumor was the Tabs had gotten their asses kicked. The state-controlled media outlets crowed about how the Army had routed the “terrorist instigators” with minimal casualties.
“Some armor, mostly Growlers and technicals,” she said, meaning commercial vehicles mounting larger belt-fed weapons. “None of the vehicles lasted through the third day,” she said, her voice flat. “Then it was back and forth for another two days through the neighborhoods and that giant ass railroad yard, slowly pushing north. Mortars and RPGs and house-to-house fighting. By the end of the week we’d moved five miles north into downtown Indy, fighting for every block. I think I slept six hours total. Two thousand dead on our side, almost seven thousand on theirs before they retreated to the Lafayette line.”
“I didn’t bring anybody who hasn’t pulled a trigger in combat,” Morris told the squad.
“I never wanted to go through that again,” Weaver told all of Theodore, “but I think this is worth it, so when the Colonel asked for volunteers….” She shrugged.
“Welcome to the squad,” Ed told her.
Morris gestured at the two stacks of ammo cans before them. “All piled up together like this, it doesn’t look like much. I wish we could have brought in more, but smuggling things into the city, in bulk, are a logistical nightmare. Our main concern were the Spikes, of course, everything else was secondary. But hopefully that’ll help.”
“I don’t think you realize how short we are on ammo most of the time,” Quentin said. He cracked open the nearest can and saw it was full of loaded AR magazines—brand new Magpul Gen M5 windowed PMags in MUG, Medium Urban Gray. He then looked at the rest of the ammo cans and did a little math in his head. “You’ve got at least a thousand rounds of 5.56 here.”
Morris nodded. “All 62-grain Mk318 Mod 3 Optimized made by Black Hills, which should work well no matter what length barrel you’re shooting it out of. If I was going to go to all the trouble to bring it in, I wanted to bring in the good stuff. We had more at the secondary location where I met up with the squads of Alpha yesterday, so this is all for you guys. Well, what’s left, it looks like locusts have been through here. I think you’re one of the last squads to grab your share. But I don’t want any of it left, it doesn’t do anybody good sitting here.”
“Oh, you don’t have to worry about that,” Ed assured him.
Morris rubbed his chin as he stared at the pallets of ammunition and supplies filling the room, which they’d snuck into the city on trucks or backs over a three month period when there were no Tab-controlled satellites over the city. “It’s interesting. With the war, the Tabs are not getting any new tanks or tank parts. Aircraft or parts. They’re hardly getting any new guns. You want to know why? Before the shooting actually started there was a culture war going on. They were doing everything they could to drive not just gun owners but actual guns out of their states. For the decade or so prior to the war just about every firearms or ammunition manufacturer was forced to relocate out of those freedom-hostile states, from New York and Massachusetts, say, to Texas and North Carolina. As a result, pretty much all of the gun and ammo manufacturers ended up being inside the territory we control. While of course there are wartime deprivations, we have continued to make guns and ammo… and other more interesting and powerful munitions.” He gestured at the third pallet against the wall. “The Tabs, on the other hand, have pretty much been stuck with what they had on hand when they started the war. Now, that included a lot of the military bases and their extensive armories, but they’re not really making any more, and while they’re getting some from their communist ally states, we hear it’s all small arms stuff, rifle rounds and grenades, and not enough of that.”