But out in the country, outside the city limits, they still made their presence known one vehicle at a time.
“We’re going to own the countryside first,” Turnbull said. “We’re doing it starting tonight. Understand that this is coordinated. It’s happening in other places too. So, nobody goes home until it gets done, and I don’t want to see anybody near cell phones. You shouldn’t have them on you at all.”
The rule, announced immediately to all their recruits, was no personal cells. Never. Cells would give the bad guys a road map of where you’d been and who you talked to if they ever decided to look at you hard. Plus, as he learned in Iraq, they were an easy way for informants to tip off the bad guys to an op. Turnbull didn’t expect they were infiltrated with any informants, but he was taking no chances.
The group nodded. They ranged from teens to an older man in his sixties who still operated a farm, though how long that would go on with the never-ending imposition of new regulations was uncertain. They all lived and worked around Bretzville, a small community a few miles southeast of Jasper where State Routes 162 and 64 crossed.
They knew their mission. It was pretty simple, but they did not plan and rehearse it as if it were simple. Turnbull had gone over it with them again and again, first drawing it out and diagraming where all the players would be. Then he took the shooters and made them walk their positions and their routes of ingress and egress, until they knew the choreography perfectly. The spotters trained too, practicing spotting PSF cruisers and calling them in on the Motorola hand-held radios that had previously been used to coordinate deer hunters. They practiced the timing, from where they spotted the cruiser until it crossed into the proposed kill zone. They ran through other scenarios and options for the plan – “branches and sequels,” Turnbull called them.
Turnbull would go with them this time, as an observer. Langer was off with another team that would pull off its own mission tonight. But the locals would do the work. They would pull the triggers.
“All this to take some pot shots at a police car?” asked Kyle.
“Yeah, all that to shoot a few bullets,” Turnbull said. “Let me ask you something. How many lives do you have? Are you a cat? Do you have nine lives?”
“No,” said the confused would-be guerrilla.
“Let me ask you something else? You know everybody in this room, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Lived by them, went to school with them, and related to more than a few of them? Maybe all of them?”
“So?”
“So how many of them is it okay for you to lose tonight?”
“None.”
“That’s right. None. This is real. People can die in this, your people. So we plan and rehearse. I’m not promising you won’t lose anybody, and if this goes the way I think it will, I can pretty much promise you that you’re going to lose people you know. Know that going in. But every time we rehearse, every time we plan, every time I get a map or get a sand table with a little army man and make you mark out exactly what you’re going to do and how you’re going to do it so everybody knows the plan and there are no screw ups, then that makes it a few percentage points more likely that you all walk away from this. Yeah, we’re just shooting at a freaking police car. But what if they shoot back?”
“We’ll be at 450 meters. They are going to have a hard time hitting us.”
“See, you know that because we planned. We planned it so the edge is ours, that we have the advantage. You know exactly where you are going to hit them and you know exactly when. You know the terrain. You know how to get in, how to get out, and what they have to cross to get to you. You know how long it’s gonna take for them to get back up, maybe even air support. Yeah, that’s why we plan and rehearse. Because let me tell you guys something. You are outgunned. You cannot win a standup fight. They will always be able to generate more combat power against you. Every single time. Maybe you kill the first ten to get there, but what about the next ten and the next ten and then the next hundred? This is a guerrilla war, guys. We don’t have the numbers. We don’t have the combat power. So we have to make up for it. We make up for it by stealth. We make up for it by planning. We make up for it by picking our battles so we fight on our ground on our terms where we choose against an outnumbered unit of the enemy. That’s how we win. That’s how you don’t have to go home and explain to your mother how your brother got his brains blown out because you started some bullshit, off-the-cuff firefight that went south. So, are you guys ready for this?
“We’re ready, Kelly,” the young man replied. “We’re pissed off and ready.”
“Well, that might be the problem. Because if you’re pissed off you’re not thinking. If you’re pissed off, you just want revenge. You need to be cold. You need to be calculating. You need to have arranged all the pieces of the puzzle so in the end it’s them dead and not you. I know you can shoot. You’re all deer hunters and you all grew up with rifles in your mitts. But let me tell you another thing. Pulling the trigger is your least important skill. I want to say it again, because it’s important. Your least important skill is the ability to pull the trigger. The PV assholes can pull triggers, and they are completely screwed up, tactically and strategically. We’re going to train. We’re going to plan. We’re going to rehearse the tactics that keep you alive. We’re not going to fight until we are good and ready, on our terms. Now everybody, get your shit. We’re rolling in an hour. I’ll do the inspections myself.”
“Inspections?” the young man asked.
“Yeah, Kyle, inspections,” said an older guy. He spent most of his time listening instead of talking, only taking a moment to correct one of the others when he observed something tactically wrong in the rehearsals. His name was Banks. He motioned Kyle to come over and then he started helping the young man arrange his battle gear.
“You were an NCO?” Turnbull asked.
“Marine staff sergeant,” Banks replied.
“Now you’re one of my NCOs,” Turnbull said. “When I’m not here, you’re in charge.”
“Roger,” said Banks. Turnbull didn’t need to tell him anything else. Banks knew exactly what to do.
The radio in Banks’s hands went off. “Cheeseburger, cheeseburger. Out.”
Turnbull watched from his belly a few feet away as Banks stayed low and moved along the line of three shooters with scoped rifles, all looking down from the ridge across the wheat field to the south at State Route 64. It was a two-lane highway, and it often got confused with Interstate 64, which ran parallel a few miles to the south. They had selected a stretch of road west of a wide curve that ran through the little collection of buildings known as St. Anthony. That’s where the spotters had seen the PSF cruiser heading west. At the posted speed of 55, it would be in the kill zone in about 60 seconds.
The radio went off again as the other set of spotters, watching the road to the west, confirmed there were no PSF vehicles coming from that way.
“Pizza, pizza. Out.”
Now Banks was whispering to his people, reminding them of what he expected. He himself carried his prized M14, which he had secured out in the woods when the People’s Republic declared privately owned firearms illegal. He was not going to fire tonight unless he had to – if it went bad, he had a few 20-round magazines of powerful .308 NATO bullets he could use on semi-automatic to suppress anyone moving on their position from a distance while the rest of the unit escaped.