“PBI?”
“Yes, he’s in charge. He has a tactical team. They have these black SUVs. They told us to shoot everyone. But I didn’t! I hid! I didn’t do anything!”
“What do you want me to do with him?” Eli asked. It was pretty clear Eli would do whatever he asked.
Cannon delayed. “Just stand him up.”
Eli took the officer by the arm and hauled him to his feet. A small sack fell out of the breast pocket of the black PSF uniform. Cannon reached down and picked it up.
“That’s not mine!” said the prisoner. How many dopers had told Cannon the same thing when he caught them holding back before all this began?
The bag contained wedding rings and watches. Cannon looked up at Eli, who nodded.
“Got it,” said Eli, who pushed the prisoner forward and shot him in the chest.
Cannon felt nothing, and it sickened him that he felt nothing. But there was no time for that now.
“Let’s move out.” They now knew their quarry.
Turnbull watched as the tanks tore down Route 231 into Jasper. The insurgents had set up battle positions in and around both sides of the street at the north end of town. His was in the Walmart – the guerrillas had spent the day knocking out the front windows so it was open to the road.
The tanks were moving fast, about 20 miles per hour, and covering the four miles from the bridge south quickly. No one had engaged them; Wohl’s force let them pass right through.
The west side of the road was all houses; on the east, a closed Home Depot, an abandoned McDonald’s, and the recently requisitioned Walmart store. The tanks were moving fast. Turnbull hoped that he had trained the other gunner well.
Turnbull engaged the sight on his FGM-148 Javelin missile. With the sun setting, he used thermal. He selected the third tank in line and locked on it. He pushed the trigger and he was surrounded by exhaust gasses as the missile leapt out of the launcher, followed a fraction of a second later by the second from the other missile team.
The missile erupted from the tube and the fins popped into place – not that he could see it. He did see the burning light of the engine jiggle and twist in the air as it made for the speeding Abrams. The missile flew upwards and down in a lazy arc – its target was not the tank itself but the air directly above it. About one meter over the turret, the HEAT round detonated, its shaped explosive forming a stream of superheated plasma that went straight down into the relatively thin armor at the top of the tank.
It was an immediate crew kill, and the second Javelin exploded over the next tank’s gas turbine engine and turned it to scrap. The halon fire suppression system inside the crew compartment kept that crew from roasting. Unfortunately, when they scrambled out of the crew compartment, the other guerrillas opened fire, cutting them down before they hit the ground.
“Displace!” Turnbull yelled, abandoning the Javelin launchers. They didn’t have any more missiles anyway. Turnbull and the others sprinted to the back of the warehouse as two M1s fired their main guns. The first was the wrong round for the job; in the excitement, the loader had filled the breech with a M829 Armor-Piercing, Fin-Stabilized, Discarding Sabot anti-tank round – basically a titanium dart fired off at several times the speed of sound whose sheer energy would send it punching through tank armor and turn the crew inside the target to a pinkish mist. The sabot shot into the warehouse through the open frontage, flew through a dozen rows of shelves, punched out the back of the building with a barely perceptible loss of speed and finally buried itself 40 feet into the earth.
The second shot was more effective. It was a HEAT round, and it exploded against the back wall, spraying the four guerrillas with fragments.
Turnbull was knocked to the ground, disoriented for a moment by the heat and the noise and the spray of pieces of building. He shook his head and stood, as did two of the others, the ringing in their ears loud and sustained. The fourth guerrilla, whose name he did not even know, lay there unmoving with a shard of rebar sticking out of his eye.
Turnbull ran, but a red curtain seemed to descend over one eye. He wiped it, and as he suspected, it was blood from a cut on his head. He kept running through the “EMPLOYEES ONLY” door into the back area and then was thrown off his feet again. Out in the store area, two more HEAT rounds blew the interior apart. He shook it off again, and they ran through the loading dock and toward the woods.
The appearance of the anti-tank missiles in the hands of the guerrillas had changed everything for Captain Cardillo. He realized his eight remaining tanks were in a kill zone and he did exactly what he was trained to do – punched it in order to get the hell out of there.
The turbines of the eight surviving tanks roared as the drivers demanded their full 1,500 horsepower. They tore off south down 231 into the middle of town.
But that left the trucks full of infantry behind in the kill zone. The infantry company dismounted under a ferocious storm of bullets. The guerrillas with AR15-style weapons and other modern combat rifles focused on achieving fire superiority – that is, they attempted to put such heavy fire on the enemy that the blues would be unable to maneuver or counter attack. The snipers, the veteran deer hunters with the scoped Remingtons and Winchesters, focused on aimed shots at officers, NCOs, and anyone else who looked like he was taking initiative.
As the tanks headed into town and Turnbull was running out to Mill Street, which ran parallel to 231 behind the Walmart. The pick-up truck he had requisitioned was sitting there, keys in the ignition. He put his M4 on the seat and punched it, heading toward the heart of Jasper.
Both sides of 231 were lined with businesses and other buildings close to the road, which to Cardillo was a mixed blessing. The wall of structures made it hard for the guerrillas to engage them with Javelins, but it would also let them get really close. He held the M2 machine gun’s dual grips tight, thumbs hovering over the thumb trigger.
Nothing.
And then something, an explosion on the treads of the rear M1 tank. The metal treads flew off and flapped on the road as the vehicle came to a halt.
All hell broke loose and fire started coming from every direction. Cardillo saw flashes, swiveled his turret and fired at them with the heavy machine gun.
The PRA infantry company commander took a 5.56 millimeter round through the throat and fell dead at the feet of a lieutenant, who instantly took charge and rallied his force. The machine guns began kicking and his men and women began returning fire. There was a lot of fire coming from the houses on the west of the road, so he pointed it out to his fire support officer, who checked grid coordinates and got on the radio.
“Quebec One-Seven, this is Crusader Nine! Fire mission! Fire mission! Over!”
As the FSO called in artillery, the infantry lieutenant ordered a casualty collection point in the McDonald’s and put one of the medics in charge of the dozen wounded. More people flooded into the restaurant, and he realized they were senior officers. The TAC-CP had pulled up outside and was co-locating in the old fast food joint.
The building shook, and he looked across the street to see 105 millimeter artillery shells exploding among the houses where the enemy was hiding. The fire from the insurgents slackened, and he began to move his company south.
Langer’s eyes opened. He was still in the hospital bed. Somehow he had hoped he would wake up elsewhere. There were no beeping monitors because the power was off, but he was hooked to an IV. That came right out. He slid around on his bed in his gown and sat on the bed.
Damn, his stomach hurt.