With just the top of his camo cap showing, JR watched the troops set up a perimeter around the armory, with tanks on the four corners. Bradleys each carried six troopers, so that meant there were twenty-four troopers out there afoot, searching and guarding and looking to shoot the first man they saw with a gun.
Time passed. Perhaps a half hour. The idling tanks were surprisingly quiet. The thunderstorm drifted off to the east and the wind was just a zephyr.
Finally JR realized they had fired the armory. Probably by pouring gasoline around. Some of the windows must have been broken or shattered on their own, because soon smoke was oozing around the lights on poles around the place and the lights illuminating the parking lot. He hoped the fire department had the sense to stay in the station tonight.
He checked his sentries, who were out of sight. Waited.
Waiting was the hardest part, he thought. You never get used to it. You wait for everything in the army, literally everything. Take a number, soldier. Or get in line. Then in combat, you wait some more. Wait to shoot and wait to die.
Finally, with visible fire coming from three of the armory windows, the Abrams tanks started snorting and moving. Two of them led off up the street.
JR Hays ignored them and watched the troopers return to the Bradleys. The Bradleys lined up; two tanks guarded the rear of the column.
Darn.
Picking up his AT4 and the spare, JR scuttled out of his hidey hole — he didn’t want to be there if the tank or Bradleys cut loose. The Abrams main battle tank was a formidable foe. Equipped with a 120-mm gun, a .50-caliber machine gun, and two .30-caliber machine guns, it was a rolling sixty-ton fortress protected by massive armor. Quite simply, the M1A1 Abrams was the finest tank on planet earth.
The Bradley was also armored, more lightly than a tank, but for protection it did have a nice 25-mm gun that fired up to two hundred rounds a minute. Twenty-five millimeters meant the shells were about an inch in diameter. Throwing three of those monsters every second, the gun could shred buildings, vehicles, and people very nicely, thank you, at terrific ranges.
JR took up a new position, partially hidden by a corner of a building. He laid his spare AT4 on the ground against the building. The lead pair of tanks clattered past JR at perhaps eight to ten miles per hour. He turned on the battery in the AT4. Now the Bradleys came, in formation, at the same speed. Kneeling, JR glanced at the trailing tank, then sprinted forward to get a square shot at the rear of the last Bradley. He kneeled, pushed the safety button forward, quickly made sure he had the crosshairs where he wanted them, and pushed the fire button. The job took no more than four seconds. Just a tiny delay and the rocket shot out of the tube, leaving an enormous blast of glowing hot exhaust gases pouring from the rear of the launch tube… and almost instantly the rocket hit the end of the Bradley, punched through, and exploded. A jet of fire shot back out the entry hole.
JR had already dropped the empty tube and was running for the corner of the sheltering building when he heard the chatter of a machine gun. That was from the tank behind him, he thought. He tore around the side of the building, out of sight of the tanks, ran right by the extra loaded tube lying by the building, and ran hard. Troopers from the other Bradleys would be after him in seconds.
He quickly found himself in an old neighborhood of mature trees and lawns and iron fences. Vaulted a fence and ran as if the hounds of hell were behind him, which they were, then got into an alley and ran on the gravel.
From somewhere behind him he heard a shot. Not too loud. One of his kids, he hoped, slowing down the pursuit. He checked street signs and kept moving, now jogging.
The carbine on his back was slapping him at every step, slowing him, so he pulled it off and carried it in his hands. His pistol belt was also rubbing him with every step. Damn, he was going to be sore. He must have run three miles or more before he came to the parking lot of a Walmart. He found Wiley Fehrenbach sitting behind the wheel of his SUV; his two guardsmen were already seated in the back.
“I’m getting too old for this shit,” he told Wiley as he motioned him to drive and put on his seatbelt. Then he tried to ease the pistol on his raw, aching hip.
Fehrenbach headed downtown.
JR thought about the troopers in the Bradley he’d shot. No doubt they were all dead, or wished they were. They had been American soldiers, and perhaps he had even served with them somewhere in the last twenty years. When he recovered his breath, he turned to the two soldiers in the backseat.
“I’m a soldier,” he offered in way of explanation, “which is an ancient, honorable profession. I had absolutely nothing to do with independence. I wasn’t even asked my opinion before the legislature did it. They did it because they thought their constituents wanted it desperately and without independence, Texas didn’t have a chance. I don’t know if they were right or wrong, yet I’m a Texan, and I’m all in. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” the two young men murmured. They were Texans too. JR wasn’t sure they did fully understand, so he continued: “Soldiers fight for their country. Ours is Texas. Freedom isn’t free, and if we’re going to get it, we’re going to have to fight for it. We’re going to have to hurt them worse than they hurt us, and we can’t ever give up. You see that?”
One of the soldiers, his name tag said he was Murray, replied, “My dad is locked in a railroad car at the base. He’s the president of the El Paso Rotary. Wrote some stuff for one of those independence movements. Fight for Texas? Hell yes.”
The other soldier, his name tag said Tyler, nodded his head. At the wheel Wiley Fehrenbach was nodding too.
“Some of our enemies have to die and some of us will too,” JR Hays said. “Blood is the fertilizer of freedom. Maybe yours and mine.”
He fell silent and watched the street with old, careful eyes. Fehrenbach pulled into a McDonald’s parking lot. Cars full of National Guard soldiers were waiting. “Murray, Tyler, run on over there and tell them to follow us to the airport. We have some work to do tonight.” The young guardsmen trotted off, carrying their weapons.
On the way to the airport, JR said to Wiley, “Our objective is to isolate First Armored, make sure it can’t be reinforced or resupplied and can’t run. I want you to pull all those executive jets onto the runways and taxiways and then shoot out their tires so they can’t be moved easily. We may not be able to hold the airport, but at least no airplane will land on it until the army takes it back.”
“And the airport on base?”
“We’ll take care of that in a day or two,” JR said. “After you do the international airport, I want you to get busy blowing up railroad trestles, as far out of town as you can. No trains in or out. Then bridges on the highways.”
“We can do that. We’re engineers.”
“Do some ambushes, one or two, after you blow a trestle or bridge and they come to look. Try to hit a patrol in town occasionally. Shoot, then skedaddle. Don’t get in any stand-up fights when you’re outnumbered and outgunned. Just worry them.”
“Hit and run.”
“Precisely. The playbook is so old the pages are crumbling, but the tactics still work.”
After a moment he added, “The army will soon be trying to ambush your men and doing searches house to house looking for weapons and uniforms. You’ll be amazed at how fast the army’s combat veterans will catch on, even anticipate your tactics. They’re pros, not twenty-year-old amateurs like the two with me tonight.”
“I understand.”
“You have to watch out for your boys, Wiley, or soon we won’t have any soldiers to fight with, just a bunch of bodies.”