“Please say again all after: ‘S-1 report to follow.’”
Tompkins rolled his eyes at the radioman, who smiled and shook his head.
Then Tompkins repeated the missed part of his report, even more slowly. “I say again: Send Hotel Yankee Mike team to grid golf oscar fife niner eight three two fife one one, for administrative recovery of two-four captured weapons, three property booked weapons, and two body-bagged friendly KIAs. No intelligence sources available. Continuing to bivouac point Crimson. ETA four zero mikes.”
“Roger that.”
The company commander keyed the handset again and blurted, “Bravo fife niner, out.”
The battalion radioman echoed back, “Kilo one seven, out.”
Tompkins passed the handset to his radioman. He said wearily, “You know, Specialist, this whole thing stinks. What the heck are we doing out here in Idaho shooting at more civilians? How many women and children do we have to kill before we’re done? And how many of us are gonna die? We just lost two more good men, and for what?”
The radioman didn’t answer. He was wearing a thousand-mile stare.
After a few moments, Captain Tompkins waved his arm in a “forward” motion to his platoon leaders.
They in turn motioned their platoon sergeants forward, and within moments the entire company was on its feet and moving east, in a traveling overwatch formation.
As they started forward, Tompkins muttered to himself, “Curse the New World Order, and the pale horse it rode in on. I pray to God that this ends soon.”
Todd Gray devoted the next morning to deep meditative prayer. He spent much of his time reading Psalms from his pocket-sized King James Bible. Not long after noon, a mechanized infantry company approached his land. Two motorcycle scouts paused at the gate at the bottom of the hill. One of them shot off the padlock on the gate with an Uzi. Then they roared up the hill and dismounted behind the barn. Looking through his binoculars, Todd could see that they were both armed with Uzis. They were wearing uniforms in a flecked camouflage pattern that Todd didn’t recognize. As they crouched behind the barn, one of them pulled a walkie-talkie from his belt and gave a report.
The armored personnel carriers arrived few minutes later. They were Russian built BTR-70s that had previously been part of the former East German National People’s Army (NVA) inventory. Todd had expected German soldiers to be driving Marders or Luchs APCs. Then he realized that what he was looking at was a ragtag force that was put together in the wake of the Crunch in Europe. They were equipped with whatever was available at the time. The aging eight-wheeled machines had originally been painted gray-green by the NVA, then white by the UN, and were more recently repainted a flat olive drab green to make them more tactical. They were prominently marked “UNPROFOR” in black paint on the sides, and “UN” on the back. The latest coat of paint was starting to peel and wear off. Some of the white paint beneath was beginning to show, mainly on the high points and inside the wheel wells.
Most of the APCs stopped at wide intervals on the county road. Two continued through the gate to the Grays’ circular driveway. They quickly disgorged one eight-man squad each. These squads searched the barn and shop, and then, hesitantly, tried to search the house. The lock on the chain-link fence around the house was not a big obstacle. One burst from an HK G36 shattered the lock and chain. The locked front door would be more difficult, as would the heavy steel window shutters. Todd chuckled when he saw the soldiers try to kick the door down. He whispered, “Knock yourselves out, guys.”
The rear doors of all of the APCs at the county road opened up and squad after squad of infantry ambled up the hill. They were dressed in a motley assortment of German Flecktarn camouflage, Woodland BDUs, and the later-issue ACU digital camouflage pattern U.S. Army uniforms. Some of the soldiers, Todd noticed, had their HK rifles and various SMGs slung across their backs. Some were even smoking cigarettes. Todd clucked his tongue and whispered, “Ah, yes, just another casual day of looting for the Bundeswehr.” One soldier unbolted a pick from the assortment of pioneer tools on the side of one of the waiting APCs and began to assail the door. Even from the long distance, Todd could hear the banging of the pick, and cursed shouts.
As the door was being attacked by one squad of soldiers, the others began to lose patience. One trooper hosed the Winco windmill with long bursts from an HK-21 light machinegun. Another shot out the tires of Mary’s VW with a HK G36 5.56 mm rifle, and then started shooting chickens that scuttled around the barn. The dwindling flock ran around the barn twice before the soldier finally tired of the game and let the rest go.
After several minutes, the German soldiers gave up with the pick. Next, they tried opening the door with a Russian-made disposable RPG-18 rocket propelled grenade launcher. The rocket went through the middle of the door, leaving a neat hole two inches in diameter, but to the surprise of the soldiers, the door still didn’t budge. A second RPG was carried over from the BTR and was aimed at the right side of the doorframe. It took the door completely off its hinges. The Germans spent the next few minutes putting out a small fire that the RPGs had started inside the house. After the smoke started to clear, a steady stream of soldiers went into the house, looking for loot.
Closely watching the house with his Steiner binoculars, Todd counted thirty-two soldiers entering the house. Even at this distance, he could tell by their arm gestures that two of the men who went into the house were either senior NCOs or officers. Despite the large quantity of logistics that had been evacuated, there was still plenty in the house to interest the soldiers.
Todd waited until he saw the first soldier come back out the door. Then Gray whispered, “Okay you goons, you want my house and everything in it? Well then, it’s all yours!” Then he pressed a button on the panel in front of him.
The house erupted in flames with a tremendous roar. Six sticks of dynamite hidden in separate parts of the house detonated simultaneously. Each of the six was taped to the seam on a five-gallon can of gasoline. Two of the cans were hidden at the ends of the attic, one beneath the kitchen range, one beneath the hide-a-bed, and two in the basement. The combined explosion was so powerful that it sent several of the heavy metal window shutters flying more than thirty feet outwards. The roof of the house split into two halves, and landed on either side of the house, engulfed in flames. A huge ball of fire rose from the house, billowing upward in a mushroom cloud. It gradually turned to black, then to gray as it rose higher in the sky. Todd smiled in satisfaction.
Knowing in advance that the vast majority of the gasoline wouldn’t be fully vaporized, Todd hadn’t expected such a dramatic explosion. Todd recalled from a college chemistry course that one gallon of gasoline could have the explosive force of fourteen sticks of dynamite, under optimal conditions. He had expected at best a one-percent yield of the potential explosive force of the six gallons of gas in the house. He knew that most of the gas would simply burn, and that only a fraction would become a true fuel-air explosive. The result, however, was far better than he expected.
A dozen of the troops that had been loitering away from the house when the explosion occurred ran into the shop to escape falling debris. Todd pressed another button on the Mr. Destructo panel. This time, three more cans of gasoline as well as the small remaining quantity of gas in the underground gasoline tank under the shop were detonated. The corrugated roof of the barn flipped over to land back on its base. “That’s good riddance to bad rubbish,” Todd cursed. The fireball from the shop immediately set the barn on fire, too. Fueled by the hay piled up inside, it was soon a mass of flames.