They were just about to make contact when a series of explosions back on the street shoved Donaldson’s stomach into his throat. Through the trees, he couldn’t see anything. He tried to raise any of his vehicle crews on the radio. You didn’t have to be fucking Napoleon to realize that without a base of fire, a flanking attack against an enemy of unknown size is a mistake. Blessedly still unnoticed by the enemy, he called back his guys.
The mission, his mission, was a failure. To his credit, Donaldson adapted to the situation quickly and without too much self-recrimination. He wasn’t an officer; he didn’t try to salvage his reputation with unnecessary aggressiveness. He did the best he could to sidestep the enemy and slowly work their way back to friendly lines. About 10 minutes later, friendly’s made it to them.
You can imagine his delirious relief to hear a Brad clanking in from the north. He ordered the survivors of his unit to hold their position while he hopped out of the bushes to welcome their reinforcements. He slowed just as he emerged from the tree line and saw the smoke column up the road marking the remains of his unit. The guilt and shame of losing most of his platoon so easily slowed him down. He paused to light a smoke and shake the shame off.
The federal troops in the track a few feet away were curious as hell who this new dude was. Not one of their guys. All their dismounts had taken off in the other direction. You had to be careful since the enemy wore the exact same uniforms and, for the first time in over 150 years, spoke the same language. Well, anyone that’s shouldering his weapon can’t be that much of a threat.
The flick of his cigarette lighter finally calmed the crew down and made the gunner relax his grip on the coax machine gun. Who would attack them with a cigarette in hand? The battlefield here happened to sit exactly on the boundary between three separate companies, so there were a lot of friendly strangers running about. The track’s commander dropped down into the cabin to open the rear ramp and meet the new fellow.
Donaldson was pleased to see a regular guard platoon leader when he slipped through the ramp door. Thank God, their main body must have finally linked up with them. That meant his mission was no longer needed. He excitedly explained where the rest of his unit was hiding and what little he knew about the enemy’s location. Donaldson idly wondered why the guy looked so confused.
If it was strange how the LT’s eyes widened when he looked closely at the unit insignia on Donaldson’s shoulder, it was downright insane when he whipped out his 9mm. The frightened corporal grabbed the man’s gun hand while telling him to calm down and take a breath. There was no reason to worry. It will all be over soon. The LT was, by this point, freaking the hell out. He fired fast and wild at this rebel psychopath who’d infiltrated his track and wanted him to accept death calmly.
Donaldson fell to the floor with this shooting nutjob on top of him. The LT’s body, while doing everything it could to kill him saved his life by shielding him. Blasting away with a high velocity weapon inside of a sealed metal container is a dangerous game. Each of the dozen rounds ricocheted multiple times off the deck or ceiling. Donaldson couldn’t hear when the rattling finally ended. It would be several minutes before his ringing ears would stop hurting and any sound came back. He only noticed it was over when the guy on top of him mostly stopped moving.
Shoving the twitching body away, he wound up puking into the cavity that used to be the back of the LT’s head. The sight of so much vomit mixed with brains and blood only made him heave harder. He spun around to take his eyes off that horror, only to see the driver’s cleaved open face grinning back at him. The poor bastard must’ve crawled into the crew compartment to see what all the fuss was about. Dry heaving by this point, Donaldson dashed up the turret to try and get some fresh air.
The gunner’s riddled body blocked his way. The poor guy had taken his IBA off to move more freely about the cramped turret. Sitting behind several inches of sloped armor, he must’ve felt safe. The gunner died so fast he barely had time to regret that call. The man’s body slouched over both the fire control switch and turret traverse lever in that tightly packed turret compartment. Donaldson didn’t need to hear anything in order to feel the 25mm auto cannon blasting away uncontrollably. He yanked the gunner off the controls and finally got his head out of that hellhole.
And right into a new hellscape. The other three tracks in the platoon were shredded. They had taken up firing positions in a rough circle around their commander and weren’t ready for their own platoon leader to open fire on them. Not one member of the other crews managed to get out of the flaming death traps in time. The rest of Donaldson’s men swarmed in and mopped up the shocked dismounted survivors.
Donaldson’s previously dejected troops could not have been more gung ho and motivated after an example like that. Watching their skinny young leader calmly waltz into the mist of the enemy, fucking cigarette in hand, slaughter an entire track’s crew and then wipe out the rest of the platoon’s vehicles singlehandedly was the most badass, Audie Murphy-style shit they’d ever seen. They weren’t just going to sit back and watch. No, the Guardsmen wanted a piece of the action.
For his part, Donaldson still didn’t know what the hell was going on. It was hard to wrap his mind around the idea that some of his brothers in arms could turn traitor. He didn’t mention it when he grabbed the radio mike. Who would believe him? Instead, he called for fire support on a large enemy force moving towards them from the south. He switched the radio to preset channel four, his battalion command frequency. As luck would have it, on the captured federal radio, those settings happened to be the Fires net…the direct line to the artillery.
Several miles away a thoroughly confused fire direction center busily plotted a fire mission. The terrified young soldier calling for support was using an unknown radio call sign and had an odd reference point to the target… well, the map had these particular grid coordinates free of friendly forces at the moment.
Since the Department of Defense had temporarily shut off the GPS network just a few minutes ago, to deny its access to these surprisingly high-tech rebels, the artillery were forced to rely on more old fashioned methods to keep track of friendly forces. In this swirling, running fight even a few minutes delay in updating a unit’s location could falsely show a unit miles from its real position.
In normal circumstances, they would have double-checked with the appropriate battalion headquarters. Of course, these were far from routine times. Besides, the artillerymen weren’t immune to the desire for action. This unknown unit was one of the few in range to receive fire support. The chance to save a platoon about to be overrun by this surprise enemy force was overpowering. The mission was approved and rounds flew downrange in record time.
Needless to say, with the federal artillery busy shelling their own side, the Florida breakout went relatively smoothly. A perplexed Corporal Donaldson received the first battlefield commission since Vietnam on the spot by his grateful colonel.
I-75, just north of Gainesville
By modern standards, First Brigade stuck together like a phalanx down I-75. They left most of the cumbersome support train back at FOB Lake City, but even this “light” force still consisted of over 500 tracked and wheeled vehicles loaded with more than 2,000 men. All rolling down a single interstate. The convoy sprawled out easily five miles, even when taking up both north and southbound lanes and the median. Sometimes less than four miles spacing, if the lead elements were forced to stop.