All those rebels clustered together, and without body armor, didn’t stand a chance. All of them went down in the blasts. Parrott gave a war whoop and jumped up, but found no real resistance. Only one of the wounded made a move for his weapon. Parrott finished him off quickly, but noticed there was no more shooting around him. In one of those awkward moments, he realized the entire rubble pad that used to be their fortress was now crawling with blue jean-clad fighters. Not a living friendly face to be seen. He wasn’t the only one to notice the tables turned. Twenty unfriendly rifles flashed up in a full 360 degrees around him.
Parrott wasn’t the hero type. He enjoyed life as much as the next guy. Dropping his rifle, he threw both arms high. “I give up! Don’t shoot!” With all those rebel eyes on him, only Parrott saw PFC Burger rise to his knees a few yards away. Covered in blood and with his left arm missing below the elbow, Burger was the last person anyone expected still to be alive. With that big SAW machine gun tucked under his good arm, he let rip a long burst while screaming, “Fuck you, traitors!”
He Ramboed three rebels to pieces before the rest hosed him down. Parrott would never remember what happened, but he lost control as his buddy lost his life. Leaving his weapon at his feet, Parrott dived over the girder and rushed over to the body pile-up he created earlier. He ransacked their pockets and chucked every grenade he found wildly around the remnants of the building. A couple of the wounded men tried to resist, so Parrott took a second to scoop up a rifle and slaughter them all.
Ten or so grenades and a couple magazines later, the rubble was silent again. At least for a moment. From a door in the east wall, the only wall still standing, someone shouted the challenge of the day. “Godsmack!”
Parrott scanned the room one last time, still not quite sure what had happened. “Nickel Back! All clear!”
“Six friendlies comin’ in!” Parrott recognized a few of the soldiers from another platoon in his company. “Thank God. I thought everyone had been pushed back.”
The newcomers were speechless. They just gawked at the rebel bodies piled all over the place. Eventually their lieutenant managed to collect himself. “We would have been forced to retreat, if the bastards had held onto this chokepoint. This is the first toehold in Denver we’ve been able to hold on to. Thanks to you, we’ve finally cracked their defenses! Good God! This is some real Audie Murphy type shit. Specialist Parrott, right? Damn man, I’ll see to it you get a Medal of Honor for this! You’ve accomplished something the whole division couldn’t.”
Parrott glanced down at his bloodstained uniform. Not a drop was his own. “Uh, no sir. Wasn’t me. I mean, I tagged a couple guys, but PFC Bergermeister wiped out the rest. Single handily. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
The officer walked over to a shredded corpse in the middle of the rubble. “Really? Where is this hero?”
Parrott looked away. “You’re almost standing on him.”
Sgt. Li shouldn’t be running a rebel mechanized infantry company. Besides being well beyond his skill level, he was nearly a dozen links in the command chain removed from captain. He’d complain, if there were anyone left alive to whine at above his rank. It only took thirty minutes in this flesh mill of a counterattack for him to achieve a career worth of promotions. Li prayed he could keep from getting someone else promoted just a little longer.
By cruel luck, the relentless federal advance at least whittled his company down to manageable size. Only five of their fourteen Bradley IFV’s could still fight. The rest were expensive bonfires. All four of his attached Abrams tanks were long since destroyed. Just 40 dismounted infantrymen, counting the walking wounded, could still bound forward. Li’s gunner popped out a spray of 25mm HE rounds from their mini-cannon, silencing some machine gun chewing up his foot soldiers.
Li stayed focused and scanned for more targets to give his cussing gunner. Of which there was no shortage. If headquarters called this the enemy’s exposed flank, he’d hate to see the packed front. Still, despite the unholy cost, they were slowly grinding down the federal juggernaut in this northern sector. Li prayed the sacrifice was worth it and command wasn’t exaggerating that this spoiling attack was their last chance to check the relentless federal encirclement of Denver.
Either way, with the losses they’d suffered, this was his unit’s final hurrah. Just a few hundred more yards to the tree line. There they would finally have a chance to dig in and let some other unit take up the fight. That feeling of being so close to victory was really the only thing at this point that kept Li and his exhausted men going. General Hope was in charge.
Though it was still noon, Li had to switch on the infrared sights. Even then he strained to ID targets with all the multi-colored smoke blanketing the battlefield. Black pyres from the unlucky vehicles, green for marking friendly forces, white from those dreadful phosphorus artillery rounds, brown from fountains of exploding dirt… like a rainbow in hell.
“Target, 40 degrees, Abrams behind the farm house. Give ‘em the TOW.” The adrenaline had already faded. By this point, Li couldn’t summon up much bravado. He delegated that task to his still motivated young gunner.
“Roger that, Sergeant. TOW up… Locked, cocked and ready to rock!”
Li didn’t bother checking that the back blast area was clear. Time was too short. The seriously wounded were supposed to be waiting it out in a ditch far behind them. Everyone else in this hell storm of machine gun, cannon and artillery fire was either already dead or in far worse danger.
“Fire.”
From inside the 32-ton mini-tank, there was surprisingly little kick from the anti-tank missile. Their last one, Li noticed glumly. He forced his eyes off the missile and the unraveling Slinky-like command wire. Four seconds later, their barely visible target disappeared in a cloud of smoke and hope. The gunner hooted. “Take that, you traitors!”
Li held off applause until the smoke cleared a bit. Those tanks were impossibly well armored. If the top-attack weapon’s angle was off by only a few degrees, then the warhead would detonate harmlessly against the thick, sloping sides. All they would accomplish is just pissing that big death machine off. He soon let out a sigh of relief, rather than a cry of joy. That fireball proved the round worked as advertised. Always an iffy thing with military technology.
“Shit!” Li spotted an arching incoming missile trail from another part of the tree line too late. Karma was a bitch.
Since a near-miss artillery shell blew off their right track earlier, there wasn’t much he could do. No chance to move out of the kill zone. Even his defensive smoke grenade launchers were empty. That was a Javelin fire-and-forget round too. No way to shake its lock. Li did have just enough time to clap his gunner on the shoulder. “Good bye, bro.” They both closed their eyes.
Li didn’t hear the pop from his anti-missile defense system. A small radar on their turret identified the incoming missile and fired a giant shotgun blast milliseconds later. This “Iron Fist,” as the civilian contractors called it, lived up to the name. Hundreds of BB’s ripped their potential killer to shreds. The tandem warheads detonated prematurely and harmlessly just yards above his head.
This Israeli-designed and California-tweaked “active protection system” was just one of dozens of exotic new toys in the URA arsenal. These force multipliers were hastily, and in some cases shoddily, installed on thousands of rebel vehicles. While far from perfect, the gadgets were saving countless URA lives across the Midwest.
Not that Li gave a damn about the larger picture. He just knew that he could survive a little longer. Time to make it count. His gunner was already plastering the Javelin’s launch site. Li checked his rounds count. Just 100 of the big, one inch shells left and then he could justify abandoning their sitting duck position. He unconsciously crossed his fingers around the turret-traverse switch and scanned for more targets. Time to get back to work.