General Lyon gulped. “Son of a bitch!”
Exactly where all those supply lines pinched together sat a half-dozen red squares marking the enemy’s air assault.
“They’re standing on our neck, sir! We can’t breathe and the clock is ticking.”
Lyon dreaded the answer, but asked anyway. “How long?”
“We have 48 hours if we carefully manage our stockpiles. Difficult with all this funny business messing up our computerized orders. Realistically, call it 24 hours until all forward-deployed reserves of Class III and V consumables are depleted.”
“You mean until my army runs out of gas and ammo.” Lyon rubbed his neck. “Ok. Listen up everyone! We’re temporarily suspending all major offensive operations around Denver. Leave the Colorado Springs task force alone; they’re doing pretty good, but everyone else needs to hold in place until we get this resolved.” He jabbed a finger at his clustered operation planning staff. “Commit as much of our reserve as you need to clear out these assholes and open up our supply lines again.”
The intelligence chief stood up. “Um, sir? That might a problem. We’re beginning to see a heck of a lot of rebel activity behind their lines. All our resources anticipate a major counterattack in the next few hours. Biggest we’ve encountered yet. Looks like the enemy is gambling everything on pushing us out of Colorado today.”
General Lyon clasped his hands behind his, to help hide his nervousness. “Fine then. We’re going to make it easy for them. Trade some of the ground we’ve taken for time, if need be. Heavy fighting will only wipe out our supplies faster.”
Lyon stabbed the red markers with a pointer. “Scrape up whatever you can from somewhere and get these bastards off our throats!”
Mechanical failures forced more than a dozen birds to turn back or crash land during the 300 mile, low-altitude endurance flight. Four more had collided in terrible fireballs during confused night landings, killing everyone onboard, but the element of surprise was still complete. No enemy fire touched a single helicopter. A successful mission, according to their headquarters sitting safely in another state.
Li was wide-awake now. “Five minutes, everyone!” He prayed the planners were right and the landing would be uncontested. So far, all of the rebels’ targets had no more formidable defenses than a squad of military police operating a traffic control checkpoint. They weren’t deemed valuable enough to defend, but since each small town had the bad luck of sitting on a major highway intersection, the war the citizens thought had passed safely by returned with a vengeance.
There was only one difficult target left. Sgt. Li peered over the pilot’s shoulder at the sleepy little farm town of Oakley, Kansas. Population 2,000. Nestled in a plain between Interstate 70 and Hwy 40, not even the locals called their village “crucial.” However, with the two east-west highways leading around their town and the mushrooming US Army forward logistics dump out by their municipal airfield, the town was about to get a page reserved in the history books.
Li couldn’t help himself. He peered out the empty gun port one more time. “Oh shit!” Even with his naked eyes in the dim light, he couldn’t miss an Avenger surface-to-air missile battery on the outskirts of town. All he could do was pray that they had too many targets to hit them all. Rather than dive for the deck and drop flares, his chopper pilot just slowed and yawned. “Sixty seconds to LZ.”
Noticing the pilot still had his night vision goggles on, Li dropped his down as well. Ten bright infrared beacons lit up around town. His Blackhawk was seconds away from one of them. Li grinned. Thank God for the advance party.
Posing as lost refugees, several small teams of Pathfinders had infiltrated occupied lands through Kansas a day before the operation. The massive night assault would have been unimaginable without these groups already in place. Besides marking landing zones with infrared strobes, they silenced the logistic base’s surprised anti-aircraft defenses as a bonus project. The last thing those federal air defense soldiers staring through infrared scopes at the sky expected was machine gun and sniper fire from behind them.
Most of the URA’s air assault battalion dropped into downtown. Judging from the flashes in the distance, they were getting a warm welcome. Li’s chopper, and five more, touched down just outside the tiny municipal airfield without any trouble. Li jumped out last and wedging himself in the semi-circle with his other men until the bird lifted back off. Through the backwash, he caught a single tracer round chasing the chopper. Three of his men blasted the lone shooter simultaneously.
Li sprang to his feet and charged forward, firing from the hip. “Bound forward. Follow me!” Half his men raced towards the lighted hangars and admin building, while the other half laid down an epic torrent of covering fire. The twenty of so US supply personnel taking “cover” behind aluminum shipping containers and unarmored trucks had never experienced anything like this hell.
None of the support soldiers gave in to their urge to run though. A courageous stand, no doubt. In the end though, only a symbolic stand against the seventy veteran infantrymen swamping their base. It took almost five minutes before the rebels sanitized the federal supply dump. Sergeant Li shouted into his radio, “All clear! Now let’s get to work.”
With the easy part over with, the real operation could begin. These elite air assault troops, handpicked for their fanaticism, and single marital status, had but one straightforward mission. Stay alive as long as possible. Since they now controlled every major east-west road junction along a hundred mile front… that might be difficult. You don’t cut an entire army’s supply lines without drawing a lot of attention.
If US soldiers complained about supply hiccups before, they were hopping mad now. While every frontline US commander screamed about being cut off from the river of supplies they needed to maintain their advance, the rebels calmly prepared their new graves. As they rushed around burying land mines and digging in, they planned to be more than a thorn in the ass.
With a little luck, they’d be the knife through the enemy’s heart.
Eastern TV pundits, without the slightest understanding of the military acronyms they were throwing around, added to the mass hysteria on the home front. As the first federal units fell back from the rebel counterattack, “tactically reallocated” as the Pentagon’s press releases claimed, panic gripped Washington.
A thousand miles away from the fight, the president’s staff were just as hysterical. From the raw information they received, the occasional retreating unit came off as a rout of the whole army. General Lyon’s incessant denials reeked to their political mindset as a red flag. General Bremer, bunkered down in an avalanche of paperwork at the Pentagon, wasn’t particularly reassuring either.
Once upon a time, combat reports spent hours or even days being filtered up the chain of command. By the time a situation brief reached the White House, staffers stripped out all details and provided only the essentials, nestled in carefully selected context, to the president.
Such luxuries no longer existed between the hyper-connected modern battlefield and their civilian overlords half a continent away. With the president’s staff so deeply involved in this war, all but the most routine action items bypassed the Pentagon and went straight to the White House’s hectic situation room.
As usual, the president was the calm center the hurricane of fragmentary information and paranoia swirled around. He muted the television and its gesticulating experts as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs waved for his attention. “Tell me, General, when did ‘president’ become a cuss word?”