And they were good at it. Damned good.
Of course, when they hadn't been doing their other duties they'd apparently been out there every day, all day, doing close order drill. For two fucking weeks.
I waited until the end of the day to pull Samad aside. I'd taken some time up to write up a training schedule. I suggested to him that maybe just maybe it was time for his guys to start training on something other than close order drill. Like, you know, weapons training, field sanitation, first aid. Here, I have a list.
He looked at it in puzzlement.
"You mean we will be given live rounds to practice?"
There was the fucking ammunition for a division and thirty days of combat sitting in the ammo dump. There was no way that it was ever going to be "redeployed." It was either going to sit there until it rotted or we blew it the fuck up.
"I think we can spare some, yeah."
"Very good, sahib!"
That grin. Okay, so sometimes you had to give him kind of detailed orders until he got the hang. But he had a great grin.
You can't turn raw recruits into a good reinforced platoon overnight. Not even Nepos. But we got them started on the path.
I gave him two weeks of "additional training" before I started my next little scheme. I mean, the demo was just sitting there.
Chapter Five
Unofficial? You're Fucked.
I know I'm sort of jumping around but we were getting into late August at this point. There'd been a couple more probes. No more negotiations. One what looked like an attack on the refugee camp. Convoy of vehicles, some of them with weapons on the back (called "technicals" for some reason.) Gate Stryker drove it off by taking them under long-range fire. Might have been an attack on us. Don't know. Wasn't getting close.
But sooner or later a big force would get in motion. Refugees were still coming in and they all said that everyone knew how much booty was in our walls. And people wanted it. Most of them to just fill their couscous bowl but the gangs wanted the weapons, ammo and equipment.
I'd set things up so that we could roll out at any time. There were enough Strykers, trucks, fuel trucks and all the rest, including one hell of a lot of parts, lube, ammo, food, water and most especially batteries, that we could roll to Israel if it came down to it.
That was my plan. If everything exploded we were going to roll out and head to Israel. Israel had held on, more or less. The Plague had hit their enemies worse than them. Maybe they put lamb's blood over their doors, I dunno. But they'd taken about 20% casualties and were still hanging in there.
Oh, that's something I mentioned a while back. All the models said at the point that a society took 20% casualties from a disaster, especially a plague, it broke down.
The H5N1 Plague disproved that. What it proved was that certain types of societies broke down at that point. The models and historical records had never accounted for modern, technological, democratic, high-trust societies. All the previous societies hit with that sort of plague had been preindustrial, nondemocratic or functionally nondemocratic, low-trust societies.
Every society like that on Earth that got hit with H5N1 had broken. Iran and Iraq might have been notionally democratic societies, ditto Turkey, but they were not resilient enough to withstand their casualty rates (which, anyway, ran into the 50–60% range).
The "good" societies held together. Hell, Thailand held together. And they had 60% mortality.
Nobody knows, to this day, what it takes to destroy a society like the U.S. or any of the other Anglosphere countries. Or Japan. Or Thailand or Singapore or (South) Korea. What we know is, it takes more than the Time of Suckage.
But getting back to the point, at some point I figured we were going to pull out. That we'd either be extracted or, it was looking increasingly like, have to self extract. Getting to the U.S. was going to be . . . interesting. Among other things there was an ocean in the way. Flying back was optimal, but we needed to have an airport to do that.
And when we pulled out, whether I tried to pass it off as an "accident" or just bit the fucking bullet, I wasn't going to leave this shit for the enemy.
Got any idea what it takes to really destroy an Abrams tank? I mean, so it's not even vaguely useable as a tank ever again?
Yeah, neither did I.
Or a Paladin. Or a Bradley (we had a lot of those). Or a Stryker.
Trucks and such were pretty easy. Oh, it was time intensive and manpower intensive but the Nepos were just sitting there.
Take one 155mm round. Place it on the engine block. Place another in the cargo compartment. Daisy chain them together with det cord and a small "initiator" package of a half a block of C-4 per round.
All that could be left to the Nepos. At this point you have two explosive rounds that aren't going to go off short of blasting caps (which weren't installed) and maybe not even then tied together with some funny looking cord.
In the meantime, the boys of Company B were getting an intensive course in demolitions safety. This was not "do I put the blasting cap under the sandbag before installing the claymore?" demolitions safety. This was "if you don't do it in these precise steps, everybody is going to blow the fuck up including you."
You see, none of that stuff was going to blow up short of blasting caps. Military explosives are very resilient. They have to be; they're handled by soldiers. Soldiers can break just about anything.
Stuff like 155 rounds were designed to survive handling by soldiers. They were tough as hell.
But put blasting caps in the mix and you are dealing with a different situation.
Frankly, I would have preferred that all the blasting caps be put in place and wired by myself or Fillup. But that simply wasn't possible. He had good sergeants, though, and we were very careful.
Wiring the whole damned camp, though, took a long time.
Oh, we didn't wire everything. I mean, I figured leaving all the food and shit was fine. But just wiring the vehicles and ammo was interesting.
How do you bust an Abrams tank so nobody was ever going to be able to use any part of it again?
It's not fucking easy. There are five separate sealed compartments on an Abrams. Each of them is, more or less, capable of withstanding any reasonable explosion in the other. Driver, control area (turret and crew compartment), engine and chassis. That's four, right? The gun is such a tough motherfucker it's going to resist most explosions. And it's the part that, in the end, counts so I wasn't going to leave any functional if I had my way.
The tanks were not loaded with their rounds. All of the vehicles had been stripped of ammunition before parking. (Ammo specialists had destroyed most of the onboard munitions; they weren't considered safe enough to store.)
Well, the ammo was just sitting there.
Five 155 rounds in the central compartment. Another in the driver's compartment. Another in the engine. Anti-tank mines under the chassis. A tank round up the breach preceded by a charge of C-4. Partially close the breach. When the round detonated something was going to happen to the fucking gun. Didn't know if I could destroy the fucker, but I wouldn't want to ever use it again.