Which meant he probably intended to assault through the holding encampment. More cover there so it made sense. Use the people to get up to the berm, blow the defenses, charge over the berm then fight forward through the gear in the base.
The big question was when he was going to drop the civilians. He'd do it at some point. Keeping them would make a battle impossible. At least coming through the gear park.
The answer was, as I'd guessed, at the berm. Some of the infantry, along with some civilians for cover, cleared out the last of the concertina. Then they formed up a wall of civilians on the berm as cover and started marching over into the gear park.
Worked for me.
Remember, it was rigged like a motherfucker.
We could hear them hooping and hollering all the way to the base. Most of the civilians, with the "infantry" over the berm, were beating feet back to Abadan much faster than they'd come. They left a trail of stragglers behind including some kids. See what we'd do about them later.
The colonel apparently had good enough people they stopped the sack before it got started. The thing was, to get it all out, short of major engineering, he had to take Fort Lonesome. We were blocking the gate.
We had internal cameras. I could see them moving through the stacks of gear, the tanks, the Bradleys, Strykers and Humvees. I was wondering when they'd notice all the wires and shit.
"Get ready to roll," I said as soon as most of the guys were over the berm.
I saw at least one of the guys who caught a clue. Young guy, looked about twelve which probably meant seventeen or so. He saw one of the wires and followed it back to the hood of the Humvee. Looked under the Humvee. Got up and started shouting.
There was more shouting by that time. But the guys were spread through the park and didn't have much in the way of commo. Some of them were heading back. There were arguments.
Iranians and Arabs are okay fighters until you throw them a loop. So far, everything had gone according to plan. The plan had just changed.
Bunch of them had gone into the secondary ammo dump, the one where we'd dropped most of the ammo from the FOBs we'd had scattered around Iran. I figured I'd light them up first.
Wow, that was exciting.
I'd tried to make sure shit actually blew up. You'd think ammo would just blow up and stay blowed up.
Now I knew why those ammo guys had so carefully fired every single Carl Gustav.
The explosives went off then the ammo started going off. Or not going off. Some of it was just flying through the air. In every direction.
Big, big, big explosion. Lots of secondaries. Lit up the sky despite it being broad daylight, sort of an orange-purple. And it kept going. Shit going off overhead. Shit hitting the ground and exploding.
It was hitting us and exploding.
Oh, not a lot. And we were mostly in bunkers. But it was popping all over the place. We didn't take any casualties but it was mighty damned exciting.
"Right, Fillup, get rid of their vehicles for me."
Javelin is one hell of a weapon. Absolutely sucks to be up against, mind you. But that's the point if you're holding one.
They make, like, no signature. The missile pops up under very low power and then ignites about twenty feet up. And the signature even then is really small. Something about very efficient combustion.
The really nice part, though . . . Well, there are so many nice parts about Javelin.
Nice part one. They're fire and forget. You lock them on the target, fire them and they just track right the fuck on. Forget the old days of having to keep the sight on the target like TOW and Dragon. Fire and fugedaboudit. Fucker is going to hit the target five times out of six.
Second nice part. The target is going to be smoked. Take a tank. Armored like a motherfucker, right? Sort of. They can't armor them like a motherfucker everywhere. So the majority of the armor is up front, where you'd expect a round to hit anyone but the French.
Javelin? Comes down from way the fuck up. They went damned near vertical at that range. Came right the fuck down. On the softest part of the tanks.
Third nice part about Javelin? Really easy to fire another one. Drop the launcher, slap on the sight, get another target.
Fourth nice thing about Javelin? Range. Dragons were about a klick. The vehicles that were the target would have been out of range. (And Dragon had a minimum range of six hundred meters. So you had a four hundred meter engagement basket. Sucked. Oh, and they used to blow the fuck up when you fired them. Better than nothing if you were up against tanks but not by much.)
Now, the manual said that the maximum range on Javelin employment was 2000 meters. At the range, it had been found to be at least 2500. And one SF team in Iraq had gotten a kill at over 3000.
These guys were at about 1500 meters from the Javelin teams. Clap shot.
They could have fired back if they were looking the right way. And if they'd seen the teams pop up and fire. They didn't get much of a chance.
The company had four Jav teams. They'd talked it out and engaged the two tanks, a 20mm gun and the APC first. The thing about the Javelin was . . . Okay, another nice thing. They went way the fuck up. Time of flight for a short range shot or a long range shot was about twenty seconds. If you were in a hurry to take somebody out, not so good.
If you were in a hurry to take out a bunch of things, pretty good. Because our guys could reload, target and fire in less than ten seconds.
Second flight was off before the first had hit. Targeted at . . . the two tanks, a 20mm gun and the APC.
Never do unto others unless you do unto them hard.
Then they slid down the berm and displaced. Just in case.
Meantime, the guys in the gear park were freaking out. Some of them were running forward. Some were running back. The ones near the ammo dump were just rolling around on the ground.
I do so love my job.
So I figured, what the fuck? Everybody survived the first ammo dump . . .
I had no need for any of the ammo. I had all I could carry in Fort Lonesome and then some. And, what the hell, ammo is cheap.
This one, fortunately, was further away than the first. It was also bigger. Less rained down on us. More rained down on them. Most of it didn't explode, mind you. Clearing the area was going to be an interesting job. And, okay, there was going to be some ammo for the locals to pick up and use. It was going to be on each other. They'd been doing that since Sargon; some scattered and very fucked up ammo wasn't going to change things. But the "Husayn Ali Martyr Brigade" was not going to be using it if I had my way.
So three "technicals" had survived, all mounting 14.7mm machine guns. They were now looking for whatever had killed them. I doubt any of them had ever faced Javelins. They were pointing the guns into the sky.
The Jav teams displaced. They popped back up. They only fired once this time.
Smoke three more technicals. Round two to Bandit.
Now, the gear park was about a mile long. And it could be confusing as hell if you didn't have a map, which I trusted they didn't.
Well, I more than trusted. I couldn't figure out, anymore, who was trying to attack us and who was running away. Except the running away ones were probably the ones running up the berm and sliding down the other side.