by Glen Tate
“Yeah,” Bobby said, “it’s not a ‘park’ like with swing sets. It’s more like a big nature preserve in the middle of the city. Super steep terrain, too.”
Edwards pulled out a map that he’d received from gray men inside the city right before the invasion. He spotted Watershed Park on the map.
Crap. It was a huge wooded area about a mile from the capitol. It would be a natural Lima magnet. Anyone with an ounce of sense trying to get away from the Patriot forces would go there, and could set up ambushes there and kill Patriots for days or even weeks. Edwards hoped other Patriot units had sealed off the route from the capitol to that park.
Pow had another urge to suggest they go to the airport, but he didn’t want to look like a coward, so he didn’t say anything.
“Orders are to go Watershed Park and clean it out,” Edwards said. “Anyone got a problem with that?” Edwards asked. He wasn’t being a dick. He wanted to see if these irregulars, who weren’t used to military discipline, would participate in the operation. If they wouldn’t, Edwards could get some regular troops who would.
“No, sir!” Ryan said. He was a Marine and knew how to take an order.
“No, sir,” Bobby and Scotty said more slowly.
Wes shook his head and said, “No problem, sir.”
Pow was silent.
“Okay, show me on the map how you’re going to get us there,” Edwards said. “Remember, we’re walking behind you so you’ll need to just idle it.”
“You got any scouts?” Ryan asked.
“Nope,” Edwards said. “You guys, my locals, are my scouts.” Edwards pointed to the map again. He didn’t want a conversation to start with these irregulars about how dangerous the mission was or how they didn’t have any scouts. It was time to get going. He wouldn’t even be wasting his time with the contractor-looking guys if they weren’t the locals he needed to get the company to the objective.
The Team showed Capt. Edwards where the park was and how to get there.
“Only about two miles,” Capt. Edwards said. “A short walk for my men.” He was proud of the fact that his company was a regular unit used to walking several miles in full gear.
“Okay, let’s go,” Edwards said. The Team did a press check and checked their magazines. Just like the last time they did that, they had a round in the chamber and a full load out of topped off magazines.
The sun wouldn’t come up for almost four hours. It was still drizzling and cold. Darkness and nasty weather for the dark and nasty things that lay ahead.
The Team got into Mark’s truck. Everyone expected Pow to say, “This never gets old.” But he didn’t. They didn’t feel like they were kings of the world like when they patrolled around Pierce Point. Things felt different.
No one talked much during the slow drive to Watershed Park. They kept their eyes peeled for threats. Ryan and Wes stood in the back of the truck without the tarp. They could be out in the open now. No use hiding it. In fact, they wanted the civilians to see them. Help had arrived.
As they traveled down the Olympia streets toward Watershed Park, they were struck by how downhill the city had gone. They hadn’t really been noticing it when they went with Bravo Company toward the capitol right before the surrender. They had been expecting a full-on fight with regular forces, so they weren’t noticing little things.
Now they were. There was garbage blowing everywhere. Most businesses were boarded up. Graffiti was everywhere; mostly gang graffiti, but an occasional Patriot message in yellow paint. “I miss America” was everywhere.
There were a few civilians out. Ryan and Wes would cover them from the back of the truck, using the top of the cab as a platform to hold their rifles steady. The civilians were harmless, especially when they saw about a hundred regular troops behind the pickup. Regular troops with uniforms and high-tech weapons.
At one point, some civilians came up to the truck at an intersection. They were not afraid of Ryan and Wes pointing rifles at them.
“Do you have food?” a middle aged woman desperately asked. She looked like hell, so thin. “Please. Food. For my children.”
“Stand back, ma’am,” Ryan said.
“There is a limited amount of food at the brewery,” Wes said. “Do not bring any weapons. You will be searched.”
“Thank you!” she said. “Thank you,” she repeated as she started to walk toward the brewery and Bravo Company.
“Whoa!” Ryan yelled. “Don’t move, ma’am. Wait here with your hands up until the troops behind us get past you. Okay?”
She nodded and put her hands up. She kept looking toward the brewery like it contained the solutions to all her problems. Because it did. They had food there.
Scotty radioed to the troops behind him that the woman there was going to the brewery for food and would keep her hands up while they passed by.
“Roger that,” the Bravo radioman replied.
Mark’s black truck crept down the streets for another twenty minutes. The idling of the diesel engine was loud, but soothing. It meant they had transportation when no one else seemed to have any.
The Team and Bravo Company came to the intersection where they needed to turn left. Scotty called into the company what direction they’d be taking.
“Trouble!” Ryan yelled. Wes swung around to the direction Ryan was pointing. There were four men with what looked like hunting rifles or shotguns. They started to run.
“Can’t identify,” Wes yelled. Scotty was calling it in.
“Don’t shoot unless you can identify as enemy,” the radio said after the men had disappeared.
Not shooting unless you could identify the enemy made sense. It wouldn’t have made sense if they were invading a foreign country and everyone with a gun was a bad guy, but they were in America. As reassuring as it would have been to shoot anything with a gun, this was a city full of Americans. Who knew if they were civilians protecting their neighborhood from the gangs, were gray men out to whack Lima neighbors, or were plainclothes Limas. There was no way to tell. The Team didn’t mind rules of engagement that spared unnecessary civilian deaths when the civilians were their neighbors. Rules of engagement to make politicians happy or to prevent bad footage on CNN were another thing entirely.
Seeing those armed men, whoever they were, put the Team on edge. This wasn’t at all like their previous cakewalks. This was the real deal.
They crept along for another half hour or so. Even at idling speed, they had to stop periodically to let Bravo, on foot, catch up. They were in good shape but had tons of equipment and had been up for a few days. They were tired.
“Heading into the wooded area,” Scotty said into the radio. “Be ready for ambushes from the right or left flanks.” Or from the front, he thought, right at our truck.
“Should we kill the headlights?” Scotty asked Bobby and Pow.
“Nah,” Pow said, “we need them to see anyone ahead of us.”
“Plus, we’re cleaning the place out,” Bobby said. “So if they see our lights, they might go further into the forest. Concentrate themselves.” Made sense.
They spent the next half hour barely moving along. The high beams on so the headlights were lighting up their path. Nothing.
Edwards got on the radio and said they would stop here, dismount, and go into the woods. Ryan and Wes relaxed. They had been careful to stand up in the back of the truck while staying ready for a sudden lurch if Bobby had to take off. It was exhausting, but now they could relax.
“Dismount, dude,” Wes said and stood in the back of the truck.
“Boom! Boom!” Bursts of fire.
Fire was coming from everywhere. And tracers! They had a machine gun! Green tracers were like laser beams from a science fiction movie.
Bobby punched the gas and the truck flew forward. He swerved and slammed on the brakes. The truck was now sideways in the road, providing plenty of cover, just like they’d practiced.
A burst of machine gun fire blew out the windshield just as they
got out of the truck. Scotty was about two feet away when he got sprayed with glass. He didn’t even feel the glass. He was moving away from the truck in slow motion.
Bravo Company, now behind the truck, lit up the right and left flanks. They, too, had machine guns. Red tracers spit out from behind the truck and into the sides of the road and bounced all around the forest.
The Team was shooting into the woods. They couldn’t see what they were shooting at, but it felt so good to shoot back, which was better than just sitting there feeling helpless.
Pretty soon, Pow yelled, “Save your ammo!” It was impossible to see what they were shooting at. Now that they’d got a half magazine out and didn’t feel helpless anymore, they could start thinking this through, which was what Ted had told them before the Collapse. He warned them to resist the urge to shoot just so they could feel like they were doing something. They’d want those rounds back if they start to run out and they will run out. That being said, Ted admitted to them that he emptied a mag the first time he got ambushed.
“Moving!”
“Move!”
“Moving rear!”
“Covering!” The Team was doing what they’d practiced, moving to the best cover behind the truck and covering each other’s movements. With live rounds coming at them this time. They felt remarkably calm, now that the initial shock was over. They could feel their training kicking in and getting them through this. And the wild volleys of green tracer fire showed them what Ted had always said, “Your enemy is probably a shitty shot.” Whoever was spraying at them wasn’t hitting crap.
After a minute or two, the fire started to die down. It was pretty obvious that neither side was hitting what they were aiming at. The Team could hear yelling and rustling bushes. The Limas were completely disorganized. It was starting to become obvious that the Limas had just started spraying poorly aimed machine gun fire, and now were getting the hell out of there.
Edwards realized the same thing. He and a SAW gunner—a soldier with a light machine gun—ran up to the Team, who were behind the truck.
“You guys give us cover fire left, right, and front,” Edwards yelled, because he couldn’t hear with all the gunfire. “And my guys will move into the woods left and right. You hold the point. Got it?”
The Team nodded or gave a thumbs up.
Except Wes.
Pow wondered where Wes had gone, and assumed he was hiding behind some cover.
“Give me cover fire in thirty seconds,” Edwards said, as he ran back to his company. They were still taking pot shots into the woods to keep the bad guys’ heads down.
The SAW gunner counted off the thirty seconds. The Team was counting. The SAW gunner got a good position on the ground.
“Twenty-nine … thirty,” Pow counted to himself. All of the sudden, the SAW and the Team opened up on the left, right, and front.
“Loading!” Ryan yelled, meaning he was changing a magazine.
“Check!” Scotty yelled and threw out cover fire so Ryan could load.
“Loaded!” Ryan yelled when he was done.
“Loading!” Scotty yelled.
“Check!” Ryan yelled. And so they did this for a minute or two as they coated the woods with bullets.
They had done this so many times that they could keep track of who had reloaded and who would need to reload soon.
They didn’t hear Wes call for a reload.
Bravo Company moved into the woods on both sides. Pretty soon, they could hear scattered shots in the woods. Hopefully it was Bravo shooting escaping Limas, rather than the Limas ambushing Bravo.
“Wait!” Pow yelled out to the Team. They hadn’t received any fire from the woods so they stopped shooting. There was no need to, unless someone took a shot at them. Besides, their guns were getting hot from a couple magazines of firing.
“Pop! Pop!” The shooting in the woods continued, but was dying down. Pretty soon, it was over. The Team sat there scanning the left, right, and front. Nothing. Each of them kept imagining a Lima running toward them out of nowhere and them shooting him. They kept imagining it to keep sharp, and to make it easy to do when it happened.
The bushes around the Team started to move. They swung their rifles around to the movement. It was Bravo, or some military unit with the same kind of uniforms. It could be a FUSA Lima unit, but given how calmly they were walking up to them, it probably wasn’t.
The Team quickly started recognizing individual members of Bravo coming back from the woods. Edwards was one of them.
“We ain’t running into their trap,” Edwards said to Pow. “The map says there are two points in and out, where this road goes into and out of the park. Do you know of any other points?”
“No, sir,” Pow said. “The steep hills go down into the watershed. It would be hard to cross that water and get out of here.”
“Good,” Edwards said. “We’ll seal up the two exit points and wait for the sun to come up. We can go in there in the light, but not in the dark. I only have a handful of NVGs,” he said, referring to night vision goggles. If all his guys had them, and especially if he knew the enemy did not have them, then he would have gladly walked into the woods in the dark.
“We’ll split the company up and put them on each exit point,” Edwards said. “We’ll take this first exit point and have you drive up to the next one, using your headlights the way you were.”
To get shot at, Pow thought. Oh well. There were pluses and minuses that came with riding in the truck.
“We’ll be ready to go in a minute,” Pow said. “Let me know when the half of the company following us is ready, sir.”
Edwards nodded and ran off to get his company split into two.
The Team left their cover and gathered around the truck.
“Where’s Wes?” Ryan asked.
Chapter 303
A Missing Friendly
(January 2)
Everyone looked around. Wes wasn’t there.
“Hey! Wes!” Ryan yelled. “Let’s go.”
Silence.
Pow figured Wes was back with Bravo, so he said, “These Lima dickheads really suck. Did you see all that spray and pray machine gun fire? What a bunch of jackasses. These guys can’t fight worth a shit. We so outclass them.”
Ryan got out his flashlight and started looking around the truck. Wes wasn’t there.
Oh, God. Ryan remembered that Wes had been standing in the back of the truck and not bracing himself when Bobby hit the gas. He ran back to the point where the truck had accelerated. Everyone followed him, as they were now realizing the same thing.
Ryan looked around with this flashlight.
“Shit!” Ryan yelled out. “Come here, guys!”
The Team approached and saw Wes' rifle on the ground. It had been dropped, but Wes was nowhere to be found.
They stood there stunned and silent. Finally, Scotty got on the radio and grimly announced, “We have a missing friendly.”
“We have to go find him!” Pow yelled as Edwards came up.
“What?” Edwards asked. The Team filled him in.
“We can’t go look for him,” Edwards exclaimed. “We can’t be walking around those woods at night! Not without NVGs.”
“How many do you have?” Ryan asked.
“I dunno,” Edwards said. “Seven, I guess.”
“We need them. Where are they?”
“Whoa, soldier,” Edwards said, using his captain’s voice. “We’re not going into those woods until sun up.”
“But we are,” Pow said pointing to the Team. “Captain, we’re volunteering. Give us the NVGs and we’ll go get Wes. We won’t ask for any support.”
“No way,” Edwards said. “Negative. Understand me?”
The Team was silent. They were going into those woods to go get Wes one way or another. He was a member of the Team. They had agreed long ago that they wouldn’t leave a teammate behind. It just wasn’t going to happen. They didn’t need some captain’s permission to do so.
“You don’t talk to me that way,” Edwards yelled to Ryan. No one ever challenged his authority this way. No one, especially not these irregulars. What a pain in the ass it had been even letting them come out with a real unit.
“We’re irregulars, sir,” Scotty spoke up and said. “We consider ourselves under the command of Lt. Matson and he would let us do this.”
“That’s the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard,” Edwards yelled. “First Sergeant, get over here. We have a discipline problem.”
The First Sergeant and two others came over. “What’s up, sir?”
“These irregulars want to go off into the woods and find their friend,” Edwards said. “I told them no. They say they’ll disobey my direct order.”
“Do as the good Captain says,” said the tough-as-nails First Sergeant.
“We’re done,” Pow said. “We’re resigning our commissions or whatever.”
“You don’t have commissions and you couldn’t resign them on a battlefield anyway,” Edwards said. These irregulars had no idea what they were talking about. Who were these fucking goofballs? Edwards wondered, his frustration level rising.
“Let’s go, guys,” Pow said as he walked toward the woods. He walked right past the First Sergeant and the Team followed.
They got a few yards away and Edwards yelled, “Halt!” The Team thought they might get shot by Edwards and his men. What a way to die, shot by your own side for not obeying an order.
Wes. Wes was in those woods and time was wasting. That was all they could think about.
Edwards had been briefed in advance of this mission that regular military units could not expect irregular units to obey orders like professional soldiers did. If the choice came down to trying to arrest irregulars for insubordination, Edwards’ commanders told him to let the irregulars go ahead and do whatever it was they were going to do – as long as it didn’t get other Patriot forces hurt. The Team guys going out into the woods with no support wouldn’t get any other Patriot forces hurt, Edwards realized, and they were irregulars who were just volunteering. They could go get killed if they wanted.