A similar effect was happening along all three of the enemy approach routes. As the columns pushed further into the town, the buildings became denser and better suited to urban defense. The troops were still sitting in the AFVs, the columns effectively blind to the hit and run ambush tactics used by the Resistance fighters.
As they were hit by the consecutively ambushing and falling back squads of the three platoons, the armored columns ground to a halt, the commanders confused by such organized resistance. They had not expected this, and certainly not to lose multiple armored vehicles when they were simply pushing into a town to extract reprisals on the civilian population.
The Regime battle group’s operations order for this mission had included an ‘enemy forces’ paragraph laying the responsibility for the IED attacks in the valley on a Resistance group based out of Harrisonburg. The group was operating up and down the valley; evidence in the form of drone surveillance of militia activity and roadblocks in the town was used to back up the assertion that the center of resistance was located there.
The Regime commander called an ‘operational pause’ in order to adjust. They had to deal with the casualties and recover the damaged vehicles. In a change of tack, the infantry were ordered out of the vehicles to clear surrounding buildings and provide security for the armored vehicles. This was reported back to Jack, who called for mortar fire missions onto the enemy in the open.
The dump trucks moved out of the warehouse into prepared fire positions, where the coordinates were known, thus aiding quicker adjustment of fire. One truck with its two mortar barrels was allocated to each Regime advance route. The fire controllers coordinated the fire; once they had it on target they called for ‘fire for effect’.
The mortar fire was devastating, whistling in to detonate high explosives in and around where the columns were stalled, smashing into the flimsy houses that the troops were trying to secure.
The Regime forces were quick to react with their mortar locating radar, and were able to bring in fast fire missions from their own mortars onto the vicinity of the dump trucks. As soon as rounds started to land, the dump trucks took off, protected by their armor from the worst of the shrapnel.
The mortar trucks moved to alternate locations and the game began again, before Jack called for a pause in fire to conserve ammunition; the desired result had been achieved, and the Regime columns were reeling from the blows.
As the Resistance mortar barrage ended, the dismounted Resistance platoons moved in closer again. They took up fire positions to cover multiple angles. They started to snipe at the dismounted troops and any vehicle commanders who were up in their hatches.
Chapter Ten
The Regime columns paused some five hundred meters after their start points. They were reeling from the initial ambushes and the mortar barrage and they continued with the operational pause in order to regroup. They were evolving to the situation, learning lessons long forgotten in the military education of the officers in charge. They prepared to advance the armored columns with dismounted infantry in support.
There was no question of the Regime pulling back. This was political. The battle group was accompanied by several combat camera teams and the Battle Group Commander had some pet Regime supporting journalists with him. They must push forward at any cost and seize the town from the rebels.
The Battle Group Commander was Lieutenant Colonel Vick Chester, a West Point graduate and career officer. He was a political man and careerist, not without intelligence and military acumen. It was essential for him to succeed here, if he was to make his way in the new Regime and find the advancement that he desired. He was adamant that he would conduct the operation with his own integral assets, and not call for outside support unless he absolutely had to.
The Battle Group had integral mortar and artillery fire support assets. As he gave the orders to prepare to continue the advance, Lt-Col Chester ordered indirect fire ahead of his maneuver elements. The problem for his fire controllers was the lack of an identifiable enemy location.
The Resistance fighters were highly mobile and tended to remain in the cover of buildings as much as they could. The Regime force’s assumption was that any strongholds would be in the town center so they settled for a rolling barrage, starting in front of the columns and creeping up to the town center.
Jack watched the mortar and artillery barrages as they switched from target to target, moving steadily onwards towards his position of observation in the upper windows of an old apartment building. He knew that down on the ground the fighters would be hugging cover and hiding in basements as the high explosives rolled over them.
When contemplating his strategy, Jack had gone for the delaying withdrawal, but had foregone the idea of moving back to strongholds. Partly, they had not had time to effectively construct them, and also he did not want to be fixed in place. His intent was not to hold the town.
Caleb’s platoon was sheltering in their various squads in the basements of several houses. The barrage rolled over them. It was noisy, violent and frightening, but it proved ineffective. Some of the modern houses in the outlying parts of town were so flimsily built that they were literally blown to pieces by the high explosive rounds. It just added to the cover and confusion.
As the barrage passed over top, they redeployed from the basements into fire positions to await the advance of the Regime columns. The Regime infantry started to move, patrolling in formation up the roads, including the side roads. With a roar of engines and belching exhaust smoke, the armored columns rolled forward again.
The Regime infantry was moving in the streets. Caleb’s squads kept light, identifying enemy routes and moving through buildings to place explosives. They set hasty ambushes and started to hit the enemy infantry with improvised claymore and small arms fire. Out to the flanks, Caleb deployed several of his sharpshooter pairs to bring accurate crossfire onto the enemy squads.
If the Regime forces identified a firing point, they would move an Abrams or Bradley forward and use either the tanks main armament or the cannon on the Bradley to tear the building apart. All the while, they were facing incoming cross fire from multiple firing points. The Regime advance started to bog down again.
Caleb’s teams were moving fast, hit and run, leapfrogging from position to position, mainly under cover of the buildings, sometimes sprinting across open areas out of sight of the enemy where possible.
The Regime infantry company opposing Caleb’s platoon started to figure that the streets and open areas were killing grounds. They evolved again, and started to clear into buildings, adopting the approach of Caleb’s fighters. They started to breach and enter buildings, with the intention of fighting down the streets using the buildings as fire positions to provide shelter and also cover the advance of the armor in the streets below.
Again they were not well served by the lessons in Iraq and Afghanistan. The basics of urban warfare had been forgotten, replaced by SWAT style breach and entry techniques that were more suited to dawn arrest and search raids. They targeted buildings and started to stack up by the doors, to breach and use them as entry points. As they stacked ‘nuts to butts’ they were vulnerable to flanking fire from Caleb’s sharpshooters.
It was carnage.
The onslaught from all directions from Caleb’s fighters was causing casualties among the Regime troops and bogging down the advance again. Fire was coming in from all directions and it started to cause a visceral reaction of terror and extreme violence from the embattled Regime forces. They started to fire wildly at any likely Resistance fire positions, in an attempt to gain ‘fire superiority’. They used the armored vehicles to pummel the buildings around them, smashing them to pieces.
As Caleb’s fighters withdrew in the face of this onslaught, they fired some of the buildings, adding to the confusion and the covering thermal smoke. In others they left booby traps. The Regime forces evolved again, and started to simply destroy buildings as they advanced.
The Regime
infantry stuck to surviving buildings and the rubble, while the armored vehicles pummeled anywhere that was identified as a firing point. Mostly, Caleb’s fighters skipped out before the tank rounds started impacting. The Regime armor was even starting to bulldoze through some of the buildings, smashing them and negating the need for the infantry to breach and clear them.
The battle had been raging for several hours now and the Regime forces had advanced somewhere around a kilometer. It was now around midday. Jack was keeping his mortar team in cover – he could not bring down fire because his fighters were so closely engaged with the Regime columns. The air defense technicals were still distributed around the north west side of town in covered positions.
Jim and his logistics party were using the gators to move ammunition forward and bring casualties back. They had established exchange and collection points for each of the platoons and Jim was organizing runs between the warehouse and the forward positions.
Jack had ordered more houses to be fired and the town was covered in a pall of thermal smoke, adding to that from the fighting in the front areas, and it was obscuring the surveillance of the drones overhead.
There was a steady trickle of casualties coming back. Many were wounded from flying shrapnel and debris. Urban fighting took a toll, there were so many hazards involved in fighting in such an environment. The fighters were a rough and tumble tough bunch, they had to be, and most of them fought on with the cuts, lacerations and minor wounds they received in the rubble and debris of the battleground.
Eye protection was priceless, as were protective gloves.
Jim was moving forward from the warehouse on his gator when the call went up for incoming enemy aircraft. Two A-10 tank busters came roaring in from the north. The air defense controller started calling out target indications and the technicals were pulling out from their covered positions.
The A-10 is a slow aircraft and the two of them came roaring in over the town to be met by streams of tracer fire as the gunners on the technicals tried to direct their machine-gun fire into the path of the oncoming aircraft.
The A-10s flew over, identifying targets, wheeled south of the town and came back over. One of them had seen Jim moving in his gator through the streets and roared towards him. The A-10 came in on a gun run, the sound of the burst from its chain gun was terrifying, like the sound of some primeval monster screaming in the sky. The rounds tore up the asphalt and caught Jim’s gator, tossing it and throwing him clear to lay senseless in the rubble of the street.
As the A-10 pulled up from its gun run, the slow flying aircraft was caught by a burst of 7.62 rounds through the side. The pilot lost control and the aircraft went smashing down into the town, detonating in a fireball of flame and black smoke. The second A-10 pulled up with a swarm of tracer rounds whipping past it, banked out and took off for home. A ragged cheer went up from the rebel fighters below.
Jim sat up, his head spinning from the concussion. He was covered in dust and dirt, his BDUs and tactical vest as well as his face. He pushed himself up and staggered back towards the warehouse, bleeding profusely from a scalp wound, the blood mingling with the dirt to mask his face.
Megan turned to see Jim approaching the aid station. He looked in a bad way. She grabbed his arm and led him to a chair. “What happened to you?” she asked.
“Got blown up.”
“Really, I never would have guessed. Let’s take a look at you.”
“Yea, just fix me up. I’ve got work to do. Couple of Motrin should do it.”
“I’ll be the judge of that, Jim Fisher.” The gentleness of her fingers as she examined him belied her cold tone.
“Ok, you’ve got a concussion and a laceration to your head. Judging by your thick skull you should be ok, but you really need to rest.”
“Yea, spare me the sarcasm, just put a band aid on it, give me a couple of painkillers, and I’ll be on my way.”
Megan cleaned and sutured his head wound, gently wiping some of the blood and grime from his face. “That ought to do it. You need to rest.”
Jim stood up. “Thanks. See you later.”
“I don’t think so Jim, you need to rest and….”
Jim had taken her face in his hands and kissed her on the lips. She tried to pull back, her hands on his chest, and she pushed him off, looking flustered.
“Anything to shut you up Megan,” he winked and walked off, a little unsteadily.
“Damn you Jim,” she said to his back, a little unconvincingly, her face red.
In Caleb’s sector, the fighters continued to fall back in the face of the ultra-violent firepower demonstration from the Regime armored Battle Group. They were not on the run; they were simply fire and maneuvering back, each element covering the other as they leapfrogged back through the buildings.
Caleb was using two squads, including Olson’s, as maneuver elements working in tandem to cover each other as they hit the enemy and moved back. The third squad was divided up. Caleb had the two IED pairs working under his direction to set booby traps in the face of the advancing Regime forces. The other two sharpshooter pairs were deployed independently to the flanks to harass the enemy with accurate small arms fire.
Caleb currently had each maneuver squad working back on each side of a street, consecutively covering each other as they attempted to stay ahead of the incoming MBT and AFV fire. The squads were running fire positions for small arms fire as well as versions of the anti-armor ambush using enfilade fire from defilade positions. It was trickier now that the Regime infantry were dismounted.
To add to the chaos, the IED pairs were hastily setting devices such as EFPs and improvised claymores and running command wires back to firing points. As the regime forces advanced, the Resistance fighters would detonate the devices, targeting vehicles and dismounted troops alike. It all added to the friction on the enemy, slowing their advance to a violent crawl.
Suddenly, there was a rapid situation change as a Regime squad went left flanking and inadvertently cut off the sharpshooter pair which was in a house. The Regime squad started to breach and enter the building, looking to occupy it as a fire base.
Trapped inside were Jenny and Carl. Jenny was one of the women who had graduated the training and been identified as a natural shooter. She was twenty two years old and a slim, athletic girl who had done well at the physical side of the training.
The Regime squad breached through one of the windows with grenades into the interior, followed up by a team rushing in. They cleared the ground floor and started up the stairs. Jenny and Carl were upstairs and had put out a distress call to Caleb. As the Regime team pushed up the stairs in a stack, weapons covering their advance, Carl engaged them from the upstairs hallway with his M4. Jenny was back behind him, supporting him from an upstairs doorway.
A firefight erupted as the squad pushed up the stairs under cover of automatic fire, tossing grenades into the hallway, pushing Carl back before hitting him with rifle fire and killing him.
Jenny was fighting from the doorway, popping out to engage the heavily armored troops. The sheer weight of fire that was returned to her pushed her back into the room, where she was forced to take cover as the rifle rounds smashed through the walls, filling the room with dust and noise.
Jenny crawled into the far corner and turned to face the door, raising her rifle. She heard the sounds of footfalls in the hallway and the shouted orders of the soldiers back down by the stairs. She fired through the wall to where she thought she heard the enemy soldier. She heard a scream as her rounds hit home, followed by the thud of a body hitting the ground.
Shortly after, a grenade rolled through the door, bouncing into the room. It detonated, sending shrapnel flying, some of it shredding into her legs.
Jenny screamed as the troops came rushing into the room. One of them shot her in the chest, the round stopped by her body armor plate as it knocked the wind out of her. They secured the room, dragging her weapons away, and the squad leader entered.
The velcro name tape on his armor said ‘Gameros’ and gave his rank as Staff Sergeant. He had been a gang banger in southern California before joining the army and ‘making good’.
Gameros was a nasty piece of work.
“You fucking bitch, I’m gonna fuck you up good,” he said as he came towards Jenny. He dragged her up and started to beat on her, ripping her helmet off to punch her in the face. “Me an’ my boys gonna have some fun with you, bitch.”
Gameros started to rip her body armor off. He produced a knife and started to cut open her clothes. He tore open her shirt and started to violently fondle her breasts, laughing. The squad stood around, the battle raging outside, as they laughed.
Gameros ripped open her pants and tore off her underwear, ignoring the bleeding lacerations on her thighs. Jenny was done screaming and fighting, she was sobbing in despair as all hope drained away.
The squad gathered; a couple in the room and the others outside in the hallway to watch. They neglected their security, lured in by the spectacle of Gameros and Jenny.
Olson had responded to Caleb’s urgent call and brought his squad stealthily into the building, moving through the ground floor. He left one team downstairs to pull security while he took the other stealthily up the stairs.
Olson and his team stood shoulder to shoulder at the top of the stairs and unloaded a fury of fire down the hallway into the unsuspecting enemy.
They pushed forward down the hallway, taking the enemy completely by surprise, smashing them with 5.56mm rounds. As Olson rounded into the room, he caught sight of Gameros, holding Jenny, turned around to look at the doorway in shock. Olson shot him and pushed towards him, the rest of his team pushing into the room and gunning down the remainder of the Regime squad.
Patriot Dawn: The Resistance Rises Page 15