“OK, we’re going to camp on this spot. Scouts are picking up headlights and movement a few miles ahead. Pro, up and out. I want you to take a quick look at the surrounding area and tell me where you want to park this thing.”
“We could come up right behind that abandoned truck,” Pro suggested. “It won’t hide us, but it might break our . . . uh, profile.”
“Points for the suggestion. But no, where else do you see?”
He didn’t see anything that looked like one of the firing positions they’d shown him in the training manuals. In desperation, he pointed at the concrete Jersey barrier at the inner edge of the road. “Hide behind one of those? We could push it around.”
“You could, but what’s it going to protect? It’ll just be something you have to crunch if we need to move out.”
Salguero grabbed him by the shoulders and forcibly turned him to the side of the road and the barrow pit. “Remember, the only things that have to sit up high enough to operate are our gun and the sensors in the turret, so we can see. Two ways to do that—dig a firing position or . . .?”
“Find a hole.” Pro nodded. It made sense.
“Outstanding, we’ll make a tanker out of you yet.”
He’d already decided he wanted his own rifle back and the freedom to move on his own. There was enough moonlight that it must have shown on his face.
“Why do you think I went recon?” Salguero patted him on the shoulder. “Recon oh-rah. OK, quick, do a walk-around. Decide where you are going to park, get a picture of what’s around us in your head, remember it, and get us moved.”
Chapter 20
Pavel and Nathans saw the approaching headlights at the same time. Pavel was almost insulted; the enemy was either stupid or so confident from rolling through unprotected towns that they didn’t even think to douse their headlights when moving in their city. The column was headed right towards them down Route 250, out towards the enemies’ roadblock on the freeway.
“Looks like they’ve spotted our diversion. I know we’re supposed to wait . . .” Nathans let the obvious question hang there. He and Nathans had finished wiring the small, two-lane Long Street Bridge an hour earlier. Once they’d made it past the roadblock, it had been no issue avoiding the single patrol they’d seen. They’d been able to sneak to the bridge and wire its two concrete support pillars with cutting charges. In this case, two shaped charges of C-4, emplaced opposite each other, and wired with matching lengths of detonation cord. A pair for each of the two columns of reinforced concrete.
Pavel wasn’t certain it would bring the bridge down, but no one of sound mind would be driving infantry fighting vehicles or heavy trucks across it when they were done. They were supposed to wait until the diversion was engaged out on the highway. But he took Nathans’s suggestion for what it had been.
“Be prepared to blow the bridge.” He could wait until they had a better idea of what was coming towards them.
“Been ready.”
He knew Nathans very well. Pavel was sure the type existed in every army. The young Marine was the soldier who was always right, and for whom orders were almost always wrong. The attitude wasn’t one he shared, but that didn’t make Nathans wrong . . .
“Cremova, can you see them?”
“Shkol'nye avtobusy, a zatem tanki.”
“What the hell she say?”
“School buses, with tanks following,” he translated.
“Tanks? As in more than one?”
He was getting a clearer picture as the column approached. A block from the far side of the bridge, the buses were visible. The headlight from the second bus in line backlit the profile of the full bus in front. And those were more Bradleys following behind, not tanks. He couldn’t fault Nadia Cremova, her specialty had been related to ice core samples not very long ago.
“Soldati in the buses—infantry,” he finished before Nathans could complain. “Infantry fighting vehicles following.”
“So now?”
“No, we wait.” He clicked his radio. “Cremova, move your team back to our rally point.” He turned to Nathans. “We will let school buses cross, then explode the bridge.”
“Blow the bridge, we say ‘blow’ the bridge.”
“Call it whatever you will. Do not do it before I give the word.”
“Those school buses will be headed towards our people on the highway.”
He was becoming tired of the whining. “It is nothing the colonel cannot handle. The more of the enemy that witness their defeat, the more progress towards the colonel’s goal.”
“Yeah, but . . .”
“Corporal Nathans, you are making me angry.” He pulled his binoculars away and turned to glare at the Marine. “Is not a good thing.”
Nathans was about to say something else but thought better of it and turned away to look down the barrel of his rifle.
The first school bus was across the bridge and rolling past their position on the roof of a restaurant. Pavel crept along the rooftop and waited until the last bus was across.
“Now!”
Nathans didn’t hesitate. The dark gully beneath the bridge flashed, as if a massive camera had just snapped a picture, followed immediately by the sharp crack of the charges. They watched as the bridge tilted for a moment before the roadbed seemed to steady itself. The Bradley in the middle of the bridge gunned its engine, and the momentum transferred from its tracks did the trick. The near side of the bridge pulled away from the embankment as the middle of the roadway rotated to the sound of shearing reinforced concrete. It completed its turn, dumping the lead Bradley into the ravine forty feet below.
In what Pavel took as an engineering miracle, the far side of the bridge remained, and the Bradley there began backing up, trying to get its weight off the bridge. It almost made it before the bridge seemed to sag against the far hill. The Bradley was deposited with the front of its tracks on the sloping bridgeway and the rearmost of its track trying to grip the hillside.
“It won’t be getting out of there.” Nathans sounded pleased.
Pavel was more concerned with the three Bradleys in a row behind. Their autocannon began to slew around, looking for a target.
“We go! Now!”
He was pleased Nathans had no issue with that order.
*
John Bruce’s whole body spun in place at the sharp crack of the explosion to the northeast of his position. It had been Pavel’s target bridge. So much for plans. He glanced over at his own team, who were all looking back at him, waiting. They’d seen no patrols and had worked quickly to wire both lanes of I-64 over the Rivanna. It was only going to take out one short section of the roadway, but it would be enough to stop truck traffic from moving east out of town on the freeway. The colonel had ordered radio silence, not because they worried about Charlottesville breaking the encrypted signals of the radios, but because the traffic itself could be heard as static and was a good indicator that something was in the offing. That was now a moot point.
“Major Volkov, report.” Skirjanek’s voice sounded calm.
It was nearly a minute before Volkov’s voice came back, sounding out of breath. “Target destroyed; strong enemy force was halted. Infantry continuing towards roadblock.”
“Copy, stick with your plan. Captain Larsen, report.”
“One target prepped, still working on second. Heavy guard presence.”
“Copy, beware of reinforcements.”
“Copy.”
“Captain Bruce, execute as soon as ready and then proceed with as planned.”
He turned to Antwan; the naval petty officer had been assigned on active duty to McMurdo and was a long way from where he started. The rest of Antwan’s trainees stood around him, burdened with their gear. “You get the honors, Mr. Sikes.”
“Fire in the hole!” Antwan didn’t have to shout, but he did anyway. Everyone plugged their ears before the sharp cracks; four distinct flashes from beneath the freeway’s bridge lit up the night around them. F
rom two hundred yards off, they could hear the crashing of the roadway into the shallow ravine below.
It took nearly two minutes before the dust had cleared enough that his NVDs were able to process a clear image. The freeway was only missing about twenty feet of pavement, but the gap stretched across all four lanes. “Well done, Mr. Sikes! You missed your true calling.”
“Yes, sir. Been preparing for the apocalypse all my life. Just figured there’d be angels and the sounds of trumpets.”
Not so much. “OK, people. We move back along the freeway, east. Stay on south side of the hill as we move up to assist the colonel. Antwan, you and I in front. Beware of people from their roadblock trying to get to high ground. Weapons on safe while we move.” He had half a dozen trainees with him; everybody needed experience, but he didn’t need to catch a round in the ass from somebody who had been monitoring weather balloons not very long ago.
The echoes from Bruce’s bridge reached them as a dull rumble. Pavel’s bridge going up had already woken the guard force. Now they were hyperalert, and Jason could see several talking on the radio. It was only a matter of time before somebody down there did some critical thinking.
“Headlights coming this way,” Elliot whispered. “Two vehicles, coming fast.”
Shit . . . He tapped his microphone. “Ray, status? They’ve got reinforcements coming. Talk if you can.”
Ray’s response was one click.
Shit. He was going to have to buy Ray and Uwasi some more time so they could finish wiring the second bridge. “Rachel, mark whoever looks to be in charge when the backup arrives. Be ready. Wait for my fire before engaging.”
Rachel came back with a single click of her own. The headlights were less than a mile south of the river and coming at them in a hurry.
“Elliot,” he whispered and pointed down at the main bridge to his left. “Get an angle on the guard post, this side of the river with the LAW. Take it out, but wait for my fire.” He had the radio control for the detonators with him and could take out the first bridge right now, IF Ray and Uwasi had used the correct detonator. They’d carried two, set to receive two different frequencies; in the dark, working on foot, up the edges of the river, they could have used the wrong one. If they had, nothing good was going to happen.
“It’s not stopping.” Rachel’s voice brought his head up from where he’d watched Elliot squirm his way out of sight down the hill.
One of the suburban-looking vehicles stopped on the far side and disgorged half a dozen guns. The lead vehicle crossed over and disappeared from his line of sight, behind the small hill that hid his perch from the guard posts on his side of the river. He thought it sounded like the tires squealed to a stop well past the terminus of the bridge beneath his location.
“Elliot, the vehicle that crossed. Take it out as soon as you have a sure shot!”
The LAW was nothing more than a modern version of a bazooka, except that there wasn’t anything modern about it, and the punch it packed wouldn’t have done more than scratch the paint against a tank. Against an SUV, it punched through the driver’s-side window of the open middle door and kept going until it met the back seat.
Jason had a moment’s panic as the back blast from the small rocket lit up Elliot’s unseen firing position, but the explosion from the suburban dismissed it out of mind. If he lived through this, he was going to make sure the other Marines cut Elliot some slack. Rachel’s big gun barked twice in quick succession as he maneuvered around the back of his hill.
“Rachel, move!” he screamed into the radio. “Shoot and move!”
The enemy on the far bank was spraying automatic rifle fire into the dark from across the river; he could hear rounds impacting the trees above him and whistling past overhead. More fire erupted below him. He wasn’t certain if it was Elliot shooting or if it was enemy fire aimed at the Marine. He moved fast, half sliding on his ass, half running. Twenty feet and three tree trunks later, he discovered it was both. Elliot was pinned down behind a fallen tree. There were at least two or three guns firing from below at the Marine.
He had a line of sight on Elliot and could see where one guard was hunched down behind some rocks at the edge of the road. “Elliot, toss a grenade down there.”
“Copy.” He watched as the Marine pulled a grenade from his webbing. “Grenade out.” Elliot’s voice was full of adrenaline. He tensed as he watched Elliot toss the grenade down the hill. It wasn’t going to get near close enough to cause any damage, but he just needed a distraction.
When the grenade exploded harmlessly on the near side of the burning suburban, he was already moving. He curled around the hill, away from Elliot, towards the now empty guard post at the end of the bridge, moving farther downhill as he went. He pulled up with a tree trunk between him and the guards as they opened up on Elliot’s position again.
Peeking around the tree, he could see three of them. He dropped one with a head shot before they knew he was there. He might have hit another as they reacted quickly and turned their fire in his direction.
“Elliot, move!” he yelled as he kissed the dirt. A heavy, wet-sounding THUNK impacted the tree just above his head, followed by the echo of heavy-caliber rifle.
“Rachel, they have a rifle across the river with night vision. Do you have him?”
“Was moving,” Rachel came back a few second later. “I don’t have him. Can you get him to fire again?”
That’s the challenge, isn’t it? “Wait one.” He slid deeper into the shallow depression he’d found in his panic, rolled onto his back, and dug out the packed rain poncho from his fanny pack. It took him longer to find a stick in the forest than it should have, but he stuck it through the hood.
“Going to give him a target, Rachel.”
“Copy, I’m watching.”
He paused for a moment as Elliot fired a couple of bursts; the Marine had moved to where he could threaten the nearer threat from the remaining guards on this side of the bridge.
He thrust the poncho up slowly and then moved it incrementally to the side, trying to mimic the profile of a man looking around the edge of a tree. The incoming round missed his elbow by a couple of inches and his head by not much more. The poncho hadn’t fooled whoever was behind that gun, and the shooter clearly had some very good night vision. He pulled his arms in, out of reflex, as the booming echo reverberated back and forth across the shallow ravine.
It was followed by another shot; this one he knew had come from Rachel, given its source.
“Shooter is down,” Rachel breathed into his ear. She fired again and then a third time a few seconds later. “Doesn’t look like anybody wants to pick up the man’s nice rifle.”
He popped his head up and looked across the portion of the bridge he could see, which was only about halfway across. It wasn’t good. There were three more of the enemy crossing on foot.
“Tangos on the bridge,” he called out before lining up a shot and dropping one of the reinforcements.
“I don’t have a shot,” Rachel came back.
“Blow the first bridge.” Ray’s voice cut in.
“Ray, say again, confirm.”
“Blow it!”
He dug for the detonator, flipped back the safety shield, and made certain it was set to channel A, which would trigger the detonator that Ray and Uwasi were supposed to have used for the first bridge. “Fire in the hole—cover.”
The road surface of the bridge blocked the blast itself, but the flash of the cutting charges and the sharp series of cracks lit up the entire area for the briefest of seconds. He’d had his eyes mashed shut, but for a brief second, it seemed like daylight behind his lids. A creaking rumble of falling concrete started, followed by an earthshaking collision as the roadway of Highway 29 fell forty feet into the ravine below.
Jason was up on his feet and moving as the dust and smoke was still billowing up. The cloud had reached the road by the time he did. He moved quickly, tossed a flash-bang grenade behind the rocks where the guar
ds had been hiding, and moved again. There were two unmoving forms and one who was on his knees, screaming with his hands over his ears. He serviced all three of them and then looked for cover for himself. There were still a lot of enemy guns across the ravine, and it wasn’t the type of river canyon that would prevent anybody from walking down, across, and back up this side.
“On your six.” Elliot’s voice in his earbuds helped clear some of the deep tonal ringing leftover from the flash-bang.
“Rachel, what can you see across the river?”
“They are taking up positions on the roof of that motel. A few are behind vehicles in the parking lot. No movement across the second bridge.”
“Ray—status.”
“Second target wired; we are moving to safe distance. Three minutes.”
He breathed a sigh of relief. “Signal when safe. Keep moving back to our vehicles. Rachel, you, too, move now. Elliot and I will bring up the rear.”
Four minutes later, he pushed the button on the second bridge. They were in the woods, a quarter of a mile from the river, and moving quickly. The bright, momentary flash behind them almost had the feeling of flashing a middle finger at the enemy as they moved away.
*
“OK, the idiots are coming on.” Salguero sounded excited. “Our infantry has dismounted and gone to ground above us on either side of the freeway. Does everybody see our two friendly blue force Bradleys?”
“Affirmative,” Mason said, “I have them marked blue.”
“Got them.” Pro nodded to himself, with his eyes glued to his own thermal view screen. The M3s were maybe two hundred yards ahead of them. One in the median strip, the other in the borrow pit across the eastbound lanes.
“Where are you standing, Mr. Cruz?”
“My ass is kissing the wall of this thing.”
“Outstanding, Cruz. What happens in the tank, stays in the tank . . .”
Seasons of Man | Book 2 | Reap What You Sow Page 20