“Don’t worry, honey,” Langer said. “We ain’t here for you.”
The girl, who made the minimum wage of $19 People’s Dollars an hour, felt herself far too underpaid to intervene in whatever was happening. When the five men proceeded on toward the restaurant, she took the opportunity to slip out the back door.
Langer walked into the diner and immediately unloaded half a magazine of AK rounds into the ceiling. A cascade of white tile dust and debris dropped down as the entire place stared, amazed.
“Hi there!” he said. “We are the forces of Free Indiana. If you’ve heard them calling this ‘Indian Country,’ well, I guess that makes us the Indians!”
He looked over at a picture of the doddering President Elizabeth Warren on the wall and nodded. “No offense, ma’am.”
He walked to the front while his guerrillas spread around the perimeter of the room.
“Now, I want to make an announcement and I want you to carry it far and wide for me,” he said. “Relax. I ain’t going to hurt you, unless you decide to pick up your cell phone or some other such foolishness. I need you to spread this message for me. Spread the word to all your brother and sister truckers.”
“I don’t identify as either,” one of the diners said, indignant. Langer stared for a moment. One of the other guerrillas walked over and stood by xim; xe got the message and was quiet.
“I ain’t here to discuss your plumbing, sir, ma’am, whatever. I’m here to tell you to don’t come back. Don’t drive your trucks through here. Not during the day, not at night, because this is your gimme. This is your free pass. But the next time it ain’t going to go so good.”
There was a storm of gunfire outside the diner in the parking lot. The truckers all looked, but the guerrillas didn’t flinch. Outside, the other guerrillas were spraying the trailers with rifle fire, punching holes in them, making sure that anyone who saw them understood what a drive through Indian Country meant.
Four PSF cruisers and an orange big rig wrecker marked “Clyde’s Towing and Recovery, Bloomington, IA” headed southbound on I-69 toward the two toppled tractor trailers blocking the north-south interstate near where it crossed under Route 125. This was the northernmost of the blocks – there were reported to be others but no PSF had gone past the first one to explore.
These two trucks, one blocking each pair of lanes, had been tipped over next to the overpass and then dragged in close. There was no on or off ramp at 125, so there was no easy way to bypass the block. I-69 was sealed tight.
The convoy pulled up to the toppled trailers, and the PSF officers got out of their cruisers warily. After all, this was Indian Country, even if they never used that term around the brass.
There were some buildings to the west, and tree lines in the distance all around. They formed a rough 360 degree perimeter, AKs pointing outward. Nothing. The leader motioned for the wrecker operator to come forward, which he did – reluctantly. He had not been asked along. He had been taken.
“Well, get going,” said the PSF leader. “Clear it.”
Clyde the wrecker operator regarded the mess with awe.
“I’m not even sure how I can clear this yet,” he said. “I need to think it through first. Look, they dragged them back under the bridge. First, I gotta drag them out. Then I gotta get them upright.”
“Just move them to the side of the road,” said the PSF leader. “I need this freeway open!”
The wrecker driver was about to respond when the PSF officer’s face vanished in a puff of pink goo and his body twirled like a top before spinning out onto the asphalt of the empty freeway. A moment later the crack of the .30-06 shot that killed the blue echoed over the open fields.
Then there was a swarm of rounds buzzing over Clyde’s head and all around him. Another PSF officer was hit in the leg as he was standing there; the bullet slammed into him from the side at the knee and his lower leg twisted at an impossible angle and he fell screaming. Another bullet in the neck shut him up for good.
Most of the PSF officers were now firing back, on full automatic, off toward the trees and the buildings and everywhere as they scrambled for their cruisers. A few others were hunkered down under their cars or in the ditches that lined the freeway, hoping to wait out the storm forgotten by the invisible insurgent enemy.
But they were not invisible to the men above them on the Route 125 overpass. There were several of them, in tan or camo clothes with battle rigs, firing their AR15s down from the overpass into the PSF officers below.
Clyde, believing discretion was the better part of sanity, ran.
He sprinted as full out as his 55-year old body could sprint toward his orange baby, but the windshield blew out and a tire went and bullets stitched the hood.
The hell with that orange bullet magnet, he thought.
Clyde passed the wrecker and kept on running north up I-69 as the one-sided firefight behind him raged.
The black and white monitor showed freeway, endless, empty freeway, as the Predator drone high above flew parallel to it. They were in a small, but well-air conditioned building watching the feed. Outside, a helicopter was spinning up.
“There it is,” said the operations officer, pointing. Deloitte squinted. Another overturned big rig blocking I-64.
“That’s nine different overturned trucks blocking the freeways in this sector. We’re not using those freeways.”
“You can bet every one of them is under direct observation and fire,” the colonel said. That was basic Combat Engineer 101. An obstacle that you don’t cover is no obstacle at all since the enemy will just reduce it if there’s not one stopping him. Some PSF morons out of Bloomington tried to reduce an obstacle on I-69 earlier in the day. That cost four carloads of them.
He remembered back to what General Yamamoto had said: “You cannot invade the mainland United States. There would be a rifle behind every blade of grass.” Perhaps the quote was apocryphal – anti-gun rights fanatics had always insisted it was – but the fact was that there had been over 325 million guns in the United States in the hands of the American people after the gun selling frenzy that greeted the long postponed election of Hillary Clinton in 2020. The People’s Republic had gathered up a few million in its confiscation campaigns, but Deloitte had understood the kind of American he was now facing from his time in the Army even if his leaders on the coast dismissed them with contempt. Now here they were, armed and ferociously dangerous.
“Vehicles,” the operations officer said, pointing to the screen. Four vehicles moving on a side road, two of them pick-ups. The people in back were definitely armed – he’d looked at enough live drone feeds in the Middle East to see that.”
“Follow them,” said Deloitte to the drone operator, who sat seated in front of the two senior officers. “What are the rules of engagement?”
“The order says ‘Eliminate the racist oppressors using any means necessary.’ The Corps JAGs say it means what it says,” said the operations officer.
“Then I guess we have a green light. We’ve got four hostile vehicles. Target the second in line, the pick-up.”
“Roger, sir,” said the drone operator. The targeting graphics appeared on the screen and locked-on to the second vehicle, some sort of pick-up truck.
“Ready,” said the operator.
“Take it out,” Deloitte said.
The operator pushed a button and the feed jiggled almost imperceptibly.
Dust, heat, and a roar like he had never heard before engulfed Turnbull as he sat on the front passenger seat of the Chevy Blazer. Something lifted the rear of the SUV up and pushed it along on its front wheels, but it was out of control and the driver had no say as the Chevy flew off the pavement and across a culvert and into a ditch. The grill slammed into the dirt hard.
The airbags deployed as the front end of the SUV dug into the side of the ditch, smacking Turnbull hard in the face and chest behind his battle rig. The Chevy’s cab filled with broken glass and a weird, chemical smoke – an airb
ag is actually just a sack filled with the exhaust gas products of a controlled explosion that vents after it expands the bag.
Ears ringing, Turnbull shook his head and beat down his air bag. There was a moan from behind him. They turned and one of the guerrillas in the back seat had a long, bloody cut on his forehead. Another’s neck was at an awful angle and he wasn’t moving.
The driver was slowly beating down his air bag.
“What the hell?” the driver said, his eyes half-closed.
“Get out,” said Turnbull, shaking away the fog.
“What happ-?”
“Get out now!” Turnbull yelled, pulling his Ka-Bar blade. He sliced off his lap and shoulder belts and pushed on the passenger door.
Stuck.
“Get out of this vehicle. Now!” he shouted at the driver, who slowly complied. His door opened easily.
Turnbull maneuvered a leg up and kicked the inside of his door with all his strength. It budged, barely. He did it again, and it reluctantly swung open. Turnbull sprawled out into the muck at the bottom of the ditch. He forced himself to his feet and reached in for his shotgun and radio. He glanced back on the road – it was a Dante-esque tableau of twisted metal, smoke and flames.
Turnbull opened the rear passenger door, flicked the belt release, and pulled out the moaning guerrilla.
“I don’t know what happened,” said the driver, who had come around the crashed SUV. There was smoke in the air, and not all from the air bags.
“Get over here and help me pull him!” shouted Turnbull. “Move!”
The driver lent a hand and they dragged the injured man toward the culvert that ran under and across the road. It was about three feet wide. Turnbull pulled his cargo inside and the driver followed.
“I still don’t –” began the driver, but another thunderclap hit them, and an explosion threw them against the side of the culvert and gut-punched the air out of their lungs. Big and small pieces of debris began raining down outside both ends of the tube.
“Hellfires,” Turnbull said.
“What?” asked the driver, confused.
“Hellfire missiles. From a drone. We got droned.”
“Drones? They can’t use drones on us!” sputtered the driver.
“Why not?” Turnbull said. “I would.”
The sun was down, and Ted Cannon was on top of the water tower north of town with a pair of binoculars. He had a map and a red light – for light discipline. And he had the best view in the area.
His teams were out there to the north. He had already divided the map up into grids and assigned teams to defend each one. There would not be a lot of coordination, but then communications were always iffy. The blues had cut cell service to the whole of Southern Indiana, but cells still would have been risky to use since the blues always listened in. As for the radios, they had started to experience strange interference. The blues might be jamming. The guerrillas had to hop frequencies, and that was a pain in the ass to coordinate. Decentralized execution of the plan was going to be the name of the game simply because there was no way to effectively centrally organize the plan’s execution.
Whoomp-whoomp, in the distance. Ted went silent, holding his breath. There was a slight breeze, but that was it. The crickets and the critters below were too far away to hear up there in the air.
Whoomp-whoomp.
Helicopter.
Ted stared hard into the darkness. The helicopter was out there all right, and there was a little moonlight, but he could not see anything. He squinted harder. The sound was out there, northeast, yes, it was coming from the northeast.
The pitch of the sound changed. It slowed – descending? It was somewhere northwest, a mile or two from town. Ted had a mental picture but consulted his map to be sure. He took his radio mic. No interference at the moment. He keyed it.
“Calico, this is Boxcar, you have a helicopter in your area of operations maybe dropping a recon team, over.”
“Boxcar, this is Calico,” came a woman’s voice. “We hear it and we’re on it.”
The helicopter was back to its normal sound and moving west. Then the sound changed again.
“Budweiser, this is Boxcar, over,” Cannon called.
“Boxcar, Budweiser, go ahead, over,” came the answer.
“Helicopter descending in your AO, over.”
“Roger, checking. Out.”
Probably fake drops – a helicopter would mask a real insertion with a half-dozen fake ones. But maybe not. Each of those areas had a team insurgents assigned and each team was comprised of locals who knew the terrain because they had grown-up playing army there. The PRA recon units were at a disadvantage.
Cannon called in three more potential insertion sites when he saw the flashes and the occasional tracer from Budweiser’s area. The sound of the shooting took a moment to reach him – and there was plenty. Then nothing.
“Boxcar, this is Budweiser, over,” came the call.
“Budweiser, this is boxcar, go ahead, over,” Ted replied.
“Boxcar, we got three enemy KIA, over,” said the voice. The enemy recon team was dead. “We have one KIA and one WIA of our own, over.”
They had lost one of their own people and another was wounded. Ted knew everyone on Team Budweiser. Someone he knew, probably for all his life, had just died. Who? He could ask, but then he thought better of it.
He put it aside and acknowledged. Then he called in medical evacuation.
An hour or more – or perhaps less – passed. Ted Cannon stared out into the darkness to the north. He had listened in to another firefight on the radio, somewhere much farther north. They had gotten the recon team, but lost another guerrilla. Someone’s dad or mom, sister or brother, a friend or neighbor.
He could not believe it had come to this.
How the hell had it come to this?
But it had.
Helicopter sounds, different, and more. At least two. Inbound from the north, fast. They weren’t like the others, which were almost certainly Blackhawks. No, this was some different kind of helicopter, more powerful, more…angry.
“Ah, shit,” he said, as the pair of malignant, insect-like choppers roared past the water tower at high speed. He keyed the mic on the command frequency, which thankfully was not jammed.
“Control, this is Boxcar! You have Apache gunships inbound!”
The gunships followed a course roughly along Route 231 right into the center of Jasper, but the GPS location of their initial target was already fed into the weapons system. Power was intermittent below – it seemed it was coming from generators, since the electricity had been cut off to the whole region. Much of the town was dark, but the aircraft had forward-looking infrared viewers that gave the pilots a look at what was happening below.
What was happening was panic.
The roar of the helicopters sent people running for cover, and their speed over the town made it hard to react before they had disappeared over the neighboring rooftops.
The Apaches banked right, their weapon systems feeding the pilots the targeting data and they fired. A Hellfire missile came off of each helicopter’s rails, shooting over the rooftops and slamming into the abandoned PSF station.
The two missiles punched through the walls, detonating inside. The blast ripped through the walls and lifted the roof up, then set it down, collapsing it.
“Sierra-one one, main target destroyed, over,” the lead plot radioed.
“Roger, continue mission, out.”
The Apaches swung over the town, seeking targets of opportunity. The problem is there were so many. People were scattering and running, and at least a dozen vehicles were moving.
Plonk!
The lead pilot knew that sound from flying gunships in Afghanistan before the Split. These people were shooting at him.
“We are taking small arms fire, over,” he called.
Plonk plonk!
A round struck the lead pilot’s canopy and cracked it a bit. The aviator was not w
orried – the cockpit was set inside a titanium tub designed to protect the crew from bullets and the glass was thick and strong. Much of the rest of the craft’s critically vulnerable parts were likewise armored. The Apache was not invulnerable to small arms fire, but it was a damn hard nut to crack.
“Looking for targets…armed targets firing in open. Engaging!”
A band of four guerrillas had taken cover behind some cars along North Newton, firing with various types of AR15 knock-offs. The lead pilot swept the sight over them and engaged the M230 30 millimeter cannon mounted under the pilots. The gun slaved to where the pilot’s eyes fell and the ship shook as a burst of ten rounds tore downward, followed by another ten.
The cars were ripped to shreds, and the effect on the four guerrillas was worse. There was not a lot left, but the Apache dumped another burst into the area just to make sure.
There was still a great deal of firing from individual shooters. The Apaches swept across the town, engaging and firing at anything that looked hostile. One of their targets was the high school – they put a Hellfire missile into the administration building, which at least gave some of the local kids something to be happy about.
But the fire kept coming from the ground, and some of the rounds hit. One of the Hellfires took a bullet in its canister and would not launch. Both canopies were peppered with cracks.
The lead Apache unleashed two bursts at the fire house – several firemen were firing on it – and destroyed the ladder truck. It swung starboard when the call came in from its wingman.
“Hey, I’m losing hydraulic pressure, over.”
“What is it, over?”
“Uh, I don’t know. Maybe a bullet cut a line. I gotta return to base, over.”
“Roger, expend your ordnance on the way out, over.”
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