The Last Centurion
Page 38
The Avesi Alliance now owned this patch of ground. You will pay a toll of all your vehicles, those are nice tanks by the way, and equipment. We'll let you leave with a couple of trucks and fuel and enough food to get you back to those heathen Kurds. Oh, you have some heathen Kurds with you? Well, take them back where they came from. These are our lands!
I appreciate your sentiment. However, my orders are to proceed through this region on the way to complete a mission of some importance. Move or I'll move you.
How?
I have great and wonderful powers you cannot begin to understand. And if worse comes to worse I can get airstrikes. Move.
Fuck off and die.
Okay, Burger King, you can have it your way.
The Avesi are not really the most violent people in the world. Most encyclopedias talk primarily about their contribution to Turkish music. (By the way, that sort of makes them violent in my opinion. I'm not a fan of Turkish music.) They're a branch of Shia that are related to Sufiism and . . .
Ah, Christ. Go look it up.
"After Action Analysis" indicated that a former infantry captain (hey, look at me!) took the name as a way to build local support. He'd established a little feudalism in Sivas province. I don't think he was actually doing bad things, unlike some of the bandits and others we cleared out. At the time I didn't really care. And the Turks did reestablish order in the region after we passed through. Having someone clear out all your troublemakers makes that easy. When we got done the Van Road was pacified with a capital P.
The Nepos got up on the ridge about nightfall. They made it to a good firing point around 2100. Yes, they had night vision gear.
I called up the local commander.
Yo, dude. You've got two Leopard tanks and three trucks up there.
Wait, how did you know about the trucks?
I have mysteeerious powers. Look, surrender, now, and I'll leave you the use of your legs.
Hah, hah, you are very funny . . .
Then one of the trucks blew the fuck up.
What have you done?
Blew up one of your trucks. Don't try to move the rest of the shit. Just lay down your guns and surrender. I have wondrous and mysterious powers. Don't make me kill you all.
So they pointed the tank guns to the rear and we drove up and accepted their surrender.
We left some Kurds to guard them and the pass while we sorted things out. They promised not to kill and eat anyone. We picked up the Nepos down the road so they never knew what my "mysterious powers" were. (Javelins. Low signature.) It was less of a walk for the Nepos. But that's where Samad slipped on his way down, something of the ultimate insult to a Nepo along the lines of drowning in his fucking bathtub to a SEAL, and turned into a human snowball. Very scary at the time, very funny in retrospect. Made for great cinema.
"Sorting things out" took a couple of days and one or two skirmishes. We also had to leave a bunch of Kurds behind. And they didn't interact great with the locals but we pointed out that they were just there to guard the prisoners and we'd get Turks over to straighten things out shortly.
Bandits by day, sneak thieves by night, occasional feudal lords. Some we could negotiate with, they were trying to decide which way to hop on the whole "who's in charge" thing. Some we had to fight. They lost. We took almost no casualties because a) I never fight fair and b) when the Nepos couldn't flank someone the Kurds could. In retrospect, it was good training for what was to come.
Turned out we didn't hit the first outpost of "order" until we got to Kirkkale. Actually west of Kirkkale. Ankara was near the back side of what the Turkish general controlled.
But I rolled in with seven more Leopards than I'd had at the beginning. Also down two Abrams, a HERCULES and a carrier. Five WIA, two KIA. Two cases of frostbite. One guy lost toes.
Maybe I should have taken the Adana Road. But I swear he said Van.
Chapter Twenty-One
Of Course We Fucking Looted
So there we were ready to perform our heroic . . . What do you mean you can't fight in this weather?
Okay, the weather was rather bad. We'd explained that to the world. Well, not all of it. We only had an hour.
Go back to the Global Warming thing. One of the things that was raised about why Global Warming was going to Destroy Civilization was that Storms Got Stronger.
Uh, huh.
Maybe, maybe an argument for hurricanes. (I can argue ag'in it. And so would most paleoclimatologists and even hurricane experts.) But hurricanes don't affect most regions of the world. Very few, actually. Oh, they're big news in the U.S., but they don't hit most parts of the world, period.
Cold fronts do, though. And warm fronts. And they can be pretty fucking powerful. See "Storm of the Century." Well, it might have been for the 20th Century, but in the 21st we've learned a whole new definition.
Why?
Meteorology 101. "Storms are governed by differences in temperature between the polar regions and the tropics."
Global Warming would have meant warmer temperatures in the polar regions and pretty much the same in tropical regions.
Global Cooling meant much colder temperatures in the polar regions and pretty much the same in the tropical regions.
Oops.
And, yes, that meant the weather was a bitch. Especially since weather is always worse when there's a big change going on. All those thunderstorms you get with a cold front are because the air temperature is suddenly changing. It gets colder, air condenses, storms build up, ice movement makes static electric-icity, water falls, lightning strikes.
The air temperature all over the world was suddenly changing. We'd gone through some motherfuckers of thunder snow storms in the Taurus. Those are not regular occurences. I'd run across, maybe, two the whole time I lived in Minnesota.
The weather was a bitch.
And bitchy weather favors defenders. And for the plan I had in mind to work, it was going to take our friendly Anatolian Alliance fighters climbing out of their trenches and bunkers and assaulting.
Which was going to suck. No question.
It also was the only way to get the oil flowing by the end of December. Which was the "drop dead" date for the U.S. Somewhat literally.
Things had never gotten anywhere near pre-Plague normal in the U.S. and now we were going into "the Mother of All Winters." It had taken a fucking Brit news crew and a bunch of infantry stuck in the middle of nowhere to get people to stand up and notice but it was finally happening. And now everyone was going ape-shit because they realized we didn't have the fuel or food to carry us through.
We eventually realized that was bunk, but in November of 2019 it really looked like total Disaster. This is the Big One. End of Civilzation As We Know It. Here come the glacial sheets! Fuck you, buddy, I'm heading for the hills!
(It did suck if you lived in Canada. But, hey, Canoeheads are tough. They tell us that all the time.)
I hadn't traveled all this way through those fucking mountains, okay, okay, maybe you did say the Adan road, just to sit on my ass and let my country freeze to death. We were here to open up the spigots. And we can't do it on our own. Get off your ass or I'm going over to the Dardanelles and catching a ship for Greece. And, no, I won't be leaving useable equipment. I'll send it back with the Kurds. Don't try to stop them.
I didn't need a full-court press. All I needed was for the Caliphate to be using a lot of supplies and concentrated on Adapazari.
The E80, in that area a full-up interstate, ran from Istanbul through Izmit and to Adapazari where the bulk of the fighting was centered. The main log base for the fighting, though, was at Izmit.
On the south it was well protected by a range of high ridges that were strongly held by Caliphate forces. South of those ridges was Alliance territory.
What I proposed was to take Izmit. If we could cut the E80, Adapazari would become untenable to hold. The Caliphate forces would have to fall back and either retake Izmit or, if it worked properly, be forced back beyond.
I pointed out that a B-52 strike would clear the way long enough for us to dart down to Izmit. All he had to do was reinforce us. Fast. Please. Don't dawdle.
It was a Japanese technique called the roadblock. It wasn't the cavalry raid of old. The idea was to get a force across your enemy's resupply and hold there. Don't let anyone past. There were ways for the Caliphate to resupply around Izmit. But the intel said the bulk of their military stores were in Izmit. And getting around it was difficult. Think "Ruffles have ridges." And all that snow.
Just east of Izmit the E80 and the E100 crossed. Between them was the Izmit airport which was where the main log depot for the Caliphate forces had been established.
That was our target. We were going to blow a hole through the Caliphate forces on the ridges, dash down to the Izmit depot and take and hold it against all comers.
Sounds easy, right?
God, it fucking sucked.
It took a week to arrange. B-52s had to be flown back to England; closest bases that could take them. The Alliance had to get their guys ready to charge. Build up artillery supplies.
The good news was that the bases the B-52s were returning to were the same ones they'd used pre-Plague. And the Brits never really lost control of them. So there was plenty of ordnance on site. If we'd had to move ordnance it would have been impossible.
I also arranged for resupply drops. We were going to be using a lot of ammo. We might be able to use some of the shit in the depot but I wasn't going to count on that. We hoped we wouldn't have to blow it all up again. The Alliance could use it.
So we got into position and we struck. Easy, right?
Fucking ridges south of Izmit are motherfuckers. I mean motherfuckers. We could barely get the Abrams up them.
And the Caliphate was dug in hard. We hit them with an arclight strike that should have blasted them to the stone age. They were still fighting.
What saved us was the Nepos, the Kurds and the Mongrels. The Caliphate, thank God, did not have good anti-tank weapons. And the Nepos had worked with tanks quite a bit at this point. And, okay, I threw in something I'd learned in a book.
If you're very careful, you can fire an anti-tank round right past infantry. It's not as easy with these new tanks; silver bullets have a tremendous sonic backlash. But you can fire close. The Caliphate was dug in, deep, in bunkers with interlocking fire. They were Turks and the Turks know how to fight.
The way to take out bunkers with interlocking fires is to have your troops get as close as they can get without getting killed then hit the bunkers with tank fire. The tanks have to fire right past the infantry but they can suppress a bunker like nobody's business.
We had to get up the ridges fast. We started off fast, with the Scout Strykers tearing up the hairpin roads.
They got hammered halfway up the ridge. Most of the crews bailed out before they brewed up, but they got hammered.
In go the Nepos. They're going up sheer cliffs, it looked to me, like it's a walk in the park. They're still taking fire, though. The Caliphate was dug in hard all along the ridges.
Enter the Mongrels. They rolled up the road in the teeth of the Caliphate fire. By then there was artillery but they're still not letting go. And as the Nepos started pointing out bunkers, they'd take them under direct fire with anti-tank rounds.
A bunker may be strong. But a sabot from a 120mm Rheinmetal tank gun will ruin everyone's day inside.
We started from the Alliance held town of Turgutlu. And up we went. It took time. It took more time than I thought we could possibly have. It took three days to fight our way down onto the plains south of Izmit.
I don't know why the Caliphate didn't reinforce. Possibly they thought it was a feint. And the local forces did close the road behind us, for a time. Maybe they thought they could cut us off to die on the vine.
Maybe they thought the tank battalion that was camped south of Izmit as a strategic reserve would stop us.
Oops.
The battle of Rahmiye is . . . Well, let's just say when I did finally get to CGSC it was fucking humorous to have two battles I, ahem, had "participated" in be ones that were refought in class. Rahmiye, though, wasn't really special. We just let them come into an ambush and lit 'em up. Okay, so I got a little deceptive on them again. In the Koran it says that it's completely okay, indeed a good thing, to lie to an unbeliever. If so, the reverse is obviously true, right?
And, yeah, Rahmiye is the place where they got that shot of me snapping orders then going right back to what I was saying. Like I said, it wasn't really hard. You know? I mean it was like muscle memory at that point.
We took casualties, though. Both going over the mountains and at Rahmiye. Lost six Strykers and two Abrams. The Abrams really hurt but, hell, that was for nearly sixteen Leopards and a bunch of AFVs. Captured more and dragged them along with us. Then we got to the base. That was easy-peasy. Sure, it had defenses but nothing to stop us or even slow us down.
I expected the Caliphate to put in a heavy assault. And they did.
That. Sucked.
The Caliphate and the Alliance had been trading blows for nearly four months solid. They'd gotten over the Plague pretty quick to do that but they'd been steadily building up on both sides. Originally there'd been several other factions on the Alliance side. Therefore "Alliance." The Caliphate was about three which had united under Caliph Omar something something something. (Look it up.)
But the point was, they'd gotten okay at what they did by then. And what they did was WWI style assaults. Okay, maybe even WWII. It went like this.
Shell the hell out of you for hours. Just rain down metal. Then send in a line of infantry and tanks, generally behind a curtain barrage. Sometimes they used AFVs to carry the infantry.
They had some planes. They'd bomb and strafe.
We dug in. Then we dug in deeper. We lost Strykers, quite a few, to the artillery. We lost an Abrams to artillery. We lost guys to artillery.
We held the position.
They tried to filter supplies past us. They were in range of our Abrams, which would shoot the trucks carrying the supplies. Eventually they took the long roads.
What saves us was a few things.
We got more B-52 strikes. We could generally tell when they were getting ready for a big push. We were getting intel from the Alliance among other things and occasionally Predators and Global Hawks. We'd call the B-52 and ask them to stop by around when we thought we'd be getting assaulted.
Sometimes we timed it right. Other times we didn't. Then they'd fly over the main area of the Caliphate and just sort of bomb at will. But when we did it would really fuck the Caliphate forces up big-time.
We hadn't thought about defending the B-52s. Fortunately, the AF chief was no idiot. There was no way, at the ranges they were flying, to establish "air superiority." But they could send F-15s and F-22s as escorts. It was real old-fashioned stuff. But they could generally slam the Caliphate fighters long before they could threaten the Buffs.
There were anti-aircraft missiles. There were anti-aircraft missile site anti-missiles.
I think we lost two Buffs. I'm sorry as hell for their crews but they did a hell of a job.
The second thing that saved us was the airdrops. We had brought in a lot of supplies. We shot through much of it in the first couple of days. C-17s and C-130s dropped supplies. Again, they had to be escorted and were more vulnerable to anti-aircraft. But they managed to drop the supplies without being shot down. By the end of the battle, they were landing on the airstrip, dropping the shit fast then taking back off. Very ballsy.
The third was that the Caliphate commander was an idiot. He should have massed a force and overrun us. Instead we'd get hit by whatever he gathered at any particular time.
So we'd get hit by three Leopards, some IFVs and a bunch of infantry on foo
t. We'd wax the Leopards and IFVs with Javelins then the infantry with machine-gun fire.
Then we'd get hit by a shit-pot of infantry. Machine-gun fire.
Then a bunch of tanks, no infantry. Javelins.
Then some IFVs. Javelins.
We got hit from the east and west. But we never got hit from the east and west at the same time.
The artillery sucked. Other than that, "they came at us in the same old way and we beat them in the same old way."
Casualties? Nasty. And at first no way to evac. Then a C-130 landed and picked them all up, American, Nepo and Kurd. Thank you, Air Force. I take back every evil thing I've said about you.
Meantime, the Alliance was trying to cross the damned Sapanca River and failing miserably. That is until one of their battalion commanders, and the guy deserved and got a medal, noticed that his section had frozen solid. He wrapped a bunch of his guys up in bedsheets of all things for camouflage and infiltrated them across.
Turks are bastards with bayonets, I'll give them that.
The Alliance got a foothold on the far bank and held on for dear life. Then they expanded it. Then they got a bridge. It was blown, but they could repair it.
It took them five days to really get serious forces across the river but at that point it was Katy Bar the Door.
The Caliphate forces broke and ran. They had to go around us. Roads got choked. Control disintegrated.
We got relieved on day six of taking the base. A bunch of stuff on the base was fucked up. But we had an airstrip and logistic materials for the Alliance forces.
Then we moved out. We'd barely gotten over getting hammered and we moved.
Straight to Istanbul, right?
Give me credit for sense. The Caliphate was hurt, its main force was retreating, but it wasn't licked. And it had most of its functional forces defending the E80 and E100 to Istanbul.
We went for the side roads.
The Alliance forces ground forward towards Istanbul. The main line of resistance was on the hills near Hereke with the main supply and control base at Gebze.
Guess what we went for?
Up through more fucking mountains. And they were defended. A lot of the Caliphate forces were in full-out retreat but there were enough hardcores, and hardcore formations, to make our life miserable. And the weather still sucked.