Thirty minutes later, Brigadier General Herbert Smith of the United States Army approached the Black Buffalo Bridge from the east. He brought with him the nine thousand or so troops of the 4th Mechanized Infantry Brigade out of Fort Leonard Wood, which had been assigned to occupy the town of Bannack, establish a small military administration headed by one Captain Chaim Lipshitz of the Judge Advocate General Corps to run the town, backed by a company of military police, and then head north to re-unite with the two columns from the 36th Infantry Division and 10th Mountain Division that composed their particular Combat Operations Group of the United States Combined Military Force South.
The Pentagon’s war-gamers were wise to the wolf-and-caribou analogy. They had spotted the danger of keeping their three invasion forces together in one big huge mass and leaving the many smaller NDF units so much room to maneuver and attack from all sides. In a last-minute change of tactics, they had modified the grandiose “Baghdad Boogies” they had planned for all three of their armies, and the Americans were now moving their forces into the Republic from each army group using multiple detached units of anywhere from brigade to full division strength, small enough to maneuver and move quickly, but hopefully large enough to beat back attacks from the NDF. They were trying to duplicate the same Cannae-like strategy in offense that the Northwesters were attempting in defense, modeling their attack on Patton’s hedgerow-hopping advance through Italy and France during the Second World War, a series of swift enveloping movements they hoped to emulate almost a century later.
Brigadier General Herb Smith was a short and lean man with the traditional buzz-cut that most West Pointers usually retained through their whole lives. His old-style Iraq desert fatigues always seemed to be starched and to hold razor-sharp creases, even in heat like this. Smith sat in his personal Humvee, pulled over to one side of the road, watching his long column of troops rumble by in their trucks, their Strykers, and their Bradley Fighting Vehicles. He held in his hand an ordinary field radio, in lieu of his usual encrypted personal helmet phone communication device, which was dependent on a satellite and which could now show him only a picture of his commander-in-chief with his mouth open, barking like a dog. The voice of Captain Jason Beard, U.S. Army Ranger Recon, crackled in his ear. “Foxtrot Five, this is Romeo Echo Charlie. Forward lurps are in. They report Nazis ahead, sir. Thousands of ’em.”
“That’s what we came here for, Captain,” said Smith, nodding to his driver to move out. His Humvee sped along the side of the road past the slow vehicles filled with troops. Smith spoke into his radio. “Alpha Sierra Charlie, this is Foxtrot Five. Tell our birds it’s time they quit hitchhiking on Daddy’s shoulders and spread their wings. Get the gunships into the air, get them four or five clicks ahead of us, and tell them to start blasting anything that moves wearing a goddamned Swastika. It’s time we had some fucking air cover on this little excursion.”
It took the Americans some minutes to get their six Apache gunships launched from the flatbed trucks that had been hauling them laboriously up hill and down since the brigade had left Billings, but once they were in the air the assault craft swooped toward the valley and the Black Buffalo Bridge across the highway. They were met by a hail of small arms fire from thousands of weapons and shoulder-fired missiles. Their own rockets and chain guns managed to inflict a few NDF casualties and knock out one 75-millimeter gun and one self-propelled 88, but in a matter of two minutes, three of the six choppers were down and lying in flaming heaps on the ground, and the others turned and ran. It wasn’t only the Bluelight weapons that could bring copters down. Smith himself ordered the retreat. He had no intention of stripping himself completely of his aerial scouting capability.
Smith ordered his Ranger-filled Bradleys and his Strykers forward out of the cover of the wooded hills to secure the small, nondescript concrete bridge he now saw through his field glasses as he stood up in his Humvee. Many of his vehicles were tracked, and they could easily ford the minor obstacle of Grasshopper Creek on their own, and his engineers could throw temporary bridges across the small stream with no difficulty. Technically speaking it wasn’t necessary to take Black Buffalo Bridge, but capturing a bridge with such a picturesque name had a definite cachet to it. It sounded good: future vets swilling beer in bars and saying, “I was with Herb Smith at Black Buffalo Bridge!” Besides, Smith’s Rangers were armed with the new-fangled “corner guns” developed for use in the Middle East, weapons that were in essence small grenade launchers that fired a timed and calibrated charge slightly over the head or to one side or other of a concealed enemy, burst in the air, and took him out with concussion and shrapnel even as he remained behind his cover. They had been used in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Gaza with some success, although they were by no means the mighty terrorist-slaying miracle weapon claimed for them. Even in modern combat, the man behind the weapon was more important than the weapon itself.
Finally, there was another sub rosa consideration: Smith had a schedule to keep. His boss, General Albert Scheisskopf, had been very specific about that: all American units had to keep to the schedule, lest it look bad to the president and the media. Like so many American military adventures over the past century, this wasn’t just a war, it was a made-for-TV movie, and the U.S. military’s masters wanted to keep to the script with no ad-libbing allowed. Never mind anything the enemy might have to say about it.
Four of the lead American Bradleys floored it on Smith’s orders, and they headed for the bridge. They made it without drawing any hostile fire, rather to Smith’s surprise. The Ranger platoon in the Bradleys leaped out of their armored vehicles, seized the bridge, quickly checked it for explosives and found nothing. They reported back to Smith that the bridge was clean. “Establish a perimeter and hold it until our forward units reach you, Captain,” Smith told the Ranger officer. “We’ll get you some help down there ASAP. Hey, maybe the Nazis are going to be gents about this and let us stroll on across.”
Two Stryker assault vehicles crossed the bridge and assumed positions on either side of the Valley Road, their weapons pointing to the faintly seen enemy who seemed to be scuttling in and out among the scattered trees about five hundred yards up the slope and along the road. “We be sittin’ ducks out here,” muttered Sergeant Omar Little, one of the Stryker’s .50-caliber machine gunners, to his comrade-in-arms, Specialist Leo “Hook” Chamblin, who sat behind the vehicle’s 40-millimeter grenade launcher. Chamblin was a former pimp from New Orleans who had been offered the choice of three years in prison or three years RA. In real life, Hunter Wallace’s much-vaunted new recruiting standards for the American military were sometimes not quite so vaunted as all that.
“I see sumpin’ movin’ ober dere in dem muthafukkin’ trees,” said Specialist Chamblin. He did indeed, and it was the last thing he ever saw. The entire First Battalion of the NDF’s 85th Infantry Regiment opened fire on his black ass at a distance of from two hundred to three hundred yards, concealed as they were in quickly dug and camouflaged scrapes. A trained NDF company with all its men and weapons could dig into almost any terrain and present not a single visible target to a frontal observer within three minutes; when the Americans on the bridge took up their position their eyes had been on the ridge line, and they had no idea that there were hundreds of Northmen almost within spitting distance of them. The bullets shredded Chamblin and Little into hamburger, while two Thermite shells from 75-millimeter cannon crashed into the Stryker and melted about half of the vehicle down into a puddle of steel, along with the driver inside it.
* * *
The main infantry weapon carried by millions of Northwest Defense Force, SS, and other NAR military during the Operation Strikeout campaign was the Excalibur Model Three assault rifle, otherwise known as the X-3. The Republic’s endless legion of gun nuts had spent the past twelve years almost coming to blows over the design and specifications for the Northwest military’s workhorse weapon, but finally they had produced the X-3.
In configuration
, the weapon resembled the old Chinese SKS, but instead of the archaic stripper clips, it fed from detachable and interchangeable 20-round or sometimes 35-round curved magazines like an M-16 or AK-47. The SKS’s attached bayonet had been dropped as a useless anachronism, over the screams of countless military traditionalists, and the muzzle of the weapon was fitted with a combined flash and sound suppressor. Like the SKS, the stock and grips were of wood, a plentiful commodity in the Northwest Republic. The rifle was chambered for standard NATO 7.62 X 51mm cartridges; it had an automatic fire selector switch and could be used as a squad-level full-auto weapon if necessary. The weapon was slightly lighter than the old SKS, weighing in at about seven pounds eight ounces. Its effective range in the hands of a skilled marksman was 900 yards, and in the Northwest Defense Force, every soldier was a skilled marksman. The time and effort that the United States Army expended on politically correct Mickey Mouse bullshit, the NDF spent on the rifle range and on squad and company-level fire-and-maneuver courses.
Each NDF rifle company also had at least three Widowmakers, otherwise known as the Squad Light Machine Gun or SLMG Model 5. This was a magazine-fed machine gun on a Russian RPD frame, but a lot lighter to carry. The bipod-mounted weapon was chambered for NATO 7.62 packed into 50-round curved magazines or 100-round plastic drums, and so the enemy’s M-60 ammo fit it nicely. It had a cyclic rate of fire somewhat slower than its parent weapon, only 600 rounds per minute, which allowed for better control and greater accuracy, and it was considered effective up to 1200 yards. The best marksmen in each company got to pack one of the two Lockhart rifles, the 7.62-millimeter M-21 that the greatest sharpshooter from the War of Independence had actually carried himself, or else a lighter and more accurate version of the Barrett M82 .50-caliber weapon that many of the NVA snipers had used, known as the Big Bopper.
Add to this an assortment of rifle grenades, hand grenades, and other deadly impedimenta in the hands of the individual NDF soldiers, throw in shellfire from the sixty-odd fieldpieces attached to the 85th Infantry Regiment, and the Rangers on Black Buffalo Bridge never knew what hit them. Their corner guns did them no good. They were all dead and all of their vehicles were burning junk heaps before the rest of the American vehicles winding down the Valley Road were even halfway to the bridge. Then the shells started raining down on the rest of them.
* * *
As the shells and bullets began flying back and forth across Black Buffalo Bridge in Montana, hundreds of miles away, another battle was in preparation, all along the Pacific coast of the Northwest American Republic. Admiral David “Bloody Dave” Leach of the Kriegsmarine was getting ready to lead his motley fleet of coastal defense vessels out against a full-fledged U.S. Navy task force.
The Lazarus Birds had pinpointed the location of the American Task Force Soaring Eagle, almost ninety miles west of the Columbia River Bar. The American fleet’s commander, Vice Admiral Hiram Warner, had positioned his fleet that far out so that his ships would receive plenty of warning of the approach of any hostile attacking craft from the shore by sea or by air. While it was true that Rotfungus still held the U.S. satellite surveillance system in its grip, Task Force Soaring Eagle still had effective aerial surveillance in the form of over a dozen carrier and frigate-based helicopters that patrolled the seas as close to the Northwest coast as they dared to come, looking for the Kriegsmarine’s ships.
Admiral Hiram Warner was not a happy camper. His naval task force had failed in its primary mission of reducing the western industrial and population heartland of the Northwest American Republic to rubble, and now almost all of the carriers’ bomber and fighter-bomber aircraft were blasted shards of burned metal littered up and down old Interstate Five, scattered among the Seattle and Portland suburbs, and through the Olympic mountains. His vessels carried the usual complements of U.S. Marines, and he was now bombarding the Pentagon with requests to be allowed to send them and drafts of armed sailors ashore to seize the towns of Astoria and Seaside. If for no other reason, Warner wanted to do this out of revenge for the humiliating defeat that the Federal Anti-Terrorist Police Organization and the United States Coast Guard had suffered at the hands of the NVA at nearby Sunset Beach, Oregon almost exactly thirteen years before. [See The Brigade.]
There is little room at sea for tactical maneuver or for any element of surprise, since there is no cover to hide behind, and sonar and radar can always let a navy ship know who and what is coming for dinner. During most of World War Two and in the infrequent naval engagements since then, such as the Falklands War of 1982, naval warfare had consisted almost entirely of aircraft versus surface vessels, and very occasionally surface vessels against submarines or surface vessels against shore batteries of missiles. The trick to winning at sea consisted of locating one’s opponent through radar or satellite surveillance, and then slipping or blasting past his anti-aircraft defenses with a missile such as an Exocet. Ships fighting other ships on the open sea had been virtually unknown since the battle of Jutland in 1916; even the mighty Bismarck had been sunk by torpedo bombers. Naval strategists and tacticians simply didn’t think in those archaic terms anymore. Yet this was Leach’s plan.
He really had little choice, because he had little to attack with. A blue water navy was always one of the most expensive toys that any nation could indulge in, and the Northwest American Republic could never afford the luxury. Instead, the General Staff of the NDF had concentrated on quantity, combined with as much quality as could be packed into small packages. They had produced a fleet of small, light coastal defense vessels, including submarines, in order to prevent coastal infiltration by small commando groups of hostiles from the Office of Northwest Recovery or anywhere else, and especially to hamper and interdict any attempt at a seaborne invasion. This wasn’t such an actual invasion, since the Americans simply didn’t have enough combat troops to add a fourth prong, but a large U.S. Navy task force could not and would not be allowed to sit off the Republic’s coast and threaten white life and limb, even if it was true that almost all of their aircraft carriers’ planes had been blown out of the sky like mosquitoes flying into a bug-zapper.
The mainstay of the Kriegsmarine’s coastal defenses was the Torpedo Assault Craft or TAC boat, a forty-two-foot vessel armed with three rocket-propelled torpedoes packing PBX warheads and a magnesium core that could burn through a carrier’s outer bulkhead in less than a second. There was also a 20-millimeter cannon and twin. 50-caliber belt-fed Browning machine guns on the deck. The TAC boat rode low in the water and was hard to spot in the darkness or in choppy seas. It was powered by a methane turbine engine, and it had retractable hydrofoils that allowed it to make a torpedo run at speeds of up to 55 knots. Its range was short; less than 400 miles round trip, and its armor was non-existent. The TAC boat was all speed and punch, all engine and weaponry. It didn’t even have any bunks for the four-man crew, just a couple of hooks to stretch out a hammock between them when one man out of the four wanted to catch 40 winks. No one would be sailing across the Pacific in one.
Then there were the MAC boats, Missile Assault Craft or “punchies.” These were even smaller, lighter, and faster vessels of fiberglass that packed only one Nova missile and a single .30-caliber Browning machine gun, which was mainly there for morale purposes, to make the sailors feel a little less helpless once the missile was gone. Their range was even shorter than that of the TACs, and reaching the American task force would take them pretty much to their limit, but all they were expected to do was to make one fanatical charge at an American vessel, cut loose with the Nova and its polymerized magnesium warhead, and then break off and head back to port. That is if they weren’t ripped to pieces and sunk by the computer-controlled enemy chain guns, High Energy Laser (HEL) weapons, and repeating cannon.
The sun was setting over the long rows of docks at the Hammond Naval Station just south of Astoria, Oregon, as Admiral David Leach stepped on board TAC-157, which had been specially fitted with communication and electronic gear in the pilo
thouse to enable him to get an overview of the entire fleet action and speak with his vessels’ captains. Leach wasn’t wearing his navy blue sea fatigues; he had decided to affect his full dress uniform including his ceremonial sword for this trip. His Fleet Operations Officer stood beside him on the dock. “Sir, I have to ask again, does the State President know that you intend accompanying the fleet into action personally?” asked Commander Alexander Krycek in a concerned voice. “You’re the head of our whole navy!”
“I didn’t actually mention the matter, no, but Red knows me well enough to understand that I will never send my men into a situation like this where I won’t go myself,” replied Leach. “As to me being head of the navy, you might better put it that I’m taking almost the whole damned navy with me on this lunatic expedition. If I don’t make it back, you’ve got what’s left. Alex. I don’t have to tell you to serve this country, this president, and these men with honor and ability, because I know you will. That’s why you’re where you are. I’m leaving you all six destroyers, twenty-five TACs here and up and down the coast, ten punchies, and seven of the U-boats. Use them and whatever comes back from this run tonight well.” Krycek knew it was pointless to argue further, and he saluted as Leach stepped on board TAC-157.
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