Patriots
Page 46
The rear doors of all of the APCs at the county road opened up and squad after squad of infantry ambled up the hill. They were dressed in a motley assortment of German Flecktarn camouflage, Woodland BDUs, and the later-issue ACU digital camouflage pattern U.S. Army uniforms. Some of the soldiers, Todd noticed, had their HK rifles and various SMGs slung across their backs. Some were even smoking cigarettes. Todd clucked his tongue and whispered, “Ah, yes, just another casual day of looting for the Bundeswehr.” One soldier unbolted a pick from the assortment of pioneer tools on the side of one of the waiting APCs and began to assail the door. Even from the long distance, Todd could hear the banging of the pick, and cursed shouts.
As the door was being attacked by one squad of soldiers, the others began to lose patience. One trooper hosed the Winco windmill with long bursts from an HK-21 light machinegun. Another shot out the tires of Mary’s VW with a HK G36 5.56 mm rifle, and then started shooting chickens that scuttled around the barn. The dwindling flock ran around the barn twice before the soldier finally tired of the game and let the rest go.
After several minutes, the German soldiers gave up with the pick. Next, they tried opening the door with a Russian-made disposable RPG-18 rocket propelled grenade launcher. The rocket went through the middle of the door, leaving a neat hole two inches in diameter, but to the surprise of the soldiers, the door still didn’t budge. A second RPG was carried over from the BTR and was aimed at the right side of the doorframe. It took the door completely off its hinges. The Germans spent the next few minutes putting out a small fire that the RPGs had started inside the house. After the smoke started to clear, a steady stream of soldiers went into the house, looking for loot.
Closely watching the house with his Steiner binoculars, Todd counted thirty-two soldiers entering the house. Even at this distance, he could tell by their arm gestures that two of the men who went into the house were either senior NCOs or officers. Despite the large quantity of logistics that had been evacuated, there was still plenty in the house to interest the soldiers.
Todd waited until he saw the first soldier come back out the door. Then Gray whispered, “Okay you goons, you want my house and everything in it? Well then, it’s all yours!” Then he pressed a button on the panel in front of him.
The house erupted in flames with a tremendous roar. Six sticks of dynamite hidden in separate parts of the house detonated simultaneously. Each of the six was taped to the seam on a five-gallon can of gasoline. Two of the cans were hidden at the ends of the attic, one beneath the kitchen range, one beneath the hide-a-bed, and two in the basement. The combined explosion was so powerful that it sent several of the heavy metal window shutters flying more than thirty feet outwards. The roof of the house split into two halves, and landed on either side of the house, engulfed in flames. A huge ball of fire rose from the house, billowing upward in a mushroom cloud. It gradually turned to black, then to gray as it rose higher in the sky. Todd smiled in satisfaction.
Knowing in advance that the vast majority of the gasoline wouldn’t be fully vaporized, Todd hadn’t expected such a dramatic explosion. Todd recalled from a college chemistry course that one gallon of gasoline could have the explosive force of fourteen sticks of dynamite, under optimal conditions. He had expected at best a one-percent yield of the potential explosive force of the six gallons of gas in the house. He knew that most of the gas would simply burn, and that only a fraction would become a true fuel-air explosive. The result, however, was far better than he expected.
A dozen of the troops that had been loitering away from the house when the explosion occurred ran into the shop to escape falling debris. Todd pressed another button on the Mr. Destructo panel. This time, three more cans of gasoline as well as the small remaining quantity of gas in the underground gasoline tank under the shop were detonated. The corrugated roof of the barn flipped over to land back on its base. “That’s good riddance to bad rubbish,” Todd cursed. The fireball from the shop immediately set the barn on fire, too. Fueled by the hay piled up inside, it was soon a mass of flames.
Around the house, the remaining German soldiers were in a panic. Most ran back toward the APCs at the county road. Three of them dived for cover behind a downed tree. Todd gave a thin-lipped smile and consulted his revised sector sketch. He hit another button, firing the fougasse that covered the area behind the fallen tree. It went off with a roar, shredding the three soldiers.
The pair of BTR-70s that were parked in the barnyard started their engines in rapid succession. The few surviving troops near the shop and barn piled into each of them. As they started toward the road, the 14.5 mm machine-gunner in one of the APCs fired his weapon in angry long bursts. Todd estimated that he fired more than a hundred rounds at the nearby hilltops. Two gunners in BTRs on the county road picked up the cue and began pouring fire into the Ander-son’s house and barn across the road.
As the first of the two BTR-70s neared the county road, Todd watched carefully through his binoculars. When he thought their position looked right, he triggered the vertical fougasse. At first Todd thought that he had hit the button too early, since the explosion went off under the BTR’s front wheels. The twenty-two-thousand-pound vehicle didn’t move perceptibly upward with the blast. The APC continued to roll forward briefly, then stopped. Smoke began billowing out of it. Some of the German soldiers ran toward the BTR. Two of them opened one of the back doors, hoping to help any survivors get out. They were greeted only by deep red flames and clouds of thick black smoke.
The fire in the APC grew more intense. By now, twenty German soldiers were milling around the back of the burning BTR-70. The BTR’s rubber wheels caught fire, and then the 14.5 mm rounds and grenades inside the APC
began to cook off. Fearing the explosions, the gaggle of soldiers instinctively backpedaled up the Grays’ driveway. Todd couldn’t believe his luck. He reached down and punched the button for the first of the fougasses that Mike had built. Chunks of scrap metal, short lengths of chain, and broken glass ripped through the cluster of soldiers, cutting down nine of them at once, like a huge invisible djinn hand. The survivors from this blast ran to the remaining intact BTRs, dragging two wounded soldiers with them.
All along the road, the drivers of the BTR-70s fired up their engines. Most of the 14.5 mm gunners rotated their turrets, firing in long wild bursts at the tree lines, mainly to the east. The AGS-17 gunners joined in, firing their thirty-millimeter automatic grenade launchers in seemingly random fusillades. The firing went on for several minutes. Todd smiled and laughed out loud, overwhelmed by the enormity of the expenditure of ammunition that was going on at the road below. Todd could also see fully-automatic small-arms fire coming from the firing ports on several of the BTRs.
The grenades and 14.5 mm tracers were igniting sporadic grass and brush fires. He realized that any moment one of the grenades might land next to him, but still he laughed. To his surprise, none of the rounds came within fifty yards of his position. Scanning with his binoculars, Todd could see the APCs remained parked during the firing. The Andersen’s house and barn, he saw, were now fully engulfed in flames. In the midst of the roar of gunfire Todd susserated, “Go ahead. Burn up your ammo. Knock yourselves out. You’re as green as grass. Sound and fury, hitting nothing. Burn it up! Burn it up boys. As for me, I think I’ll save my ammo for precisely aimed fire at distinct targets, thank you very much.”
After a while, the tempo of firing noticeably slackened and then nearly stopped. Todd fired off the remaining fougasses in rapid succession, even though there were no targets in front of them. Todd laughed and mockingly whispered to himself, “Vee are surrounded!” The gunners on the BTRs started shooting wildly again, and there was even more intense small-arms fire from the gun ports. Finally, the rate of fire slacked off again, and the column of BTR-70s started up the road, leaving the burning BTR behind. A few of the gunners still fired off unaimed bursts to either side of the road. Todd watched through his Steiners as they continued up the road until
they were out of sight.
“Run away! Run away!” Todd mouthed soundlessly. Todd heard their engines gradually receding in the distance. Then, all that he could hear was the crackle and occasional pop of the fires. Dozens of small brush fires were blazing in a thousand-yard semicircle around the remains of Todd’s house.
Todd waited and watched. Most of the brush fires burned out quickly. A few on the drier southern-facing hillsides continued to burn longer. These too burned out when they reached the ridge tops. Luckily, none of them had been immediately below his position. The valley was still largely shrouded in smoke.
As sunset approached, the fires at his house and at the Andersen’s house were nearly out. They were still smoking heavily, but there were just a few spots of open flames.
• • •
Two hours after it was dark, Todd quietly disconnected the WD-1 wires from the Mr. Destructo panel, and wrapped it in his poncho.
He shouldered his pack and picked up the panel and his rifle. The smell of smoke was heavy in the air. Todd snorted quietly to clear his nostrils. He realized that the Germans might have left a “stay behind,” so he didn’t dare try to approach the house site to look for abandoned weapons. That could wait for another day. Todd silently and methodically started to hike in a circuitous route toward Valley Forge.
As he strode on, he quietly hummed the tune of one of his favorite songs, an old Shaker hymn, “How Can I Keep From Singing?” popularized by Enya.
As he walked, the tune and the lyrics rolled over and over in his mind, in cadence with his steps:
My life goes on in endless song
above Earth’s lamentations,
I hear the real, though far-off hymn
that hails a new creation.
Through all the tumult and the strife
I hear its music ringing,
It sounds an echo in my soul.
How can I keep from singing?
While though the tempest loudly roars,
I hear the truth, it liveth.
And though the darkness round me close,
Songs in the night it giveth.
No storm can shake my inmost calm,
while to that rock I’m clinging.
Since love is Lord of heav’n and earth
How can I keep from singing?
When tyrants tremble in their fear
And hear their death knell ringing,
When friends rejoice both far and near
How can I keep from singing?
In prison cell and dungeon vile
our thoughts to them are winging,
when friends by shame are undefiled
how can I keep from singing?
CHAPTER 26
Dan’s War
“Unus quisque sua noverit ire via.”
—Properitus
Dan Fong heard about the approaching troops while he was having his breakfast. The next-door neighbor’s teenage girl burst into the kitchen and exclaimed, “They say on the CB that there are Federal and UN tanks in Moscow and they are shooting at anything that moves, and searching house to house.”
Stepping outside, he could hear what sounded like artillery or perhaps tank main guns firing occasionally, far in the distance. Dan kissed his wife, snatched up his HK91, and dashed out the door. He was heading for the Town Hall.
The freeholders’ council had an impromptu meeting. It took only forty minutes to decide what to do, but not until after a lot of arguing. It wasn’t until it was made clear that there were seven thousand troops headed north and that they were burning everything in their path that the voices of dissent were silenced. The town council decided that Potlatch would be evacuated immediately. It was agreed that to stay put would invite attention and inevitably the wrath of the Federals. The wilderness to the east of town was vast and thickly wooded. The entire population of Potlatch, roughly four hundred people, could simply walk a few miles into woods and escape notice.
Dan spent the rest of the day helping to coordinate the evacuation. He assigned his deputy the responsibility of policing the evacuees and making sure that every house was evacuated by noon the following day. He sent almost all of his storage food and the majority of his guns and ammo with his wife and adopted children, who planned to follow on horseback behind her father’s flatbed diesel truck. It was one of only three trucks in town that was still running. All of the others that were running were diesels too. The lack of reliable gasoline and the lack of spare parts had resigned the rest of the vehicles in town to the category of scrap.
Dan spent some time making plans with his wife and saying his goodbyes.
With the children out of earshot, he quietly confided to his wife that he had less than a fifty-fifty chance of living through the next few days. As sheriff, he said, he was charged with upholding the law and protecting both lives and free-held property in Potlatch. Dan had decided that he would stay to carry on with his job. Cindy didn’t argue with her husband. She kissed him, and implored sweetly, “I love you, Dan. Do your best to live through this. Don’t make me a widow all over again. I’ll leave word where you can find me and the kids.” With that, she slung Dan’s well-worn HK91 across her back, and mounted their Morgan mare, Babe. She added, “Don’t worry, I’m in good company. I’ve got Mister Heckler and Mister Koch to protect me.”
Dan laughed. It was a favorite joke of theirs. He asked, “And Colonel Colt?” Cindy smiled and replied, “Yes, indeed, and Mister Sykes and Mister Fairbairn, for good measure. Keep your powder dry, Dan. I love you.” Cindy Fong turned to wave several times as she rode away.
Dan now had very few of his household belongings left in Potlatch. His Toyota pickup truck had broken down nearly a year before, and was sitting immobile behind a neighbor’s barn. The truck needed a new water pump, and despite his searching for many months, he could not locate one.
By nightfall, aside from Fong, the town was deserted. Based on what he heard on the CB, Dan calculated that he would probably have one day, or perhaps even two, to prepare.
Fong picked the military crest of a hill eighteen hundred yards southeast of the center of Potlatch. It had a commanding view of the valley below. Carrying his two most prized long guns and the rest of his gear took three exhausting trips. Fong spent twenty-five minutes disassembling, cleaning, oiling, reassembling, and reloading the two guns that he’d brought with him. The last step in the process was cleaning their optics with lens paper and a camelhair brush. He had test fired and re-zeroed both guns just a month before.
The first was the fiberglass bedded McMillan .50 caliber bolt-action repeater. There were still eighty-six rounds of ammunition left for it. The other rifle was his green composite stocked Steyr SSG .308 Winchester. It was a standard 1980s vintage SSG with double set triggers. Two years before the Crunch, Dan had mounted it with a three-to-nine-power Trijicon scope with a 56-mm objective lens. This scope used special crosshairs that were lit by vials of radioactive tritium gas. By turning a selector ring, it could be quickly switched to a green, red, or amber crosshair. In daylight, there were also settings for a standard black crosshair, or a magenta crosshair that was lit by a daylight-gathering dome on top of the rear portion of the scope. Dan often praised the Trijicon as “the next best thing to a Starlight scope for night shooting.”
The only modification that Dan made to the SSG was the addition of a DTA brand three-prong flash hider. Long before the Crunch, he sent the barreled action of the rifle off to Holland’s of Oregon for the gunsmithing.
Holland’s cut one-half-by-twenty-eight threads on the muzzle, and installed one of their patented muzzle brakes. Dan was not so much interested in recoil reduction as he was the ability to mount a flash hider. He thought that a flash hider might attract suspicion in “peacetime,” so he normally kept the less controversial muzzle brake installed. He always kept the DTA flash hider handy in the SSG’s case before the Crunch, “just in case.”
He completed the cleaning tasks just as it was getting dark. He rolle
d out his sleeping bag and immediately fell into a deep sleep. He spent half of the next day digging a small fighting position for himself, and camouflaging it with half of an army surplus “diamond” camouflage net. Then he went halfway down the back side of the ridge and dug a trench that was five feet long, ten inches wide, and twenty inches deep. He left his Austrian-made SSG rifle beside the hole in the McMillan’s Pelican case with just one latch closed. Then he picked out a secondary fighting position three-fourths of the way up the next ridge. He was nearly exhausted by the time he finished digging the second foxhole. Luckily, as with the two previous holes, he encountered only a few hand-sized rocks. He finished camouflaging this last hole just before it got dark. For it, he used the other half of the diamond net for camouflage. Dan left his pack in the bottom of the hole, and quietly walked back to his primary position in the darkness. There, he curled up in his poncho and poncho liner and soon fell asleep.
When he awoke just after dawn, his first task was to systematically observe the area with his binoculars. He couldn’t see any movement in or near town.
He could, however, hear what sounded like cannon or mortar fire, far to the southwest. Dan kneeled to pray silently. He quietly recited the Lord’s Prayer. He scanned Potlatch and the county road through his binoculars. He prayed some more. Fong stood up and nodded to himself. He knew what he had to do.
He was confident that the McMillan was still zeroed, since he had moved it only in its heavily padded Pelican case. He was more concerned about the zero of his SSG, since he had carried it on a sling from his house to the hilltop. He’d been careful to not knock into the scope while moving it, but he would have been more comfortable if he’d had the opportunity to confirm point of impact. With the hostiles so close, he didn’t want to make any noise that could betray his presence.