Patriots

by James Wesley, Rawles

  The corporal bent down to search Fong’s body, which was still partially stiff with rigor mortis. It took considerable effort to pry the rifle from his cold, dead hands.

  CHAPTER 27

  Abrams

  “The time to guard against corruption and tyranny is before they shall have gotten hold of us. It is better to keep the wolf out of the fold than to trust to drawing his teeth and talons after he shall have entered.”

  —Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia

  All the members had been briefed on the Abrams tank. Months before, Jeff Trasel gave the Northwest Militia and some of the other local militias a series of briefings on armored vehicles, using his Jane’s books and Army field manuals such as FM 17-15 Tank Platoon, for reference. Seeing some of the tanks up close was another matter. To Todd, they looked ominous and frightening.

  • • •

  Jeff began his M1 briefing, “The M1A1 Abrams tank was the principal tank of the United States Army and Marine Corps before the Crunch. The M1A1 weighs sixty-seven-and-a-half tons. It is just over thirty-two feet long, twelve feet wide, and nine-feet-six-inches high. It can travel at forty-two miles an hour with the governor on, and even faster if the governor is disabled, as some tankers are known to do. I don’t know how things are now, but doing that before the Crunch was grounds for an Article 15 disciplinary action. The M1 tank can climb a vertical obstacle forty-nine inches high.

  “When the first Abrams tanks were fielded in 1983, as the ‘M1,’ they were equipped with a 105-mm main gun. Variants produced since 1986 (the M1A1) were fitted with a M256 120-mm main gun. The bigger gun was an outgrowth of the escalating armor add-on cold war between the NATO countries and the former Soviet Union. As each side added more and more armor to their tanks, they saw the need for progressively bigger main guns to punch through all that armor. The normal ammo load is forty rounds for the main gun, and over twelve thousand rounds of ammunition for the machineguns, mainly 7.62-mm NATO for the coax.”

  “The armor on the Abrams is impressive. ‘Chobham’ layered armor panels are installed on the glacis and turret. In addition to the main belt of armor, there are also armored bulkheads between turret and engine, and special ‘blow out’ panels over the main gun ammunition compartment. M1s built after 1988 also have depleted uranium armor beneath the Chobham panels. Those are M1A2s. I suppose they weigh even more than the M1A1 model, but I couldn’t find a spec on that.

  “The M1 series tanks are powered by Avco-Lycoming AGT-1500 turbine engines. This fifteen-hundred-horsepower turbine gives the tank its distinctive quiet whining noise that can be heard above the sound of the treads when the wind is right. One interesting point is that it uses the same amount of fuel when idling or running fifty miles an hour cross-country. With a turbine, it always burns roughly the same amount of fuel. Needless to say, depots are often easier targets, if available. So when you have the chance, the best way to stop a platoon of M1 tanks is to take away their refueling infrastructure.

  “There are several high technology goodies on an M1A2. They include GPS navigation systems, which could be working, assuming that the GPS satellites have been in stable orbits for the past four years. They also have a digital inter-vehicular information system, commonly referred to by its acronym, IVIS. With maintenance likely degraded, the IVIS systems probably won’t be working, but their FM radios probably will. The laser range finders may or may not be working at this point. Also, of greater concern are the gunners’ thermal imaging sight and a commander’s Independent Thermal Viewer. Both of these can literally see heat. They are optimized for detecting the heat of vehicle engines, but they can see human body heat. I strongly suspect, however, that the thermal sights won’t be working, due to the limited useful life and fragility of their sensor heads.

  “In addition to the main gun, the Abrams carries a coaxially mounted 7.62-mm machinegun, a Browning M2 .50-caliber machinegun for the commander, and another 7.62-mm machinegun—the M240—for the loader. In all, the tank normally carries a crew of four.

  “Tankers seldom operate alone. A single tank is very vulnerable to getting enveloped by infantry, particularly in limiting terrain. The tank platoon is the smallest maneuver element within a tank company. Organized to fight as a unified element, the platoon consists of four main battle tanks organized into two sections, with two tanks in each section. Tanks are normally accompanied by infantry for local security. On the march, they talk back and forth on SINCGARS VHF radios. The SINCGARS are frequency-hopping radios, but under the current circumstances, I’ll bet that they are operating on fixed frequencies, and possibly without encryption.

  “When they are in laager, they use field telephones, especially if they’ve stopped for more than a few hours. Count on it. The tanks have telephone boxes on the back for communicating with infantrymen. The infantry have digital field phones—sort of like ours—for when they are dismounted, and telephones boxes like the tankers’ on their APCs like the M113s, M2s, and M3s. For some reason, when the Army designed the M1 tank, unlike the older M60 tank, they forgot to run cabling from the main commo panel inside, called an AM-1780, to the phone box, so their crews have to run WD-1 wire through the loader’s hatch or one of the vision blocks and attach it to a field phone on the back of the tank.

  “The M1 tank has vulnerabilities just like any other tank. When they are getting pinged with a lot of small-arms fire, they button up and pull in the thermal viewers so they don’t get their optics shot up. That limits their visibility. That’s when they have greater difficulty acquiring targets, maneuvering on rough terrain, or spotting approaching infantry. One other thing to consider is that although they carry a huge supply of ammo, they don’t have an unlimited supply of vision ports. They carry spares, but if you keep shooting out the ports, or obscuring them by spray painting them, for example, eventually they’ll be blind.

  “Inside, tankers carry full-length M16s for crew protection from crunchies.” Jeff detected a few puzzled looks and clarified, “Tankers call anyone dismounted ‘crunchies.’ That’s tanker humor. Since M16s are ungainly to shoot out of a tank hatch, they don’t have much more than the tank commander’s Beretta nine-mil pistol for a ‘get off my tank’ weapon—hardly an ideal tool for the job. A stubby submachinegun or a perhaps a compact riotgun would work far better. In case a tank gets enveloped by infantry, the crew usually depends on co-ax machinegun fire from other tanks in the platoon to hose the crunchies off. It’s a mutual support function.

  “Oh yes, one other design flaw of the M1 that I should mention is that it doesn’t have a bottom escape hatch like its predecessors, the M48 and the M60. Despite its shortcomings, however, the M1 Abrams is a very tough nut to crack.”

  Mary asked, “If their armor is so tough, how do we stop them?”

  Jeff replied, “Well, like Mike Carney used to say on the shortwave,‘They’ve got to get out and pee, sometime.’ The best time to destroy a tank is when it is parked somewhere in a garrison or kasserne setting, unoccupied. The only other halfway decent time would be when a tank is in the field, but parked.

  Then you might have a chance to take out the sentries and do a thermite number on it. If tanks are in motion, traveling in mutual support, and carrying live rounds, you can pretty well forget it unless you want to take a tremendous number of casualties.

  “The five most susceptible targets on M1s are, number one: the ammo storage blow-out panels. These are on the back of the turret. They are often covered with strapped-down bags of camouflage nets and other gear. This works to your advantage. You can get on the back deck and shove a thermite grenade between and under the bags. If they are strapped down well, they’ll interrupt the operation of the blow-out panels causing blow back into the turret.Very nasty.

  “Number two: The fuel cells. You can see the two rear covers on either fender. Pull the pins, open the caps, drop the grenade in one of the strainers, jump, and run like crazy. Leave both caps open for propagation. The right tank is the one I wou
ld choose since if the fire doesn’t get the whole tank, it will get the battery box and electronics routing box, which are right next to the right fuel tank.

  “Number three: The loader’s hatch, which is on left side of the turret. It is the thinnest bit of armor on the whole tank.

  “Number four: The Tank Commander’s hatch. The TC’s hatch is relatively thin, just like the loader’s, and has a conveniently provided lip to keep the grenade from rolling off if the hatch is battened down. If by chance it isn’t battened down, throw in a frag grenade and follow it with gunfire! If the crew has the hatch in the open position but aren’t sitting up in it, they are too stupid to live a full life anyway.

  “And five: The engine cover, in the center of the back deck. It’s a big, thinly armored target. Again, a thermite grenade will go right through it.

  “Now remember boys and girls, if you are destroying a parked or otherwise unoccupied M1, don’t forget to reach over and switch the M2 .50 cal to safe, and then you can pull the two pins on the left side and take it home as a souvenir! Of course, the back plate on the tank model is different than the standard ground model. There are no spade grips, and the charging system is on the left. But we have friends in the Moscow Maquis that happen to have a couple of spare standard M2 back plate assemblies, and at least one spare tripod with pintle. That’ll be fun. And naturally you’ll want to take as much ammo as you can before you burn up the tank. Ditto for any other stored gear, if tactical conditions allow you time to haul it.

  “Another hint: If the commander has his hatch in the ‘open-protected’ position and the loader’s M240 is mounted and has ammo, take the M240, shove the muzzle through the opening under the edge of the TC’s hatch, and spray away. The bullets will bounce around very nicely inside that spam can and make Swiss cheese out of most of the crew. You can even use your personal weapon if necessary, but the Provisional government provides a machinegun and in most cases a long belt of ammo for just such purposes, so why not use it?

  “Oh yes, I should also mention that there are also two small lifting holes, one on each side of the tank commander’s weapons station—the demi-turret—which go all the way through. You can fire into these holes if the TC is buttoned up.

  “Most of the techniques that I’ve just described involve climbing onto the tank. This should be done only if the beast is stationary. Never try to climb on a moving M1 series! Likewise, never try playing Tarzan and dropping or jumping onto it from a tree, overhang, overpass, or nearby bank. We will discuss some standoff techniques next time. Any other questions?”

  • • •

  In the dim moonlight on that July evening, Todd looked at the four Abrams tanks parked on the other side of the rise, and remembered Jeff’s question. He belatedly asked himself in a whisper, “Yeah, Jeff, how do I get close to these monsters without getting myself killed?” He crept back down the reverse side of the hill and consulted with the others, quietly.

  At just before 2 a.m., Todd reconnoitered the area around the tanks. Moving slowly and stealthily, the reconnaissance took nearly an hour. Curiously, he found no nearby infantry, and no sentries posted. He went back to brief the others and attach longer fuses to the grenades.

  The crews inside the tanks were asleep. The tankers had become lackadaisical in their campaign across the western states. They had long since decided that the biggest threat that they would face was a high-powered rifle, perhaps something like a .375 H&H Magnum. A few .50 calibers were rumored to be floating around, but even those bullets bounced off an M1. The worst a .50 BMG could reportedly do was, by luck, jam a tank’s turret ring with a well-placed shot.

  The tankers didn’t bother posting a guard, even though it was a violation of their official SOP. They had a saying, “There’s a time for SOPs, and then there’s real world operations.” Except in extremely hot weather, the tankers slept “buttoned up” with their ballistic doors closed. Feeling virtually invulnerable under the current circumstances, some of them had also lost the habit of collocating with infantry at night. The infantry was noisy, frequently begged for extra food and smokes, and always woke the tankers up before dawn for “stand to.” The general consensus among the tankers was that the infantry could take a flying leap. More and more, the tankers laagered by themselves.

  At precisely 3:10 a.m., Todd, Mary, and Jeff lit the fuses of eight thermite grenades, on cue. There was one over a blow-out panel, and one on the engine cover of each tank. They taped them down with long strips of duct tape that they had cut in advance and wrapped around their pant legs. The tape ensured that once the thermite reaction started, the grenades would not roll off the tanks from the force of the venting molten metal. They walked away quietly at first, and then they ran. After they crested the top the hill and had starting down the reverse side, Todd whispered to Mary, “I feel like I’m playing ding-dong ditch-it.”

  Mary replied with a low laugh, “Ding-dong, thermite calling.” After they had jogged on a few more yards, she added, “I’m glad we had that extra cannon fuse with us, so we could extend the fuses. I want to be a long, long way off when they go off.” They didn’t stop running until they were more than nine hundred yards away, on a ridge in heavy brush.

  The automatic Halon fire suppression systems were turned off in three of the four tanks. They had been disabled by the crew because they had a tendency to go off unexpectedly. Even if they had all been working, the fire suppression systems wouldn’t have helped much. The iron oxide in thermite provides all the oxygen required for the reaction. Thermite will even burn underwater.

  Watching the tanks burn was gratifying. After a few minutes, they heard the deafening explosions of 120-mm shells cooking off. The four fires were still burning intensely as they turned and headed toward the rally point.

  • • •

  The green Laron Star Streak touched down in the meadow and taxied slowly toward the tree line, bouncing slightly on the uneven ground. Ian shut down the engine, pulled up his goggles and shouted, “I need a reload and about three gallons of gas!” He put the “safing” pin in the firing lever for the M16s and crawled out, over the receiver extension tubes. Doyle hopped out of the plane, and even before the others emerged from the trees, he started punching the release buttons and pulling out the empty magazines. Then he loosened the wing nut for the brass catcher door and shoveled the empty 5.56-mm brass and the empty magazines into a nylon sleeping bag stuff sack. Mary ran up, carrying five loaded thirty-round magazines, and breathed, “These are mixed one-in-three, just like the last ones.”

  Doyle popped each of the fresh magazines into place, and tugged on each to ensure they were firmly latched. He pronounced, “What I want you to do now, please, is go and get me another five spare loaded magazines. That way I can pick out an empty stretch of road somewhere to land and do my next reload by myself, without having to come all the way back here.” Mary quickly did as she was told.

  While she was gone, Doyle pulled back the charging handles of each of the five M16s, and let them fly forward, chambering rounds. Then he reached underneath each rifle and firmly tapped the forward assist buttons with the heel of his hand to ensure that each of the bolts was fully engaged.

  As she poured gas into the main tank at the rear of the fuselage, Margie asked, “How did it go, Ian?”

  “I caught some infantry in the open, and I shot up a couple of slick Bell Hueys on the ground. I made three passes at them from different directions. That was about ten or twelve miles southwest of here. Then I ran out of ammo. I think I got at least twenty guys, and probably made the helicopters unusable. It wasn’t exactly like making a ‘guns run’ in a Falcon, but it works! I got the whole thing on video. I turned the camera on just before I made my first pass, and left it on for the next two passes. I was so pumped that I almost forgot to turn the camera off after I ran out of ammo and started heading back.”

  Mary returned with the extra magazines. As she handed them to Doyle, she said breathlessly, “These have the last of ou
r .223 tracers. They are mixed one-in-five in this batch. Any reloads after these, and you’ll be shooting straight ball.”

  He snapped back, “That’s okay, Mary. I’m getting used to how these guns shoot. I’ll have it down to a science after this sortie. If I open up from two hundred meters at a fifty-mile-an-hour ground speed, I can see the tracers hitting right where I want them. I won’t need the tracers to help me with my aim much longer.” He ran his hands over the wings, tail, and fuselage, searching for new bullet holes. He found none. Doyle handed the sack that held the fired brass and the five empty magazines to Mary, and then stowed the extra magazines in the canvas tool bag at his feet. He smiled and joked, “Well, I gotta go. I’ve got important people to kill!” Less than a minute later, he was airborne, headed west.

  At the same moment, Blanca’s Star Streak was turning sharply, with its left wing pointed straight down at the treetops. Blanca leveled the plane out and began her third strafing run. It was a mixed convoy of Humvees, two-and-a-half-ton, and five-ton trucks, five miles east of Moscow. By now, they were nearly all off to the sides of the road, and their drivers were taking advantage of the scant cover wherever they could find it. With great concentration, she lined up the improvised gun sight and flipped the shift lever, starting the M60 to work.

  She estimated that she had expended at least two hundred rounds each on the two previous runs, so she had about five hundred rounds left. With a ground speed of only forty-miles-per-hour, she had a very stable platform and plenty of time to “paint” all of the trucks in the convoy. She stabbed at the rudder pedals, to keep the nose lined up on each of the trucks as they came in turn before her gun sight. She smiled, finally understanding Ian’s professed love of CAS missions. It was a thrill.