Parting Gifts
Page 30
“Alright, George. Why don’t you shoot that APC in the front there? That could jam up the others so that they cannot get any closer to us. I’ve got one of those OG-7 anti-personnel grenades ready for you to use on the ones that get out too.”
George stood up with little more than his head and shoulders above the edge of the foxhole that he and Marion had been fighting from. Then George quickly, but carefully, aimed his RPG at the APC that Marion had pointed out and then fired. Both George and Marion quickly ducked down into their foxhole after firing because the large white cloud of smoke from the rocket propellant had spotlighted their firing point. The two militiamen wanted to be protected from the return fire that was bound to soon be on their way.
The militiamen heard a loud explosion on the front lines, then Melanie’s voice over the militia’s short-range communications network.
“You hit that APC pretty good with that RPG.”
George carefully lifted his head up just enough to see over the lip of his foxhole. He saw white smoke billowing out of the jihadi vehicle’s hatches while several of the crew attempted to bail out of their crippled vehicle. He could also see the scorched point on the vehicle’s fore side that was blackened from where the RPG’s warhead had struck. George also saw something else that made him quickly duck back down out of sight.
“Quick! Give me another grenade. We’ve got one of those damned APCs coming right towards us. The bastards must have seen our backblast from when we fired. Some of their dismounted infantry are also coming this way too.”
Marion handed George another PG-7 round, but was also preparing something else of his own to help defend their position.
Several of the militiamen had purchased 37mm flare launchers that they had attached to their rifles. Prior to the invasion, the Federal Government had forbidden the possession of anti-personnel projectiles that could be fired from these launchers. The combination of the launcher and these rounds were considered to be a ‘destructive device’ and subject to significant fees and regulations. But since the invasion basically put all such regulations on hold, it didn’t take long for the militia to come up with a variety of lethal rounds for use with these launchers.
Marion had attached one of these flare launchers onto his AR-15 before the battle. Now, he slid the barrel forward to open the launcher’s breech. Then, he inserted what was essentially a large flechette round before sliding the barrel forward in preparation for firing.
George quickly loaded the RPG and carefully stood up to take aim at the incoming armored vehicle. At the same time, Marion also stood up, carefully leaned forward against the front berm of the foxhole and carefully aimed his rifle and attached launcher towards a group of jihadists about a hundred meters away trying to outflank another couple of fellow militiamen.
At almost the same instant that George fired his RPG, Marion also fired his launcher. Immediately following the bang of the launcher’s propellant charge, it sounded like a swarm of angry bees in front of Marion as the flechettes raced towards the jihadist dismounts. Suddenly, half a dozen of the attackers fell backwards onto the ground. Marion and George could hear the screams of the enemy wounded that had been impaled by the tiny steel darts even above the din of the battle. But there was nothing that the two militiamen could do except reload and continue to defend their position.
A second APC also skidded to a halt after George’s RPG scored a hit on its engine compartment. The jihadist infantrymen bailed out of the disabled vehicle and tried to find cover from the militia’s deadly fire.
Even though the militiamen and the two snipers were taking a toll upon the jihadist attackers, many of the attackers were still pressing forward with the use of the tanks and other armored vehicles. The limited number of direct-fire anti-armor weapons possessed by the militia simply could not stop the jihadi armor.
“You have some air cover on the way now.” Sheryl Carter, one of the workers from the Barnes factory, radioed from the town’s command post.
“You were able to contact the Air Force?” Jeff quickly asked.
“No. We just have some assets of our own moving up to support. Just try not to shoot at them on the way out, please.” Came the curious reply.
A swarm of ten dark grey-painted drones lifted off from a nearby field to the east of town and raced towards the front lines. Each of the drones was kept in the air by eight small, but powerful, electric motors powered by a rechargeable lithium-ion battle. Four of the radio-controlled drones carried clusters of armed grenades, both anti-personnel and anti-tank. But all of the others carried a modified 6.5mm AR-15 rifle that was bore-sighted to a video camera. The rifle had been stripped of its buttstock, handguards and even its pistol grip in order to reduce its weight so that it could hold an 88 round drum magazine and still be carried by the drone.
Jeff heard the faint buzzing sound of the drones’ electric motors and quickly turned around. About thirty seconds later, he saw the drones flying just over the treetops towards him.
“So they finally got those armed drones working, I guess.” Jeff commented as the drones buzzed quickly overhead towards the west.
One of the drones flew towards one of the enemy tanks and then hovered just about twenty meters over the top of it. A few seconds later, a metal cylinder that was about twenty centimeters in diameter dropped down from the drone, trailing a small cloth parachute to stabilize it. Barely visible below the object, a weighted pair of wires dangled below it. As soon as the wires touched the top of the tank, the cylinder exploded. It looked like an instantly formed white-hot blowtorch extended down from the cylinder and hit the top of the tank. A couple of seconds later, the tank itself began to burn, a white hot jet of flame over ten meters high roaring out of the commander’s hatch that had blown open from the explosion. The drone immediately flew back to its launch point after dropping its anti-tank grenade payload to be rearmed for another mission.
Many of the militia soldiers cheered at the sight of the Caliphate tank brewing up. Caliphate troops fired machine guns at the sources of the cheering. But that only briefly ended the exultation that the defenders of Ashley felt.
“Well, I’ll be damned. That must have been one of those anti-tank grenades that they were working on at the Barnes factory. They were using some sort of explosively formed penetrator, weren’t they?”
“It seems that they did get them to work quite well.”
The clatter of weapons fire drew Jeff and his fellow militia soldiers to look back at the advancing jihadist force. Jeff saw several of the drones firing their 6.5mm rifles down at the attackers, forcing them to take cover. Jeff was surprised to hear the drone-mounted weapons firing in automatic mode.”
“I didn’t know that we had been producing fully-automatic firearms for those drones at the Barnes factory, not that I am complaining.”
“There were some people out in DC who still didn’t like the idea of new automatic firearms being produced for ‘civilian’ use. I guess that our folks decided that due to the nature of the emergency here that the rules concerning automatic weapons didn’t apply any longer. At least the operators of those drones were smart enough to fire in short bursts still so that they wouldn’t run out of ammunition too quickly.”
“Well. Folks. We need to do our part too, not just sit here gawking like spectators at a ball game. Let’s see what we can do about sweeping around their flanks and hitting those jihadists where they are not looking now.”
“Can we employ our mortars now, Sir?” Samantha Tatro asked. The busty brunette in her late-thirties had been working on the gas-fueled mortars at the factory from the beginning and was eager to try them out again against the people who had captured the small town in northeast Indiana where she had originally been from.
“I don’t think so, at least not yet. I know about the idea of big skies and small shells, but those drones are fairly irreplaceable right now. So I don’t want to take a chance on one of your mortar rounds knocking down a drone of ours. So hold off on f
iring your mortars until our drones withdraw for reloading. OK?”
Sam nodded her head.
“I know what else we can do. Let’s get those shoulder-mounted grenade launchers that the Barnes’ designed up here. We can probably inflict a pretty heavy toll on those guys out there while they are trying to deal with our drones. We are already just about out of ammunition for the RPGs that we captured earlier.”
“Yea. Hopefully, we have been able to make some more ammunition for the launchers. The launchers are supposed to be based on the RPG anyway, I believe.”
“Yes, they are. In fact, our launchers are supposed to be able to use the same ammunition as pretty much every RPG-7 variant that has been constructed. Building the launcher has always been the easy part. Making the ammunition has always been the stumbling block. Hopefully, we will be able to obtain more RPG ammunition to use with our own launchers though.”
More of the drone-delivered anti-tank grenades began to drop upon enemy vehicles, most of the time either destroying the vehicle or crippling it. For all intents and purposes, a crippled vehicle was a dead one since it began to take fire from militia rocket launchers.
“The jihadists are getting out of their vehicles now. I think that our drones have forced them to decide that the risk outside of their vehicles is less than the risk of dying inside of them.”
“That will give our automatic rifle drones a chance to eliminate some of their infantry then.”
Samantha had also seen the movement of jihadist infantry outside of their vehicles on her monitors also. Instantly, she turned to her fellow drone controllers.
“Focus on attacking with your rifle drones now. We need to take out as many of those bastards as possible now. Remember, fire in short bursts. ”
“Roger that, Sam. We’ve got them moving in now. I’ll have our drone mechanics load up fragmentation grenades when our grenade drones come back for reloading and replacing their batteries.
Within a couple of minutes, the jihadists quickly learned that the last thing that they would hear would be the puzzling sound of a hovering drone above them before it fired its automatic rifle or dropped a cluster of hand grenades upon its target. There were no safe places for the enemy attackers. Their morale was at the tipping point. But something else needed to happen now.
“Pull back the drones for rearming and tell our mortar crews to start firing smoke and HE now.” Jeff quickly ordered after several of the rifle-armed drones were reported to be out of ammunition or nearly so. He saw the enemy force wavering now from seeing the images coming from the drones’ videocameras. They could not move forward without losing many more of their troops. But at the same time, they had not yet been broken to the point that they would retreat either.
The mortar rounds began to now drop right on top of the jihadists less than a minute later. The invaders could hear the rounds coming in. That sound quickly terrified them. When the smoke rounds also began landing, a few of the jihadists thought that perhaps they were being hit by poison gas rounds too because a few of the mortar rounds contained tear gas or CS powder.
Finally, the Caliphate force began to withdraw. Eight of the jihadi tanks had already been disabled by militia rocket fire and explosive devices. So the firepower that the attackers had counted on had largely been neutralized. At first, the movement to the rear was slow and measured as the invaders tried to use whatever cover was available to protect them from militia fire. But the mortar rounds kept coming in. When the mortars stopped firing, then the drones came back to strike again and again. Finally, the Caliphate troops broke and ran for the rear. Many of them tossed down their weapons in their haste to find a place of safety.
Before the invaders finally slipped back to behind the cover of the woods with their surviving vehicles, they left behind the wreckage of nine M-60’s, seven trucks and more than a dozen M-113’s in the fields to the west of Ashley. The withdrawal of the jihadists also left the Ashley militia in control of the entire battlefield.
“That was a hell of a thing to do, attacking us in broad daylight. What did they think that they would accomplish? They had to know that we could see them coming almost as soon as they got past that tree line out there.” Alan sadly asked as he looked over the wreckage-strewn battlefield, smoke still drifting in the air from both the mortar rounds and the burning jihadi vehicles.
“I imagine that a lot of the people that the Caliphate has recruited for this war don’t have much experience fighting at night, even if they have decent night vision equipment. Fighting at night is a very frightening experience because you can’t see very far. You don’t know if the enemy is right next to you when you walk past, ready to cut your throat from behind or if there is a machine gun set up right in front of you. You feel your heart up in your throat at the first sound of a twig crackling as someone steps on it. Then you have to decide whether or not to freeze, keep moving forward or turn around and run back.
Perhaps also the Caliphate felt that it could control its troops a lot better in the daylight than at night also? You can see who is actually attacking and who has frozen in fear, unable to will himself to get up and move towards an enemy that is shooting at you. Like Stalin from the Second World War, I’m sure that the Caliphate has ways of motivating reluctant troops the hard way.” Jeff grimly replied as he stood there surveying that same battlefield with a pair of binoculars.
“We are going to need to go out there and see what we can salvage from those vehicles and the dead Caliphate troops, Sir.”
“I agree, Alan. But we are going to have to wait until tonight to go out there. I know that we have enough people here with night vision optics so that we can see what we are doing without having to use lights. We’ve also got the better part of a full moon tonight as well. That will help us working on those wrecks. But at the same time, if the jihadists decide to try to slip a few snipers up, they can perhaps see us as well in the moonlight.”
“I think that we gave the jihadists a big enough bloody nose that they will be too busy trying to get reorganized before trying anything else. But we could probably rig up some night vision optics on one of our drones to keep an eye out for infiltrators too, just in case.”
“That sounds like a very good idea, Alan. You and the others better get yourself some sleep though. I have a feeling that it’s going to be a very busy night tonight.”
“Then you better get some sleep yourself, Jeff. You look like you could use it.”
“I will. Trust me, I will. Melanie will make sure of it, I’m sure.” Jeff said with a weary laugh.
During the following night, the militia could hear the occasional crackle of rifle fire off in the distance. Small groups of militiamen led by their commander were moving through the wreckage of the jihadist vehicles at the same time to try to salvage any additional weapons and ammunition. But none of the gunfire that they heard was being fired anywhere near the militia salvage parties.
“What in the hell are they shooting at? None of those shots are coming anywhere near us.” Marion asked.
“I can’t be sure. But we did hear some rumors about the jihadists executing some of their own soldiers for retreating rather than fighting to the death. That’s a lot like what the Russians would do to their troops during the Second World War, especially their penal battalions. The Bolsheviks would set up machine guns behind those troops and shoot anyone who retreated for any reason.” Jeff quietly replied as the group moved forward among the dead jihadists.
“Take a look, Jeff. A lot of these dead guys are Americans, not Arabs or even Asians. What the hell do they think that they are doing fighting against fellow Americans?”
“I don’t know, Marion. Maybe if we find one alive out here, we can ask. But for right now, let’s focus on our mission here. We need every rifle, bullet, grenade and anything else that is not tied down to bring back to use.”
Jeff sadly shook his head as he saw the underweight, tattooed young man lying on the ground in a pool of his own blood.
“Maybe they now know the difference between an AR-15 and an M-16. It looks like these folks got issued their rifles and ammunition from the California Army National Guard.” George said as he picked up a rifle and bandolier from one of the dead enemy soldiers.
“Yea. But they are the old 5.56mm versions, not the 6.5mm that we use.” Marion commented after closely looking at one of the ammunition magazines.
“We’ll take what we can get, guys. Anyone find anything heavier?” Jeff asked over the militia’s short range radios that everyone on the salvage teams carried.
“I’ve got some grenades here…”
“We’ve got a couple of RPG’s and some ammunition for them….”
“When you have all that you can carry, take them back to our lines and then come back here for more.” Jeff ordered as more reports of salvage came in.
“Hey, Sir. One of these tanks only has a busted track. Is there any way that we can put it back together and take it home with us?” One of the militiamen reported.
Jeff got the location and moved there to inspect it himself. The tank had been hit by a militia rocket launcher on its left hand track and disabled. The crew apparently bailed out in the smoke and confusion, leaving behind a basically intact vehicle.
Jeff looked over the vehicle for a couple of minutes then asked over the radio.
“Anyone here have any experience putting together tank tracks?”
Unfortunately, no one there had ever worked on a tank before. A couple had some experience working on a bulldozer, but the tracks on an M-60 tank were significantly different. It would take every one of them to try to get that track back on the bogies and linked together with one of the spare track segments.