Patriot Dawn: The Resistance Rises (31 page)

Cobb
would have preferred to have kept his men together, but Jack agreed with Jim that this was not a good idea. Granted, the two groups had moved past the trust point by now, the turned Regime soldiers were too far into it to be forgiven by the Regime. However, it was partly to split them up for security reasons, but also to make sure they became integrated into the mindset and experience of the Company, rather than continue in a regular army mindset. Jack’s fighters were after all Resistance fighters who could operate in small teams or alternatively concentrate up to Company level, as they had trained and demonstrated so well.

What Jack agreed to do as a compromise with Cobb was to let him keep each of the
individual squads of the 82
nd
soldiers together. The three squads would be bolted-on to the three infantry platoons. This would mean that they would not follow the exact same model that the fighters had been trained in, and would not be able to operate as IED teams, but they would add value as infantry squads as an asset to each platoon. They could also be used as an organic fire support asset for each platoon, utilizing their support weapons training.

             
Val was in 3
rd
Platoon, and Jack put Cobb and his squad in with her. The two of them had developed a bond since their joint adventure and it seemed like a good idea to keep them together. The second squad went to Caleb’s first platoon and the third one was allocated to 2
nd
Platoon but would wait up at Victor Foxtrot until they rotated out of Zulu Delta.

Duty at Zulu Delta was not exciting. It was good operational patrolling experience, and battle discipline had to be maintained. It was not a camping trip, despite whatever was happening up the valley in Zulu itself; it was a tactical operation.

             
The patrol base itself was defended by a routine of sentry duties, while squads or teams would push out one at a time to conduct patrolling and surveillance activity in the valley.

             
It could be interesting work. The woods were by no means empty, although it was not that frequent that they got hunters or survival groups this far into the hills. They got some though, but if they were out here they tended to be self-reliant hunter types.

             
Zulu, and now Zulu Delta, had always tried to be covert and avoid any attention from travelers or hunters passing through. It posed a dilemma. If a patrol came across anyone, they aimed to remain covert, observe, and report back to base.

             
Occasionally a hunting or survivor party had stumbled into Zulu before Zulu Delta was in place. It posed a problem, even now with the patrol base. What to do with them? So far there had not been any Regime foot patrols – the assumption was that aerial surveillance would be the method of choice - but there had been unaffiliated survivors.

             
It had never led to a firefight because the training of the patrols and sentry positions had so far led to the Resistance getting the drop on any approaching groups. On the rare occasions that they had encountered anyone and been compromised they had ended up detaining and questioning them. In those instances they had absorbed the survivors willingly into Zulu. It had seemed preferable to word getting out and the intercepted survivors had been happy to find food and shelter.

A day or so before 2
nd
Platoon were due to pull out back to Victor Foxtrot, a four man team was out on patrol two kilometers to the north of Zulu Delta. They were patrolling slowly northwards on the slope above the trail that led down to the south to Zulu. They were hand-railing the trail, some hundred meters upslope above it, occasionally stopping to observe the trail through the trees.

             
Mid-morning they moved into the cover of a slight depression in the slope, obscured by some undergrowth, and went into listening watch mode. They had moved just upslope of the small game trail they had actually been following.

             
They were in position for around fifteen minutes when a bird broke cover from the trees in noisy flight some hundred meters to the north. The team tensed and waited, observing. 

             
A short while later some figures came into view on the game trail. They were moving slowly south, following the game trail in single file, apparently doing exactly what the team was doing but in reverse.

             
As they came closer, it was obvious that these were soldiers, but not line infantry. There were four of them and they appeared to be wearing some sort of highly effective non-standard camouflage clothing. They wore plate carrier chest rigs covered in magazine pouches, and they wore it easily in a professional manner that appeared to sit lightly on them. They had daypacks loaded with gear. Their helmets were without fabric covers and cut high, boom mikes extending forwards across their faces. They had Special Operations Forces written all over them.

             
As the team observed, the Regime team stopped and went to one knee. They made no sounds, accomplishing this with a quick hand signal. The point man was observing forwards, scanning the trees with an optic on his weapon. The rear man turned to kneel facing the rear. The center two faced outwards, opposite to each other.

             
The second man appeared to be the leader. He pulled what looked like a GPS out of a pouch and looked at it, then looked around him. Then he pulled some sort of monocular optic out of another pouch. He proceeded to look around, peering up the trail with one eye glued to the device. He then scanned slowly to the flanks, passing the optic towards and then over the position where the Resistance team lay.

             
As the enemy leader’s gaze passed over the team, he barely appeared to pause. There was possibly a slight glitch, the Resistance team leader Billy thought, before he scanned on, obviously dismissing what he thought he may have seen. The enemy leader put the device away. He then quietly tapped his magazine with a finger, getting the attention of the point man who had otherwise not taken his gaze off his forward sector.

             
The enemy leader passed a quick hand signal to go back the way they had come. The patrol peeled back down the trail and headed slowly and deliberately away north back down the game trail. The rear man never looked back.

             
Billy was excited. This was some serious stuff. As soon as the Regime SOF team was out of sight Billy told his team they were going to follow them down the trail and see where they had come from, before reporting back to Zulu Delta. They would not send a real time radio report except after enemy contact, to maintain net security and avoid Regime direction finding, so the report would be verbal on return to base.

             
The team moved out onto the tail and proceeded to patrol north. Billy was on point and he kept catching glimpses of the enemy rear man through the trees, but again he never looked back.

After four hundred meters, Billy emerged round a be
nd in the trail and realized that he had lost sight of the enemy rear man. As he led his team down the trail, there was an area of thicker cover upslope to the right.

The
Resistance patrol never saw it coming. The Regime SOF patrol had broken track ahead and peeled back into the cover above the trail into a hasty ambush. Billy had been trained in the technique by Jack, so he should have known better, but hindsight is a bitch.

The SOF patrol opened up with an ambush weight of fire into Billy’s team at a range of ten meters. All of the team was hit instantly, but due to their body armor it was not fatal for two of them. They managed to return fire, and even we
nt into a break contact drill and tried to peel back down the trail, but the enemy was too close, they were both wounded, and they were shot to the ground.

The
Regime SOF team wanted to capture one of them, but the fighters fought so hard they had no opportunity but to finish them off with rapid fire. The Regime SOF team broke cover to clear their bodies and search them, before calling in the contact to higher.

The grizzled SOF
team leader surveyed the bodies. Addressing his team, he simply said, “Good kill. Let’s move out.”
Aren’t those handheld thermal imagers a bitch. Suckers.

Back at Zulu Delta, they heard the sounds of the firefight echoing around the valley. Stand-to was called and the remaining two and a half squads stood ready in their two man foxholes with overhead protection and thermal screening. There was no ‘troops in contact’ call over the  net from the patrolling team, but the gunfire came from the vicinity of where they had been due to be, so it did not bode well.

             
Concurrently to the SOF patrol’s move up the valley a Reaper unmanned aerial vehicle, a UAV drone, was in the air above the valley. The drone was conducting surveillance and target acquisition in support of the SOF patrol mission to locate Resistance bases. There were in fact multiple patrols in the surrounding area that day but as soon as the contact happened, assets were directed to support it.

There was also an AC-130 Spectre gunship loitering on station to provide support to the SOF patrol mission as required. The gunship had been circling out to the east for a couple of hours to prevent its engine noise alerting anyone down below.

Unfortunately, just as stand-to was called and the platoon at Zulu Delta took up positions in their concealed foxholes, a buddy pair was attending to a call of nature at the latrine. One of them was taking a dump. The drone operator picked them up on his FLIR camera, but it was indistinct through the trees. He watched as they hurried to complete the business and move back to their foxhole, where they promptly disappeared.

As this was going on, the airborne reaction force for the operation was spun up
at the order of Director Woods. The regional ARF hunter-killer company had been moved forward in their Chinooks to the Harrisonburg FOB for the duration of the operation. Director Woods had also asked for more troops, and had been allocated two more Ranger companies from the same battalion, both also now forward based and waiting at the Harrisonburg FOB.

Now that the drone operator was reporting a likely
Resistance location following the hasty ambush, he was tasked to look for a landing zone (LZ) suitable for the Chinooks.

The AC-130 gunship moved into a ‘pylon’ racetrack pattern above the valley, always keeping the left side of the aircraft pointing towards the ground. Th
e
40mm Bofors cannon and the 105mm M102 howitzer pointed out of the left side of the aircraft to provide a potentially massive weight of fire directed at a single point on the ground.

As Captain Brooking’s hunter-killer ARF Company flew south down the valley to the selected LZ one kilometer north of the suspected Resistance position at Zulu Delta, the AC-130 gunship opened fire at the location reported by the drone operator.

The cannon and howitzer mounted in the side of the aircraft rained explosives down into the
area around Zulu Delta. Fortunately given that the positions had overhead protection in the form of a couple of feet of dirt, they could not be picked up on the thermal imagers mounted in either the drone or the gunship.

It was a shocking display of firepower, but it was ineffective. After a couple of minutes
of this display and having failed to draw any Resistance fighters into the open, the gunship ceased fire and continued to run a racetrack pattern above the valley. They still considered the targeted location as the most likely site for a Resistance base; they were just frustrated in not being able to confirm it.

Meanwhile, the ARF descended in their Chinooks into the
LZ in the clearing, ramps lowering and the platoons running off the back. There was an operational pause while the company oriented themselves and then they set off in formation through the woods. It was an advance to contact in a southerly direction, towards the site targeted by the AC-130.

The hunter-killer
company moved in echelon, which meant that there was a lead platoon, followed by company tactical HQ with Captain Brookings, and then the other two platoons in column behind. The lead platoon had adapted its formation to one better suited to fighting in forests. The platoon leader had pushed two squads up front in an extended skirmish line, with the other squad providing the flank protection, a team to either side trailing back off the ends of the skirmish lines as they patrolled.

The hunter-killer
company was a light infantry formation based off the Ranger Companies from before the collapse. Today, they had left their fire support elements behind, taking on a purely light infantry role with fire support provided by aerial assets. Given Jack’s background as an Army Ranger, the way he had trained his fighters was very similar to the way this force was trained, without the insurgency aspect tacked on.

Jims Special Forces background was a larger part
of where that insurgency side had come from, and Jacks fighters certainly had an ‘X’ factor of unconventional tactics to fall back on.

Up at Victor Foxtrot they had heard the distant small arms contact followed by the bombardment from the AC-130 gunship. There had been no communications from Zulu Delta either before or after, but that was to be expected.