Max Velocity - Patriot Dawn - The Resistance Rises

As they headed across out of the forest canopy in their patrol formation, the gunner in the Apache attack helicopter picked them up on his thermal imager. He had been tracking what he thought was the hunted patrol for a few minutes, but given the close combat in the woods he had been unable to clearly identify the patrol from his own forces. The pilot maneuvered on station in order to give the gunner the best shot.

The Hydra 70 rocket burst in the air before it hit the patrol, sending ninety six flechette darts into the center of the patrol where the stretcher party was jogging along. The casualty on the stretcher as well as four others surrounding him, including Doc and Chavez, disintegrated into a red mist under the impact of the darts.

As the patrol roiled from the shock Caleb screamed: ‘RUN!”

Meanwhile the Apache gunner switched to 30mm cannon. The cannon aimed where he looked, slaved to the sight in his helmet, and he decided to roll up the patrol from the rear.

The burst of 30mm M789 HEDP cannon rounds exploded around the rear security team as they were running for the tree line. The gunner chased them all the way with the cannon rounds exploding around the rear team. Three of them didn’t make the tree line.

Caleb had lost half his patrol, with just half of both squads left. They kept running into the trees. The Apache could still see and track them, but there was a little more cover from the FLIR thermal imager in the trees and some of the explosions from the 30mm rounds were absorbed.

There was no way they could go back to recover the downed members of the patrol. It was something they had learned since the civil war began: the old rule of ‘never leave a fallen comrade’ just never worked any more when you were on the run and didn’t have the overwhelming force and assets to get them back. Sometimes fighters went down and there was nothing you could do for them.

The patrol ran into a ravine and followed it as it steepened down towards the valley. In an area of the ravine with steep overhanging sides and good tree cover they went static. The Apache had struggled to continue to follow their move and despite continued circling was unable to find the patrol while they were both in the ravine and under the tree cover.

After a time of searching, the Apache had to return to base to refuel, and luckily the exigencies and scarcities of the collapse situation meant there was no back-up to replace it on station.

In the Fusion Center RTOC, Tyrone Woods was sitting in his command chair. He had been watching the live feed ‘kill cam’ footage from the Apache, and following the action from the footage provided by an overhead drone. He was raging inside, while concurrently turned on by his power to reach out and kill the ‘redneck terrorists’ as they scuttled on the ground below his cameras.

“Track them. Get me that Apache back on station. I want them all dead,” he announced to the RTOC.

A young Ranger liaison officer from the hunter-killer company, a Lieutenant Jefferson, approached him. Jefferson was a West Point Graduate, a college football star quarterback. He was an ambitious and rising young officer.

“Sir, if we capture rather than kill, we could exploit the intelligence…” He was cut off in mid-sentence as Director Woods came out of his chair, grasping him by the collar of his ACU uniform jacket.

“Listen to me,” he shouted, “I said kill them, every last one!” The spittle flew into Lieutenant Jefferson’s face as he tried to recoil, shock plain in his expression. Director Woods let go his grip and pushed him away.

“Listen you fuckers,” he announced to the RTOC, “No one ambushes and kills my guys in my area, you hear me! Those blue shirts are the vanguard of the revolution! If you are not killing these insurgent vermin, you are terrorists just like them. If I hear another word of complaint from any of you terrorist sympathizers, I will send the offender to the camps for reeducation!”

With that, he stormed out.

After a while of listening watch, the patrol determined that the Apache had gone. There was still the problem of the dismounted hunter-killer company.

The patrol packed up their gear and started to head down into the valley to the west. They followed the steep ravine down, jog-walking as best they could, occasionally slipping in the steeper areas.

Then they heard the baying of the tracker dogs from up on the ridge.

Caleb called a halt and gathered the team around, “Ok, we are gonna split. First into two teams, then split again into pairs. Head away from each other and keep altering your course. We will RV at the pickup point as per the orders. Ok?

They nodded, the stress was apparent on their faces.

“Ok,” said Caleb, “I’ll call the first split. We are gonna move fast. Let’s go.”

They took off back down the ravine again, in formation and spread out. They heard the beat of a CH-47 pass over top of them, headed east towards the valley. The patrol emerged on the lower slopes of the ridge, still in the trees, and kept jogging downhill.

“Watch for hasty ambushes, they will try and get ahead of us,” called Caleb, breathing heavily, “Split now.”

“Roger that,” called Olson. “Alpha with me!” He led them off to the right as Caleb continued on with the remainder of Bravo.

A couple of kilometers later, the teams spit again into two man buddy teams, preparing to exfiltrate back to the pickup point. As Olson sent Phillips and Gibbs in one direction, he paused with McCarthy and removed a pre-prepared improvised claymore from the top of his daypack. He rapidly emplaced it, sited covering their back trail and armed to be triggered by a tripwire.

As the hunter-killer dog teams emerged from the ravine they soon found the place where the patrol had split. They also split, following the two directions. Once they had the line of travel, they called it in to the RTOC, located at the Fusion Center in Richmond, which responded by directing the CH-47s to drop troops ahead of the line into hasty ambush positions.

The helicopters made multiple dummy landings to confuse the pursued and make it harder for them to predict the location of the hasty ambushes.

Once in the valley bottom, the fighters found that the trees thinned out and there were more fields, areas of farmland for grazing. The pairs tried their best to make changes to their direction to make pursuit more difficult.

Around twenty minutes after Olson had split his team, he and McCarthy were jogging through some trees when they heard the distant sound of the claymore detonating. Olson grinned.

That’ll give ‘em pause for thought.

One of the pairs from Bravo team got complacent and started to try and head due south along a creek in the valley bottom. It was a predictable route and a hasty ambush had been placed in a tree line overlooking the line of the creek.

The pair was walking in the shallow creek, hoping to throw off the dogs, when the squad ambush opened fire on them from seventy five meters. They were not initially hit in the fire, which was heavy on quantity and not so much on accuracy.

The pair dove for cover in the creek bed and tried to use it for cover to crawl back out to the north.

The hunter-killer squad was static in the tree line, shooting the area of the creek to pieces, but not hitting the two men low crawling along below the creek bank.

Suddenly a CH-47 roared into the air above the pair, directed by the contact report from the Regime squad. The Chinook went into a right hand circuit above the two fighters and the door gunner in the front right window opened fire with his chain gun.

The creek around the two men erupted in gouts of flying water as the rounds struck home into the rocks and mud of the creek bed.