Max Velocity - Patriot Dawn - The Resistance Rises

For now, the Regime was not trying to occupy the valley, but rather use the I-81 as a main supply route and also conduct occasional patrols. So far there was no forward operating base (FOB) in the valley in order to establish a permanent presence. It would likely be coming, as the Regime spread its influence out of the zones. Pushing back against that was the mission of the Company.

It was only a matter of time before the Regime had to push into the rural areas and start to take control of food production, for its long term survival. That was probably why the rural patrols and traffic control points, outside of the zones, had not so far insisted on the RFID chip, or the whole DHS registration that those in the FEMA zones had to do.

The Regime was motivated to leave the farmers, the producers, alive. And they knew that the time was coming as the Regime gathered strength, when they would push out and try to gain further control of the contested sectors.

Sometimes the IED operations would be a success, other times the devices would not even be initiated if the enemy failed to appear, and the ambush would be collapsed, the IED recovered and returned to Victor Foxtrot. With about thirty percent of missions resulting in a successful kill on a regime vehicle, the operations were gathering attention and the Regime focus on the valley was increasing.

They lost a team early on, caught withdrawing from the contact point after successfully destroying an MRAP. The MRAP was the successor to the armored Humvee, bigger and heavier. The team was moving back though a wood line when an Apache was called on station. It effortlessly picked them up on thermal and tracked them, first destroying the IED pair and then sniffing out and snuffing out the cover team.

It was increasingly apparent that the possession by the Regime of the Apache was a huge force multiplier and the Resistance would have to do something about it. They had developed the thermal ponchos, which had been proven to work well when static. Good use of ground and cover, as well as alert air sentries, was another factor that helped them.

They had discussed the use of smoke for any set piece attacks they were to plan. The idea was that the presence of hot smoke particles in the atmosphere interfered with the thermal imagers employed by the helicopters. If they could get set up upwind of an objective, it would be possible to light fires and allow the hot smoke to drift over the objective area. They had planned for this and prepared some half oil drums that they could burn diesel fuel in. A collection of old tires, thrown on top, would really get some nasty hot acrid smoke going.

They really felt strongly that although the IED plan was working well to harass the enemy while the training reached its conclusion, they wanted to hit back at the Apaches. They had noticed that they seemed to fly mostly in pairs, sometimes alone if there was a resource issue.

Now that the fire support platoon was equipped with the machine-guns and Barrett sniper rifles, Jack felt it was time to plan something, and he enlisted Caleb as his key volunteer. Caleb had strong reason to want to get back at the Apaches.

Jim had established a couple of vehicle laager points under camouflage netting spread around the area of Victor Foxtrot. He had trained a couple of welders to help with his metal shop and the IED production, and also used them to modify vehicles. Now that they had the fire support platoon up and running, under training right now, they had been working on some ideas that Jim had come up with.

They had acquired three large dump trucks, the multi-axle type with the large metal high box rear. These were big heavy trucks with a huge weight capacity. Jim had his guys weld additional plate steel around the inside of the truck bed, and sandbag the floor. They also welded steel plate to the cab doors, removing the windshield and welding a steel plate across, with a rectangular viewing port to see through. This resulted in a cab and truck bed resistant to high velocity rounds.

They set the trucks up to receive two mortar barrels each, baseplates buried under sandbags in the bed of the truck, along with gear and ammunition to operate them. If utilized in this way, it would give the six-barrel mortar squad the potential to be mobile and dispersed.

While they were about it, they also rigged the trucks to run as machine-gun carriers. They did this by mounting receivers at various points along the front and sides of the truck bed, in place of pintle mounts, which allowed the machine-guns to be slotted in rapidly and mounted on the sides of the dump trucks.

They also worked on acquiring and setting up some heavy pick-up trucks as ‘technicals’; these were gun trucks. Rather than using the tripods which came with the 240 and .50cal machine-guns, for deployment in the ground role, they welded in pintle mounts that were set up to receive either the 240 or .50cal machine-guns. This would allow the pickups to be deployed against ground targets, but having a pintle mount also allowed use in an air defense role.

They used heavy pick-up trucks for this purpose; they had ten of them for the machine-gun sections. They had acquired some dual rear axle trucks for use with the .50cals. Jim knew from experience that firing these machine-guns in the back of a truck could cause some heavy rocking on the suspension. Thus the .50cal trucks were designed to be heavy duty with solid dual rear axles and a reinforced pintle mount built off a strong frame.

As well as the technicals, they also had a few ATVs and gators. Using either the trucks or the gators would allow them to utilize options for deployment of the fire support platoon. They could go entirely mobile in the dump trucks and technicals. Or they could go lighter and move into position using either the technicals or the Gators, but stopping short in the vehicles and moving forward to set up the guns in either the light role or tripod mounted sustained fire (SF) role.

The technicals, unlike the dump trucks, were not armored. This reduced survivability from enemy fire and thus their deployment had to be considered. It was best to deploy the technicals from cover, even a ‘hull down’ position, or at long range out of the reach of enemy small arms. Either that, or use the technicals as simply transport vehicles, dismounting the guns onto their tripods in cover to engage the enemy.

It was certainly true that all their weapon systems, including the .50cals and the 81mm mortars, could be man-packed in. They practiced as such with heavy carries through the woods on field training exercises. The key thing was ammunition quantities and resupply. Using even a single ATV to accompany a mortar or machine-gun section allowed an exponentially larger supply of ammunition.

If absolute stealth was not required while moving into position, ATVs could be brought up to just short of the fire support position, and then when the attack went ‘noisy’ they could bring ammo resupply up to the firing positions.

Come early February, they had been observing the Regime tactics of often flying surveillance or Apache attack helicopter top cover over many of the convoy moves along the highways. Jack and Caleb had been looking for some suitable ground to mount an ambush and they thought they had found it.

At the town of Lexington at the southern end of the valley was the junction between the I-81 and the I-64. The I-64 ran out to the west and went through the lower part of the George Washington National Forest, cross graining the ridges of the hills which made up the western boundary of the Shenandoah Valley. Victor Foxtrot was further north in those hills, shrouded deep in the wooded ridges.

Jack was going to be personally in charge of this mission. He planned a multi-weapon shoot using 240 and .50cal machine-guns, as well as a couple of Barrett .50s. The idea was to try and bag one or a couple of Apaches. He took with him an IED team, a kill group from the machine-gun sections with four 240s and four .50cals, as well as two Barrett sharpshooters.