Kurt Schlichter - Indian Country

“Displace!” Turnbull yelled, abandoning the Javelin launchers. They didn’t have any more missiles anyway. Turnbull and the others sprinted to the back of the warehouse as two M1s fired their main guns. The first was the wrong round for the job; in the excitement, the loader had filled the breech with a M829 Armor-Piercing, Fin-Stabilized, Discarding Sabot anti-tank round – basically a titanium dart fired off at several times the speed of sound whose sheer energy would send it punching through tank armor and turn the crew inside the target to a pinkish mist. The sabot shot into the warehouse through the open frontage, flew through a dozen rows of shelves, punched out the back of the building with a barely perceptible loss of speed and finally buried itself 40 feet into the earth.

The second shot was more effective. It was a HEAT round, and it exploded against the back wall, spraying the four guerrillas with fragments.

Turnbull was knocked to the ground, disoriented for a moment by the heat and the noise and the spray of pieces of building. He shook his head and stood, as did two of the others, the ringing in their ears loud and sustained. The fourth guerrilla, whose name he did not even know, lay there unmoving with a shard of rebar sticking out of his eye.

Turnbull ran, but a red curtain seemed to descend over one eye. He wiped it, and as he suspected, it was blood from a cut on his head. He kept running through the “EMPLOYEES ONLY” door into the back area and then was thrown off his feet again. Out in the store area, two more HEAT rounds blew the interior apart. He shook it off again, and they ran through the loading dock and toward the woods.

The appearance of the anti-tank missiles in the hands of the guerrillas had changed everything for Captain Cardillo. He realized his eight remaining tanks were in a kill zone and he did exactly what he was trained to do – punched it in order to get the hell out of there.

The turbines of the eight surviving tanks roared as the drivers demanded their full 1,500 horsepower. They tore off south down 231 into the middle of town.

But that left the trucks full of infantry behind in the kill zone. The infantry company dismounted under a ferocious storm of bullets. The guerrillas with AR15-style weapons and other modern combat rifles focused on achieving fire superiority – that is, they attempted to put such heavy fire on the enemy that the blues would be unable to maneuver or counter attack. The snipers, the veteran deer hunters with the scoped Remingtons and Winchesters, focused on aimed shots at officers, NCOs, and anyone else who looked like he was taking initiative.

As the tanks headed into town and Turnbull was running out to Mill Street, which ran parallel to 231 behind the Walmart. The pick-up truck he had requisitioned was sitting there, keys in the ignition. He put his M4 on the seat and punched it, heading toward the heart of Jasper.

Both sides of 231 were lined with businesses and other buildings close to the road, which to Cardillo was a mixed blessing. The wall of structures made it hard for the guerrillas to engage them with Javelins, but it would also let them get really close. He held the M2 machine gun’s dual grips tight, thumbs hovering over the thumb trigger.

Nothing.

And then something, an explosion on the treads of the rear M1 tank. The metal treads flew off and flapped on the road as the vehicle came to a halt.

All hell broke loose and fire started coming from every direction. Cardillo saw flashes, swiveled his turret and fired at them with the heavy machine gun.

The PRA infantry company commander took a 5.56 millimeter round through the throat and fell dead at the feet of a lieutenant, who instantly took charge and rallied his force. The machine guns began kicking and his men and women began returning fire. There was a lot of fire coming from the houses on the west of the road, so he pointed it out to his fire support officer, who checked grid coordinates and got on the radio.

“Quebec One-Seven, this is Crusader Nine! Fire mission! Fire mission! Over!”

As the FSO called in artillery, the infantry lieutenant ordered a casualty collection point in the McDonald’s and put one of the medics in charge of the dozen wounded. More people flooded into the restaurant, and he realized they were senior officers. The TAC-CP had pulled up outside and was co-locating in the old fast food joint.

The building shook, and he looked across the street to see 105 millimeter artillery shells exploding among the houses where the enemy was hiding. The fire from the insurgents slackened, and he began to move his company south.

Langer’s eyes opened. He was still in the hospital bed. Somehow he had hoped he would wake up elsewhere. There were no beeping monitors because the power was off, but he was hooked to an IV. That came right out. He slid around on his bed in his gown and sat on the bed.

Damn, his stomach hurt.

There were a lot of people running around the hospital floor. Yelling and shouting, but he could hear the shooting and the explosions outside over the noise.

He wasn’t staying here. Not while a fight was going on.

He slid off the bed and found he could walk with much less pain than expected. It was probably the drugs, but it didn’t matter. He was not sitting this one out.

Langer stepped over to the pile of his clothes, which someone had been nice enough to wash and fold, and started getting dressed.

“You’re not leaving,” said a nurse from the doorway, shocked that he was upright. “You’ll open your incision and bleed out.”

“Ma’am,” Larry Langer replied. “Where’s my gun?’

Banks and his team heard the thunder of the artillery battery from nearly two miles away. It was coming from what appeared to be an open field along County Road 20 about two miles west of 231. An excellent place to set up – everything they needed to shell was within the eight-mile range fan.

“Let’s go!” he said, as the artillery let go another volley. Every minute that passed brought more steel death down on Jasper. They moved out fast on a beeline for the firebase.

Cannon had set up his team on both sides of Route 231. The intact PSF cruiser sedan they had captured was parked on the shoulder, and a uniformed PSF officer sat on the hood. There was a fair amount of military traffic, which would ignore the slacker PSF officer. Kunstler wouldn’t. This was the MSR, the main supply route. The PBI Inspector had to pass through here some time.

To the south, as he waited, Cannon could hear echoes of the battle for Jasper.

Davey Wohl’s mission was to slam the door shut behind the attack force, and that’s what his guerrillas did. They moved down out of the hills and woods to converge on the south side of the bridge over the White River on Route 231. That was the door.

The second infantry company tried to cross and was turned back by the volume of fire. The enemy dismounted and the forces shot at each other across the river. The PRA soldiers were not particularly motivated to cross 100 meters of open bridge roadway under the guns of dozens of shooters with scoped rifles.

Davey Wohl moved from position to position, ensuring his people were properly using cover and concealment. He didn’t count on the PRA employing snipers too.

The 7.62 millimeter round caught him in the back of the neck crossing Route 231 to get to some of his troops. Two of his men were wounded trying to drag him back in. But no PRA soldier crossed the bridge that night.

The roadblock was at 231 and 8th Street, not far from the courthouse square. The block was a set of logs fitted together and wrapped in razor wire. The tanks could smash the logs, but the wire would tangle in the gears of their tracks. Cardillo saw it and immediately ordered his force to turn off eastward at 9th Street.