This led them on to the attack helicopter threat. Bill let them know that MANPADs, which were shoulder fired surface to air missiles, were simply not available. The Regime was keeping a tight lid on them, not needing them to counter any threat themselves, and knowing the threat they posed to the Regime’s air superiority.
None of the Regime ground troops carried them: they did not need them to counter a threat and there was too much risk of them falling into Resistance hands. Jack reasoned that they may ultimately get hold of them through an allied group, such as from Texas if they could link up networks at some point.
They gave Bill their shopping list. In the absence of MANPADs, they wanted heavier caliber machine-guns, such as 240s and .50cals, along with the tripods to mount them on. They also wanted Barrett .50 Cal sniper rifles and 81mm mortars to equip their mortar squads with. They needed the ammunition to operate these weapon systems, which would have to fall off the back of a truck somewhere.
Once the training progressed to the right point, these weapons systems would allow them to equip a dedicated fire support platoon.
Bill already had access to a lot of these weapon systems, stolen or looted and stashed away. Some he would have to procure, as well as the additional ammunition, through his network.
Jack took a trip down to Zulu that night. As he entered the dugout, softly lit with lanterns, he passed the partitioned section where Chavez’s family lived. He caught a glimpse of a Catholic shrine with a group of candles around it in the niche, and heard the soft sobbing of a woman.
I need to go see her, in a little bit.
Jasper came running out from his family area, wagging his tail and trying to lick Jack’s face.
“Down Jasper, down,” he laughed.
At the sound of his voice, Sarah and Connor came running out to him, “Daddy, Daddy!” and he picked them up in his arms.
As Jack walked past the wooden partition into the family area, Caitlin looked up from what she was doing at the table at him, smiled, and then sensed his mood and her face changed.
“Hi Hon,” she said, “What’s the matter?”
‘Hey, I missed you. And you guys too!’ he said, turning to the two kids with a smile. “Bill was here,” he continued, “Major Cassidy is gone.”
She looked at him, her mind working.
“So, honey, I was thinking…” he started.
She made the connection in a flash.
“Oh no. No you don’t Jack Berenger, that wasn’t the deal.”
“Hon, they need me.”
“We need you,” she replied.
“I know, I’m sorry, I promise I’ll be careful, but this is something I have to do.”
“Damn it Jack, there is nothing truer than that I know you. I should have guessed. This is just typical.”
Jack stood there like a klutz, both kids in his arms. “Look Hon, I’m sorry.”
She turned back to the table, “It’s FINE, don’t worry about it.
Clearly it wasn’t fine.
“Fine,” he said.
“Fine,” she said, face to the desk.
“Come on kids, let’s go for a walk.”
Later, the kids were sleeping and he was sitting at the table in their partitioned area when she came up behind him, put her arms around his neck, and her cheek onto his.
“I’m sorry Hon, I love you,” Jack said.
“I love you too. Just don’t get hurt.”
Chapter Eight
Come early January, the training was progressing well. Bill had sent the support weapons they had requested and they had begun to train a fourth platoon as a fire support element. They had two mortar squads with three barrels each. There were two machine-gun squads who had a choice of 240 or .50cal weapons depending on the task at hand. They also had several men trained up as .50cal Barrett rifle shooters.
Luckily amongst the veterans that had been recruited they had some with relevant experience, either as machine-gunners or mortar men. This made the training process smoother and allowed them to identify trainers for these specialist weapons.
The training had been pretty tough through the winter, the harsh cold and wet was a constant challenge, exacerbated by barely adequate rations. As they had anticipated, some of those being trained had fallen off the course, either voluntarily withdrawing or being told they would be better elsewhere. A steady flow of new recruits had allowed them to reach the desired four platoon Company strength.
About fifty percent of the women had not made it through the training, finding jobs elsewhere within the organization but leaving a hard core behind, spread across the platoons. Some of the women, although not allocated to the fighting Company, had been kept as covert assets to be used by the IED cells or for covert recon tasks.
They had begun to deploy the four man IED/shooter teams. These teams would be taken out of the training for a week at a time, given IEDs and an area to operate in, to include several miles of road. They would deploy and conduct harassing IED operations on the routes used by Regime convoys and patrols, attempting to disrupt Regime movement through the Shenandoah Valley.
Jim had his metal shop up and running and was creating the off-route mines, otherwise known as explosively formed penetrators or EFPs. These were set at the side of the road and angled for a shot into a passing vehicle. The explosives behind the copper cone would detonate and shoot an ‘incoherent spray’ of molten metal at the target, burning through the armor with the molten slugs.
It was a related process to the way a HEAT warhead or RPG worked, but with the difference that the EFP was set off the road away from the vehicle, whereas the RPG warhead detonated on the side of the vehicle and used the Monroe effect to fire a molten jet, or stream, through the armor.
The EFP was unstoppable by the Regime armored vehicles but the vital factor was accurate targeting. It had to fire at the right time and strike the enemy vehicle in the right place. The thing about EFPs was that, for example, one could strike through the cab of a vehicle, but leave everyone in the back unharmed. This is why they were often deployed as a targeted array of multiple devices in the Middle East, for maximum damage.
Jim designed the initiation system straight from the briefs he had received and the examples he had seen of recovered devices while on deployment. The device would be triggered when a vehicle broke the beam of an infra-red (IR) ‘tripwire’ set across the road. The distance between this trip beam and the EFP itself determined where on the vehicle the device would hit.
In order to avoid striking the wrong vehicle, or civilians for instance, the beam would be turned on by an observer using a remote device, from a distance. The Regime troops had not so far been deployed with electronic counter measure (ECM) equipment to disrupt such attacks, but as the IED campaign continued no doubt they would.
The ECM protection created a bubble around the convoy within which the remote controlled devices would not work. This meant that for the EFP, timing was critical: it was to be switched on when the convoy was imminent, but not too late so the ECM would counter attempts to turn it on with the remote device. Initially, there were failures due to experimentation and inexperience.
The EFP was the key device that they deployed with. It had the advantage of being a hybrid of a remote controlled IED, but at the same time it was victim operated and the detonation was tied to the placement of the IR beam.
When the IED team deployed, it was more of a covert operation than the more conventional side of the Resistance operations they were training for. They shed most of their overt irregular fighter garb and went as low profile as possible, equipment and battle belts with jackets and such.
The teams would select a kill site within their allocated area of operations using whatever intelligence they had supplemented by their own recon. The two IED specialists would covertly place and camouflage the EFP by the side of the route and fall back to an OP where they could over-watch the device. The two shooters would usually be deployed in a separate location in order to
provide early warning and cover for the withdrawal.
The teams took to taking the thermal ponchos on these OP missions with them, because they could set up and lay in the OP under the ponchos and avoid any aerial surveillance. As the campaign progressed through the month of January they started to see more and more ‘top cover’ flights by helicopters equipped with FLIR, forward looking infra-red. Sometimes these would be AH (attack helicopters: Apaches), sometimes even just police surveillance helicopters. The Regime intent was to conduct a route clearance ahead of any convoys utilizing their FLIR equipment.
Through the Resistance network and also from previous missions into the valley, the Company was building up a database of information on the valley, patterns of the Regime convoys and patrols, and also useful places to lie up. There were places that were known to be available, such as barns and sheds on the land of sympathizers, convenient wooded copses and the like, where IED teams could lie up while out on mission.
Along with the lay-up points, sometimes co-located or in separate areas, was a network of caches for food supplies that would be checked and refilled routinely by local sympathizers. This was working well for the Resistance, and maintaining the support of the people in the valley was essential.
Jack knew that if the attention of the Regime really began to focus on the valley, with detailed surveillance and Intel gathering assets, then some of this network would be exposed to reprisals.
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 amm
o 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.
He also took Caleb and one other fighter from his platoon, Sam, in a technical with a mounted 240. Sam had been the one hit in the plate by the 7.62mm round while breaking contact from the hunter-killer force. As well as this group, he also took a man with a video camera.
They drove cautiously south through the web of rural roads, firebreaks and forest trails until they came to a position north of the I-64. Jack had identified where a small side valley opened up north of the road, with spurs of wooded high ground to the east and west of it. Running north up the valley along the banks of a winding creek was an asphalt road, partially obscured in places by the tree cover.
Jack had the machine-gun kill group set up in a defilade position on the spur to the west of the valley, looking to the north east. They dug shallow ‘shell scrapes’ to increase their protection and covered the position and the tripod mounted machine-guns with thermal ponchos. The way they were oriented put them out of view of the I-64 south of them in the main east-west valley.
Patriot Dawn: The Resistance Rises Page 12
