She’d been counting on the militia to keep her and her people safe while Marks and then Josh and their supposed military people fought. It wasn’t supposed to have come down to this. “How many of them will fight?”
“If they show half the enthusiasm for defending us as they have for shooting our own people, I’d say most of them.”
She let the criticism go. Moser probably didn’t know those orders had come from her. The last thing she needed right now was yet another worker bee who suddenly had a crisis of conscience.
“Give the order. I’ll follow it up with one of my own. They are to fall back to this facility and make a stand here.”
*
Jason listened in on Poy’s intelligence report. He didn’t bother to wake Farmer. The young Marine was out cold, stretched out on the floor underneath the classroom’s windows. Having spent the previous day and night first corralling Pro, and then inserting into the campus, they were tired. Spread out on the carpet of a ground-floor room in the school of architecture, they’d alternated to catch maybe a couple of hours of sleep apiece.
Pavel and Pro had abandoned their golf cart a few hours earlier, when the campus had descended into chaos. They’d gone to ground in a building a few hundred yards away from their own position, but not before managing to deliver Nathans to Cabell Hall. The sniper was now lying low on the roof of that building and had an unobstructed view of most of the central campus and the main lawn. The four of them, he and Farmer and then Pavel and Pro, were less than half a mile away from the president’s office, where the militia had all pulled back to. Just behind the building was the sunken, fenced-in field where Charlottesville had parked all their heavy military gear.
Jason was only half listening to Poy’s report over the radio; most of the information had come from him and his people on campus. He turned the volume down, hoping to let Farmer sleep a little while longer.
“I’ve spotted seven distinct groups making their way off campus to the west, towards the lake at the edge of the golf course.” Jason smiled to himself at Poy’s practiced diction; he sounded like he was reading a prepared report, at odds with the broken pidgin he spoke when he was relaxed.
“Several hundred have already reached the lake,” Poy continued. “They look to be waiting this out.” Jason couldn’t fault them. Where were they going to go on foot that they couldn’t be caught, regardless of which side won out on campus? As far as he could tell, it was a good sign that they seemed to be sticking together. Some of those groups, he knew, had fought with the militia just to get clear of the campus. That fighting was the reason they’d gone to ground; it had been impossible to tell who was who. Pavel and Pro’s security golf cart had come under fire before they’d managed to ditch it and hide themselves.
“As of the last few hours, I’ve gotten a clear view of their militia having pulled back around the administration building and the adjacent equipment park. They have sortied their two Abrams’ and assorted APCs in a rough perimeter around the site and dug a narrow trench for personnel. No visual on AT missile loadouts on their Bradleys—I repeat, no visual—but not confirmed. Estimate between three and four, repeat, three and four hundred enemy personnel visible on the perimeter with crew served weapons. No sign of principal targets.” Poy’s transmission broke for a moment. “Uh, I think that’s it. Over to you, Gypsy One.”
“All units—Gypsy One. Thank you, Mr. Park.” Skirjanek’s voice cut in. “Hold positions for now; we are in process of returning recon bird for fuel and turn around. They are consolidating their forces at the moment, and we do not want to interrupt them. Schedule will be moved up as soon as recon is back on station. Be ready to step off, starting at 1300 hours. Captain Bruce—your strike team will start rolling before general attack as will Gypsy One. Be prepared to roll at 1200 hours.
“Captain Larsen, you are still up on their radios, correct?”
“Affirmative,” he answered, eyeing the three radios they’d collected during the night. “At least two distinct channels, no radio discipline—but we catch most of it. No mention of principle targets or this Josh character.” It was far worse than that. At one point during the night, it had sounded like a troop of Boy Scouts arguing over their walkie-talkies during a weekend camping trip.
“Copy—I’ll have you deliver a final plea to their common sense before we begin.”
“Copy all,” he replied.
Chapter 30
It was a typical late July day in Virginia. If there had still been weather reporters on TV, or any TV for that matter, the forecast would have been hot, hazy, and humid, with a high chance of thunderstorms in the late afternoon. Same as the day before, same as tomorrow. The classroom on the fourth floor of their building that they had climbed to had a wall of southern-facing windows. Jason figured it was close to 120 degrees in the room, and it was a sauna. But it was where they needed to be in order to broadcast.
“To any and all people who can hear this transmission. My name is Captain Jason Larsen. I’m in command of our forces that are already on campus and watching you at this moment.” He let up on the transmit and smiled at Farmer. Lucas was holding another radio on a different channel up to his face.
“All five of us?” Farmer grinned back at him and shook his head.
Jason nodded at the radio and pushed his own button again. “To those of you with the good sense to have laid down your arms and vacated the campus during the last twenty-four hours, stay where you are. We will render aid and assistance as soon as we are able. To those of you who have taken up position on the perimeter of the admin building, the ones who call themselves ‘militia’ . . . be advised we observed you openly attacking your own people during the night.
“You’ve given up the right to live among them. Instead of protecting your people, you are defending the ego of Lisa Cooper. Is that enough to die for?” He let up on the button and waited until Farmer did the same.
“Tough to tell if they are getting in any of this.”
“They are.” Farmer nodded. “They were chatting up a storm a few minutes ago. Probably in shock we have some of their radios. Idiots.”
He waggled the radio to signal he was going to start again. “You have fifteen minutes to throw down your weapons, exit your military vehicles, and empty the administration building. Proceed to the central lawn and remain there. You will not be harmed as long as you comply with these instructions. What happens to you will be up to the people of Charlottesville and whatever leadership they elect. This will be our last communication. You have fifteen minutes, starting now.”
He and Farmer set the captured radios down and just looked at each other.
“You think they’ll cave?” Farmer asked, risking a look out the window.
“I hope so.”
“Fuck you! Fascist pigs!” blasted out of one of the captured radios. “You have no authority here.”
Jason grinned back at Farmer. “I’m going to go out on a limb here and say no.”
“As much as I want to stand here and watch Poy’s artillery strike, Nathans has a much better view, and he’s probably at a safe distance.”
“Probably?” Jason had to smile at that. Nathans was on a rooftop, eight hundred yards farther from the admin building than they were at the moment.
Farmer grinned. “Poy is an oh three-eleven, rifleman. He’s had some secondary training in comms, and as technical as he is, it probably should have been his MOS. Right now, he’s ten miles away, aiming two 155mm howitzers in our general direction.”
“So, basement?” Jason asked.
Farmer shook his head after a moment. “We’d lose comms.”
They settled on a classroom in the west wing, on the ground floor. It was as far from the target area as they could get without leaving the building. The windows were facing away from the target area, and they weren’t going to see anything. They’d have to be satisfied listening to Nathans adjust the fire.
“Nine minutes,” Farmer breathed and wiped the s
weat off his face as he took a knee under the windowsill.
*
“Movement, Gunny!” Elliot yelled from the Bradley behind him. John Bruce heard it in the clear and over his headset. He was so jacked up that he didn’t even think of reminding Elliot that he was now a captain. A direction to look would have been nice though; that he would remind him of. They’d rolled along the train tracks all the way through town and hadn’t left the rail cut until they reached the southern edge of the university hospital center.
His four Bradleys were parked in a lot just two hundred meters south of Cabell Hall. Somewhere on the roofline of that massive edifice, Trey Nathans was set up and had the best seat in town.
“Movement left, civilians!” Elliot yelled again. John spun his turret around and immediately saw a group of twelve or fifteen men and women and a couple of kids emerging from the tree line fronting what looked like a residential area, dotted with houses. Most of the adults were holding a white T-shirt or pillowcase over their heads. Several of the adults were armed, he saw straightaway, but the weapons were slung. He moved the turret, and the 25mm Bushmaster canon it held, away from the group.
“Uwasi! How much time do we have?” he yelled. Regardless of the answer, he didn’t have time for this right now.
“Six minutes!”
“You people are in no danger from us, but you need to find some shelter, and I mean right now!” He shouted across the distance.
A woman turned and said something to the rest of the group, then kept walking towards him while the others stopped.
She stopped ten feet away from the Bradley. “Ma’am, you don’t understand. It’s not going to be safe out here in the open in a very short moment.”
“We’ve been hiding since you dropped those notes. They turned the water off to the campus. Please.” The woman clasped her hands together under her chin. “Can you spare some water, the kids . . .?”
Water? He did a double take. They’d brought plenty, and the colonel’s force had even more.
“Hell yes, send a couple of your people over.” He pulled back in his hole and yelled down into the interior of the Bradley. “Uwasi, pop the ramp, off-load our watercoolers.”
When he looked back up, the woman was crying. “You’re really going to leave us be?”
“Yes, ma’am, as soon as we’ve done what we said we would do.”
“They tried to kill us!”
“I know, ma’am,” he answered, keeping a close eye on the two approaching men as he heard the back-ramp smash down on the asphalt. Two of Reed’s combat team off-loaded two large watercoolers as Uwasi watched over them, with his assault rifle held ready at his chest.
“It’s all going to be over soon,” he added as the two men started waddling away with the ten-gallon coolers.
“Were you the one we heard on the radio?”
“Uwasi! Time?”
“Four minutes, twenty, sir.”
“No, ma’am,” he answered, and pointed at the nearest house he could see through the break in the trees at the edge of the lot. “Get your people inside that house, the basement if it has one. Right now, ma’am!”
He felt bad about the way the woman jumped at his voice. But that would be the least of their worries in a few minutes.
He’d yelled loud enough that the larger group was starting to move back, helping with the heavy coolers.
“What’s your name?”
“John Bruce, ma’am. Please, you need to go, right now.”
“Thank you, John.” The woman nodded, turned, and started back to her people at a jog.
“Mount up, Uwasi!”
“Sir!”
He watched the group disappear into the house he’d directed them to, as he listened to the hydraulic whine and ratcheting click of the ramp coming up and sealing the rear of the vehicle.
“Time?”
“Three minutes, sir!”
He turned around to face the rest of his vehicles and waved his arm over his head in a looping motion. Satisfied they all had running engines, he clicked his command link. “Button up!” He confirmed all the hatches coming down before he slid down into his chair, dropped it to the interior position, and sealed up his own vehicle.
That had been a first; a local saying “thank you” before he blew the shit out of their home. It had never been an expectation in Iraq or Afghanistan, even if there had been a few after-action offers of gratitude from populations that had been held hostage by the local muj or Sunni warlord. He’d been a Marine his entire adult life; he’d never been anything else, but he’d never imagined he’d be fighting Americans on US soil.
They weren’t Americans, he corrected himself; not the people trying to protect the crazy bitch running this place, not anymore. They were the enemy, and they were about to reap what they had sown.
*
Drew checked his watch; just over two minutes to go. He hadn’t thought Cooper’s militia would surrender, but he had hoped Jason’s transmission would cause some more infighting. He had just brought his column’s approach to a stop on Main Street, after crossing over the rail tracks that Captain Bruce’s units had utilized less than an hour ago. They were twelve hundred meters from the target area and could get there in a hurry; the road they were on was crossed by another rail line that looped through town. It passed within fifty meters of the northern edge of the Madison Bowl, where the enemy had dug in.
The whine from the turbine of Salguero’s Abrams caught his attention. The German Army in the 1980s, during training maneuvers, had nicknamed the Abrams “whispering death” for the relative quiet and distinctive sound of its turbine engine. The name made sense; something that big and heavy should just make more noise. Salguero was “up” in his turret behind the small glacis that mounted a machine gun as it pulled to a stop next to his Bradley.
“Two minutes, Mr. Salguero.”
“Yes, sir.” The Marine saluted him. “I’ve been wondering if the colonel wouldn’t be more comfortable in here, sir. We can squeeze you in.”
“You’ve been wondering?”
“Captain Bruce was very convincing, sir.”
“I’ll be fine, Sergeant. Better button up.”
“Sir, with all due respect, I can read a map. We are in the flight path of Poy’s artillery; if he’s short, anything but a direct hit isn’t going scratch me. You are a lot more . . . squishier, sir.”
“Have some faith, Tommy. I’m a lot more worried about Jefferson’s Rotunda; it’s an historic landmark.”
Salguero jerked his head back in shock. “It’s a building . . . sir.”
He shook his head and grinned. “Button up, and roll up fifty yards, Sergeant.” He pointed forward.
“Yes, sir.” Salguero shook his head in disgust and saluted.
He checked his watch, and then the sky above. “Please, Lord, help that kid shoot straight.”
Everyone had checked in and was in position. He watched the sweep of the second hand on his watch, a Rolex; it had been a gift from his parents when he’d graduated from West Point. He realized this was the first time he’d worn it in combat. It had always seemed stupid to him that some of his colleagues went into the field with their prize watches. It was a damned strange thing to think of at the moment, and he knew he was deflecting his attention from the issue at hand. He fundamentally wished he didn’t have to do this, but was just as sure that he didn’t have an option. He reached down to the microphone inside the tank, the one attached to the Bradley’s radio and the twenty-foot whip antenna above him.
“Fire when ready, Mr. Park.”
He waited for a few seconds. “One gun, fire when ready. Out.” Poy’s reply was calm enough. He knew the Marine directing the M777 artillery piece was a bundle of nerves, but he was confident that Poy had tied in the fire-control targeting computers to the still-functioning GPS system.
“You reading this, Sergeant Nathans?”
“Affirmative, one round, out. I will direct.” He didn’t envy Nathans’s b
eing on the rooftop on a day like this; the sniper was probably cooking on the metal sheeting of Cabell Hall’s roof.
Poy spoke again. “One round, out. I say again, one round, out.”
Any artillerymen of the last hundred years would be screaming at the call for fire direction, but Poy was wearing so many hats at the moment, the only thing he cared about was that the Marine had the basics down.
He thought he heard the howitzer fire in the distance, but he couldn’t be sure until he heard the incoming round ripping through the air. He ducked back down inside and pulled his hatch shut behind him. “Please, God, not the Rotunda.”
*
Trey Nathans couldn’t bring himself to give a shit what Skirjanek thought of Poy’s technical acumen. As far as he was concerned, Poy was still the lazy, fat piece of shit who had almost eaten himself to death in The Hole. Which was why he covered his head with his hands the moment he heard the incoming round. He knew Poy didn’t like him; the fat bastard would probably get away with an errant shot that went wide.
The pitch of the ripping sound in the heavens above altered; snipers were often cross-trained to act as Fire Support Men in the Corps. It made sense; they were often well concealed and a lot closer to the target than most of the units they supported. He’d never directed arty fire before, and only called in one air strike, but he’d had enough arty rounds go over his head to realize he wasn’t going to get hit.
He raised his head to look down the length of the lawn, past the Rotunda to the admin building beyond and the large field behind it. The map of the campus he carried with him labeled the field the “Madison Bowl.” It was where most of their foraged gear had been held until they’d moved it to create the perimeter of men and machines around the building.
Seasons of Man | Book 2 | Reap What You Sow Page 31
