“These are the guys that drew the short straws,” Reaper said to Python. “The rest must be sleeping it off or still diddling each other.”
“Yeah.” He spoke into his walkie. “Everyone in place?”
Double-clicks came back.
“Boss lady says go.”
Rocket-propelled grenades streaked across the night, aimed at the two doors of the guard’s barracks. Before the debris stopped falling, Reaper’s team charged through the openings, assault rifles chattering.
Simultaneously, the roving guards and those at the gate were cut down by Python’s men.
In thirty seconds it was over. Five minutes later, Reaper confirmed two guards dead and twenty wounded. She could live with that.
“Make sure you trank and infect all of them,” she told Bunny and Livewire. “Hulk, open the gate. Tarzan, jog down there and tell a few people they’re free, then run like hell back up here before you get swarmed. We march in five minutes.”
Her timing was impeccable. The first shuffling groups of skeletal Edens exited the pit just as her team and Python’s began jogging away on the road. They’d eat all the guards’ food, drink their fill of water, and then…well, it wasn’t her problem anymore. She’d done what she could.
Chapter 30
“Where are they headed?” General McAllister asked, looking at the overhead live feed. They had been watching the lead elements of the U.S. mechanized force drive relentlessly southward from their jumpoff positions on the Oklahoma border. McAllister had expected the invaders to bypass points of resistance in order to seize key terrain, but he couldn’t see the point of their current maneuver.
“They’re on a path to go right between Fort Worth and Abilene,” Colonel Sherrie Gervais said. “Kinda looks like they’re driving straight for Austin.”
McAllister shook his head. That one mechanized battalion was outracing everything else the enemy had crossed the border with. Either its commander was criminally overeager, or he had a specific target, one important enough to sacrifice his unit. They might get in, but they wouldn’t get out. They simply didn’t have enough fuel.
“III Corps says they’re ready whenever you need them,” said a comms NCO with a headset. “1st Cav Division has cleared the highways north in order to speed the counterattack.”
“Not yet. We want to draw the majority of the attacking element into our kill zone before we spring the trap.”
Something wasn’t right, McAllister realized. He looked at the Common Operating Picture screen. The invading red mech battalion icon inched closer to a miniscule blue dot. “What is that?” he asked.
The analysts leaned close, clicked on the icon, and then consulted a spreadsheet. “Comms hub, it says, sir.”
“What type of comms hub?”
“I don’t have more specific info in the system.” The analyst looked around as if for help from anyone in the room, but saw that he was on his own. “I’ll find out, sir.” He hurried away in the direction of the intelligence center.
“Sir,” said an officer. “We’ve gotten reports of aircraft taking off from every enemy airbase within three hundred miles of Texas. Looks like a full court press.”
“Not a good idea,” said Gervais. “Our air defense will rip them to shreds. They must be desperate to support the ground push.”
McAllister frowned. “Never assume your enemy is stupid. They’ve got something up their sleeves. We need to figure out what it is.”
“We’re also getting reports that enemy maneuver brigades have turned toward Austin and are speeding forward. Looks like a coordinated advance to swing wide around to bypass the DFW urban center to the west. As expected, they’re setting up to screen Abilene and San Angelo, cut the state in half, and assault Austin.”
“The capital isn’t that important,” McAllister mused. “Do they think a symbolic victory will make Texas collapse? It’s the DFW-San Antonio-Houston triangle that matters. We hold that, we hold Texas.”
“Sir,” said the analyst, rushing back in. “That blue dot is an automated communications hub.”
“For what?” he asked, only half listening.
“Air defense, sir. The entire network runs through it.”
McAllister froze and turned to give the mapscreen his full attention. They’d been fooled, he realized. Caught sleeping. The enemy had identified the one node that would cripple their air defense, a point McAllister didn’t even know about until now. As the commanding general, he couldn’t keep everything in mind. He had to trust his subordinates, but someone had dropped the ball by not distributing the network routing better, or at least highlighting the importance of this one location so that it could be defended.
“Hit that battalion with everything we have, now,” McAllister ordered, pointing at the screen. “Priority across the board goes to that target. Divert aircraft, retarget artillery – anything we have!”
The air and artillery liaison officers immediately began yelling into their headsets while their assistants frantically typed orders into their computers. Gervais said, “We don’t have any ground units in the area that can even slow them down. Just a few Guard companies with no mobility, garrisoning the smaller towns, and the enemy is bypassing those. The air, and maybe a couple of light artillery batteries, are all there is.”
“It doesn’t matter how many helicopters or planes we lose; we can’t let them destroy that data hub. If they do, we’re cooked. Our air defense umbrella will lose most of its effectiveness.”
“What have we got defending that site?” McAllister asked.
“A Texas State Guard light infantry company,” the analyst answered. “Unfortunately, there’s no cover or defenses. It’s just a small abandoned industrial park at a crossroads.”
Gervais shook her head. “There’s no way they stand against a heavy battalion.”
“Patch me through to them,” said McAllister. “We better hope they can buy us some time until we can send help their way; otherwise we’re going to have enemy planes crawling all over Texas.”
“What about the rest of our counterattack?” asked Gervais.
“Go ahead, initiate it. It may be too little too late, though if we don’t stop that one battalion.”
Too smart for my own good, McAllister thought. Let them invade deep and then catch them on the flip side. The problem is, I missed a critical node. Dear God, please don’t let my negligence lose us this war.
“Sir,” said an aide. “I have Captain Scaggs on the line. He’s the commander of the company guarding the relay station.”
***
“Yes, General,” said Captain Jimmy Scaggs. “We’ll hold, somehow.” He then hung up the phone.
“General McAllister himself?” said Scaggs’ executive officer, Lieutenant Allen. “From the look on your face, he gave you an ass chewing. How could we possibly screw anything up way out here in the middle of nowhere?”
Captain Scaggs face had taken on a cold, dead look. “Get the key personnel together. Everyone down to squad leader level. Quickly. I need to talk to them.”
Within two minutes, twenty-five sets of eyes looked at him.
“I just got a call from General McAllister,” Scaggs said. “The lead element of the entire U.S. advance, a mechanized battalion, is headed this way. They’re ten miles out. Twenty minutes, maybe less.”
“Why here?” asked one of the platoon leaders.
Scaggs pointed at the warehouse behind them, the largest building in a small industrial cluster at the intersection of a rail line and a highway. A microwave tower studded with dish antennas rose next to it, and a large diesel generator ran day and night, providing electricity to feed its servers and air conditioners. “The general just told me this might be the key to the entire war. All the primary air defense data for Texas runs through it. If it’s destroyed, we’ll probably lose the air war within twenty-four hours, and then Texas will fall. We’ve got help coming, but we have to hold them off.”
“Uh, sir,” said one of his
platoon leaders. “Didn’t you say it was a mechanized battalion? We’re light infantry. They even took our antitank weapons to reinforce other units defending the bigger towns. All we were supposed to do is fend off commando raids. We got nothin’ but small arms.”
Scaggs nodded, looking off into the distance at the line of stalled refugee vehicles spread as far as the eye could see along the highway. Then he turned to the detailed map of the area mounted on the wall.
“What you thinking, boss?” asked Allen.
“We need to slow them down before they get into effective main gun range, which means at least three kilometers north of here to be safe. We don’t have to destroy them, just get mobility kills. Slow them down. The general said we’d have help within two or three hours.” Skaggs traced his finger along a road on the map, where it crossed a deep concrete canal.
“I wish we had antitank mines, or had dug some ditches ahead of time.”
Scaggs shook his head. “That wouldn’t have mattered. We couldn’t have prepared anything three klicks out, not with all the civilians driving everywhere. We’d just have killed some citizens. No, we have to hurry out and set up a hasty ambush. I’m asking for volunteers only. The chances of walking away from this are slim to none.”
“An ambush with what?”
He pointed at the line of refugees’ cars and trucks. “If we can ram some trucks into the sides of the Bradleys, we might get mobility kills by destroying their tracks. If we do it at the right place, we can hold up the whole battalion for a couple of hours. By the time they get clear, the cavalry will have arrived.”
Twenty-five sets of knitted brows stared back at him.
“I’m open to other suggestions,” Scaggs said, “but it needs to be quick. The only alternative I see is to sit here and get turned into cat food by their 25-millimeter cannons and machine guns. Either that, or run. And I ain’t runnin’.”
“They’ll just shoot the vehicles before we can get close enough to ram them,” said Allen.
Scaggs nodded. “They might, but I’m hoping they’ll be hesitant to fire at civilian vehicles until they know for sure they’re a threat. Might be able to sneak up on them.”
“That’s…isn’t that against the laws of war? Using civilian vehicles?”
Scaggs snorted. “Nope. It’s called a ‘ruse de guerre,’ a trick of war. As long as we don’t fly white flags, we’re good. We’re partisans defending our own country.”
“Well,” said a voice from the back, “let’s be honest. Who hasn’t wanted to drive in a demolition derby? Are we really going to let that pass us by?”
A nervous laugh rippled through the formation.
“Ask your folks for volunteers. I don’t want anyone going who isn’t committed,” Skaggs growled. “We load our vehicles in three minutes. Bring the mortar and all the rounds we got. I’ll brief you over the radio as we go. Dismissed.”
Three minutes later, all eighty-six men in the company had jammed into their Humvees and trucks. Skaggs led them northward beside the railroad tracks next to the stalled civilians on the highway. At intervals, one of his squads would stop and commandeer several trucks, nothing smaller than a heavy-duty work van. Soon, eighty-six civilian vehicles from duallies to milk trucks raced across dry, hard fields toward near-certain death.
Skaggs led them up a two-lane that ran obliquely across the route of the enemy’s advance. Perpendicular to the road, a deep drainage canal formed the other half of a V. The oncoming battalion would have to turn and form up single file to cross the lone bridge strong enough to hold armored vehicles.
In the distance, he saw the giant cloud of reddish dust that marked the forward edge of the mechanized battalion. Fifty high-tech, heavily armed combat vehicles against a bunch of trucks, one mortar and the men’s small arms.
It would be a slaughter, even if everything went perfectly.
Yelling orders over the radio, he got the four heaviest trucks parked on the canal bridge, haphazardly as if they had tried to go around traffic and gotten stuck. One was a full gasoline hauler. He sent off his two-man mortar team to emplace themselves five hundred meters away, in the bed of the canal where they couldn’t be seen, with orders to aim at the bridge.
The rest of the vehicles he ordered pulled forward, and then backed up in order to appear as if they had experienced a traffic jam due to two trucks crashed at the head of the column, and then had abandoned the mess.
“Hunker down in your seats, boys,” Skaggs called over the radio. He watched as the mech battalion approached, slowing as they spotted the canal. For long moments they nearly stopped, before one platoon of four Bradleys lumbered forward to investigate the bridge.
The others began to maneuver into a loosely packed column in the middle of the fields in preparation for racing across the bridge when it had been cleared. Hatches opened and men jumped out to check the condition of their vehicles, drink water and smoke. Turrets rotated and elevated into air-defense positions, obviously more concerned about helicopters and airplanes than nonexistent enemy tanks.
“What a godsend,” Skaggs breathed, and then gave the order. “God bless Texas, boys, and I’ll see you all in heaven. If you ain’t there, we’ll come break you outa hell. Execute.”
Engines roared to life and the civilian trucks turned as one to race across the dusty plain and aim themselves at the sides of the Bradleys. Crews gaped in shock or ran for their armored vehicles.
Mortar shells began falling among the lead platoon, which was still trying to figure out how to clear the bridge of its forty-ton blockages. The small shells had little effect, but they threw up dust and forced the track commanders to button up, causing confusion. When one round detonated the five thousand gallons of gasoline parked there, spreading an inferno of petroleum, the Bradleys withdrew, still unaware of what was happening behind them.
Five of the forty halted Bradleys rotated their turrets and opened fire, blowing an equal number of trucks to kingdom come, but that was far fewer than Skaggs had feared. With no ground threat in front of them and the Abrams company to cover their rear, the enemy had become complacent. Now they were going to pay.
Skaggs lost track of how many of his trucks slammed into Bradleys. He’d set himself at the lead of the road column, which meant he had the farthest to go. He’d wanted to see the results of his ploy, as well as giving others the best chance to hit their targets. The more open ground to cover, the more likely it was that he would get picked off.
Whether due to luck, skill or divine providence, Captain Jimmy Skaggs smashed his five-ton truck loaded with beer into the track assembly of a Bradley, thus immortalizing himself and his State Guard company, and becoming the most famous Texan military hero since William B. Travis, Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett died defending the Alamo.
Ten minutes later, F-16s and A-10s of the Texas Air Force began savaging the battalion until a hard-driven company of Texas National Guard M1 Abrams tanks arrived. Between them, they destroyed all the Bradleys and forcing ten surviving Abrams to withdraw to a nearby copse of trees for cover, where they wisely dug in, cut off and nearly empty of fuel.
When the sun went down, the two mortarmen were the only survivors of Bravo Company, 39th Regiment (Roughnecks), Texas State Guard. No other action in Texas since the Alamo had resulted in such a casualty percentage. No other engagement had been so mismatched, yet had achieved such lopsided result. Some historians later compared Bravo Company to the 300 Spartans (and over 1000 other Greeks) who had died defending the pass at Thermopylae.
The air defense communications node, though now unguarded, remained untouched.
***
McAllister kept his face neutral as the day wore on, but the growing death toll hit him like a physical blow. Stopping the mechanized battalion had been successful, though bought at terrible cost. The price of war had been far greater elsewhere, but no other single unit had sustained such high casualties. Those Guard boys...
He watched as the largest armored engageme
nt in the western hemisphere was fought around Abilene. Battalions and brigades smashed into each other head to head, aided by hundreds of tubes of artillery. Aircraft fought and died grappling for the upper hand, while missiles crisscrossed in the sky, some incoming, some outgoing. Helicopters died the quickest, unless they stayed at the fringes of the battlefield.
Unlike the clean, neat exercises of War College, or the meticulous conventional campaign against the Iraqi military that had yielded few friendly casualties, this was a swirling melee, fought by men and women who spoke the same language, had gone to the same training, and operated the same equipment. It was perhaps the finest example of a pure civil war since the Reds and the Whites fought for dominance in the Russia of a century ago.
Some amateur historian quickly claimed it ranked in the top ten by sheer size. McAllister didn’t care about that; he just wanted it over.
Thousands of infantry had disgorged themselves from personnel carriers and found each other in short-range, even hand-to-hand combat while armored vehicles fought around them. Dismounted engineers slapped sticky bombs on the sides of tanks while steel treads rolled over formations of prone riflemen. Fire and smoke engulfed an area of more than five hundred square miles.
Throughout the long night, the two gargantuan combatants fought with every weapon at their disposal. Masses of attackers fell to stubborn, outnumbered defenders, dug in and determined to hold. The kill ratio averaged three to one in the air, two to one on the ground in Texas’ favor. By morning, every combat unit on both sides had sustained at least thirty percent casualties. Some had taken double that. Out of ammo and fuel, many became combat ineffective.
The difference was, the Texans were on home ground. Ammo and fuel were scrounged from armories and redistributed among units. Escaped vehicle crews were fed and given medical aid by local citizens, and returned to fight. Aviators parachuted into friendly hands and were dropped off at airfields in search of planes to fly.
Apocalypse Austin Page 24
