by James Rosone
Pointing at something, Master Sergeant Stotts said, “Reyes, see if the drone’s laser mic can pick up what they’re saying. I think those guys are up to something.”
“Copy that, Master Sergeant,” Reyes replied as he typed a command into his keyboard. He was sending a message to the drone watching the enemy soldiers to turn on its parabolic mic so they could try and hear what was going on. Reyes was fluent in Spanish, so understanding the Cubans wasn’t going to be a problem.
In a barely audible voice, Reyes muttered, “What the hell? Over.”
Scooching next to Reyes, Stotts asked, “What’d you find? Can you hear them?”
Reyes moved to hand him the headset so he could hear for himself. Stotts stifled a laugh. “You know I don’t speak Cuban.”
“They speak Spanish, idiot. Isn’t your wife Cuban?” Reyes chided in annoyance.
“She sure is, but I tell her all the time I don’t speak Cuban or Mexican,” he whispered back with a big grin on his face.
Reyes punched him in the shoulder as he shook his head. “We’re going to overtake you gringos one day, Master Sergeant. You best start learning to speak Spanish now. That guy right there”—Reyes pointed to the Cuban regular—“is translating what the ChiCom is saying. He’s telling the soldiers around him that the Chinese didn’t travel across the world to help the Cuban People’s Revolution only to have them get scared and not want to fight. He’s going on about how the Chinese lost millions of people in their people’s revolution, but they won because they didn’t give up. The Chinese soldier is trying to encourage them to fight a little longer, a little harder. He says they’re so close to victory that they can’t give up now.”
“Jesus…” Stotts trailed off. His immediate thought was of his wife and her family. They had escaped Cuba when she was a baby. Her parents had made a makeshift raft and fled the island. It had been a horrible journey across the Straits. The waters had been rough, and the raft had ended up falling apart as they’d sighted Florida. Her two brothers and one sister had drowned before a Coast Guard cutter had been able to rescue them. Had her father not tied her to him, she probably would have drowned like her three siblings.
Prior to meeting his wife, Stotts had had no idea of the risks the Cuban refugees had taken to escape the island. The stories her mother and father had regaled him with of what it was like to live under the Castro regime had firmly cemented his dislike of communism. He had always thought the stories of Cuba were tall tales, but now that he had married into a Cuban family, he knew differently.
Despite his hatred for what the regime had done to his wife’s family, he almost felt bad about sending so many of them to meet their maker. Sure, they had new uniforms and weapons courtesy of the Chinese, but their training and tactics were terrible. Their Chinese advisors were using them like cannon fodder against the Americans.
Looking at the drone feed again, Stotts saw the Cubans stand and reassemble into their respective platoons.
“Looks like school’s out,” Reyes said.
“I’m calling it in,” Stotts announced as he depressed the talk button on his radio. “Banshee, Fox One Bravo. How copy?”
“Fox One Bravo. Banshee. Good copy. Send it.”
“Banshee, fire mission. Grid, Victor Hotel 75645-04335, break. Troops in the open, company-sized element clustered, break. Danger close, requesting one round HE. Will adjust. How copy?”
“Fox One Bravo. Good copy. Break. Grid, Victor Hotel 75645-04335, troops in the open, company-sized element clustered, break. Danger close, one round HE. Stand by for fire mission.”
*******
USS Lake Champlain (CG-57)
Six Miles off the Coast of Gitmo
Lieutenant Sammy Ramsahi was the Tactical Action Officer or TAO aboard the Champlain, or Champ as she was known to her crew. The Champ had been on station for a day, and what a wild and crazy twenty-four hours it had been.
During the first few days of the new war, the Chinese had hit several ships in their squadron, forcing a couple of them to head back to port to undergo some emergency repairs. The Champ had taken a hit from a CSS-N-8 Saccade antiship missile only two hours after coming on station. The missile had nailed their hangar, blowing one of their ASW helicopters apart and killing many of the ground crew. Thankfully, the ship was still able to stay on station, functioning as a floating artillery base and anti-air warfare platform. They just couldn’t support the traditional ASW mission without their helos.
Lieutenant Ramsahi yawned. He was just about to get up and go refill his coffee when the radio connecting them with the ground forces ashore chirped, letting them know the SINCGARS radio was about to receive a message once the encryption had synced.
“Banshee, Fox One Bravo. How copy?” came the distant-sounding voice of a Marine.
The sailor manning the radio grabbed for the hand receiver as Ramsahi made his way over to him. “Fox One Bravo, Banshee. Good copy. Send it.”
As soon as they heard the call for a fire mission, the mood in the room electrified. Several of the sailors sat up, preparing themselves for whatever action might be about to start.
Ramsahi alerted the ship’s captain, who had previously given him weapons-free permission if it was to support the Marines ashore. The captain knew a fire mission was a life-or-death call for the grunts, so he didn’t want anything to stand in the way of the support they needed.
The Champ was among a select few Ticos that had been outfitted with the Navy’s newest advanced gun system, AGS Mod III. The Navy had finally solved the compatibility problem between the Army’s 155mm rounds and their own. They had simply adapted the gun system to the Army’s existing tubes. Aside from some slight tweaking and modifications for use aboard naval vessels, it made most sailors with average intelligence scratch their heads, asking why they hadn’t done this decades ago. The Navy had spent a lot of money trying to reinvent the wheel, only to go back to the obvious solution.
The AGS Mod III was a marked improvement over its predecessor. It could fire six rounds per minute, and the Champ had two of them, one fore and one aft. Together, their magazines held an impressive thousand rounds of various types of ordnance, from HE rounds to rocket-assisted projectiles or RAP rounds, and everything in between. The AGS had given the Tico-class a new lease on life.
In this war, all the Ticos that hadn’t already been deployed were being kitted out with the new gun systems before they joined the fight. Once it had become clear how heavily fortified the island of Cuba had become with surface-to-air missile systems, naval gun support had become incredibly important. Until the Air Force and the Navy air wings were able to remove the SAM threat, close-air support or CAS missions were simply too risky for the aircrews. The Ticos were suddenly finding themselves the most important ships in the Navy.
On the deck of the Champ, the 155mm AGS turrets turned towards Cuba, elevating slightly. As the fire control technicians input the targeting data into the fire direction computers, the crew below deck got the gun ready to fire.
“Sir, guns report loaded and ready,” called out one of the petty officers.
“Guns ready, very well,” acknowledged Ramsahi, nodding to the technician on the radio with Fox One Bravo.
“Fox One Bravo, good copy. Break. Grid, Victor Hotel 75645-04335, troops in the open, company-sized element clustered, break. Danger close, one round HE.”
Ramsahi gave the order: “Fire!”
Boom!
Even in the CIC below tons of steel, they felt the gun boom as the 155mm tube fired a single shot.
“Fox One Bravo, Banshee. Shot!”
“Banshee, Fox One Bravo. Shot, over.”
All eyes in the CIC were on their workstation clocks. The distance to the target was just under six miles. At 760 meters per second, it would take less than fifteen seconds for the round to impact.
*******
MSOT 8211
Outside Gitmo
Master Sergeant Stotts tapped Reyes on the shoulder, and bot
h Raiders ducked their heads and kept their mouths slightly opened. They knew full well that calling in 155s danger close was going to be jarring. Stotts was counting in his head; when he got to ten, he could hear the round coming in. This was just a single round. Once they saw where it impacted, they’d call in a last-minute adjustment and a fire for effect to pulverize the Cubans.
When a round this large came flying in, it didn’t sound like some loud whistling noise—they didn’t have fins. They were more like a freight train approaching, until either it flew over your head or it plastered you.
Stotts tried to keep his eyes on the drone feed while still keeping his head down. He didn’t want to poke himself up too high for fear of catching a piece of flying shrapnel. What he did see as he watched the Cuban soldiers and their Chinese advisor was almost comical. The ChiCom was speaking to the Cubans when his head cocked to the side. He stopped talking, then slowly began to look towards the sky. Stotts could swear he saw recognition on the Chinese officer’s face of what was about to hit them.
Boom!
The single 155mm shell detonated roughly fifty meters long from the main cluster of Cuban soldiers. Still, their bodies were thrown and tossed about from the impact.
Stotts was already on the radio, calling in an adjustment to the last round so he could hammer the entire enemy force. “Banshee, Fox One Bravo. Splash! Adjust fire, drop twenty-five meters, right one hundred meters. Fire for effect, eight rounds HE. Over!”
When both guns had fired eight rounds, that would make a total of sixteen—Stotts knew the sixteen rounds about to be fired would saturate the area where the enemy soldiers were. He almost wondered if he should have called in a twenty-round mission but decided that would have been overkill and probably would have wasted ammo. He knew everyone was short—he just didn’t want to leave any survivors.
Less than a minute later, they heard the roar of the rounds coming in and hunkered down. The ground beneath them shuddered as round after round shook the ground until all sixteen rounds had impacted.
When the fire mission concluded, Stotts looked down at the drone feed and caught a glimpse of the carnage they had inflicted. What he saw nearly made him sick. There were sixteen smoldering craters intermixed with the torn and ruined body parts of what had been more than one hundred enemy soldiers. The cries of the wounded started to pierce the air once the soldiers realized the bombardment had subsided.
“Fox One Bravo, Banshee. Rounds complete. Over.”
“Banshee, Fox One Bravo. Rounds complete. Break. Good hits. End of mission, over.”
“Fox One Bravo. Banshee. End of mission. Out.”
Stotts switched to the Fox Company net. He needed to speak to Major Bostic.
“Fox Actual, Fox One.”
“Fox One, Fox Actual, send it.”
“Sir, we just engaged a company of militia with ChiCom support. Good kill on target.”
It took several moments for Bostic to respond. When he did, the news wasn’t good. “Fox One, you need to beat feet back to Position Victor. I say again, displace to Pos Victor.”
“Good copy. Fox One out!”
Stotts and the team were moving before he even finished his sentence. Position Victor was the company area reserved for the collapsing of lines. They were to abandon all their listening and observation posts and consolidate into a company element so they could prepare to fight not as individual small-man teams but as a combined unit. This was basically the “Oh crap!” part of the plan for when everything else fell apart. Things had been getting progressively worse over the last few days. With no reinforcements, outside supplies, or any sort of CAS they could call on, it was only a matter of time until they had to collapse back to their Alamo positions.
*******
1/65 Infantry
Outside Gitmo Perimeter
Lieutenant Colonel Marquez was crouched low, his M4 carbine firmly in his shoulder; he had the Chinese soldier lined up in his holographic sight. The red dot was in the notch of the man’s neck, just above his front chest plate of his body armor. Marquez gently squeezed the trigger until he felt the rifle buck in his shoulder. The Chinese soldier fell to the ground in a heap, dead before he knew what had happened. The platoon dug in to Marquez’s left and right opened fire with their M240B and M4s.
The patrol they’d engaged was crossing from the woods on the far side of the road to the near side, where his men were dug in, waiting. Their ambush was a textbook V-shape and the Cuban militia had walked headlong into it. Moments after the shooting started, the platoon leader, Second Lieutenant Reynosa, called for a cease-fire. Lieutenant Reynosa tapped the soldier next to him on the helmet; the soldier stood and fired his M320 grenade launcher.
Thump!
The projectile launched into the air, only instead of a grenade, the launcher had fired a GLUAS or grenade-launched unmanned aerial system. The drone operator flew the device over the remains of the patrol they’d just killed.
“Hover over that individual there,” Marquez ordered the operator. As the enemy soldier tried to crawl away, he must have heard the whirring of the drone because he rolled over and looked into the camera.
The soldier was clearly Chinese. Half of his face had been shot away—it was a miracle he was still alive. When the man’s radio crackled, Marquez couldn’t fully understand what he said, but he was able to make out one word: “Jūntuán.” It sent chills down his spine.
“Lieutenant Reynosa, displace! We’re moving back to your company lines now!”
The young officer didn’t hesitate; he gave the order to his platoon sergeant and the men began to police their gear and move out.
“Sir, what is it?” Reynosa asked his battalion commander as they scurried back across the Gitmo perimeter.
“That Chinese soldier, he said the word regiment. That was also a short-range radio he was using. That means he was probably in contact with a much larger element near our position. We’re way too exposed out here. We need to get back to our lines and get ready for what’s coming next!”
Marquez knew he was going to catch hell from his XO and command sergeant major or CSM for being this far from the battalion CP and exposing himself this way, but he’d wanted to get a feel for his forward positions and what kind of enemy forces were arrayed against them. Marquez didn’t know if that Chinese soldier was saying something to another Chinese unit or some Cuban militia—in either case, he was certain things were about to change along their lines and not necessarily for the better.
*******
ODA 7426
One Mile outside Gitmo
Captain Sam “Stank” Morehouse lay on his stomach in the hide site, looking at multiple feeds from the cameras they’d placed along the southern leg of Carretera Glorietta. The covertly placed cameras activated each time they detected movement along the road or near it and alerted them of the activity. If the enemy was going to move any large numbers of troops or equipment, they’d likely use this stretch of road to get them in closer to the American base.
Stank’s team had set up their hide position roughly a quarter mile from a small gap they’d created in the Gitmo fence line. They’d left a platoon of Seabees there to ensure no one was waiting in ambush for them when they returned to base.
The Seabees had been eager to join them outside the wire. They were itching to get into the fight and do their own part. Stank had politely declined. Their mission required stealth and violence of action—the Seabees weren’t trained or equipped for either.
Stank swatted at a fly that was annoying the crap out of him. He was just about to hand off the monitor to his team sergeant when his earpiece chirped. He touched the screen and used two fingers to enlarge the feed from the camera that had picked up the movement.
Oh crap, that’s not good.
Stank rolled over and showed his team sergeant, who immediately shared his concern. Master Sergeant Trip “Walker” Hodges brought his little scout drone to life and started moving it in the direction of the roa
d to get a better view of what was happening.
When their ODA team had arrived in Gitmo two weeks ago along with the Force Recon Marines, they had done a deep reconnaissance in the jungle and hills beyond the fence line of the American facility. They were scouting for the most likely avenues of attack and vehicle routes the enemy would use to hit Gitmo. As they’d identified the possible attack vectors, they had placed some solar-powered scout drones nearby, in anticipation of moments just like this.
The drone Walker had activated was one they’d positioned at the highest point in the area they were observing. It was small enough that the Chinese radars wouldn’t pick it up, at least not right away. The purpose of the little drone was to give them a quick snapshot of the entire area and what they might be facing. If there was a target of opportunity juicy enough to blow their cover for, then they’d order in a naval bombardment from one of the Ticos off the coast.
“Damn, boss! You seeing this?” Walker exclaimed excitedly.
“Yep… bad juju, man, bad juju,” Stank replied softly.
The images they were looking at were being relayed to the tactical operations center for both 2/8 Marines and 1/65th National Guard. They were staring at a column of Chinese mechanized infantry and main battle tanks, accompanied by a ragtag assortment of trucks hauling Cuban militia—all of it heading towards the besieged American base.
“Bayonet Three, Splinter Actual.”
“Splinter, Bayonet Three Alpha, send it.”
“Are you getting my feed?”
“Sí… I mean yes, yes, we are receiving.”
Stank looked at Walker; they both laughed. The Puerto Ricans were Americans no doubt, but while on Cuba, even though they were US Army, they almost always spoke Spanish, much to the frustration of the regular Army dudes with them. When they did speak English, Stank found that he really needed to pay attention or he’d need a translator.
The men of ODA 7426 all spoke Spanish fluently; it was a prerequisite in 7th Group. Latin America was their AOR. Still, the men of the 1/65th Infantry had done their best to speak English over comms.
