As they were about to land in Olympia, Dibble pulled Joe aside on the bridge of the tug and said with a smile, “Hey, you wonder why no one stopped us on the water?”
“Yes, I sure did.”
“We have someone on the inside at the FUSA Coast Guard in Seattle,” Dibble said with a huge grin. “She’s at the Coast Guard Maritime Control Center. She’s one of the radar people that tells ship and planes where to go.”
“Or not go,” Joe said with a huge sigh of relief. The Patriots never could have won without inside help like this, Joe realized.
The Patriot tug radioed the barge to let them know that they were entering Budd Inlet, the final leg of the journey. It was just before midnight on New Year’s and the gunfire and explosions had just started near the capitol. The sounds of war got Joe’s men pumped up and ready to land.
Joe was on the bridge of the tug with his binoculars. He was stunned to see the lights on at the port but no one around. It was exactly like Dibble said it would be: abandoned. The gunfire and explosions were still far away, about two miles north of them at the capitol campus.
Landing at night was scary, not because of enemy gunfire but just because it was a landing in an unknown port, and barges aren’t easy to steer. The tugboat was manned by an excellent tug crew of volunteers who had landed at the port of Olympia before. They put the barge exactly where it needed to be.
Joe remembered that they had some trouble getting the armored car off the barge and onto the dock. They couldn’t drive the armored car off the barge because it would crush the wooden dock. They needed to use the crane to lift it up and onto the cement staging area onshore. They knew where the keys to the crane were because the tugboat captain had hung out with the crane operators before the Collapse. They went to the control center where the keys were, but it was locked. A special 12 gauge breaching round, which shot metal powder out the barrel, took care of the locked door. A minute later, the tug captain was unloading the armored car. It was an ugly crane job, with the armored car swinging wildly, but it got the job done.
By now, the landing party was out of the shipping containers and doing a final coms and gear check. Once the armored car was operational, the men took up positions behind it. Commercial armored cars were the poor man’s armored personnel carrier.
Joe’s landing party went slowly up the street toward the capitol campus. They first encountered an F Corp checkpoint in downtown Olympia. The FCorps guards, an old man and a young teenager, put up their hands without a word and were zip tied after Joe’s men took their radios.
The next checkpoint, manned by about a dozen FCorps, decided to shoot when the armored car disobeyed their loudspeaker order to halt. Their bullets bounced right off Joe’s armored car, causing the occupants to laugh out loud. The Marines behind the armored car patiently saw where the F Corp muzzle flashes were coming from and demonstrated the marksmanship skills the Marine Corps was known for.
But, as could be expected, the FCorps checkpoint that shot at them had radios.
“There’s an armored car and a bunch of soldiers coming straight up Capitol Boulevard!” one of the FCorps screamed into his radio.
The dispatcher coordinating the response to the gunfire all over the city was overwhelmed. Besides, there was no way an armored car could have driven downtown; all the roads and streets leading to the capitol had checkpoints so it was impossible that an armored car was downtown. The dispatcher assumed this was a mistake or that some teabaggers had stolen a radio and were trying to divert the legitimate authorities, perhaps to an ambush. She disregarded the report of the armored car and moved on to the dozen other emergencies confronting her all at the same time.
Joe remembered how the fire got thicker as they moved toward the capitol campus. Joe’s coms guy, Daniel Briggman, was monitoring the Lima frequencies. The Limas had secure channels, but in the chaos of the attack, many of them, especially the untrained FCorps, were freaking out and talking on the unsecure frequencies. This gave Patriots invaluable information.
Joe and Dibble were in the armored car when Briggman came running up and said, with some concern, “Hey, they now know we’re here, but some of them still can’t believe it. They’re trying to get some armor to engage us.”
Monitoring the Lima radios wasn’t the only source of information Joe’s men had. Some of the Marines were scouting ahead of the armored car. One of them turned a corner and saw a tank sitting in an intersection, fully illuminated by the street lights. The engine wasn’t running, which seemed strange. He used a silent hand signal to tell his fellow scout, who then ran to the armor car to report it.
“I got it,” said Gunnery Sergeant Martin Booth, who was in command of the Marines. He had a plan for this and with a couple of shouts to key personnel, the plan was underway.
Booth pre-determined five Marines to make their way to the corner where the scout had spotted the tank. They had a secret surprise for the tank: a Javelin anti-tank missile. The men made their way to the corner and verified the target was there. It was a block down the street from the corner where the Marines were.
As they were getting ready to fire, the enemy tank crew came running up to the tank, which explained why the engine wasn’t running; it was just sitting there, unmanned. Perhaps the Limas were trying to scare people away, but that didn’t work on Marines.
“Capture them,” the corporal leading the anti-tank party said. “If you can,” he added.
Knowing that the tank couldn’t fire at them without a crew in it made deciding to take it on much easier.
“Freeze!” the Marines yelled as the first of the tank crew members was climbing on the tank to get into it.
The scared National Guard kids threw their hands up in an instant. One by one, they were ordered to walk down the street to be zip tied.
Once the fifth member of the tank crew was secured, the corporal called in the good news.
“Looks like we captured an Abrams,” referring to the M1 tank in the intersection. “Betcha that’ll come in handy.”
Just as those words left the corporal’s mouth, machine gun fire came from the second story of the building just behind the tank.
“Oh, well,” he said, and gave the signal to his two-man Javelin crew. After a few bursts of fire from the Marines, the machine gun stopped. But, to the Marines’ surprise, a new tank crew came running out and started to get into the tank.
The Javelin crew was in place and gave one last look to the corporal in case anything had changed.
“Light ’em up,” the corporal yelled, and a second later the Javelin exploded out of its launcher and rocked the intersection. The concussion knocked some of the Marines down. The Abrams was still in one piece, but on fire. The secondary explosions from the tank rounds inside started to go off.
The Marine anti-tank crew ran back to the armored car. The corporal reported to Booth about trying to capture the tank. Joe remembered Booth saying, “Shit happens, Corporal” and shrugging.