“War Machine Six, Ronan One-Six. That’s a good copy, sending a runner to you now,” Slater answered.
Sergeant Starr huffed slightly but then yelled over to a couple of his guys, “Go find those Strykers and lead the soldiers with them to our position!”
Fifteen minutes went by before the two privates returned with the battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Isaac Zacharia, and a handful of soldiers from Bravo Company. They sauntered up to their little makeshift observation post.
Zacharia said, “I heard you guys may have found a den of vipers waiting for us.”
Slater nodded. “It would appear so, Sir,” he answered. “My sniper team has already located seven machine-gun positions in the various windows and minarets of the mosque and Islamic center.”
“Make that nine, Sir. Found two more,” added Corporal Biggs. He still had his rifle out and he continued to scan the building.
“Well, I’ll be damned if we’re going to willingly walk into this ambush,” Zacharia said. “I’m going to get the rest of the battalion moved over here, and we’ll see if we can’t get some air support to blast the place before we advance. We’ll lead with the tanks and Strykers and then follow in on foot after I get us a couple of JDAMs on that place.”
The men around them nodded in approval.
He turned to his radioman. “Put me through to our Air Force TACP,” he demanded.
A few minutes went by as the Air Force guys were tracked down. An Air Force master sergeant made his way forward to their observation post and nodded toward the battalion commander. “I heard you have a target you want blown up, Sir?”
Lieutenant Colonel Zacharia smiled. “I sure do,” he said nonchalantly. “You see that mosque and nearby Islamic center? Our sniper here and his spotter found at least nine enemy machine-gun positions throughout the building. Every couple of minutes they find another one. I need both buildings leveled. I’m not going to lose any of my soldiers because the Chinese are hiding behind a religious structure.”
The master sergeant took a couple of steps forward. Then he leaned down and got next to the spotter. “Can you show me the positions you’ve found already?” he asked.
“Sure thing, Master Sergeant.”
The TACP thoroughly examined the building and the enemy positions. Eventually, he pulled out his map and then got up and walked back to the battalion commander. “Sir, I can take the building out, but could you help me identify the friendly units in the immediate area? I want to make sure when we drop ordnance on that place, our friendly units know how far to stay away.”
The group plotted out where the other companies were at in relationship to the rest of the brigade. There was also another brigade of soldiers that was slated to come ashore that evening, and they would need to keep them updated.
Now that he had all the information he needed from the ground level, the TACP got on his own radio and began to identify what aircraft were in the area and what munitions they were carrying. He eventually got a hold of a pair of F-16s who were packing 2,000-pound JDAMs. After giving them the coordinates and making sure they read them back to him, he gave them the green light to hit the building with four of them, one on each corner of the building.
“That should be more than enough to flatten the mosque as well as the nearby building,” Slater thought as he listened to the TACP’s side of the call.
When the TACP put down his radio, he turned to look at the group of officers. “OK, Colonel, our birds are inbound. They should hit the target in five mikes. I’d suggest we tell everyone to get down and stand by for a really loud boom,” the Air Force guy said with a grin on his face.
The minutes ticked by rather quickly until the ground and everything around them shook. Then the blast wave from the bombs going off smacked them with a wave of searing heat. Looking back toward where the mosque had been, Slater couldn’t see anything left standing. Now there was just a bombed-out shell with fires everywhere and debris raining down to the ground.
With the building destroyed, Lieutenant Colonel Zacharia ordered the battalion to attack. The four tanks he’d managed to grab lurched forward, quickly followed by their Stryker vehicles. As the vehicles moved forward, the soldiers advanced, leaving their covered positions. The men felt a lot more confident about going into the open field now that the Air Force had blasted the buildings ahead of them and they had plenty of armor leading the way.
An hour after they destroyed the mosque and secured the surrounding area, a small contingent of Chinese soldiers made themselves visible under a white flag. This was the first time Lieutenant Slater had seen a group of Chinese soldiers ever come forward to surrender. He hoped it truly meant they wanted to end the fighting there. He’d already lost three soldiers that day, and another four had been wounded; he didn’t want to lose any more.
Two hours after they spotted the Chinese officers with the white flag, the fighting on the island officially ended. The PLA colonel whose unit was in charge of defending the island decided that he’d rather save the remaining lives of his men than fight a futile battle he had no chance of winning.
Lieutenant Slater just hoped this was just the beginning of Chinese forces surrendering. He’d seen enough death and killing for a lifetime; all he wanted now was to go home, get drunk, and not do anything for a long time.
Chapter 6
Complications
Ambassador Ava Hicks was four months into the occupation of Russia. Already, things were starting to fray at the ends. While there was no open revolt against the Russian Provisional Authority yet, there were increasing demonstrations denouncing the occupation and the slow progress of the postwar recovery. Of course, it didn’t help that key generals across the military were dragging their feet in helping the Allies maintain law and order.
That was not what was weighing on Ava’s mind, however. The Russians’ latest request was for them to be allowed to bring their Spetsnaz teams back home from the US and other Allied nations. Since the official end of the war, the ones that hadn’t already been hunted down and killed had been lying low in hopes of being able to return home. Ava was conflicted about how to handle this situation. The American people wanted them held accountable for the wanton destruction and deaths they’d caused within the Allied nations — and rightly so, Ava thought.
However, it wasn’t a simple one-sided argument. The Department of Defense had reasoned that what the Spetsnaz teams had done was no different than what the DoD had done to the Russians when they had gone after their power grid or the Indian railway system.
It was a tough position Ambassador Hicks found herself in. If she sided with the Russians and the US Department of Defense, then the American people and political establishment would turn on her. If she sided with the Department of Justice and the politicians, then the military and the shaky Russian government might turn on her and the occupation force.
She grabbed a chocolate bar from the secret stash in her desk and munched on it anxiously as she considered her options. Although she wasn’t proud of it, she’d gained five pounds in the last month from all the stress. There was a heavy weight on her shoulders.
As if things weren’t complicated enough with the issue of the Spetsnaz teams, she also had the far more concerning issue of the “missing” nuclear weapons. There were still almost a thousand nuclear devices that were unaccounted for. She thumbed through the papers on her desk, as if they were going to tell her something new, but she already knew what they said. The Russian Air Force report claimed that three hundred nuclear-armed cruise missiles had been destroyed during several Allied raids in the last weeks of the war. However, the US investigators countering weapons of mass destruction disputed that argument; there was no evidence that these weapons had been destroyed, only of radiation where they had been previously held.