Trev sucked in enough breath to ask. “The other teams?”
“All safely away.” His cousin smiled. “Mostly because the blockheads discovered the greater part of valor. They bolted back downslope as soon as they realized they were walking into the beginning of a wildfire.”
That was mixed news. “So we don’t get to burn up hundreds of them, or send them running into our ambushes.”
“No. But they won’t be doing anything along this slope for a while, so our people are safe.” Lewis clapped him on the shoulder again. “I’m taking my squad to help Gutierrez and Ben. Jane’s taking hers to help Thompson’s people south of here. I want you to keep your squad up here watching the fire, to alert us when and if any blockheads make their move on this slope. While you’re at it finish moving our stuff over the ridge and out of the way.”
“Gotcha.” Trev let himself collapse to the ground and pant for a bit, while Lewis’s team got together their gear and headed out. They were joined by their squad mates from the other emplacements, and quickly slipped out of view towards 31.
He toggled his radio. “My squad, post sentries to watch the slope while we move our supplies the rest of the way to safety. After that we’re splitting into two man teams to watch the emplacements. All but Rick and Trent… you guys have solo duty.”
“So we’ve got fire watch?” Alice asked. “Is that a good or bad thing?”
Trev glanced downslope at what could now officially be classified as bonfires, which were spreading in all directions and starting to leap where the wind caught them. “It’s a vacation, as long as the fire goes where we want it.”
Over the next five hours, until roughly noon, Lewis and his squad fought in the canyon above 31.
He’d survived plenty of fights since the Gulf burned, but few compared to that experience. For one thing the tanks stationed in Huntington rolled out, and to cover the blockheads approaching on foot they began shelling the emplacements along the road from a distance. If they hadn’t already known Davis’s fighters were out of antitank missiles, they had to know it after that provocation produced zero response.
Several people died in the first few hits, after which the fighters were forced to abandon the emplacements and scatter along the slopes. Without the cover of the fortifications the hundreds of blockheads streaming into the canyon were far more of a threat, and holding them back became a serious challenge. Even using their few remaining grenades barely slowed the enemy.
As the hours passed they were forced to give ground yard by yard, until they’d been pushed back almost half a mile up the canyon. The fighters desperately holding the ridges to either side became surrounded, and it was all they could do to keep the enemy back until Davis and his reinforcements managed to push in and hold the north ridge.
On the south ridge Trev and everyone in his squad but Alice and Deb, who remained as lookouts, came up and over to help out. Some of that help came in the form of holding the emplacement alongside the beleaguered fighters. But more importantly, at the same time Trev worked to bridge the firebreak they’d created along the ridge, which was keeping the wildfire from getting into the canyon itself.
It was an incredibly risky maneuver, but since the canyon was already nearly lost there were few other options. Once freed, the fire swept around and raged across the south slope in the canyon, engulfing dozens of blockheads in flames and forcing the rest to flee right at Lewis and the other canyon fighters.
The fighting had become beyond fierce at that point, but eventually they killed or captured the enemy soldiers or drove them back into the flames. In the meantime Davis managed to take and hold the north ridge, and working together his and Harmon’s fighters pushed the blockheads back to the mouth of the canyon again.
The blockheads backed away for a while after that. Davis’s fighters used the time to halt the wildfire’s advance on the south slope, then regroup and prepare for the next wave of the attack.
That was the good news. The fighting wasn’t going so great along other fronts, and Gold Bloc forces had managed to break through in several spots. The military forces there, routed and panicking, had all they could do to withdraw and set up new positions. In the meantime enemy soldiers were drawing perilously close to two different refugee camps, which were undergoing emergency evacuation while soldiers scrambled to plug the gaps.
Lewis didn’t have time to worry about any of that, though, since just after noon Trev radioed in to announce that the wildfire had died down along parts of the southern slope. The enemy wasn’t wasting a moment responding to the opportunity, and once again hundreds of blockheads were massing down below to try pushing their way up. At the same time the tanks resumed their shelling of the canyon, and hundreds more blockheads pushed up the road for another attack.
“Go,” Harmon told Lewis when he heard the news. Lewis nodded, shook the sergeant’s hand, then gathered his squad. He’d lost two men in the canyon, but with the rest at his back he rushed to circle around the fires still raging on the south slope, hoping to get to his cousin in time to help. Jane had already pulled her squad back from helping Thompson’s fighters, who weren’t doing so great either but had managed to hold so far.
Rather than making their way down from the ridge, they followed along it to where it connected to the main ridge the southern slope ran down from, in a fairly continuous hillside all the way to the valley below. A hillside that was still an inferno in many places.
Near the top Trev, Jane, and their squads waited in the emplacements. It looked as if they’d lost three fighters from Jane’s squad and one from Trev’s, so the Aspen Hill volunteers had now lost six people in total.
Although he grieved the fallen, Lewis was at least relieved to see that Trev’s squad had found time to move their supplies up over the ridge like he’d asked. He was especially glad for it when he looked down the burning, blackened, ash-choked slope and saw the enemy force gathered below. That looked like a determined bunch of soldiers who obviously weren’t going to let the fires stop them, and two and a half squads of volunteers had very little hope of turning them back either. It was almost certain they were going to have to give up these emplacements.
Jane ran over to hug him when he arrived, followed moments later by Trev. “Good thinking getting the fire into the canyon,” Lewis told his cousin as he hugged him back.
Trev grimaced. “It was enough, barely. And it didn’t burn any of our guys, so that’s a plus. But my squad’s completely out of grenades and any other toys. We’ve just got our guns, and we’re running low on ammo.”
“My squad’s down to our guns, too,” Jane said. “And if the fighting in the canyon was as bad as it sounded I’m guessing it’s the same for you, right Lewis?”
Lewis smiled crookedly. “Yeah, within the first hour. Good thing we’ve got plenty of rocks to throw.” He glanced a hundred yards up the slope to the ridgeline above, where he could just barely see the top of a modestly tall pile of rocks running all the way along the stretch they had to defend. A ridge that petered down to half a mile at the top of the ever-narrowing mountainside, but was still almost too much distance to manage. That rock pile was their last line of defense once they lost these final emplacements.
Neither of the others smiled back at his weak attempt at humor. “Here they come,” Rick called as he stared over the sandbag fortifications.
So this was it. “All teams to their emplacements,” Lewis ordered as he hurried over to join his friend.
He needed to know how the enemy was attacking so he could plan their response. If the blockheads sent just a few squads ahead to try to clear the ridge, his fighters should be able to wipe them out without too much threat to the emplacements.