“There didn’t seem to be much activity at all in the city last night,” Cooper went on. “Hardly any reports of sniper fire or movement, which is a nice change. I do, however, finally have the detailed after-action report of the patrol that got hit late last week, with interviews of the wounded. The AAR is already on your desk.”
“Tell me.” The AAR would tell him the who, the what, and the when, but sometimes they didn’t provide the whole story. He knew he’d lost four men in the attack, with another ten injured. It was the biggest single loss they’d suffered in months. Which meant they’d had a relatively quiet spring and summer. For which, he knew, he should be grateful, but he also knew the lull wouldn’t last.
“An understrength platoon from the 12th, more like three squads, really, twenty-eight men, commanded by Lieutenant Hauser. Mixed armor package, including one Toad, doing a sweep and clear. Force projection as much as anything else, that’s why they had the Toad.” Through the cracked door he saw the Colonel nodding.
That was the only reason they still patrolled this gigantic cesspool of a city, “force projection”. Parker, and Cooper, and probably all of the soldiers in the command would prefer to just stay buttoned up inside their base and let the city eat itself, but IV Corps in all its wisdom had decreed that, despite a critical lack of men and resources (most notably fuel), they had to keep patrolling the area to keep the population in check.
And, in truth, Parker was in charge of more than just the city, he was in charge of the whole region, from Fort Gratiot to the northeast to Lansing to the west, all the way to Monroe in the south. However, it was the city and the suburbs which surrounded it which occupied the lion’s share of his time, attention, and manpower. The city was the rotten center of the decaying piece of fruit they’d all been told to eat with a smile.
“On their way back in, running late because one of their vehicles broke down. They were rolling in four Growlers, doing a sweep, backed up by the Toad and IMP.” Growlers were the Army’s four-wheel-drive passenger vehicle. Great ground clearance, and enough torque to get over or around just about any obstacle, but their passenger compartments were cramped, their diesel engines were loud, and their transmissions were, strangely enough, difficult to maintain. The troops were not fond of them.
“They were hit at a residential intersection. One of the Growlers was not armored, and the armored windows on the other one failed to stop half the incoming. UV deterioration, apparently.” Parker nodded. They’d been seeing a lot of that, but despite numerous requisition requests had yet to receive any new armored window panels for their Growlers. Or run-flat tires. “The tank commander fired a round from the main gun, and the troops cranked off a lot of rounds from their rifles and belt-feds, but they didn’t find any bodies. They had to abandon one of the Growlers, it was shot up pretty good. When a patrol went back for it, it was stripped and torched.”
“Of course. Heavy weapons?”
“Just small arms, rifles and a couple grenades. The lieutenant thinks they were ambushed. Well, of course they were ambushed, but he thinks it was ‘extensively planned’.”
“Hmmmm.” As dry as he was likely to get just standing there, the Colonel pulled on a clean pair of jockeys and opened the door the rest of the way. He shared a look with his subordinate. Both of them knew that if it had been a planned ambush, a lot more than four people would be dead. And the guerrillas really didn’t like going up against the impenetrable Toads, which was why there’d been one with the patrol. A hasty ambush, perhaps, set up by a guerilla squad that’d heard the Growlers coming their way. Luck. “No enemy KIA even with a 120mm main gun firing at them?”
The Major made a face. “The tank commander accidentally had a sabot round loaded instead of HE.”
“Christ. Why the hell? There isn’t any enemy armor within a two hundred miles of this godforsaken trash heap of a city.”
“He knows he was supposed to have an HE round loaded, sir. He screwed up.”
Parker sighed. Christ. More dead men on his conscience. How many did that make? Eleven in the past month alone. What a waste, killed patrolling a city that had been killing itself long before the war ever started. Hell, the city wasn’t dying, it was dead. They were fighting over a corpse.
Major Cooper watched his commander get dressed. Parker was a likeable man, but sorely out of his depth when it came to commanding this many men and machines. He wasn’t stupid, per se, he just didn’t have the experience required. Admittedly, the Army was a little short on experienced officers—hell, make that a lot short. They’d had a dearth of competent officers before the war ever started, what with the massive retirements due to the new socially and culturally sensitive rules imposed on the military by the new administration. After the war more commanders than he wanted to remember had either deserted or ended up like General Block. In Parker’s chain of command the men directly above him, General Maxwell Goetterman and Brigadier General Danvers, had both died in the suburbs just a few miles to the north, Goetterman during the intense but short-lived armor campaign, Danvers four years later from a sniper’s bullet. After General Block’s assassination they hadn’t bothered to assign a new General to this command, or promote Colonel Parker after assigning him to hold the region. Cooper wasn’t sure what that said about the importance of this command, that it no longer rated a General. Nothing good.
Since the initial conflagration they’d held the ground, sure, with their tanks and aircraft and men, but at what cost, and with what result? They’d lost only fourteen tanks during the fierce eight-day battle, surprisingly few. Since then they’d lost twenty-two, a few from sabotage, a few when a Toad rolling through the city or parked in a laager outside the wire with a hatch open was successfully swarmed or hit with a grenade or RPG. The rest were destroyed by improvised weapons such as a combination of hand-dug tank traps and fertilizer bombs. Not to mention all the IMP armored personnel carriers and Growlers that had been destroyed and not replaced. And men. They now only had twelve tanks, only eight of them functional, and his mechanics were having to cannibalize the four for parts to keep those eight running. Parker rarely had them out patrolling the city, ostensibly because they rarely had the fuel to support patrols, but the truth was he was deathly afraid of losing another. His plan seemed to be working, as they hadn’t lost a tank in almost a year. Spare parts were getting so scarce he’d already started cannibalizing his own vehicles, and he barely had the fuel to send them out more than once a week. They sat around the perimeter, main guns facing out, the crews disgruntled, their morale nonexistent. Not that they had much morale to begin with, they were all draftees.