The mile went quickly, but we ran into three Zs that had been attracted by the commotion on the other side of the canal. We shot them, cleanly, and, even if I had my camera anymore, I wouldn’t have bothered taking their pictures. Not worth the time and effort anymore. From here on out, it was finish the mission, nothing else. We settled down in a bunch of trees, just off the side of the road. Doc and I took first watch. Jonesy quickly set about stripping the radio after he had cleaned his weapon, drying each part as best he could and laying the circuit boards out in the sun. Then we switched off, and last thing I did was reassemble the radio and test it out.
“Empire Main, this is Lost Boys, radio check, over.”
I pictured the commo geeks sitting high on Prospect Mountain over Lake George, barricaded in their little fortress/van. They had been air mobiled in a few weeks ago to coordinate coms and provide retransmitting capability to any of the teams operating in the southern Adirondacks. Our SINCGARS backpack radios would never reach back to TF Liberty, so they relayed the signals of all the teams operating in the area via microwave transmitter, line of sight to the big tower at Fort Orange. I wouldn’t want their job; endless hours of boredom punctuated by terror when you had to go out of your armored van to service the antennas or take a dump, or run the 20 feet to your armored sleeping trailer.
“Lost Boys, we read you Licken’ Chicken, out.” Great, the radio was still working. I wasn’t looking forward to having to hump all the way back to Fort Orange through Indian Country if we weren’t able to call in a helo for evac. Another couple of hours and we were done, and we would be riding that sweet chopper back to Fort Orange for mission debrief, and we would get to see Brit again.
We moved out, single file, slowly threading our way to the canal locks. I hated the end of missions because that’s when guys got killed. You get slack, looking forward to what’s next; hot showers, good food, getting laid. Drop your guard. I wasn’t going to let that happen.
“Yo, Jonesy, stay on your toes. Now isn’t the time for slacking off.”
“Yo, Nick, shut the hell up. I know what I’m doing. Man, you more nervous than an Infantryman at a queer convention. Don’t know whether to run or join in.”
We made it to the locks without incident. The three of them pulled guard while I checked out the machinery and looked at the gates. These looked like they had been smashed with high explosives and lay twisted open at each end. Weird, but nothing the Engineers couldn’t fix.
“OK, Boys, that’s it. Homeward bound!”
I rang up TF Liberty TOC and gave them my final report, accompanied by pictures from my iPhone. I requested an EVAC as soon as possible. That’s when LTC Jackass came on the horn.
“Lost Boys, what is your current food, water and ammunition status, over?”
“Empire, we are at about one day of rations and twenty-five percent on ammo. Maybe less, over.”
I waited for an acknowledgement. Nothing came.
“Empire, Empire, this is Lost Boys, over.” I repeated this three times. No answer.
OK, sometimes commo goes down. America was still pretty screwed up. A lot of crap we were using was dragged out of prepositioned stores sitting on a ship off Diego Garcia or something. Not the newest, top of the line stuff. Still, it was a little unsettling. I gathered the guys around.
“Here’s the situation. No coms, no helo. I trust this guy, the TF Empire commander, as far as I can spit. What do you think?”
Doc advised that we wait for later tonight, see if we could get commo up then. Ahmed had nothing to say. Jonesy was of the opinion LTC Jackass was setting us up for failure.
“Nick, that sumbitch has had it out for you ever since you countermanded that order he gave outside Saint Johnsville, when he wanted to level that village with artillery and you were convinced that there were civvies living there. You made him look bad, and this whole pissing in his pants thing over at the prison. That dude don’t like you nothing at all.”
“Jonesy, he may be an asshole but he’s still an Officer in the US Army. He can’t just leave us out here high and dry.”
“Wanna bet? I seen plenty of mothers like him in prison. Always out for himself, and if you make them look bad, they gonna stick a shiv in you fast as they can.”
“OK, well, we’ll try to call in tonight. Meanwhile, let’s put some mileage between us and Whitehall, try to find a place to lay up for the night.”
We had jogged a kilometer or so down the road when we heard a ripping sound, followed by a POP, then a rumbling series of explosions that knocked us all to the ground. Or it would have, if we hadn’t all dove to the ground the second we heard the rocket coming in.
A Multiple Launch Rocket System, or at least the battery at Fort Orange, fires the MGM-140A - Block I rocket. It has an unguided range of roughly one hundred kilometers and carries almost a thousand antipersonnel bomblettes, each about the size and explosive power of a hand grenade. The explosions leveled the entire center of town, including the lock area where we had been standing less than twenty minutes before.
I stood up after a few minutes and looked at the cloud of dust and smoke rising behind us.
“That sonofabitch.”
Chapter 23
We all stood, watching the dust settle. Well, Jonesy, Doc and I stood and watched. Ahmed continued to scan the area.
“Pretty impressive, no?” asked Ahmed, though his eyes never left the surrounding trees. “None of you have ever been on the wrong side of American artillery before. You should try being in a cave while it detonates directly overhead. I have seen men go insane.”
His comments shook us out of our stupor.
“OK, well, um, oh fuck,” I said.
“Yeah, that about sums it up, Nick. Where to now, fearless leader?” Doc hunched down on the ground, pouring water into an MRE heater.
“Well, I can think of one place we’re going to wind up eventually.”
“Yep, back at Fort Orange.”
“It’s going to be a bitch to sneak in there.”
“We’re not going to sneak in there. We’re going to walk in there in the middle of the night, just like we we’re coming back from a mission. But we can cross that bridge when we come to it. Meanwhile, we have to get through the next couple of days. We have a few hours of daylight left. Our first objective is to go back to the prison, see if there is anything we can scrounge from there. At the least there has to be water, and we might be able to get some useable ammo.”
“What about getting our packs back?”
“I doubt, after what just dropped down on them, we would find anything useable. Plus, you know there is probably unexploded ordnance lying around.”
“Agreed,” said Doc. “I lost my aide bag back there, so I don’t feel like patching any of you up with my sewing kit. That and I’m just getting dried out.”
We started down the road, in an airborne shuffle that ate up the meters at a steady pace. I was tired, worn out by all we had been through in the last two days, but I reached down inside myself and ignored the blisters being generated by my wet boots, the burns I was getting in my crotch from the wet uniforms pants chaffing my skin raw. I was on a mission, now. One was to rescue Brit. The other was to deal with LTC Jackass. I didn’t know if I even needed to do both. Brit was probably in no condition to be moved from the hospital, and as far as she knew, the team was lost, cut off from coms. Hell, Jackass or his ass-sucking Sergeant Major would probably feed her some bullshit about us being overrun by Zombies in Whitehall. He was a sneak and an asshole, but I don’t think he would have the stones to make Brit disappear right out of the hospital so she was safe for now. I just hated her thinking we were dead.