Clyde the wrecker operator regarded the mess with awe.
“I’m not even sure how I can clear this yet,” he said. “I need to think it through first. Look, they dragged them back under the bridge. First, I gotta drag them out. Then I gotta get them upright.”
“Just move them to the side of the road,” said the PSF leader. “I need this freeway open!”
The wrecker driver was about to respond when the PSF officer’s face vanished in a puff of pink goo and his body twirled like a top before spinning out onto the asphalt of the empty freeway. A moment later the crack of the .30-06 shot that killed the blue echoed over the open fields.
Then there was a swarm of rounds buzzing over Clyde’s head and all around him. Another PSF officer was hit in the leg as he was standing there; the bullet slammed into him from the side at the knee and his lower leg twisted at an impossible angle and he fell screaming. Another bullet in the neck shut him up for good.
Most of the PSF officers were now firing back, on full automatic, off toward the trees and the buildings and everywhere as they scrambled for their cruisers. A few others were hunkered down under their cars or in the ditches that lined the freeway, hoping to wait out the storm forgotten by the invisible insurgent enemy.
But they were not invisible to the men above them on the Route 125 overpass. There were several of them, in tan or camo clothes with battle rigs, firing their AR15s down from the overpass into the PSF officers below.
Clyde, believing discretion was the better part of sanity, ran.
He sprinted as full out as his 55-year old body could sprint toward his orange baby, but the windshield blew out and a tire went and bullets stitched the hood.
The hell with that orange bullet magnet, he thought.
Clyde passed the wrecker and kept on running north up I-69 as the one-sided firefight behind him raged.
The black and white monitor showed freeway, endless, empty freeway, as the Predator drone high above flew parallel to it. They were in a small, but well-air conditioned building watching the feed. Outside, a helicopter was spinning up.
“There it is,” said the operations officer, pointing. Deloitte squinted. Another overturned big rig blocking I-64.
“That’s nine different overturned trucks blocking the freeways in this sector. We’re not using those freeways.”
“You can bet every one of them is under direct observation and fire,” the colonel said. That was basic Combat Engineer 101. An obstacle that you don’t cover is no obstacle at all since the enemy will just reduce it if there’s not one stopping him. Some PSF morons out of Bloomington tried to reduce an obstacle on I-69 earlier in the day. That cost four carloads of them.
He remembered back to what General Yamamoto had said: “You cannot invade the mainland United States. There would be a rifle behind every blade of grass.” Perhaps the quote was apocryphal – anti-gun rights fanatics had always insisted it was – but the fact was that there had been over 325 million guns in the United States in the hands of the American people after the gun selling frenzy that greeted the long postponed election of Hillary Clinton in 2020. The People’s Republic had gathered up a few million in its confiscation campaigns, but Deloitte had understood the kind of American he was now facing from his time in the Army even if his leaders on the coast dismissed them with contempt. Now here they were, armed and ferociously dangerous.
“Vehicles,” the operations officer said, pointing to the screen. Four vehicles moving on a side road, two of them pick-ups. The people in back were definitely armed – he’d looked at enough live drone feeds in the Middle East to see that.”
“Follow them,” said Deloitte to the drone operator, who sat seated in front of the two senior officers. “What are the rules of engagement?”
“The order says ‘Eliminate the racist oppressors using any means necessary.’ The Corps JAGs say it means what it says,” said the operations officer.
“Then I guess we have a green light. We’ve got four hostile vehicles. Target the second in line, the pick-up.”
“Roger, sir,” said the drone operator. The targeting graphics appeared on the screen and locked-on to the second vehicle, some sort of pick-up truck.
“Ready,” said the operator.
“Take it out,” Deloitte said.
The operator pushed a button and the feed jiggled almost imperceptibly.
Dust, heat, and a roar like he had never heard before engulfed Turnbull as he sat on the front passenger seat of the Chevy Blazer. Something lifted the rear of the SUV up and pushed it along on its front wheels, but it was out of control and the driver had no say as the Chevy flew off the pavement and across a culvert and into a ditch. The grill slammed into the dirt hard.
The airbags deployed as the front end of the SUV dug into the side of the ditch, smacking Turnbull hard in the face and chest behind his battle rig. The Chevy’s cab filled with broken glass and a weird, chemical smoke – an airbag is actually just a sack filled with the exhaust gas products of a controlled explosion that vents after it expands the bag.
Ears ringing, Turnbull shook his head and beat down his air bag. There was a moan from behind him. They turned and one of the guerrillas in the back seat had a long, bloody cut on his forehead. Another’s neck was at an awful angle and he wasn’t moving.
The driver was slowly beating down his air bag.
“What the hell?” the driver said, his eyes half-closed.
“Get out,” said Turnbull, shaking away the fog.
“What happ-?”
“Get out now!” Turnbull yelled, pulling his Ka-Bar blade. He sliced off his lap and shoulder belts and pushed on the passenger door.
Stuck.
“Get out of this vehicle. Now!” he shouted at the driver, who slowly complied. His door opened easily.
Turnbull maneuvered a leg up and kicked the inside of his door with all his strength. It budged, barely. He did it again, and it reluctantly swung open. Turnbull sprawled out into the muck at the bottom of the ditch. He forced himself to his feet and reached in for his shotgun and radio. He glanced back on the road – it was a Dante-esque tableau of twisted metal, smoke and flames.
Turnbull opened the rear passenger door, flicked the belt release, and pulled out the moaning guerrilla.
“I don’t know what happened,” said the driver, who had come around the crashed SUV. There was smoke in the air, and not all from the air bags.
“Get over here and help me pull him!” shouted Turnbull. “Move!”
The driver lent a hand and they dragged the injured man toward the culvert that ran under and across the road. It was about three feet wide. Turnbull pulled his cargo inside and the driver followed.
“I still don’t—” began the driver, but another thunderclap hit them, and an explosion threw them against the side of the culvert and gut-punched the air out of their lungs. Big and small pieces of debris began raining down outside both ends of the tube.
“Hellfires,” Turnbull said.
“What?” asked the driver, confused.
“Hellfire missiles. From a drone. We got droned.”
“Drones? They can’t use drones on us!” sputtered the driver.
“Why not?” Turnbull said. “I would.”
The sun was down, and Ted Cannon was on top of the water tower north of town with a pair of binoculars. He had a map and a red light – for light discipline. And he had the best view in the area.
His teams were out there to the north. He had already divided the map up into grids and assigned teams to defend each one. There would not be a lot of coordination, but then communications were always iffy. The blues had cut cell service to the whole of Southern Indiana, but cells still would have been risky to use since the blues always listened in. As for the radios, they had started to experience strange interference. The blues might be jamming. The guerrillas had to hop frequencies, and that was a pain in the ass to coordinate. Decentralized execution of the plan was going to be the name of the game simply because there was no way to effectively centrally organize the plan’s execution.