“You’re bleeding out,” Turnbull shouted. “Go back to the damn hospital!”
Langer shook his head. The ground shook as the main gun fired again. A guerrilla position in an empty coffee shop exploded.
“Shit,” Turnbull said as he saw he had little choice, and sprinted toward the tank,
The senior sergeant on the firing line of M119s understood what the fire mission meant. The tanks must be in the midst of being overrun or they would not call for artillery on their own position. What the hell was going on down there? The gunners had been firing missions in support of the infantry nonstop since sundown.
The Jasper fight had priority – they were rejecting missions left and right from the units near the bridge. Three guns could only do so much. But they could do something.
He shouted out the next mission and felt like he was punched in the gut. He staggered back and felt another punch. Except it was a .308 round from Banks’s M14.
The gun bunnies scrambled, trying to grab their weapons, but the guerrillas were past the sentries and to the gun line too quickly.
With most of the artillerymen dead or running, Banks took out his radio and made the call.
“Gandalf, this is Orc,” he said. It still annoyed him, but he persisted. “Mission accomplished. I say again, mission accomplished. They are black on arty.”
Bullets zipped around him, pinging off the pavement and the armor of the tank ahead of him. Its gunner was blazing away to the west, and Turnbull was coming from the east. If the guy at the machine gun turned around, Turnbull would be shot in half.
Turnbull was at a full run and dropped his M4, then leapt on the tracks of the Abrams and pulled himself up onto the deck of the tank.
The machine gunner was still firing at targets to the west as Turnbull stood up and drew his .45 from his thigh holster.
He aimed it and fired at the man’s head. The gunner dropped into the tank and Turnbull reached the pistol inside the hatch and fired again and again, stopping only when it clicked empty. He pulled it out and inserted another mag, and peered inside.
Thanks to the floodlights, he could see nothing was moving in there.
Turnbull breathed hard and looked up at the 120 millimeter barrel pointed directly at him. The other tank had gone to the end of the block but had come back. They saw him with his gun on the tank containing their dead friends.
I’d do me too, thought Turnbull, and he waited for the HEAT round.
Langer stumbled forward from the alley with something round and black in his hands, right toward the other tank. The tank was buttoned up, so he was in their blind spot until he crossed in front of the coaxial 7.62 millimeter machinegun that was mounted parallel to the main gun.
But by then it was too late. Larry Langer, who had watched Turnbull eliminate the tank that was demolishing his town, had summoned every last bit of strength to pick up one of the anti-tank mines and slam it, contact detonator first, onto the side of the cannon’s barrel.
Larry was gone; there was only smoke and flame, and Turnbull took that opportunity to leap down to the street. The smoke cleared and the smoothbore gun was no longer smooth in any sense of the word. It was a curled, charred twisted abomination. The tank itself was still. The guys inside were almost certainly still alive – the Abrams was unparalleled in terms of crew survivability – but they no doubt got their bell rung.
Turnbull caught his breath, supporting himself with his weapon. He shook his head. Only Larry Langer would take on a tank hand-to-hand and win.
Guerrillas were moving past him now. This part of the battle was done. But there was still most of an infantry company in the north of town.
Turnbull let out a sigh, picked up his M4, and began trotting north.
Kunstler slammed the black Blazer’s door behind him, but the PSF slacker sitting on the cruiser’s hood did not even react. There was work to be done – this area was nowhere near pacified, and this man was just sitting there, on the side of the road.
“You!” Kunstler shouted, approaching the cruiser from behind. The officer just kept looking off into the distance. He probably just did not have the stomach to do what needed to be done to ensure a truly human and caring future. Fine. If he could not serve as an active participant, he could serve as a cautionary example.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Kunstler walked past the car toward the hood where the man was sitting.
“Waiting,” the man said without turning.
“For what?”
“For you.” Now Ted Cannon turned around. Kunstler saw him and gasped. He drew his Beretta and aimed.
Cannon sat, quietly. Kunstler looked him over, the gun still aimed at Cannon’s chest.
“Funny that you’ll die in a PSF uniform when you hate them so much,” Kunstler said.
“It’s a little funny.”
“I always hated cops. Fascists. Oppressors. Me? I serve the people, culling out vermin like you.”
“I have to say, you sound pretty fascist.”
“Get off the car,” Kunstler said, and Cannon slipped off and onto his feet.
“You know how I know you’re not a cop?” asked Cannon.
“I suppose you’ll tell me,” Kunstler said. He decided this would be Cannon’s last sentence. He was getting bored, and there was work to be done.
“A real cop would have checked the back seat.”
Kunstler pivoted as Eli sat up inside the cruiser holding his Mossberg, smiling as he unleashed the swarm of double aught.
The two dozen prisoners from the command post were zip-tied in the courthouse square, having been brought back by truck. The courthouse itself still smoldered from the artillery hits. A 105 shell had taken out the Ruth Bader Ginsberg statue from the waist up.
The guards were mostly teenagers and old folks. A woman who had to be in her seventies stood guard with a single barrel break action 12-guage; the rest had either deer rifles or M4s.
There were a lot of M4s to be had.
Turnbull checked into the command post in a storefront on the edge of the square. The adrenaline was still running through his blood and he knew it was only a matter of time before he crashed.
“Motrin,” he said to the medic. He was handed two 200 milligram tablets.
“Don’t toy with me.” The medic handed over two more and Turnbull swallowed the 800 milligrams dry.
“Situation?” he said. Dale showed him the maps, old AAA paper jobs with yellow Post-Its representing insurgent units and red ones representing People’s Republic Army and other forces.
Several townsfolk were talking into radios and taking notes, then stepping forward to tell Dale’s battle captain, Becky the waitress, the information. Then she would have her ops sergeant, a high school friend of Carl Hyatt’s, move the Post-Its. No one touched the maps but the ops sergeant.
Dale walked Turnbull through the current status of the Battle of Jasper. The red Post-Its were in disarray and were scattering north with no perceptible rhyme or reason.
“They’re running,” Turnbull said aloud. Dale looked at the map as if to confirm that it was really true, then went back to his work.
“Becky,” one of the radio operators shouted, excited. “There are more tanks coming, lots of them, dozens, on I-69 and 231!”
The command post froze. Everyone understood what that meant. They had barely survived the first time.
Turnbull’s mind raced. Dozens? How long could he try and hold out as a rearguard while the rest of the townspeople ran for the border?
Not long. It was over. The silence itself was almost audible.
He and most of these people had held off a brigade, and now they were all going to die.