The attack did come in precisely as John had predicted; the two Black Hawks swept in at just after three in the morning. The watch post John had suggested be pushed forward and concealed within spitting distance of the mall, which had been converted into Asheville’s helipad, had warned of the liftoff ten minutes earlier.
The two helicopters touched down, seconds apart—one in the parking lot in front of the town hall, dropping its troops and then lifting off, and the second coming in thirty seconds later with a second squad. The second chopper remained on the ground, rotors turning at idle, while the other circled. Half of the first squad stormed into the town hall, weapons raised. A number of shots were fired, and at that same instant, the phone receiver John was holding, his link to the Swannanoa road barrier, went dead.
“They shot out our phone, damn it!” John snapped.
The second squad to land spread out in a skirmish line and raced toward the hospital… and found it and the town hall empty.
John, with Maury Hurt and a couple of the members of his first company mobilized down from the college, sat concealed in an abandoned apartment above the old hardware store, which looked straight out at the hospital and town hall. At least for the moment, they tried not to laugh, though the fact that some shots were fired as the assault team stormed into the town hall told him that their orders did carry deadly intent.
The assault unit that had charged into the hospital with weapons raised came out, and even in the dark, he could sense their confusion by the way they moved. He prayed that it ended this way, that confused and cursing, they’d get aboard their chopper, lift off, and the second one that was circling would pick up the rest, and they’d be gone. Maury had argued against John’s plan, saying that if ever there was a time to capture one or maybe both of the Black Hawks, it was now. He did balk, however, at John’s repeated query about whether he was ready to gun down the troops that had landed and whether he realized that even before they could snatch it and move it, chances were the Apaches would be on top of them in retaliation.
He wanted a message sent back to Fredericks, not the first shots of a full-scale war unless Fredericks ordered it first.
The troops headed back to their helicopter. No one in the town had night-vision goggles, but in the shadows cast by an early morning waning moon, he could see that the men were confused by the results, and several stopped alongside the small public bathroom in the town square to talk.
“Come on. Get back aboard and get the hell out,” John whispered.
It was far tenser and more dangerous at this moment than the men who had come in realized. He had pulled everyone out of the town hall; it was too obvious that they might hit that first to try to take prisoners, but in the perimeter around the town hall and hospital across the street, he had over a hundred troops concealed, and they were trained killers. Survivors of the fight with the Posse and close to a score of small-scale skirmishes since—several of them with the reivers—they had stood many a cold, lonely night’s watch at the hidden locations guarding the approaches into their valley. Their weapons varied from hunting rifles to what before the war were rather illegal automatics, a number of the weapons taken from the Posse dead. He had an RPG that had been captured from the Posse; a second RPG, a homemade affair, he entrusted to his best small unit, a group of Afghan and Iraqi vets.
Their orders were strict: no one was to fire unless directly fired upon or he popped off two green flares—green because they were the only two left in the entire supply of the town. But he knew from many bitter experiences and history itself that orders were one thing, but the tension of a moment like this another. A weapon accidentally discharged by either side… someone undisciplined or even drunk and pissed off… anything could happen when you put this many armed men and women with ever deepening antipathy in close range of each other.
The rotor of the copter on the ground began speeding up, the always distinct thumping echoing across the open plaza. The troops loaded in, and it lifted off. Even as it cleared the parking lot, the second chopper came back in from the west, flared, and settled down, troops loading in. As they left the town hall, there was more gunfire, and just as the last man loaded in, the door gunner unleashed a sustained volley into the building. Then the chopper lifted off into the darkness and was gone.
John breathed a sigh of relief and then sat back to wait. A standard ruse was for an enemy to come back into the same place fifteen minutes or so later. They undoubtedly had night vision, and he did not. He would not relax until his forward scout reported that all four aircraft were back on the ground, a report that did not come back for nearly a half hour. With the telephone switchboard in the town hall apparently shot out, it was a long wait until he heard a moped puttering into the town plaza, its driver circling several times, obviously a bit confused as to where to go, until John finally leaned out the window and shouted for the driver to come over. He then received the report from the courier that all four choppers were back at their base.
He shouted for an all clear. Kevin Malady stepped into the town square and repeatedly blew a whistle. Only a few appeared out of hiding; the rest remained concealed as ordered. A paranoia John had developed while waiting for this move was that maybe Asheville had more air assets than he knew about. More could be concealed on the far side of town or even called in from Johnson City or Greenville. Bureaucracies being as they were, he knew it would take a lot of wheeling and dealing to borrow more assets, but he was not going to bet anyone’s life on that. He had passed the word that they had to assume that the sky above was now unfriendly and indeed watching.
He stepped out of the hardware store, looking up and feeling a bit naked. The first indicators of dawn were approaching as he walked up to Kevin, nodded, and shook his hand.
“Good job,” he said, and then he headed for the town hall. It was Kevin who shouted for him to stop and to not open the door, and John inwardly cursed himself. They just might be capable of setting a claymore or IED on the way out, and Kevin shouted for a couple of his Afghan vets to come and check things out first. It was a long, tense fifteen minutes, the sky to the east shifting from blackness to a wash of indigo and deep gold before the two came out and said the building was cleared, but they were grim faced, angry.
John went in and stopped at the town’s small telephone exchange.
“Son of a bitch.” The switchboard had been blown apart, at least a couple of magazine loads poured into it. They had shut down most of the town’s communications with this one wanton act of destruction, and John suddenly felt that the clock of their progress had been pushed backward.
His office had been ransacked, filing cabinets torn open, papers missing. Almost amusingly, they had taken the long-defunct computer, which had rested on a side table gathering dust.
On his shot-up desk was a manila envelope labeled “For John Matherson.”
John went to pick it up, but one of his vets called for him to wait and then cautiously pushed the envelope with the muzzle of his M16 and flipped it over, finally opening it up himself before handing it to John.
What a pathetic world we are indeed slipping back into, John thought, to again bring back these types of concerns. It was too dark to read the note within, and not wanting to turn on a flashlight, he just held the envelope as he walked through the rest of the building.