After assessing the situation for a moment more, Caleb grabbed his whistle and blew a long blast: ‘ceasefire, watch and shoot’.
The shooting stopped, the order being passed verbally now down the line, and the kill group searched the roadway with their optics for any enemy movement. A few shots rang out here and there, enemy movement ended.
Caleb got up on one knee and blew the whistle in a series of short blasts, followed by voice, “Fight Through, Fight Through!”
As they had rehearsed, the kill group got up and skirmished forward down towards the killing area, moving as an extended line in buddy pairs under the control of the squad leader.
The idea was to fight through, sweeping the killing area and ensuring there was no enemy left. The cut-off groups provided flank protection while this happened.
The squad reached the road with Caleb in the center of the formation; they double-tapped any enemy bodies they saw. They all got the same treatment, whether they looked dead or were trying to crawl away wounded.
Teams went into each vehicle, finishing off any bodies they saw. The bus was a charnel house. Once they had finished with the vehicles and the bodies that had taken cover behind them, they skirmished up to the edge of the road where they could observe the windrow of bodies that had attempted to take cover there.
The kill group went static, a fusillade of fire rang out as they made sure the enemy was dead, and then Caleb gave the signal to withdraw. They skirmished back up to the top of the embankment.
Once there, Caleb gave the order to withdraw. The cut-off groups peeled in back behind the kill group, checked in with him and then moved back to where Doc was waiting. Following them, the kill group peeled in to the center and moved back to the RV.
They all grabbed their rucks, which had been laid out in order, and the squad leaders got accountability. All present, no injuries. Caleb gave the order to move and they set out at a rapid patrol pace in single file through the woods.
As the ambush had been sprung, the convoy commander in the center Humvee had managed to hit the panic button on the ‘blue force tracker’ navigation system, which utilized a satellite transponder to send an automated alert with their location to the Regional Tactical Operations Center (RTOC), located at the DHS Fusion Center in Richmond, Virginia.
Tyrone Woods was the Director of the Richmond Fusion Center. He was a political appointee, placed in charge of the region’s security by the Regime leadership. At the time when the alert came in, Director Woods was not in the RTOC, and after he received the call he hurried into work, driven by his security detail in a convoy of armored SUVs.
Woods was a veteran activist, a political bruiser, who had grown up in the gutter political environment of Chicago. He was adept at vote rigging and intimidation and exhibited naked unbridled ambition. This all made him a valuable asset to the Regime. He was a rabid racist, Muslim and communist; he hated white Americans. He saw them as the very evil at the heart of everything that was wrong with America.
In fact, at the heart of it he hated America and wanted to be part of its destruction, bringing in the new order.
Woods was big on the injustices of slavery, and it was slavery that was at the root of his hatred. He railed against the injustices of slavery and the heritage of white western imperialism and colonialism. America was the new empire, subjugating the Islamic and third worlds.
America was the ‘Great Satan’.
He in fact had never been a slave, neither had his ancestors. In fact, his father had emigrated from Nigeria after his number had come up in the green card lottery. It was a little ironic, but Woods did not know that his father’s tribe in Nigeria had historically been responsible for capturing and selling into slavery many of the original people who had been shipped over to the American Colonies.
Woods hated the white majority in America. He wanted to see them broken and enslaved. He hated what he saw as the gun owning, constitution hugging ways of white Americans; their pickup trucks and Patriotism. He had no truck with the achievements and traditions of America, he wanted to see it all wiped clean. Such was the motivation of this racist, communist, ‘progressive’ bully.
By the time Director Woods arrived at the RTOC an unmanned drone was in the air, surveying the destruction of the ambush site. The burning vehicles and the bodies of the slain blue shirts were all too evident on the TV screens.
Woods was incandescent.
“Find who did this. Use the drones. Bring in the hunter-killer troops. I want them dead. Kill them all.”
The patrol had accomplished their mission, after lying in position overnight to ambush the convoy, and they moved rapidly away before continuing to patrol out on their route through the fall forest, headed south to their pick up point.
The previous afternoon, they had identified a suitable patrol base on the map so that they could rest up and administrate themselves before continuing the extraction.
As they moved towards the area of the identified patrol base, the patrol was not following a trail, but instead they were ‘hand railing’ a small creek, keeping it a hundred meters to their right as they moved.
The patrol leader, Caleb, signaled for a hasty ambush and they broke track, moving off left at ninety degrees to their trail and then peeling back into a line covering the route they had come. They had not seen any evidence of a Regime tracker, but they took precautions all the same.
Once they had been in the hasty ambush for a few minutes, observing their back trail, Caleb took a small party away and found a suitable patrol base in the deep cover of the trees. A buddy pair returned to the ambush party and led them into the occupation of the base.
Caleb had decided to occupy in a linear formation, with the two squads parallel to each other in two lines, Alpha to the south side and Bravo to the north, headquarters between the two squads. There were two sentry posts, one at each end of the line, each squad responsible for one of the posts.
The patrol occupied the base in buddy pairs, with four pairs per squad. As part of the work phase of the occupation each pair dug a ‘shell scrape’, a shallow twelve inches deep rectangular hole large enough for two men to sleep in with their rucks. Each pair faced out of the patrol base with interlocking sectors of fire allocated by the patrol leader.
A track plan was cleared behind the scrapes, with communications cord strung between the trees to allow for hand rail movement at night. A latrine was dug under the watchful eye of one of the sentry positions and each time it was used the fighter would pile a little dirt back in over his leavings, to cover it up and reduce smell.
Once the work phase was complete, the patrol went into routine. They were on hard routine after the ambush and this close to the enemy and there was no cooking on open flame. Weapons were battle cleaned and food was eaten cold, unless heated using the flameless MRE heater packs. Socks were changed and feet powdered.
Following evening stand-to, in the dark, ponchos were put up over the scrapes. Throughout the night the sentry rotation went on. There were always two sentries at night per sentry position. Each man was woken ten minutes before his duty and he would quietly and without use of light put all his gear away in his ruck, save taking down the poncho.
All gear not in use was always stowed, in case of the need for rapid movement.
In the night it started to rain but by morning the rain had stopped. It was fall, and it was cold out there in the woods with a hint of the coming winter. The rain didn’t help, and it continued to drip down out of the trees long after the rain itself had stopped.