As soon as they confirmed their positions, Jack gave the order to dig in and put up the thermal ponchos. Furiously. They took their entrenching tools out and started to dig in buddy pairs, one man covering while the other knelt and furiously carved out a shell scrape from the forest floor. Anything that lowered their profile below ground level would protect them from incoming rounds and high explosives.
Casualties had been light on the Resistance side, but Jim was up and cutting about the positions with a working party, collecting casualties and the bodies from the blown foxhole.
The story among the Regime soldiers was a little different. There was a tideline of a couple of dozen bodies surrounding Zulu Delta, where the Regime troops had crouched in the woods behind trees trying to gain fire superiority, before being rolled up from the flanks and having to withdraw.
Captain Brookings was not a happy man. His two platoons were forced back in disarray, on the verge of combat ineffective due to the losses sustained. He ordered a withdrawal three hundred meters north and formed a defensive position. He then called for air support.
The AC-130 was still on station and it requested that the hunter-killer Company pop smoke to identify their location in the trees. They did so, and also relayed the coordinates of Zulu Delta to the gunship.
The AC-130 was finding it hard to pick up the exact position of the Resistance fighters below the canopy. It identified Captain Brookings’s new defensive position. The bodies lying around Zulu Delta were still warm, some wounded and some even trying to crawl away. This confused the picture, which was further confused by the fact that the AC-130 could not see the foxholes and the other two Resistance platoons were now under thermal ponchos beneath the leaf canopy.
The AC-130 relayed a request to the RTOC for confirmation of fire coordinates. Director Woods was watching the live feeds on the monitors. The thing was, he hated the military; they had always been the bad guys to him, spreading oppression and death around the world, killing Muslims. He had been enjoying the spectacle of the redneck terrorists and the Rangers fighting it out and killing each other in the forest.
Director Woods knew that the Resistance base was down there, and he did not care that some of the warm bodies on the monitor from the Ranger Company may still be alive.
He gave the order, “Weapons free, engage it.”
Lieutenant Jefferson was over by the map board, watching all of this.
“Sir, those are most likely friendly forces, some of them are our wounded!”
Woods turned on him, “Get the fuck out of my RTOC now, you traitorous piece of shit!”
Lieutenant Jefferson was about to start towards him, military discipline forgotten, when he was intercepted by two of the Director’s security team who were stationed in the RTOC and hustled out of the room. Woods smiled as he was pushed out of the door.
Director Woods announced to the RTOC, “Those heat signatures are confirmed Resistance, that is the enemy position, engage it now.”
He turned to the senior Ranger Liaison, “Jefferson, he’s fired, I don’t want to see him back here, see that he is sent for reeducation.” He turned back to the monitors.
The AC-130 pounded the area around Zulu Delta with its 40mm Bofors cannon and 105mm howitzer. What the aircraft could pick up through the gaps in the tree canopy was mainly the bodies of the dead and wounded Regime soldiers, some of them still alive and trying to crawl away, having been left in the hasty withdrawal.
After a ten minute bombardment of the area the AC-130 called to return to base for re-arming and refueling, both of which were now depleted by the long mission.
Back in his defensive position, Captain Brookings linked up with the second company commander, who had brought his command in from the LZ to the north. They huddled together to work out a plan of attack. As they did so, the obligatory call came in from Director Woods on the satellite phone.
If it had not been plain before, it was plain now. The Resistance would be crushed today, or Captain Brookings’s family was going to the camps.
As the bombardment from the AC-130 had raged around them, Jack’s 1st and 3rd Platoons had huddled in their shallow scrapes, as much as they could have dug before the bombardment started, while the high explosives and shrapnel shrieked through the trees.
On the ground around Zulu Delta, it was carnage. The Regime soldier’s bodies, both the dead and those that had only been wounded, had been blown apart, shredded and scattered through the trees, body parts and intestines thrown around and hanging from branches. It was a horror show.
As soon as the engine noise of the aircraft receded, the fighters were up on their knees frantically digging their scrapes deeper.
A few of the fighters had been wounded to various degrees and Jim was having them brought into Zulu Delta before moving them back to the collection and treatment point back at Zulu. He was also organizing redistribution of ammunition to resupply those squads who were low.
Fortunately, Jim had the foresight to plan ahead and Zulu Delta itself had a dug in ammo cache and the foxholes themselves had been stocked with extra ammo that simply remained there as platoons rotated through, so the Company was able to replenish their reserves.
Thirty minutes later, they came under mortar bombardment from the LZ to the north, where the Regime had flown in fire support elements as well as the additional hunter-killer company.
It was now mid-afternoon.
Jack had been in the process of making arrangements to withdraw to the south when the new bombarment began, forcing them to hunker down in the scrapes and foxholes.
Getting mortared in the woods had its pros and cons. On the one hand, the trees soaked up some of the flying shrapnel. On the other, sometimes the mortar bombs would burst in the trees, instead of in proximity to the ground, which effectively created an airburst and would send shrapnel and wood splinters down onto those in the open below.
Mortars are an area weapon and they were hard to target in the woods without direct observation. It appeared that the enemy was stonking the general area and the exploding shells were largely ineffective against the sheltering fighters. The bombardment did have the effect of fixing the Resistance force in place.
Fifteen minutes later, the bombardment ceased. It was ‘danger close’ for the assaulting hunter-killer companies. The fresh company came in from the north in a platoon column formation, the lead platoon colliding with 3rd Platoons triangular defensive position up to the north east.
Captain Brookings had reorganized his command into two platoons and came in from the low ground to the west. He had put the previous reserve platoon in the lead, with the mauled combined platoon in echelon behind.
Both companies hit together, working at right angles to one another, one from the north and one from the west. As the western force bumped into Caleb’s flank protection from across the trail, he called his right hand squad down. They were the one that abutted on the right side with Zulu Delta, and they peeled out and moved down to reinforce the left flank. He then moved another team to cover the south, effectively his new left flank, from enemy flanking movements hooking round to his left/rear.
In both the north and west, the contact between the two forces went as before, with the Regime troops going to ground and ending up in a firebase around fifty meters away. The difference this time was the pressure and the volume of fire directed at the Resistance fighters. The two direction simultaneous assault was also psychologically difficult to deal with, and the expectation was that now that the two sides had reestablished contact, the Regime forces would now try and flank.