The two platoons inside the kill zone were pinned down and it was essential to extract them from the ambush.
Val was leading her squad and found herself just on the edge of the kill zone as the ambush was sprung. Her squad hit the ground, the rest of her platoon ahead were in the kill zone and pinned down. She saw the SAW gunner ahead of her hit and killed and she crawled up and grabbed the machine-gun from him.
Val heard Jack come over the net giving the ambush direction. She looked up and identified the enemy fire coming from on top of the linear outcrop to the left of the trail. She could also see that where she was the outcrop faded out into the slope of the valley side, where the end of the enemy firing line was located. She looked back and saw Jim behind her squad, taking cover with the medical section, and back behind that was the 82nd platoon, dragging the casualties they were carrying into cover.
Val shouted, “Ambush left, left flanking! Let’s go!” and spurred herself into action. She stood, carrying the SAW and shouted to her squad, “Follow me!”
Val rushed forwards, her squad fanning out on either side of her. She stopped to brace herself and fire the SAW, using it like an oversized M16. She was trying to hit the ambush from the flank.
Jim instantly grasped the situation. He shouted to Megan to stay down and rushed after Val’s squad. He looked back down the trail to see the three squads from the 82nd platoon running up the trail towards him. Jim waved them on and kept running.
Val’s angle of assault was just too acute to the ambush. The rush of her squad was seen by the gunners on the end of the Regime line and they switched fire towards the skirmish line as it came towards them. Val’s squad didn’t stop, they didn’t fire and move, they simply ran at the enemy firing, in their desperation to get to grips with them and rescue those in the kill zone.
One of her men was hit, then another, both going down. Val had the SAW firing from her hip in short bursts as she ran forwards, her squad fanning out on either side. Then, she was hit in the plate and knocked down.
The charge faltered and the man next to her ran to her aid. She rolled to her knees, got up and charged forwards into the enemy fire, hammering at them with the SAW, and then her head snapped back as a round smacked into her helmet, her blonde ponytail whipping around as she crashed to the ground. Jim came running through the middle of the squad.
“Let’s go!” he screamed as he charged the end of the Regime line. The remainder of Val’s squad let out a shout of fury and followed Jim as he charged at the enemy, screaming as they came on.
Something changed psychologically at that moment. The Regime gunners on the end of the line felt it. They panicked in the face of the onrushing screaming Resistance fighters, filthy in their mismatched gear, unkempt ‘mountain men’ beards and hair. The enemy on the end of the line broke as Val’s squad clawed their way up the end of the outcrop and onto the position.
It went hand to hand.
Jim expended his magazine, drew his handgun and laid about him with it until he emptied the magazine on that also. He ended up rolling on the ground with a big 240 gunner, smashing his head in with a rock snatched up from the ground.
Then, in a rush, Cobb and his three squads poured in, hitting the Regime ambush line from the north and starting to roll them up. They pushed past Jim and the remainder of Val’s squad and started to fight down the line. The enemy was breaking and pulling back.
Jim, on his knees, looked back to where Val had fallen. Megan was there, out in the open.
Don’t you ever listen?
Megan was treating Val, who appeared to have been concussed but was still alive. Jim shook his head.
Bloody heroine, saved us, broke the enemy.
Back in the ambush kill zone Jack felt the pressure lift. The fire slackened. He stood, calling “Fight through, Fight through! Move it, let’s go!” and advanced towards the ambush, firing. Around him a visceral yell went up and the fighters began to fight forwards in bounds, then simply charging the enemy ambush line.
All along the line the will of the Regime forces broke and they started to fall back in the face of the assault, the rebel yell rising along the line of Resistance fighters. The Resistance Company had seized the moral component of the fight.
The charging fighters reached the linear outcrop and scrambled up it, chasing the enemy back. The Regime NCOs were trying furiously to get control back over their troops and have them fight back towards the ridge and a rally point. Some of them succeeded and groups started to coalesce and fight back to safety.
Jack got hold of Caleb on the radio and told him to make sure he had security covered back down the trail to the north, in case the enemy companies arrived from that direction. With that thought in mind, Jack called a halt and had the platoons withdraw back to the ambush site.
The charge took some stopping, the shouts going up and down the line to pull back to the trail, some of the hotter heads taking a little longer to get the message.
The medical section had already been moving around the kill zone treating the casualties they could find. Jim was cutting about organizing again and they loaded the additional casualties onto ponchos and set off again for the ERV.
Val was walking, propped up on the shoulders of two of her squad members. She had a possible broken rib from the plate strike and a bloody crease down her temple where a round had passed through her helmet, clipped her head, and passed on. She was concussed and groggy but insisted on walking.
An hour later they reached the ERV without incident. Jack was very aware of being compromised and hit in the ERV so he acted with a sense of urgency.
Between the ambulance vans and the other vehicles there was enough transport to move the various wounded, including the walking wounded and the medical and logistics teams. Jim organized them quickly into small packets, loaded the vehicles and sent them away to the secondary ERV via different routes.
Jack then gathered the remainder, made sure they had the grid coordinates for the secondary ERV thirty five miles away, and told them to split down into four man teams and exfiltrate. They would meet at the secondary ERV to reconsolidate the company and rest up.
He stressed the need for stealth, using unobvious routes, and the use of the thermal ponchos. He split the Company into the basic components of four man teams and they then bomb-burst out into the woods.
The Company was gone, fading like ghosts into the trees.
Back in the Fusion Center RTOC, Director Woods was frustrated. The terrorists had just disappeared. The Reaper drone had picked up two pickup trucks racing away down a forest trail, and they had seen on the cameras the wounded laying in the back of the trucks, medics leaning over them.
Director Woods had given the order to engage and the two trucks had been destroyed by hellfire missiles, the explosions blooming across his TV monitor. The drone had then picked up a small group of terrorists moving through the trees, but the men below must have heard the drone overhead because they just simply disappeared from sight, including from the FLIR TI feed.
Woods had a date that night back at his compound with a hooker and a few lines of cocaine. All in all, it had not been a bad day. Although they had failed to annihilate the terrorist fighters, he had been able to orchestrate much death to two groups that he had a deep seated hatred for: the hick terrorists and the Army Rangers.
Ultimately, they were all cut from the same cloth, white supremacist redneck Special Operations Forces veteran types, whichever side they were on. Once the Rangers had outlived their usefulness, they would be ‘disappeared’ into the reeducation camps as the revolution progressed and the Homeland Corps was ramped up to take over domestic military duties.