Jeff drummed his fingertips on the stock of his HK, considering what he had heard. Finally, he intoned, “You know, we’ve bumped into a lot of the local militias in the last few months. We’ve done our best to help them out too, just like you. Up until now, we haven’t invited any of them to join us. Either they were too inexperienced, or they had more people in their units than we wanted to add to ours. We like to keep our signature small. In your case, however, I think that the Commandante will make an exception. Are you interested?”
Teesha gave a toothy smile and nodded enthusiastically to her husband.
Tony reached out to shake Trasel’s hand and declared, “Sure, Jeff. We’ll join if you’ll take us.”
CHAPTER 29
Tolvajärvi
“Ever so often, the tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”
It was bitter cold. The snow had been coming down steadily for several days.
As the patrol worked its way toward Potlatch in the dim twilight, they could hear the shrieks of a Katushya rocket barrage, followed by the distant rumbling of the impacts, far in the distance. All five of the patrol members were wearing hooded snow camouflage ponchos that Kevin and Della had sewn from white bedsheets. They were cut extra long to accommodate backpacks. All of them were wearing small, improvised snowshoes made from willow boughs laced with parachute cord and rawhide. They halted on a wooded knoll that was just out of line of sight to the town. This was both their bivouac site and objective rally point (ORP).
It was nearly daylight by the time they had set up their pair of tents and rolled out their sleeping bags. They changed trousers, hanging their wet ones up inside of the tents to dry. Then they prayed and shared a breakfast of venison pemmican, dried apples, and dried biscuits, washed down with water.
They had kept their canteens under their coats to keep them from freezing.
Mike and Lisa Nelson snuggled in their Wiggy’s FTRSS bags, gradually getting warm after a numbing all-night march. Mike rubbed his hands together vigorously. They took turns rubbing each other’s feet, trying to restore circulation.
The air temperature outside the tent hovered around 5 degrees Fahrenheit. It would peak at just 10 degrees that afternoon. Just before he drifted off to sleep, Mike told Lisa, “Tonight will be one to remember. I wish Dan Fong was here to be in on it.” Outside, Kevin stood the first day watch.
Contact with a local rancher in January in the sixth year of the Crunch had provided Michael Nelson’s company with a valuable piece of intelligence: Potlatch was recently re-garrisoned by a company of the Belgian Chemical Corps, and their security was lax. The five-member raiding party consisted of the Nelsons, Kevin Lendel, and the Carltons. The snow had stopped for the present, but Kevin’s pocket barometer was falling, telling them that more was on the way. There would be a half moon rising that evening, but it would be obscured by clouds.
At 7 p.m., Mike left alone to conduct a patrol leader’s recon of Potlatch. He picked out a hillock two-hundred-and-fifty yards south of the nearest house.
There, he spread out his poncho, rolled out his FTRSS bag, and set up his Bushnell spotting scope on its stubby tripod. Through the scope, Mike saw the Belgians change guards at 9 p.m. and midnight, right on schedule. At twelve-fifteen, Nelson headed back to the ORP. The raiding party struck their tents and reloaded their gear in their packs. At twelve-thirty Mike gave his revised op order. Then they did a final inspection. Two noisy canteens were silenced by combining their contents. When the cold weather had set in, in November, they had delubricated their guns and lightly relubricated them with Moly Coat—powdered molybdenum disulfide. Nonetheless, they manually tested their actions to ensure that they weren’t frozen shut. Then they set off in a widely spaced single file, with their rifles and shotguns at port arms beneath their ponchos.
As they approached the town, the whine of a generator grew steadily louder. Mike had been told by the rancher that he should expect it. The Belgians had brought with them a trailer-mounted fifteen-kilowatt generator to power their lights, radios, and some small space heaters. On a listening halt, Mike smiled and whispered to Lisa, “This will be great. Not only will their night vision be ruined by the lights, but the noise of the generator will cover the noise of our approach.” Mike had been told by the rancher that there were no civilians left living in town. There would be no confusing the bad guys and friendlies. They had also been told that the guard changed every three hours.
The Belgians in the garrison company had originally been trained and equipped for chemical warfare decontamination. Here in America, their primary duty was to act as garrison soldiers. Most of their duty hours were spent guarding various facilities and manning roadblocks. Only occasionally did they get to use their cylinders to eliminate resistance fighters that the infantry had found hiding in bunkers. Their field SOP was to suit up and gas the bunkers and then leave for three days. Then they would return, again wearing their Mission Oriented Protective Posture (MOPP) suits and protective masks with green ring filters, in case any residual gas remained. Then they would drag out the bodies and gear. They liked the duty. The occasional gassing gave them the chance to gather plenty of booty. Because they were almost the only unit in the region with full MOPP suits, nobody else could handle their loot. If an officer from another unit made a fuss, they would offer them the doubled black plastic trash bags with the jocular warning, “Here, go ahead, take these! But, of course, remember that they are contaminated with VX, so be careful.” Then the officers would make a quick and polite exit, leaving the bags behind. Incidents like those made the Belgians laugh.
Most of their time was spent in town garrisons, getting drunk. Occasionally some hashish would come in the mail pouch from friends in Belgium. Then they’d have their big parties. Sometimes they could even catch a local teenage girl to gang rape. The Belgians would have otherwise liked being posted to Potlatch, but there were no residents left in town. It wasn’t as much fun without a few rapes.
Despite the Corps-wide “two-man rule,” there was only one sentry on duty when Mike’s raid patrol arrived. He was slightly drunk. His name was Per Boeynts, a Flemish-speaking Walloon private from the countryside northeast of Brussels. He hated being posted to UN peacekeeping duty in America. In the last year he had developed into a chronic alcoholic. At one-ten a.m., he stood just inside the doorway of what had been the sheriff’s office, trying to stay warm. His coat collar was turned up, and he was wearing his long underwear, a set of cold weather fatigues with cold weather liners, a sweater, and his heavy wool greatcoat. Still, he felt cold. The thermometer read 3 degrees Fahrenheit. Per wondered what that equated to on the Celsius scale. He could hardly wait the hour and a half until his relief was due. Then he could get back to bed.
Per had left a pair of Dutch-made night vision goggles on the chair by the orderly’s desk. By SOP they were supposed to be hanging on a cord around his neck. He hadn’t bothered to put them on, because the lights in the buildings would cause them to shut off automatically, anyway. The night sentries often cursed 1st Sergeant Van Duyn for making them carry the stupid things.