“Break! This is Gator 6. Your ROTC time doesn’t count. I’m taking command and we will stay put until relieved. We can’t let the enemy break out of this pocket. All elements acknowledge, over.”
Walker shook her head. “Break, break, break. This is Blackjack 6. What’s going on? I’ve been offline. Where’s Iron Main?” Even as she asked, the answer was pretty clear through her viewports.
A fine gray mist blanketed the ground in all directions, despite the sunny day. As she rotated her turret, a puff cloud appeared only fifty yards from her. She knew intellectually that gas-filled artillery rounds wouldn’t create a massive explosion, but witnessing the silent killers in action was something else.
Sure, they trained for this scenario off and on, but no one took it too seriously. The US military hadn’t faced a real chemical threat since World War I. A hundred years of inaction breeds certain… complacency.
“Blackjack 6, this is Charlie 6. Good to hear your voice. I thought you were gone like most of the headquarters company. Thanks for the heads up. You saved our butts. Now, I’m taking charge here. Are you with me? Over.”
Good God. Whichever one was right, they both outranked Walker. “Charlie and Gator 6, please drop down to battalion internal.” The three company leaders switched over to a private channel known only to officers, in order to deliberate high strategy in discreet, erudite fashion.
Walker laid out her highbrow case first. “Hey dipshits, you’re scaring the troops. Now’s the wrong fucking time for a dick measuring contest! I see movement ahead. Flip a coin or whatever, but will someone please call in a counterbattery fire mission already?”
Dixon twisted his head in all sorts of directions while trying to get a good sight picture through his gas mask lens.
“Got ‘em. Target: 30 degrees, 1,500 meters, unknown IFV by the school entrance. What is that thing?”
Walker dropped out of the radio fight and focused on the real fight. “Not ours; that’s all you need to know. Armor piercing rounds. Kill him!” Despite his chattiness, her gunner was on the ball and burped out five rounds before she even finished speaking.
Walker spotted a second of the strange mini-tanks the Freedom Brigades loved so much… just as she realized none of their 25mm rounds had an effect on target.
“Driver: hard reverse now!” As both enemy vehicles swung their clearly larger guns in her direction, Walker reached down and popped her track’s eight smoke grenade launchers. No, the cloud wouldn’t stop a shell, but invisibility was the next best thing to armor.
The reassuring voice of the tank platoon leader filled her headset. “Blackjack 6, this is Door Knocker 5. We have eyes on those enemy Pumas. My platoon is moving up. Give us 10 seconds and we’ll cover you, over.”
“Negative, Door Knocker. Hold fast. I have a better idea. Standby for FRAGO.”
Lieutenant Walker spent all of 20 seconds figuring out what needed to be done. As a glorified NCO, she never wasted a second thinking about the proper chain of command.
“Net call, net call. All armored elements: converge on my position, but hold fire until I give the order. All infantry elements: drop any dismounts with AT-4’s or Javelins and fall back at least two clicks. Dismounts: find some cover. You’re our ace in the hole. My first sergeant will round you up and give you more details. Acknowledge, over.”
Maybe it was the iron in her voice, but none of the other company commanders dared to argue. The most they could muster was a question. “Roger. Uh, Blackjack 6, what do you have in mind, over?”
“These fanatics want to come to us rather than force us to dig them out of town. I say let’s oblige them. We’ll lure them into the open and finish them there.”
Beside her, Dixon recoiled at the grin on her face. In the blood red interior lighting, it was positively sadistic. “Let’s give these hard charging psychopaths enough rope to hang themselves with!”
Five harrowing minutes later, Walker scanned the crowded fields ahead as best as possible through her gas mask. They were probably out of the contaminated zone, but she wasn’t about to take any chances.
“Shit, LT. They took the bait! Those Freedom Brigade bastards should have invested in a little more training and not so much nerve gas!”
Walker couldn’t help but agree with Dixon. Unlike her previous fights in Colorado and Kansas, these fighters weren’t pros. Their exotic weapons and fanaticism led them to outsmart their commonsense far too often. She checked one more time that two battalion’s worth of enemy vehicles were truly rushing across the open towards them, completely exposed.
“All right. We found them. We’ve fixed them. Now it’s time to finish them. Door Knockers: open…” fourteen tanks blazed away simultaneously, “…fire.”
Also unlike her previous battles, she had real support this time. Having an entire tank company attached, equipped with the brand new M1A5 series at that, was a game changer. For all the talk about being revolutionary, this new breed of tank was simply a throwback to the original idea behind tanks: infantry support.
The M1A5 kept the reliable chassis and monstrous power plant of the venerable M1 tank series, but abandoned the iconic turret. Instead of one oversized turret, they sported an ugly totem pole of three smaller and remotely controlled gun platforms stacked on top of each other. The same rapid fire 105mm gun used on Stryker’s constituted the vehicle’s primary weapon system. While not nearly as powerful as the 120mm gun the Abrams mounted, the ultra-compact, depleted uranium Sabot rounds the smaller weapon fired could still kill any tank at four thousand yards.
Above the cannon rested a trusty 25mm Bushmaster chain gun. Like deadly antlers, two remotely operated 7.62mm machine guns finished off the ensemble. Still not satisfied, the designers wedged in an 81mm mortar above the rear engine compartment. With all the weapons gyro stabilized and tied into a state of the art fire control computer, they could fire independently at multiple targets, with unmatched accuracy, all simultaneously.
Toss on a large bulldozer blade in the front and a twelve-shot, radar-activated active protection system to stop RPG’s… and this ungainly monster became a true “assault vehicle.” An infantry soldier’s wet dream.
Walker grinned savagely at the best feature of all… the rebels had nothing like it. The enemy’s advance party withered away under the lead storm.
“Blackjack 6, this is 5. Their main body are dropping ramps. I estimate nearly 400 dismounts, over.”
Oh, Walker almost forgot her other goodies. Over her gunner’s whooping as he squirted off a TOW missile, Walker quickly changed radio frequencies.
“Thunder 6, where’s my fire mission, over?”
“One second Blackjack… shot out!”
Since the guns were so far away, the next county over in fact, she had a fifty-five second time of flight. A whole minute to sit and watch as the enemy fanned out.
It was well worth the wait. Those rebel infantry might be scattering to the four winds, but it made no difference. Once word reached the brass that the Mississippi line had been breached again, her unit’s fire support priority level suddenly climbed to carte blanche status. Three battalions of federal artillery, 54 guns, fired three salvoes apiece at her command. One hundred and sixty two DPICM mini cluster bombs could sure saturate a lot of ground. A little over a square kilometer, to be exact. No living thing in the open larger than bacteria would survive in that zone.
“Fuck me! I’ve never seen an entire artillery brigade strike at once. Not even in training.” Dixon flinched back from the gunner’s scope in awe. Walker never peeled her eyes from her scope, preferring to savor every one of the 11,000 popcorn explosions from the submunitions.