Seeing those armed men, whoever they were, put the Team on edge. This wasn’t at all like their previous cakewalks. This was the real deal.
They crept along for another half hour or so. Even at idling speed, they had to stop periodically to let Bravo, on foot, catch up. They were in good shape but had tons of equipment and had been up for a few days. They were tired.
“Heading into the wooded area,” Scotty said into the radio. “Be ready for ambushes from the right or left flanks.” Or from the front, he thought, right at our truck.
“Should we kill the headlights?” Scotty asked Bobby and Pow.
“Nah,” Pow said, “we need them to see anyone ahead of us.”
“Plus, we’re cleaning the place out,” Bobby said. “So if they see our lights, they might go further into the forest. Concentrate themselves.” Made sense.
They spent the next half hour barely moving along. The high beams on so the headlights were lighting up their path. Nothing.
Edwards got on the radio and said they would stop here, dismount, and go into the woods. Ryan and Wes relaxed. They had been careful to stand up in the back of the truck while staying ready for a sudden lurch if Bobby had to take off. It was exhausting, but now they could relax.
“Dismount, dude,” Wes said and stood in the back of the truck.
“Boom! Boom!” Bursts of fire.
Fire was coming from everywhere. And tracers! They had a machine gun! Green tracers were like laser beams from a science fiction movie.
Bobby punched the gas and the truck flew forward. He swerved and slammed on the brakes. The truck was now sideways in the road, providing plenty of cover, just like they’d practiced.
A burst of machine gun fire blew out the windshield just as they got out of the truck. Scotty was about two feet away when he got sprayed with glass. He didn’t even feel the glass. He was moving away from the truck in slow motion.
Bravo Company, now behind the truck, lit up the right and left flanks. They, too, had machine guns. Red tracers spit out from behind the truck and into the sides of the road and bounced all around the forest.
The Team was shooting into the woods. They couldn’t see what they were shooting at, but it felt so good to shoot back, which was better than just sitting there feeling helpless.
Pretty soon, Pow yelled, “Save your ammo!” It was impossible to see what they were shooting at. Now that they’d got a half magazine out and didn’t feel helpless anymore, they could start thinking this through, which was what Ted had told them before the Collapse. He warned them to resist the urge to shoot just so they could feel like they were doing something. They’d want those rounds back if they start to run out and they
will
run out. That being said, Ted admitted to them that he emptied a mag the first time he got ambushed.
“Moving!”
“Move!”
“Moving rear!”
“Covering!” The Team was doing what they’d practiced, moving to the best cover behind the truck and covering each other’s movements. With live rounds coming at them this time. They felt remarkably calm, now that the initial shock was over. They could feel their training kicking in and getting them through this. And the wild volleys of green tracer fire showed them what Ted had always said, “Your enemy is probably a shitty shot.” Whoever was spraying at them wasn’t hitting crap.
After a minute or two, the fire started to die down. It was pretty obvious that neither side was hitting what they were aiming at. The Team could hear yelling and rustling bushes. The Limas were completely disorganized. It was starting to become obvious that the Limas had just started spraying poorly aimed machine gun fire, and now were getting the hell out of there.
Edwards realized the same thing. He and a SAW gunner—a soldier with a light machine gun—ran up to the Team, who were behind the truck.
“You guys give us cover fire left, right, and front,” Edwards yelled, because he couldn’t hear with all the gunfire. “And my guys will move into the woods left and right. You hold the point. Got it?”
The Team nodded or gave a thumbs up.
Except Wes.
Pow wondered where Wes had gone, and assumed he was hiding behind some cover.
“Give me cover fire in thirty seconds,” Edwards said, as he ran back to his company. They were still taking pot shots into the woods to keep the bad guys’ heads down.
The SAW gunner counted off the thirty seconds. The Team was counting. The SAW gunner got a good position on the ground.
“Twenty-nine … thirty,” Pow counted to himself. All of the sudden, the SAW and the Team opened up on the left, right, and front.
“Loading!” Ryan yelled, meaning he was changing a magazine.
“Check!” Scotty yelled and threw out cover fire so Ryan could load.
“Loaded!” Ryan yelled when he was done.
“Loading!” Scotty yelled.
“Check!” Ryan yelled. And so they did this for a minute or two as they coated the woods with bullets.
They had done this so many times that they could keep track of who had reloaded and who would need to reload soon.
They didn’t hear Wes call for a reload.
Bravo Company moved into the woods on both sides. Pretty soon, they could hear scattered shots in the woods. Hopefully it was Bravo shooting escaping Limas, rather than the Limas ambushing Bravo.
“Wait!” Pow yelled out to the Team. They hadn’t received any fire from the woods so they stopped shooting. There was no need to, unless someone took a shot at them. Besides, their guns were getting hot from a couple magazines of firing.
“Pop! Pop!” The shooting in the woods continued, but was dying down. Pretty soon, it was over. The Team sat there scanning the left, right, and front. Nothing. Each of them kept imagining a Lima running toward them out of nowhere and them shooting him. They kept imagining it to keep sharp, and to make it easy to do when it happened.
The bushes around the Team started to move. They swung their rifles around to the movement. It was Bravo, or some military unit with the same kind of uniforms. It could be a FUSA Lima unit, but given how calmly they were walking up to them, it probably wasn’t.
The Team quickly started recognizing individual members of Bravo coming back from the woods. Edwards was one of them.
“We ain’t running into their trap,” Edwards said to Pow. “The map says there are two points in and out, where this road goes into and out of the park. Do you know of any other points?”
“No, sir,” Pow said. “The steep hills go down into the watershed. It would be hard to cross that water and get out of here.”
“Good,” Edwards said. “We’ll seal up the two exit points and wait for the sun to come up. We can go in there in the light, but not in the dark. I only have a handful of NVGs,” he said, referring to night vision goggles. If all his guys had them, and especially if he knew the enemy did not have them, then he would have gladly walked into the woods in the dark.
“We’ll split the company up and put them on each exit point,” Edwards said. “We’ll take this first exit point and have you drive up to the next one, using your headlights the way you were.”
To get shot at, Pow thought. Oh well. There were pluses and minuses that came with riding in the truck.
“We’ll be ready to go in a minute,” Pow said. “Let me know when the half of the company following us is ready, sir.”
Edwards nodded and ran off to get his company split into two.
The Team left their cover and gathered around the truck.
“Where’s Wes?” Ryan asked.
Chapter 303
A Missing Friendly
(January 2)
Everyone looked around. Wes wasn’t there.
“Hey! Wes!” Ryan yelled. “Let’s go.”
Silence.
Pow figured Wes was back with Bravo, so he said, “These Lima dickheads really suck. Did you see all that spray and pray machine gun fire? What a bunch of jackasses. These guys can’t fight worth a shit. We so outclass them.”
Ryan got out his flashlight and started looking around the truck. Wes wasn’t there.
Oh, God. Ryan remembered that Wes had been standing in the back of the truck and not bracing himself when Bobby hit the gas. He ran back to the point where the truck had accelerated. Everyone followed him, as they were now realizing the same thing.
Ryan looked around with this flashlight.
“Shit!” Ryan yelled out. “Come here, guys!”
The Team approached and saw Wes' rifle on the ground. It had been dropped, but Wes was nowhere to be found.
They stood there stunned and silent. Finally, Scotty got on the radio and grimly announced, “We have a missing friendly.”
“We have to go find him!” Pow yelled as Edwards came up.
“What?” Edwards asked. The Team filled him in.
“We can’t go look for him,” Edwards exclaimed. “We can’t be walking around those woods at night! Not without NVGs.”
“How many do you have?” Ryan asked.
“I dunno,” Edwards said. “Seven, I guess.”
“We need them. Where are they?”
“Whoa, soldier,” Edwards said, using his captain’s voice. “We’re not going into those woods until sun up.”
“But we are,” Pow said pointing to the Team. “Captain, we’re volunteering. Give us the NVGs and we’ll go get Wes. We won’t ask for any support.”
“No way,” Edwards said. “Negative. Understand me?”
The Team was silent. They were going into those woods to go get Wes one way or another. He was a member of the Team. They had agreed long ago that they wouldn’t leave a teammate behind. It just wasn’t going to happen. They didn’t need some captain’s permission to do so.
“No, sir,” Ryan said. “We are going into those woods, NVGs or not. Your choice, Captain. We go in with NVGs or we go in without them. Your choice, sir.”
“You don’t talk to me that way,” Edwards yelled to Ryan. No one ever challenged his authority this way. No one, especially not these irregulars. What a pain in the ass it had been even letting them come out with a real unit.
“We’re irregulars, sir,” Scotty spoke up and said. “We consider ourselves under the command of Lt. Matson and he would let us do this.”
“That’s the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard,” Edwards yelled. “First Sergeant, get over here. We have a discipline problem.”
The First Sergeant and two others came over. “What’s up, sir?”
“These irregulars want to go off into the woods and find their friend,” Edwards said. “I told them no. They say they’ll disobey my direct order.”
“Do as the good Captain says,” said the tough-as-nails First Sergeant.
“We’re done,” Pow said. “We’re resigning our commissions or whatever.”
“You don’t have commissions and you couldn’t resign them on a battlefield anyway,” Edwards said. These irregulars had no idea what they were talking about. Who were these fucking goofballs? Edwards wondered, his frustration level rising.
“Let’s go, guys,” Pow said as he walked toward the woods. He walked right past the First Sergeant and the Team followed.
They got a few yards away and Edwards yelled, “Halt!” The Team thought they might get shot by Edwards and his men. What a way to die, shot by your own side for not obeying an order.
Wes. Wes was in those woods and time was wasting. That was all they could think about.
Edwards had been briefed in advance of this mission that regular military units could not expect irregular units to obey orders like professional soldiers did. If the choice came down to trying to arrest irregulars for insubordination, Edwards’ commanders told him to let the irregulars go ahead and do whatever it was they were going to do – as long as it didn’t get other Patriot forces hurt. The Team guys going out into the woods with no support wouldn’t get any other Patriot forces hurt, Edwards realized, and they were irregulars who were just volunteering. They could go get killed if they wanted.
Edwards turned to the First Sergeant and spoke loud enough for the Team to hear.
“Sergeant, you are my witness. “These men—irregulars who assert I have no command over them—are going into the woods against my orders. They have acknowledged that they’re on their own. I wash my hands of them.”
“Yes, sir,” the First Sergeant said.
Pow turned on his weapon light. It lit up an amazing swath with its 110 lumen Surefire. The rest of the Team did the same. It suddenly became easy to see.
And easy for the enemy to see them. The Team knew it.
“We made a pact,” Bobby said to the Team. “We don’t leave anyone behind and we take care of each other’s families.” The Team started to think about Kellie and the baby she and Wes were expecting.
“I couldn’t look Kellie in the eye,” Scotty said, “and tell her I didn’t go out to get Wes.”
The Team started to move out into the woods.
Not very well. It was pitch dark and their weapon light almost over-illuminated the woods. They were getting blinded by their lights. And their weapons lights couldn’t light up the foliage at their feet unless they constantly swept their rifles up and down. Their arms were going to get tired from all the sweeping of their rifles to see their way.