Dan and the Bottle Ch. 15

Mickey and Doris had both been re-tasked to teaching shooting classes in their small town, and they took their jobs seriously, although they took vastly different approaches.

Doris kept them in the classroom for the first few weeks, teaching the theory of ballistics; every day, when her students walked in, they were confronted with 'problems' on blackboards, involving how to take shots from different directions, at different distances, with estimated wind velocities and shifting wind patterns factored in.

Mickey, on the other hand, took a more hands on approach, taking the people out to different ranges to shoot at different distances at targets that got progressively smaller.

Between the two of them, though, the new recruits made rapid progress, particularly when Mickey took his class out one day, startling them with full sized photographs of Chinese soldiers as their targets. This upped the ante considerably; the class concentrated as never before, and the results were impressive, to say the least. By the time the cease-fire was called, the faces and chests of the targets were a real mess.

'Nothin' like a little motivation' he thought as he watched the targets being shredded with his binoculars, by the entire class. 'God only knows what they'd look like if I'd given them full automatics.' he thought to himself.

A few weeks later, he changed things up; instead of the usual sniper's rifles, the gun cabinets were filled with forty MM grenade launchers, along with bandoleers of practice rounds. Once they'd finished reading the training materials provided, they were led out to the range, where targets were set out at fifty, a hundred, and a hundred and fifty yards.

This, of course, baffled most of the class completely, although a few of them had a decent handle on things by the late afternoon.

He would alternate them between rifles, pistols, and grenade launchers for the next two months, drilling the different problems into their heads constantly, always finishing his classes with the words "Ladies and Gentlemen, these things Must become second nature to you. You must be able to switch from one to another in your sleep! You never know, in combat, which one you're going to need next! Think on these things this evening, you will be tested again tomorrow!"

Phil was back at the Cave, filling in John, Jim, and the rest of the council members on what he'd found at the three small bases.

"As much as I hate to say this, Ladies and Gentlemen, there may be no way to hit these places without losing the prisoners. The two smaller bases, to the north and south of this one don't appear to have any prisoners; we observed both of them for over a week, and never saw any sign of them. The main one, though, in between the two... from the size of the barracks they're in, I'd guess there are about forty, maybe fifty women there. They've cleared the land surrounding the fences out to well past RPG and LAW range, and the whole area, as far as we could tell, is mined. They've ringed it with anti aircraft guns and surface to air missile sites, all radar guided, so an aerial attack would be tricky, at best."

John nodded, deep in thought. "So we're going to have to change up our tactics again."

Phil looked over at him, curiously."What do you have in mind?"

"The two smaller bases... how are they equipped? All Chinese equipment, American gear, mixed...?"

"It looked like mostly AKs, from where we were sitting... nothin' special, why?"

"So we could pretty much flatten those bases without really losing much, right?"

"Yeah... " Phil started to see where he was going with this; the beginnings of a smile touched his lips.

"Would four Apaches and a couple of Abrams, followed by ground troops, at each of those small camps do the trick, then?"

Archer looked up sharply at this.

"What are you thinking, Johnny?"

"We've got those Stealth fighters they found, down at Juniper... they're already loaded up with small, laser guided bombs. We don't know that the Chinese radar can track them... and I doubt that they can. All of those SAM launchers at the big base in the middle are tied into one radar pod, and if we take that out first, they're blind. At fifteen thousand feet, the Nighthawks can launch Smart bombs from a few miles out, in the middle of the night... especially if we have someone on the ground, painting the site with a laser from six or eight hundred yards out. We can take out their AA capability, then move in with Apaches, F22s, and Harriers, and destroy the guard towers and the front gates, then move in with heavy armor. Five, maybe six tanks followed by APCs loaded with as many men as'll fit."

Phil nodded. "I think we'll want multiple guys on the 'painting' lasers, just to be on the safe side... my guys can handle that. The question is, just how powerful are these 'Smart bombs'? Will they wipe out the whole camp?"

John Corcoran frowned. "Hadn't thought of that... maybe we could modify one... open up the warhead, take out most of the explosive charge, limit the blast to just the radar and a little of the surrounding area?"

Jim nodded... "We could, but it'll still send shrapnel all over the place."

Corcoran frowned in thought for a minute, then began to smile.

Archer noticed this. "Okay... what are you thinking?"

"Remember that APC, the one with the inch and three quarter machine cannon bolted to the side?"

Archer nodded, the beginnings of a grin touching his face. "How many rounds do you have for it?"

"About twenty five hundred. We've kept the machine shop busy, and a lot of the used twenty-two brass found it's way to the smelter, too. We've also been breaking down a shitload of AK rounds, melting down the lead and the brass and re-using the powder."

The planning session would go long into the night, moving, eventually, from the council office to one of the restaurants in the Cave.

Frank Bergen came over to sit with Jim Archer and John Corcoran, with a plate of buffalo steak and mashed potatoes in hand. As they ate, they discussed the state of the ordnance warehouse.

Corcoran was going over reports from the small towns and villages they'd set up; the numbers were promising, but he had to keep in mind that many of the people he was looking at were needed where they were, as the farming season was in full swing.

Juniper base was coming along nicely, as well.

They, too, had been expanding outwards, with five towns of their own producing food and keeping livestock... and training new troops.

Within several weeks, two teams were assembled from all of the bases and a number of the small towns in the surrounding towns; the two small 'reinforcing bases', to the north and south of the Chinese base that stood in the way of their march into Idaho, were their targets, and the enemy never knew what hit them.

Sherman, Patton, and Abrams tanks rolled into positions surrounding the bases, pounding the guard towers and the anti aircraft emplacements, followed closely by Apache, Blackhawk, and Huey attack helicopters with their miniguns and heavy machine guns, and five thousand ground troops followed up, killing the few survivors with sniper fire and short bursts from M 16s.

A wealth of paperwork was found in the administrative buildings and the communications shacks, along with, again, hundreds of American rifles and pistols and tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition, among other things.

All of this was divided up among the small towns, and the American troops once again withdrew to their assorted bases and towns to take stock, patch up the wounded, and bury their dead, of which there were, in Jim's eyes, far too many.

They'd lost nearly fifty people on this op.