Dan and the Bottle Ch. 18

He got to the edge of the new field, and was about to turn and cut the next row when he caught movement from the corner of his eye.

At the northern edge of the field, running behind the tree line, were a short line of men in darkened yellow uniforms, who appeared to be moving into position around the small town.

He shut the big machine down, taking the key from the ignition, and ran to his truck, trying to keep the D-12 between himself and the sight line of the enemy soldiers. Sliding the ignition key into the steering column of the truck, he grabbed for his CB mic, sending out a general call to all of the troops stationed in town.

Half a dozen people acknowleged his original, general shout-out, but one voice cut through the rest; Colonel Billy Jackson himself, who cut through the clutter immediately, asking for quiet.

"Ok, Mister Clark, what exactly is the problem?"

"Sir, be advised: Chinese troops are moving into position around the town; they appear to be lightly armed, but that could change. I'm in the new field to the north of town. Suggest going to high alert."

"Acknowledged and agreed... all troops, go to high alert, cocked, locked, and ready to rock. Prep for battle, boys an' girls. Full loads, and don't spare the rocket launchers. grenade launchers, and S.A.W.s."

A chorus of 'Yes sir's' came from the radio's speakers, and all around town, men and women grabbed rifles, fighting harnesses, and equipment belts. Crews ran to heavy Armored Personnel carriers and Bradley fighting vehicles, and sniper teams ran to get to fortified, upper floor shooting positions in three and four story homes around the perimeter of the town, where spotting scopes and motion detection equipment were soon set up and operating.

In the main office of the defense force, computers booted up and perimeter cameras were brought to bear, revealing Chinese moving into what they apparently thought were well-concealed positions around town, looking for targets, and finding... nothing.

The locals, what few were out, were mostly carrying old American rifles, and retreating into houses, where windows were opening.

Major Kwan looked around the edge of the town they were approaching, cursing quietly. The Americans had spotted them too soon, and had time to get to defensive positions. He called for his men to pull back, not realizing that his radio frequency was being monitored in the main headquarters of his enemy... and that his retreat order was too little, too late.

Bill Jackson smiled as his interpreter relayed the Chinese commands. Grabbing the mic that his own troops were monitoring, he thumbed the button, calmly informing his people that the free fire zone was now open for business.

All over town, men and women chambered rounds, sighting in on retreating Chinese troops, and opened fire. Sniper rifles, many of them silenced, whispered; Squad Automatic Weapons and Browning M2 Big .50s chattered, and twenty-five mm chain guns on top of Bradley fighting vehicles roared; grenade launchers popped as RPGs and LAWs roared from their launchers, and all around the perimeter of the town, Chinese died.

Some few returned fire; ineffectually, for the most part, but a few rounds connected.

The village lost seven people that day, and twice as many were wounded, nine seriously.

A team of their best scouts backtracked the Chinese, to a small, hidden encampment, about thirty miles to the north.

Will Jackson, Junior, leader of the team, sat back, watching as the three big trucks rolled into the Chinese camp. From the first two, more than a dozen men piled out of each, wearing Chinese uniforms and carrying AKs. The third backed up to one of the larger tents to offload dozens of boxes, obviously supplies for the new base they were attempting to build in the hidden spot. It was well off the nearest road, and just barely accessible for a truck with four wheel drive.

Will smiled... this was going to be fun.

He and his team waited until nearly midnight, watching as the perimeter guards settled in for the night, becoming more bored by the minute.

Tom Samuels moved up behind the snoozing guard, slipping the piano wire loop over the man's head, and pulling hard on the wooden handles. Blood spurted as the man was nearly decapitated. Tom drew back into the thick underbrush before turning and heading to the other side of the small camp.

At the other end, Andy Marlowe finished with the last of the small mines he was burying, stepping carefully, and made off to the rallying point.

Six hundred yards away, Barbie Nixon, another member of the team, carefully set the tripwire for the four Claymores she'd set; when this one was tripped, all four would go off at once, aimed inwards in a box formation roughly thirty feet long and ten feet wide, creating a killing box the size of a large truck on the trail leading into the camp.

Further down the rough trail of ruts that led from the road to the hidden camp, Al Dizett set another trap, burying a number of anti-tank mines, then adding tripwires before and after the line of mines across the road, which would set off Claymores hidden in the trees above.

Will finished setting his own little contribution, a pound and a half of Cave made C-four, crammed into the nooks and crannies of a large boulder facing the camp... enough to turn the massive rock into gravel... gravel that would be flying into the camp at bullet-like speed. Plugging in the remote detonator, he grinned evilly as he, too, made his way back to the rally point.

Once the last of his people turned up, they sat back to wait. It was't long before the first of the six garrotted guards were discovered, and the alarm was raised.

Chinese soldiers ran in all directions, setting off more of the heavy concentration of Claymores and Bouncing Bettys, spitting death in all directions; they tried drawing back to the center of their camp, thinking it would be safe until daylight, when they could get men out with metal detectors. It was at that point that Will set off the explosives in the big rock, with predictible results. Chunks of jagged rock, ranging in size from gravel to the size of baseballs, flew into the camp in a wide arc, at speeds comparable to rifle fire, creating a killing zone at least fifty feet wide.

The entire team shared a mutual grin, chambering rounds in their silenced rifles and setting to work. Not many of the Chinese weren't wounded in some way; most of their shooting involved finishing shots.

When they were finished, the only sounds left were coming from a few of the tents, where the moans and screams of pain drowned out the sounds of the silenced rifles.

A thought occurred to Will, as his team members looked over at him, and he gave a wolfish grin... "Gentlemen, we're going to leave those few wounded in the tents."

"Why, Sir?"

"Two reasons, actually... One: their screaming and groaning will draw in the wild dogs and the other scavengers, and Two: if they manage to survive those, they might... might... be found by their fellow soldiers. How much terror will that spread amongst the enemy troops?"

Barbie grinned... she liked that idea.

Considering the fact that she'd been a prisoner of the soldiers a mere year and a half ago, it came as no surprise to anyone there.

She smiled in Jackson's direction. "Sir, you have a wicked sense of humor."

"Naaahhh... I just have no sympathy for those bastards."

Later that night, she would enter his tent unannounced, and practically rape her Oh so lucky Commanding Officer. Which, in turn, came as quite a shock to him; he knew for a fact that back at the camp, she was known to prefer women, and in fact lived with her girlfriend.

Of course, the next month, when she missed her period, she had a bit of explaining to do... and eight months after that, when she gave birth to two baby boys, Karla, her girlfriend, almost fell over when Barbie asked if she wanted to be listed as the father.

Jim led another small group of recruits out to the firing range, this one a quarter mile away from an old car dealership, from which they'd already taken everything of value. There was a clean line of sight from the hilltop on which they set up to the used car lot, which was full of rusting hulks that had once been clean automobiles; those would be their targets. Paper targets would have been worse than useless with these rifles.

"Okay, People, listen up! I know you're used to all firing at once, but these weapons are different from anything we've ever used, and the batteries take a devil of a time to recharge, so we have to be conservative in how we use them. I'm going to fire on the first one in line, to mark the starting point. I will point out the second shooter and tell him which vehicle is his target. Three round burst fire only, folks, and then back to safe, and the next person steps up. Are we clear?"

A chorus of 'Yes, Sirs!' followed, and he nodded.

Turning to face the old car lot, he chose an old Chevy and fired a quick burst into it, turning most of the aging rust pile into a pile of molten metal, and then turned.

The shots had been nearly silent. In fact, they were quieter than a silenced bolt action .270.

"Davis! You're up next! I want you shooting at the one to the immediate left of the one I just hit! I'll take accuracy over speed, but don't dawdle!"

"Yes, Sir!" Ernie Davis replied, drawing a bead on the old Dodge pick-up.

And so it went for the next three hours, until everyone had had at least ten or eleven chances to shoot the unfamiliar rifles, growing comfortable with the lack of recoil and the flat-as-a-bowstring trajectories. The fact that there were no solid projectiles involved, just intense beams of energy, worked in their favor, as there was no bullet drop or wind deflection. By the end of the session, Jim was quite pleased with their progress.

Within a month of their locating the old research base, they had three full platoons trained in the use of the laser rifles, and were back in production of both the rifles and the immensely potent power cells for them... and the science department was hard at work, developing a pistol based on the new/old technology.

Ed Anderson looked out the window of his modest home, doing a double take as he realized a trader had actually made it to his town, in the Black Hills. What's more, it wasn't just one trader, it was an entire caravan, with three wagons and a full dozen men, many of them carrying bows and crossbows; a few of them even appeared to be carrying... guns! Real, antique, guns! He knew they were antiques, because he had one just like these, hidden in his storm cellar, a leftover from his great-grandfather. Not that it really mattered... he'd never seen a single round of ammunition for it.

'Maybe they'll sell me some ammunition.' he thought, considering what kind of surprise he could arrange, the next time some bunch of raider punks or soldiers came to town. He grabbed a shirt even as he looked around, wondering what he could use for trading.

Jimmy Shaw sat back in the wagon seat, wondering how long it would be before somebody came out to trade. He'd felt eyes on himself and his squad since they'd entered the small, suburban neighborhood.

His unspoken question was answered a few minutes later, as an old man, carrying an M-16 that looked like it hadn't been cleaned or lubricated since the great war, stepped out of a house behind him to his right; he could sense the tension in his own team, and held his empty hands up, signalling for calm on both sides.

"Easy, old timer... we're just lookin' to trade."

"Uh huh... where'd y'all get them guns?"

"We scrounged an old Army base a few weeks ago... found a few boxes of 'em, hidden in the back of a warehouse, along with a few crates of ammo. We've got a few extra to trade, but they're expensive. We won't let any of that go cheap."

"I 'spect you won't." The old man replied, slinging the age old battle rifle over his shoulder and extending his hand. "Ed Anderson."

"Jim Shaw. Is there anything you folks need? We've got some tradin' goods here... thick blankets, warm clothes, magnesium firestarters, sharp knives, jars full of seeds, got a couple of good arkansas whetstones... "

"I could use a new whetstone. What kind of seeds have you got?"

By this point, Ed's neighbors were poking their heads out, and seeing the small trade caravan, came trickling out, a few at a time, to trade with the strangers.

Jim and his team, of course, took this as an opportunity to spread a few rumors, about a certain militia 'army', making life very difficult for the Chinese... and that they might be headed this way.

In turn, he and his team mates, most of whom were posing as simple, hired guards, gathered rumors of a small contingent of Chinese who were holed up in a town called Sturgis, maybe two dozen strong. Later that evening, after they were encamped in an old, unoccupied farmhouse, they discussed the possibilities. All of them were experienced fighters, with extensive training in martial arts, infiltration, and various Special Forces techniques.

Within a week, they had split into a pair of five man teams, still maintaining their cover stories as wandering traders, approaching the town from both the northwest and the south east, taking numerous photographs and filling several notebooks with written commentary.

The Chinese in Sturgis turned out to be a helluva lot more than a mere two dozen, they soon learned, after several days of steady surveillance. It was closer to two hundred, and even as they watched, more were pouring in.

Three of the big Army deuce and a halves, preceded and followed by armored Humvees, rolled into town as they watched; two of the big trucks contained troops, while the third was backed up to a warehouse and a number of steel ammo boxes and wooden crates were offloaded. Apparently it was loaded with weapons, ammunition, and food.

Jim got on his satellite phone, relaying this new development to his superiors back at the Cave; he knew Mayor Corcoran and Colonel Archer would want to know right away.

John Corcoran sat back in his office, both hands covering his face wearily as he contemplated these new developments. Archer was still at the base in Idaho; even if he set out with the newly trained troops right now, it would take the better part of three days to get an operation up and running to root the Chinese out of Sturgis. Planning it alone could take a week, and that would only be after Shaw and his teams got back here with their intel. One more mess to deal with... and that didn't take into account the number of other small Chinese bases that were seemingly coming out of the woodwork.

"What I wouldn't give for a few thousand Tomahawks right now!" he said to the empty room.

Over the course of the next few weeks, the Cave, with help from Juniper and Jackson hole, sent teams to five different Chinese encampments, wiping them off the map entirely, preparations for moving on the base at Sturgis. They were mostly small camps anyway, none populated by more than fifty or a hundred men, but Corcoran and his allies considered them good practice for their newest people.

When Jim Archer came back from Idaho, and Jim Shaw and his team came in from their trading circuit, planning began in earnest, with a lot of help from the high resolution cameras fitted onto two F-117 Stealth fighters, and a newly discovered Keyhole 16 spy satellite that Archer guessed hadn't been known to too many people, even back before the war. Jan Archer had found that one, after several weeks of hacking the computers at the research base where they'd found the 'electric rifles'. She was still there, still getting information out of the large mainframe.

Sturgis, it turned out, was going to be a genuine clusterfuck. The Chinese were spread out in two different hotels and several dozen houses, some far apart from each other. Worse still, there were civilians interspersed amongst the enemy troops, not by choice, but by force. Patrols were regular, frequent, and numerous.

This one was going to have to be special ops work, exclusively. More importantly, it would all have to happen in a single night, to preclude the possibility of Chinese retaliation against the civilian population.

It took nearly a month of constant surveillance to pinpoint the locations of all of the Chinese troops; eventually, though, they had all of the homes and hotels identified, and they could start identifying and assigning targets. This one was going to have to be up close and personal.

Within two weeks, the planning was complete, the weapons were chosen and laid out, and the final planning was in motion. Snipers would take up positions all around the town, first, followed by more, who would infiltrate and get to the rooftops of more than a dozen six and eight story buildings in the center of town, to take out roving patrols inside the city.

Then the rest of the troops would move in, going house to house, killing the rest of the Chinese in their beds, using knives, garrotes, and silenced pistols.

The operation went off with almost clockwork precision... Almost. Otto Michaels slipped in to one of the hotel rooms he'd been assigned to, only to find the bed empty. He barely had time to position himself in a blind spot before the soldier he was looking for exited the bathroom, popping the man twice in the back of the head, and then another for good measure.

Jimmy Hall ran into much the same thing; one of his assignments was in the shower when he stepped into the hotel suite, and he left the cooling corpse draining blood and brain tissue down the drain of the tub.

On one of the rooftops, Mike Jefferson took careful aim; the electric rifle spat out it's silent burst of three short bolts of red energy, and a Chinese soldier's head and helmet were melted into a puddle at the top of his corpse, which fell in it's tracks. He smiled as the rest of the man's patrol stopped, gawking at the corpse; he switched to beam fire and cut each of the other three men in half as he swung the rifle in a narrow arc, setting the small rifle back to safe as the German shepherd that had been accompanying them sniffed at the cooked meat of their lower torsos.

"That's right, big boy... lunch!" He murmured as he went back to looking for targets.

It took a full two days to dig out all of the Chinese troops, but in the end, they got what Jim wanted. In the back of the old Harley dealership, they found nearly fifty old/new bikes, many of them still hidden in their original, factory shipping crates.

Archer moved a small company, two hundred men, into the town, which elicited some grumbling from the locals, until the supply trucks rolled in by the dozens, carrying tons of dried storage foods and other supplies, followed by over a hundred techs and a full contingent of heavy equipment and operators.

These chose one old neighborhood, three square blocks of it, which was unoccupied due to extensive bomb damage, and proceeded to demolish it, taking all of the old debris out to the edge of town to be sorted and either repurposed or run through crushers before burying it in the pit they had taken their fill dirt from, and soon a two hundred and ninety acre field sprung up in the spot where the old homes had been. This was quickly prepped and left to absorb tons of compost before the next planting season.

Another sixty acres was set up as an orchard, with apple, pear, and plum saplings from the cave, as well as cuttings from the vineyard; many of these would be bearing fruit within two years.

The old construction lumber that wasn't re-usable was cut into shorter pieces and piled up in the center of town, and the locals were informed that it was free firewood. It didn't last the day.

The entire town was disconnected from the old power grid, and several large wind generators and a twenty five acre section of solar panels was set up, and soon, the people of Sturgis again had modern conveniences like electric lights, heat, and hot running water.