The Retreat Read online

  The General watched the fast replay and finally said, “That was the battle of Teutoburg where the Roman legions were wiped out.”

  “Yes, General, but the price is still too high. Our best result was only 12% losses on blue and 90% on red. We just can’t take on both forces at once and need to bog one down in Boise or Coeur D’Alene so they can’t make the link up,” Mitch explained.

  “Who is running the opposing force?” the General said.

  “Come with me, General,” Mitch said as they left the room and walked through the door to get to Duncan’s offices where the Colonel, Angus and their prepper author were seated. The Colonel was watching the replay again and going over maps, looking for inconsistencies. Mitch had beaten him six times already. The Colonel looked exasperated and turned to the Colonel and said, “Sorry sir, but this is like Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan on steroids, I am road bound while my enemy isn’t. He keeps taking out my fuel trucks and spotting ability to call arty or air strikes, eventually I get strung out and kaboom, I’m done. After running these simulations and if I was the red force commander, I’d tell my staff to burn the damn forest down and then attack but the rules makers over here tell me that the forest won’t burn until late summer and by that time half my force would either desert, starve or be picked off by patriots. I win any blocking force engagement but lose any other way. I’ve been to the Command Staff College and was first in my class. I have won every sand table exercise I’ve ever played, even managing to win Gettysburg for the South. My next strategy would have been to create outposts in the forest like Vietnam and resupply by air but the engagement would take years and I’d still lose. You’re welcome to take a shot, General, but I’ve been handed my ass by Mitch six times already and I’m down half a case of scotch to boot.”

  “How are you doing this, Mitch?” the General asked.

  “Napoleon said that an army marches on its stomach, General,” Mitch explained. “We can live in the forest without the need for replenishment. We let the Colonel see all the blue dots but we think we can stay more invisible than that to our enemies. We will always win the intelligence part of the battle and will know what our enemy is doing. The lion might be the king of the jungle but a pack of hyenas can take one down by attacking its rear legs and balls whenever it turns around. A hyena can’t confront the front of a lion and live but multiple hyenas can keep nipping at the lion’s balls until the lion chooses to run away. That is our strategy.”

  Chapter 10

  The National Guard troops were slowly being infiltrated into the Retreat and the General quickly learned that his troops needed an orientation and mini boot camp upon their arrival before being integrated into the Retreat squads. Duncan thought it was unfair and cheating the soldiers of their initiation education but it stopped the General’s troops from feeling humiliated right out of the gate by a bunch of civilians. The US Army trained its personnel to a standard set of minimum requirements during basic training that each recruit must achieve but every recruit quickly learns that the spit, polish and iron clad discipline gets thrown out the window during a deployment and every recruit and officer gets assigned specific duties to be performed to a specific set of guidelines. The Retreat follows a credo more like the US Marines where every Marine is first and foremost a rifleman. There are no mess cooks, motor pool officers or supply clerks at the Retreat and most of all there is no paperwork so therefore there is no support staff and chair warming brigade. Once the General’s troops, including the General, had met the Retreat’s standards of expert in marksmanship, hand to hand combat and woodcraft, only then were they considered operational and became fully integrated into their Retreat squads. The troop officers were having a harder time adapting than the non-commissioned ranks; non-commissioned personnel were used to a certain level of what they call chicken shit but officers tended more to the “I don’t need to know that, I’m an officer,” as if receiving a degree and a commission bestowed on them some form of better wisdom and judgement. Officers give orders and non-commissioned personnel take them. It was also an unwritten rule in the US military that officers do not do manual labor like laundry and KP duty. The General always nodded, smiled and promptly issued judgement on the spot and that judgement usually involved loss of rank; there were many Majors running around now wearing Second Lieutenant’s silver bars. Once the squads were integrated, then the troopers moved in with their Retreat counterpart’s housing and performed their regular jobs with them; everything from planting greenhouses to mucking out cow poop. The Retreat always had a third of their top tier squads in the field while a third was on standby and a third was on a regular work schedule, it was a weekly turn of people into the field. Even the command squads took their weekly time in the bush; the Retreat command squad looked at it as a blessing while the troopers looked at it as work. There is no such thing as idle time at the Retreat except during Sunday services. The troopers quickly learned the rules of the Retreat after learning the price of a bottle of scotch, while they also learned the value of keeping a bottle versus drinking a bottle. One Corporal had a few nips of his recently acquired bottle and made the mistake of whistling at a neighboring teenage girl who was hanging laundry next door. The teenager sashayed over with a big smile and turned the Corporal’s lights out. The judge caught wind of it, as only the judge could, and the Corporal’s punishment was a fine of two bottles of scotch, suspended, if the Corporal could earn hand to hand high expert. It takes a lot of body punishment to earn high expert in hand to hand as the lessons are “instructional” in practice and not long on theory; you only get better at fighting by fighting and not by practicing on how to fight. The troopers also had a doctor, nurse and dentist who were more than happy to liaise with their civilian counterparts. The troopers always groaned if their checkups were performed by the military personnel because they were not only charged for services, they were punished on top of it for infractions. Military doctors had set guidelines of the minimum standards needed for combat effectiveness. Minimum is not a word used at the Retreat for healthcare; they went with “Maximum achievable” and the military doctors and dentists were overjoyed with the program, to the dismay of the troopers. PFCs were paid one gold coin a week, Corporals two and Sergeants three. Lieutenants and Captains received two, Majors and Lieutenant Colonels three and bull Colonels four, the General and Sergeant Major got five each. Angus lobbied for a much different pay structure based on his prejudicial thoughts about officers but relented once the officers and gentlemen started pulling their weight.

  The General, Duncan, Melanie and the personnel trooper officer were in the field together on their weekly rotation; the General was very good in the field after his Vietnam tours as a Lieutenant, the personnel officer was not but his male ego would not let him look stupid in front of Melanie who he looked at as a goddess. The four command staffers were working their way toward the 25-mile road when Duncan stopped and raised his fist; the other three melted into the forest. Duncan clicked his radio once and pulled out his map. Melanie was in the rear of the column so they backtracked half a mile and conferenced quietly; only giving hand signals. There was a basecamp being set up at the head of the trail and there were three electric dune buggies with Minimi .30 caliber machine guns full of Chinese soldiers being sent down the 25-mile road. The first Chinese dune buggy would scout ahead 100 yards while the second dune buggy crew would disembark their vehicle, take GPS readings, scan the woods with binoculars, heat sensors and infrared scopes. The third vehicle provided security. The Chinese troops were mapping the forestry service roads. Duncan looked at his map and his watch and the team pushed a mile up the trail until Duncan found what he was looking for. The team dug up a 4” round Alder and dropped it across the road. It would be short work for the Chinese crew but the math on their rate of advance would put them at the location close to sunset. Duncan went to work on emplacing his team and made a quick radio call to his field crews. All transmissions were kept to under three seconds. Melanie fished i
nto her pack, crawled out to the road and began working her way into the woods while Duncan worked on a hunter’s trail. The General and Colonel were found appropriate hides to provide over watch. Just around sunset the scout electric buggy stopped at the fallen tree and one of them got out and grabbed a chainsaw while the other three manned the machine gun and swept the forest for signs of ambush. The officer yelled to the chainsaw operator and made a cutting motion across his neck. The other two dune buggies eventually made it to the scene and the three dune buggies made a triangular laager. The Chinese had one stationary guard and one roving guard while the rest started setting up a camp in the center of the vehicles and started heating their MRE food packages. It was a cold winter’s night but fortunately there was no snow on the ground. It got dark fast and Duncan saw that the sentries both had night vision goggles and continuously scanned the surroundings. The roving patrol scout walked down the hunter’s trail to relieve himself when he suddenly yiped! The Chinese troops, who were just bedding down, jumped up and scrambled to get their rifles. The sentry went to investigate and saw the roving scout come hobbling out of the woods with a twisted ankle. Melanie, on the opposite side of the trail, slowly and carefully crawled under one of the buggies with a small branch in her hand. She was only under the buggy for ten seconds before she faded back into the woods. The wounded soldier was attended to and was replaced with another soldier who continued to walk a post around the laager. About two hours later, a couple of skunks came out of the forest. The skunks kept stopping every couple of feet to nibble. Neither of the sentries saw them as the skunks infiltrated the camp. One of the soldiers yiped when the skunk stepped on him and the Chinese camp went back onto high alert with a lot of commotion. The skunks responded as only skunks do in having their meal interrupted. Four sprays later the perturbed skunks headed back into the forest. The Chinese troops had never encountered a skunk before and they quickly donned gas masks and changed clothes to try and hide the scent that assailed their senses. Gas masks remove harmful particulates from the air but they do not remove odors. During the chaos, Duncan had slithered under the scout buggy and had worked on two of the tires. The Chinese troops did not get any sleep that night and decided to return to their base the next morning after trying to decontaminate their bodies. One of the buggies would not start and the mechanic of the group was sent to fix it; the batteries had shorted out. One of the buggies had two flat tires, so the mechanic had to change two tires and the third buggy started and ran but 100 yards down the trail before there was a grinding noise and the front wheel assembly seized up. The mechanic crawled under the buggy and found that a branch had shredded the CV boot joint. The driver was beaten in the head for driving over the branch and ruining the buggy; it seemed corporal punishment still existed in the Chinese military. The patrol loaded into the two remaining buggies and limped back to their basecamp. The generator to charge their buggies at the basecamp had quit and half the basecamp had managed to come down with a poison oak infection. The first Chinese incursion into the Idaho forest had only managed ten miles before turning back.

  The Chinese are anything but passive so their next incursion down the 25-mile road was to reconnoiter with force and they sent a 100-person company down the trail with advance scouts and flank guards 300 feet into the forest. To their credit, they made two whole nights in the forest before three quarters of the company came down with a running explosive case of the trots, eight had rattlesnake bites and twelve of them had a bad case of poison ivy. The cook was summarily executed on the spot and the eight snake bite cases had to be medevacked by helicopter because the medical officer did not have any rattlesnake anti venom in his medical kit. The Chinese never entered the forest again and their maps listed it as impassable.

  The troopers quickly assimilated themselves into the Retreat community and even helped teach the Retreat members some combat and survival skills. Many of the soldiers were from the south and the good old boys had a few tricks of their own. The Retreat rules were simple; the most capable became the teachers, regardless of rank; the top archery instructor was a PFC from Montana and the top horse rider was a Major from Kentucky. It did not matter who you were or where you were from, the most competent taught the others the skill.

  Mitch, the operations Colonel and the General became tight. They war gamed every possibility they could think of and had nightly discussions on tactics, historical battles and enemy armaments and capabilities. Mechanical experts gave lectures on how to disable, destroy, confuse or decoy enemy vehicles and armaments. The Operations staff knew that combat plans only lasted seconds into any engagement and their people would lose their lives if they made bad decisions and any loss of movement by their troops would result in a loss. The Retreat finished their spring planting and their troops took the field. Their best gaming outcome had come from engaging the Boise advance first on the assumption that the redoubts of Northern Idaho were going to give the Coeur D’Alene advance a big bellyache and it would take them time to root the preppers and survivalists from their homes. The operations Colonel assigned to logistics begged permission to go into the field, he was hopelessly outclassed by Melanie who had an encyclopedic knowledge of their needs and could do math in her head twice as fast as the Colonel could do with a computer. The Colonel was left in place as redundancy and acted as Melanie’s secretary. It did not help that the Colonel could not manage a single proficiency level in any Retreat discipline better than Melanie’s except metallurgy; he was an engineer.

  In early April the two-pronged marauder attack was underway. Their intelligence showed that there was a large contingent of Chinese troops and mechanized infantry in the rear of the column. The gangs were sent ahead as potential cannon fodder and to scout the likely defenses that were shown on the satellite images. The gangs charged ahead in force and advanced with heavy fire strafing anything that even looked suspicious. There were a few rifle pot shots taken at them but Ma Deuce quickly silenced the opposing guns. The Retreat scouts remained hidden and sent the order of battle to the Retreat where it was uploaded onto the operations team’s screens. The enemy had sent 30% more manpower and material to the front than was estimated. The population of Boise was warned and told to get out of town or hide in town. Caches of “butter knife” guns and ammo were left with leaders who bravely decided to stay. The population knew they had to stay hidden until the gangs had looted and pillaged the surrounding suburbs until the population could make themselves known. They faced certain death and rape if found by the gangs and only possible death and rape if they surrendered to the Chinese. The Chinese remembered what life was like under Japanese occupation and their primary mission was to win the hearts and minds of the American population. The Chinese needed slaves for their collective farms; they had plausible deniability and could distance themselves from the gangs, who were Americans committing atrocities against their own people but the wanton slaughter of civilians would not be welcome in Beijing. The gangs found few civilians but did manage to recruit the gangs that were operating in Boise to their team. The Chinese set up a command post in Boise and the engineers worked on restoring power and water to the city. The American civilians waited a week until after the gangs had left before they started to surrender to the Chinese where they were put to work in “comfort” stations for the officers and given menial tasks to perform for the military personnel.

  “Only four prongs!” Mitch declared from the command center as Duncan’s intelligence team tracked the direction and makeup of each enemy column. “They are bypassing a bunch of highways and towns!”

  “Give it time, Mitch,” the General chided. “We know none of those towns can support the raiders. They will probably break up and spread out later or split and backtrack and catch the others on the way back.”