The Retreat Page 12

  “Mel!” Mitch yelled. “I need you.”

  Melanie came into the room and patted Mitch on the head. “Settle down, honey. I know this is your first war and I know you’ll do amazing but the guy on the other side of this isn’t anywhere near as smart as you are. Now how can I help?”

  “The makeup of each prong is on the back wall; what is the most efficient way for the Chinese to supply them based on their trajectory?” Mitch asked.

  Melanie looked at the back wall monitors, put her chin towards her ample chest and started mumbling to herself. “The fuel they have with them now can get each prong out 122 miles before they run out of gas so they will stop at 61 miles and the fuel trucks can refill them and have to return to base if they convoyed all their fuel trucks; the more efficient way is to keep a perpetual loop of fuel trucks one at a time to keep their columns moving by filling up the top portion of their tanks instead of running them to empty. Anything else, dear?”

  Sure enough, after the first suburb had been reached on the highway, one gas truck and one diesel truck returned to Boise escorted by two Stryker armored personnel carriers.

  “You are brilliant, honey!” Mitch exclaimed. “They are slaves to ROI!”

  “I know, honey. Now don’t stay up too late; it’s an elephant and you don’t have a big enough gun.” Melanie left but not before flashing the Colonel and General one of her million-watt smiles.

  Mitch spoke into his microphone and two circles showed up on his map and the likely fuel truck future dispositions and routes flashed on the monitor. Mitch’s Olympus trading team was working all the computers under Devin’s guidance in the operations office downstairs; no matter how hard he tried Devin was a terrible shot and could not get operational and Angus did not take bribes no matter the size.

  “Um, Mitch,” the General asked, “why is this important?” Meanwhile the Colonel just laughed.

  “Fuel, General,” the Colonel said. “Mitch gets me every time on the fuel. The way they are running their logistics makes them more vulnerable; it is the most efficient way to resupply in perpetual motion but it puts their largest vulnerability in one place farthest from their base. What do you think, Mitch?”

  “Horseshoe Bend,” Mitch declared. “They will secure it and use it for their first fuel depot then split the northwest prong to take Banks and Emmit. The northeast prong will stage out of Idaho City and keep heading north to Placerville. The southern two prongs will skirt both sides of the Snake River Forest and reconnect at Hammett. They will use Hammett as a base then run down to Twin Falls.”

  “And you know this how?” the General asked.

  “They are slaves to ROI. They are running around Idaho trying to pick a fight in the most efficient way possible. They want a decisive engagement and want to move on as quickly as possible. Their Achilles heel is their fuel because they are 100% mechanized and they are leaving the bulk of their fuel resources in the field at night and we own the night. They probably won’t make the same mistake twice once they scare up some more fuel trucks but the north prongs are screwed. They would have got farther north and cost us more men if they had convoyed their fuel trucks but it would have taken them…” Mitch looked up in the sky for a few moments and bobbed his head, “14.23 more days to accomplish their objective.”

  “So we go tomorrow?” the General asked.

  “Heavens no, General,” Mitch said with a smile. “This is what we expect the enemy to do, not what he is doing. You have to show him what he expects to see, all of his backup elements are on standby and high alert right now awaiting an engagement. We’ll toss a little Sun Tzu at him and hit him three days from now. I want our people on the ground to completely scout out their deployment and security apparatus. Duncan and Angus live for this shit, those two rogues will probably find a way to destroy their fuel trucks without them even thinking it was us and a few of their soldiers will get offed by their own side as a result. Failure is not an option to them and, no offense intended, General, leaders don’t give logistical officers their due; they are not married to one that looks like Mel. They are always fascinated by the people with the guns and their strategic objectives.”

  The next night the enemy deployed almost exactly as Mitch described and 24 hours later Duncan had a computer simulated sketch of how their fuel trucks were parked as well as the security patrols and refueling protocols. Angus immediately saw the hole in their plan and mumbled something to Duncan.

  “Something to add, Command Sergeant Major?” the General asked while watching the exchange.

  “No offense, sir, but you’ve never moved an ounce of gas for the Army in your career so you would not know the SOP and more importantly the why behind the SOP,” Angus said with a snarl.

  The Colonel laughed, “Please enlighten the chair warming brigade, Angus.”

  “There is a standing order in the US Army, sirs. You NEVER fill a fuel truck with another fuel truck, you only fill a fuel truck at a depot because the depot is grounded to avoid static electricity. These jagwhistles are even too lazy to crack the top of the tanker to fill it, they are back-feeding it through the hoses under pressure. Every PFC in the US Army knows how to treat fuel, sirs, especially jerry cans but I guess they don’t teach that at OCS. We don’t have to do shit and they’ll blow a bunch up all by themselves. This might be Chinese SOP but their fuel trucks were probably not built by the lowest bidders like ours and their engineers might have solved the static problem,” Angus said plainly.

  Duncan spoke into his microphone and the chemist came into the room.

  “Doctor,” Duncan said, “how big a fireball could you expect from a full 2,000 gallon fuel truck and say another with…Mel!....say 1,000 gallons of fuel on board?”

  Melanie came into the room and said, “Boys, I am not your human calculator and the next one of you that pages me like a secretary will not walk out of here with their balls.”

  “Sorry, Mel,” Duncan said. “How much fuel will each of these tankers have on them at 2AM tomorrow when we estimate they will be refueled?”

  Mel did her mumble thing and said, “1,193 gallons, Duncan. Anything else?”

  “Hang on a sec, Mel, the doctor is getting a little lost in his math,” Duncan laughed.

  Angus piped up, “The US Army SOP is that no two fuel trucks may be parked within 300 yards of another one unless empty; these dumb shits only have theirs 100 yards from each other.”

  “Well, aren’t you just a fountain of US Army lore, Angus,” Duncan said. “You have now used your decade’s quota of words to US Army officers in one seating. So, the question, doctor, to the eggheads is how do we increase the static electricity in the trucks without shuffling our feet or rubbing it with a balloon using the contents of a standard load out pack?”

  “No further eggheads needed, sir, you just need to…” the doctor began.

  Angus snapped his fingers like a shotgun, pointed at the doctor and left the room. Angus wasn’t dealing with theories, he wanted to see it work. Twenty minutes later instructions were sent to the field and a daisy chain of batteries was made and a piece of chewing gum held an exposed wire to one of the trucks. A small fire in the main street café kitchen put the Chinese fuel depot crew on high alert. Fire was very serious at a fuel depot. The Retreat infiltrator hooked the device to one of the fuel trucks. At 2AM, the resupply truck arrived and the technician removed two of the nozzles and as soon as he touched the two couplings from different trucks the small charge went to ground through the technician and the residual fuel in the line caught fire. The resulting fireball took out all the fuel trucks at the depot. The first shot of the war was a spark that blew up 13 fuel trucks. The Chinese army dispatched a special forces team and the area was scoured by helicopters, drones and a fast response team. The Retreat squads were already ten miles away and repositioning to the north before the Chinese arrived. The Chinese engineers reviewed the refueling operation at Hammet and placed extra security on it. A refueling technician at Hammet showed the
engineers how the trucks were refueled from the resupply trucks. The technician showed the engineers how he had to wear rubber gloves and stand on an antistatic rubber pad to avoid getting shocked when coupling the two hoses together. New fuel trucks were sent to Horseshoe Bend, the refueling SOP was changed and the trucks were parked farther apart. Six of the new fuel trucks were dispatched to Placerville and Emmet to support the gang’s next jump. Only half the gang moved on while the other half stayed to protect the fuel and get resupplied with food and water. Mitch and the Colonel moved their squads accordingly. They decided they did not want to show their strategy and the next night they attacked the lead elements outside of Emmet and the fuel and security forces and fuel trucks in Placerville. The teams came in under the cover of darkness and eliminated the Emmet force, only firing four suppressed rounds to the crew on the Ma Deuces, the rest of the gang got knives. The Placerville attack squadrons took a different approach; one squad infiltrated the Chinese radio station and silenced the radios while two squads in the woods opened fire on the sentries, concentrating their shots on the fuel truck security squad. The twenty-man squad leapfrogged in retreat while the gang forces and Strykers poured fire into the woods hoping they would hit someone. When no return fire was forthcoming, the gang worked cautiously into the woods to look for the bodies of the sniper team; they didn’t find any. During the confusion, another two squads snuck over to the fuel trucks and poured a 25-pound bag of sugar in two of them through the top hatch and inserted two blocks of C4 into the remaining two trucks set with a pressure switch and timer. Boise was at a much lower elevation than Placerville and the timer was set to go off one hour after reaching that elevation. Two days later the entire Boise fuel dump blew up.

  The command team was enjoying a dinner together in celebration of the Boise fuel depot destruction.

  “Why are we celebrating?” the General asked. “We have only taken out 10% of their force and disabled 20% of their vehicles.”

  Melanie smiled. “They are toast, General, they just don’t know it. The fuel depot was checkmate for their advance, they are all dead unless they leave Idaho, they just don’t know it yet and we get the best possible less than 9.2% casualty rate, General. Cheers to Duncan, Mitch and Angus.”

  “We could not have done it without you, honey. Now we just need the Coeur D’Alene Chinese General to follow his most predictable path,” Mitch said.

  “You two make absolutely no sense,” the General said. “The Chinese still have 12,000 men in Idaho and we still only have 2,000. The Chinese will refuel in a couple of days and we are back at it.”

  “Ok, General, I’ll play,” Melanie said. “You get to be God for a minute; how would you refuel Boise?”

  “I would be sending a column of super tanker trucks along I-84 right now, along with refueling trucks out of Fort Lewis escorted by helicopters and escorted by a Stryker company,” the General said.

  “Yes you would, General. Would it surprise you if I told you that there are currently..” Melanie spoke into her microphone, “…forty-eight fuel trucks on fire on I-84 right now and another fifty-two on I-90 including tankers and refuelers.”

  “I wasn’t briefed on this,” the General complained. “How are we doing this?”

  “Remember the .50 caliber sniper rifles we requisitioned from the Guard, General?” Duncan asked. “Devin was kind enough to offer a bounty of 100 gold coins for every tanker shot on the interstate.”

  “Hang on a second, Duncan,” the General insisted, “I still get to play God. If the land lanes were closed for fuel then I’d fly Globemasters full of fuel trucks and bowsers and KC 35 fuel tankers out of McChord and refuel by air.”

  Duncan laughed. “I like your style, General. We let our master logistician play God for three whole days and she is much better looking than you are, by the way. There is only one airport in Boise that has enough runway to handle large transports and its runway has been seeded with caltrops and we have back up explosives already in the runway that we placed there thirty days ago. The airport squad is really tired of just sitting there waiting to hit the button.”

  “So, what are the Chinese in Boise going to do?” the General asked.

  “We will know in twenty-four hours, General,” Mitch replied.

  “What is so magic about twenty-four hours?” the General asked.

  “Honey?” Mitch asked.

  “General,” Melanie smiled warmly at him, “the Boise advance currently has 2.4 full days of operations left based on their current fuel consumption and what they have on hand. It will take them one day of fuel to bug out to Coeur D’Alene. I am assuming, and I hate to do that, that transport planes are being loaded as we speak with fuel and fuel trucks bound for Boise that will be here tomorrow, reducing their reserves to 1.8 days. When the transports go up in smoke then the Boise General will either stop operations, hold tight and wait for more fuel or marshal his forces and bug out. The trouble is that his southern prongs have to return all the way to Boise to link up taking him down to one day of fuel. The probability is 92% that he burns the extra day waiting for orders, then bugs out without the marauders who will have to walk to wherever they now need to go or the Chinese could come get them in helicopters and move them by air to Coeur D’Alene. We do not know if the Chinese command and control forces with the marauders will bug out or be thrown to the wolves; no radios means no choppers. We did not engage the other prongs because they were doing what we wanted them to do after the depot blew up and that was burn fuel. The mistake that my counterpart is making is called tunnel vision and they have no redundancy or plan B-Z already in motion. They probably won’t make the same mistake twice but they did not preposition enough fuel or bring enough fuel trucks with them. He will probably be shot in the next forty-eight hours. The Boise advance went up in smoke when the fuel depot went up and my husband correctly said checkmate.”

  “OK,” the General sighed, “I’ll concede Boise. What about Coeur D’Alene?”

  “May I?” asked the Colonel.

  Mitch nodded and swung his arm down and said, “After you, sir.”

  “General,” the Colonel began, “the Chinese commanders have made a critical mistake; they have not recognized the critical nature of Lewiston and it is one that the new logistics officer will probably not overlook. Lewiston can be supplied by boat, barges can get all the way from Portland up the Columbia River to Lewiston if you control the locks, which they actually do. One of their southern prongs is still a couple of days away. There are only a couple of highways that link I-90 and I-84 and the one that links Coeur D’Alene and Boise runs through Lewiston. The Chinese seem overly focused on the shorter distance between the two Interstates that runs through Southern Montana. Duncan and Angus think they can spoof the Chinese into thinking we are marshalling our troops to place a blocking force outside of Lewiston in an appropriately named area called Hells Canyon and get the Chinese to commit to an engagement.”

  The General turned to Angus and asked how he was going to do that.

  Angus answered with a “Humpf.”

  The Boise Airport blew up the next day after three planes already skidded off the runway with blown tires and two days later the Chinese force moved out of Boise without the marauders in tow. The force only got as far as Lewiston before they ran out of fuel and had to be rescued by the Coeur D’Alene Force; the next night, the Retreat squads moved in to erase the Boise, now unmechanized marauder force. Twenty squads moved into Riggins, Idaho just outside of Hells Canyon and started digging in, preparing foxholes and once the emplacements were done, they settled in and waited for reinforcements. On the next evening the marauder advance force was wiped out in Grangeville in a loud engagement and the Retreat squads faded into the forest. Once the replacements for the foxhole team arrived by trucks of all things, trees were dropped across the road and the ambush was set. The relief column sent to Grangeville was harassed by intermittent sniper fire in the evening after that and the marauders lobbed mortars and ar
tillery into the forest. There were no airstrikes; Angus was right, the Chinese air force doesn’t fly at night. That evening the Chinese satellites spotted the ambush that was manned by 2,000 soldiers. The marauders waited for reinforcements and the spotters called in even more artillery on the ambush position. The following morning air strikes were called in on the ambush location. All the marauder prongs were recalled to attack the position and the surrounding area looking for a knockout blow. Intermittent sniper fire harried the marauder position who answered with mortars. The Boise Chinese command force was sent from Lewiston where they had remained. The Chinese General in Coeur D’Alene had committed everything but his base command force to wipe out the Idaho National Guard. The marauders finally cut through the barricade and found 2,000 bodies of the Boise marauder force, who had been tied up and placed in foxholes beside and behind the barricade; none were left alive. The entire two-lane road with a small shoulder was packed with vehicles between Riggins and Grangeville and the Strykers, fuel trucks and marauder force had to try and turn around to head back to Coeur D’Alene. Mitch had his Teutoburg Forest scenario and the Retreat forces executed it to perfection. The marauders and the Boise Chinese command force was decimated by a force less than a quarter of its size.

  All the squads returned to the Retreat and after all had returned a large feast was enjoyed by all. Duncan even broke out 40 cases of scotch for the members of the Retreat to enjoy; it was his bounty that had never been collected. The marauders had been halted and wiped out but the Commanders knew that the Chinese were massing and no enemy ever made the same mistake twice.

  Chapter 11

  The Retreat returned to its usual cycle of activity through the summer that year and the field patrols were constantly vigilant for any incursion into the forest. The General and the troops left the Retreat with reluctance and all were sworn to secrecy about its existence with the promise that at the conclusion of the conflict they would be welcomed back to the Retreat. Diarrhea of the mouth would result in having that privilege revoked. Everyone knew the conflict was not over and none of the Guardsmen wanted to endanger their future homes and potential place of safety, sanctuary and relief for both them and their families. The Guardsmen now knew how to live off the land and while their maps were returned, many knew the location of a few of the hidden forest caches that could be used in an emergency. The Guardsmen also knew they had been equipped and trained on how to live off the land in the forest; food security was not a prevalent feature in the post-bankruptcy world. The General kept the five-man fire teams operational and took a page out of the Retreat’s playbook and scattered them throughout Idaho to provide intelligence and security to the population from banditry, ensuring no large gangs could form and providing much needed survival skills to the population as well as providing whatever medical skills they could provide, often utilizing homegrown or herbal remedies they had learned from the Retreat’s apothecary and naturalists. The people of Idaho were surviving but far from thriving. Montana and Wyoming provided some livestock in exchange for gold coins that some of the soldiers seemed to have on their possession. Idaho had stemmed the tide of the advance that was heading to Montana and Wyoming and the farmers and ranchers were both grateful and generous in their terms. Montana and Wyoming were not overly affected by the loss of power and could trade for fuel with the people of Canada and North Dakota to keep the large farming communities’ mechanized farming equipment working. The Chinese did not interfere with these transactions because they wanted the oil infrastructure to remain intact and the farming to continue so they could own it later.