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GWOT VI - Grand Theft Automatic
Jan. 22nd, 2020 01:40 pmGWOT VI - Grand Theft Automatic
With their church burning merrily in the background, and the congregation safely locked in their own fenced athletic field, I verified again with my signaler that the transmitter was not merely powered down but physically destroyed.
I was standing on the spot marked X.
The militias were opening the 36-pack family size cans of Whoop-Ass (TM) on the California Republic. And this was the spot they would send the most metal to.
The first battle would be air. I had one helicopter; it was busy. The militias had rough field transport aircraft, formerly private planes, that ranged in cargo capacity between two postage stamps and six tons.
And every single one of them headed here was a lawful military target.
There were two airfields and a convenient stretch of road that they could in theory land on.
We were fixing that.
As I watched, California troops were purposefully correlating the keys we'd taken off the congregation with the vehicles we were seizing for military use.
Without compensation.
A quick mechanical check, which all but two of the vehicles passed, and as necessary a top-up from our fuel truck, and they raced out to the necessary locations in teams of two and three.
You don't have to put your troops in big vulnerable vehicles like buses and trucks. You do need to be sure they won't run away.
If I had any cowards among my deployment crew, traitors to California and to their own humanity - which I doubted - the hypothetical hardy traitor(s) would be faced with an insurmountable obstacle.
Surrounded by a million Christian militia, where the fuck would they go?
###
"Airfield blocked," reported the technician running the camera, needlessly.
They could both see on the screen the farm equipment inconveniently parked at intervals. A single tractor was actually in motion, plowing a line guaranteed to break the nose gear of any small aircraft that attempted the landing.
The first militia aircraft overhead was a command and control aircraft borrowed from the Iowa State Police. As such, it had long range cameras in addition to radar and infrared sensors, Stingrays and DRT-boxes and the panoply of what professionals called ELINT for Electronic Intelligence, and amateurs (once they learned of it) called deeply fucking scary.
It also had oxygen on board and could orbit safely at 30,000 feet, well above the range of the man-portable surface to air missile launchers the California force likely had.
"Check the alternate," the commander ordered.
"Same."
"The road?"
"Clear so far."
It was a calculated risk. But of those are wars won and lost. If the Californians had figured out the alternate use of this desolate stretch of county highway, the first aircraft to land would be helpless.
But it was worth the risk, he thought. Families were dying while he thought about it.
"Commit the first wave."
###
The only distinction between the sergeant and the small force she commanded was the name of the force on her nametape. Everyone else's said "CA REPUBLIC" and hers said "CA ANG". ANG - Air National Guard.
In some other military, she'd be a commissioned officer. She'd been a commissioned officer, and a flight officer. But she was three years into her eight year commitment, and no matter what else happened, she would never ever be a California Republic commissioned officer.
She'd flown for Homeland. And that was very nearly an unforgivable sin. It was certainly enough to also keep her off the controls of any California Republic aircraft, ever.
That didn't mean she couldn't still score kills.
Point to point data links connected the scattered elements of her small force. Their weapons were tiny, their ability to resist any sizeable ground element miniscule.
The electronics were nice. But she reached out with all her senses, trying to get inside the head of the enemy commander.
She knew the burning need to get in there and rescue her people. She'd felt it often enough, on a hot LZ where anti-American partisans and later the Resistance were desperate to kill Homeland aircraft at literally any cost. And no Homeland bird had ever worn a Red Cross.
They'd committed. She felt it.
"Tiger Six, all elements, weapons hold."
###
The small aircraft was slightly larger than a Cessna. It was first because of the rear drop-down hatch. Fully loaded, it could carry eight ordinary people, two stretcher cases or six combat troops.
Today it carried four combat troops and two small motorcycles.
Someone had to go first. They were first.
The sweat poured off the pilot's face. Not because the landing was anything but routine. Slight crosswind, no significant hazards.
Except the possibility of the enemy.
###
The two-man teams got on their motorcycles and raced in opposite directions, checking the roadway for hazards.
Tiger Six heard them check in. Again, great to have the electronics.
Now a heavier aircraft started to come in for a landing.
Thirty men or two vehicles and ten men.
###
There is a moment in the landing of any fixed wing aircraft where the pilot must either apply thrusters and take off again, or apply air and tire brakes and land.
Tiger Six longed to see that moment. And she had a little switch under her hand, a simple red light / yellow light / green light three position switch for communicating with the position she'd selected.
Flick.
###
The pilot had just switched the flaps to DOWN when the streaks of smoke crossed his vision. MISSILES.
Making it worse, repeated heavy flashes strobed across the cockpit from multiple point sources. GUNFIRE.
He couldn't help pulling up on the yoke and firewalling the throttles. Landing abort.
Too many inputs into a complex system. If he'd had time to flick the flaps back UP, there still would have hydraulic lag and the friction of the tires to deal with.
The tail of the cargo aircraft slammed into the road as the nose lifted briefly, then broke off and fishtailed into the trees on the side of the road.
Cars don't explode when they crash.
Aircraft often do.
###
"Shit!" exclaimed the technician. He checked the threat boards. No radar, no active measures, but he could see the smoke of the missile tracks with his wide area camera, and the fireball whose pieces skittered down the road in a rude parody of landing. They had been fired almost horizontally across the front of the now-crashed aircraft.
Everything about the State Police aircraft was oriented towards watching the ground, in a peacetime environment of total air superiority.
So neither the technician nor the commander had any warning before their aircraft, loitering in circles for just too long, broke apart in mid air.
They didn't even get a chance to get a radio message off. Only the fact that the aircraft's transponder had stopped transmitting, because it was in pieces and also no longer attached to a power source, betrayed their destruction.
No one would ever know if they had been killed by trauma or hypoxia.
Certainly the condition of their remains would not lend itself to autopsy.
###
Sharp cracks from the treeline made quick work of the motorcyclists.
The pilot took two steps towards his aircraft and only his body lurched against the door frame.
His head was splattered all over the grass.
There had been no ready way to predict which direction the aircraft would land from.
So she'd deployed enough snipers to cover all the options.
###
Tiger Six spoke slowly into her microphone.
"Attention all aircraft. Extreme danger. Attention all aircraft. Extreme danger. This is a combat Temporary Flight Restriction for Midland, Iowa. This airspace is under the control of the California Republic for lifesaving peacekeeping operations. Unidentified and unauthorized aircraft are ordered and directed to maintain a distance of 30 nautical miles from Midland, Iowa on pain of immediate destruction. If you are hearing this message you are in immediate danger and must alter your bearing at once to avoid destruction without further warning. All permission to enter this airspace is denied until further notice to all traffic."
She set the recording to REPEAT. The frequency selector had already been configured for half a hundred frequencies, including the distress channels.
No doubt the beacon on a nearby hilltop would eventually attract an enemy RF team or if they felt spendy, a homing anti-radiation missile.
Then, once it was switched off, another beacon would note the fact and activate.
Beacons were cheap. Some were on hilltops, others attached to trees or even power towers. A nice game of whack a mole once enemy ground forces had invested the area.
In the meantime, with three aircraft destroyed, no pilot worth her license would go anywhere near the area until air defenses had been thoroughly suppressed.
And you couldn't suppress what wasn't there.
Smoke and mirrors.
Smoke rockets and large hand-held mirrors, deployed by California Republic troops with cursory anti-air training.
###
A cursory search for intelligence value. Bodies dragged into the bushes. A grenade donated to the landed aircraft, which burned merrily.
The troops left for their next objective.
They had many.
###
California Air National Guard
Mammoth Lakes Operations Center
The conversation was curiously brief and antiseptic.
"Track Victor 5 destroyed."
The timing had been the thing.
Making it look as though the landing aircraft and the orbiting aircraft had been destroyed within moments of each other by the same land based weapons system.
The militia orbiting spotter aircraft had been destroyed by a long range air-to-air missile launched from a California stealth aircraft.
As the aircraft was over American airspace, and the Americans were touchy about that sort of thing … and didn't know that California even had stealth aircraft …
The California stealth aircraft remained on her station, sixty thousand feet above the wind swept plains of Iowa, where she had loitered for weeks against this moment.
The official story, even for the troops on the ground, was that the California Republic had satellite reconnaissance of Iowa. And they did.
But they had something even better.
Her only protection was her sheer implausibility, and that only three people in Iowa even knew she was there.
Neither fixed wing, nor rotary wing.
Dynamic lift stealth blimp.
Hundreds of cameras. A crew of five, one pilot, two communications operators, two battle analysts.
RCS Panoptes.
And with her over the battlefield, the enemy might as well be deaf, dumb and blind.
"Copy," Mammoth Lakes said laconically.
With their church burning merrily in the background, and the congregation safely locked in their own fenced athletic field, I verified again with my signaler that the transmitter was not merely powered down but physically destroyed.
I was standing on the spot marked X.
The militias were opening the 36-pack family size cans of Whoop-Ass (TM) on the California Republic. And this was the spot they would send the most metal to.
The first battle would be air. I had one helicopter; it was busy. The militias had rough field transport aircraft, formerly private planes, that ranged in cargo capacity between two postage stamps and six tons.
And every single one of them headed here was a lawful military target.
There were two airfields and a convenient stretch of road that they could in theory land on.
We were fixing that.
As I watched, California troops were purposefully correlating the keys we'd taken off the congregation with the vehicles we were seizing for military use.
Without compensation.
A quick mechanical check, which all but two of the vehicles passed, and as necessary a top-up from our fuel truck, and they raced out to the necessary locations in teams of two and three.
You don't have to put your troops in big vulnerable vehicles like buses and trucks. You do need to be sure they won't run away.
If I had any cowards among my deployment crew, traitors to California and to their own humanity - which I doubted - the hypothetical hardy traitor(s) would be faced with an insurmountable obstacle.
Surrounded by a million Christian militia, where the fuck would they go?
###
"Airfield blocked," reported the technician running the camera, needlessly.
They could both see on the screen the farm equipment inconveniently parked at intervals. A single tractor was actually in motion, plowing a line guaranteed to break the nose gear of any small aircraft that attempted the landing.
The first militia aircraft overhead was a command and control aircraft borrowed from the Iowa State Police. As such, it had long range cameras in addition to radar and infrared sensors, Stingrays and DRT-boxes and the panoply of what professionals called ELINT for Electronic Intelligence, and amateurs (once they learned of it) called deeply fucking scary.
It also had oxygen on board and could orbit safely at 30,000 feet, well above the range of the man-portable surface to air missile launchers the California force likely had.
"Check the alternate," the commander ordered.
"Same."
"The road?"
"Clear so far."
It was a calculated risk. But of those are wars won and lost. If the Californians had figured out the alternate use of this desolate stretch of county highway, the first aircraft to land would be helpless.
But it was worth the risk, he thought. Families were dying while he thought about it.
"Commit the first wave."
###
The only distinction between the sergeant and the small force she commanded was the name of the force on her nametape. Everyone else's said "CA REPUBLIC" and hers said "CA ANG". ANG - Air National Guard.
In some other military, she'd be a commissioned officer. She'd been a commissioned officer, and a flight officer. But she was three years into her eight year commitment, and no matter what else happened, she would never ever be a California Republic commissioned officer.
She'd flown for Homeland. And that was very nearly an unforgivable sin. It was certainly enough to also keep her off the controls of any California Republic aircraft, ever.
That didn't mean she couldn't still score kills.
Point to point data links connected the scattered elements of her small force. Their weapons were tiny, their ability to resist any sizeable ground element miniscule.
The electronics were nice. But she reached out with all her senses, trying to get inside the head of the enemy commander.
She knew the burning need to get in there and rescue her people. She'd felt it often enough, on a hot LZ where anti-American partisans and later the Resistance were desperate to kill Homeland aircraft at literally any cost. And no Homeland bird had ever worn a Red Cross.
They'd committed. She felt it.
"Tiger Six, all elements, weapons hold."
###
The small aircraft was slightly larger than a Cessna. It was first because of the rear drop-down hatch. Fully loaded, it could carry eight ordinary people, two stretcher cases or six combat troops.
Today it carried four combat troops and two small motorcycles.
Someone had to go first. They were first.
The sweat poured off the pilot's face. Not because the landing was anything but routine. Slight crosswind, no significant hazards.
Except the possibility of the enemy.
###
The two-man teams got on their motorcycles and raced in opposite directions, checking the roadway for hazards.
Tiger Six heard them check in. Again, great to have the electronics.
Now a heavier aircraft started to come in for a landing.
Thirty men or two vehicles and ten men.
###
There is a moment in the landing of any fixed wing aircraft where the pilot must either apply thrusters and take off again, or apply air and tire brakes and land.
Tiger Six longed to see that moment. And she had a little switch under her hand, a simple red light / yellow light / green light three position switch for communicating with the position she'd selected.
Flick.
###
The pilot had just switched the flaps to DOWN when the streaks of smoke crossed his vision. MISSILES.
Making it worse, repeated heavy flashes strobed across the cockpit from multiple point sources. GUNFIRE.
He couldn't help pulling up on the yoke and firewalling the throttles. Landing abort.
Too many inputs into a complex system. If he'd had time to flick the flaps back UP, there still would have hydraulic lag and the friction of the tires to deal with.
The tail of the cargo aircraft slammed into the road as the nose lifted briefly, then broke off and fishtailed into the trees on the side of the road.
Cars don't explode when they crash.
Aircraft often do.
###
"Shit!" exclaimed the technician. He checked the threat boards. No radar, no active measures, but he could see the smoke of the missile tracks with his wide area camera, and the fireball whose pieces skittered down the road in a rude parody of landing. They had been fired almost horizontally across the front of the now-crashed aircraft.
Everything about the State Police aircraft was oriented towards watching the ground, in a peacetime environment of total air superiority.
So neither the technician nor the commander had any warning before their aircraft, loitering in circles for just too long, broke apart in mid air.
They didn't even get a chance to get a radio message off. Only the fact that the aircraft's transponder had stopped transmitting, because it was in pieces and also no longer attached to a power source, betrayed their destruction.
No one would ever know if they had been killed by trauma or hypoxia.
Certainly the condition of their remains would not lend itself to autopsy.
###
Sharp cracks from the treeline made quick work of the motorcyclists.
The pilot took two steps towards his aircraft and only his body lurched against the door frame.
His head was splattered all over the grass.
There had been no ready way to predict which direction the aircraft would land from.
So she'd deployed enough snipers to cover all the options.
###
Tiger Six spoke slowly into her microphone.
"Attention all aircraft. Extreme danger. Attention all aircraft. Extreme danger. This is a combat Temporary Flight Restriction for Midland, Iowa. This airspace is under the control of the California Republic for lifesaving peacekeeping operations. Unidentified and unauthorized aircraft are ordered and directed to maintain a distance of 30 nautical miles from Midland, Iowa on pain of immediate destruction. If you are hearing this message you are in immediate danger and must alter your bearing at once to avoid destruction without further warning. All permission to enter this airspace is denied until further notice to all traffic."
She set the recording to REPEAT. The frequency selector had already been configured for half a hundred frequencies, including the distress channels.
No doubt the beacon on a nearby hilltop would eventually attract an enemy RF team or if they felt spendy, a homing anti-radiation missile.
Then, once it was switched off, another beacon would note the fact and activate.
Beacons were cheap. Some were on hilltops, others attached to trees or even power towers. A nice game of whack a mole once enemy ground forces had invested the area.
In the meantime, with three aircraft destroyed, no pilot worth her license would go anywhere near the area until air defenses had been thoroughly suppressed.
And you couldn't suppress what wasn't there.
Smoke and mirrors.
Smoke rockets and large hand-held mirrors, deployed by California Republic troops with cursory anti-air training.
###
A cursory search for intelligence value. Bodies dragged into the bushes. A grenade donated to the landed aircraft, which burned merrily.
The troops left for their next objective.
They had many.
###
California Air National Guard
Mammoth Lakes Operations Center
The conversation was curiously brief and antiseptic.
"Track Victor 5 destroyed."
The timing had been the thing.
Making it look as though the landing aircraft and the orbiting aircraft had been destroyed within moments of each other by the same land based weapons system.
The militia orbiting spotter aircraft had been destroyed by a long range air-to-air missile launched from a California stealth aircraft.
As the aircraft was over American airspace, and the Americans were touchy about that sort of thing … and didn't know that California even had stealth aircraft …
The California stealth aircraft remained on her station, sixty thousand feet above the wind swept plains of Iowa, where she had loitered for weeks against this moment.
The official story, even for the troops on the ground, was that the California Republic had satellite reconnaissance of Iowa. And they did.
But they had something even better.
Her only protection was her sheer implausibility, and that only three people in Iowa even knew she was there.
Neither fixed wing, nor rotary wing.
Dynamic lift stealth blimp.
Hundreds of cameras. A crew of five, one pilot, two communications operators, two battle analysts.
RCS Panoptes.
And with her over the battlefield, the enemy might as well be deaf, dumb and blind.
"Copy," Mammoth Lakes said laconically.
