EndWar

The RCMP had gone through the town of High Level ordering everyone to evacuate to Highway 35, and Sergeant Nathan Vatz was getting reports from his team that the citizens were indeed complying. One of his commo guys did say that he spotted quite a few men driving their families off; if Vatz were married with children, he wondered whether he’d do the same.

At the police station, members of the local chamber of commerce, along with the local fire chief and mayor, were engaged in a huge debate over whether they should defend themselves or simply surrender to the Russians in order to preserve the town and save lives.

Captain Mike Godfrey and Warrant Officer Samson had walked out of that meeting, telling the townsfolk that they welcomed help but had no intentions of surrendering. A lot of the local men had told the mayor to kiss off. They were fighting to protect their town. Period. And their numbers were growing.

Meanwhile, Vatz worked with about twenty guys to set up the main roadblock north of town. Fortunately, demolition derbies were a big pastime in High Level, and with the drivers’ help, they were able to create a nice little wall of vehicles, even adding a couple of tractor trailers from the local lumber mill. This wall would channel oncoming mechanized forces to the left or right, into the embankments—

Where Vatz and his men had set up a little high-tech surprise that, when they were finished, left all of them wearing evil grins.

The roadblocks on 58 to the east and west were hardly as reinforced, containing just four cars each but manned by another twenty riflemen that Vatz had organized into two teams. Nice thing was, quite a few of those guys were hunters who owned high-powered rifles with scopes — one of the benefits of working with a more rural community.

The final roadblock on the south side of the town was not yet in place, since there was still a steady flow of evacuees. But they had another 18-wheeler whose driver claimed he could flip the thing onto its side so that the entire trailer would lie across the road. He seemed eager to try that. At least thirty more guys would help hold that exit.

Finally, half of Vatz’s team had staked out the local airport, six miles southeast, with its single five-thousand-foot runway and small air terminal building. It seemed highly likely that at least some of the air recon forces would land there, the crews refueling while the troops dismounted. Vatz’s boys had negotiated a little something special for that party.

Vatz figured that a few more helos would land in the downtown area, near the RCMP station, town hall, fire station, and the local hotel and motels. So that’s where he and his half of the team were now positioned, strung out along the rooftops in sniper positions. Vatz had found himself a nice perch above the town hall, near a large stone balustrade. He was in one corner of the rooftop, while Captain Godfrey was in the other.

In some respects, this was a classic foreign internal defense (FID) mission, often an exclusive task of Special Forces operators. The training of the resistance in occupied France during World War II was one of the more famous FID missions that Vatz had studied. However, most teams had a lot more time to train and organize the citizens. Still, Vatz was proud of the work they’d accomplished in such a short time.

Though dressed like locals, Vatz’s team wore their camera-equipped Artisent ballistic assault helmets with laser target designator; the headgear subsystems’ 180-degree emissive visors provided them with maps, routes, and other networked data in the cross com monocle below their left eyes. High bandwidth wireless communications, along with a microelectronic/optics sensor suite, provided 360-degree situational awareness and small arms protection.

At the moment, Vatz worked the system’s handheld controller, not unlike the ones used for video games. He studied a radar image being piped in to both ODA teams. Twelve glowing blips were superimposed over a local map. The blips morphed into the glowing silhouettes of inbound Ka-29s with an ETA of about twenty-two minutes.

After muttering a faint, “Whoa,” he pulled up the camera images from every man on his team, silently making sure that each operator was in place.

ODA 888, call sign Berserker, and ODA 887, call sign Zodiac, lay in wait.

Many ODA team members liked to pick radio call signs based upon the first letter of the team’s name, with the detachment commander always being the team’s name followed by the number six, for command. Vatz’s old team used “Victor,” and he’d picked Vortex, which in his humble opinion sounded cool.

But when he’d been reassigned to Berserker, a “B” name had eluded him. The depression hadn’t helped. It was Marc Rakken who had suggested “Bali,” short for balisong, referencing the knives they both collected and reminding Vatz once more of the Venturi in his pocket.

Thus Nathan Vatz, call sign “Bali,” was reborn.