Chapter 10

We decided to mount another small expedition against the government troops outside our portals. We just could not believe that an elite unit could have such sloppy security. There had to be something wrong, and we needed to spot what it could be.

Three groups were sent out out again with the same targets. The only change was in the actual personnel. So many people wanted an opportunity to strike at the hated oppressors that we had to rotate the team members or face a symbolic mutiny. The new groups were sent out two nights after the first one. Surely, by this time, the enemy would have had time to bolster its security, and that was the real reason for this probe. We had to know what the enemy was capable of beyond brute force attacks.

The results were amazing! Our little units met no more resistance than they had the first time. Group #1 was able to destroy two more fuel dumps, and Group #2 knocked out what had to be the main ammunition dump. This time, Group #3 did find the C&C tent and reduced it to ashes. The only thing of note was that the response to being attacked was more rapid than the first time, but it was still more of a case of individuals responding to personal danger than it was an organized defense.

Okay, one more excursion, but this time with a different purpose. The next night, four teams went out with the primary purpose of picking up officers for questioning. Oh, they would hit targets of opportunity and certainly fight to defend themselves, but what we really wanted this time was information, and that could only be obtained by questioning prisoners. Unfortunately for them, the prisoners were not going to live very long after questioning—we simply had no place to keep them. Besides, we were going to treat them the same way that they would have treated any of us who were captured.

All four teams returned with prisoners, so we had 11 officers to question. Only two of them were of very high rank, but it turned out that one was on the commander's staff. Strangely to our way of thinking, he was a priest. It took only a small amount of questioning to find out that all of the higher commanders were priests, and they knew virtually nothing of military tactics.

Things like logistics and other technical matters were handled by professional military men who did know what they were about, but all of the tactical command came from the priests. In essence, all that the priests could do was to pick a target and say "Charge!" The men who did the fighting were fanatics who knew little more than which end of the gun the bullet came out of. The fighting men were usually high on a variation of marijuana, and could not make serious combat decisions. They relied completely on their fanaticism and the fact that they normally outnumbered the people they were attacking.

All of this was a complete revelation to us. Had we realized this, we could have eliminated the attackers when they first showed up. We decided to do that very thing three days later. The delay was to make sure that all of our people knew what they were supposed to do and were careful about spraying friendly fire a bit too generously.

Our greatest concern was having one of our groups fighting another of our groups. Therefore, we wanted to attack during the day when everybody could make a visual identification of friend or foe. That also gave us time to copy some maps that were marked with each units field of operation. They were not supposed to leave that area without specific orders or a request for help from the adjacent unit.

On "D-Day," we moved out before daylight so that the enemy would not know exactly where all our exits were located. Everybody had orders to hold in position until 10:00 AM, and to start the attack as soon after that as possible. We even had a plan of retreat just in case the priests called in helicopter gunships. We had some heat-seeking missiles, but we really did not want to use them. They were too damned expensive to waste.

We moved out, and the first people we ran into were regular army grunts. They had been requisitioned by the priests to provide perimeter security against us. The funny thing was, as soon as our people showed up, those perimeter guards switched sides! They seemed to hate the priests more than we did. We picked up over 100 trained troops that way, and the priests knew nothing about it. We also picked up something even more valuable: the complete radio protocol used by our enemy. It was not very complicated because of the uniform lack of training, but we did know what radio frequencies to use when the attack helicopters showed up. We hoped to convert them to fighting for us; the men we had already picked up insisted that a few moments of conversation between them and the air crews would have them switching sides. By damn, it looked like the rebellion was on its way, especially if the rest of the Army followed suit!

It turned out that it was the photographs that Mark took of the slaughter house in Wyoming that was the final straw for the regular soldiers. Virtually everybody had a friend or relative who had gone there to escape the tyranny of the religious fanatics. The result was that many of the men were just looking for a good excuse to rebel, and those photos provided the rational for doing it.

Yes, the priests did scream for help when we opened our offensive against them that day. Combat helicopters were dispatched to cover their asses, but the men who had already defected got on the tactical radio frequencies and explained what was going on. All of a sudden, the helicopter fire was directed the other way. The last of the King David Brigade was wiped out before noon. They simply could not cope with our infantry and the airstrikes from the defecting helicopter crews. You might say that suddenly we had an airstrike capability.

Of course, the situation was unprecedented, and the church put pressure on the Army to dispatch enough troops to wipe us out. All of the combat arm from Fort Jesus Loves Me was sent, complete with their armor and artillery. This turned into an embarrassment of riches for us in the cave when they all wanted to defect instead of attacking. We simply had no place to put that many men, so, after a couple of hours of discussion, the whole bunch turned around and went back to Fort Jesus Loves Me. The difference was that they were now functioning as the Army of the Free United States of America.