Chapter 10

We were headed toward Atlanta, but we were almost dead certain that any fighting would be done outside of the city, itself. The boss of Atlanta was very unlikely to let his puppet general cause a lot of damage to the city that would cause the boss any inconvenience, including loss of income. Meanwhile, I tried to stay out of the way as Hank and Jimmy plotted the best way to defeat the enemy with a minimum loss of life.

Helicopter scouts reported that it looked like we were going to run into the major line of resistance at the town of Marjory's Bridge. There was a narrow cut through a ridge that was used by the Interstate Highway, so they had probably intended to ambush us there. Well, baring something unexpected, that was going to work in our favor, since that concentrated their troops for our helicopter gunships to hit. The gunships had unguided rockets, guided missiles, and napalm bombs, so we would be making it rather warm for the enemy.

As far as we knew, the enemy had no air arm to use against us, but we had Sidewinder missiles if they did. Other than that, we only had to worry about machine gun antiaircraft fire, and our helicopters had the latest package in armor against that. Only a very lucky hit on a rotor blade was likely to do any significant damage.

I don't know if it was true, but the rumor was running rampant among our troops that the only people facing us were the hard-core Waffen SS types that had sworn personal allegiance to the boss and to the general. There was no love lost there, and our men would delight in taking some shots at those bastards who had made life difficult for even the regular joes in the Army.

We probably out gunned the enemy, and we certainly outnumbered them, so we were pretty sure of winning the coming battle. We just didn't want a lot of unnecessary casualties. Our people were really fired up, so my main worry was that they would let their emotions carry them into bad situations. Dammit, I hated to have somebody shooting at my friends!

The leading column of our troops was led by four Main Battle Tanks (MBTs) with a screen of Strykers to either side. The first shot was fired by the enemy at the lead MBT when it was about half way through the rather long cut. This was an RPG that was caught on the slat armor and did no damage to the tank. However, it did give away the location of the man firing the RPG, so he received a thank you note for his gift in the form of a 40 mm grenade burst from a Stryker. These were from some new air-burst rounds, so anybody around there was now reduced to hamburger.

This was the signal for the enemy to dump samples of pretty much everything he had on our MBTs and Strykers. The result was a lot of noise and smoke, but little in the way of damage, bearing out our assumptions about his remaining armament. Just as I was thinking this, a Stryker went up in a ball of fire and smoke. Shit, I should keep my thoughts in neutral, just in case I was jinxing our people! Four grunts bailed out of the rear door, but they were riddled by shrapnel from enemy air bursts.

That must have been a remotely controlled mine, since none of their cannon or rockets were making that kind of impression. Hank ordered the advance to halt while the helicopters put down a lot of hurt on the enemy. Three waves of helicopters went in before Hank figured that it was reasonably safe to resume the advance. It looked like he was right. A lot of bullets and rockets flew in our direction, but no more big explosions. The enemy had invested a lot of resources, both men and matériel, in the defense of that cut, but it didn't do them much good. All it really did was slow our advance for one day, since we spent the rest of the day reorganizing in the town of Majory's Bridge. Well, that did give the bosses an day extra to escape from Atlanta before we got there.

Ft. McPherson was the intelligence and administrative hub of the 3^rd Army District which encompassed the majority of the old southeastern USA. As such, Hank hoped to gather a lot of useful information from the abandoned computers. We had some first class hackers, both professional and amateur, in our ranks, so they quickly broke through the internal security of the computers. Actually, whoever set up the system was so arrogant that the major security line was a simple password that was easily worked out. That opened up the entire network to our sweep.

Not much of real military value was found, but our next objective was clear—a concentration camp north of Marietta. I looked like the head boss of Atlanta was an enthusiastic fan of torture, and his wife was a real aficionado of torture of males. The thing is, it wasn't men, but young boys who were the primary target of her sadism. We found a file with literally thousands of photos, carefully dated and annotated, showing the woman, herself, affixing a piano wire loop to the scrotum of a boy who was subsequently lifted from the ground by this piece of wire looped over the hook of a chain-lift. It seemed that the boys were left hanging by their balls until they died or the wire simply crushed their balls and pulled loose.

The man preferred to torture women with electric shocks to their nipples and clit. He, too, did the final part of the torture himself, so that he could get the maximum enjoyment from it. When he got bored with that, he usually jammed a cattle prod up her anus or pussy and left it on for continuous shocks until she died.

In both cases, there seemed to be no particular criteria for the selection of the victims, except for the proper age group. Victims were swept up among the unemployed by Waffen SS details patrolling the slums. A task-group was hastily organized to rush to the camp in the hope of saving as many of the victims as possible.

I don't know why, but I went along in the rescue detail. Maybe it was from sympathy with the victims, or maybe it was "survivor guilt," but whatever it was that made me go, it resulted in an experience that I would never forget.

When we got there, we found that all of the guards had run away, and I could understand why. The people had not been given food or water for two days and were really suffering for that. They were confined to cage-like cells holding two to six people per cage. The sanitary facilities consisted of a bucket in one corner that looked like it was emptied no more than once per week. All the victims were naked and the cages were arranged around an open courtyard that had a small stage used for the tortures. It looked like the idea was for the future victims to have a good view of what happened to the people being tortured.

We found a few boys hanging from the chain-lifts, and a few more corpses lying on the floor of the stage. None of them had lived long enough for us to help them. There were no female corpses. Why? I don't know.

Anyway, there were 131 boys and women in the cages. We administered IVs to try to save as many as we could. Despite all of our efforts, some still died, but we did manage to save 114. Dear God, how can people be so cruel? I just don't understand it!

We did show our troops photos from the files and the conditions we found at the camp, and this reinforced their hatred for the powers that be on the other side. The result was that the troops were even kinder to the people we liberated and more determined to eliminate the people who abused them.

The conquest of Atlanta was the end of all major fighting in Georgia and South Carolina. There were minor skirmishes with "soldiers" of local bosses, but nothing that couldn't be handled at the squad level.

There was a major Navy base at Charleston, SC, and we feared that there would be a fight there, but we were pleasantly surprised. As soon as we got into sight of the city, live ammunition was issued to the Marines at the base. Once everybody had his ammunition, some sort of signal was given, and there was a complete mutiny by all of the Marines. As soon as the Navy personnel saw what was happening, they mutinied, too. They had been waiting to see if they would be shot by the Marines. A few of the junior officers were too slow to react, so they were shot by zealous Marines, but even the highest level of officers made every effort to make us welcome at the base.