Chapter 5

Sort of "by return mail," we got the 40 mm cannon. It was on a fixed mount, not mobile, so it was up to us to figure out how to use it. I thought of putting it on a truck bed and knock down the truck's sides so that it had a 300 degree traverse. Only the truck cab would provide a problem. We had to work fast, but we managed to get the work done in time for a little practice before we had to take it to war.

The gun closely resembled the Bofors pom-pom AAA gun of WW2. This particular version had two guns mounted side-by-side on the same support. It was fully automatic with optical sights. It could be hand-cranked or electrically controlled by a motor/generator combination on the mount. It was hand fed by clips of four cartridges. Obviously, this was not something we were going to teach the Inglets to operate in less than two days! I wasn't even sure that I could do the weapon justice in the short training time available. Obviously, Hasup was the only person available who had a chance of operating the gun with any hope of success.

We worked around the clock, but finally got the gun mounted and ready to use in time for Hasup to take a few shots to re-familiarize herself with it. Oleer was her assistant on the gun and two more people were volunteered to act as loaders. As the only other person available, I was the designated driver. Damn, we've got to train some more drivers real damned quick!

We had chosen our MLR(main line of resistance) to be as much to our advantage as possible, but this was not going to be the cake walk the ambush had been. We had to march to the MLR simply because we did not have the necessary truck drivers. I drove the gun mounted truck and Hasup drove another truck loaded with our extra ammunition and MREs.

I was scared! This was not the way guerrillas were supposed to fight! I had no idea how we were going to stand up in a straight knock-down-drag-out fight. To my mind, our only hope was superior equipment. With the possible exception of the APCs, the enemy was fighting with weapons from the early 20^th Century on my time line, while we had weapons representing 50-100 years of advancing development.

We were badly outnumbered, so our weapons had to account for a lot. We did have machine guns taken from the trucks, so we did have some weapons with range longer than that of our AA-12s, but we didn't have trained gunners. Hasup and I were the only ones who would be able to man the machine guns, and we were needed for other jobs. Besides, I was supposed to be in command of this so called army. Shit, we were in trouble!

Undoubtedly, we had the moral and morale high ground, but I didn't know how much good that was going to do when our people started dying. I just hoped that the concept of defending your own family and friends against death by an evil stranger was enough to keep my forces fighting when the going got rough.

We arrived at the MLR with about an hour to get ready for the onslaught. I hoped to surprise the invaders, but that depended a lot on just how good their scouts were. Hopefully, they could be taken out by my scouts and their knives before the opposition could be warned.

Fortunately, there was a kind of ritualized knife fighting popular among the teenaged boys, so it didn't take much to transfer that skill into a more deadly form of combat. Earlier, I had thought that my people were not going to do well with the hand-to-hand fighting that might arise, but that was before I knew about the favorite pass-time of many of the kids. Even some of the girls had developed a bit of skill with it. I hadn't known of this until I accidentally asked the right question, and we took it from there! Now, I knew that my people could be deadly with a knife, given the right circumstances.

The first contact with the enemy was made by a pair of our scouts who encountered a lone scout of theirs. Our scouts got quite creative to trap the enemy. One of ours was a woman, and she simply stripped off her bra and loin cloth and lay down on the path which the enemy was following. She pretended to be sleeping while her companion was hiding behind a nearby tree. When the enemy soldier saw the nude and "helpless" woman lying on the trail in front of him, all thoughts of military discipline deserted him and his little head took over all of his higher brain functions.

The enemy was already stripping off his clothes as he approached the naked woman lying asleep. Her companion waited until the hopeful rapist got down on his knees before stepping out to attack. A deft move with the knife fastened to the toe of his boot was enough to drive the blade completely through one side of the rapist's head to project out the other side.

This was when the man with the knife learned the disadvantage of this type of attack. The knife was securely wedged into the dead man's head at one end and tightly fastened to his boot toe at the other. The man fell across the woman who was acting as decoy, pinning her to the ground under him. Her sole remark to the soldier was, "Oh, Asatal, I didn't know you cared!" before she started laughing at the ridiculous situation. Her companion was startled by this reaction, but he did recover enough to kiss her before scrambling off her.

None of the other encounters with enemy scouts were quite so dramatic, but the scout was killed in every case before he could report back to his commander that the defenders had been sighted. Each scout team had reported back to me by their radio of their success, so my hopes were beginning to rise.

Our MLR was at the edge of a rather dense forest with a funnel-like exit in our direction. My troops were arranged along the edge of the tree line, and the Bofors look-alike was stationed behind some camouflage down in the neck of the funnel. The enemy did know enough to keep some infantry screening the APCs, so they appeared to have some grasp of combined operations; however, this was not going to help them very much if we could get all of the APCs into the funnel before we had to destroy one.

I no longer needed to drive the truck once I got it into position, so I was free to man the machine gun, and to try to coordinate the defense. I let the enemy APCs start down the funnel before I ordered any shooting at the enemy infantry. We were well dug in, in a trench line just inside and hidden by the trees. Fortunately, we'd had time to prepare the defensive trench before the enemy got close, so it was already there when we had to begin our actual defense.

By this time, I had an army of 73 soldiers, male and female, so I was able to put 25 in the two trenches, one on either side of the mouth of the funnel. When the main body of troops got close enough, I had the eight soldiers at the far end of the funnel away from our cannon to start shooting HEAP rounds at the enemy as fast as they could fire on semi-automatic. They were using 32-round drum magazines, so this was a hell of a lot of explosive and shrapnel flying at the poor grunts who were caught by surprise.

I had ordered the shooters to fire sort of behind the infantry so that they would tend to run into the funnel for protection by the APCs. Well, most of the enemy did that, though a few did drop to the ground and shoot back. They knew where to shoot, because, with that many rounds being shot so quickly, there was bound to be telltale powder smoke hanging around, even though we were using smokeless powder. They might have killed us all if they had made a banzai charge at our forces, but, luckily, nobody thought of that. Shit, I've got to prepare for that next time!

Anyway, the APCs were now pretty damn close to the cannon, so I ordered Hasup to open fire. In classic form, she fired first at the last vehicle in the column, with the idea of blocking the escape of the rest of the vehicles. That was when we found out why it had taken so long for the enemy to attack us in response to our destruction of that other enemy force. The APCs were actually nothing but trucks with steel plates attached to the sides, front, and back. Apparently, they had been built locally from materials on hand, and that was what had taken so long.

Each APC was carrying a field cannon of between 30 and 40 mm bore that was mounted, more or less fixed pointing forward so that the major aiming was done by turning the truck. This was similar to some of the early anti-tank weapons of WW1. The remainder of the truck bed appeared to be used for ammunition storage and carrying the command and medical staff of the column. How stupid can you get? Oh, well...