299 Days: The Restoration

Chapter 316 One Armored Car

Joe Tantori couldn’t keep his eyes open any longer. As the sun was coming up on… he had no idea what day it was… he fell soundly asleep in the passenger seat of one of his company’s armored cars. The past few days had been a blur, but they were the most exciting days of his life.

It started on New Year’s Eve morning when he and about fifty of his men, most of whom were FUSA Marines, boarded a barge at his facility. They had precious cargo on board: one of his armored cars from his pre-Collapse security business. With a Patriot tugboat to pull them and another as an escort, Joe and his men on the barge spent New Year’s Eve puttering down the Puget Sound toward their objective: Olympia.

In the pre-mission briefing by Lt. Cmdr. Dibble, Joe questioned the wisdom of landing a very small force right in the middle of the enemy’s location, the port of Olympia. He didn’t want to sound like a coward, but he had the lives of his men to think about. “Is this a good idea, landing my men right under their noses?” he asked.

“Normally, no,” Dibble said. “But in these circumstances, yes.”

“Okay,” Joe said, “tell me these circumstances so I can tell my men.”

“Sure,” Dibble said. “First of all, Olympia is hollowed out. Our intel shows they have been evacuating their key people for a few weeks. All that are left are some poor National Guard kids. You should hear the radio traffic from them. Those kids are terrified and they know they’re on their own. We expect mass surrenders.”

Joe nodded. He knew how unreliable intel could be, but he had seen with his own eyes the uptick in evacuations by sea on the Puget Sound from areas outside of Seattle into Seattle. The Limas were obviously abandoning their outlying areas and concentrating on Seattle. But the evacuations stopped about a week ago, apparently because they got all their key people into Seattle.

“Second,” Dibble said, “we have assets at the port facility itself. We know for a fact that the port employees are taking New Year’s Eve off. There will literally be no one there when you land.” He smiled. He was very proud that they had this level of information.

“Okay,” Joe said. He could sell this mission to his men. They were, after all, privateers operating under a letter of marque, which meant they could technically decline the mission. But there was no way Joe or his men would miss out on an amphibious landing in the Lima’s capitol city.

Joe was worried about being intercepted on the Puget Sound as they sailed south toward Olympia. They had to get past the Bremerton shipyards, Seattle, and Tacoma, all of which, theoretically, had significant maritime defenses. It was true that these facilities had potent defenses like mines and harbor boats to counter a close-range force directly attacking them, but several months into the Collapse they didn’t have many ships that controlled the open waters. FUSA naval assets needed an enormous amount of spare parts and fuel — and sailors, who were quickly going AWOL or joining the Patriots. So, while the Lima naval presence in the Puget Sound was significant a few months ago when Joe’s men were out patrolling on the outskirts of the sound, it had dropped off significantly by now.

Besides, there wasn’t much for Lima naval assets to do now, anyway. Except for the recent evacuations to Seattle, there was much less ship traffic in general than there had been before the Collapse. Before everything started, ships with goods from all over the world, especially China, clogged the waterways around Seattle. There was no more international trade now that the dollar had officially tanked and was virtually worthless. No country in its right mind would sell things to Americans for dollars and America had almost no reserves of foreign currency to pay for goods with money that other countries would accept. Fuel was very hard to come by, and this put even more of a dent in ship traffic. Finally, the FUSA Navy and Coast Guard were a small fraction of what they used to be. They no longer had the support of the rest of the American military because many states had “opted out” and weren’t supporting FUSA military operations.

The Limas still had a few maritime patrol aircraft. To lower any suspicion if they were spotted from the air, Joe’s men filled the barge with garbage, which worked out well because garbage had been piling up at Joe’s facility and he needed to get rid of it anyway. They put the men in two small shipping containers. The armored car was covered by a large tarp. The barge looked like a load of garbage with some ancillary cargo; perfectly normal to be on the water. They had some fake papers for the load, but the quality of the forgery wasn’t that good. If they were stopped, they’d have to shoot their way out of it. They could easily repel an attack from a patrol boat because the Marines brought some of their anti-tank rockets and they had quite a few .50 machine guns on board. But if a patrol boat or plane radioed in their location, a larger vessel could easily intercept them. They couldn’t outrun a real naval vessel. “Die with your boots on,” Joe said to himself, which was one of his favorite Iron Maiden songs.

As they were about to land in Olympia, Dibble pulled Joe aside on the bridge of the tug and said with a smile, “Hey, you wonder why no one stopped us on the water?”

“Yes, I sure did.”

“We have someone on the inside at the FUSA Coast Guard in Seattle,” Dibble said with a huge grin. “She’s at the Coast Guard Maritime Control Center. She’s one of the radar people that tells ship and planes where to go.”

“Or not go,” Joe said with a huge sigh of relief. The Patriots never could have won without inside help like this, Joe realized.

The Patriot tug radioed the barge to let them know that they were entering Budd Inlet, the final leg of the journey. It was just before midnight on New Year’s and the gunfire and explosions had just started near the capitol. The sounds of war got Joe’s men pumped up and ready to land.

Joe was on the bridge of the tug with his binoculars. He was stunned to see the lights on at the port but no one around. It was exactly like Dibble said it would be: abandoned. The gunfire and explosions were still far away, about two miles north of them at the capitol campus.

Landing at night was scary, not because of enemy gunfire but just because it was a landing in an unknown port, and barges aren’t easy to steer. The tugboat was manned by an excellent tug crew of volunteers who had landed at the port of Olympia before. They put the barge exactly where it needed to be.

Joe remembered that they had some trouble getting the armored car off the barge and onto the dock. They couldn’t drive the armored car off the barge because it would crush the wooden dock. They needed to use the crane to lift it up and onto the cement staging area onshore. They knew where the keys to the crane were because the tugboat captain had hung out with the crane operators before the Collapse. They went to the control center where the keys were, but it was locked. A special 12 gauge breaching round, which shot metal powder out the barrel, took care of the locked door. A minute later, the tug captain was unloading the armored car. It was an ugly crane job, with the armored car swinging wildly, but it got the job done.

By now, the landing party was out of the shipping containers and doing a final coms and gear check. Once the armored car was operational, the men took up positions behind it. Commercial armored cars were the poor man’s armored personnel carrier.

Joe’s landing party went slowly up the street toward the capitol campus. They first encountered an F Corp checkpoint in downtown Olympia. The FCorps guards, an old man and a young teenager, put up their hands without a word and were zip tied after Joe’s men took their radios.

The next checkpoint, manned by about a dozen FCorps, decided to shoot when the armored car disobeyed their loudspeaker order to halt. Their bullets bounced right off Joe’s armored car, causing the occupants to laugh out loud. The Marines behind the armored car patiently saw where the F Corp muzzle flashes were coming from and demonstrated the marksmanship skills the Marine Corps was known for.

But, as could be expected, the FCorps checkpoint that shot at them had radios.

“There’s an armored car and a bunch of soldiers coming straight up Capitol Boulevard!” one of the FCorps screamed into his radio.

The dispatcher coordinating the response to the gunfire all over the city was overwhelmed. Besides, there was no way an armored car could have driven downtown; all the roads and streets leading to the capitol had checkpoints so it was impossible that an armored car was downtown. The dispatcher assumed this was a mistake or that some teabaggers had stolen a radio and were trying to divert the legitimate authorities, perhaps to an ambush. She disregarded the report of the armored car and moved on to the dozen other emergencies confronting her all at the same time.

Joe remembered how the fire got thicker as they moved toward the capitol campus. Joe’s coms guy, Daniel Briggman, was monitoring the Lima frequencies. The Limas had secure channels, but in the chaos of the attack, many of them, especially the untrained FCorps, were freaking out and talking on the unsecure frequencies. This gave Patriots invaluable information.

Joe and Dibble were in the armored car when Briggman came running up and said, with some concern, “Hey, they now know we’re here, but some of them still can’t believe it. They’re trying to get some armor to engage us.”

Monitoring the Lima radios wasn’t the only source of information Joe’s men had. Some of the Marines were scouting ahead of the armored car. One of them turned a corner and saw a tank sitting in an intersection, fully illuminated by the street lights. The engine wasn’t running, which seemed strange. He used a silent hand signal to tell his fellow scout, who then ran to the armor car to report it.

“I got it,” said Gunnery Sergeant Martin Booth, who was in command of the Marines. He had a plan for this and with a couple of shouts to key personnel, the plan was underway.

Booth pre-determined five Marines to make their way to the corner where the scout had spotted the tank. They had a secret surprise for the tank: a Javelin anti-tank missile. The men made their way to the corner and verified the target was there. It was a block down the street from the corner where the Marines were.

As they were getting ready to fire, the enemy tank crew came running up to the tank, which explained why the engine wasn’t running; it was just sitting there, unmanned. Perhaps the Limas were trying to scare people away, but that didn’t work on Marines.

“Capture them,” the corporal leading the anti-tank party said. “If you can,” he added.

Knowing that the tank couldn’t fire at them without a crew in it made deciding to take it on much easier.

“Freeze!” the Marines yelled as the first of the tank crew members was climbing on the tank to get into it.

The scared National Guard kids threw their hands up in an instant. One by one, they were ordered to walk down the street to be zip tied.

Once the fifth member of the tank crew was secured, the corporal called in the good news.

“Looks like we captured an Abrams,” referring to the M1 tank in the intersection. “Betcha that’ll come in handy.”

Just as those words left the corporal’s mouth, machine gun fire came from the second story of the building just behind the tank.

“Oh, well,” he said, and gave the signal to his two-man Javelin crew. After a few bursts of fire from the Marines, the machine gun stopped. But, to the Marines’ surprise, a new tank crew came running out and started to get into the tank.

The Javelin crew was in place and gave one last look to the corporal in case anything had changed.

“Light ’em up,” the corporal yelled, and a second later the Javelin exploded out of its launcher and rocked the intersection. The concussion knocked some of the Marines down. The Abrams was still in one piece, but on fire. The secondary explosions from the tank rounds inside started to go off.

The Marine anti-tank crew ran back to the armored car. The corporal reported to Booth about trying to capture the tank. Joe remembered Booth saying, “Shit happens, Corporal” and shrugging.

The Patriot field commanders at the battle of Olympia wondered why one of their biggest problems, a tank in the middle of a key intersection, just exploded. Joe swelled with pride when Briggman got on the radio and told the Patriot commanders that they had taken it out.

The rest of the night, Joe’s men slowly went up the street and probed each intersection in the surrounding area. They encountered heavier and heavier fire as they did so. Finally, it was apparent that one armored car and fifty Marines wasn’t enough to push through the increasingly strong defenses ringing the immediate boundaries of the capitol. Besides, Joe’s men had captured so many Limas it was getting hard to keep moving with all of them in tow. Eventually, Joe’s men linked up with Patriot regular forces and started to run heavy patrols in the areas they’d secured, intercepting fleeing Limas. They captured even more of them, almost of all them were scared National Guard kids, but some nasty FCorps, too. They killed several of them who wouldn’t surrender, having learned from their prisoners that the hardcore Limas were shooting deserters. This might have explained some of the fire the Marines took when capturing enemy soldiers; the Marines had no choice but to fire back.

On the second day — although Joe’s memory was hazy because he hadn’t slept — his armored car was in high demand. It proved to be the perfect way to safely ferry high-value personnel. The armored car was the only armored vehicle the Patriots had; they couldn’t move tanks or armored personnel carriers up and down I-5 to Olympia.

Joe’s Marines were also highly valued; they were assigned to the Delta Company of the Second Battalion of the Washington State Guard. The Marines used their last remaining Javelin on a Lima tank parked at the entrance to the capitol building.

Blowing up the second tank was just about the end for the Limas. After a thunderous tirade of fire from the windows of the capitol buildings, Joe and the others felt and heard an earth-shaking explosion. Joe thought an exploding tank was loud, but this was a hundred times bigger. Later, they found out that this was the Lima’s ammunition bunker that they detonated to prevent the ammunition from falling into Patriot hands.

Joe was given the great honor of having his armored car used to bring the Patriot commanders into the capitol to receive the surrender of the last handful of Limas. Using his car was partially thanks for the fifty Marines and taking out two tanks, but was also because it was the only armored vehicle the Patriots had.

Joe started to cry when he saw a soldier bring the new Patriot flag out of his armored car and hoist it up the flagpole over the capitol. It was silent as the flag flew, except for some of the secondary explosions from the ammunition bunker. As he was looking up at the new flag on the old capitol, Joe noticed his Marines were slowly making their way to his armored car. Once they were there, he went into the vehicle and got out three wooden boxes of cigars they’d captured from pirates a few months ago. He motioned for Booth to come over and told him to hand a cigar to every man in the unit. Once they all had one, Joe lit his cigar and said, “Well done, gentlemen. Well done.”