Battle Group Castle
By
UCSBdad
Disclaimer: I own zero Castle. Rating: K Time: In an AU future and see below.
Author's note: This is a sequel to Vengeance and to Tercio Corazon Negro.
Tanks, and other armored fighting vehicles, are powerful weapons of war. Some of their advantages are obvious. They have thick, tough armor that can withstand attacks by many sorts of weapons. They have their own powerful weapons. Tanks carry main guns that can shoot out more than eight kilometers and can often destroy enemy tanks at that range. They also carry an assortment of secondary weapons, usually heavy machine guns, but occasionally small mortars or grenade launchers.
Infantry fighting vehicles are also well armored, often, as is the case with both Castle's and Davidson's IFVs, because they are based on tanks. Their main guns are not so powerful, usually being either 30mm or 50mm guns, as opposed to the tanks' 125mm guns, but they not only have several machine guns, but a heavily armed infantry squad carried inside.
Other advantages are not so obvious. Each of these vehicles carries sophisticated electronics that allow it to find their enemies at long range, and other electronics that can blind the tiny computer "brains" of guided missiles fired at them.
In addition, they have other active defenses. Most noticeable are weapons systems that are designed to fire clouds of small shot that will destroy enemy missiles that do manage to lock onto them. They also are covered with what is called explosive reactive armor, sometimes referred to as tiles as they resemble them. Many guided and unguided missiles use what are called shaped charges that cause the explosion to fire a high velocity jet that literally cuts through the armor. When such a fiery jet hits an explosive tile, the tile explodes, dissipating the jet and protecting the armor underneath.
However, these advantages aren't always present when armored units fight in large cities. Long range weapons and sensors are not much use if you're tank is on a street where your enemies can hide in buildings only a few yards from you. And, in a city like Harmony City, where the streets were planned in a harmonious pattern that used gentle and not so gentle curves instead of a straight grid, it was all that much easier for your enemy to creep up on you.
Tanks and infantry fighting vehicles have very powerful weapons, to be sure. But, few weapons, mostly anti-aircraft heavy machine guns mounted on the turret tops of the vehicles, could elevate sufficiently to hit targets in buildings that towered over them by many, many stories.
Captain Sarah Glass was finding this out. Captain Glass had been a first lieutenant in the Triple Alliance Army, and a member in good standing of Senator Bracken's American Nationalist Party. Both her party contact and her Alliance commander had told her that a chance to get some real combat experience would enhance her career prospects.
Glass now commanded a company composed of a platoon of four tanks, and two platoons of armored infantry fighting vehicles, numbering eight vehicles. In addition, she had two very long-range anti-tank missile vehicles and a tracked and armored repair vehicle. She had only one other officer who was actually military and seven NCOs. The rest were Bracken's bully boys, but they had done all right. So far.
She had been ordered to go to the assistance of an ordnance company that was surrounded by Esposito's troops. They had more than a dozen powerful vehicles that had been under repair, but only three were now mobile. Not enough to carry the more than a hundred soldiers to safety.
The only route to the besieged company was through Harmony City. She had begun taking fire within five hundred meters of leaving her own lines. So far, there had been only one hit on a tank, which had done very little damage. Enemy soldiers in the building above them fired at them relentlessly, even if most of their weapons had little chance of damaging Glass' vehicles.
Lieutenant Glass' tank was third in line with two tanks ahead and the rest of the little force following behind.
Suddenly the lead tank stopped as they crested a small rise.
"Alpha Two Five." Glass called out on the radio. "What is it?"
"Road block, ma'am. Cars, balks of timber, steel beams and shit all across the road. Damn! There's a gun!"
Glass heard the firing of the other tank's machine guns.
"What the fuck is happening?"
"Nothing, ma'am. What I thought was a gun was a phony. They just wanted to stop us so they could shoot at us."
Glass could hear bullets clatter uselessly off her armor and saw light anti-armor rockets swatted away by her defenses.
"Okay, Alpha Two Five, we'll keep going."
The lead tank drove over the road black and as it did, there was a blinding flash and a roar that shook all of the other vehicles. When the smoke and dust cleared, Alpha Two Five was on fire and minus its turret, which was a good fifty meters away, and also on fire.
"No one got out of that." Glass' gunner said.
"Send out a drone. Make sure there's no more surprises." Glass growled.
A small drone shot out from under the tank and sped to the former road block, now a trench across the road. The drone lasted long enough to show the way was clear.
Glass' column moved on.
Two hundred meters later, a bomb went off in an alley to the left of the column, spattering it with shrapnel, but doing no real harm. However, an infantry fighting vehicle veered to the right and slowed almost to a stop. Two of Esposito's soldiers ran out from a basement apartment and attached magnetic mines to the roadwheels of the IFV. One was wounded running back, but not severely. The mines destroyed three road wheels and destroyed a track, leaving the IFV immobile.
"Repair Seven. This is command. Can we fix it?" Glass demanded.
"Command, we'll need to get them to stop shooting at us to fix it."
Glass had her vehicles spray all of the surrounding buildings with machine gun fire while the twelve infantrymen and three crew exited their damaged vehicle and ran to other IFVs gathered around them. Nine made it to safety, although three were wounded.
"Stay in the middle of the fucking road, people!" She yelled over the radio.
A few hundred meters ahead of them was a manhole cover in the middle of the road. It was not an ordinary manhole cover. It was attached to a pressure plate and when something heavy ran over the cover, the cover would be pushed down, an electric connection would be established and a charge of explosives detonated.
The first tank went past the manhole cover without touching it. Glass' tank also missed it. The third tank didn't.
Again, there was a blinding flash of light and a massive roar. Every vehicle shook like a leaf in the wind. When the smoke and dust cleared, there were only parts of the tank left. And, an IFV behind it had been destroyed.
A kilometer away, a squad that called themselves the "Trash Pandas" watched their handiwork through a video camera and cheered.
"Ma'am, the blast knocked out our machine gun on the turret roof. We can't fix it from inside and I'm not sure we could even fix it if they'd stop shooting."
Glass cursed. Then her radio sprang to life.
"(Static)… is Ordnance Section…(static)…are you? We've got…(Static)… and mortars falling all…(static.)… help now. (Static).".
"Ordnance Section North. This is Command Alpha. We're on our way. You'll have to hold out. Over."
There was no reply. Glass tried again, but still no reply.
Bucky Doyle sat in a well-built bunker and watched the enemy column approach via a series of small video cameras. The enemy column couldn't seem to decide whether it wanted to speed up to get through as soon as possible, or slow down the better to watch for booby traps and ambushes. The column slowed down when a pair of light anti-tank missiles hit the lead tank in a spot where the explosive reactive tiles had already been detonated. The missiles cut into the tank's armor, but didn't penetrate. It did cause the tank to stop so they could check for damage. That caused the column to stop.
Behind them, a pair of IFVs stopped by a battered and burned out truck. Packed into the truck was over a ton of high explosives, mostly ammunition taken from Davidson's supplies by Esposito's men.
Bucky smiled and whispered to himself, "Fire in the hole." And pushed an electrical detonator. One IFV was blown onto its side and set on fire with the fire soon reaching the stored ammunition. The second had its turret blown off, but remarkably most of the men not in the turret survived, although wounded. The Tercio's soldiers in the building above them sent down a rain of bullets, grenades and missiles. All inside were killed.
Glass moved her column down the street, still attracting fire, but now more of the missiles were getting through, thanks to the damage done to the defenses.
Glass breathed a sigh of relief as she saw the next turn. There, the street widened out and they'd be only five hundred meters from a large park. The column's long-range sensors and weapons would be able to keep the damned Tercio light infantry away.
When they turned the corner, everyone in Glass' tank groaned. Ahead of the in the street were piles of trash, dirt and structures made of thick timber and steel plates and beams.
"What the hell is that?" The driver asked.
"Stop the damned column." Glass yelled. "I'm damned sure that every one of those things has a mine in it. Start spraying the damned things with the machine guns. "She keyed her mic. "Alpha Two Seven, come up parallel with me and help us detonate the mines. I know those bastards have us stopped for a reason. We have to move quickly."
The first three mounds of trash were blown apart with nothing happening. The fourth blew up spectacularly, but there were hundreds left.
The reason that the column had been stopped where it was suddenly appeared. From rooftops and windows high above flaming gasoline poured down on the stuck column. Everything from giant barrels to emptied beer bottles filled with gasoline were dropped. Some had explosives wired to them and some had cloth wicks that were lit before being thrown. The armored vehicles were engulfed in flames.
Glass brought three of her remaining IFVs up to spray the hidden mines. To one side of Glass' tank was a steel pipe ten feet high and four feet around. A heavy machine gun set off the mine inside it and sent it flying into the air. It landed not a meter from where it had started and caused no damage. It did leave a lovely smoke ring in the air.
When a small path had been cleared, Glass ordered her team through. The vehicles own fire suppression systems kept most from being damaged, but the two vehicles at the end of the column were destroyed. An anti-tank missile vehicle blew up and the repair vehicle just burned. No one got out of them.
Glass pulled her vehicles up once they were in the park. Aside from an occasional burst from machine guns, no one was shooting at them for the first time since they'd begun their mission. Glass talked to the commanders of each vehicle and was told how much damage each had received, how many dead and wounded they had aboard and how much ammunition they had left. The answers were not encouraging to Captain Glass.
Having failed to contact by radio the ordnance unit they'd been sent to rescue, they approached it carefully. What they found shocked them.
TBC