Ellie's Heroes

Chapter 9

by Technomad

As we had thought it would, the driving rain had driven most sensible people indoors. Good job we weren't sensible. We got in where we wanted to with no problem.

Our first target was the enemy motor pool a little ways outside of Monmouth. There was an attempt at a fence around it, but we had scouted it thoroughly, and knew where there were weak spots. Since the guards were bludging…huddling in their shack at the gate, instead of walking the perimeter…we were in no danger.

The motor pool contained all sorts of vehicles, from tanks on down to little motor-driven peddlers' carts. Some of them were obviously of foreign make, while others had been stolen locally. We spread out among them, and went to work, like Santa's little helpers at Christmas. However, instead of leaving pressies, we were rigging up plastic explosive charges. When anybody tried driving many of these vehicles, they were going to get surprises…some of them would go boom when the engines started, while others would go for a little while before the big bang happened.

The tanks, surprisingly enough, were the least troublesome. We just rigged charges so that the treads would be blown off. A tank without its treads is helpless…at best, it's a pillbox, and that's only if it's immobilised where it can be useful. And the way we'd set the charges, the bogie-wheels would also be damaged, which would make the tanks that much more difficult to repair.

"Maximum returns for minimum effort," Homer murmured to me, his eyes bright against the black soot he'd smeared, as all of us had, on his face. "Well, that was easy. Now, for the guards."

As I've mentioned, the guards were sloppy…they weren't expecting trouble, since we'd not operated anywhere near Monmouth before that night. They were huddled up in their guardshack, most of them sound asleep. The rain poured down outside hard enough to mask any noises we made approaching. The one guard who was awake was leaning back in his chair, looking at a girlie magazine from his homeland. He started when we opened the door, and the expression of pure terror on his face was comical, even before we started shooting.

The front gate was electrical, and opened at the touch of a button. Once it was open, we went back to the one military vehicle we'd spared our attentions. It was a ten-wheel MOWAG Piranha armoured car, from Switzerland. Our armour-recognition classes had taught us to recognise it instantly, and from the second we'd seen it, it had figured prominently in our plans.

It was the latest, hottest thing in armoured cars, with amphibious capability, a turret on top with a 105-mm gun, more machine guns in ports on the sides, and the ability to cross almost any terrain. When we'd first seen it, I could see Homer and Lee all but licking their lips at the thought of all the fun they could have with it. Men. More usefully, it had lots of cargo capacity; it was designed to carry as many as fourteen troops at once, so if we got to the gold, we'd have no trouble carrying it away.

The hatches were unlocked. As I'd said, they weren't expecting trouble around here, with the local population under lock and key. We were soon all in; the Piranha was nice and roomy, and it was very pleasant to be out of the rain. Homer and Kevin were prying off the bar that prevented the steering wheel from turning with a bolt-cutter. Once that was loose, a stab at a button, and the engine fired right up. Swiss engineering. Can't beat it!

The car was fully-fuelled and stocked with ammo, but once we got it into motion, we stopped at the supply point and took aboard as much more ammo as we could. Our instructors had pounded the idea "you can never have too much ammunition, too much food or too much air support" into our heads, and topping up on ammunition or food (air support was a little bit difficult to arrange) had become reflexive. They also had some Russian RPGs there, and we took all of those we could find, along with a couple of launchers.

Once we were through the gate, we closed it behind us, so that the enemy might take a few more precious seconds to figure out just what was wrong, and drove toward Monmouth, which we could see on the horizon. Fi was at the wheel. There was no way in Hell…the real one, the one with fire…that I'd trust Homer at the wheel of an armoured fighting vehicle!

OOO

Our next stop was outside Monmouth, on a hilltop overlooking the petroleum refinery. It was brightly lit; the RNZAF couldn't strike this far away from Kiwiland, so they thought they had nothing to fear.

We got out and went to work, setting up the automatic mortar. It was designed so that once set up and sighted in, it would fire by itself until it ran out of shells. We were well within range, and had a timer we could rig to it to make it wait a while to start its work.

Homer grinned a maniacal grin. "Once this thing starts going, it'll set off the biggest damn bonfire in the history of Australia!" I could see that he was really enjoying the thought. Trust Homer. Then I saw the expresssions on my companions' faces. All of them…Lee, Kevin, even gentle Fi…looked like kids staring at a big pile of Christmas pressies.

I imagined what the mortar bombs would do. I knew that any petroleum refinery's a firestorm waiting to happen, and when the bombs started whistling in, it would become a raging inferno in minutes, at most. Even if they found out where the bombs were coming from, and found the mortar…we'd be long gone. And I felt my face twist into a smile very like theirs. I felt evil glee at the thought of the destruction that we were going to wreak. As payment for Corrie's death, in my case. For that, no amount of vengeance would be enough. Vengeance never grows stale, though it may grow gray. And we all owed the invaders a great deal of payback.

Once the mortar was set up, we headed on into Monmouth. It was late at night, it was raining, and there was little traffic on the roads. At least the invaders drove on the left side of the road, as is the custom in civilised countries. I'd heard horror stories about poor souls who'd gone to countries where they drove on the right, and how much trouble it was to constantly have to fight one's lifelong reflexes.

Driving one of the enemy's own vehicles ensured that we had no trouble; even so, we were ready for anything. Lee, Fi and I manned machine gun positions, while Homer…of course…claimed the turret gun as his very own. I thought about what our old teachers would have said, to see Homer Yannos with a 105mm cannon, and smiled to myself. They'd have been running for the hills, along with anybody with the least bit of common sense!

We didn't know how long we had before anybody'd check on the guards we'd killed. We'd watched as best we could, but we weren't sure how often the guard was changed. We might have minutes before the alarm went up, or we could have till morning. Of course, in the second case, we'd have raised more than enough hell that nobody'd be paying attention to a few dead guards on a motor pool.

Monmouth was laid out in a nice, regular grid pattern, so we had little trouble getting to where we were going. Once or twice, we had to take side streets because the main routes were blocked up with what looked like construction; there'd apparently been some real fighting here when the invasion hit. I heard Fiona mutter "Good on you, Monmouth!" I hoped they'd cost the invaders some blood, unlike poor Wirrawee, which had been caught with its trousers right around its ankles.

The bank we were targeting was off in a side street. It was fairly inconspicuous, and only the presence of a few armed guards in the street betrayed its secret. Just as we started our approach, a glow of light against the clouds announced that our mortar had started its deadly work.

Peering through one of the viewslits on the side of the Piranha, I gasped in wonder. I had known, intellectually, how terribly inflammable petroleum refineries were, but this was bigger than I had thought it would be. The fire lit up the dark clouds overhead, painting them a vivid orange. In the distance, I could hear the roar of the fires.

The guards saw it too. They pointed and gaped, babbling to each other in their incomprehensible speech. At first, they didn't pay us any attention. They were too busy speculating to each other on what the noise and light meant. They reminded me of people before the war, looking off toward the horizon at a brush-fire, and wondering if it would come their direction or not.

When they did notice that we'd parked nearby, they came wandering over, leaving their assigned posts behind. If I'd been their sergeant, they'd have been in trouble. Even though I wasn't their sergeant, they were in trouble. They just didn't know it yet.

One of them tried to talk to us, but we didn't understand a word he said. He was within the firing-arc of Kevin's machine gun, and Kevin speaks fluent Automatic Weapon, though. With a maniacal gleam in his eyes, he opened fire, his bullets chewed the soldier to bits. The soldier fell bonelessly, dead before he hit the ground.

From my own position, I engaged the other guards, shooting them as efficiently as I could. They'd been caught off their guard completely by our use of one of their own vehicles, and none of them even managed to unsling his rifle, much less return fire. In seconds, they were all dead.

Except for Kevin, whom we'd designated as our vehicle-sitter, we piled out of the Piranha as fast as we could, trotting across to the bank. Like a lot of modern banks, it was glassed-in, depending far more on the police and on things like exploding dye packets in the currency to ward off robbers than its own fortresslike qualities. If it had been an old-fashioned bank, this raid would have been much more difficult. The one my family used in Wirrawee would have required us to use explosives and that would have taken up a lot more time.

As it was, we were inside very quickly. The night lighting was on, and we fanned out, searching for where the gold was being kept. We found it in minutes; the bank people had locked the vaults up and the other side hadn't been able to get them open, so the gold was sitting in crates out in one of the back rooms. They still had hand-trucks in there, and we took advantage of those, loading crates onto the hand trucks (and nobody had ever really gotten across to me how heavy gold is!) and hauling them out and across the street to the Piranha as fast as we could.

By the time we'd taken all the Piranha would hold, even the heavy-duty springs of the suspension were beginning to creak and groan. We piled aboard and pulled out, heading for our next destination. Fiona was back at the wheel, and all of us were in a cheery mood. So far, everything had gone perfectly.

That lasted until we came to a main street. Unlike the deserted side-streets, the main street was Chaos; people were milling around, and vehicles were trying to work their way through the crowds. From what we could gather, the fire had spread into Monmouth itself somehow.

Fiona commented dryly: "People, I think we may have a problem."

END Chapter 09