Guard Duty [Tankverse Fanfic]

[Hippin_in_Hawaii 639]

Guard Duty
Fanfic in the Tankiverse by Hippin_in_Hawaii

“Escort duty, sir? Is that really the best use of our resources?”

The captain fixed Fred with a dispassionate stare of infinite patience and said nothing. The cherry on his cigarette flared and dimmed as he inhaled; the clinging pseudopod of ash grew a centimeter longer. Smoke wafted through the sunlight slanting in through the window.

Fred cleared his throat. “Sorry, sir. Of course that’s for you to say. Sorry I interrupted.”

The captain pointed at a map. “In the last ten days, we’ve had three supply convoys attacked. Here, here, and here. You can download the map and study it after this briefing. Your team will accompany the next convoy, and you will continue on this duty until such time as you can assure me that this particular threat has been neutralized.”

The captain gestured with his cigarette, miraculously not losing the completely-intact ash. “Staff Sergeant, I picked your team because you have a reputation for getting things done in a manner both effective and conscientious. Our soldiers are losing lives in these attacks, and the resources that are being destroyed could cost more lives, both military and civilian. Make it stop.”

He crushed out the cigarette. “Dismissed.”

Fred walked away from the command center, heading back to his tank, already downloading data on his pad. Briefings with Captain Morrison were famous both for their one-cigarette duration and their lack of useful information. That he seemed to have caught the captain’s eye in a favorable manner worried Fred to no end, but he would have to fret about that later.

Fred distributed the information to Georgie, Chip, and Nienna, and called for a briefing in half an hour. The next convoy was scheduled to leave Ostacor before sunrise the following morning; Fred and his team would have to drive through most of the night to meet up with them, leaving very little time to do more than briefly scan the intel they had been given.

From what Fred could tell, the three incidents weren’t actually attacks, but were more likely the result of I.E.D.s. In each case, only one vehicle in each convoy had been destroyed, and those each by a single blast. An explosive device, remotely triggered by an observer, seemed the most likely scenario to his mind.

Team Greenway reached the rendezvous, a repurposed football field just north of the recently-liberated city, with barely enough time to refuel and slug a cup of coffee before heading out. Fred placed Nienna’s heavy on point, followed by one of Georgie’s APCs. The other APC came up the rear; Fred took the left flank, and Chip the right. Red-eyed and sleep-deprived, they set off on (hopefully) the most boring duty imaginable.

The convoy consisted of nine trucks loaded with food and medical supplies, destined for the even-more-recently-liberated town of Millhaven, roughly 300 km distant. The route was largely through empty land, former agricultural spreads that had been abandoned after the last war, punctuated by small pockets of forest and endless lines of windbreaks. This far from any active conflict, the normal escort would have been a single armed scout vehicle with a crew of four; today, they were joined by the three tanks and two APCs of Team Greenway.

The sun rose on on a beautiful day. The sky was clear; the dew sparkled on the grass. Fred imagined that, were it not for the ruckus of a heavily-armed convoy trundling by, there would be birdsong floating on the breeze and woodland creatures cavorting in the meadows. Dust motes and dandelion fuzz floated dreamily in the slanting early morning rays; the sun’s blazing glory was scarcely above the treetops of the distant woodland. It looked like an illustration from a children’s fairy tale.

Until the second truck exploded.

The remaining trucks immediately dispersed into the traditional herringbone pattern. Georgie’s Dozen boiled from the APCs, taking cover behind and underneath vehicles. Nienna’s tank stopped, her turret sweeping the forward horizon. Chip and Fred’s tanks roared, banking out from the roadway into the meadows on either side to run in tight circles, searching for activity in every direction.

Adrenaline surged. Eyes squinted and strained. Radio traffic flew, terse and chaotic. Churning treads flung dust into the air. The convoy was a bristling cluster of death, nerves strung taut, fever-pitch ready to unleash a withering barrage of ordnance at...what?

Medics dashed to the burning wreckage, but there was no hope of survivors. Milliseconds stretched into actual seconds. Several eternities later, those seconds had become minutes. And still there was no movement, no sign, no point on which to focus the accumulated hostility which was so desperate to be unleashed. Five minutes. Ten.

“Mount up!” signalled Fred. “Resume course, dispersed column, double speed!”

The infantry scrambled into their APCs; Nienna’s tank gunned its engine and lumbered forward; crews returned to their trucks and pulled back on the road. The convoy scurried forward, moving much more quickly this time.

They pulled into Millhaven well ahead of schedule, the remainder of the trip having proven uneventful. There was a debriefing, but between the sleepless night and the adrenaline crash, Team Greenway wasn’t in good shape to really accomplish anything. Fred sent everyone for a nap, with a call for an after-dinner meeting, before heading to the comm shack to get lashed by Captain Morrison.

Chip didn’t sleep. He never had. Three hours a night was really all he needed, much to the despair of his parents. True, no parent ever sleeps with a newborn in the house, but Chip’s parents had not enjoyed an uninterrupted night’s sleep from the time he was born until the day he left for the military.

In military training, of course, there was no “doing things” after lights out, so Chip got pretty good at lying in his bunk and thinking. Chip wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, and he knew this about himself. He was surrounded by people smarter than he was, and had made peace with that. But Chip had good instincts, and he was meticulous, and he had a notebook. He found that if he kept writing down the things he did know in different ways, and looking at it over and over again, he could sometimes discover things he didn’t know. His instincts told him there was something to be found in the information they already had, so he spent naptime lying in his bunk with his tiny notebook.

Fact: Three of the four incidents had happened just after sunrise; the other had happened during sunset.

Fact: Each incident had targeted exactly one vehicle with exactly one explosion.

Fact: Each vehicle had been quite effectively destroyed.

Fact: No one in any of the vehicles had survived.

Fact: There wasn’t a firm pattern to the intervals between incidents.

Fact: All of the convoys had departed from the same Ostacor rally point.

Fact: No route had been attacked more than once.

Fact: The locations of each incident were spread over a pretty considerable area. The shortest line you could draw to connect them was close to a thousand kilometers long.

Fact: The distance between the incidents, when mapped chronologically, seemed directly related to the intervals between them.

Fact: There were no reports of any unusual activity immediately before or immediately after any of the incidents.

Fact: Not all of the convoys had reacted in the same way. One had fled immediately; two had herringboned; one had simply stopped. None of these behaviors changed the lack of any follow-up activity.

Fact: The four convoys that had been hit weren’t particularly special.

Fact: In the same time span, departing from the same rally point, there had been over a dozen other convoys that proceeded without incident.

Chip continued listing what he knew. When he got stuck for an idea, he would just stare at the ceiling for a while. Sooner or later, he would think of a new entry for the notebook. TIny page after tiny page, he wrote, one fact each. When finally he judged it had been half an hour since the last entry, he began flipping through them. Carefully, meticulously, he tore pages out and re-arranged them. And again. And again. Some pages he set aside. Some he duplicated to place in more than one grouping.

It took a while, but Chip was also patient. And by the time the others were rousing themselves for dinner, Chip was pretty sure he knew four new things: there was only one hostile; it was armor, most likely a tank, with a very big gun; it was more interested in stealth than confrontation; and it was receiving pretty good intelligence.

Mahalo (thank you) for reading; I hope you enjoyed! This story is part of a series. Information on the series, and links to the other stories, can be found here.

Edited October 17, 2018 by Hippin_in_Hawaii

[tweezers 1,034]

Approved.

 

I'm running out of words to describe these. How about, um... excellent!

 

 

 

 

 

 Nessie,

 

SHE LIVES

 

 

[Hippin_in_Hawaii 639]

 

SHE LIVES

 

D'oh!!! Good catch!

 

I'm introducing a character in this arc named Deila. But my fingers keep typing Delia. I've spent so much time trying to keep Deila Deila that I didn't pay adequate attention to my core group!

Edited February 12, 2018 by Hippin_in_Hawaii

[Merovingian 656]

Nice, solid story.

You kind of do more description than dialogue nowadays, we miss the interaction between the different protagonists.

[GrandExecutioner 1,403]

Like

[Hippin_in_Hawaii 639]

Nice, solid story.

You kind of do more description than dialogue nowadays, we miss the interaction between the different protagonists.

I'm actually kind of worried about the volume of dialogue coming up in the remainder of this arc. Hopefully, you'll find it fulfilling!