Chapter 189
They were overconfident. I didn’t know why then, and I still haven’t figured it out. Basic and sane tactics meant that the jamming devices should have been closely guarded. I suspect some of it may have been the result of too few men on their side to guard everything adequately, but it still makes no sense to me as a strategy what they did. Essentially, they assumed that no one was coming up behind them while they faced the direction of town. It made me think less of the “smart leaders” that’s for sure.
Had I still been in the military I could have used some ultra-tech anti-jamming whosiwhatsit to “break” the jammers. Well I didn’t have one of those whositwhatsits so that meant physically breaking the jammer and to do that I would need to be hands on. Giving it a swift think, and knowing I would have to be quick to open up enough of a gap in the jamming to make a difference, I decided on a method that I’d used at Ft. Lee to dispose of certain types of circuitry. And I was able to do so because Winn had the chemical stocked for some of the water treatment systems that he’d maintained up the mountain.
Peroxide. It isn’t just that stuff that bubbles when you put it on an infected wound, or used to get rid of blood stains or other biological spills. Nope. In the right concentration it can even be used as rocket fuel. The concentration I was using was not something you wanted to ever get on your skin. It is an acid. The container I had it in was special because of this; all glass based, including the nozzle. I added a gas mask over my balaclava and put the special gloves on that Winn had insisted I add to my gear for just-in-case.
The “guts” of the jammers were open to the elements. They would have eventually failed because of this, but I wanted them to “fail” faster and more permanently. I hurried from jammer to jammer and sprayed the exposed circuit boards with a high concentration of peroxide. It basically melted everything it touched and there would be no repairing all the jammers even if they had enough parts to repair some of them. I was hoping that since the jammers didn’t emit any sounds, and that I wasn’t stopping the power, just the jamming circuitry, the disfunction would take a bit to notice. Everyone already on radio silence would add to that … I was hoping.
The other thing about peroxide is that it is “environmentally friendly” since it is H2O2 and breaks down into H2O rather than some nasty chemical requiring an environmental cleaning crew.
I was only able to disable one side of the “dome” they’d created. Town was boxed in but at least one side was now open to some type of signal. I wasn’t sure how long it would take for anyone to notice so I went on to phase two.
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They’d brought their supplies all the way up to their line. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Even more stupid is that they didn’t have them adequately guarded anymore than they had the jammers. These guys wanted a battle, wanted to earn their heavenly stripes. How many of them actually wanted to die while doing it was debatable but I could see they were jonesing really bad for something to expend the adrenaline on. I also noted that some of the groups were partaking in what is euphemistically called “battle candy.” Basically, amphetamine type drugs that had the effect you would expect.
Battle candy is bad news on both sides for the obvious reasons … someone can be a rager and unpredictable, unable to follow the most basic of commands, and if they don’t have anything to expend the “candy” on they start feeding on themselves. Ugh. I knew it was common … stay “up,” stay awake, six foot tall and bullet proof feelings of euphoria, no feelings for what you are inflicting, controls battle fatigue by keeping the troops happy-happy, controls hunger so less need for supplies, etc. No wonder so many of these men seemed strung out. They were being kept “high” for too long. These drugs were originally developed to control things like depression and attention deficit problems but were creating more problems. One was they were all hyper focused on what was immediately in front of them – a potential battle – and everything else was “gone” from their thought processes. It made sneaking up to their piles of supplies too easy. It also made getting into their water supplies easy. I don’t mean danger-free, but it was certainly easy for Capt. Dunn to do what she had been trained to do … inflict the greatest casualties without being caught.