“How many?” Blain asked quietly.
“Two” Gregor responded.
“We got one still unaccounted for” Blain informed Gregor. “Sig said we’ll go looking for him a half-hour after sunrise.”
Lliam counted four. Blain did the math: Four minus Davey-the-giant next to Roger's porch minus the two Gregor shot (the two who had been positioned next to the two-track to prevent people from escaping. That left one, Lightning who started from farther back when the light went on and the shooting started.
Gregor heard multiple men running toward him. He saw/sensed that there were at least two and they were bunched up. The first runner hit the trip-wires and was flattened. The second runner was staggered by the now-loose and slightly out of position trip-wires but not slammed face-down into the gravel.
Gregor shot the second runner twice. Then he ground-sluiced the first runner with two shots.
Then he made two, carefully aimed shots to anchor them.
Had Lightning been following the second runner, Gregor might have been in trouble. High energy 12 gauge loads (35gr-to-40gr of Blue Dot) have bright fireballs and would have both impaired his vision and revealed his position.
He might have been in trouble but Lightning would still be running with big blind-spots in the center of his vision from the spot-light.
When the team found Lightning, that made Number Four and all were accounted for.
Things to note about the plan
The spot-light crushed the invader's ability to fight back. They could not see.
The spot-light was off-set from Roger so if Davey or Lightning started shooting at the light, Roger was not downrange.
It did not have to be 200,000 lumens but that is a common size. It was way more than needed but it worked.
The trip-wires were located in places where the runners would have maximum speed and where the assassin had the ability to engage in enfilade fire along two directions if the need presented itself.
Roger, Sig and Blain were defending their own homes. The chances of cold-feet and the defender being unable to drop-the-hammer on an invader was reduced to almost zero, even for Blain. Maybe it would have been smarter to engage them on the road but the invaders could have slipped off the road and then things would have been sporty.
The invaders were cowards. As soon as it became apparent that they did not have overwhelming, super-advantage, they bailed.
The invaders were not wearing body armor. Their weapons were not the greatest. They counted on surprise and numerical superiority.
The dogs saved the day.
Having two motion detector alarms allowed defenders to have some order in their battle plan. They had a sense of where the enemy was and how much time they might have.
Radio communication could have been a force multiplier. Lliam could have alerted the team with his count and their deployment. They could have contacted Gregor when Lightning headed down the drive.
Knowing their limitations, they had rock-solid assignments of who was going to be where, when. They also had the hoot-owl IFF thing down.
Alice, and Ellie in Sig's house, disappeared from the story when the shooting started. That could have been a disaster. It seems probable that they were too close to the door when the shooting started and were probably standing.
Roger did not have a good "look" at the bad-guys because they were pasted right up tight to the front of the house. He could not move west (and see Lightning) because he would be bouncing buckshot off the front of his house. He had to stand just slightly out of the plane of the front of his house and all he could see was Davey-the-Giant.
Another issue was that Sig's house was down-range of Roger's presentation of the bad-guys. Roger's "plan" was to be very close to the porch so he was shooting upward and (hopefully) pellets that missed or passed through would arch over Sig and Blain's house.
Sig had a similar problem in his role of backing-up Roger. Sig could not really start peppering the bad guys standing on the porch because Roger was downrange.
Lightning's reaction...which was totally in-character...actually did Sig and Roger a favor. His movement meant that Roger was not down-range.
There were multitude of ways events could have gone south for either party.
Still wonder how tires got repaired from sidewall punctures, unless I read that wrong.
ReplyDeleteGonna buy several valve-core removal tools and some spare valve cores.
Boat Guy
The original story had Gregor using an ice-pick through the tread. "Punching a hole through the side-wall" was in the comments.
DeleteThey already had a plan to dispose of the bodies...about like stuffing the dead woodchuck back into the hole he came out of.
A plug kit will fix sidewall punctures. It's not pretty, and tire dealers (who are in the business of selling new tires) don't approve, but it will work.
DeleteJust my opinion, but the dogs actually seem to create a kind of paradox as fas as realism goes: from everything I've read, esp by ex-cons, and heard from a few LEO-types, there is almost no criminal alive that would dare continue a robbery, etc., attempt if he heard multiple dogs (even a gravel drive intimidates many criminals). A semi-sentient druggie . . . maybe. Anyone with enough intelligence to know how to make meth and not get into it himself, no way. A cowardly criminal even remotely familiar with that territory would know 1) dogs alert everyone and 2) hicks in the sticks all have guns (and from the drone Lightning knows that it's multiple houses, which = multiple now-allerted guns). Most likely, they'd have retreated till they could figure out a way to disable (maybe with something Techie could drop from the drone) those organic burglar alarms or picked an easier target.
ReplyDeleteJust my opinion.
Valid points.
DeleteIf the invaders had turned around and left that would have been a big win for Copperhead Cove but not as good of a story.
Could be that drone-boy was so excited at seeing those girls that he failed to recce the dogs.
ReplyDelete