Chapter 1412: Going deep into enemy-occupied areas
Morgan has been staying in Sanya for the past few years, and his work mainly focuses on training medical staff. Although he is also responsible for the selection and training of snipers, due to the environment in Sanya, there are very few opportunities to guide students under battlefield conditions. Even for himself, he will gradually lose the feeling of fighting because he has been separated from the troops and the combat environment for too long.
Fortunately, Morgan was alone and had no family burdens. After handing over the affairs of the medical department to Johnson, he was free to concentrate on leading the troops in the war. While leading the students to practice techniques and tactics, he himself was also in a process of constant recovery.
The M200 sniper rifle, known as the "Grim Reaper", that he brought over when he traveled through time. Because the ammunition stock was getting less and less, he rarely used it anymore and basically kept it at home as a collection. The main weapon Morgan uses now is, like other snipers, a homemade sniper rifle produced in this time and space. Of course, due to his special status, his rifle is also a highly customized and unique version. There are still many differences from the mass-produced model. For example, the gun is specially designed to install the sight he brought from another time and space. A base was made, and the dimensions of the rifle were tailored to his size and personal usage habits.
Morgan spent nearly an hour examining the terrain of this hill, selected several locations with good views as alternative firepower points, and drafted two retreat routes.
The lunch of the sniper team is very simple, just cold water and dry food. Everyone is the same, even Morgan is no exception. Although the logistics department of the Ministry of National Defense also prepared self-heating military rations for frontline field troops, Morgan did not want to carry too much extra weight during this mission, so he did not choose self-heating military rations with heating packs. Fortunately, this field mission will not last long, and I can survive by eating dry food for a few days.
After eating and taking a short rest, everyone gathered together and set off again. Before walking out of the forest, Morgan used his telescope to carefully confirm that there was no trace of the Hou Jin Army within a visible radius of several miles, and then ordered to continue moving northeast.
The rest of the journey is an area that the Haihan Army has never explored before. Even last year, the Marine Corps pretended to attack the Jinzhou Isthmus and faced off with the Hou Jin Army for several days, but it did not launch activities in this area. The military only relied on the military maps of the Ming Dynasty that were collected with great difficulty, as well as descriptions of the soldiers and civilians of Liaodong, plus the satellite maps in the Sanya database, to roughly depict the topography here. However, the satellite maps that the military referenced were hundreds of years later. There must be changes in the terrain during this period, so Morgan can only use it as a reference, and the specific situation still needs to be manually explored bit by bit to master.
And here is getting closer and closer to the Jinzhou base camp of the Hou Jin Army, so the possibility of the appearance of the Hou Jin patrol team naturally increases. If Morgan wants to lead a sniper team through this area without losing any blood, the risks will increase a lot. The team would stop every few hundred meters to use telescopes to observe the surroundings to ensure that possible enemy troops could be spotted at the first opportunity and to take concealment measures in advance.
Half an hour after setting off, Morgan finally spotted the first Houjin patrol he encountered today in his telescope. Judging from the direction of travel, they were heading towards the hill where the sniper team stopped to rest in the morning. However, before Morgan left, he carefully ordered his soldiers to remove all traces so that the Houjin people who patrolled there would not discover his whereabouts.
The sniper team did not attempt to launch a surprise attack on the patrol. Instead, they avoided the opponent's route in advance and hid in the snowy field. They wear camouflage clothes with gray and white as the base color. As long as they keep their bodies low and don't move, it is difficult to detect their presence from a little distance.
Because they reacted in advance, the Houjin patrol did not notice the presence of the sniper team at all and went straight south. Morgan confirmed from the telescope that this patrol had three cavalry and nine steps, a total of twelve people, and the number was similar to his team. However, Morgan did not intend to take action against this patrol. It would not be a problem to kill these Houjin soldiers, but he could not confirm whether there were other Houjin patrols nearby. Shooting might cause greater trouble. Moreover, there is not much shelter on this plain, and it is quite troublesome to quickly dispose of more than a dozen corpses.
After the Houjin patrol slowly moved away in the snow, Morgan signaled the sniper team to emerge from their respective hiding places, and then continued to move north. Morgan knew that from this moment on, the sniper team had officially entered the enemy-occupied area, and that they might encounter the Houjin Army more frequently in the future, so he was extremely cautious at the moment.
Although Haihan had fought against the Hou Jin Army on land several times, he did not have a traceable pattern for the enemy's patrol arrangements. According to the confessions of prisoners, the arrangements of the Hou Jin Army in this regard basically depended on the commander, and there was no definite regulation. Some officers attach great importance to peripheral defense and will arrange relatively intensive patrols, and even send small teams out to carry out alert defense twenty or thirty miles away from the camp; while some careless officers may only arrange some alerts near the camp. Damn, I won't spend too much time on this.
Morgan didn't find this strange. After all, in his eyes, the Jin army was still a relatively primitive armed form. In terms of the completeness of the military system and command system, it was far inferior to the Ming Dynasty. However, the Hou Jin Army also has its own unique strengths, which is its extremely high field mobility. The Later Jin army relied on this characteristic to defeat the Ming Dynasty, which could only be trapped in the city and did not dare to engage in large-scale field battles with it. It was in a passive position for a long time. In terms of land mobility, even the Haihan Army, which has fought all over the Far East, dare not say that it can defeat the opponent of the Houjin Army.
Haihan's own cavalry troops are both small and expensive, and it is impossible to draw them out to fight a war of attrition with Hou Jin. Therefore, in large-scale field battles, Haihan cannot expect his own cavalry troops to play a big role. Just to contain the opponent. However, in the small-scale reconnaissance and cavalry confrontation, the Haihan cavalry had obvious equipment advantages, which also caused Hou Jin to suffer some hardships in the confrontation before winter.
According to the recent observations of the special operations battalion, Houjin has rarely sent out a whole team of cavalry for patrol and reconnaissance tasks. They usually use a combination of infantry and cavalry. Morgan believes that this may be due to the cavalry stationed in Jinzhou at Lushun and Jinzhou Isthmus. The consequences of heavy losses in the battle. The Houjin patrol encountered just now also confirmed the accuracy of the special operations battalion's intelligence, which is good news for the sniper team's operations.
After walking cautiously in the snowy wilderness for about three hours, Morgan confirmed the second target location of the trip through the telescope. There is also a hilly area ahead, and the area is larger than the place we stayed before. This hilly area is located on the west coast of the peninsula, and the raised terrain extends all the way to the seaside and submerges into the Bohai Sea. This place is only three or four miles away from the narrowest section of the Golden State Isthmus. It can be said that it has entered the preset battlefield area for the Haihan Spring Offensive. It is also the key area for Morgan's inspection.
If this place is used well, it can not only be used as a firepower point for snipers from high above, but it can also be turned into a forward position that is easy to defend and difficult to attack, allowing Haihan's participating troops to complete their assembly here. Of course, as one of the few commanding heights nearby, Morgan believed that the Hou Jin Army would definitely realize the strategic value of this place, and perhaps have already established an armed stronghold here earlier. Therefore, he did not rush to get close to the hill. Instead, he directed the sniper team to stop more than a mile away, each found a bunker to hide, and first used telescopes to conduct detailed observations of the target area from a long distance.
In this snowy weather, it is difficult to observe the situation in the mountains and forests from a distance of more than a mile, even with sharp tools such as telescopes, to achieve ideal results. So Morgan gave up after trying for a while. No matter how powerful he was, he couldn't see clearly the situation in the distance through the falling snowflakes. This place was no better than the previous place, and the possibility of Hou Jin stationing troops here was much greater. Morgan did not dare to act rashly, and could only wait patiently for the sky to darken before taking action.
The group of people waited for a long time. Although they were wearing a lot of clothes, their hands and feet were still numb from the cold because they had not been moving for a long time. Fortunately, everyone carries ginger slices, chili peppers, spirits and other warming things with them, and they take a sip from time to time to keep themselves warm. After persisting like this until the sky darkened, the sniper team cautiously moved towards the hills. Morgan turned on his night vision goggles, and after approaching, he confirmed that there were no enemies lurking in the night within his field of vision, and then he used bird calls to signal the team to quickly enter the forest.
Everyone formed a long snake formation in the forest to obtain the maximum surveillance range, and then slowly moved forward. After climbing to a high place, Morgan could already see the enemy within his field of vision without having to put on his night vision goggles again.
There were three fires burning in a mountain col on the downhill side, and there were more than ten tents nearby. There are several private houses not far away, and lights can be seen shining through them. It seems that this place is like a stronghold set up by Hou Jin, but it is far away and it is difficult to see how many people are vaguely active in that place.
Morgan secretly rejoiced that the Jin army had obviously found a place to camp in the leeward direction, but they did not set up a lookout post high on the hills, so they were able to catch him so easily. If the opponent arranges a few sentries at a high place, although it may not be able to hide them from Morgan's night vision goggles, it will take a lot of effort for the sniper team to get close enough to deal with the sentries.
The other party obviously did not expect that Haihan soldiers would cross the plain area of more than 20 miles to reach this place, and had no precautions against the south direction. Morgan judged the situation between the enemy and ourselves, and felt that it was impossible to deal with the enemies at the foot of the mountain silently. As long as their whereabouts were exposed, they would be alerted, and the safety of the retreat route could not be guaranteed, so he suppressed the idea of taking action.
However, he was also a very brave man. Although he discovered that the enemy troops were stationed nearby for disaster relief, he did not intend to evacuate the place immediately at night. This trip took a huge risk to come here, but Morgan still hopes to understand the surrounding situation before leaving. After thinking for a moment, he chose to lead the team around to the seaside side of the hill. In the past, because Haihan did not want to alarm the Ming Dynasty, he launched raids on the Liaodong Peninsula from the sea in the Yellow Sea and did not allow the fleet to sail into the Bohai Sea. Therefore, Morgan believed that the coastline of the Bohai Sea might be a defensive blind spot for the Jin army.
The foothold Morgan finally chose was separated from Houjin's stronghold by a mountain ridge less than 100 meters high, and a sentry post was placed on the mountain ridge to monitor the movements of Houjin's stronghold. Others, under his leadership, quickly set up a temporary camp in the forest.
When the sniper team set off, they only brought a special marching tent, which consisted of two shrink poles, a large piece of waterproof canvas, an oilcloth floor mat and several lengths of rope. When setting up, the poles were used to hold up the middle section of the canvas, and then connected with The ropes of the canvas are pulled to nearby trees, and the stress points of the canvas are dispersed. Then the canvas and floor mats are fixed with ground nails and the job is done. Although this triangular tent has a simple structure, it can accommodate more than ten people when it is set up, and the force is dispersed and is not easily collapsed by the snow. It is a field equipment specially developed by the logistics department for the Liaodong operation. The sniper team can be regarded as The first trial users.
In addition, each member of the team was equipped with a camping sleeping bag with a duck down lining. Without this, Morgan would not have dared to take this group of men to camp overnight in the wilderness at temperatures of ten or twenty degrees below zero. It was the first time for the two soldiers from the special operations battalion who were traveling with me to enjoy this thing. It was considered as a favor to the sniper team. After sleeping in it, they couldn't help but marveled. They felt that this thing was indeed much more convenient than a quilt.
"Silence! Go to sleep immediately, and don't snore at night!" After Morgan whispered the order, the tent immediately became quiet. Although you can't control snoring at all, with so many people crowded in a tent, anyone who hears it can try to stop the person concerned from continuing to snore.
In order to prevent the sentries on duty on the mountain ridge from being overwhelmed, Morgan set a guard changing time of every two hours, so that everyone could take turns and rest for a few hours. He believed that the Hou Jin Army on the other side of the mountain ridge would not be idle until midnight to patrol the mountain, so he soon fell asleep confidently and boldly.
Before dawn, the sniper team had already woken up and packed their bags quietly. Regardless of whether he leaves this place today or not, Morgan doesn't want to leave any trace here.
Everyone silently drank the cold water in the kettle that was kept unfrozen by body temperature, ate some dry food, and even finished their breakfast. Then Morgan led the team back to the mountain ridge to observe the enemy's movements below the mountain.
(End of chapter)