Guns for Writers: Part 45

Our old friend Czja asks one of those sorts of questions that by itself could be the subject of an entire blog.

Question: [in my story], my men are about to rescue a woman being held captive as a sex slave. The place is rural Wisconsin on a 450-acre compound, with four armed posts, three guards at each post. There are four men on the rescue raid. One is a retired cop from Chicago, so he has a .22 and a .45. The others are average joes, but they have a decent amount of disposable income. The time is January 1973.

They are going to strike at around 3 A.M. and the raid will be over by dawn's early light. They are going to have to get through some steel-reinforced locked doors. They have snowshoes and a couple of snowmobiles at their disposal.

What kind of guns and supplies should they be carrying?

I have some ideas, but before I get to them, I want to direct your attention to a really cool website: the U.S. Naval Observatory (http://aa.usno.navy.mil/). In particular, I'm fond of this little web tool on the USNO site, which enables you to calculate the moon phase and local sunrise, sunset, moonrise, and moonset for pretty much any date and pretty much any location on the face of the Earth. Want to know what the phase of the moon was when Washington crossed the Delaware? With this site, you can find out. (Of course, what this site won't tell you is that it was raining in Trenton that night, so Washington couldn't see that the Moon was just one day past full.)

And with that said, the topic is now open for discussion. What should Czja's rescue party be packing?