I squatted down, and Jackie climbed up onto my shoulders, then stretched up and peered in through the dirty glass. After a moment, she reported, “I don’t see anyone, but there’s something set facing the door, just out of the range of its swing.”
“Any idea what it is?” I asked.
“Let me back down,” she said. “I’ll try to draw it.”
“Okay.” I eased back down, and she slid down.
“I mostly just saw a shadow,” Jackie told me as she knelt down and sketched a rectangular shape in the dirt. “Something like that.”
“Shit,” I muttered. “You’ve seen those before, remember? At least, I’m pretty damn sure that’s what it is.”
“One of those, oh,” she said, her brow furrowed. “Claymore mines?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Son of a bitch. They were here.”
“Who?”
“I told you about the guys that tried to take us out in Atlanta,” I started walking away. “I think they worked for this guy, Price. If Hunter was connected with them, then likely they knew about the farm and us. I’ll bet they camped here while they were scouting, and our flyover with the chopper made them leave.”
“But,” Jackie continued, “they left a trap for us.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m going to check the other buildings.”
One by one, we had a closer look at the generator building, the processing shed, and lastly, the outhouse. Every building but the outhouse had a door wired with a claymore. Knowing they were there gave me the information I needed to disarm the things. Each one had been set on a tripwire that would pull-activate the firing device. Cutting the tripwire let us bypass the mines.
“Umm, Henry?” Jackie was pale as she said my name.
“What?” I looked curiously at her. She’d gone to check the open latrine while I took care of the shed.
“There’s one in there,” she said softly. “Down the hole.”
“Damn,” I exclaimed. “That’s just mean.”
“I’m not sure what trips it,” she told me. “I just kind of had to pee, but I took a look before I sat down, and I’m really glad I did.”
I pulled her into a tight hug, anger surging through me. Just one wrong step and I could have lost her. This was a terrifyingly close call.
“I don’t have to pee anymore,” she said, her voice muffled by my shoulder as she clung to me.
When we went to check, we found that the one in the outhouse was set up to fire when someone sat down. The wide-open door had been the lure, meant to draw a possible victim in through seeming normalcy. I disarmed and carefully retrieved the thing.
In Afghanistan, it hadn’t been hard to get secondary training in EOD, considering how frequently insurgents used improvised explosive devices. We’d also been trained on our own devices, like claymores, which included setting and disabling. Once again, I was really glad of my service time, although I never figured I’d be using these skills once I finished my tours.
The cabin had obviously been a bivouac for a few days. There was no clue as to how many people had camped there, but we found little pieces of evidence confirming my suspicions. The small fireplace had been recently used, and fresh trash was in the old plastic can, including some soup cans that still smelled of gravy.
They’d left the processing shed alone, except for booby-trapping it, but the generator had been disabled. Someone cut the fuel lines and pulled out all the electrical wires. I could fix it, of course, but I’d need time and parts, and the fuel had probably been pissed in, or something equally annoying.
Outside, we regrouped a bit and gazed around at the camp.
“So, what do we know?” Jackie asked.
“An unknown number of people camped here for at least a couple of days,” I said. “I expect they left suddenly. Probably after our flyover. I’m kind of surprised I didn’t see their vehicle, but they might have had it camouflaged or hidden in the woods.”
“They could have been out scouting in it, too,” she suggested.
“True. The traps suggest they were hostile and expected someone to come to investigate the place, and they might have waited to spring an ambush, too.” I barked a mirthless laugh. “Maybe we avoided the worst because I forgot about this place for a few days.”
“Maybe,” Jackie said. “Whoever they were, they’re gone now, right?”
“I hope so,” I said. “Now that the weather’s clear, I think I’ll get Gene to take me on a patrol. Maybe I’ll get you and Angie to come along. You can play copilot, and we’ll be gunners.”
Jackie’s eyes went wide as she asked, “You want to kill them?”
“No,” I replied, “but they’re dangerous, and they could have killed someone I cared about. I really want to either capture them or drive them off.”
“I…” she said slowly. “I think I can get behind that. This isn’t right.”
“No,” I said. “It’s not.”
I had a moment of clarity right then and there. As much as I wanted this new world to be perfect, it wasn’t. There were still bad people, and now I’d been the object of two of them. Maybe there wasn’t anything personal about the two attacks. Maybe they hadn’t been sanctioned or ordered.
Hell, maybe Price wasn’t even the one behind them, but if he was, and I could prove it, there would be war between us.
Jackie looked at me, then smiled, stepped in, and kissed me warmly, her arms on my shoulders. I rested my hands on her hips.
For Jackie, Angie, Estelle, Gwen, the kids, and the others, I would move heaven and earth. I might not be trained for guerilla combat and insurgency, but I was a mechanic and an engineer. There were things I could do that special forces could not. For the people I cared about, I’d do them.
Jackie broke the kiss and smiled up at me. Then, once again, her eyes went wide, and her expression changed from love to concern. “Henry,” she whispered. “Is that one of Penny’s?”
I twisted around to look where she now pointed. Just above the treeline, a drone hovered. How long it had been there was anyone’s guess, but as we looked at it, it moved backward and disappeared from view.
“Shit,” I swore. “No.”
Grabbing her hand, I started moving. “Back to the truck!”
A scant moment later, someone opened fire from the treeline, their shots kicking up dirt just behind our running feet.
36
Jackie outdistanced me and hit the treeline a second before I did. She dove prone and vanished, and I followed. The shots stopped after a few more splintered wood, showering both of us with bits of bark.
We stayed down and rolled behind separate trees within about four feet of each other. I shifted my AR-15 to ready and peeked around the trunk, sweeping the rifle over the clearing.
Nothing. I wondered where the bastard was hiding. He probably had a blind on the other side of the clearing, but if he did, why hadn’t he tried to take us out while we investigated the buildings?
Unless he hadn’t actually been nearby and was just using the drone to watch. If he saw us and had to hurry here, then where had he been? Hell, was there more than one shooter out there?
Jackie copied me, using the scope on her .308 to seek our foe. I just watched for movement, or, failing that, a muzzle flash if the person took a shot.
The drone buzzed back over the treetops and dropped down in the center of the clearing, beginning a slow rotation as it scanned the treeline. That was a clever usage. We would reveal ourselves by taking a shot at the drone, or it might find us with the camera. Either way, we were in trouble, especially if this guy had heavier weapons than whatever rifle he was using.
At a guess, he was firing 5.56, which meant an AR or CAR. I suspected a semi-automatic since the rate of fire hadn’t sounded like burst or automatic fire.
I glanced over at Jackie, she looked at me, smiled and mouthed, “Get ready to move.”
What the hell did she have in mind?
She raised her rifle and sighted through the
scope.
Oh, shit. Clever girl.
I shifted and got ready to move like she wanted. A moment later, a single .308 shot cracked loudly in the silent woods. Part of the drone blew off in a spray of plastic, and it spun in place before doing a little death whirl off into one of the steel buildings.
Leaping to my feet, I took off in one direction, while Jackie took off in the other. It took a moment, but wild shots erupted from the woods about one-third of the way around the clearing. They tore through the foliage where we’d been hiding. Now, I had a target.
I was convinced that it was only a single shooter now. The gap between the drone getting shot and the timing of the shots he took implied that he’d been the one operating the device as well.
So I crept my way through the woods. I didn’t know if our enemy would move or sit tight. No more shots came as I kept going, staying low and alert, moving from cover to cover. How we’d missed each other during our circuit of the clearing, I didn’t know. That seemed to be more evidence that the shooter hadn’t been here when we arrived.
As I closed in on the spot where the shots came from, I drifted carefully deeper into the forest. It was a known fact that people tended to ignore cover at their backs. Sometimes it was impossible to ensure that you couldn’t be seen from every direction, or sometimes you had lots of available hiding places. Staying quiet and still was the key.
I paused and put my back to a pine tree, then closed my eyes and listened. The wildlife was quiet, and I easily tuned out the soft whisper of the breeze. Suddenly, a squirrel barked from a tree not too far ahead on my path. I stayed how I was, then heard a soft curse and the hiss of leaves as someone up ahead shifted position. He was close.
Once I had a general idea of where he might be, I risked a look around the tree trunk. It wasn’t the person I was looking for. It was the squirrel. Up on a limb about twenty yards or so from my position, a grey squirrel continued to bark its warning at something down below.
Hopefully, Jackie wasn’t too close. I fumbled around for a couple of old pinecones, then slipped out of cover long enough to toss them into the area beyond the squirrel, and behind where I thought I’d heard a person moving.
As I’d hoped, he started shooting out of surprise, and I headed straight for his position. Rounding a tree, I came face to face with a heavyset man, bearded and round-faced, wearing disheveled digital forest camouflage, and holding a tricked-out, tacticool AR-15 of some variety. He let out a yelp and started to swing his weapon in my direction.
“Drop it,” I said, pointing my own, far more utilitarian AR-15 right between his eyes.
For a moment, he froze, and I could tell that he was trying to decide if he could get out of the way and fire on me. Brush crashed behind him, and Jackie emerged, .308 at the ready.
“Do it,” she said brightly. Then, from the bushes next to her, the sleek, dusty brown form of Goldeneye emerged, his eyes focused on the shooter.
Holy shit, the coywolf had stuck around. I wondered for a moment how he’d known where we were, but then, it could just have been chance. Or maybe he had been watching this newcomer himself.
“Oh crap, oh crap,” the man said, dropping his rifle as he raised his hands. The strap tangled around his arm, and the whole mess dangled from his elbow.
“You got him?” I asked Jackie.
“Yes, sir,” she replied, and the coywolf let out a low growl as if he were answering me too.
I really hoped that wasn’t what I smelled when I lowered my weapon and relieved the bearded fellow of his rifle, then his sidearm and a big, truck stop bowie knife. On the ground nearby was a tablet control rig for a drone. I had been right.
Once I finished disarming the fellow, I stepped back and asked, “Have you got any other weapons to declare?”
Apparently seeing that we had everything under control, Goldeneye faded into the brush and vanished. Jackie shifted a bit so that the man could see her, too.
He looked at us both and started laughing.
“What’s so funny?” Jackie demanded.
“Oh, nothing.” The man tried to stifle his snickers.
“I’m gonna shoot him,” I said.
“Okay,” Jackie said.
That was totally unexpected, but it worked. As I raised my rifle, the man bowed his head and started whimpering, “Please don’t shoot me,” over and over.
“What’s your name?” I asked firmly, keeping that steely tone to my voice.
“Samuel Rosenthal,” he answered, sniffling.
“Okay, Sam,” I said. “What’s a good Jewish boy like you doing out shooting at people in the Alabama woods?”
“I had to,” he blubbered. “Sergeant Wilcox said to keep anyone who showed up at the camp pinned down. I was watching with the drone from about a mile that way and headed over soon as I saw you.” Samuel looked between us and sniffled again. “Why d'you have to shoot Elaine?”
“Elaine?” I asked.
“My drone,” he replied.
He named his drone. The thought locked my mind up for just a moment. I knew infantrymen who named their guns, pilots who named their planes. Maybe it wasn’t the strangest thing I ever heard, but still.
“Are you service?” I asked, my AR-15 hadn’t wavered.
Samuel shook his head. “Nossir,” he replied. “The other guys were, or are, or something. They use ranks and everything.”
“I figured as much when you said Sergeant Wilcox,” I grumbled. “What the hell are you doing here? Why the secrecy?”
“We were supposed to observe from afar,” Samuel replied. “We had drones, and we were watching your farm. The other day, though, you flew over in that helicopter.”
“You saw we had that, too?” Jackie asked.
“We did,” he said, nodding vigorously. “And all the new people. Yesterday, we got a report that contact was lost with our team in Atlanta, and then you left. With just girls, kids, and an old man left behind, the Sergeant figured he could take the farm really quick and use that to bargain with you.”
He suddenly clamped his hands over his mouth.
“Oh God,” the man said. “He’s gonna kill me.”
“They’re on their way to the farm?” I demanded, anger rising in my chest.
“They’re probably already there,” Samuel answered forlornly.
“Go,” Jackie said suddenly. “I’ve got Rosenthal here. Once I secure him, I’ll be along.”
“But you don’t have a car,” I said.
“I have a four-wheeler,” Samuel offered. “Back at the blind.”
Of course, they had a blind.
“If you’re sure,” I said. “We could just shoot him and go.”
Jackie smiled and shook her head. “I’ve got this, Henry. Go.”
I went.
With proper motivation, you can run pretty damn fast through the woods. I took off towards the dirt road, dodging trees and bushes as I hauled ass towards the truck. It occurred to me as I ran that I had no idea how many people were headed to the farm, or how they were armed. I had my AR-15 and my Les Baer, but I wasn’t packing more than a couple of extra magazines for each. It had to be enough.
Hopefully, the early warning system would do what it was supposed to. Otherwise, the homestead was nothing more than a bunch of sitting ducks waiting for the punt gun to go off.
Still, though, Angie was there, and Gene. Maybe even Susan. Those three all had military experience, but I really didn’t know if they’d actually seen combat. Still, any hope was better than none. I leaped a deadfall and landed on the muddy dirt road. My boots skidded a little, but I caught myself and headed up towards the main road and the truck.
Then another shape emerged from the bushes, leaping clear over them to join my run. I almost took a tumble again, but grinned and didn’t question things as Goldeneye joined me, loping along with his pink tongue lolling. He leaped into the bed of the truck as I ran around to the driver’s side, started it up, and floored the accelerator while yanking t
he wheel hard to the left.
The rear tires spun and kicked up dirt as the truck slewed around. The front wheels caught the pavement and yanked us around, but then we were on the road and accelerating towards the farm. If I’d known a more direct, cross country route, I’d have taken it. As it was, I drove pretty damn recklessly, much to the coywolf’s annoyance, I was sure.
He’d probably never ride in the back of my truck ever again.
Sure, it was weird that the big canine had joined me, but Jackie said he was smart, and maybe he felt he owed us for helping him out. He had lost the challenge to the young woman, but I really didn’t think animals were that intelligent. Hell, maybe they were. I wasn’t going to complain, so long as he was coming to help and not just hitching a ride.
Scenery rushed by in a blur as I approached the turn onto the road leading towards the interstate. I braked hard, then accelerated into the turn without looking either way. Goldeneye complained from the bed as he was thrown around, then crouched down and braced himself.
I had one focus, and that was getting home. Hopefully, I’d make it in time.
The hunting lodge was about five miles directly from the farm, but it was about a ten-mile jaunt by actual road. I braked again as I came up on the turn for our road. If this was the war these men wanted, then I’d give it to them. Up ahead, a humvee blocked the road. I slammed on the brakes as the lookout at the machinegun whirled to spy me.
Instead of charging, I turned the truck off-road, plowed through some undergrowth, broke part of a pasture fence, and ended up in the far eastern section of the farm. Abandoning the truck, I got out and ran towards the distant farmhouse. Gunfire and shouts came from up ahead, and a machinegun rattled back on the road.
Goldeneye loped along with me as I passed the cows heading the other way. Apparently, they knew enough to move away from the sound of gunfire. Me, not so much. Hopefully, my crazy driving threw them off at least enough to let me get close. The humvee was probably reporting incoming as I vaulted the fence and took cover behind a large oak tree.
After The Virus (Book 2): Homesteading Page 26