by Ward III, C.
The truck slowed down to a crawl and then stopped after Victor put his foot off the brake. Reaching up to the ocular lens on the night-vision device, he adjusted the focus to read the trip meter under the speedometer. “We’ve gone almost three miles from the last turn. The next road should be coming up soon,” he reported as he refocused back on the road and began driving at an idling pace again.
Hidden in the passenger seat, Raymond was hunched over with a large winter coat over him. Tucked underneath, he read the road map with a small red LED light. “Turn left at the intersection of Washington and Square.”
“Nothing but forest, farmland, opossums, and raccoons out here. I haven’t seen a driveway for a while,” Victor observed. “It looks like that crossroad is coming up.”
“Go ahead and stop. I’ll confirm the road sign. And I have to take a leak,” Raymond said, pulling the coat over his head, stuffing it behind him, picking up his AR, and putting the sling around his neck.
The truck slowed to a stop as Victor turned the wheel left at the intersection. They both scanned the area for a minute before Raymond opened the door and got out, walking toward the road signs to confirm their location. “This is it. We’re still en route. Must be my superior navigational skills…What the hell is that?”
The sound of nearby brush cracking and road gravel scuffling overpowered the truck engine sound. The tranquil night air was split open by an ear-piercing, echoing screech. Victor scanned the trees on his side of the vehicle for movement and then toward the front, where he saw Raymond sprinting for the truck.
“Go, go, go!” Raymond said, reaching for the open truck door.
Victor put the gas pedal to the floor before Raymond was fully in. The truck tires fought for traction, spinning on the loose gravel. The truck pitched forward, shifting to the right; Victor counter steered to straighten it out, fishtailing slightly. Something impacted the tailgate from behind with a loud thud.
“What was that! I’ve never heard a Gray make a sound like that before!” Victor yelled, trying to gain speed, keeping the truck in the middle of the road.
Raymond was facing backward, sitting on his knees in the seat, but he couldn’t see a thing out the back window. “The hell if I know! It was like an effing stampede out there as soon as we stopped. Something was swarming us, but I couldn’t see a thing!”
Moonlight illuminated the dust cloud following the accelerating truck, clouding any visibility behind them. Frustrated, Raymond turned around so he was facing forward again. “Great, now I really have to piss.”
To be safe, the assumption was made that the Grayling group had full military capabilities, including thermal- and night vision. So the decision was made to cache the truck a good distance away from the base on the opposite side of a neighboring lake. They would patrol on foot from there.
Victor briefed his partner: “If we get separated, we meet back here at the truck. If the other person doesn’t show for twenty-four hours, head back to Lake City.”
“Roger that. Let’s go find us a good hide before the sun comes up,” Raymond acknowledged in a whisper, turning toward the tree line and taking point on their patrol.
Oversize backpacks bore down on their shoulders. Victor’s carried with him a change of clothes, poncho, four meals, two gallons of water, HAM radio with spare batteries, navigation gear, pistol with two spare mags, six mags of 5.56mm for his shorty AR, three mags of .308 caliber for his long gun, a ghillie suit, and the lower receiver of a Barrett M107 50 cal, which slowed him down.
The weight of all their equipment and weapons wasn’t the only thing that slowed them down. It was caution and fear. They were both frightened of shadowy predators that could be lurking in the bushes. Getting in a firefight was the least of their worries, for Victor and Raymond both had experience in conventional warfare.
Wild animals, Grays, and whatever had swarmed the road intersection earlier were a completely different story. Raymond paused their patrol often to stop, look, listen, and smell. He knelt and faced to the left; Victor knelt next to him, shoulder to shoulder, facing to the right. Before standing up to continue the patrol, he reached over to give his partner a squeeze on the shoulder.
They continued to patrol slowly through the cold, dark coppice, circling a small lake that threatened to freeze and coming to a tall chain-link fence around an airfield perimeter. Destruction of the rogue group’s leadership, capability, and willingness to fight was their primary mission. But Victor also wanted to learn more about this base. He wondered if Raymond and Victor could locate the armory, munitions bunker, or gear-supply building, or maybe seize some military vehicles to take back home. They also needed to answer a troublesome question: Were surveillance drones on this airbase?
The final checkpoint was drawing near, but with little time to spare. A disciplined infantry unit would “stand to” the hour before sunup and after sundown, because that is the most common time for enemies to attack. Victor highly doubted that this merry band of thieves had enough discipline to be a hundred percent alert during the early morning hour. But it was better to be safe than sorry.
Camp Grayling was a decent-size base. Finding a small group of individuals would be difficult. To make matters worse, it was divided into two major sections: combat training and logistics to the south and the army airfield to the north. The logical place to look would have been near the barracks, but surprisingly, they found evidence of activity near an airplane hangar on the north side. After Victor gave it some thought, lacking water and electricity, the barracks wouldn’t have been the best apocalyptic place to live.
Parked in front of the hangar were a single tan HMMWV, a fuel-transfer tanker truck, and the same eight-wheeled Stryker vehicle that had visited Lake City. Not a single sentry or guard patrol in sight. Victor suspected that they were all sleeping, secure inside the locked doors of the hangar.
He nudged Raymond. “Do you know how to drive one of those?” He tilted his head toward the light armored vehicle.
“Negative, but how hard could it be?” Raymond shrugged.
“It’s probably grunt-proof easy, but we won’t have time to figure it out once the boogaloo starts,” Victor concluded, then looked behind them. “What are you thinking for a hide site: That tree line across the airstrip or those admin buildings over there?”
“The tree line would give us more flexibility and easier escape. Although the building would give us more cover and shelter. The second story would give us a great field of view for observation.” Raymond quickly calculated the distance from the admin building to the hangar. “I’m feeling a little exposed out here in the elements. Let’s get inside.”
The long two-story concrete admin building was unlocked. Victor and Raymond dropped their packs and long guns near the back door, then cleared the building room by room, swift and silent. The lower level had been ransacked and vandalized, presumably by the young soldiers across the airstrip. Coffee pots were smashed, computer screens and keyboards thrown against doors, unit logos spray-painted on walls.
Boots crunching on broken glass, they carefully negotiated the mess and secured each exit door’s locking mechanism. Victor chose a large upstairs windowed office with adjacent rooms for their hide site. According to the numerus awards and citations decorating the dark wood-paneled wall, the office had belonged to base commander General Carter. The connecting interior office was assigned to the general’s adjunct. A fire escape across the hallway gave them multiple exit options if needed. The office chairs piled up down the hall, along with trip-wire booby traps, would provide an early warning of unwanted guests, human or otherwise. Raymond lowered the window blinds, leaving only small slits to observe through.
They sat in the dark, motionless, for almost an hour, carefully observing and listening for any sort of activity. The place was a ghost town, and they began to second-guess if they’d chosen the right location to hide.
“Well, nothing is moving, I’m pretty sure we’re secure here. We may have to r
elocate tomorrow night. I’m wide awake if you want to get some rest. It’s going to be a long day,” Raymond suggested.
As a hint of color rose in the eastern sky, Victor took advantage of the darkness to close his eyes for a bit. With his gear and rifle placed by the door for quick use, he curled up on the secretary’s small office couch, using his ghillie suit as a blanket, and closed his eyes, feeling knots begin to form in his tired legs.
A nudge woke Victor out of a heavy slumber. He could hear birds chirping, and his eyelids were heavy with sleep. Lifting the ghillie suit off his face, Raymond nodded toward the adjacent room. “We have movement outside.”
Victor rolled off the couch and crawled around a drab metal desk toward the doorway. The general’s office was not used to observe from, because even with the blinds down, the enemy could easily see movement through the window. Instead, they used the general’s office as a buffer, keeping it as dark as possible to create a mirror effect to anyone outside looking in. If the line-of-sight angle had been better, they would have preferred to stack two rooms deep for standoff. “What do we have?”
Raymond handed him a small pair of binos. “We’re in the right spot. They just now opened the hangar doors, and from the appearance, they just woke up too.”
Victor lifted the glasses to his eyes and watched several men lingering around the building, stretching and yawning. At least they parked their other vehicles inside for protection and quick response, he thought. He lowered the binos, estimating the morning sun already four fingers above the horizon.
“An hour after sunup. They are a lazy bunch, aren’t they?” Victor noted. “Uniforms are a mess too. Boots are unlaced. None of them shaved. Some in civilian shirts. Completely unsat. They are a disgrace to the uniform. I wonder if all of them were enlisted when the lights went out, or if civilians have been recruited to their renegade ranks.”
“Hard to say, but there is still not a single person on watch,” Raymond added. “They think they’re untouchable and are not expecting someone to bring the fight to them. These guys are just a bunch of bandits. Worse than that, because they should be using their training and resources to help people instead of this strong-armed mafia persona.”
On the wall hung a dry-erase board, on which Raymond had artistically drawn a detailed sketch of the nearby base, with distances to several prominent features. Apache helicopters to the right were seven hundred yards. Farther down the L-shaped runway to the right were Blackhawk helos at nine hundred seventy-five yards. A pair of radar towers directly adjacent to them on the left sat at two hundred yards. It was five hundred fifty yards to the hangar across a crumbling road and overgrown grassy area.
“No sign of drones?” Victor asked, studying the range card sketch.
“Negative. And by the looks of the flight line, I don’t think any of those birds are flying either,” Raymond whispered.
Through magnification of the binoculars, Victor surveilled the littered and overgrown runway. When this base was fully active, troops were made to walk the length of the strip, every single morning, picking up any loose trash that could be sucked into an airplane or helicopter engine. Even in the apocalypse, a pilot would demand the same flight-line cleanliness before lifting off. A thick layer of dust on the helicopter’s cockpit windows confirmed the suspicion.
“Well, we don’t have to worry about aerial threats,” Victor said nodding his head happily before he eyed Raymond questioningly. “So who was flying the drone over Lake City?”
Raymond shrugged. “Not these clowns. But that doesn’t really matter at the moment, does it? They don’t need drone surveillance to drop 81mm mortars into our homes. Hell, that means they launched them blindly without a care where they landed. They could have killed your entire family.” Raymond spat with fire in his eyes.
Any reservation Victor had about assassinating US military members had just washed away. Raymond was absolutely correct. Victor thought of all the helpless people he had aided over the past few months on such limited resources. The men loitering around the hanger could have done the same or better, but they chose to oppress the less fortunate instead. Disasters can bring out the best—and worst—in people. They weren’t just a band of menacing road pirates—they were an extremely dangerous enemy bound by values of greed and lawlessness. Their blaze of terror was about to get snuffed.
Victor nudged Raymond awake. “Our boys are back.”
Raymond squinted and rubbed the sleep from his eyes. “How long were they gone?”
“About four hours. Looks like they pillaged another town. Hummers are full of vegetables and random tools. I’m guessing that they’re tired of eating MREs,” Victor said.
Raymond used Victor’s rifle, sitting securely on top of a tripod, to scan the returning group. “How many do you count?”
“Twelve in the group that just returned, including the proclaimed leader, Sergeant Eddie Parks. Look for the only guy wearing a black beret. He split them evenly in the four Hummers; driver, truck commander, and a gunner up top,” Victor reported, tapping Raymond’s shoulder and motioning toward the dry-erase board. “He kept eight behind for working party, which locked the hangar without guard, and took four more hummers to the southern side of base. They returned a couple hours ago full of ammo cans, wooden crates, and more MRE boxes. I’m guessing they have keys to the ammo-supply point and all the other logistics buildings on the base.”
“Hmmm, those keys would be nice to have. It would have been a good time to jack that Stryker LAV,” Raymond mentioned in a whisper.
“The thought crossed my mind, too, but it would have ruined our element of surprise,” Victor added. “Where are the Grays? That’s what I don’t understand. I mean, these yahoos aren’t the quietest bunch.”
“Well, there is the ten-foot-high fence topped with concertina wire surrounding the strip. I doubt it will keep out a large horde for long though,” Raymond noted. “I wish we could raid their ASP. Imagine what we could do with some 105 artillery shells?”
Victor eyed Raymond curiously as his partner put on an expression of concentration. “Are you an artilleryman?”
“Nah, man, I’m thinking back to the postsurge insurgency in Iraq. We could plant IEDs all along Lake City’s outer perimeter. Next time these idiots—or idiots like them—come around with demands, we could simply push a button. Problem solved. Problem staying solved,” Raymond said with an evil grin.
“I always said that there’s no problem in the world big enough that a small amount of C4 explosive can’t fix,” Victor agreed.
“Exactly.” Raymond nodded. “Grab the lower receiver to the Barrett, would you?” Raymond asked, unstrapping the upper receiver and barrel from his pack and handing it to Victor. He dug into the bottom of his pack, pulling out a large box of ammo, lifting the lid and exposing massive 50 caliber bullets with a gray tip.
“M8 API rounds!” Victor whistled. “Very nice! Those will do some damage to the engine blocks of their HMMWVs.”
Raymond almost seemed giddy to bring the hate. “Yeah, buddy. 662 grains of steel-core fun and excitement, followed by an incendiary composition. Screw these guys. So what’s our plan, anyway?”
Victor watched through the binoculars as the men laughed and joked while offloading the loot they had pillaged from already-starving villagers. A couple of guys pushed out a large grill, lighting a fire of timber to cook their pilfered feast. Several bottles of whiskey were passed around as they appeared to celebrate another successful day of thuggery. He wondered how long it would take before simple rations would satisfy their lust of power. Soon, if not put into check, enslaved young women could be among their stolen treasures.
“Hit ’em hard right at dawn; use the chaos to escape and evade. We can move faster during the day than at night. Drive like hell back to town.”
Two hours before sunrise, they were packed and ready to go. Victor’s pack hung from a hook on his tripod, which the weight helped to stabilize. The windows to the general’s of
fice had been cracked open and the blinds raised slightly, permitting a clear trajectory path without obstructions.
Victor and Raymond had spent the night putting the pieces into place. Victor had wanted to attach the Claymore mine to the fuel tanker truck to create a VBIED, but with only one hundred feet of wire, it was way too close to detonate without any suitable cover. So an alternate plan to utilize the tanker was hatched.
Several holes had been cut in the fence surrounding the airstrip, with tin cans tied to the fence by a string acting as a noisemaker. They hoped to lure in Grays as a strategic weapon or to at least help mask their escape. Their goal was to create the most damage, chaos, and casualties in the shortest amount of time.
Victor looked at his watch; in about an hour and a half, the time would be right. Even with suppressors, the muzzle flash inside the building would be like a neon arrow pointing directly to their location. They would wait until there was an ample amount of civil twilight illuminating the morning sky in shades of orange and pink.
Their anxiety and nerves made them both fidget. They both scanned the area, watching for movement. Victor took northern sector, Raymond the south.
“See anything?” Victor asked, wanting conversation.
“Nah. Looks like a bunch of critters or small dogs roaming around out there. Quite a few of them, actually. They’re pretty quiet; normally you’d hear them yapping all night long,” Raymond said calmly. “Whoa, check this out! A target of opportunity,” he hissed.
Victor looked through his riflescope, illuminated by the attached night-vision device. A man pulled open the large hangar door, which moaned in the silence of night. He stumbled outside with a red lens flashlight, presumably still drunk from the festivities, staggered to the far side of the hangar, and relieved himself in the grass.
“He left the door open, man,” Raymond reported. “Shit, is he wearing a beret?”