No need to go hunting for the sentinel post. We were still more than a mile away when Sonia reported in over our coms. “I see smoke up in the air.” Ten minutes later, we could all see what used to be the lookout post on top of an old shed clearly—because the whole building was on fire. Nate debated simply going on but then had us swarm out around the area to investigate. When nobody shot at the cars, we got out to check on foot—the drivers the marked exception to that. I gnashed my teeth while I waited an endless fifteen minutes until I saw Nate hoof it back to the car, not exactly stealthy.
“All dead,” he told me as he got back in the passenger side. “I can’t say more because the bodies are charred beyond recognition, but looks like someone doused them in accelerant to make sure we wouldn’t find any traces or could guess at their cause of death. There are no bullet holes that we could see, but since everything’s pretty much burnt down to the ground, they’d be easy to miss.”
I wondered if I should have suggested that we stay to make sure the fire couldn’t spread, but since that was the last thing I wanted to do, I kept my trap shut.
“Where to next?” I asked instead.
“The town,” Nate said simply. “Or as close as we’ll get.”
A few minutes later, both other groups signed in, reporting similar findings. So similar, in fact, that I got the suspicion that whoever had torched the outposts had waited to set the stage for us. Nate gave them the same orders as me, and while I still hated that we were now four cars on our own again, it also set my mind slightly at ease. If they were waiting for us, they’d also had time aplenty to booby-trap all available roads leading to our destination. The more spread out we were, the better the chances of not getting blown to smithereens all in the same instant.
I could only imagine how much worse the handful of people from the settlement must have been feeling when I was already driving on figurative pins and needles.
Unlike the first smaller settlement that we’d helped build, the current one was directly at the coast and easily visible from a distance. On my first and only visit there two months ago, it had been easy to see why Zilinsky had chosen the spot, besides the fact that there had once been a small town there that they had been able to convert to their specific needs: the entire plain leading up to the sea was one gigantic kill zone. Built in a more or less circular fashion, the palisades that served as the town borders now could easily be held by a handful of people if they just had the right kind of weapons and enough ammo for days. Good snipers could easily shoot out the engine blocks of advancing cars at more than a mile’s range, maybe even two. Forcing advancing troops to go on foot easily bought the defenders another twenty to thirty minutes to get ready for the shooting-fish-in-a-barrel action.
I had certain concerns that what had once been a great plan of defense might come to bite us in the ass now.
We were still twenty miles outside of that very kill zone when the sun disappeared into the ocean, leaving us at a clear advantage since we had enough people between us to drive in the dark and not give away our position from miles away. I couldn’t help but feel that must have been part of Nate’s plan—and a good trade-off for the extra exhaustion all of us were rocking, if it meant that we were harder to spot. Split into three groups that were, in themselves, not driving in convoys but with careful distance between the vehicles, I gave us a one-in-three chance to get close enough where the inevitable sounds our cars made would give us away rather than anything else.
“Are we sure this is the only way in?” I asked Nate as I continued to inch the car forward, wincing whenever something on the uneven ground made the vehicle rock, thus making the frame groan slightly.
He cast me a sidelong glance. “Like what? Swim around to their dock? In full gear, without getting the weapons wet? That’s a great way to drown.”
“What if we walk?” I suggested. “We’d be much more silent than in the cars. We might not trigger any alerts, and there’s a much better chance for every individual not to get shot, or become collateral damage in a car hit.” I knew he must have considered that option, but I just had to ask. Did I want to spend two to three hours possibly crawling across dust, gravel, and get stuck in prairie grass and cacti? Not necessarily, but I was only just getting used to not having a hole in my hide.
I was surprised when Nate didn’t shoot me down right away. “They had time enough to stage the sentries,” he pointed out. “If it was me, I’d have mined the plains before that, or at the very least added barbed wire or some other nasty shit like that.”
It was a possibility—and I felt vaguely stupid for not having considered that.
“You actually want to do a bull rush instead?” I ventured a guess.
“I… don’t know,” Nate ground out, each syllable laced with frustration. When I actually turned my head to fully look at him—that admission certainly warranted it—he grimaced. “I’m not shooting down your suggestion. But I don’t have a satisfying answer. I don’t remember the last time I’ve been in a position where I’ve had no intel and no contingency plans. We have nothing—absolutely nothing—to go on, and the fact that I haven’t heard anything from two of my best scouts and fighters doesn’t make this any easier.”
I really didn’t like how panic started licking up my spine at his words. “We went in blind with Dallas, too,” I said. “France as well. Sure, we had blueprints for the France lab, but no fucking clue what was waiting for us.” He glared at me as if I’d called him a liar, making me scramble mentally for another angle. “But you already know that. What makes this different?”
The pause that followed was long enough to make my skin crawl, and seeing the utter frustration in Nate’s expression was bad enough, but then I realized what else was in there: fear. And that wasn’t something I ever wanted to see from him.
“I don’t know,” he repeated more vehemently now. “I don’t trust myself. My instincts. I know my gut reaction is the one thing I can always rely on, but Decker got under my skin. He’s the one who created most of my fallback reactions. He can guess at what I will do better than anyone else. How am I supposed to outsmart the one man who taught me how to outsmart anyone else?”
A different kind of light bulb went off in my head at that sentence. “That’s why you’ve become so chummy with Hamilton, right? You two have been trying to hash this all out. To find the impossible needle in the haystack.”
Nate didn’t look particularly happy at my exclamation. “You’re my needle,” he assessed. “And I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but it galls him to no end that he has to agree with me on that. Not that it helps us much, seeing as everything you come up with is textbook protocol that I’ve hammered into your head for years.”
“See, that’s why you refrain from mindfucking your wife,” I told him succinctly, but my hint of triumph was short-lived. “Let’s think about this again. We know they must have more people than we do; else they couldn’t have overwhelmed everyone swiftly and silently, including our vanguard, the sentries, and the scavengers that went snooping for intel.”
A muscle twitched in Nate’s jaw. “All it takes for that is a small, very efficient embedded strike force,” he pointed out. “If people trust them and never suspect they’re moles, they’d have an easy time to overwhelm key personnel swiftly without giving everyone else a chance to rally.”
“But they must have more support, or else they couldn’t have held their position,” I objected. “Unless they slit everyone’s throat, someone would have managed to either send us a warning, or set said key personnel free.”
Nate mulled that over briefly. “Hate to say it, but I agree with you.”
“That bad that I’m right?” I teased.
I got a deadpan stare back. “It means we’re likely facing twice as many people. I always prefer a smaller opposition.”
“Spoilsport,” I muttered under my breath, but did my best to focus back on the question. “We assume they had time to mine the kill zone in front of t
he town. With what explosives? And wouldn’t that hinder them just as much if they had to beat a quick retreat?”
“Who says they are planning for a retreat?” I didn’t like Nate’s question at all—or rather, the implications—and he gave me a wry grin for my frown. “Even efficient, they must have bled heavily to gain the upper hand. They know we’re coming for them. They must have known that coming for our civvies will turn us much less receptive to taking prisoners than we otherwise might be. This is a suicide mission for them—and not one they plan on beating the odds and coming back from. People are twice as deadly when they are fighting with their backs against the wall and their only objective is to take as many with them as possible.”
“What you’re really saying is that they wouldn’t have taken prisoners, either.” Damn, but I hated to be right.
He nodded slowly. “Only to use them against us,” Nate professed. “And drive the stake even deeper into our hearts. But you have a point there.”
“Which is?” I didn’t have to feign surprise.
He offered up another mirthless grin. “Knowing Zilinsky as I do, she wouldn’t have kept explosives in the town to prevent a situation like this from getting even worse. They would have had to take everything they’d want to use with them, and I doubt they had much room for that, considering they already needed to cram people, gear, weapons, and ammo into their vehicles.”
“Unless they got there by boat,” I objected.
He shook his head with barely any consideration. “I’m sure they had their port closed for everything short of triple-checked cargo ships pre-arranged through New Angeles. If we figured out the fertilizer scheme, I’m sure others must have at least suspected as much.”
I considered that for a while. “That means they probably just mined the most likely entry vectors—the main road to the gate, and the stretches around the two smaller entryways by the guard towers inside the palisade. Plus the very ends where the town borders the sea. If we stay to the stretches of land in between, we’ll probably be fine.”
Nate snorted. “I hate to bet my life on ‘probably,’” he admitted.
“Yeah, well, so do I, but it looks like that’s our best way in.” I didn’t exactly jeer, but it did make the most sense.
“Probably,” he echoed, making me roll my eyes. More seriously, he added, “But I’d also drop some mines right in the middle of those middle swaths, just to fuck with people who think they can outsmart me.”
“Would be too easy if they didn’t,” I offered. “So how do we do this? Risk detection at the three-mile-mark and drive until we absolutely have to exit the cars, or get out now in favor of stealth and spend half the night walking up to the kill zone?”
Not much consideration was needed. “We walk,” Nate ordered—and I didn’t miss that conviction had, for the most part, replaced his previous trepidation. “Pack lightly. We only need weapons and ammo—and we will replenish our stores on the go. Needing to make a mad dash for the town will be more likely than running out of bullets.”
Using our close-range coms rather than the car radio, Nate relayed the new plan of attack—we would drive just a little farther, up to what was roughly the ten-mile mark to the settlement. The rest of the way would be on foot, split up into small groups and avoiding any direct, easy routes that would likely be guarded or booby-trapped. We had about enough night-vision gear for half of those who needed it, but the moon was shining just brightly enough that walking across the plains would be feasible for everyone.
I wasn’t all that surprised that, as soon as we got ready to depart on foot, Nate put me in a group with Martinez, Burns, and Sonia, deciding to set out with Hamilton himself. Before I could protest—and point out that it was super smart to put the only two people with real first-aid knowledge into one team—he shut me up with a remark whispered into my ear. “I’m not sidelining you. I expect the four of you to head straight to the palisade, be there first, and make it into the settlement before the bulk of us make enough noise to inevitably attract the wrong kind of attention. If necessary, Burns will drop away as a diversion. You get in. You find any potential hostages—or someone we can beat the crap out of—and provide first aid if required. The three of you are smaller and easier to miss, and I’m counting on that. I’d send Buehler with you if her limp wasn’t bad enough to keep her back.”
Leaning back, I gave him a considering look before I whispered my response. “So, what you actually are saying is that I kill and they patch up what’s left over?”
“Pretty much.”
I could have done without his smirk—and the answering thrill racing up my spine. I had to admit, it was mostly token protest that wanted to make it over my lips—and that was very easy to silence considering that I knew who might be sitting in the middle of the camp with a knife to her and her kid’s throat. I was a very long shot from any turn-the-other-cheek sentiments, but come after the less bloodthirsty of my friends, and you’re asking for a knife in the back.
And, my, didn’t it feel healthy when that sentiment made me crack up, if as silently as possible.
Martinez and Sonia both had their own night-vision goggles, and because of Nate’s intent for them, nobody disputed them using their gear. Burns and I traded a quick look at each other’s bare face, him giving the slightest of shrugs as if to say any advantage was welcome. He was downright gleeful as he helped me smear camouflage paint all over my face to keep my skin from turning into a beacon in the night. Asshole. But I couldn’t help but grin myself, feeling just a little better seeing as I was setting out with two of the people I trusted the most in the world—and I doubted that Sonia’s animosities toward me would be an issue tonight, provided I got neither Martinez nor Burns killed. Lucky me—they could take care of themselves.
The temptation was strong to jump Nate for one last goodbye kiss, but I passed up the chance. It felt too much like jinxing it.
With all three of them very familiar with the terrain, we made good time through the low hills that quickly evened out into the plain leading to the coast. Trees were small, gnarly-looking nightmare creatures in the dark, but there was plenty of shrubbery around that the first hour we could walk for the most part, if as quietly as possible. Nightlife went about its business mostly ignoring us, which was reassuring. No exploding jackrabbits ahead was always a good thing. But then we trotted down the last mile of proper elevation, and the work the settlers had put into securing their town became more obvious. They’d either torn down or carted away all obstacles large enough to count as proper cover, leaving the entire extended perimeter of the town bare and easy to observe from the palisades. We’d been following a few deer trails before but Burns abandoned them, sending us into the dry grass instead. The entire area looked undisturbed by recent trespassers, but just to be sure we spread out farther, the distance between Burns and me increasing from just inside shouting distance to several hundred feet. I didn’t look forward to crawling through the grass, but trotting forward, hunched over to give as small a profile as possible, wasn’t exactly pleasant, either. Soon, my shoulders, lower spine, and knees hurt, and the wound gave rhythmic, pounding waves of agony in tune with my heartbeat. More than once, I lost sight of the others when someone ducked down for a quick rest, and looking back the way we had come, I had a hard time tracking our trails. Nothing else of note was moving in the night, making me guess we’d beaten the others to the kill zone by a solid thirty minutes of the going on two hours since we’d left the cars.
I almost jumped when I heard someone blow into their mic, making me pause and hunker down immediately. Sonia’s voice, barely a whisper, followed a few moments later. “I think I just stepped over a tripwire. Not tripped it, but there’s something on the ground behind me. Noticed it when the grass whipped back weirdly.”
I held my breath, listening to see if we’d attracted any attention.
“Be right back with you,” Burns responded. “You two, advance. We’ll catch up with you.”
&nbs
p; I’d been last in our stretched-out line, Martinez ahead and slightly to the south of my position. I saw him pop out of his hiding spot and move forward before Burns’s much more visible silhouette started in the other direction. I was tempted to join him at Sonia’s position mostly out of curiosity, but we were on a deadline, and I was sure the two of them could take care of whatever Sonia had found.
I got about a hundred yards farther when I suddenly heard Burns curse, followed by a hissed, “Fire in the hole!” I had just enough time to crouch low when something behind me detonated—presumably whatever Sonia had almost triggered before. The shockwave hit me almost immediately, not strong enough to push me over but definitely unpleasant. I didn’t need a warning to flatten myself on the ground, sure that all attention would be on us now. Trying to peer back through the grass, I thought I saw two shapes, next to each other, also lying low, but it was mostly the lack of screams of pain that made me guess that they’d both gotten away.
I was tempted to remain where I was for the next five or ten minutes, knowing that whoever was keeping watch at the settlement would be focusing on this sector now, but instead pushed myself up into a low crouch. “Go, go,” I whispered into my mic. “We need to be gone should they send out a firing squad.” No protest followed, and I was quick to enact my own command. Ahead, the walls of the settlement were still far enough away to be nothing but a long, slightly curving block of darkness, and I made sure to angle farther north to keep out of what I presumed was the most likely line of sight. All I could do was hope that whoever was on guard duty would attribute it to an unlucky coyote biting it, but I didn’t believe it for a second.
Green Fields Series Box Set | Vol. 4 | Books 10-12 Page 82