Robert had no answer to that. He didn’t know what the right answer was and apparently no one else knew either.
"Just because you can kill someone doesn't mean you should," Kevin said. "Arthur is right. If we have to answer for this one day, for killing a congressman, I want to be able to say with absolute certainty that we tried everything. Your daughter told me that part of how she survived so successfully was that you taught her to think several steps ahead of every action she took. Think several steps ahead now. It would be easy to kill all those men out there but will it be as easy to explain our actions to their families when they show up? Do you think they’ll accept our response? Are you prepared to kill them too if they threaten to go out into the world and bring more people back here?”
"Then what is the answer?" Robert demanded. “Do you just open the gate and invite them in? Do you give up this place and hand everything over to them? Do we stay trapped here forever?”
"There is no clear answer yet," Arthur growled. "But there may be one around the corner. We’re not forced into action yet. Congressman Honaker and I will talk at least one more time. That idiot will hear all the same arguments you just heard. He needs to gut-check his own level of commitment. He needs to understand the very real possibility that their families might arrive to find them all dead.”
Robert pushed his chair back abruptly and stood. He shoved his way through the back door and went outside to stand on the back porch. He crossed his arms and examined the mountains. Frustration percolated inside him. He thought about everything, from the things he'd heard in Arthur’s kitchen to the fate of his own family at home. He thought about himself as a father and as a writer. He thought about his legacy and his future. He wasn't certain how long he dwelt on those things but at some point he felt a hand on his shoulder. He flinched, then turned to find Sonyea standing there.
"I’m sorry for startling you but breakfast is ready if you want some."
Hunger overcame his anger and frustration, leading Robert to go back inside and sit down at the table. The other men were already filling their plates. The tension was thick, the disagreement not sitting well with any of the men. They weren’t best friends but, like it or not, they were a team thrown together by circumstance. They had to work together, which would be difficult with so many emotions swirling around between them. Robert accepted he was responsible for it and needed to attempt to fix it. If they thought he was losing his shit before, they probably thought worse of him now.
"I apologize. I was out of line," Robert said. "It's easy to just drop in here and make suggestions when I don't have to stick around and face the consequences of those decisions. I’m sorry.”
“Acknowledged.” Arthur shrugged. "We’re all a little stressed out. Nerves are bound to fray under these conditions. We’ve got to hold it together and stay cool though."
Robert extended a hand to Kevin and the man took it. “We good?”
"We’re good,” Kevin replied, perhaps a little too quickly to mean it.
Robert hoped it was true. He hoped he hadn’t damaged things beyond repair. For the rest of his stay, no matter how long it was, he would have to work harder to rein in his frustration.
4
Arthur barged through the door of the communications shack, startling Carlos. The radio operator spent most days monitoring frequencies in relative peace and quiet so any guest was unexpected. He jumped, and Arthur realized he may have entered a little more abruptly than was usual for him. It was that damn discussion with Robert at breakfast. It still had him feeling a little raw.
"See if you can raise the congressman on the radio," Arthur ordered. "Then give me some privacy. It may take a while to talk sense into the hard-headed son-of-a-bitch."
“You sure you don’t me to stick around?”
“What part of the word privacy do you not understand?” Arthur snapped.
Carlos looked stung by the sharp response. “I just meant that I wasn’t sure if you were familiar with this radio setup or not.”
“Who do you think put all this crap together?” Arthur frowned at the younger man. “Besides, I was tinkering with radios when you were sitting at daycare mining nose nuggets. I think I can manage.”
“Yes sir,” Carlos said efficiently, punching a preset button to return to the frequency he'd used to contact the congressman before. "Bridges’ Survival School for Congressman Honaker. Bridges’ Survival School for Congressman Honaker, over."
Carlos continued repeating his request at intervals. After nearly two minutes, a snide response unfurled from the headset speakers.
“Bridges’ Survival School?”
Carlos recognized the voice from earlier radio transmissions. It was the congressman. “Hold for Arthur Bridges, sir.” Carlos slid his chair back and offered it to Arthur, then excused himself to sit on the steps and have a smoke.
Arthur waited until Carlos was closing the door behind him to address the congressman. “This is Arthur Bridges. That you, Honaker?”
“Well, it is, but people typically address a sitting congressman with more respect than that.”
Arthur gritted his teeth. “If you were acting within the responsibilities of your office, I might tender more respect. As it is, you’re acting like a bully and a criminal so I’m probably addressing you with more respect than you deserve.”
There was a long pause. “Bridges’ Survival School," Congressman Honaker finally muttered dismissively. Over the years, his voice had lost some of the twang of the region. Now it sounded like more of a cultivated southern accent, the kind that a speaker might adopt on the campaign trail to demonstrate that he was just a decent, homespun country boy. “I never did buy that training school bullshit. Your place is a survivalist compound. Pure and simple."
“We never broke any laws,” Arthur replied. “In fact, if you were having us surveilled for your own nefarious intentions, then maybe it was you who was breaking the law.”
“I will neither confirm nor deny that I might have monitored your activities over the years but I guess none of that matters at this moment, does it? It’s not like you can sue me. We’re kind of at a stalemate, aren’t we? Waiting to see who flinches first.”
“Thinking you’re up for a showdown with us is going to get you killed, Honaker. And you’ll be taking a lot of men with you. You’ll also be condemning their families to a slow and miserable death if there’s no one around to help look out for them.”
"Well," Congressman Honaker drawled, "the solution is simple. It’s already been presented to you. All you have to do is gather your men together and march your happy camouflaged asses out the front gate. Make no mistake about it—we will eventually be occupying your compound and there is not a damn thing you can do about it."
Arthur sighed loudly into the microphone. It was pure frustration, not intended for dramatic effect, but it was certainly audible across the airwaves. "That's where you're wrong. You might have planned for this. You might have come here thinking you could actually do this. You probably even convinced those men dumb enough to come with you that you could do this. But you can’t. We won’t let you. Taking what's rightfully mine will not be as simple as just knocking on the door and asking me to leave."
"You anti-government types are all alike. Paranoid, misguided, and misinformed. Your only choice, Arthur, is to leave on two legs like a man. If you can’t see reason, your decomposing corpse can fertilize the forest," the congressman bellowed. “You’ll be worm food.”
Arthur chuckled. "Now when you say shit like that, it shows me you've got an audience. You’re probably sitting over there right now trying to impress a roomful of people. That always seemed to be the thing that you liked most about being a congressman. You always liked an audience. You liked being the big man. Since you’ve got an audience, let me take the opportunity to tell them a few things at the same time I tell them to you. You came in here with a leg up on us. You had more advance knowledge of our capabilities than we had of yours. Now, though, w
e’ve been collecting our own intel and I think we have pretty good picture of what we’re dealing with."
"Is that right? Well, despite what you might think, I can assure you that you have no idea what you're dealing with,” the congressman boasted.
"There you go again, showboating for your audience. Do I need to point out that half of your force is middle-aged and soft? That half includes you, by the way. The other half appears to be from a law enforcement background. While they may have been good at their jobs, law enforcement training is well below what even the most poorly-trained of my men has gone through. You are outclassed here. You and your men are going to die."
"You sound awfully sure of yourself over there, Arthur," Congressman Honaker said.
“I am.”
“Your confidence is misplaced.”
Arthur shook his head in disgust. There was no reasoning with this man while he had an audience. He enjoyed acting tough. He enjoyed putting on the appearance of hard-nosed negotiation. He was one of those congressmen you often saw in the televised congressional hearings, asking questions purely for the drama of the moment. Purely for getting himself on the evening news.
“And your families are heading here with the expectation that you’ve arranged a safe haven for them?” Arthur said, changing tactics.
"That's exactly right. And you should understand a man will fight for nothing with such dogged determination as he will fight for his family."
"I completely understand that, but I can’t agree that you have the well-being of your families in mind. If every one of you gets killed you’ll have family showing up here for nothing. How do you think the death of all these men will affect the odds of their families’ survival? For each of your men who gets killed, does his family have someone equally as capable, ready to assume the role of leading the family? Or will those families be reduced to scavenging? Will they become slaves to someone with better resources? Will they have to become prostitutes in order to eat and put a roof over their head?"
"The same could be said of your own families," the congressman retorted.
Arthur let out a low laugh. "You obviously missed something significant in your intelligence gathering. There are no families here. We have women soldiers and men soldiers but no families. Everyone who lives here has nothing left to fight for except this compound. They'll fight to the death because this place is their last stand. They see your attempt at an invasion as an affront to everything they believe. They will risk everything to see you killed."
Arthur gave the congressman a minute to process this new information, then another, and when there was no reply, Arthur continued.
"I want to add one more thing. I have no doubt that you used your resources and the resources of your men to scour police arsenals for tactical gear and weapons. You probably feel like you're pretty well-armed compared to the average citizen. I’m sure you are. But understand that the residents here have devoted their lives to amassing the supplies we need to operate this compound. I'd venture that I personally have more weapons and ammunition than your entire force and that doesn't include what the rest of my folks bring to the table. If you came for a war then you brought a knife to a gunfight. Bridges out.”
Arthur slipped off the headset and stood up from the chair. He hoped he’d given the congressman something to think about. He pushed his way out the door. Carlos was hunched on the steps like a gargoyle, sucking at the stub of a hand-rolled cigarette.
“All yours,” Arthur mumbled, heading back to his house.
5
Arthur had given the congressman a lot to think about. In fact, he hoped Congressman Honaker was at that very moment involved in a deep discussion with his cohorts as to whether they should continue this endeavor or not. However, Arthur knew the congressman wouldn’t give up. He was too hard-headed, too persistent, and his ego too large to risk the embarrassment of backing down.
After Arthur finished his radio conversation, Kevin persuaded him there was a mission they needed to undertake. The surveillance Arthur’s group had conducted that morning had given them some useful pieces of information. For one, the enemy had a hot breakfast and hot dinner each day but lunch was usually canned or freeze-dried fare taken whenever they had the opportunity to eat it. That was only of interest because it meant the cook was probably unoccupied during the middle of the day. If he was alone and unobserved, that would be the best time to launch an operation against him.
Kevin surmised that the cook might be the one person who knew the scope of Honaker’s plan but, at the same time, was probably the least likely to be able to defend himself. Kevin had watched the video their observer shot several times over, focusing on the sections showing the cook. There was a definite sense that he resented his assignment. Whatever circumstance put him in that particular role was not of his choosing. Those kind of people could be exploited. They often felt unappreciated and under-utilized. They were the weak link.
In Kevin's assessment there was only one man among them cut out for the job of kidnapping the cook; the same military-trained sniper who had collected the footage in the first place. There were many among Arthur’s group with the skills for precision rifle shooting but there was only one who had completed the U.S. Army Sniper Course. Part of that training was mastering the intricacies of camouflage and stalking. That was exactly the type of skill that would be required to pull off this job.
The perimeter around Arthur's compound was porous, mostly wooded and ill-defined. It wasn’t fenced or walled-in. The congressman’s force was monitoring this perimeter by means of snipers and gunmen placed at intervals around the compound. During the day they used rifle scopes or spotting scopes. At night they used thermal and night vision. In daylight they had no difficulty spotting overt breaches, such as when Sonyea and Robert tried riding out in a vehicle or on horseback. Perhaps a heavily-camouflaged man in a perfectly-designed Ghillie suit creeping along a single inch at a time might not be so easily spotted.
The sniper’s name was Brandon Barton. He was a stout young man with a buzz cut, incredibly fit and focused. He’d done twelve years in the Army with half of that as actual combat time served in the Middle East. Kevin, Arthur, and several other men from Arthur's team met with Brandon in the command bunker. They explained the assignment to him. Brandon listened with conditioned stoicism, never a flicker of concern, indecision, or questioning in his eyes.
“Think you’re up to it, son?” Arthur asked.
“I’d be honored, sir. What are the rules of engagement?"
Arthur and Kevin smiled at the same time and looked at each other. They’d chosen wisely. You had to like a fearless, no-bullshit young man like that.
"You can drop the sir," Arthur said. “There’s no rank here. We’re all in the shit together.”
“Old habit,” Brandon replied. "What are the rules of engagement, gentlemen?"
Arthur took a seat on the edge of the table and rested his hands on his thighs. The homemade table creaked under his weight. “You’ll be issued a suppressed .300 blackout with an EOTech. No sniper gear on this trip. You’re cleared to engage anyone who engages you or anyone who threatens to compromise your mission."
While Arthur was trying to avoid the wholesale slaughter of the congressman’s group, he was okay with the selective removal of targets as part of an effort to put an end to this siege. He understood this was perhaps selective morality but these were complicated times. In the back of Arthur’s mind, he understood there was a possibility that they might even have to take out all of the enemy before the dust settled. He hoped to avoid that, though.
Kevin handed Brandon a picture of the cook captured from the video shot earlier that morning. "This is your target. The cook you saw this morning. Notice that he’s one of the few not wearing a hat. He’s also wearing jeans and not cargo pants. We’ve never seen him with a sidearm or weapon but that doesn’t mean he’s defenseless. Approach with the same level of caution you’d use with any other target.”
; "What am I supposed to do with him when I find him?" Brandon asked.
"Snatch and grab. We think he’s staying in a tent on the edge of the camp. This time of day, he’s probably one of the few remaining in camp. Everyone else is either in the command RV, out on assignment, or sleeping because they’ve come off-duty. If he’s like most of the other cooks I’ve met, he’s probably taking a nap before he has to prep for dinner. You’ll approach him with utmost stealth and discretion, then disable him with a stun gun. While he’s incapacitated, you’ll gag and cuff him, then deliver the package to us."
Brandon nodded, completely unfazed by the nature of his mission. His cool head was part of why he was here. He’d only been able to buy into the compound because Arthur had cut him a break on the lowest tier of ownership. It was moments like this that demonstrated what he’d seen in the kid—total detached coolness, total professionalism.
"When you’ve bagged your target, you head home. If you hit trouble, put out a call on the radio. We’ll launch a diversion. Once you get within visual range of our perimeter I’ll have assistance waiting for you."
"Roger that," Brandon said. "When do I go?"
Kevin and Arthur looked at each other, then back to Brandon.
"Now.”
6
The mountaintop compound was made up of several hundred acres of hardwood and pine forest. The majority of the structures were clustered in small groups or pods around the property. There was a shooting complex with an elaborate range which, before the collapse, was used to train paying students in different shooting and tactical situations. There was a precision rifle range that allowed shooters to stretch out to four hundred yards. That was a pretty long shot for the steep Carolina mountains but was useful for training both the precision shooters and the hunters that signed up for the long-range classes. Both ranges had classroom facilities, a covered bench area, and a composting toilet facility.
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