Keith relaxed just a little, until Willis pulled up into the yard and jumped out of the cab as soon as he brought the vehicle skidding to a stop.
“There’s half a dozen houses on fire up in St. Martinville! I could see lots of dark smoke from the highway when I passed south of there after leaving the house. I turned north and drove close enough to town to see that it was coming from burning houses, and then I knew all those houses couldn’t be burning by accident! After what Becca told us when we got in, I figured it had something to do with those folks from Texas. I didn’t know how I could help anybody by myself if they were the ones that started it. I mean, I’ve got my rifle and all, but I’m just one guy, so I turned around and hauled ass back here to get y’all as fast as I could!”
Keith had never met Willis, so he introduced himself and did his best to calm the young man down so he could better remember any details he was leaving out, but even when he got his breathing under control there was very little he could add.
“I didn’t see any,” he replied, when Keith asked him if he’d noticed any distinctive vehicles that looked out of place. “The roads were empty, like they are pretty much all the time these days. I didn’t get any closer once I figured out what the fires were about. I just headed straight back here.”
“You did the right thing,” Keith said. “I don’t think that many fires started by accident either. It’s my job to find out though, even if it’s too late to stop whoever is responsible. I need to go and have a look,” Keith turned to Ronnie, “if you’d be willing to lend the use of your truck again?”
“Hell yeah, I’m willing, but I’m not letting you go alone!”
“And neither am I,” Joe said. “We just agreed right before Willis got here that we were in this together with you, so if it starts today, then we start today, as far as I am concerned.”
Willis said he was in too, and Diane and Becca didn’t want to be left behind either. Keith had little choice but to agree with whatever they decided, since he needed the truck to even get there, but he was happy that Joe and Ronnie both insisted that Diane and Becca should stay there and keep watch over the house and the trawler.
“He’s right,” Keith said. Besides, five is too many and we’ll get in each other’s way if we’re piled up in the truck together.”
“But you may need the extra backup,” Diane said. “Three of you probably won’t be enough.”
“Five wouldn’t either, Diane. We’re not going there looking for a fight in which we’re almost certainly going to be outnumbered. We are in no way ready to engage with these guys in combat unless we get backed into a corner and there’s no other choice. We haven’t even begun our training or discussion of strategies, so rest assured that this mission is just for reconnaissance, and to possibly rescue any survivors we may find. We’ll get to the more proactive stuff when Eric returns, and we start building specific teams with specific tasks.”
Diane reluctantly accepted this, but Keith knew her anger towards this enemy was building into fury now that the initial shock had worn off. Not only had they taken her aunt, but she had that painful shiner that wouldn’t let her put the experience out of her mind. She’d gotten her revenge on one of her six assailants, but Keith knew she wanted even more. Today was not the time for that though, so with that argument settled, he got in Ronnie’s truck to ride shotgun while Joe and Willis took the back seats. Keith didn’t want these men to get hurt, but he was glad he wasn’t going into this situation alone, because he knew damned well that if he got there and saw residents of his parish under fire or held hostage by those mercenary thugs, he would have to try and do something about it. The three men with him were not warriors, by any means, but they were tough country folk unafraid of a fight and he knew that every one of them knew how to use the weapons they carried. And they knew too that with the main town in their parish burning, using those weapons was what things had come to.
Eight
“THIS SUCKS, DUDE!” JONATHAN whispered, as he helped Eric tie up their boat to some overhanging bushes back around the first bend, and just out of sight of the lock and dam structure. “There goes our hope of getting any help from the Army!”
Eric checked the spare mags in his vest and made sure Jonathan had his gear together too as they left the boat and slipped into the woods to work their way around to the back of the abandoned post. “They must have had a good reason to pull out of here, if that’s what they did, but I can’t imagine what that would be. Controlling access to those locks seems pretty essential if they’re still interested in securing the Mississippi River, but who knows? Their mission could have changed. We won’t know until we check it out, so follow me and stop when I stop. We need to be careful until we’re sure this place really is deserted.”
The wide expanse of open grass around the lock area prevented Eric from getting as close as he would have preferred in concealment, but by circling around through the surrounding woods, he found a spot from which he could glass the portable buildings before leaving concealment. From that angle, he observed what appeared to be numerous bullet holes in the sheet metal siding of most of the buildings, and he could also make out damaged entrance doors and many broken windows. It became obvious as he took it all in that a battle of some sort had occurred there, but though he scanned the surrounding grass he didn’t spot any bodies, nor evidence of any in the form of scavengers.
“I want you to hang back and cover me,” Eric said, “until I give you the signal that it’s safe to follow. Keep your eyes open and watch for movement!”
Jonathan got into position with his M4 braced over a fallen log and Eric left the treeline and moved out onto the grass, crouching low as he crossed the exposed gap to the first of the temporary barracks. When he reached it, he verified that the holes he’d seen from a distance were indeed bullet holes, mainly from rifle-sized rounds, but there were also clusters of larger ones that indicated a 50-caliber machine gun may have been involved. Clearing the buildings one by one, Eric determined that all were shot up and empty, as well as ransacked for anything of value or use. Eric noted lots of dried blood smeared on the floors and wall surfaces, as well as spent brass likely ejected from the defender’s rifles but still, no bodies. Whoever did this had to have manpower and training to pull it off, because Eric estimated there were 15 to 20 soldiers on station here when he and Shauna and Jonathan came through before. Someone had taken them by surprise, and though the evidence suggested the men had fought back, it was also clear from the looting that they had lost the battle. Eric stepped back out to the edge of the perimeter and into Jonathan’s view, where he waved the kid in. There was nothing alive here to threaten them, and Eric wanted his help in looking for any clues as to what may have happened.
“Wow! So, the guys here didn’t just leave, did they?” Jonathan asked, as he took it all in. “Who could have done this? I mean, those dudes were real soldiers, and they had that badass gunboat too. How many people would it take to take them on?”
“It depends,” Eric said. “It depends on who took them on and how. All I know for sure is that these men put up a fight. You can tell by all the empty brass laying around. It’s everywhere!”
“But no bodies…what’s up with that? Why would they take them away? I mean, who does that?”
“I don’t think they would, but I don’t see any indication that they buried them either. I’m thinking they disposed of them in the river. That would be the easiest, but why they would even take the time to do that is a mystery. It’s not like they could really cover up what happened here.”
Following up on this thought, Eric led Jonathan on a search of the riverbank, looking for evidence that his theory was correct, but there was nothing to either prove or disprove it. There was also nothing to indicate that either the Gulf Traveler or the gunboat had sunk in the fairly shallow water there, so Eric assumed both vessels had been taken away intact. Jonathan was correct in thinking that it took a strong and brazen force to pull off such an o
verwhelming attack on even a small military outpost, and Eric doubted it was the work of unorganized local bandits, or even militia fighters, unless they were of a different kind than those he’d already encountered. Whoever did this knew what they were doing, and that meant they had training and discipline, and likely good equipment. Returning to the portable buildings where most of the shooting took place, Eric scanned the ground beyond them near the road, and picked up several samples of the cartridge casings he found out there that likely came from the attacker’s weapons. Everything he came across though was the same type of 5.56 as the defending soldiers had been using. That didn’t prove or disprove either civilian or military attackers though, because Eric knew there was such a widespread availability of all types of ammunition in the country before the collapse that just about anyone could get whatever they wanted. But it was strange there wasn’t a mix of calibers or even ammunition type, as he would have expected if this were the work of a foreign unit, or even one of the cartels or a team of contractors from an outfit like C.R.I. The .50 caliber bullet holes in some of the buildings were the only exception, and Eric figured those came from much farther away, maybe even from the river, if the attackers commandeered the gunboat he’d seen here previously before launching their assault.
“Whoever did this was using the same weapons as the good guys,” Eric said, as he dropped the handful of cases he’d collected back to the muddy gravel.
“They probably took all the rifles from the dead soldiers after they killed them too. I doubt they threw those in the river. Maybe they got the ones they used to do this from some other soldiers they killed somewhere else.”
“It’s possible, but I imagine they already had their own equipment before attacking anyone. They weren’t amateurs, unless there were a hell of a lot of them and they took a lot of casualties that we can’t know about without dredging the river.”
“You’re not thinking about doing that are you?”
“Nope. I’m curious, but not that curious.”
“I guess there’s no hope of getting any military help to fight C.R.I. now.”
“Not here, there’s not, and it’s way too far up to Lieutenant Holton’s post and we have no way to reach him from here without satellite communications. I have no idea where we might find another military unit, or if there are any on the lower Mississippi at all. But we knew coming up here that the chances of getting help were about fifty-fifty. It wouldn’t bother me so much if Sergeant Patterson was here to tell us he couldn’t do anything; what bothers me is that there’s an unknown and capable enemy in the region that is hostile to U.S. federal troops. It’s bad enough facing the known enemy we have coming from the west, but this may be something else altogether.”
“So, what do you want to do now?”
“Nothing here, other than to take a second look inside all these buildings to make sure they didn’t leave anything we can use, like ammo, explosives, or anything of that nature. But I’ll do the searching. I want you to stand watch at the perimeter facing the river, because I don’t like the vibe I’m getting here.”
“I know what you mean, dude! This creeps me out too, thinking about all those guys dying here. Let’s make it quick and get the hell out of here!”
Eric doubted he would find anything, but it didn’t hurt to look one more time. In the barracks there were still some personal possessions of the soldiers scattered around, but as he’d suspected, all the weapons and combat gear were missing. The supply rooms had been ransacked, and all ammunition and ordinance stolen. Rations were likewise raided, and Eric found nothing but MRE wrappers and a few partial containers of seasonings and cooking utensils. There was nothing of use that they didn’t already have access to in St. Martin Parish, so Eric ignored it all and made his way to the sergeant’s office, where he had a quick look through the scattered paperwork to see if there was any information that might be of use. He was looking through some crumpled dispatches from a smashed fax machine when he was suddenly startled by an eruption of heavy machine gun fire. Eric instinctively dropped to a low crouch and glanced out the doorway in Jonathan’s direction, relieved to see the kid already belly-down in the gravel and crawling for cover. Eric was sure the weapon was an M2, like the one mounted on the gunboat that had been stationed here, and it sounded like it was coming from the direction of the river, somewhere downstream. He yelled at Jonathan to stay down as he exited the building and crawled to the kid’s position. Before he could get there though, another sustained burst from the machine gun riddled the buildings around him with incoming .50-caliber projectiles. Eric heard Jonathan return fire as soon as the incoming stopped; a wasted effort that only resulted in another fusillade directed at the building and wall of sandbags that were their only cover.
“Hold your fire, Jonathan! Did you even have a target, or were you just shooting back at the noise?”
“I saw the assholes! They’re on that gunboat, just like you thought. They shot at our boat first, and I think they tore it up! I could hear the bullets hitting it! Now they’re back around the bend!”
Before Eric could say anything else, another burst erupted from downriver and he heard the bullets hitting metal in the direction of where they’d left Ronnie’s boat. Seconds later, there was an explosion, and then another right after the firing stopped, followed by a huge flare-up of flames and smoke they could see through the intervening brush.
“Dammit! Eric cursed. “There goes our boat! They must have hit those fuel cans with either tracers or incendiary rounds!”
“Don’t blame me! They were shooting at it before I shot back!”
“I’m not, but you’re damned lucky you were behind these big sandbags or you would have been cut to pieces. You’re wasting your time and your ammo trying to engage them at that range. Did you run through a full mag?”
Jonathan removed the mag and inserted a new one immediately, as Eric had taught him, before he even looked at the used one. “No, there’s still a few rounds there. And I’ve got two more full ones plus the new one in the gun,” he said, after checking his pouches.
“Then keep the safety on and hold your damned fire unless you have a target you know you can hit. This isn’t like the other firefight we were in when the two fishing boats were following the schooner. We aren’t getting any more ammo other than what we’ve got on us, and now we’re going to have to extract on foot. Ronnie’s boat is toast and even if it wasn’t, there’s no way in hell we could avoid that gunboat out on the river.”
“How are we supposed to get back to the Miss Anita with no boat?”
“However we have to: walk, wade or swim! But right now, we’ve got to get our asses out of this death trap, because they may already have a team of men on the ground coming our way. We’ve got to reach those trees and stay out of sight, but the main thing is we’ve got to do it without getting shot on the way.”
As Jonathan processed the predicament the two of them were in, Eric checked his own load-out, which he already knew was on the light side for a situation like this. He wore a minimal chest rig that carried five spare mags in addition to the one in his rifle, plus four extra mags for his Glock, a couple of M67 grenades and his first aid gear. That was all he had on him, other than the fighting knife on his belt and the folded map, compass and lighters he had stuffed in various pockets. The food they’d brought with them for the trip upriver was all in the boat, along with everything else. Eric was going to have some explaining to do when he saw Becca again and met her husband, Ronnie. He truly felt terrible about losing the man’s boat, but there was nothing he could do about it now.
Whoever was aboard that gunboat must have heard them go by earlier. There were numerous side channels off the river in which it could have been hidden, and the crew would have known there was no escape beyond the locks in the direction the John boat was headed. They had slipped out of their hiding spot to come hunt them at their leisure while Eric and Jonathan were looking around the abandoned Army post. They could have
waited for them to return to the boat and taken both of them out with it, but for whatever reason, they’d gone ahead and targeted the boat first, maybe because as Eric said, they had men on the ground that were already on their way to intercept them.
“What if they already have us in their sights?” Jonathan asked. “Should we hunker down and wait until dark to make a run for it?”
“No. It’s way too early. It’s at least eight hours until dark again. And we don’t know that they don’t have assets on this side of the river too. And even if we did wait for dark, we don’t know that they’re not equipped with night vision. It’s risky either way, but we can extract out of here if we move now. We’ll head north first, until we get back inside that treeline, and then we’ll make a plan on how to proceed from there. You’re going to go first while I hang back here to cover you. Just keep down and crawl all the way. As long as you’re not up on your feet, you’ll be out of the line of sight of that gunboat crew if they come back up the river. Now go!”
Eric waited behind the sandbags until Jonathan was halfway to the woods. There was no sign of the gunboat, so he withdrew at that point and followed the kid. He reached the trees ten minutes after Jonathan and the two of them headed deeper into the woods until they found a dense thicket in which to hide for a few minutes and discuss their next move. The options were limited, and the objective was days away if they had to travel all that distance on foot. As Jonathan had stated, returning to their base in St. Martin Parish was going to be difficult without a boat. It wasn’t really feasible to follow the riverbank directly downstream, as there would be innumerable sloughs, bayous and dead lakes to cross, not to mention impenetrable thickets to fight. It would be easier to follow the backroads, but that would take them farther out of their way, and it was out of the question in the daylight and probably unsafe even at night. Eric knew they needed another boat but finding one now after months of looting and theft wouldn’t be easy. Even if they could locate someone willing to part with one, Eric had no gold or anything else of value with which to trade, because he’d come here only to visit Sergeant Patterson and ask for his help. Eric knew that paying for such help likely wasn’t an option, but even if the soldiers could be bribed, he knew too that the cost would be more than any of them could afford.
Feral Nation - Defiance (Feral Nation Series Book 8) Page 8