by Trent Reedy
—• Every time the Fed sends a patrol to Moyie Springs out of their HQ at Bonners Ferry, we tear ’em up. Twelve dead Feds this last time. Rise up, Idaho! •—
—• This is going out to all my fellow citizens of Idaho listening to their shortwave radios tonight. Me and my guys are out here around East Hope. We’re set up at cabins and secret bases all up in these mountains. Feds come looking for us, we keep picking them off one by one, and then moving so they can’t find us. Today we nailed a whole Fed convoy! You should have seen it. •—
—• Calling East Hope! Break transmission! Don’t stay on so long, over! •—
—• Convoy had two armored gun Hummers and four cargo trucks. We’d already weakened the supports on the Route 200 bridge north of town, but then we set up fertilizer bombs underneath. When the convoy was on the bridge, BOOM! We took them all out. Blew ’em up and dumped the bits of bridge and Fed into Lake Pend Oreille. Only the lead Humvee made it across. We blocked the road with an old pickup truck, and then attacked the Hummer from both sides of the road. Wait a minute. Guys, you hear … Like a roar. Oh no! Get out of here! •—
“The Fed commander in Wallace, Idaho, is dead. Sniper got him. Long live Idaho!”
“Did you hear that?” Crocker shouted from his radio desk up in the guard tower. We’d set him up there so he could monitor the radio and keep secondary watch on the road at the same time. “That’s the third strike this week!”
We went up to hear the details. “You’ll never believe what else happened,” he said. “One attack was just south of Coeur d’Alene. We captured two M142 HIMARS trucks.”
“High mars?” Becca asked. I’d never heard of it either.
“High Mobility … Artillery Rocket System,” said Kemp. “Pretty serious weapons. Not used very often, and then mostly in Iran and Pakistan.”
Crocker nodded. “They were probably going to be used against Idaho forces in the mountains near White Bird. But a ton of resistance fighters took out the Fed, stole the trucks, and drove them off somewhere!”
“Whoa. Some guys got rockets now?” Cal said. “Wish we had some. Be so badass.”
“It’s too bad we couldn’t get those things turned over to the actual Idaho military,” I said. “They could use them.”
Crocker scratched his belly. “Someone also radioed to say they’ve taken an M777 Howitzer and a bunch of M795 rounds. The Howitzer is a field artillery weapon, a big cannon,” he said to Becca. “The M795 is a 155-millimeter high-explosive round. It weighs about a hundred pounds and has over twenty pounds of TNT.”
“Sounds like a seriously nasty weapon,” I said. “I wouldn’t want to be downrange of that thing.”
“From the little bits and pieces I’ve heard on shortwave, the Fed blockade line along the border with free Idaho is stacked with even more weapons than the one that surrounded the state before the war.”
“I think the Fed’s getting ready for another big attack on southern Idaho,” Kemp said. “They’re going to level everything until there’s no resistance.”
I went to stoke the fire in the woodstove, shifting things around with the poker. Would President Griffith really order an attack that would level and burn everything? So far, it seemed like she’d tried to hold back a little. She hadn’t simply destroyed the state in order to force it to obey the Fed.
“With Texas and maybe Oklahoma on the edge of fighting, the Fed might be willing to be a lot tougher on Idaho to get this over with,” said Becca. “Stop the rebellion here, stop the civil war in its tracks.”
Kemp nodded. “The last time states were in rebellion, back in the Civil War, the Union Army destroyed everything it could. Burned whole cities to the ground.”
“We’re not alone,” I said. “We gotta find the others in the resistance. Maybe if we work together, we can slow down the enemy until Idaho can figure out what to do.”
Luchen moved to stand behind the .50-cal. “I’m tired of getting our asses beat.”
“No shit,” Cal said. “We’re running out of time. If we don’t fight, the Fed’s gonna kill us all.”
“Remember TJ told us that the Fed supplies are coming across the border from Washington?” Luchen said. “Right through our old checkpoint on the state line. That must be the shortest route for them or something.”
“It might be a good idea to shut that road down,” said Sparrow.
We all nodded slowly.
“We have to do this smart,” said Kemp. “But if the Fed is bringing traitor bait over the mountain, I think we can close the road fairly simply.”
“But if we shut down that road and stop the convoys, won’t we prevent a lot of innocent people from getting food and stuff?” Becca asked. “I hate that the only way for people to get anything is through the Fed, but if that’s how it is, maybe it wouldn’t be so great to stop them.”
“I hear what you’re saying, Becca,” said Sweeney, “but I don’t see that we have a choice. The Fed also has to be bringing ammo and weapons on that convoy.”
“But how do we stop them? Set off charges to cave in the tunnel up on the mountain?” Luchen asked.
Kemp shook his head. “That’s reinforced concrete supporting a tunnel carved out of solid rock. They built that tunnel to last, and we don’t have close to enough explosives to bring it down. I’m thinking we wait until the next Fed convoy rolls through, and then we use fougasse.”
“Fougasse?” Becca said.
“A sort of homemade napalm.”
“Sergeant, how do you know all this?” Sparrow asked.
“Yeah, first rigging the Humvees to explode, now this fougasse stuff,” said Luchen. “I don’t remember any of that from combat engineer school.”
“One of my buddies in our unit who’s deployed to Iran right now is a sapper, and he learned just about everything there is to know about explosives at the Sapper Leader Course. We used to talk about this stuff at annual training in the summer.”
“You think this fool’s gas will stop a whole convoy?” said Cal.
“Fougasse,” said Kemp. “And yeah. If we do this right, they don’t have a chance.”
Sweeney shrugged. “Then it’s settled. Let’s do it.”
“Right,” said Kemp. “Luchen, Cal, we found a bunch more cold-weather gear in the closet. Why don’t you both get suited up for the cold and then go down to the igloo to keep watch there. Luchen, you know the fifty-cal, right?”
“The Ma Deuce is like a beautiful woman.” Luchen closed his eyes and held his hands out in front of him like he was feeling up some girl. “I know all her sweet spots and …” He opened his eyes and saw Sparrow shaking her head. “I know the gun, Sergeant,” he said quietly.
Kemp smiled. “Good. Show Cal how to load it, unload it, cock it, functions check, and everything.”
“Can we shoot something?” Luchen asked.
“Nick, no,” said Sparrow. “Think about it. You’d be wasting ammo and giving away our position.”
Kemp tried to keep from laughing. “Right. So, suit up and take care of all that without firing. Crocker, stay on the radio. Sweeney and Wells can help you if you need it. They’ll keep watch on the machine gun. Sparrow, Wright, you’re with me.”
Out in the generator shed, Kemp started me cranking a hand pump to empty the rest of a fifty-gallon gasoline barrel into the electrical generator. After the barrel was empty and we’d wiped it out and even lit the remaining gas on fire to dry it, we placed a wad of steel wool on the bottom of the barrel. On top of that we taped down one block of primed C4, running the det cord from that block out of the barrel. Next, we pumped diesel from a second barrel into the one we were rigging.
“So long, hot showers,” Sparrow said.
Kemp sent me inside to grab all the soap powder in the cabin. I found some in the laundry room and more in the kitchen under the sink.
“Mix the soap into the gas. We want it pretty thick,” said Kemp. “The soap will act as a binding agent and will help stick the burning
fuel to everything. The C4 will heat the steel wool to ignite the mixture just as it’s blasted out of the barrel.”
When the barrel was full, we sealed the lid back on and ran the det cord from the C4 three times around the top. “These det cord wraps will cut the lid off just as the ignited mixture is flying out,” Kemp said. “We gotta find a truck somewhere. Then we haul this baby and park the truck in the tunnel, using a brick or something to tilt the barrel at about a forty-five-degree angle. When the Fed convoy rolls through, they’ll have to stop because the truck will be blocking the road. Then, when the fougasse explodes, the soldiers and their vehicles will be burned up. The oxygen will be sucked out of the tunnel, suffocating anyone who survives the burns.”
“Geez,” Sparrow said. “Are we sure we want to do this?”
The Fed had taken my life, killed my friends, and murdered my mother, but even I had to think about what we were proposing to do.
“It’ll stop the convoy and block up the tunnel. The Fed will take forever to clear the road,” Kemp said.
It would leave burned corpses everywhere too. It would rob people of their loved ones. I remembered what me and Sweeney had talked about that morning in the guard tower. Then I looked at the scar on my left hand. The Fed hadn’t worried too much about right and wrong when they killed my mother or the other guys in my Army squad. This was a war, and the rules were win or die.
“We’ll use this to hit the next Fed convoy,” I said. “Burn the bastards.”
* * *
“I wish I’d been able to work with Lightning more this fall. With everything that’s happened, she hasn’t been able to stretch her legs and get exercise for months.” Later that day, Becca was brushing Lightning down while I shoveled manure out of the stall into a wheelbarrow. “I mean, I know there probably won’t be any rodeos come summer, but Lightning gets restless if she doesn’t get to work out.”
“She wants a workout? Have her muck her own stall,” I said.
Becca made like she was trying to kick me, and though her foot came up about two feet short, I still acted like I’d taken a hard shot to the gut. I groaned, bent over, and fell back onto a bale of straw.
“He deserves it, doesn’t he, Lightning?” Becca said.
I stayed on my back on the bale. The prickliness of the straw in the dusty barn and even the smell of the manure tugged me back toward simpler times. “Remember when we first learned to ride? That little pony your parents bought you named—”
“Trigger!” Becca laughed. “And you cried and cried when your dad first put you on him.”
“I did not!” I’d kind of blocked that part of the memory out, and I wasn’t about to admit to it now.
“Did too!”
“How could you possibly remember? We were like five.”
“I remember everything as if it were yesterday.” Becca sat down on the bale next to me. “I tried to explain how Trigger was nice, but you were so scared he’d bite you. You had no trouble in the mutton-busting event at the rodeo— you rode that sheep longer than anyone else. But when our parents decided you were ready for all four feet of big, bad Trigger, you panicked.”
“Yeah, well, I figured out riding eventually, and when you messed up and fell and skinned your knee, who came and carried you back to the house while you cried?”
“You did,” Becca said quietly. “You kept saying everything would be okay, that you’d take care of me.”
“Exactly.” I sat up. “And I always will.”
She took a deep breath, and her eyes were a mix of emotions. There were the ones I feared and even worried that I was starting to share. But there was also something else, a dark cast of anxiety, like she used to get before a tough test in biology class. Now it ran deeper, and when she reached over to take my hand, I knew it was for comfort and not romance.
I closed my eyes. I’d go back to the dungeon in a second if it meant that Bagley, Herbokowitz, and Schmidty could be alive again, but since we’d moved to this mountain cabin, I often took time to simply enjoy being alone, or mostly alone. “If I make it out of this war alive, I’m going to disappear,” I said. “Find a cabin like this one, even a trailer on the bank of a river somewhere. Just fade away. Just sleep. For the rest of my life.”
She gave my hand a squeeze. “Not if, Danny.” Her voice shook as she spoke. “When. We’ll make it through this.”
I squeezed her hand back. “You’re worried about this attack. I am too. And I meant what I said. I will take care of you.”
Becca remained silent for a moment. “Great,” she said. “You can start by hauling out that wheelbarrow of manure.” She chucked a dried horse apple at me.
“Hey!” I laughed, catching the grassy ball of shit and whipping it back at her. “I’m going, sicko.” We both stood up, and I left the warmth in the barn, pushing the wheelbarrow with its heavy load.
* * *
The next day, I smashed the side window of a truck with my hammer. It had snowed all through the night, and probably would again later in the day. The end of January bit into our spines with a paralyzing cold.
“C-come on, man, w-would you hurry up?” Cal said. “If the Fed drives by, we’re toast.”
“At least toast would be warm.” I opened the door and leaned in to get at the wires down below the steering column. The only truck we could find up here was a beat-up late 2000s Ford F-150 with a FOR SALE sign. It sat way out in front of a cabin about half a mile down the main road from Shady Glen. Snow covered the top of it and icicles hung from its bottom like stalactites in some old forgotten cave, so we’d had to dig it out to get even this far. This road had been plowed, we thought, so the Fed could run supplies up to an outpost they were establishing at Silver Sunset Resort on a different part of the mountain. To get into the truck, we’d tracked all over and messed up all the snow. There was no way soldiers would pass by on the road without thinking something was up. With any luck, by the time they noticed, we’d be long gone.
Thanks to everything I’d learned from Schmidty, hot-wiring the truck was easy. I cut and stripped a little insulation off the end of the accessory and engine wires. Then I did the same with the end of the crank wire. “There’s no guarantee this thing would start even if we had the keys. It’s so damned cold.” I started cutting the insulation off the end of what I hoped was the power wire. “It would help if I had the right tools. Working with this bayonet really sucks.”
Cal opened the passenger door, put his AR15 on the seat, and leaned over to look more closely at what I was doing. “You need help?”
“I need you to keep watch so some damned Feds or the owner of this truck don’t jump our asses.”
“Okay, okay. Just if you can—”
“Hurry,” I said. “I know. I about got it, I think.” If the wire I’d just stripped was the power wire, the truck would start to turn over as soon as it touched the other three wires that I’d twisted together. “Let’s hope this works.” I made the contact and the engine started turning over. It was a low rumble, though. She was cold. Careful to keep the wires touching, I pushed down on the gas pedal. “Come on, baby! Fire up!”
With a short whine and a strained vroom, the engine started.
“Yeah! You got it, buddy! Let’s roll.” Cal climbed up into the truck.
I finished twisting the wires together and climbed in behind the wheel, resting my head on the top of the steering wheel for a moment. The only thing I’d ever stolen was a small, twenty-five-cent pack of three SweeTarts from the checkout lane at the grocery store when I was about five. When Dad saw that I had them, he drove me back to the store and forced me to apologize to old man Travers, who owned the place. I was shaking and crying, but I apologized, and I never stole anything after that day. Not until after everything fell apart at Boise.
“You okay, man?” Cal asked.
I picked my head up off the steering wheel and laughed for a second at my own stupidity. How could I be bothered by stealing a truck after I’d killed so many peo
ple? What kind of person had I become? My bad hand ached, and I looked out the windshield at a world blurred by frost.
I put the truck in gear and drove out of the yard, spinning out a little in the snow, then hooked a left down the main road, heading toward the rendezvous point. “They better have the fougasse there waiting for us.”
“Relax. Sweeney’s all over this plan. You know he’ll get it done.”
The plan was kind of idiotic. So many things could go wrong. Sweeney’s job was to drive Silver Bullet through the woods, towing the fougasse barrel in the sled, with Luchen standing right behind it to make sure the weapon stayed upright. Kemp, Becca, and Sparrow would drive down with them. That way, we’d have enough empty seats on the snowmobiles when we needed to get the hell out of there.
I stopped the truck right by a rocky outcropping. Kemp and Sparrow rushed out onto the road with their M4s drawn. Kemp checked that I was driving, and then he and Sparrow spread out and took a knee, scanning the road and woods. We were already out in the open and in trouble if the Fed saw us, so there was no use trying to hide our weapons, and we might as well set up good security.
Sweeney drove his snowmobile to the tailgate of the truck, and Cal jumped out to help Sweeney and Luchen lift the heavy fougasse barrel up into the bed. They were straining so much that I put the truck in park and ran back to help them. When the drum was loaded, I slammed the tailgate closed and hurried to get back behind the wheel. Cal hopped in back to steady the weapon.
I went as fast as possible without spinning out on the slick roads. By the time I finally pulled up to the tunnel, everybody else in our group was supposed to be up on the ridge keeping watch. I drove into the tunnel and started what felt like a sixty-point turn so I could get the pickup’s ass end pointed west, where the convoy would be coming from. TJ had told us that the Fed supply convoy rolled in most Saturdays in the late afternoon, maybe about seventeen hundred. We figured that meant they’d roll through the tunnel about fifteen minutes before. We had about twenty minutes to spare, if they came today. We might be camped out here for a while.