With his troop size shrinking, Muhaimin had been spread thin. On one front, he had the resistance fighters, who were scattered and lacking leadership to form an effective resistance. Because he had initially underestimated the patriots, he was now brought to his current problem of being spread thin. He had found himself trying to reorganize his manpower so he could wipe out large gatherings of military resistance, like the group he had identified using the Main Core program.
On another front, he found he had apparently made a new enemy with North Korea. He could not afford going to war with another country, especially now that China would probably back the North Koreans. It was his ego that had brought the North Korean attack to American shores, wiping out every piece of electronic superiority that he had over the Americans living on the West Coast. If China was to find out that it was Muhaimin that had orchestrated the death of Councilor Pao, it would bring a new set of problems and circumstances for the already troubled executive commander.
With these thoughts in mind, Muhaimin entered the White House Situation Room, where he had requested a meeting with the UN Council regarding the current status of America and the progress he was making. His goals were not the same as the UN’s, but he was smart enough to know that he had to sell to them what it was that they were wanting to hear. The bottom line to Muhaimin was that he needed more troops.
“Gentlemen, so good to see you again,” he said as he looked up at the hologram. “It saddens me to hear of the loss of Ambassador Pao.”
Ambassador Makarovich was always the second most outspoken member of the council, after Pao. He was the first to respond to Muhaimin.
“General Muhaimin—” he started to say before he was interrupted.
“It’s Executive Commander Muhaimin,” he said, correcting the ambassador.
“Right, Executive Commander Muhaimin, since you are so very good at creating positions of power, perhaps you can explain to us why it is you need more UN troops?”
Muhaimin played coy about the attack on America. He knew exactly what country attacked him, but wasn’t willing to reveal his abuse of power with the Iranian Homeland Security intelligence.
“Gentlemen, America’s West Coast was attacked with some type of electromagnetic weapon, rendering me without contact to all troops in operation west of South Dakota. This means that the Main Core program and the Utah Data Center are useless.”
Idin Afsadi, the Iranian ambassador to the UN, asked Muhaimin, “Are you being successful in other areas of the operation? Are you securing more ground and isolating these pockets of resistance so that we can move forward with Agenda 21?”
“The short answer is yes. We have a great number of isolated pockets of resistance, but putting that aside, we have relocated several million, but keep in mind that the US population was over three hundred million, and ten percent of those are veterans. In addition, roughly one million active-duty military personnel are actively aiding in the resistance. It’s true that they are scattered and leaderless, but effective nonetheless.”
“Iran’s military analyst has advised me that the US Navy had a sizeable fleet in the Pacific. It is now my understanding that what we thought to be a problem with the EMP attack may have actually worked in our favor. Executive Commander Muhaimin, you have never operated with advanced technological systems, and you have been successful. Why do you feel so attached to these systems, and can you return to your roots as a guerilla fighter and use your primitive skills to defeat the American resistance?”
The statement just made by Afsadi was true. Muhaimin found himself in retrospection wondering why he had allowed himself to become as the Americans were. He had always hated the US for their reliance on technology and fossil fuels. He believed the US to be the great Satan and had somehow allowed that spirit to affect himself. Now he was finding that the very shoes of the people he hated were on his own feet.
“You’re correct, Ambassador Afsadi. I do not need to rely upon technology, but I do need troop strength. I am asking the council to send more troops to aid in this operation. Further use of advanced weapon systems are not needed or being requested.”
Ambassador Makarovich interrupted by saying, “Request denied. You have the full might of the United Nations locked down in this operation. There are urgent matters elsewhere that need our supervision and you are taking up our time. Good day, General Muhaimin.”
Makarovich disconnected the signal to the White House Situation Room. As Muhaimin stood there looking at the blank spot in space where the hologram had once lit up the room, he was irate at the disrespect he was shown by Makarovich, especially the way he spoke the last word and slapped him in the face with terminating the signal.
Everybody in the room dared not to look at him and they continued to work as if they heard and saw nothing. The silence was interrupted by the sound of a federal employee typing on a keyboard. Muhaimin snapped out of his blank stare into space and pulled out his pistol. Walking out of the room, the employees heard two gunshots, but nobody dared to move to see what had happened outside of the door.
When Muhaimin had walked away, several UN guards came running from around the corner to the sound of the gunshots, and saw two dead Russian UN soldiers lying outside of the White House Situation Room.
CHAPTER XII
Mount Vernon, Illinois, 240 miles south of Chicago
There was a big to-do over going through Mount Vernon. Like Benton, Mount Vernon was a larger southern Illinois town and the seat of its county. It had already been discovered that the UN liked to make use of the capitol buildings and/or the county courthouses. After barely surviving their previous encounter with the TITAN 1 direct energy weapon system, most of the men were livid about the possibility of cutting through another UN-controlled zone. The benefit of their last encounter was that they were able to free several thousand Americans from certain death, most of whom they could not care for and bring along. There weren’t enough supplies or vehicles, even with the UN vehicles they had just seized, to accommodate them.
By the time they reached the outer city limits, they could tell that something was amiss. The UN activity levels were down and no UN vehicles could be spotted anywhere. Aside from a couple destroyed personnel carriers, it looked as if they had packed up and left.
The group proceeded with caution as they slowly rolled into the town.
Jess could tell that Nathan was preoccupied with something on his mind. Ever since Tori was found, he had seemed a little off. Tori and Denny were riding together in a separate HMMWV while Jess and Nathan were in another. She knew he had gone through a lot with his encounter with Cade, having lost a fingertip while being tortured, but also saw a different Nathan than she was used to. She couldn’t tell if his mental preoccupation was back in that torture room or if his mind was on Tori. Either way, she kept trying to probe him for information, but he just kept giving her the runaround. She wasn’t feeling the same connection with him that she had before. It was almost as if his life spark was fizzling out.
“Hey, I’m talking to you,” she said, nudging him. She had just made two attempts at asking him if he thought the UN had evacuated.
Nathan snapped out of his daydream. He was back in Gorham, alone with Tori, walking on the Mississippi River when Jess captured his attention.
“Huh, what?”
“Do you think they evacuated? It’s possible they have left.”
“Can we stop here and check it out on foot?” Nathan asked Sergeant Banks.
“Makes good sense to me,” he replied.
The convoy came to a stop. The antitank infantry and heavy gunners stayed in their turrets while many of the infantry Marines and militiamen walked in on foot.
“The whole town is ghosted out,” Sergeant Banks said.
Looking ahead, Jess saw a fence similar to the one in Benton.
“Check it out,” she said, pointing down the street.
“Denny, you have binos, don’t you?”
“No, they got bust
ed up in Benton.”
“We don’t need binos,” Banks said. “We have TOWs,” he continued by motioning on to one of the Marine lance corporals to go get a TOW mounted up.
Within a couple minutes, several Marine TOW gunners were setting up a TOW in the middle of the street so they could look through the high-magnification lenses and see detailed information.
“We’re up,” one of them said.
“Can I look?” Nathan asked.
“Yeah, go ahead.” Sergeant Banks gave permission.
Nathan stepped behind the TOW and looked through the day-sight tracker.
“Wow, it’s been a long time since I’ve looked through one of these.”
“What do you see?” Tori asked, touching Nathan on the back.
Jess saw the touch and saw his change in demeanor when she was around.
“Well, I see the fence, but there’s no sign of life anywhere.”
Each of them took their turn looking through the TOW system.
“That’s enough, guys,” Sergeant Banks interrupted. “We have to use our system sparingly because we only have a couple of these left.”
Jess walked up to Nathan and planted a kiss on his cheek. “It’s okay, babe. I’ll get you one next Christmas.”
“We need to keep moving,” Nathan said, averting a potential conflict. He was feeling emotional conflict between his feelings for Jess and Tori, but the last thing he wanted was for them to have conflict between one another.
Denny had been feeling an attraction towards Tori since she first arrived. They had been spending most of their time together, and he was under the assumption that it was a mutual attraction. Nathan had Jess, and now Tori had finally rejoined the group, this time without a husband. He only thought it plausible that he and Tori might have some kind of relationship. He had seen the way she touched Nathan and the response it got from Jess. Not willing to interfere with what Nathan might do, he chose to pull back, as he usually did, and see how it played out. He would never think of interfering with Nathan’s feelings for Tori, if he still had them.
The group had packed up the TOW equipment and started on foot towards the fenced structure. The closer they got, the more they could see that it was indeed abandoned, but even more horrifying was the sight of several hundred dead Americans.
“It’s obvious what happened here,” Banks whispered. “I’m not sure where they went, but I’m betting their train never arrived.”
Nathan picked up on what Banks was saying. The train they had destroyed in Benton was a prisoner transport, complete with hand and leg shackles. Its destination was most likely Chicago, FEMA’s Region V compound, and it was supposed to pick up Americans at this Human Handling Center and transport them northward, to the destination point. When the train never came, they dispatched the people on sight.
There were entire families lying dead, covered lightly in snow. The temperature was below freezing, keeping the smell and the act of decomposition at bay. It seemed almost impossible, to the men who were familiar with Mount Vernon, that it was emptied out and now void of life.
The men stayed on high alert and maintained a tight 360-degree area of observation. When one of the combat engineers cut the bolt on the fence, they heard a shout from atop a building. Every person with a gun pointed it in the direction of the voice. It was a foreign language and was mixed with English.
Sergeant Banks gave the hand signal for everyone to spread out and get low. Everyone took cover and kept their weapons trained on the building, where they continued to hear a voice. A squad of Marines, Nathan, and Denny approached the building. They carefully looked down the walls of every corner and could not see a ladder up, so they breached the front door of the building and made their way to the hatch, where they found the ladder. They carefully climbed up the ladder and onto the roof, finding an Iranian UN soldier with his hands in the air and his rifle on the snowy rooftop.
The Marines kept him at gunpoint and gave him commands to get down. As the man was lowering himself, Denny moved forward and kicked the man’s rifle away from his reach. Nathan picked it up and immediately noticed that it was a Colt-style M4 rifle, American manufactured.
“Do you speak English?” Banks asked.
“Me speaks English small,” he replied.
“Where did you get this gun?” Nathan asked him.
“They give it me.”
Nathan took the magazine out of the magazine well and inspected the bolt. The chamber was empty, as was the magazine. He ran his good pinky into the chamber of the barrel and discovered that it was caked with carbon, indicating he had been firing his gun and, most likely, all of his ammunition.
“Check this out.” Nathan showed his pinky to Banks.
“Do you think he shot them up?” Banks asked.
“I think he helped. I doubt he scared off his buddies by emptying his rifle into the air.”
“Did you kill those people?” Banks asked the Iranian, now noticeably scared.
When he didn’t answer the question, Nathan raised his voice a little and asked the same question. “Did you shoot those people?”
Nathan was being animated with his question. He pointed the empty rifle at the man as he asked, and jerked the rifle back and forth to aid in demonstration of his question. The man did not answer, whether out of confusion, fear, or refusal.
“Let me say it this way,” Nathan barked as he took one of the magazines from his pouch and slapped it into the M4, charging the bolt to the rear and letting it go to make it a ready-to-fire weapon. Nathan pointed it at the man and said, “Did you kill those people?”
“Please no shoot,” he replied. “Wife and family.”
Nathan thought of his sister, Katie, while Denny’s thoughts shifted to his sister, Heather. Both were killed months earlier in a raid on their southern Illinois homestead.
Banks used Nathan’s pause to place his hand on the handguard of the M4 and push it down.
“Maybe we can use him,” he told Nathan. “He’s got to know something. He was probably left behind by accident or something. He may know where they’ve gone or what they’re planning.”
Nathan took the magazine from the rifle and ejected the round. Once he had collected the ejected round, he put it back in the magazine and into his pouch.
“If we take him downstairs, we’ll have to protect him. There are men down there that want UN blood. I’ll deal with Jess, she’s a little bitter toward these guys and might act hastily to put a bullet in his head.”
“That goes for Tori, too,” Denny added. “She’s beast mode.”
Three of the Marines led the way down the hatch, followed by the Iranian, and the rest came down after him.
Tori saw the POW first.
“No way,” she exclaimed and briskly walked toward the Iranian, pulling her shiny 1911 from its place and pointing it at the man’s head, as if prepared to execute him.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Sergeant Banks shouted as he moved towards Tori.
The commotion caused Jess to look in that direction, who had a similar response.
She pulled out her Walther P22 pistol, charging after the man from the opposite angle as Tori. Jess was standing at about thirty degrees of angle to the man’s front and Tori was standing at about one hundred fifty degrees of angle.
Banks found himself flailing his arms at both of them, knowing full well that he wouldn’t be able to stop a bullet, let alone two bullets.
Both Jess and Tori would have shot the man if not for the others that were moving in from behind him. Nathan, Denny, and the rest of the Marines had completed their descent and caught up to Banks and the Iranian POW.
“Easy, girls,” Nathan called out.
Denny ran up to Tori and gently brought her arm down. Nathan wasn’t as gentle with Jess as Denny was with Tori. He pushed her gun down and spun her into him, embracing her. It wasn’t until after he was holding Jess that he realized the moment had been deescalated and Tori was watching him as he held Jess.
Tori put the gun away and said, “I’m good.”
Jess pulled away from Nathan and pointed at the POW. “Please explain what’s going on here? Blue helmets are a disease, and we are the cure.”
“Nobody’s arguing that, Jess, but Sergeant Banks has a good idea.”
Nathan gave a head nod to Banks as if to have him explain his idea.
“If we kill this turd, we waste a good bullet,” he said, looking at Jess. “Maybe two,” he said as he turned towards Tori. “But if we spare him, it’s likely we can pull some good information out of him.”
“Like, where’s everyone gone?” Denny added.
“Can we waterboard him?” Tori interjected into the conversation.
“With a canteen? Not likely, but anything aside from killing him. We need the information.”
Tori and Jess looked at each other and for once were feeling a sense of kindred spirit. The two of them gently smirked at each other.
“Fine,” Jess said, putting away her Walther pistol. “But me and Tori get to interrogate him,” she insisted.
Banks looked at Nathan and Denny.
Denny gave Banks a shoulder shrug, and Nathan said, “It’ll be fine,” reassuring Sergeant Banks that they wouldn’t kill the Iranian at the first opportunity.
“All right, but I’m going to have a lance colonel make sure you don’t get carried away.” A lance colonel was Marine lingo for a lance corporal who always tries to take control of situations if he is not the senior enlisted Marine.
“Done,” Tori answered.
“Lance Corporal Jones,” Banks called out.
Jones came walking up from the rear of the group. “What’s up?”
“Jess and Tori here are going to interrogate this prisoner. Your job is to make sure they don’t kill him or wound him in such a way that could lead to said death.”
“Got it,” he said, happy to have an assignment.
Tori smirked at the Iranian and walked up to him while Banks zip-tied his hands behind him.
Whiskey Black Book Set: The Complete Tyrant Series (Box Set 1) Page 52