“Congressman, what’s the password?” Burghoff demanded.
“I refuse to cooperate with this illegal search and seizure. You have no grounds to be here, and Posse Comitatus has not been suspended.”
“You hear that? No grounds to be here,” Burghoff said with a sad little smile. “If only it were not necessary, McCorkle. Now, give me the password.”
“Go fuck yourself.”
Burghoff turned, seeming to see me for the first time. He gave a little gesture for me to approach. I walked over, eyeballing the disgusting politician as I did.
“Luke, we need the password. You want to start the enhanced interrogation now, or wait on the captain?”
“Master Sergeant, there’s just some things officers should never be forced to watch,” I replied briskly, playing along with the sliver of an idea passed to me by the team leader. Marino would indeed want to be present for the interrogation, but if we could get the laptop up and running first, that would save us time. Time my father just didn’t have.
“Very well, and I agree. Start on the toes, I’d say. Leave the fingers for now. He may need to sign something later.”
Taking off my backpack, I started rummaging through until I found the small crowbar I’d been carrying for the master sergeant. It was stuck under a double stack of loaded magazines for the soldiers’ rifles. I was playing pack mule for the soldiers, extra magazines for the HK417s, but so far, they’d mainly stuck to their pistols. Except for that one short burst of fire downstairs, and yes, the rifles were still loud even with the suppressors.
“You want them broken only, or cut off? I’ll need to get my torch to cauterize the stumps if you want them removed,” I pronounced, using a voice that I thought approximated the level of interest I’d experienced when I went to get my driver’s license. Those people really didn’t seem to care if their hair caught on fire. Or if they had to cut off somebody’s toes. Just don’t interfere with their lunches and coffee breaks and they were the same all day long.
“Ah, break ’em first. Then when you run out, cut them off,” Burghoff said with an equally bland tone.
“All right,” I said, hefting the small steel bar. McCorkle, the whole time this exchange was taking place, had been alternating between crying, screaming for mercy, and chanting a string of numbers and letters. Birdman, standing by, had out a pen and paper at the ready.
“I gave you the password! I gave you the password!” he shrieked as I brought the metal tip of the bar down on his little toe. Blood geysered as the tiny bones shattered, and I think Burghoff was nearly as surprised as Birdman when I did it.
I looked at McCorkle, giving him my patented deadeye stare. “Do it again, and get it right this time,” I said simply.
He did, and after a second, Birdman simply said, “We’re in.”
And boy, did the congressman start to sweat after that. As well he should have. By the time Captain Marino arrived, McCorkle had admitted to just about everything except the Lindbergh baby. Ha, didn’t think a youngster like me knew that reference? It was on my Modern American History midterm exam.
“Hey McCorkle, where’s your boy? Where’s Chad?” I asked, killing time while we waited. The intel expert and the master sergeant began scanning the files, and I wondered if I would ever be allowed to see them. Of course, from what Barlow said about Camp Gruber, I wondered if I really want to read the reports.
“I…I don’t know. He was in DC when the lights went out. He was supposed to go to the pickup point, but he…never showed up.”
“Well, I’m sure he would have gotten out if he could. Probably best to hope the cannibals got him. Been my experience, they usually don’t like to play with their food first.”
Watching the look of horror work its way across the broken man’s face, I reflected on all the death and harm caused by this man. We still didn’t even know the extent of McCorkle’s sins, but he had given the order that caused the death of four of our number at the ranch.
Five. Kate. I reminded myself. Kate was dead too. She hadn’t made much of an impression on my life, but maybe somebody somewhere had loved her. So McCorkle ordered a baseless attack and killed five of our people, and now he was our prisoner.
Death, I decided. How hard he died would depend on what happened at daybreak. If my father lived, then McCorkle’s death would be relatively painless. If anything happened, though, I made a vow to myself. If anything happened, then the neighbors would be complaining about McCorkle’s screaming for months.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-EIGHT
The convoy wound its way slowly toward town just after sunup, led by a pair of up-armored Humvees, first one operated by the Green Berets and the second, my own rig. Behind that, we had all of the surviving deputies from Shelby County, all twelve of them, packed into two of the government-issue Suburbans. Following behind was a trio of farm trucks packed with “observers” as we called them, which meant some of the armed farmers and a few townspeople who rallied to the sheriff’s cause. We couldn’t take all who wanted to come because they simply couldn’t be spared from the watch. Bringing up the rear were the captain’s two other vehicles, another Hummer and a retrofitted five-ton transport truck.
All of this had been organized by Captain Marino and his four men while the rest of us handled getting the congressman and squeezing the intel. The captain was in nonstop motion for at least twenty-four hours straight, and I never saw him even slow down. As for me, I was exhausted and still carrying a heavy heart over our losses.
When we’d left the night before, headed for Nacogdoches, I remembered rolling through the burned-out remains of Ripley and feeling another slug of sadness settle over me. The little wide spot in the road was only five miles from my home, and I remembered my father letting me pilot the big farm truck down the dirt and gravel roads leading to “town.” I looked at the burned-out skeleton of Hank’s, and felt a longing for a gentle past lost not that long ago.
I’d learned to drive on those roads leading to the rundown little village, which I think is what they would have called it in the Northeast. I wasn’t sure, since my tour of the country failed to include much out that way. My father had only done one TDY posting in New Jersey and we’d never moved from the apartment in Southern California to join him. Later, he said it was just as well. He’d never want us living like that, anyway.
Now I was thinking of things lost as we motored along with our caravan of relative strangers. I rode shotgun in our Humvee while Ike drove and Mike stood in the back, ready to man the 240B. Our group was loaded for bear but coming in under a white flag and looking to talk, not fight. Captain Marino had enough dirt, and then some, to convince the National Guard major that he was backing the wrong dog in this fight. That is, if the major was truly being misled. If he was working knowingly with McCorkle, then things were likely to get a whole lot messier.
Amy wanted to come, of course, but I for once was on the same page as my mother. We somehow convinced her that going on a recon mission with a bunch of highly trained and specially trained soldiers wasn’t a good idea.
“So why are you going?” Amy had asked me then, and I didn’t have a good answer to give.
And there was that question again. I remembered it, and asked myself the same thing as I was stumbling through the dark woods behind the congressman’s home. Why was I here? And the answer came to me in that moment. I was here because the captain and his men were on a mission to stop the crazy plotting of little men grown drunk on power…the power of Washington. That was all well and good, but my purpose was different—I was here to get my father home. I would kill or maim or torture whoever the fuck I had to in order to carry out my mission.
“You boys ready for this?” Ike shouted over the roar of the open cupola, and I knew these men were with me on this mission. Our mission.
We drove slowly, white flags hung from each vehicle by a short wooden dowel attached to the vehicle hood. More of the captain’s work. He was a meticulous planner
and seemed to be ahead of the curve when it came to countering this rogue Homeland operation. Except, of course, intercepting the strike team that decimated our numbers at the ranch. I thought about my dead uncle and wanted to kill something. Again. Even there, I had to admit, if only to myself, they arrived soon enough after that Benny, the Special Forces trained medic, working in conjunction with Beth, managed to keep all our wounded alive. As for the medic I’d hit, well, he was still unconscious when we pulled out. Oh well.
“Think this is going to work?” I asked Ike, who seemed to really think about the question before he answered.
“Don’t know. We’ll see though. I was against all this at first, you know. Fighting to protect some food? What does that make us? Then I saw your mother slipping packages out, always for the kids, and making sure the people who wandered down the road would get plenty of water on their way. I thought, this isn’t so bad, and wondered when we could go home.
“Then came the first group that didn’t ask for food but demanded it, like it was their right. This was maybe a week after the lights went out and they weren’t really hungry, not yet, but they wanted what your family had. Not wanting to trade for it, you understand? ‘You have it and we want it,’ was what one woman said. Just before she started shooting at your dad with a little pistol she pulled from her purse.”
“Jeez, Mr. Stanton, that must have been terrible,” I said, because that was what I was supposed to say.
Mr. Ike glanced over for a split second and caught my eye.
“I know you’ve seen worse, Luke. And we all have, later, but at that moment, I was just frozen in my spot. Not your daddy, though. He was already pulling that fast pistol of his, that racer gun, and he shot her and the two men with her quicker than I could blink. Your uncle, bless his soul, was still trying to get the pistol out of his holster when all three started to fall.
“And that’s when I started to see the truth in what your daddy was saying. Helping others is important, but so is taking care of your own family first. I’ve heard ministers on TV telling watchers to give ’til it hurts, but you notice, none of them ever seem to be hurting too much.”
“So you understand what is at stake? Not just our lives but our families, too? If these guys get their way, their agents will sweep through the county, taking every single bean and potato they can find. That’s the price McCorkle promised to pay the Recovery Committee to gain total control of this part of the state.”
The Recovery Committee. What a sick joke. From the e-mails collected from McCorkle’s secure laptop, using a secret hardened branch of the Internet still functioning, we learned a lot. The Recovery Committee was the framework created by Chambers and his buddies who were perverting Homeland Security to their goals. It sounded nice, anyway, since everybody and their cousin was looking for signs of recovery.
Of course, nobody wanted what Chambers and his band of bloodthirsty killers were really selling. So they worked through some of the worst raiders and prison gangs, sprinkling in some weapons and expertise to encourage attacks not only on isolated National Guard units, but anybody who looked like they were trying to pull a community together. But they saved their strike teams for harder targets, like our ranch.
Chambers, of course, knew the likelihood of this becoming “the end of the world as we knew it” or TEOTWAKI as the doomsday preppers called it. He was just the first to capitalize on the President’s fall to seize a piece of the kingdom for himself.
Well, we would do what we could to unwind this transaction here in our neighborhood. Maybe, just maybe, that would be enough to let my family get back to the business of raising stock and living our lives.
We stopped about a mile outside of town, picking up the two soldiers Captain Marino had used to infiltrate the town. He had their uniforms and shaving kits in the back of the five-ton and the men hustled to get cleaned up before hitting the first guard post into town. Like I mentioned, the man is organized.
Nacogdoches is a crossroads town. Highway 59, Highway 7, and Highway 21 all intersect in Nacogdoches, along with a half dozen other, smaller roads. We could have tried to approach on one of those secondary routes, but Captain Marino wanted to enter town openly so he drove the five miles from the congressman’s mansion north of town to the roadblock on Highway 59, headed south into the city proper.
When Captain Marino emerged from the lead Humvee, he was wearing a clean uniform with all of his badges and patches showing, captain’s bars, and the trademark green beret set just so on his freshly trimmed hair. The guy looked like a freaking recruiting poster for the Army, that was for certain. And that was his point, I’m sure.
I couldn’t hear what was said as Marino spoke to the pair of National Guard troops, but they seemed to get the message and waved over two more guys to help slide the blocking vehicle, a new-looking Ford King Cab, out of the way to allow us to pass. Much as the captain predicted, one of the grungy National Guardsmen elected to accompany the captain. We rolled forward and followed the road south through the main drag, as my father called it.
Soon we were passing the college, and I wished I was covering to the left so I could check out the campus, but my job was to watch right, and I did. Mike, bless him, gave a bit of a running commentary.
“Can’t see much for the trees here. Okay, there’s a gap.”
Mike paused, and then continued. “The Theatre building is still standing. Science building looks a little scorched. Oh, one of the tower dorms must have burned. And the administration building looks like it was barricaded.”
Then a longer pause, and I never let my eyes stray from the scene unfolding on my side of the convoy. All I saw were wrecked and looted beer stores and a gas station parking lot converted into an open-air flea market. Everyone I saw was skinny, down to the bone, and looked desperate. So, situation normal, I decided.
“Is the Old Stone Fort still standing?” I asked idly. We were approaching the south end of the campus so I knew it was coming up, if the trees were cut back as they had been.
“Looks like it,” Mike confirmed, and then continued, “and it looks like all the flower beds have been dug up and converted to vegetable gardens. Well, they have a pretty large agricultural department here, after all.”
“Yeah, for growing trees,” Ike finally chimed in with a chuckle. “I wonder how drinking that pine needle tea is going for these kids?”
“Probably about like it does back home. Tastes like drinking Pine Sol.”
We were all running on just about no sleep and starting to get punchy. Plus, I’d been ringside for another shootout, my second in about twelve hours, and I was starting to crash. Mike, having seen the effect before, was trying to keep me alert by keeping my mouth engaged. This wasn’t a secret, as he repeated his plan several times as we continued on our way.
“So what was it like, Luke? I mean, we always hear about how good these guys are, how they are top-notch operators. Was it what you expected?”
“Uh, yes. Definitely yes. These guys are just working on a different level. They are trained to a point that makes me doubt we will ever get there. The radio discipline was amazing. Like they could read each other’s minds, and they didn’t need to discuss what happened next. Half the time I couldn’t even tell what they were doing.”
“They train all the time though, don’t they?” Ike added, most of his attention still focused on the road.
“I think so. At least when they aren’t deployed. Then it is months of real, live-fire exercises. But they can still bump into the unexpected. I don’t know why the congressman had a four-man quick reaction force standing by in the guardroom there at the house, on top of the roving team already up and about. Paranoid, I guess.”
“Well, with good reason, don’t you think? I mean, look what happened to him anyway.”
There was that.
And then we were nearly to the courthouse, and once more, we reached a roadblock barring the way. All conversation ceased as we prepared for whatever came next.<
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We came to a halt in the road, and the radio call ordered all the rigs shut down for the moment. Ike did so, and we all shifted around to get more comfortable. For Ike, that meant moving the small pillow he was using to make the hard bench of the seat less painful. For me, that meant adjusting the CETME in my lap and the magazine carriers for quicker access.
When I looked back, I saw Mike doing something similar to the M249 he’d claimed from the piles of the dead. He had a 200-round box of belted ammunition and a bipod, ready to go. He already explained that if trouble came, the National Guard troops would focus their fire on the medium machine guns mounted in the cupolas. Mike planned to be ready to deploy from the vehicle with the light machine gun, and I would lay down cover fire to get him free. If this plan went to hell, we might not survive, but at least we would go out fighting. To spare Ike’s peace of mind, we decided to keep that particular go-to-hell plan to ourselves.
I saw Captain Marino pop out of his Humvee once again, this time accompanied by Staff Sergeant Barlow, Birdman, and the unnamed National Guard soldier. Birdman had the rugged, metal-sided case for the laptop in his left hand. The quartet approached the barricade, and I saw Captain Marino begin to speak.
Again, the captain must have worked his magic because the sentry spoke into his radio and then waved Captain Marino and his escorts into the open area in front of the fortified courthouse. I could make out six, no, eight guards on this side of the perimeter and what looked like two machine gun positions flanking the entry port and facing out onto the road. As the captain instructed, all our gunners waited inside their vehicles, barrels pointed straight up or off to the side.
We sat in the growing morning sunshine for nearly half an hour before a call came through on the radio. “Luke, you’re up. Strip off that armory you’re carrying and come inside for a sit-down. Major Warren has some questions. The guard at the gate will escort you.”
I looked around, catching the eyes of my friends. The difference in age and background didn’t matter. The bonds that held us together were those of family. I despaired that Scott was not here with us, and I realized he was my brother, just like Lori and Summer were my sisters. Family.
Walking in the Rain (Book 4): Dark Sky Thunder Page 21