Grace took stock of her allies following in trucks behind. Candy and her fellow rangers had rallied the Crow women along the gravel road and prevented them from walking into the ambush. Taking the initiative, they even managed to knock out one of the shipping containers on the eastern edge of the battle. Carson and Rocky had survived the shootout by staying in one of the shipping containers in the mock trailer park. By all indications, the pair of older men had the time of their lives shooting outward to defend the rest of the arriving Crow vehicles.
Her dad was full of questions. “Are there trees around there? Maybe we can knock them over the highway? Is the pass very steep, like on a mountainside? That might give us options. Better yet, are there rockslides we can dump on the road? Boulders would stop anything.”
She tried to think about the terrain at the top end of the valley. It was practically flat along the highway, rather than a narrow mountainside pass like the word suggested. The mountain ranges were visible from up there, but the snow-capped peaks were still ten miles away on either side. Her dad was on the wrong track thinking the pass would offer anything. However, there were lots of burned trees up there, but it was impossible to say if they could be knocked across the pavement. They’d run into fallen trees earlier in their journey, and she’d always been able to drive around them.
Her dad kept talking before she could address his concerns. “I should have brought the semitruck. We could have used it to knock those trees over. It would give us some horsepower, at least compared to this one.”
Grace dipped into her thoughts for the next few minutes, but she stole a glance out her window to see if the dump trucks were visible out in the broad valley. Since they were nearing the highest point, she figured a line of them would be obvious from miles away. If nothing else, the plume of dust would be impossible to miss.
“Oh, shit,” she drawled.
Everyone looked to see what had her attention. Due to the undulations of the terrain, it was hard to see much of the gravel road. There was no long line of dump trucks, as she’d expected. There wasn’t even any dirt in the air. However, five giant yellow machines rolled north, seemingly by themselves.
“Those are the biggest dump trucks I’ve ever seen,” Haley said from the back.
“What are they doing out there?” Butch asked, mirroring Grace’s thoughts.
The behemoths came out of a low spot in the terrain, leading more dump trucks behind them. By comparison, the regular-sized haulers seemed tiny. It was like a gaggle of ducklings following their yellow mothers. Above, hard to pick out due to their distance away, she observed several helicopters buzzing around, watching over the convoy.
She suddenly knew one thing with certainty.
“They haven’t made it out.”
The Rim, WY
Ezra couldn’t think of a time he’d been as proud of his daughter. Maybe when she graduated college, which was the culmination of a lot of shared toil and treasure for him, Susan, and Grace. But even that didn’t compare to seeing her operate in the real world, around new people, and in high-stress situations like a gunfight. Now she’d used her intuition and critical thinking to listen to the right person on the phone. They were going to beat the TKM convoy to the pass.
But not with much time to spare.
They sped as fast as the SUVs would go in order to beat TKM to the junction. The giant ugly duckling trucks weren’t moving nearly as fast, but they were only a few minutes from the same junction as Grace and her friends sped by. A few saplings grew around the intersection, as trees returned to the landscape.
“How the hell are they not creating any dust?” Haley wondered aloud from the back seat. “Vehicles that large should be putting out tornadoes for a smoke screen. It was bad enough back in St. Charles when they were doing road construction on the interstate. We’d have dust in our house for weeks.”
“Maybe the rock is different in the northern part of the valley,” Asher replied. He was a geologist, Grace had once mentioned, so he’d probably know better than anyone. Based on his tone of voice, though, he didn’t seem convinced he was right.
Grace looked over to him, eyes searching for help. “Dad, what do we do now? How are we going to stop those huge things? Even trees won’t be enough.” She looked into the back seat where Asher, Butch, and Haley were sitting. “Anyone have any ideas?”
“Big ideas,” Butch lamented, “for big trucks.”
“Well,” Ezra began, “when we were on the boat, there were certain bridges where the enemy knew we’d have to pass. They waited to ambush us there. We could do the same thing if you know of chokepoints where we can block them. A river crossing. A part of a town with narrow streets. Anywhere that gives us an advantage against their size. Think.”
“We did cross bridges,” Asher mused, “but how will they help us? Those trucks could roll right over us, even if we blocked the entire bridge. We’d have to blow it out from under them to be effective.”
“Not gonna happen,” Butch lamented.
Ezra looked at his friend, which prompted him to explain.
“Bridges are tough to blow up. We had special engineering teams in the military. Even they sometimes needed two tries to blow a bridge.”
“That’s what I thought,” Ezra said, returning his eyes to the front.
“Other ideas?” Grace pressed as they drove on. “I wish Shawn and his people had come with us. They’d probably have some high plains trick to stop the trucks we’d never think of. They always seemed to know what to do.”
Ezra turned again to his buddy. “Butch, would it be better to ambush them at a bridge, or somewhere they’d never think of it, like in the trees?”
Butch answered immediately. “The trees. The bridge would offer better constriction, but we don’t have the manpower to stand out in the open and force them to stop. If we keep to the trees, they won’t know how many of us there are.”
“There aren’t any live trees for a long time,” Grace replied. “Everything is burned for the next thirty miles or so.”
They drove the highway for a few more minutes, passing a growing number of small trees and seeing the return of green grass and undergrowth. However, as they approached the small tourist turnout lot, the trees became black and stunted. A bit farther along on the right, they passed a blackened pile of lumber for a shop called Rim Station.
“This is the pass,” Grace said sadly. “We’ve been here before. It still looks like hell.”
The tops of the trees had been sheered off, probably by the same shockwave that had thrown his boat out of the water so long ago. The fire had burned everything, including the underbrush on the ground.
“Grace, what do you think about stopping right here?”
“At the pass?” she said, taking her foot off the gas.
“Yeah. The tree trunks are thick. Not even those huge trucks could break through them. There isn’t enough room for them to go around a roadblock on the highway.”
“But all we have is trucks. That’s not going to stop them, either.” Grace had slowed considerably, suggesting she was warming up to his idea.
Ezra pointed to the side of the road. “We’ll never find anything large enough to block them. We’ll have to use our brains instead. The trees will give us cover. It gives us options. We’ll think of something.”
His daughter smiled broadly. “All right.”
She slowed and turned the truck sideways, blocking a little of both lanes. Once stopped, she hopped out and instructed the other drivers to pass on each side of her and form two lines, one in each lane, to block the most real estate. There were nine vehicles from her park service friends, along with the two other pickups, driven by Rocky and Carson. In minutes, she had them all parked together as one long blockage.
As he’d thought before, he’d never been prouder of her.
Before he could tell her, the low growl of heavy engines came in on the breeze.
“They’re coming,” he said seriously.
; The Rim, WY
Petteri was chuffed to see his plan working so well. He’d gone to the front of the RV so he’d have a better look at the five gargantuan dump trucks leading the procession. In front of them, almost impossible to see, several tanker trucks sprayed water over the gravel road, eliminating all the dust those giants would normally kick up. He’d sent non-essential personnel to the south, instructing them to spin their tires and make as much air pollution as they could manage. It was a ruse designed to trick the Crow idiots and their allies so they would all travel south to the railhead. Once there, they would find nothing but empty coal cars.
Trains! What idiot would depend on a train parked inside a warzone? There was only one possible course it could take, and a train could be stopped by removing a few spikes and moving one rail. He wasn’t going to risk his entire fortune on such a vulnerable transportation system, at least not the one at the soda ash plant.
By contrast, using dump trucks made sense on every level. First, no one would expect him to drive them all the way to Canada. Second, no one would expect him to have all of them staged and ready to go when he did. And finally, there was nothing but burned-out forest and abandoned towns between the dig site and the open sky of Montana. He’d be out of Wyoming and halfway across Montana before anyone knew what he’d done. The world would be so busy watching nukes blow up major cities, they’d be even less inclined to care about him and a few old construction trucks.
“I have to hand it to you, sir,” Mr. Aarons said from his mobile workstation, “this has all worked out flawlessly, despite Nerio losing her freaking mind. The networks are going crazy about your press release and how nuke-powered spaceships are going to be raining down in a couple of hours. This is madness.”
“I tried to save those poor people,” he lied for the sake of his RV driver. “By helping them evacuate the strike zones before her evil ways could kill them.” When the inquest into the disaster inevitably launched, and everyone was questioned by the authorities, his driver would only remember Petteri’s concern about the victims. Dorothy was the only other person on Earth who knew the truth about how the nukes fell out of space.
Petteri watched as they passed the tanker trucks. They’d parked at the end of the gravel road where it met the pavement. Their services were complete. Though they probably wouldn’t see him, he waved at the drivers. Always keeping up appearances.
“Now,” he said, clearing his throat, “we’re on the road that will carry us north to our refuge in Canada. From there, we can monitor everything.” It was dangerous to travel with the convoy, as opposed to in his chopper, but Dorothy had smartly warned him about civilian drones flying through the air. She’d also told him a story about a Crow pilot who’d flown an old biplane crop duster into a federally-funded electrical pylon, which was part of a hydroelectric project in Nebraska. That was decades ago, when the Crow didn’t have such good relations with the feds. However, she said they still carried that suicidal gene to this day.
In short, it was much safer to be an anonymous traveler on the ground, rather than risk being in the air. He did plan to meet his helicopter when he got to Jackson. He planned to check on some things in Idaho, then fly on to his refinery in Canada.
Jackson was still abandoned, his agents reported, and there was no Crow presence within fifty miles of it. Dorothy thought he’d probably be fine taking off from there, though she practically begged him to take her, too. Apparently, driving cross-country was not her thing. It wasn’t his, either.
His contentment lasted five minutes. The yellow hulks slowed and then stopped ahead of him. Aarons listened on his headphones, then took them off so Petteri could hear.
“This is the driver, sir,” Aarons whispered.
“As I said, I can’t risk damaging this 7-9-7. I’m responsible for it.”
Aarons turned to him, looking worried. “The lead truck driver says there’s a roadblock up ahead. I told him to run over it as long as the people weren’t in their vehicles, but he says…well, you heard him.”
Petteri wouldn’t stoop to talking to the driver. Instead, he addressed Mr. Aarons. “Tell him I’ll buy him ten giant, mega, mondo dump trucks if he has an incident with the one he’s in.”
Aarons did as instructed.
The voice came back. “Can I get that signed from your boss?”
He grabbed the microphone. “This is Mr. Tikkanen. I don’t care who you are or what you have to do up there. We can’t stop for anyone on our trip, do you understand? People or not, you run over the pipsqueaks in front of you right this instant. I’ll have a million dollars in a briefcase with your name carved on it. Get it done!”
“Yes sir!” the man responded.
He tapped the man behind the wheel. “Drive us alongside these machines. I want to see the roadblock.”
The RV driver did his best to get around the huge dump trucks, but there wasn’t much space to maneuver. The mammoth haulers tried to stay on the right side of the road, as would a normal truck, but they were so wide they almost filled the entire highway and both shoulders. The ground was flat to the side of the road, but a forest of burned and broken trees bracketed the highway right-of-way.
When the RV got closer to the front, Petteri watched with glee as the leader of the convoy had what looked like a toy truck under its two-story wheel. Behind the first crushed vehicle, a dozen identical white trucks sat in two neat rows. The yellow dump truck would have no problem crushing them all.
“This is going to be easy,” he mused.
Then the shooting started.
Chapter 24
The Rim, WY
Grace thought she’d done a commendable job of lining up all the vehicles to block the advance of the TKM convoy. Neither her dad nor his friends said anything to contradict her, which made her believe her arrangement was the correct one. However, when the first yellow Titan came around the bend in the road, she knew immediately a few trucks weren’t going to be nearly enough.
“Oh my God,” she said, the words falling out of her mouth in horror.
The mining trucks were much larger than she’d thought. Every second they got closer to her roadblock, they appeared to double in size. The top of the dump bucket competed with the height of some trees. She guessed it was every bit of three stories high. By the time the first truck was a hundred yards from her Suburban, it didn’t look like her roadblock would even be noticed by the lead machine’s operator.
Her dad spoke up. “I might have been wrong suggesting this place. I figured we’d fire a few warning shots in front of the first driver and this would be over. But they’ve got a nice armor job up there.” He pointed to the one-man cabin twenty feet off the ground. A man was in there steering the heavy beast, but TKM had surrounded it with bare-metal steel plates. “We’d need an armor-piercing machine gun to get through that.”
She chuckled ruefully. “You’re going to laugh, Dad, but we actually had one. It went with Shawn and the Crow. They even made ammo for it.” She wasn’t quite ready to explain where it came from. Telling him about Misha was on her to-do list, but she didn’t want to worry him more than he already was.
“Can we shoot out the tires?” Haley asked, making sense.
“Or the engine?” Butch added, aiming down his rifle at the huge profile creeping up to the roadblock. “If we can find it.”
“And if they didn’t add more armor,” her dad replied to his friend. The dump truck was so immense, and the driver’s compartment sat above what had to be the motor, but it was like shooting at the side of a barn. They might never hit a critical piece.
Grace became agitated. “We have to act.”
They were safe standing behind the soot-covered tree trunks next to the road, but she watched the scene on the edge of her proverbial seat. Grace was still hopeful the driver was going to stop before things went too far. Perhaps the trucks alone wouldn’t stop the convoy, but maybe they would think twice if she ran out and flagged them down? It would at least give everyon
e a chance to avoid violence and possible bloodshed. And, she couldn’t deny, she wanted to save her beloved Chevy.
“I’m going out there,” she deadpanned.
Asher latched on to her arm like a sprung mouse trap. “Wait up! Do you see what’s coming? What do you expect to do?”
More and more dump trucks came around the distant bend in the road. There were only five of the giant ones, but there were lots of the smaller models. And there was also a big black RV trailing behind the five leaders. Someone had to be in charge of their convoy. Surely, someone could be reasoned with.
“If we sit here and do nothing, we’ll either have to shoot at them or let them go by. I’m not cool with either of those.” She put her hand on top of Asher’s. “You can come with me.”
He gulped loudly. At first, it looked as if he wanted to say no, but when she met his eyes, he seemed to relent. After straightening Grace’s cracked hat for her, he faced her. “There’s no stopping you, is there?”
She smiled, then turned to her dad. “Not unless you’re going to hold me back?”
He shook his head. “You’re in charge here. As long as you have a plan, I’ll support you.”
It meant the world to her to have him say those words, especially in front of the other rangers. Technically, she wasn’t in charge of so much as a pit toilet. She might not even have a job in the park service. But Candy and the others had willingly followed her into danger. Now was the time to end it.
“I aim to go out there and wave down the leader, maybe Petteri Tikkanen himself. If he’ll talk to me, maybe we can make a deal.”
Butch inched closer. “But you always have to plan for the worst. What if he doesn’t stop? What if he listens, and then says no? What’s your contingency?”
Grace had learned nothing ever went the way she wanted. Life was messy. War was even messier. Though she hated the thought, she was at war with Tikkanen Kinetic Mining. If those drivers said no, she knew there was only one course of action which would follow.
Impact Series Box Set | Books 1-6 Page 118