by Zack Finley
Clyde waved at me when he drove by, and I followed his truck to the edge of the camp. I wondered how those in the Spring Creek Lake settlement would receive them back. Hostages seldom returned to their former life without serious problems. I hoped these brutalized women would find peace.
This left me alone on guard duty. I topped off my pistol magazines as I walked the camp perimeter. I trusted my ears to provide the first warning of an approaching intruder. I let the sounds of rain falling in the woods fill my senses, searching for any unnatural element. My pace was fast enough to stay warm but slow enough, not to sweat. Finding that elusive pace was always a holy grail on winter maneuvers. You couldn't afford to sweat too much, or your core temperature dropped when the sweat dried.
Not as critical here since we had a fire, but still good practice.
I realized quickly why these inmates wanted to relocate. The scent of raw sewage cloaked the area. Rather than digging a latrine pit for their wastes, they let it run out on the ground. A few hours of work and they could have avoided the problem minimizing both the stench and spread of disease.
In our group, only Tom and Allie slept in a trailer. The rest of the team sacked out in various vehicles. The condensation on the interior of the car and truck windows was a reliable indicator of where the guys were sleeping.
Guard duty crept by without incident. It gave me time to consider our different options. I agreed with Tom, we needed to kill the inmates shooting at the farm. We could leave a coded message at St. Francis Point; in case we were wrong, and Andy's group went north. We would relocate the Cumberland to the next point on my old map immediately south of where the barges were. This would keep us all in radio range.
Within an hour, the rain transitioned to intermittent showers. The cloud ceiling hung just above the treetops. No blue sky, but it was getting lighter, despite the heavy overcast.
Mike was the first person to get out of his truck. He trotted over to relieve me of guard duty. I left after he promised to wake everyone up at 11:00.
My wet clothes, the uncomfortable bed, nor my private chafing kept me awake.
When I woke up, the rain had stopped. It remained overcast, and a light breeze brought a new stabbing chill with it.
Razor, Tom, and Allie gathered around the well-stoked fire. Tom and Allie were eating, but Razor was just trying to dry out. Tom's color looked healthier. I dipped some hot water into a clean-looking mug. Even if it wasn't clean the boiling water should reduce the potential for disease. I warmed my hands on the cup and tried to convince myself it was as good as coffee to help me wake up.
Someone mentioned Mike and Ben left on a ninja about a half hour before to gather intel. No one heard anything from the group below us since Clyde left.
"Do you want to chat with the lakeside camp before we go?" I asked Tom.
"No real reason to. We didn't tell the women or Clyde our plans. They know we helped them, and we are well armed. Clyde knows we intend to remove some of his corn. For all they know, we intend to stay here," said Tom. "I'm sure they are waiting for us to make the first move. I hope they believe Clyde about what happens if they shoot at us."
Allie and Razor drifted over to listen.
"Should we go by ninja or take a truck, too?" I asked the group.
"We shouldn't leave those weapons behind even for a little while," Razor said. "They pose a threat, and we don't know those other campers. They may not be as rough as the inmates but no need to take the chance."
"Where did we stash the weapons and ammo?" I asked.
"In the back seat of that white pickup," Razor pointed. "I found a few more hidden in the trailers when I checked them again this morning. I think this place is clear enough to leave it, forever."
I sure shared his sentiment.
Tom suggested we snag another truck if nobody wanted to return here. Allie and Razor volunteered, lifting their ninjas into the back of an empty truck. I had full confidence Razor had previously determined that was the best truck left on the lot.
That left Tom and me in the pickup with the weapons. We would retrieve our ninjas on our way out.
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Chapter 3
The campers at Storm Creek Lake moved purposefully about, carrying water, stoking fires, and hanging wet clothes on ropes strung from one trailer to another. We drove slowly by, checking them out. No one waved, but no one made any threatening gestures. I took that as a positive encounter.
We didn't see Clyde's truck and assuming he returned to his job making moonshine. My team carefully avoiding damaging the stills, so I expected him to restart production very soon, especially since we confiscated his finished product.
We followed Clyde's tracks from the campground. The tracks proceeded across Big Spring Road and disappeared in the direction of his still. At Big Spring Road we turned right, after checking for signs of other traffic. The heavy rains converted Big Spring Road from a reasonable gravel route to a muddy track, festooned with water-filled potholes. We spotted no evidence anything other than our ninjas traveled this way since the rain began last night. Even the hints of tracks from the ninjas only showed up in particularly muddy places. That wouldn't matter once we eliminated this next threat and moved our base.
I slowed when I heard a distant shot. Razor driving the lead truck, signaled an immediate halt.
"Ben, we are about a mile away, who is shooting," Razor radioed.
"Eight hostiles sitting behind two abandoned trucks taking pot shots at a farmhouse. They sit in lawn chairs behind cover, popping up from time to time to shoot. I doubt they aim at anything in particular. I bet their shots go through at least two walls, making life hell for those in the farmhouse," radioed Ben. "We waited for you to take them down in one action. Otherwise, the rats might scatter. These guys are drunk and hungover." The disgust dripped from his voice.
We stashed the pickups immediately, locking the salvaged weapons inside. After mounting up, we rode the ninjas to where Ben stashed his. A quick hike in and we met Ben and Mike in a clump of trees about 500 feet from our targets. While we found a few Kevlar vests in the inmate trailers, I doubted these guys wore body armor.
Only one truck still had wheels, we guessed it was their only working transportation. It sat about 10 feet behind the two trucks with flat tires. Four men hunkered behind the trucks with flat tires that shielded them from the farmhouse.
Another group of four men huddled under the bright blue tarp tied to the lumber rack on the truck with intact wheels. The men sat on makeshift benches, made of boards and cement blocks. They occasionally stoked an anemic fire smoking and sputtering in a small clearing only a few feet from the tarp. The fire generated more smoke than heat. The smoke swirled and darted under the tarp drawn to the four men sitting there like a smoke magnet. I wondered if they realized the rain stopped hours ago.
My team spread out and picked targets. The three extra targets caused the most discussion. Mike wanted to move to line up two for a single shot. In the end, we prioritized the shots. Four of us targeted the inmates sitting in the lawn chairs next to the abandoned cars and firing randomly at the farmhouse. Ben took the four sitting around the fire with the understanding the rest of us would jump in and help as soon as our primary target went down.
The plan took longer to organize than to execute. I doubt Ben needed any help from the rest of us to handle his group shot. He used his three-shot bursts to advantage. Using so many bullets bothered him, targeting three bullets for each of them. Something he considered wasteful. When Mike teased him about the waste, Ben agreed to owe him a favor if Mike didn't tell Craig. I didn't know what the favor entailed, but the payment was not due until we returned to the Valley. I looked at Tom, and he shook his head the smallest amount, warning me.
We monitored the bodies for several minutes more, giving them time to fully bleed out. After five minutes, Razor and Mike sprinted forward to confirm the kills and salvage any weapons or ammo. Within minutes Razor placed our salvaged weapons
in the back seat of the operational vehicle. Mike folded up the tarp and checked the site for anything Razor missed.
"This truck is half full, " Razor radioed. "We'll finish loading up and rejoin you momentarily. Mike's leaving them a love note."
On our way out, we found the "big spring," the road's namesake, including an informative sign at the site. A steady stream of water poured over the gravel at the base of the cliff. A rusty collection system diverted some of the flow into a pipe that followed along the edge of the ridge. Most likely, the system provided water for the farm even before the crash.
My tired brain tried to tell me something important. With Andy missing the rendezvous, we could not continue to throw darts at the map to decide where to look next. I needed to treat this like a military operation, using the available data to locate high-probability sites. I found hostages in hostile countries with less information.
I knew more about this caper than I bothered to use. A group of bad guys attacked Andy's group somewhere near the Helena bridge. Andy's group fled their attackers on foot carrying little kids, and their wounded to a prepper compound. After reaching the compound, he chose St. Francis Point as a rendezvous.
When Andy picked St. Francis Point to meet, I expected a prominent local destination, not a urine-smelling fire pit.
The Helena bridge was south of town and St. Francis Point was five miles north of the bridge with the town of Helena sprawled between the two locations.
I might not know a lot about Helena, but I knew Andy and a bit about preppers. Andy's party could have fled south after the ambush to reach a prepper compound. If he fled south, his rendezvous point would be somewhere south of Helena.No way would Andy take his vulnerable group back through Helena to reach a crappy location like St. Francis Point. Conclusion, Andy fled north after being attacked, not south.
Preppers able to shelter a 20 plus person group, even temporarily, had a serious compound. For such compounds, preppers prefer rural locations, invisible to any form of government. Serious preppers also avoided sites vulnerable to natural disasters. That eliminated the section on Big Spring Road area along the Mississippi River from consideration. Driftwood suspended in the upper branches of trees confirmed this section flooded too often for a serious survivalist to consider.
I favored the forested ridge between West Helena and Helena that turned into the St. Francis National Forest about a mile north of town. A compound would ideally be outside of the city limits and not in the National Forest.No prepper wanted nosy city building inspectors or federal foresters entering their compound.
No group carrying wounded and children cross country moved far or fast. Retreating even five miles after a major battle was challenging, even assuming Andy had a destination in mind. On my map, I penciled an arc five miles from the western edge of the bridge. Within that arc, I ignored land in both the city and national forest. This left me with a two-mile-wide by one-mile-deep area of dense forest for the prepper compound location.
Still a large search area but better than before. My outdated map showed only one road in that area, part of Storm Creek Road. Based on our recent exploration, I knew we would find a few more roads. But, no matter how prolific local road builders were, we could comb the entire section in only a few days.
My crew did not come this far to give up. I intended to turn over every stone to look for Andy. I would share my new insight with the team when we regrouped on board the Cumberland.
Funny to think of the Cumberland as home, but it felt like home after a few hours of sleeping in a truck cab. A homecoming.
When we walked in, Craig sat upright on a bench seat in the galley, with his rifle on the table before him. His stay in the stokes stretcher lasted less than a day, to no one's surprise. Tom made the expected rant, but everyone knew his heart wasn't in it.No one blamed either Joel or Kurt.
Thankfully Craig's antics failed to break or tear stitches. While some yellowish pink seepage colored his bandages, there was no sign of the red blood of a reopened wound. In other circumstances, his attire would have been comical. He wore his own shirt and plate carrier, a pair of over-sized Coast Guard-issue exercise shorts, and on his left leg a groin-to-knee bandage.
Tom sent Kurt out to cut a pair of crutches for Craig from the woods around our base. I was interested to see what he came up with.
I handed Craig his rifle from the table. This provided room for the now dog-eared Arkansas map, including our additions, and the Jersey Girl river chart on the table in front of us. I urged everyone to gather around while I shared my recent insight into Andy's location.
The river chart showed some of the small roads near the Mississippi River that were too tiny for our road map. I kicked myself for not studying the chart more carefully.
To my dismay, the charts showed a series of finger dikes blocking the secondary channel I planned to use for our new base. Those dikes lurked beneath the roiling waters of the river, hidden from view by today's river level. Their presence threw cold water on my plans to move our base downriver.
To avoid the finger dikes required a journey downriver to the Helena port before entering the narrow confines of the secondary channel. After traversing that channel, we entered an even more constricted channel just to park at my new planned base. That felt high risk with little benefit, and I dropped the plan.
Leaving the Cumberland/Jersey Girl parked at St. Francis Point became the new plan. The main reason I wanted to move was to keep everyone in radio range. We might help that by setting up our precious radio rebroadcast unit on top of the Cumberland. While the rebroadcast boosted our radios, whether enough to overcome local hilly terrain was still unproven.
The unit was still in the box, never used. Before we left, Zeke and I debated whether I should bring it on this trip. The rebroadcast unit operated like a base station or repeater and extended the range of our radios. Whether the unit extended the signal by feet or miles depended on the terrain. In the flat desert, it was a life saver but in the rugged mountains of Afghanistan, not so much.
That decided, we turned to the search boundaries. West Helena and Helena were two towns that merged sometime after they printed our Arkansas map. A ridge of highlands separated the two towns ranging from the US-49 bridge in the south to the town of Marianna in Lee County, Arkansas to the northwest. Much of that ridge was part of the St. Francis National Forest except for the chunk between Helena and West Helena. We bounded our search area to a triangle from the Mississippi River west to the intersection of Storm Creek Road and AR-242.
While I had confidence in my analysis, we were only a few hours from completing our search along the Mississippi River, and we agreed to finish this.
Much of Helena was at river level protected by a series of levees, while West Helena was a few feet higher. Part of the ridge, as we experienced yesterday, was nearly 200 feet above river level. That made me concerned about how much our radio rebroadcast unit would help.
Tonight, a team of two ninjas would scout near the Helena bridge to check for signs of the attack on Andy's force. They would then sweep along the river looking for signs of a large group of refugees. By sweeping along the river first, they could come back to Big Spring Road to check on the results of Mike's letter of introduction. My gut told me Andy's group was not on the river. Despite my gut, the river was an easy region to search, since, for much of the distance, it consisted of empty fields and flood plain.
Then we would shift attention to the new search plan looking for the prepper compound. I worried the compound might be well camouflaged and we might miss it.
Tom offered to talk with Clyde, not about Andy's group but about local prepper families. He thought someone in the Storm Creek Lake camp might know something. Tom wanted to take Allie with him. He thought they might be more forthcoming to a woman.
Mike and Razor volunteered to search along the river. That left me, Ben, and Joel vying for two spots to finish the drive down Storm Creek Road. Joel missed out on several skirmishes
and made an excellent argument for him to go.
"Boss, you need the rest. You've done a good job getting us here, but you are dragging. We know Dr. Jerrod barely cleared you to come on this trip. Stay here with Craig and Kurt. You'll hear anything we find. You need to concentrate on future steps," Ben said.
Ben made a good point, and, in the end, I stayed behind.
Tom and Mike finished changing the stained dressing on Craig's leg. All of us sympathized, as Craig gritted through the painful procedure. The wound discharge glued some of the gauze to his wound. Craig fought against Tom's suggestion to take acetaminophen. I didn't hear much of the argument, but Craig took the pill.
During the bandage procedure, Razor and Joel installed and tested the radio rebroadcast unit. Kurt, Allie, and I stored all the salvage acquired over the past few days.