“Come now! I’ve got some wounded men out back.”
“Why are you here?” Rachael asked. “Take them to the emergency room!”
“I can’t! You need to come now. I’ll explain on the way.”
“Stop,” Rachael said. “I can’t just run outside with you. I don’t know what you need. I can’t give them proper care without equipment. Just bring them into the hospital. What’s wrong with you?”
“Oh jeez, Rach. Just trust me. I can’t bring them in. You need to come with me.”
“Billy, you’re not making sense. Just tell me what’s happening.”
Billy glanced at Claire, checking her up and down like an animal assessing another creature’s intent.
“She’s cool!” Rachael said.
“Is she with DHS?” Billy asked.
“No. That’s Dr. Kramer, the friend I’ve told you about.”
“Good. Bring her with you too.”
“Where are the injured men?” Rachael asked again.
“Out back, at the loading dock.”
“Oh Christ, Billy. Bring them around to the DHS checkpoint and they’ll escort you into the E.R.”
“That’s the problem. I can’t take them through the checkpoint.”
“Why the hell not?” Rachael asked.
“Because DHS just tried to kill us, that’s why,” Billy said. “The bastards tried to kill us all.”
– 12 HOURS EARLIER –
SMYRNA NATIONAL GUARD BASE
Colonel Cooper sighed as he looked at his son. He couldn’t believe things had come to this. “Are you sure?”
“Yes sir,” Lt. Jeb Cooper replied. “We are to be disbanded and absorbed into the Army. No more National Guard. No more Tennessee Volunteers. They’re making plans right now to take over the airport and turn it into another relocation camp.”
Colonel Cooper’s mind refused to believe what he was hearing. DHS was not in charge of his unit; the State of Tennessee was. The state had ultimate control of his men, and until he heard from the governor, he wasn’t going to listen to some two-bit Washington bureaucrat who hadn’t seen combat in his life.
Since his meeting with Dr. Claire Kramer and her subsequent departure almost a month ago, Colonel Cooper had been sending his men out to get more intel on the government’s activities. What he found nearly sent him into a rage-filled trip to Nashville to confront Deputy McCain. DHS was indeed using citizens as forced labor at multiple farms throughout the state. Families were being separated, and people that put up resistance often disappeared.
Cooler heads had prevailed, and the colonel instead began to plan their exodus to Fort Campbell to join up with the 101st Airborne division, who they trained with on a regular basis.
“Sir, we’re as ready as we can be.” K.T. Dixon reported.
“Any indication that the feds know what we’re up to?” Colonel Cooper asked.
“No sir,” Dixon replied. “All’s quiet.”
“Good, then let’s do this.”
“But sir,” the colonel’s son said, “we aren’t supposed to leave for another week.”
“Is there any reason not to leave now?”
“I suppose not.” The lieutenant replied. “It’s just going to rush a lot of the families that were expecting a few more days.”
“The longer we stay here, the more likely it is that DHS will get wind of our plans. We’re a high speed unit, so let’s act like one. I want all my soldiers and their families ready to bug out by 1600.”
Dixon checked his watch. He had a little over nine hours to prepare and produce the vehicles needed to move a couple of thousand people across the state. The journey would take them around Nashville and up Route 41, then bypass the city and connect to Interstate 24. From there, it was a straight shot to Fort Campbell.
All three men rose and left the CO’s office. But a fourth man followed closely behind the others. He ducked into an abandoned office where he made a final satellite phone call to Nashville, informing Director McCain of the impending move. As instructed at the end of his conversation, E-2 Guardsman Wright removed the phone’s battery and grabbed the nylon gym bag that DHS had given him.
Wright left the building and walked to a nearby shed where he kept his 2006 Honda VTX 1300. He kick-started the carbureted motor and left the base as directed by his contact at Homeland. After giving up his unit, the young traitor was returning to his masters. He shed no tear and gave no further thought to the men and their families that he left behind.
After the phone call from his contact, McCain reached out to Washington, letting his boss know about the battalion’s planned march to Fort Campbell. He reported the expected time of departure and route of travel that the unit was to take and disconnected the call.
McCain wanted to be back in Washington, and passing along that information would go a long way towards a promotion. In his mind, he was already planning on where he would move his family. There was an old Tuscan villa just west of Georgetown that backed up to Glover Park that had caught his eye. It was on a cul-de-sac and offered the privacy he so loved. If possible, he’d find a way to bring Wright with him. There were many divisions within his command where a properly placed mole could be of use.
McCain smiled to himself as the wheels of the government began to turn against Colonel Cooper and his men.
CHAPTER 14
MINOT AIR FORCE BASE
5TH BOMB WING
“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”
— Martin Luther King Jr.
ABOUT TWO HOURS AFTER COLONEL Cooper decided to send the men of the 278th to their new home at Fort Campbell, Captain Clark “C-Mat” Mathers was sitting in the pilot seat of his B-52H bomber, waiting for the ground cart to spin up his two inboard engines. The massive aircraft, sporting eight Pratt & Whitney TF33 engines, required engines number 4 and 5 be started by an outside source. Once these two innermost engines were running, they could be used to start the other six.
His co-pilot was sitting next to Mathers, acting as a flight engineer as much as anything else. The pilot could fly the beast without help, but the flight crew consisted of five men. The other members of the Minot AFB crew, a gunner and the electronic warfare officer, sat facing backwards behind the pilot, while down a short ladder the navigator accepted instructions and flight patterns from the Air Force’s Global Strike Command. Although now, with the military under the control of DHS, they would be getting their orders from Washington, D.C.
The B-52 “Stratofortress” was a big, ungainly machine. Its wings were long and thin compared to the thick aluminum and titanium tube they were attached to, sweeping back and slightly tilted upward to handle the massive weight of the jet. With 480,000 pounds of weight the beast was affectionately referred to as BUFF (for “big ugly fat fucker”,) often took the entire length of the vast Air Force runways to make it into the air.
Sweat was puddling on Mathers’ face. Most of the aircraft’s cooling capacity was needed to refrigerate the electronics that were crammed into every spare inch of the cockpit. The crew would have to endure this inconvenience until they reached their cruising altitude, where the outside temperature would drop below zero. Lining up the nose down the North Dakota runway, Mathers began final preparations for take-off.
“Set dry thrust,” he said.
His co-pilot adjusts the throttles, and the giant bomber begins to roll.
“Cleared for water,” the co-pilot replied.
C-Mat checked the jet’s water pumps. “Four good pumps,” he said as water misted into the front of the jet engines.
It seemed counter intuitive to spray water into a combustion engine, but the water vapor made the incoming air denser and allowed for more fuel into the mixture and thus more thrust. It also caused the engines to eject thick, black smoke, a hallmark of the B-52.
“Seventy knots…now!” C-mat called out to his navigator.
The navigator checked the passing sec
onds, using his knowledge of the length of the runway and speed of the jet.
“S1 expires…now,” the navigator barked.
The S1 was the point of commitment. Either the BUFF has the speed to make it off the runway, or it doesn’t.
C-Mat checked his airspeed once more and whispered into his neck mic, uttering just a single word. “Committed.”
As the Stratofortress passed seventy knots, the lift being generated started to raise the wings while the rest of the nearly half a million-ton airframe stayed glued to the ground. The wings were trying to fly, but the rest of the ship refused to lift. C-Mat fought with the yoke of the craft, keeping the rear wheels from prematurely lifting first. If they started to rise, it would send the aircraft toppling end over end, creating a very expensive fireball on end of the 13,000-foot runway.
C-Mat pulled the eight engine throttles back to the fire-wall and finally felt the bomber surrender, slowly lifting into the North Dakota air. Typical of the BUFF, it flew when it wanted to and not a second before.
“Our buddies with us?” C-Mat asked his co-pilot after achieving their cruising altitude.
“Affirmative. On our right,” said the co-pilot as he looked out his window to confirm that the other B-52 was on their wing.
“Settle in,” C-Mat said. “This may be a long flight.”
Just ninety minutes before, two crews had been scrambled for a mission to strike back at the enemy. No destination was given in the briefing; that information would be relayed while in flight by the computers in Washington. With a generally eastward path in front of them, C-Mat assumed this was a trans-Atlantic flight to drop his payload on whatever piece of shit country had set off the EMP.
The Minot AFB 5th bomb wing had been devastated by the EMP, with twelve of its fifteen bombers disabled by the electronic blast. The other three survived only because they were not in the continental United States at the time. C-Mat was flying one of these BUFFs that had been on a training mission to Elmendorf Air Base in Alaska.
Previously, the B-52s had been used for conventional strikes, dropping non-nuclear bombs and firing conventional cruise missiles in far-off places like the Middle East and Afghanistan. But with the loss of the B-1 and B-2 bombers to the EMP weapon, along with many of the nuclear missile sites, the remaining three BUFFs were once again being used to carry nukes. At any time of the day or night, one of them was flying with a payload of nuclear cruise missiles. Mutually assured destruction, a doctrine invented in the last century, would deter any Russian or Chinese attacks while the country recovered. Knowing that America’s submarines and remaining bombers were out there, ready to strike back with a fatal nuclear blow, kept the enemy at bay.
Today’s payload was conventional. Their partner’s Stratofortress, which has survived the EMP attack while flying over Canada, had been upgraded and was now carrying sixteen CBU-105 cluster bombs on its wings. Each thousand-pound bomb contained forty individual bomblets, giving the beast six hundred forty chances to destroy the enemy. Meanwhile, C-Mat’s own bomber was loaded down with fifty-one 500-pound and thirty 1000-pound gravity bombs.
“Sir, coordinates received,” The navigator said.
“Where’re we taking our little friends?” C-Mat asked.
There was a pause before the navigator answered. “We’re going to Tennessee.”
“What? Are you sure?”
“Affirmative,” the navigator replied. “We’ll receive final instructions when we are on station.”
“What the hell. Have we been invaded?” the copilot asked.
“Must be,” C-Mat replied. “The bastards are on our soil.”
The five men sat silently, each slowly burning with growing anger.
“We’re going to kill those SOBs,” C-Mat said, his jaw set and fire in his eyes. “Let’s burn ‘em down.”
“Damn right!” and “Hell yeah!” the others grunted.
No one was going to screw with the good old U.S. of A, C-Mat thought. Absolutely no one!
CHAPTER 15
278TH ARMORED CAVALRY REGIMENT
SMYRNA, TENNESSEE
1200 HOURS
ABOUT THE TIME THAT CAPTAIN Mathers and his B-52 crew learned of their destination, the men of the 278th had mustered along the camp’s main road. Over a thousand soldiers waited by their assigned vehicles. Over a hundred HUMVEEs, along with dozens of M977A4 cargo haulers and even more decommissioned but functional M35 deuce-and-a-half trucks, were lining the road for as far as Dixon could see. The vehicles were stacked nuts to butts, with little room to pass between them.
“The soldiers are ready,” SSgt. Dixon said to Lieutenant Cooper.
“As always, it’s the families that are holding things up.”
“We could send most of the soldiers up to Campbell now. It would let them get their quarters assigned by the time the families arrived.”
“That’s not a bad idea,” Cooper replied. “If they leave now, that’ll give Campbell four hours to square them away. It’s make it a lot easier on the spouses and kids not having to wait around.”
Sarcasm dripped from Dixon’s words. “You mean no standby to standby? They’d never know they were in the Army.”
“I know,” Cooper said. “They’d be lost, wouldn’t they!”
The two were standing outside of the colonel’s headquarters, raised above the ground level by a flight of stairs and a concrete landing. The main doors were propped open behind them, while Guardsman lugged papers and boxes of non-essential “essentials” out and into an awaiting HUMVEE.
“A lot of crap,” Dixon observed.
“Yet here we are, hauling it to another camp.” Cooper replied, shaking his head in frustration.
“I’ll talk with the colonel,” Cooper said, watching the never-ending line of junk being hauled out of the building. “There’s no reason for our soldiers to wait around.”
“I’ll reassign the equipment and vehicles,” Dixon replied. “I’ll make sure to hold back enough HUMVEEs to guard the second convoy. I’ve got a bunch of school buses that I’m using to move the civilians, and getting these vehicles out of the way will help me process the families.”
“Go ahead,” Cooper said. “I’ll let my dad know.”
“Yes sir,” Dixon replied, and after exchanging salutes with the lieutenant, he spun around and strode to his vehicle.
“Gringold! Forester! On me,” Dixon barked. “We’ve got a lot to do and no time to do it.”
“What a surprise,” Forester replied.
***
At sixteen hundred hours, the line of school buses with up-armored HUMVEEs interspersed between them were positioned on the camp’s main road, right where the military convoy had been just four hours earlier.
“Good idea on splitting us up,” Colonel Cooper said to Dixon.
“We’d never have had the room to pull it off if we hadn’t.”
The two men watched as the spouses and children of the Guardsmen loaded their belongings into the eight-wheeled Oshkosh cargo haulers and then took their places in the many school buses that the Guard had borrowed.
“Papa!” a little voice squealed.
“Marky!” the colonel replied as the young boy lumbered up the steps and into his grandfather’s arms.
The colonel’s daughter-in-law was lugging a large suitcase in one hand as she dragged another wheeled one behind her. Dixon shot off the landing and took both pieces of luggage from the pregnant woman.
“Thanks, K.T.”
“You’re lucky Jeb didn’t see you doing that,” the colonel admonished.
“Well, what he doesn’t know…”
“Papa, are you coming too?” the little boy asked.
“Of course, I’ll be in the car right in front of you,” the colonel said, pointing to a HUMVEE laden with multiple whip antennas. “Now, off to your school bus.”
“Give Sullivan a hug first,” the boy said, holding the bluish green doll up to his grandfather.
“Marky! Not now. Papa
has a lot to do.”
“Okay,” Marky replied good-naturedly as he hobbled down the stairs and limped onto the school bus, his leg brace making the steps a challenge.
“See you there!” Nan waved and then followed her son up the bus’s steps.
“Where will you be?” the colonel asked Dixon.
“I’ll be at the end in the recovery vehicle. Anyone breaks down, I’ll be there to sweep up the mess.”
“Makes sense. Keep in touch while we’re moving.”
“Of course, sir,” Dixon replied.
“Everyone’s ready,” Jeb Cooper said as left the building and bounded down the stairs. “This went remarkably well.”
“Don’t jinx it,” his father replied as he scanned the row of buses and military vehicles that were now idling in the street. “Let’s move out. The fumes are going to kill me if we don’t get going.”
Soldiers attached to the multiple HUMVEEs guarding the convoy stood on the sidewalk next to the idling buses and trucks. Each waved, indicating that their assigned vehicles were loaded, running, and ready to move.
“Let’s go! We’re burning daylight,” the colonel said over his headset, sending the massive convoy out the gate. With a little more good luck, Cooper hoped to be passing through Fort Campbell’s perimeter by eighteen hundred hours.
“Looks like we did it,” Dixon said to Sims as the two of them jumped into the cab of their giant tow truck. Both a mobile repair shop and towing vehicle, they would service and repair anyone that broke down on the trip.
“Copy that,” Sims replied as he turned on the diesel’s warming elements. When the glow point lights on the dash turned red, he engaged the ignition switch and the engine rumbled to life.
Normally, they would have traveled in a military open convoy pattern, with three hundred feet between vehicles. But the trucks, buses, and HUMVEEs were already bunching up. Many had less than a vehicle’s length between them.
Colonel Cooper was about to admonish the drivers but realized that many of the school buses were being driven by civilians with CDL permits. They simply didn’t know any better, and expecting military discipline from them was unfair.
Charlie's Requiem: Resistance Page 15