Tunnel Rats_Episode One_The Diggers

by Nick Cole

  “We’re running out of time,” she grunted to Chuck through clenched teeth. “The clock is ticking.”

  Chuck pulled on a headlamp, adjusted it quickly, flicked on the light, then started handing her things from the pile. “If he’s locked in some kind of steel grate, we have to blow him out,” he said. “We don’t have time to pick a lock.”

  “Will it kill him?”

  “Not if he dives down and we’re really careful.”

  Chuck grabbed a roll of det cord, a small box of trigger devices, a roll of duct tape, and a “clicker” that would provide the electrical spark to set off the explosive.

  “Does that take batteries?” Delores asked.

  “Not this one,” Chuck said as he finished his task and then rushed toward the ladder. He answered over his shoulder, pulling Delores along behind him. “This one has a small crank. It builds up a charge and then you flip the switch. Ellis let us practice with some small explosions just last week. Tiny ones. This one will be bigger.”

  They descended the ladder as fast as they could without risking falling to their own deaths. Still, on two occasions Delores felt her foot slip on the slick rebar. Inside herself, she was screaming, “Ellis! Ellis! Ellis!” over and over. She kept the scream bottled up, but it was still there, birthed from somewhere deep inside her.

  At the bottom of the ladder, Chuck glanced back at her and she hustled past him.

  “Follow me,” she said.

  “Right behind you.”

  At the grate, the water was disturbed and rollicking, but there was no sign of Ellis.

  “Ellis!” Delores cried.

  Chuck knelt down and began looking at the locking mechanism, ignoring the water for a moment.

  “Ellis!” Delores screamed. “Where is he? He was just here!”

  “If he’s down there, he can’t hear you,” Chuck said. His teeth were clenched tightly and he was using his fingers to locate just the right place to set the C4.

  “He’s been in the water so long!” Delores said. “What if—”

  “We’re not what-iffing right now,” Chuck snarled as he worked. “I know you’re upset, but we have to do this thing, and we need to keep our minds positive and focused.”

  Chuck tore off a small chunk of the plastic explosive, formed it in his hands, then pressed it to the lock. He held it in place and then nodded at Delores.

  “Take the cellophane wrapper off that roll of tape and pull me off a three foot piece.”

  Delores fumbled with the cellophane, but was able to use her nails and teeth to remove the wrapping. She noticed her hands were shaking as she scratched at the roll with her fingernails to start peeling some of the tape. Once she’d gotten it started, she measured off what felt like three feet of tape, and carefully bit it to tear it. She handed one end to Chuck, and he began to wrap the tape around the C4.

  Just at that moment, Ellis surfaced.

  He spewed water and sucked in air. His face was taking on a blue-gray tint. His body temperature was down. He’d obviously been in the cold water for far too long.

  “Ellis!” Delores shouted. “Ellis Kint! Where were you?” She knelt down and reached for him, as if she could pull him up right through the grate. As if the power of her will could make things happen if she just wanted them to bad enough.

  Ellis was shivering, his face tight and stiff.

  “I was… I… I wanted… to… check,” he paused for a moment and grabbed the grate, pulling himself up so he didn’t have to try to talk loud.

  “Go ahead,” Chuck said as he worked. “Fill us in. Take your time, but hurry.”

  “I wanted to… check to see if there were any other tunnels down there. Some… Some… any another escape, maybe.” He shivered, and his whole body shook.

  Chuck was listening, but he never stopped. He worked the tape through the grate and wrapped it tightly around the C4.

  “That grate is wet and slimy. Don’t want the bomb slipping off into the water. That wouldn’t be good,” he said.

  “You’re so calm,” Delores said. As she spoke to Chuck, her hand moved and reached until she found Ellis’s hand gripping the metal rebar. She rubbed his hand with hers, as if that might warm him up, even though she knew that it couldn’t. But it was contact, and perhaps she needed it more than he did.

  “I’m not calm,” Chuck said. “Listen, stop with the hand-holding. Start unwinding some of that wire. I need you to run it around that corner. Maybe another six feet past the corner.”

  Delores released Ellis’s hand and their eyes met for just a moment as she reached for the wire.

  Chuck finished taping the bomb and took one end of the wire, tying it to the grate, leaving himself an eighteen inch end to work with. Delores disappeared from his view, and while she walked off, Chuck bit off the insulated plastic from the wires, then attached the detonator. He felt with his right hand and made sure he had the “clicker” in his pocket. He wanted to make certain Delores wasn’t going to accidentally blow him up. This was the part that got amateurs killed. Especially when two people are working on a device. But once he was sure he still had the clicker, he pushed the detonator into the exposed C4 and turned back to Ellis, whose head was down, lips barely hovering above the water.

  “You alright, boss?” Chuck asked.

  “No.”

  “We’re going to get you out,” Chuck said.

  “I know.”

  Chuck pointed at Ellis, “When I shout, you dive down again,” Chuck said. “Go as deep as you can.”

  “I… I will,” Ellis said.

  “Cover your head,” Chuck said. “Who knows where this grate might go. Or, parts of it.”

  “I…,” Ellis looked up and just nodded.

  “Ok, brother,” Chuck said. “Let’s do this.” He nodded at Ellis then sprinted back to where Delores was waiting around the corner holding the wire.

  Chuck took the wire from her, closed his eyes and sucked in a deep breath. “We really need this to work,” he said.

  Delores nodded. “It has to work.”

  He twisted the wires around the metal poles, screwed down the clamps, then quickly examined the device to make sure it looked operational.

  “I think we’re good,” he said.

  “Do it,” Delores replied.

  “Fire in the hole!” Ellis yelled. He began counting aloud backward from ten. As he counted, he gave the small crank a few quick turns.

  “Ten! Nine! Eight!”

  “Just…” Delores said. She was frantic, and tears began to well up in her eyes. Her hands came up, as if to help hurry.

  “We have to give him time to clear,” Chuck said.

  Delores grabbed his hands and her chin dropped to her chest. “Hold on,” she said.

  There was silence for a few seconds, and for both of them time slowed down. Then her eyes opened again.

  “Blow it!”

  “Zero,” Chuck said, and flipped the switch.

  ***

  “Ellis!” Delores cried out for what seemed to her the hundredth time. And she ran. She bolted.

  Chuck tried to keep up with her, but she was gone as soon as the rubble and dust began to settle.

  “Careful!” Chuck shouted, but he knew she wasn’t listening.

  When they got to the small pond, they saw that the grate was blown back and crumpled. It hung partly in the water and partly in the air, and it was clear to both of them the bomb had worked.

  But there was no Ellis.

  “Ellis!” the two shouted in unison.

  Chuck banged on the twisted metal with his hand, and Delores dropped to the ground so she could peer into the dark water with her light.

  “He’s not down there!” she shrieked. Now she was crying and sobbing. “He’s not there! I can’t see him!”

  “Give hi
m a few seconds,” Chuck said. He hoped that any moment now Ellis would surface, but he couldn’t see anything down there either.

  Delores stood again, and as she did her hand came up to her mouth. A mournful gasp as old as time escaped from her. She took a step backwards. And then another. And another.

  “Delores…” Chuck said.

  She stared at the water, and her neck stiffened.

  “Delores?” Chuck said again, this time as a question.

  Now she straightened her back and her hands dropped to her sides and unclenched.

  “Del…,” Before he could say her name again, he knew. She was going in, and there was no stopping her. “Oh, crap,” was all he could think to say.

  She lunged forward and dove before Chuck could even move to block her path. She was under the water in the blink of an eye.

  Chuck sighed and shook his head.

  “I guess I’m getting wet,” he muttered. He pulled off his headlamp before taking a deep breath. He dropped the light and dove into the cold, black waters of the sub-Texas tunnel.

  Chapter 26

  Shooter was completing his quadrant by quadrant scan, the third since the violent end of the biker incursion, and he’d been waiting, on edge and ready, expecting a second wave, or some other follow up to the attack.

  For years the family had talked about, and planned for, organized assaults, but in their war games the attacks always seemed to be worse. With this one, he’d not even gotten to the point of considering blowing the bridge.

  Well… He’d considered it, but it never came close to happening.

  Now he scanned downward toward the Solekeep and saw bodies and bikes everywhere, stretching from Fontana’s Bridge itself, and littered all the way down the slope past the buffalo grass and sage and mesquite trees that lined the old road leading to the bridge. Bodies were in the river, and on the bridge a dead Hog lay on its side, the chopper’s handlebars twisting off in strange directions.

  He heard a sharp whistle and grabbed the ‘nocs, and looking back up their own valley where he saw Neil and Rooster walking toward him. He cursed silently.

  They should’ve come through the tunnel. Still could be a sniper out there. In fact, I’m sure there’s one, because I saved his life.

  The tunnel that cut southwestward from just north of the barn ran directly behind the pillbox and up through a trap door in the forest behind him. From there, the entrance to the pillbox was only a hundred feet and most of that would have been protected from any view by snipers down in the lowlands across the bridge.

  When Neil and Rooster climbed into the pillbox, Shooter gave them a harsh look.

  “You do realize we just survived a full-scale attack from an organized enemy don’t you?” he said.

  Rooster cackled, “Of course we do, silly.”

  “And you just walked here from Utah directly across the enemy’s line of sight. Three hundred yards or more as slow moving targets moving north to south out in the open?”

  “The battle’s over, Shooter,” Neil said. But his head dropped a little and his cheeks blushed. He knew they’d messed up.

  “Well,” Rooster said, “I guess we didn’t think about it like that. We should have, but we didn’t.”

  Shooter nodded and patted Neil on the shoulder. “Just next time please use the tunnels or go west behind the farm and barn and come back through the forest. Stay out of sniper view, ok?”

  Neil mumbled, “Ok.”

  “Some mistakes…,” Shooter said.

  “…you only get to make once,” Neil and Rooster answered in abject unison.

  They looked down the hill and Rooster whistled and shook her head.

  “That’s a heck of a mess,” she said.

  “Yep,” Neil agreed.

  “We’ll have to clean it up?”

  “Eventually,” said Shooter. “But we’ll wait for Ellis and Delores to get back. As sad as it is that we had to do that, I don’t feel awful about it. They came here for trouble…”

  “And they got it,” Rooster said.

  Shooter watched the dead he’d killed. Then, “There’ll be gear down there. More weapons, and maybe other… things.”

  “Motorcycles’ll have scrap and trade value,” Neil offered. “Maybe we can contact those PMPs Ellis met down at the bridge that day. The ones who said we could leave a message in Casperville.”

  “That’s all a little over our pay grade, Neil. For now we have another issue to deal with.” While Shooter talked, his eyes still scanned the battlefield below, watching for any movement. He knew his counterpart was down there. Watching them.

  “There’s a guy down there I’ve come to know,” Shooter said. “And he’s someone we need to know better.”

  Rooster and Neil looked down across the bridge.

  “A guy?” Rooster asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “How do you know he’s a guy?”

  “I just—” Shooter shrugged.

  She cut him off. “Maybe it’s a girl.”

  Shooter smiled, “Well, I guess you’re right little sister. It could be a girl, and that’d be fine by me.”

  Neil scowled, “I don’t understand what’s happening.”

  Rooster cackled and pushed Neil hard. So hard he almost fell down.

  “Cut it out, Rooster.”

  “Both of you cut it out,” Shooter said. “There’s a sniper down there. I sort of met him last night. And I saved his life during the battle. I need to go down and see if he needs help.”

  Neil nodded, and a look of understanding crossed his face. “I saw that guy! He was the one who took out a pistol and attacked the whole advancing biker front!”

  “That’s him,” Shooter said.

  “Stupid bugger,” Rooster said.

  “Would you two just shut up for a minute?” Shooter snapped. “I need to go down there, and Rooster, I need you to go get Marlon and Patrick to go with me.

  “Hey, wait a minute!” Neil said.

  Shooter put his hand on Neil’s shoulder. “Easy brother. Take it easy. I need you here with my gun. I’m taking them with me because I need you to stay here on overwatch to keep us all alive.”

  “And I’m worried about Delores and Ellis,” Rooster said.

  “Well,” Shooter said, “one mystery at a time. When we’re all back and safe we’ll figure out where those two are. Until then, let’s stick to the plan.”

  That’s when the three friends in the pillbox heard the screams coming from the house. In the blink of an eye they were up and out of the pillbox, sprinting toward the house. Only Shooter realized they were once again exposing themselves to sniper fire from across the bridge. But the screams were angry, and the hurt and pain in them made the hair on Shooter’s neck bristle.

  Maybe God will let us make this mistake more than once, he thought as they ran toward the house.

  ***

  The screams were coming from Kay, upstairs, and before Shooter even reached for the handrail he knew something was terribly wrong. Somewhere deep inside himself he knew everything had changed. That life on the farm, if it continued at all, would never be the same after this day.

  ***

  Karl, just ten years old, was cradled in Kay’s arms, his hair dripping scarlet and matted. Her blood-soaked arms and hands were wrapped around him as she rocked and wailed in anguish.

  Renny was curled up in a ball against the far wall, crying and sobbing into his hands.

  Karl was dead. That much was clear. Shot through the head.

  Just as Shooter was about to speak, searching for his voice and the right words, if there ever were any, Patrick and Marlon burst into the room with guns at the ready. Surveying the scene, both boys lowered their weapons and sank to the ground.

  Shooter turned back to Kay. “What…”

  Kay
looked up, taking a minute to gather herself. Twice she moved her bloodied hand to straighten the dead boy’s hair, and both times her hand hovered over the matted, bloody mess and her eyes closed.

  “I was just…” her sobs broke through again.

  Shooter moved toward her and dropped to one knee. “Take your time. Get your breath.”

  Kay took a deep breath. “I was just going to move him… him and Renny… into the bathroom. Into the bathtub for protection.” She wiped her arm across her face. “He was looking out the window there when I came in. He was trying to spot targets for Renny who was at the other window.”

  “How could someone hit him from down there?” Marlon asked.

  “A good sniper could do it,” Shooter said. “But the only good one down there was fighting our enemies with a pistol. It had to be a stray shot.”

  At this point, Renny spoke for the first time. “There were bullets flying everywhere.”

  “It hit him,” Kay said. “That’s all that ever matters. It hit him… and he’s dead now!”

  “Where are Chuck, Delores, and Ellis?” Shooter asked.

  He stood and walked to the window. Looking out through the curtains, he sighed. “Probably in the tunnels.”

  “Yes, in the tunnels,” Patrick said. “Delores came looking and she was in a panic. She said Ellis was hurt. Injured or something. Maybe he fell off the ladder, I don’t know. But Chuck took off with her and sent Marlon and me up to the hayloft to help with the crossfire on the bikers.”

  Kay’s face tightened as she fought hard not to cry even harder.

  Shooter turned to the group and held out his hands, palms down, an attempt to calm the temper of the room.

  “We have things to do up-top here right now. Patrick, you and I are going to take some ammo and food down to that sniper who saved our lives today. We’ll need to talk to him. To get intel on what he knows. And he’s served as an advance warning for us so far. We need to make sure he has ammo in case this isn’t over.”

  “What about what’s going on down in the tunnels?” Rooster asked.

  “Neil’s in the pillbox. He doesn’t know about Karl, so Rooster you go… tell him. Then you and Marlon get up to Utah. We’re still watching that bridge. But watch your six. Who knows what could be coming at us up through those tunnels.”