He unscrewed the cap and took a deep pull of the local corn whisky. “You know, Boone, I’m glad I didn’t have time to get to know your lieutenant. I did it quick. He didn’t see it coming, and I didn’t have time to think about it too much. I was leading him from the trailer with a rope leash tied to his hands. He thought he was going back to the hummer. That’s what I told him. I told him I kept the sack on his head because I didn’t want him to see me, so he couldn’t identify me later. That gave him some hope, right at the end. Anyway, thanks for leaving him with a sack over his head. I don’t need another one visiting me at oh-dark-thirty. I’ve already got too goddamn many ghosts running around my head as it is.” The curly-haired driver took another drink.
“How was he, on his way out?” Boone asked this in a hushed voice, staring ahead at the pastoral countryside. The last traces of snow were almost gone, except for a few north-facing slopes.
The driver sighed again, exhaling slowly. “Oh, he was almost sobbing, kind of choking up, but he couldn’t talk since you left him gagged. I think he cheered up just a little right at the end, when I told him why I didn’t want him seeing my face. I hope so. But the truth is…I didn’t want to see his face.” The driver took another swig of the corn liquor, looked out the left window, and handed the bottle across to his passenger without turning to face him.
Boone took his own long drink of the burning liquid. After coughing and clearing his throat, he said, “I didn’t mean to stick that job on you. I would have done it myself, but the young guy in the back had a big problem with the idea. Doug’s okay, but he’s touchy about shooting prisoners. He’s sensitive that way. He actually wanted me to let the lieutenant go. Just let him go, if he promised to leave Tennessee and go home to Texas. Can you imagine? Doug has a good heart…too good for this kind of work. He’s just a draftee, an engineering soldier from Fort Leonard Wood. He never wanted any of this. I picked him up as a stray after the second earthquake. He does his best, he really does. He went through some seriously bad shit after the quakes, and, well, I thought it would be good if he could believe that the lieutenant was going to be kept alive. He’ll sleep better, thinking that. That’s worth something, right? Why put this heavy shit on him? So thanks for taking care of it for me.”
Boone took another long drink, the burning whisky gurgling down, leaving the pint more than half empty. “Sar’nt…this part of it is something that I really hate. I don’t mind killing them in anger, hell, I enjoy it sometimes, and I’ll admit it. You should have seen us last night; man, we just tore them up! But I hate getting to know them first. Up close, face to face, that’s the worst. Sometimes it’s hard for me not to just get drunk and stay drunk, with some of the things I remember. Mannville, oh my God…that’s going to stick with me. Here, you better put this shit away.” He handed the pint bottle back to the driver.
“Boone, I understand, completely. But it’s hard enough just staying alive in this business, without the added complication of prisoners. How did you guys wind up taking a prisoner anyway?”
“It was just this morning, right before dawn. The old guy in the back, I sent him to the gas station in Carrolton to get a switch car from the owner. I had hooks in the owner, but I can’t walk into that town anymore. So I sent in a stranger, an old guy who looks fairly harmless. The old guy is Phil Carson, and let me tell you, he’s anything but harmless. He’s former SF. He was with SOG in Vietnam, but he got out after the war. Still sharp as a tack, though. Hell of an operator; you’d never guess he’s over sixty. My father knew him back in the day. They went over the fence in the same recon team a few times, can you imagine? What are the odds? He’s legit, he checks out. He’s one of us.
“So anyway, he’s in the garage in Carrolton this morning at dawn, when that NAL hummer rolled in to gas up. He had to take them out with my suppressed Glock. Two soldiers and the garage owner. Then we used the lieutenant as our driver, to get through security at the 214 bridge. He was going to be our talker, but it didn’t come to that. We were in NAL uniforms, just like the lieutenant. Well, our uniforms, but with NAL badges and insignias. Carson took the patches from the guys he shot in the garage. He even grabbed a blue beret and wore it to cross the bridge. Like I said, he’s sharp. Great situational awareness. Great attention to detail under pressure. Too bad he quit Special Forces after Vietnam…but I can understand why he did. The Army was fubar after Vietnam, according to my father. It was a real bad time for the military. Terrible morale. The media just totally made people hate the military.”
The driver grinned and looked across at his passenger. “You were wearing a NAL uniform? Somehow I can’t see Boone Vikersun passing for a Mexican. Not even if you shaved the beard and got a haircut.”
“Nah, I was in my civvies, in the back seat. I played the gringo pris-oner in that deal. But with my Glock behind my back, instead of handcuffs.”
“That was your hummer behind me at the checkpoint coming out of Carrolton, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah. Small world, huh? I didn’t even know that you were getting across the river into Western Tennessee. The junkyard was the closest pickup point that I knew about.”
“You’re lucky I had some business south of here today, otherwise I would have gone straight back to Clarksville, and I would have missed your signal by the road.”
“Business?” Boone smiled and raised an eyebrow.
The driver laughed again. “Just machine tools. I’m 99 percent legit. Well, maybe 95 percent…on a good day. Anyway, I just started crossing the river. Extending my territory. The tool and appliance salvage business is doing great. It’s a good cover. I get around, I talk to people.”
“What are you hearing, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Right now I’m hearing that resistance in Western Tennessee is just about wiped out. It’s almost fully ‘pacified.’ You know, it’s kind of a shitty paradox, but the worse it is for the resistance, the better it is for my cover business. Hey, Boone, I heard some pretty bad things are happening down around Radford County. That’s why you’re coming out?”
“No, not exactly. I’d stay, but yesterday I took some important pictures, seriously important pictures. I had no way to upload them, and nobody to give them to. That’s why I left. The pictures have to get out.”
“Tell me about them.”
“Okay. Here’s what happened. I’ve been using Mannville as my forward operating base. Well, on Saturday, the Kazak Battalion rolled in and pulled a My Lai Massacre, I shit you not. They rounded everybody up that they could grab at the swap market, drove them out of town on school buses, and shot them in a big gully. If I hadn’t been on a job down on the Mississippi state line, I might have been bagged too. I found out about it from a survivor, and I managed to get over there and snap some pictures. That’s why I’m coming out—I need to get these pictures to somebody that’s in a position to use them. But I don’t know who. Not yet.”
“That’s a problem.”
“No shit.” Boone wanted to ask the retired Special Forces NCO whom he was working for, and what kind of network (if any) was being set up in Middle and Western Tennessee, but such questions were out of bounds. Information of that nature would be provided only if and when there was a need for him to know it. All he had known of any nascent network was the bare bones of the evacuation ratline, and the emergency pickup point in the trailer behind the junkyard. Even that had been very doubtful. He’d had no idea that Sergeant Gersham was involved, until he had shown up. “I was right there, Sar’nt, right at the massacre site. Right fucking there, walking on frozen bodies, taking pictures and collecting IDs. Men, women and children. The bodies were still fresh, dead in the snow.”
The driver said, “A massacre, huh? I heard there was some kind of a battle going on down there. The Kazaks did it, you said? How many are dead?”
“Yeah, the Cossacks. They killed hundreds. Hundreds for sure. The killed women and children, the whole nine yards. After the massacre, they started torching every h
ouse they could get to. They’re depopulating Radford County the hard way, killing some and running the rest down into Mississippi. I got some payback on the Cossacks last night, but not nearly enough.”
“I’m sorry to hear about Mannville. That’s where you’re from, isn’t it?”
“Near there, but my family moved out of Tennessee a long time ago.”
“Well, thank God for that, anyway. A massacre…” The driver paused, thinking. “Boone, you’re right, those could be some important pictures. If they’re doing massacres, then they’re taking this dirty war to another level. But if we use jiu-jitsu on them, we might be able to turn it around. I hate to sound so crass, but those pictures could be valuable for our side. Those pictures might be the ace that turns a bad hand into a winner.”
“I thought so too. At least the people who were murdered won’t have died for nothing. But only if we can do something with the pictures.”
“Boone, I don’t know how to explain this other than pure luck, or serendipity or synchronicity or whatever they call it, but us hooking up like this…this might actually work out. You know what they say—things happen for a reason. It’s another hour up to C-ville, and then we’re going to lay up at another safehouse for a few hours until dark.” Clarksville was a small city of 100,000 just outside Fort Campbell, and home to a large number of active duty and former Special Forces and other specops soldiers. Forty miles northwest of Nashville, Clarksville was friendly territory, if such a place could be said to exist for the rebels in Tennessee. “We’ll change vehicles again on the way up, after we cross one more NAL security checkpoint. When we get to the safehouse, you guys can get cleaned up and grab a hot meal. Then we’ll see what we can do with your pictures. There are some people…well, I’ll tell you more about that later. You know, this might just work out for the best.”
“It might,” said Boone, “if a Predator’s not eyeballing us right now, while they decide whether a truck full of rebels is worth a Hellfire, or just a Viper.”
“Yeah, it sure sucks, living under the sword of Damocles 24/7. But what else can you do? Just quit? Sell out, and turn traitor? I can’t. I can’t do it.”
“I can’t either.”
“Maybe we’ll stay lucky,” said the driver.
“I hope so. The pictures I took might actually make a difference in this shitty little war. We’ve got nothing else going for us that I can see.”
As they drove up State Road 13, Lieutenant Malverde’s handsome young face slipped into Boone’s consciousness, hovering somewhere just in front of the truck’s windshield. Doug Dolan whispered in his mind’s ear, “We’re not murderers…we’re not murderers…”
Oh, yes we are too. Boone wished that he hadn’t handed back the bottle of white lightning. He’d drain that sucker, just to get rid of Doug’s condemnatory words and Lieutenant Malverde’s sad, doomed face, his eyes already lifeless as the duct tape X was applied. Well, Boone thought (searching for absolution but finding none), you can’t expect to keep your hands clean, not if you’re going to fight a dirty war.
A dirty civil war, with foreign enemies and traitors.
****
A quick phone call would be all right, thought Doug. Tennessee to Maryland wasn’t so far, and it was after six in the evening. It was a stroke of luck that he had found the cell phone in a kitchen junk drawer, and that it was actually getting a signal. Finally he was catching a break, and managing to turn lemons into lemonade.
They had arrived at the new safehouse in the late afternoon. It was in an isolated hollow surrounded by thick woods. Doug was happy just to squirm out of the cramped hiding place under the salvage truck. The secret compartment’s bottom and sides were ice cold metal and had left him shivering with hypothermia. The new place wasn’t much more than a cabin, but it had a cast-iron stove and plenty of firewood, so they had all been able to get warm, wash up, and enjoy a hot meal. After being locked with Phil into the frigid metal box for several hours, unable even to turn over, the cozy cabin was paradise. He’d eaten four steaming hot baked potatoes, slathered with fresh farm butter, and couldn’t remember ever eating anything tastier or more filling in his life.
Their driver and host, “Dewey,” was a mysterious sort of person. Doug knew his name only from what was written on the doors of his junk truck. In age he fit somewhere between Boone and Carson, but like both of those men, he seemed a lot tougher than his years would indicate. Doug guessed that Dewey Lieberman was not his real name, but he’d had few opportunities to talk with the man. Dewey’s conversations with Boone and Carson stopped short or shifted to some innocuous topic when he was around. Dewey left the cabin in his big truck, and returned after dark with an ordinary compact car. Again, he conferred quietly with Boone and Carson, but always out of Doug’s earshot. I’ve been traveling and operating with Boone for months, he thought, and two days after Carson shows up, I’m cut out of his conversations. Then Boone announced—not discussed, announced—that they had somewhere to go tonight. They, not him. Not Doug Dolan. No, good old faithful Doug would remain behind to…what? Guard the isolated cabin? “Hold down the fort”? Boone and Carson left with Dewey after nightfall.
So who could blame him for his curiosity, after they had ditched him and left him behind? His natural inquisitiveness about the new safehouse had led him to discover the forgotten cell phone. It was inside a small metal box, buried beneath pliers, screwdrivers and scissors. He was actually shocked when he pushed the power button and it lit up, and he stared at its glowing screen in wonder for a long time. It was the first working cell phone that he had touched since before the earthquakes, one very long year ago. It was a prepaid phone, showing 138 minutes remaining.
A few minutes on the phone were all he needed, and nobody would ever know. Who counted a few airtime minutes on an old cell phone left in a drawer? Nobody, Doug was sure. Not even these days. Boone had left him behind at the cabin safehouse, and that had been a blow to his pride. Was it because they didn’t trust him, or because they just didn’t need him? Well, Doug rationalized, at least the unexpected privacy will give me a chance to make the one phone call that I’ve been anxious to make for so many months. He punched in the long-memorized Baltimore number, and miraculously, after clicks, buzzing and dead air pauses, he heard the phone ringing at the other end. After six or seven rings, it was picked up. The call had gone through, and his heart soared in anticipation.
“Mom! Mom, it’s me!”
But instead of his mother’s voice, Doug heard music, and a man answered, but Doug couldn’t understand what he was saying. A man? What was a strange man doing at his mother’s house, answering the phone?
“Hello, who’s this?” asked Doug. “Where is Mrs. Dolan?”
The phone was dropped with a bang. Long seconds later, somebody else picked it up, a female voice. “Holá, hallo! Who ees?”
“This is Doug—Doug Dolan! Listen, where’s my mother? Where is Mrs. Dolan?”
“Meesees Do-lane? You ees Meesees Do-lane?”
“No, no! I’m Doug Dolan, Mrs. Dolan’s son! Please, is Mrs. Dolan there?”
“Meesees Do-lane? Un minuto, please. I getting Meesees Do-lane, okay?”
Doug waited, perplexed and more than a bit worried. Who were the people who had answered the phone at his mother’s house? He could make out the music now; it was some kind of fast Latin salsa or Mexican ranchera music.
After a minute, he finally heard his mother’s voice. “Hello, who is this?” she asked.
“Mom, it’s me, Doug!”
“Douglas? Douglas—you’re alive! Oh my goodness, oh thank God, you’re alive! They told me that you were missing and presumed dead in Tennessee, after the earthquakes! But you’re alive! Oh, thank God, thank God! Douglas, can you come home? When can you come home? Oh, I need you here, Douglas, I need you! Where are you? When can you come home?”
“I don’t know Mom; things are a little crazy right now. Just as soon as I can, I will. I promise. Mom, who answered the
phone? I heard a man, and then a woman came on the line. Who are they?”
“Oh Doug, I have so much to tell you! So much has happened since you left!”
“Mom, who are those people who just answered the phone?”
“Doug, that’s the Sanchorios family; they’re originally from El Salvador.”
“El Salvador? What are they doing in our house?”
“They live here now, Douglas, they live here!”
“What?!”
“The government split our house up into apartments after I couldn’t pay the vacant room tax. Then they had the Sanchorios family move in upstairs. They were living in Nashville, but their apartment building was wrecked in the earthquakes. They were earthquake refugees.”
“Mom, what do you mean, ‘vacant room tax’?”
“What? Oh, it’s new since last year. A new law. The property tax appraiser said that I had too many bedrooms for just one person to be living here. Too many square feet, there’s a formula. Since I couldn’t pay the vacant room tax, I had to take in boarders, boarders that the state assigned to live here. That’s what they do now.”
Doug tried to make sense of it. Vacant room tax? Boarders? From El Salvador? “Do they pay you rent?”
“No, not to me. That’s why I have boarders. It’s instead of paying the vacant room tax. They waived the tax since I’ve taken in refugees. The state assigned them to live here. They get to live here for free. Their son joined that new army, the North American Legion, so they have priority on housing. Oh Doug, it’s just unbearable!”
“Where are they living? How many are there?” Doug was stunned, coming to grips with the unexpected news about their home being subdivided by the state.
“They live upstairs. I can’t keep track of how many there are; they come and go at all hours. There’s usually at least seven or eight of them, not counting babies. I think they’re subletting the rooms upstairs, but I can’t tell who’s who. It seems like they change practically every week, except for the Sanchorios family. We all share the kitchen, but I’m too afraid to go in there when they’re around. I sleep in the sitting room next to the living room, that’s my ‘apartment’ now. The sitting room and the living room, and the downstairs bathroom, that’s where I live. I cook on a hot plate, when the electricity is working. Oh, Douglas, when are you coming home?”
Foreign Enemies and Traitors Page 61