Home Port (A Deep State, Post-Apocalyptic Survival Thriller) (Long Haul Home Book 4)

by Dana Fraser

  Gavin DeBerg, in his vast hubris, had maintained a secret journal of the work he had done on what he called “Project Erebus.” The text was coded, but the code was simple to crack when it was a book cipher and the source book was in the same bag as the journal.

  Hubris. Big, sweaty, bull-sized balls of hubris…

  The cipher’s key was Griffith’s translation of Sun Tzu The Art of War. Even if there had been a hundred books in the bag, Thomas would have zeroed in on it as the all too obvious first choice. Gavin had finished West Point a few years before Thomas. Every cadet who had ever forced down the slop they served in Washington Hall or stood for hours at attention on The Plain no matter the weather had carried a copy.

  Some of them carried a copy for life.

  Gavin’s was signed by an instructor who had gone on to become Commandant of the school, then a high ranking general until retiring from the military to become a very rich contractor for the military. The man had inscribed a few words of canned wisdom for the young cadet, starting with perhaps the most famous of Sun Tzu’s quotes.

  All warfare is based on deception.

  The general’s name appeared again—in Gavin’s journal among a short “who’s who” hierarchy of contacts working to betray America’s citizens. Officers from each branch of the military had sold their souls to join politicians and billionaires in a plan to reduce the earth’s population to four percent of its current size.

  As Gavin had glibly noted a few minutes before dying, the tentacles of Project Erebus could be found in every populous country. Without America and Europe fulfilling their caretaker roles for the rest of the globe, the less populated countries would begin a rapid rate of decline without further interference by the project.

  Surprisingly, the journal contained notes on Thomas and his family, like the outsized job offer to Hannah after she finished her degree so that she would be working just a few floors above one of the project’s major facilities. Other notes mentioned sabotaging development of Thomas’s app and attempts to woo Becca away from him with job offers she had never mentioned.

  He had to put the journal away for a day after encountering those more personal passages, including the casual kill order on him and the valuation of his son as worth retaining if necessary to placate Hannah and Becca.

  It was the second day after shoving the journal and its key deep down into the recesses of the hunting pack that Thomas reached the first sizable town he would need to circumnavigate. Set against a broader American landscape, it was a provincial, overpriced village named White Sulphur Springs. But, for some reason inexplicable to Thomas, there were more tanks and armored carriers on its streets than cars. There were sentries and sniper nests, too. And, despite all the explosions and gunfire he had heard in the three days leaving the park, the town’s buildings remained in pristine condition.

  Two more days would pass before a single word in Gavin’s journal triggered Thomas’s memory and explained the heavy buildup.

  GREENBRIER

  Ellis had talked excitedly about the place on the July drive back to Evansville from Gavin’s home. The government had called it “Project Greek Island,” its purpose to serve as some kind of emergency relocation center intended to secure Congress during a nuclear attack. They had burrowed their way deep into the ground with thick concrete walls then laid in place a thirty year supply of goods. The operation had existed for a couple of decades until some newspaper revealed its secrets, leading to the massive bunker being decommissioned.

  All warfare is based on deception…

  Right, Thomas thought, crawling out of his hiding hole to begin another night of careful travel. The government hadn’t decommissioned it after all—at least not the part of the government that, according to Gavin’s journal entries, had spent the last fifteen years preparing for a controlled chaos that would leave the planet in the hands of a few hundred million people.

  The “best of the best.”

  It had taken three miles of hard marching and a four-man kill team to temper Thomas’s rage after finishing that particular entry in Gavin’s little book of horrors.

  BLOOD POUNDING against his ear drums, Thomas had unexpectedly found himself within a dozen feet of one of the team members on that first encounter.

  Angry and tired, he had lapsed in practicing some of the most basic elements of his Army survival training, like drawing on all of his available senses. His fury had practically rob him of his hearing and smell.

  He had been deaf to the sounds of one man beating out a wet shirt on the opposite side of a creek bed. And he had been so preoccupied with being pissed off that he ignored the odor of fresh game cooking atop a Dakota fire pit and the acrid hints of smoke that reached him on the back of a light breeze.

  The only reason Thomas hadn’t found himself outnumbered in a gunfight was that he had remained soft-footed and stopped instinctively at the tree line before breaking cover. Seeing the man at the edge of the water, Thomas cautiously pulled back to a safer distance and tracked him to the rest of his team using the night vision goggles he had taken from Vivante’s corpse.

  After an hour or so had passed, three of the team members bunked down while the fourth took the first watch of the night and Thomas moved on.

  He encountered them again the very next night, waking to find the men a few feet from his hiding spot as they scouted their camp site for the night. They settled about ten yards off, the youngest of them tasked with gathering fallen branches and tinder for the fire.

  Thomas waited, sweat pouring down his face despite the October chill, as the man approached his location in a small circle of trees and their accompanying underbrush.

  By design, Thomas was surrounded by fallen branches and tinder—his ghillie suit indistinguishable in the dark from the very thing for which the team member searched.

  But the man finished filling his arms and returned to where one of his colleagues was digging the fire pit.

  For two hours, Thomas listened to the men talking as he waited for them to turn in for the night. He learned that they were hunting ham radio operators. One in particular had made his way to the top of their kill list.

  A local resident by the name of Hank Reynolds was broadcasting information on the activities around the Greenbrier, insinuating some of what Thomas already knew to be true—that the anarchy gripping the country was the product of a special kind of domestic terrorism deploying some of America’s own troops. Reynolds was also claiming that the troops were working alongside criminal elements like the Mexican cartels.

  Hearing that the men were heading west along the same path he had hoped to travel, Thomas reached the conclusion that he would purposefully follow in their footsteps.

  A WEEK OUT FROM GREENBRIER, the team made camp earlier than usual, stopping well before sundown. They slept two at a time for a few hours then gathered up their gear and moved out. Thomas knew by the unique silence that pervaded the camp that they were close to their quarry.

  Concealing his pack, he followed after them with a light load and a softer step as they ascended up a hill at a little after two a.m. Before they reached the top, they put down their gear and fanned out.

  Thomas hung back, climbing up a hemlock tree to hide among its needles and spy on the team with the night vision goggles. He spotted their target before they did. Backed up against the hillside was a one room shack with a sagging porch. A man came out, sat on the steps and lit up a smoke. As the target puffed on his cigarette, Thomas followed the line of the roof until he spotted the over-sized radio antenna.

  A shot shattered the man’s smoke break. He scrambled toward the front door as the team’s leader called out for him to stop or die.

  “Your choice, motherfucker!”

  The man froze, his body plastered against the porch floor. A second team member, the one Thomas had nicknamed Bird Dog, moved forward, stepping over the man and entering the shack. He emerged less than a minute later, the barrel of his rifle aimed at Reynolds’ head
as he signaled an all clear. The team leader, whom Thomas called Top Dog, and a third member—Hot Dog, moved in while the final member remained in the trees to guard the perimeter.

  Bird Dog stayed with the target while the other two went inside and began a noisy search. Thomas expected to hear the sounds of them smashing the radio equipment inside, but he heard nothing louder than drawers and cupboards being rifled through, their contents strewn on the floor and visible through the open doorway.

  As the search continued, Thomas came down from his tree and made his way toward the man left to stand guard. Sneaking from tree to tree, he heard the efforts of Top Dog and Hot Dog die down inside the shack. When Top Dog finally came out onto the porch, he spit out his evaluation in disgusted tones.

  “It’s Reynolds, alright. Just the equipment. No notes on anybody else. Few drawings, typical prepper bullshit.”

  Hot Dog bounced on the boards behind his team leader. Of the four, he really was the most dog like, his energy unflagging and his intelligence somewhere south of a German Shepherd’s.

  Thomas was maybe ten feet from the guard when the team leader shouted.

  “Hey, Billy, you want in on this?”

  The guard shuffled his feet but didn’t move anywhere. After another second or two of deliberation, he raised his voice in reply. “Gimme a few and I’ll join you.”

  As the other members of the squad began to use Reynolds as a punching bag between firing questions at the man, the guard leaned his rifle against the nearest trunk and unbuttoned his pants. Finding a tree root to hover his ass over, he squatted.

  Answering nature’s call, the man grunted. His chin tilted downward, his whole spine curving as he hugged his knees and pushed. He kept grunting, his ass and spine grinding. Thomas stepped quietly behind him, just close enough that he could visually place the soft spot at the back of the guard’s skull.

  As the man made one final push, Thomas pulled the trigger on the Maxim 9, the shot making no more noise than the landing of the spongy, misshapen mass the guard had squeezed out with his last breath.

  The body launched forward, propelled by the bullet’s force.

  Listening to the questions the other team members shouted at Reynolds between punches, Thomas contemplated the dead man. He had given all four of them nicknames during the time he had spent tracking them.

  Top Dog was somewhere in his mid-thirties. With a tall, thin frame, the man seemed to have obtained his exalted position of authority through an equal combination of whining and ridiculing. Plus he knew how to read a map better than others.

  Hot Dog was the youngest and most reckless. He had fired his weapon at least once a day, always on accident. Bird Dog also fired his weapon at least once a day, always on purpose and always for game. With a quick eye and a quicker hand, he never missed.

  Then there was the corpse at Thomas’s feet. He was the first of the team whom Thomas had named. There were no canine references to his place among the pack. He was simply “Patch.”

  It was because of Patch that Thomas figured he was dealing with private military contractors. In part, it was the man’s age, close to Thomas’s own. And the uniforms, while consistent between the team, only resembled those of the U.S. Armed Forces. But the most significant clue related to the nickname Thomas had given him.

  Bending down, he reached forward and lifted the oval cut of leather that covered the man’s left orbital socket. Beneath the material was a small depression filled with scarred flesh.

  With only one good eye, the man would have been unfit for military service.

  Thomas ran his hand along Patch’s grizzled jaw. All of the team was in an unshaven state. So was Thomas. It took a few more seconds of studying the body, particularly the face, before Thomas realized why he had shot the guard.

  Indulging a small grin, he removed the patch covering the man’s missing eye and put it on.

  CHAPTER NINE

 

  THOMAS MOVED into the clearing around the house, his ghillie suit swapped out for Patch’s field jacket and the dead man’s rifle slung over his shoulder. He wore Patch’s soft cap, as well, and approached the men with his chin down. He kept a firm grip on the Maxim 9 half concealed in the pocket of his field pants.

  Like ravenous animals, the team members’ were deep into their blood lust, no longer remembering that there were questions to ask the man. They didn’t even acknowledge “Patch’s” presence among them.

  Thomas shot Bird Dog first, the Maxim 9 once again so quiet and the bullet making contact at the same time the team leader dealt a vicious kick to Reynolds’ gut. It took a full second for the shot to register, by which time Top Dog was crumbling to the ground, the hole in his neck spurting blood.

  Hot Dog fumbled with the sling on his rifle as Thomas swung the Maxim 9 in the kid’s direction and fired, shattering his collar bone. Hot Dog spun then stumbled away from Thomas, his fight instinct replaced with the panicky urge to flee.

  Knowing there was no place for pride in a gunfight, Thomas shot him in the back. The kid took one more step then landed face first in the ground.

  Thomas rolled the body over with his foot and shot the man one final time in the face.

  Reynolds was just getting onto his hands and knees.

  “Stay down,” Thomas barked then moved around the three bodies, taking their firearms and patting them down for any other weapons or useful items.

  They all had knives. He took those and the identity card each man carried around his neck. He took his haul inside the shack, placing everything but the ID under a folded down futon.

  “Don’t move,” he warned through the open doorway, his gaze briefly meeting Reynolds’.

  Thomas shuffled through the single room. The floor of the shack was littered with drawing pads. He picked one up and flipped through it. There were mechanical designs, a layout for a solar array, another for a hay bale garden, a sketch for adding another room onto the shack and more.

  He dropped the pad and walked to the small kitchen area in one corner. A drawer of dinnerware and cooking utensils, including knives, had been upturned. Using his foot, he brushed it into a pile. He moved on to check the underside of the bottom cabinet and then the same area of the table.

  A smile carved its way across his face. The vicious idiots he slaughtered had missed a long-barreled revolver mounted to the table. Thomas pulled it out, emptied the rounds into his pocket then replaced the firearm before returning to the porch.

  Reynolds had remained exactly as Thomas left him, his breath leaving him in clogged gurgles to steam the air in front of his face.

  “Haul yourself inside,” Thomas ordered then watched the man slowly gain his feet and stumble up the porch.

  “Sit down,” Thomas commanded and pointed at the side table with its two stools.

  Thomas smiled to see the man switch directions at the last second and choose the stool that provided direct access to the revolver. Turning his back on Reynolds, he opened the refrigerator in search of ice or a cold pack. He found neither, but the man had packets of frozen corn and peas. He took them out and tossed them onto the table.

  Reynolds held one to his bloodied, swollen nose and shoved two more under his shirt, both hands occupied with treating his injuries.

  Thomas started some water heating.

  “Hope you don’t mind if I make us some coffee,” he said, pulling a bottle of instant crystals down from the cupboard. “Haven’t had any since this all started.”

  The man grunted his approval and asked a question of his own. “Mind if I smoke?”

  Thomas didn’t answer right away, listening, instead, to the man’s breathing.

  “Don’t think it’ll hurt you,” he answered after a few more seconds. “Doesn’t sound like they injured your lungs, just busted your nose up some.”

  “And my ribs,” the man wheezed as he reached for the tin of rolled cigarettes along the windowsill.

  With the water boiling, Thomas filled two mu
gs and placed them on the table, then picked up two spoons from the floor and rinsed them off. He handed one to Reynolds then opened up the jar of instant coffee and waited while the man spooned some into his mug before doing the same to his own cup

  “So, Hank,” Thomas said, taking the opposite seat. “You know why those men were beating on you?”

  A flicker of surprise crossed Reynolds’ face as Thomas said his name but then he nodded at the mobile transceiver over by the futon.

  “I didn’t hear them say anything but my last name,” Reynolds said. “Of course, I might have lost consciousness for a few seconds when that kid punched me in the nose.”

  “They made camp right next to my hiding spot,” Thomas explained as he studied the man.

  Reynolds was nearing retirement age, the hair more gray than the black it had once been. His skin was deeply tanned, like he spent a lot of time outdoors, and the flesh beneath his clothes appeared to be mostly lean muscle.

  “They had a list,” Thomas continued. “You were number one, with a bullet, so to speak.”

  “Great,” Hank laughed then had to turn and spit a wad of blood and mucus into the sink. “First time I made the top of anybody’s list and it’s to get the crap beat out of me.”

  “Tell me,” Thomas went on, his tone conversational in hopes of relaxing the man. “How do you know about Greenbrier?”

  Reynolds’ gaze narrowed with suspicion, provoking a harsh laugh from Thomas.

  “You think those men were part of my team and I killed them just to get you to talk?”

  Once he put it into words Thomas smiled at the idea, his brow lifting involuntarily.

  “Well,” he mused, “I guess it depends on the men I was traveling with and the information I thought you had. But that’s not the case today.”

  With the cheap, hand rolled cigarette smoked down to nothing, Reynolds stubbed it out. He still hadn’t answered and didn’t seem ready to, but Thomas didn’t push.