Ranger (The Bugging Out Series Book 5)

by Noah Mann

She thought on that for a moment, her gaze half swimming, half focused, some fitful, fevered sleep threatening to drag her down.

  “What do you think?”

  I shook my head and heard a quick knock at the front door.

  “Fletch?” Mayor Allen called out from just inside our house.

  “Back here,” I directed him.

  A moment later the old doctor appeared, old fashioned black medical satchel in hand. He approached the bed and sat on the edge, leaning so that Elaine could see him.

  “How’s our patient?”

  “I’ll beat it,” Elaine told him.

  “We’re going to see that that happens,” Mayor Allen said, his words sounding much like a promise.

  Elaine nodded, her cheek sliding across the pillow. Once more she looked to me. The beauty about her, in her eyes, in every line and contour of her face, both warmed and pained me.

  “What do you think?”

  She repeated the question that she’d posed as the mayor’s arrival interrupted us. I knew what she was asking—whether I thought the mission was worthwhile. The truth was, I didn’t think so. But I also had to admit that, as Schiavo had said, Olin had been schooled in using the art of deception. Of inhabiting a lie so completely that what was real and what was manufactured for his own purposes might seem indistinguishable.

  There was another truth, though, that made me wary of seeking the man again, and this was what I shared with Elaine as Mayor Allen slid a stethoscope over her back, listening to her rattling breathing sounds.

  “I don’t think he cares about us,” I told my wife.

  The mayor’s gaze angled toward me as I spoke those words, some worry in it that I might still back out of what I’d agreed to do.

  “He’s here for his own reasons,” I continued. “On his own mission.”

  “But he came to help Neil,” Elaine said, her words wet and raspy. “If he’s right about Neil sending the Ranger Signal for him. To tell him he was in danger.”

  “That’s his story,” I said, my internal emphasis on the word ‘story’.

  Elaine quieted for a moment as Mayor Allen slipped the stethoscope from her back to her chest and continued listening.

  “Is there a one percent chance he might know something that will help?” Elaine asked me. “Five percent?”

  “Somewhere north of zero,” I told her.

  My wife coughed, her body trembling beneath the thick blankets atop her. Mayor Allen eased the stethoscope away and put a hand on her shoulder to calm her through the hacking fit.

  She could say no more, left gasping by the bug attacking every cell in her body. If something didn’t change, if no progress was made, there was a very real chance that I could lose her. I could not let that happen.

  “North of zero isn’t zero,” I said, leaning close and kissing her softly on the side of her forehead. “So I’m going to go make this happen.”

  Elaine closed her eyes, drifting off, some peace coming in sleep that eluded her while awake and battling the monster within.

  “Take care of her,” I told the old doctor sitting on the edge of the bed. “Please.”

  “Count on it.”

  I stepped away from the bed and crossed the room to the door, passing through without looking back. Without thinking of my love. My thoughts were focused now on one thing. On one man. He was out there, and I was off to find him.

  Twenty Nine

  Olin had left town on a slightly northeast course, as reported by Sergeant Lorenzen. That was the direction I headed as I began my search for the CIA man.

  I left the northernmost checkpoint on our eastern border just after noon, a thick and welcome fog masking my movements as I blazed a slow, methodical trail through the dead woods. Every five minutes I would stop and take a knee next to the fattest tree I could find. From each spot I listened. Tuning my ears to the hush of the misty woods. Sampling the nothingness which used to be filled with the flutter of bird wings. The melodic chirp of jays. The quickened patter of prey scurrying toward burrows.

  There was no more of that, but there was still prey. The prey that I sought, and myself, most certainly a target for the Unified Government forces somewhere in the damp haze.

  My load was light, just the basics to survive a night or two in the elements, plus my AR, its slender suppressor affixed to the muzzle, and the Springfield on my hip. I wanted to use neither on this journey, which I had to complete quickly. Either Olin would be found by dawn the next day, or I would be making my way back to Bandon. To my home. To Elaine.

  Two hours it took me to cover a mile. The air stank of wet death, the blighted trees soaking up the moisture and seeming to bleed some grey pus. It smeared on my coat as I brushed past stands of once mighty pines and firs, marking the stench upon me.

  Once more I paused, just shy of a pair of fallen trees. The blight had taken them down, and, bit by bit, they were dissolving into the forest floor. Beyond them the fog swirled, pushed by a breeze that was funneled into a wide, low gulley, revealing more distant features in brief glimpses as the weather was momentarily parted.

  Nothing. That was what I saw in the few seconds of clearing. Just a gentle slope rising toward the crest of a low hill, trees thinning out as the terrain angled upward. I thought I recognized this particular bit of the landscape, having patrolled, then simply hiked, the area around Bandon often since coming to the community. Before the top of the hill there was a shallow ravine that peeled off to the left, and a stream that drained to the north toward the Coquille River. Following that would give me excellent cover should the fog lift. It was also where I would have chosen to go had I needed a place to hole up—isolated, yet near enough to town that it could be reached in a few hours.

  I decided to follow that route, hoping that, along the way, I would find some sign of Olin. Some marker of his presence. Tracks on the ground. A sound. A smell. Rising from where I’d stopped, I moved toward the fallen logs and stepped over the first, then the second, a thinner pine.

  Immediately, I knew I was in trouble.

  I felt no tripwire as my boot planted itself on the opposite side of the smaller log, but a sharp twang told me that I’d triggered something. Something that very well could obliterate me in the microseconds that followed.

  But there was no explosion. No blast of shrapnel. Instead I heard a snap and then a whipping sound as something ripped fast through the air. I turned toward the sound and caught just a glimpse of the tensioned length of dead wood swinging toward me. There was no time to duck or roll clear. No chance at avoiding the trap I’d stepped into. All I could do was draw a fast breath as the fat limb struck me on my left side, just below my hip, the impact launching me into the air, tumbling end over end until my body slammed back to earth like a discarded ragdoll.

  The wind had been knocked out of me. Worse, my AR had been whipped out of my hands and jerked free of its attachment to my chest sling. As I gasped for breath and groped for my weapon, I heard something. Something different than what had just cut through the silent forest.

  I heard a man.

  The Unified Government soldier stood over me, clad in black, his face masked by a balaclava, only his eyes showing through an oval hole in the garment. Just beyond him, lying against the slope, was my AR, maybe five yards away. My only other weapon, other than a knife sheathed on my belt, was my Springfield, but the very capable .45 was pinned beneath me as I lay on my right side.

  “Keep those hands where I can see them,” the soldier ordered me.

  I stayed fixed on him, my hands in front of my crumpled body. His weapon, a familiar M4, workhorse of the American military, was aimed just below my chin. If he had any inclination to pull the trigger, he would not miss at this distance.

  “When I tell you to, you’re going to roll slowly onto your stomach and stretch your hands out above your head. If you make any move I don’t like, you’re not going to see another sunrise.”

  He didn’t talk like a soldier. Not one trained as those
I’d come to know, anyway. His verbiage was almost cute, as if he’d seen too many war movies when such things existed in the old world. What this said to me was that this man, this young man with his face hidden, was a recruit. A green draftee into a force that needed warm bodies.

  “Do you understand?”

  I nodded. In the distance the fog rolled fast across the slope, washing the world with an opaque veil yet again. Out there, beyond the hilltop, would be his people. That was where he would take me once I’d been disarmed. Or from where his fellow soldiers would appear. That none had, as of yet, was more than a bit puzzling. Had this soldier been manning a post, watching a route of travel covered with traps? Was he by himself?

  “Okay,” the soldier prompted me. “Roll slowly.”

  A gust of wind rushed down the hillside, splitting the fog as I began to shift my body and extend my hand. I could make no move here. Not yet.

  As it turned out, someone made the move for me.

  The flat crack of a single rifle shot shattered the dead world’s quiet. In my peripheral vision, I saw the side of the soldier’s head erupt through his balaclava, neck snapping right, away from the origin of the shot. His body folded and fell to the ground at my feet, weapon dropping, its metallic clunk against the earth the last sound I heard before the footsteps.

  I knew who had fired the shot. Knew without a doubt. I’d hunted deer in my native Montana, in Wyoming, and on trips to Michigan and Pennsylvania, to name a few. And universal amongst those places, in those hunting seasons, was the sound that the venerable .30-30 made.

  Precisely the caliber of the lever gun that Olin had with him.

  “Get your weapon and let’s move,” the spy said to me as he emerged from the wave of fog which had formed yet again. “They’ll come to the sound of the shot.”

  I didn’t have to be prompted again. Sore, but alive, I got to my feet and collected my AR, then fell in line behind Olin as he moved up the slope and turned north along the stream, traveling exactly the route I’d planned to.

  “Keep moving,” Olin instructed. “We’ve got a half mile to cover.”

  I stayed right on his six, glancing behind occasionally, though Olin seemed unconcerned with anyone following us. He was focused fully on the way ahead.

  “How did you know I was there?”

  “I didn’t,” Olin said quietly. “I knew he was there. They’ve been spreading sentries along their line, shifting them closer to town every day. He set that trap this morning. That’s when I heard him. There’s more of those backbreakers scattered through the woods.”

  The man stopped talking there and brought his arm up to cough into the crook of his elbow, muffling the sound. He was sick, it seemed, but still functioning. That was what I believed until we reached his hideout.

  * * *

  Twenty minutes later, Olin led me through a narrow space between two boulders and collapsed to his knees. He reached out and leaned his rifle against the granite wall to one side. Opposite it, another huge rock curved around, meeting the other to create a natural shelter, complete with overhang that reached almost to the only entrance.

  Were it another person, I might have offered my hand to help them up. But it was not. It was a man who had brought news of a life my friend had kept from me. A life of deceit and darkness.

  “I need information,” I said, not wanting to prolong my interaction with him.

  Olin put a hand to the rock face and levered himself up from the ground. He turned, facing me so that I had a good view of him after the quick hike to his hideout. My reaction must have been more overt than I’d thought.

  “I look great, yeah?”

  He didn’t, and he knew it. Dark circles, looking almost like bruises, surrounded his eyes, giving the impression that he’d been beaten severely. Those markings contrasted hideously with the pale skin sagging over his cheeks. His lips, cracked and almost without any pinkish hue, were thin and stretched, leaving his mouth appearing as just a gash upon his face.

  “What did they hit us with?” I asked. “Was it Four Twelve?”

  Olin straightened himself and looked me over, unconcerned with what I’d just asked him.

  “Dial the volume down,” he said. “I’m not saving you twice today.”

  “Was it Four Twelve?” I asked again, hushing my voice to just above a whisper.

  “But don’t you look chipper? Almost like you’re unaffected.”

  “Answer the question, Olin.”

  He smiled through a shallow, dry cough.

  “They did something to you,” he said. “Didn’t they? When they took you.”

  I wasn’t there to confirm his eerie read on my physical wellbeing, but that he was able to put the pieces of the situation, maybe any situation, together so quickly, and with such accuracy, it hurt to admit the realization that rose right then—Neil had always been able to do the same. I’d thought it part of his nature, but, beyond high school and college, I wondered if that nature had been honed like a blade’s edge on a wet stone. Someone, somewhere, had taken my friend and made him into what he was—a near carbon copy of the spy before me.

  “They’re all running around, looking good, feeling strong,” Olin said. “You’re in as good a condition as the soldiers I see on their line.”

  “Do you want to help us, or not?”

  “You don’t look like you need any help,” he said.

  The man retrieved a steel cup and filled it with water from his canteen. He placed it over the narrow space between two small rocks, then slipped a fuel tablet in the hollow between, igniting it with a flick of a lighter. A blue and white flame took hold and licked upward to the bottom of the cup.

  “If they’d dosed you with BA Four Twelve, we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now. Because we’d both be dead. Eight hours tops after exposure. That’s what the Agency brains estimated, anyway.”

  The chemical smoke from Olin’s fuel tablet swirled about the hollow between the boulders, contained within the walls of his stone hideout. As the rain had done during my time at the shattered cabin, the fog here would dampen any scent before it drifted far from its point of origin.

  “Estimated? You mean no one had first-hand experience with it? What about the Iraqi village?”

  “Those were intelligence reports. Passed along. Third hand information.”

  “Third hand? That’s your best intelligence?”

  “Did you hear me? Anyone with first-hand knowledge ended up in a body bag. Trust me, they found something new and fun for all of us.”

  He dragged a sleeve across his mouth, coughing into it, stifling the sound as best he could. The bug meant for our town had gotten him, too, with a vengeance. When the spasm had passed he pulled his arm away and showed me the sleeve of his field coat.

  “Pretty, huh?”

  It wasn’t. A spray of red mucus had stained the material, fresh blood over dried. He was bleeding internally, his lungs, most likely, or his esophagus.

  “Four Twelve would be a measure of mercy right now,” Olin said, then slid down onto his bottom, back against one of the boulders, a cold, makeshift chair.

  “If it’s not Four Twelve, then what is it?”

  Olin looked at me. He managed a smile through the illness attacking his body from within.

  “There was only one soldier on you,” he said. “Just one. That should tell you all you need to know.”

  “They’re not a big force,” I said. “We already figured that.”

  “They’re off in singles, setting traps to monitor a line that should take a thousand men to secure.”

  “So that’s all it is?” I pressed. “Just some virus to weaken us? To even the odds?”

  “No, making things even has nothing to do with it,” Olin said. “What they hit you with, hit me with, it’s going to leave everyone incapable of fighting until they bring you back to health. Then you’ll be ‘reeducated’ to their way of doing things.”

  I leaned my AR against the boulder
and slid to the ground, sitting against a rock face facing Olin. He reached out and tipped a pouch of drink powder into the cup of water just starting to boil.

  “I’d offer you some, but not now,” Olin said, lifting the cup and swirling the liquid to dissolve the contents. “I need my strength.”

  I wondered if a hardy constitution was the key to surviving this. Either the virus would run its course, over some period we didn’t know as yet, or some underlying medical condition would combine with its effects to overwhelm the body’s ability to sustain itself. Genesee had said people were going to die. Looking at Olin, and remembering how Elaine had been taken down by the bug, to imagine a weakened person not surviving this was not difficult.

  “How does it feel to be a healthy island amongst a sea of suffering friends?” Olin asked, sipping the drink he’d made, a good portion dribbling down his chin as his hands trembled. “We can bet cash money that good old Neil isn’t riding a fever, or hacking up a lung.”

  “You said he was in danger,” I reminded Olin. “That’s what the Ranger Signal was.”

  “People can be in danger in different ways,” Olin said, setting the almost empty cup aside. “Sometimes they recognize a threat before it’s actually upon them.”

  “So how do you help him? If he shows up. What do you do?”

  Olin looked at me, just looked, then retrieved a thin sleeping bag from his pack and pulled it around him as he settled down to the dirty forest floor.

  “You’re not here to help us, you’re here to help him. That’s what you said, Olin, so how is it that you’re going to help him?”

  “You’re welcome to stay the night,” Olin told me. “You won’t want to move in the dark back through their lines.”

  With that, the spy closed his eyes. The fog had lingered until almost sundown, just dissolving now as the day’s last light trickled through the space between the boulders. He was right—moving at night, though it had its advantages, would, in this situation, put me in more jeopardy. I needed to see who and what was out there when I made my way back to Bandon. Back with nothing to show for my efforts.

  With nothing to help save my town.