Beth hugged his neck so hard and for so long her little arms went numb.
Dave kissed her on the forehead and said, “You take care of your Grandpa Sal while I’m gone. Don’t let him get into any trouble.”
“Shucks, Daddy. He’s an old man. He knows how to behave by now I’m sure.”
“Okay then, Peanut. You make sure you behave. How’s that?”
“I always behave.”
He cocked an eyebrow.
“Always?”
“Well… most of the time.”
“You guys be downstairs for dinner at six. And be sure to get a good night’s sleep.
“Hopefully tomorrow will be a big day for everyone.”
It would be, but he didn’t yet know how big a day it would be.
Or how bad.
On his way out of town Dave picked up the supplies Lenny was kind enough to donate to his cause.
He also made an additional stop at an abandoned supermarket on the edge of town.
Just to play a hunch.
Chapter 50
Dave’s drill instructor once told him he was the dumbest recruit the Marine Corps had ever blundered into.
That was back in his basic training days… the days the Corps lovingly calls “boot camp.”
Dave’s uncle told him before he went in that the DIs would ride him unmercifully and insult him in a thousand different ways. It was the job of the DIs to identify the weak links and to weed them out.
After all, it’s far better to identify someone who can’t take the pressure and get rid of him during boot camp than to let him go to war. If he broke under pressure on a battlefield he could get good men killed.
But Dave took it personally anyway despite his uncle’s admonition.
He spent his entire Marie Corps career trying to prove that DI wrong. He was meticulous in everything he did. He followed orders to the letter and never let his superiors or his men down.
Those days were gone.
He was getting sloppy.
Of course, he was no longer on active duty, so no one could blame him for not being on his best game.
But he could blame himself.
Because his sloppiness could have killed him.
He walked right up to the ventilation pipe without once thinking the area could be mined.
In the tall grass he couldn’t see Jones’s bones until he was right up on them.
Only then he realized he was damned lucky he didn’t step on a mine and wind up just like Jones.
Even though the meat had been picked clean, he could tell Jones met his maker by means of an explosion. His bones were scattered over a large area. Moreover they were splintered into hundreds of pieces. Especially, most notably, his leg bones.
He immediately froze in place and studied the ground around him.
Land mines are strictly prohibited by the Law of Armed Conflict. American forces no longer use them, except under certain conditions and only in close proximity to sensitive assets.
But the bad guys still routinely use Soviet-made mines in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.
United States Marines deployed to those areas, therefore, must be well versed on how to deal with the mines should they come in contact with them.
Dave could once recite Marine Corps Reference Publication 3-02E, Terrorism Measures and Countermeasures, almost by heart.
Those days were gone, but he still remembered the gist of it.
He knew if he found himself in a mine field he was to proceed with the utmost caution.
He was to crawl out, on his hands and knees if he had to, while carefully inspecting the ground in front of him with a probe.
At the same time, he was to make note of the location of each mine he found. If friendly forces were expected to pass this way again he was to mark the mine in some manner and to warn others of its presence.
While finding and marking the mines he was to look at their relative location to one another. Part of the “big picture” to help finding others easier, since mines were usually laid in a pattern.
In this case, he expected no friendly forces to come in behind him.
He just had to find his way back out of the mine field.
Alive, if possible.
He carefully inspected the ventilation pipe for any strange markings.
They were faint. Faded in the sunlight, probably.
But he was able to make out black hash marks on the two sides of the pipe he could see by leaning first to his left, then to his right.
The marks were made by hand, he could tell. They weren’t of uniform length and one was slightly slanted.
If they were made by the machine which rolled the pipe they’d have been uniform.
They were on the six o’clock and twelve o’clock positions.
They might mark safe approaches for the brothers who owned the bunker, in the event they had to do maintenance on it.
He examined the ground around Jones’s bones and was able to make out a small depression in the earth where the mine detonated.
It was between the hash marks.
That supported his theory, but didn’t prove it outright.
At least not enough to make him want to follow the line away from the vent.
Oh, he would take that route.
But not on his feet.
He made his way to the six o’clock hash mark, on hands and knees, using his knife to tenderly poke the ground every four inches.
It was nowhere as good as a probe.
But by turning the knife as he sank it into the ground he could clear away the dirt without having to shove the knife hard and risk triggering any mine which might be there.
It took him almost an hour until he was fifty feet away and felt comfortable enough to stand up and walk again.
He looked up at the sky and saw he only had about two hours of daylight left.
He made his way to the other ventilation shaft and used his field glasses to find similar hash marks.
He approached one of them head on.
But again, on his hands and knees.
He was confident this was his safe approach to the second ventilation pipe.
But overconfidence sometimes got men killed.
Even as the sun was sinking low on the horizon he went through the maddening task of searching for buried mines until he made it to the pipe.
He now had a safe approach through both mine fields.
It was too late to set in motion the next stage of his plan.
He scurried off into the woods to bed down for the night.
He’d be back first thing in the morning.
And then people would start dying.
Chapter 51
Dave had a very fitful night.
Oh, it had nothing to do with his accommodations, for the mattress on the back of the rig was quite comfortable.
It was the hundred and one things going through his mind.
Every time he relaxed enough to get some sleep something else popped into his thoughts.
Things which made him second guess his plan.
He’d stashed the rig in heavy woods a half mile from the bunker.
It was farther away than he’d have liked, but he didn’t know how much territory the bad guys controlled and didn’t want to risk surrendering his munitions to them.
He’d put a lot of thought into his gameplan.
God knew it wasn’t perfect.
But under the circumstances, and considering the fact he didn’t know who was left alive in the bunker, it was the best course of action he could think of.
He rolled off the mattress about half an hour before sunup, when the sky to the east was starting to lighten and would soon turn orange.
By the time the first rays of the sun began to stream across the horizon he was almost back to the ventilation pipe on the north side of the bunker.
He took off his backpack and removed four canisters of tear gas and a plastic grocery bag.
He laid them on
the ground immediately next to the ventilation pipe where he intended to attack.
He put one of the canisters on top of the grocery bag, lest it blow away in the soft morning breeze.
Then he set up his sniper rifle so it was ready to fire at the pillbox’s firing ports should anyone have any inclination to look out of one and take offense to Dave’s being there.
Once the rifle was set up he made his way to the second ventilation pipe.
This time he carefully made his way up the safe approach he’d marked and went all the way to the ventilation tube.
Dave knew that operations lived or died by the intel they gathered.
If the intel was faulty or insufficient, seemingly perfectly planned operations crashed and burned, and good men got killed.
If the intel was good, though, and the good guys knew who was where and what they had, the odds were turned dramatically in their favor.
It was because Dave was a dedicated Marine that he collected bits of intelligence like others might collect shot glasses or baseball cards.
He believed that one could never tell when this little bit of info or that might come in handy.
And he had an excellent memory when it came to things as important as intelligence gathering.
It was a habit he’d carried with him when he left the Corps, and found it was equally useful in his prepping efforts.
In the short amount of time he was in the bunker himself… between the time he’d liberated Karen’s farm from Swain’s men and the time he’d left to find Beth, he’d noticed a couple of things.
First, that the Dykes had no gas masks inside the bunker.
It was one of the first things Dave would have purchased, but they didn’t consider them necessary.
That was okay.
Preppers don’t always agree on what supplies and equipment are essential.
What may be critical for one prepper’s operation may not be deemed necessary at all for another’s.
This is especially true when one is on a budget and has to make critical decisions on how to invest their resources.
Gas masks and their filters are very expensive.
The other thing Dave noticed was that the vent pipes on the inside of the bunker were covered with wire mesh which was welded in place.
He assumed it was to keep rodents out, but never really asked.
It was bad form to criticize another prepper’s security plan.
Especially when he was asking that prepper to grant a monumental favor by putting up one’s family during one’s absence.
Suffice it to say it wasn’t the way Dave would have done things.
Suffice it to say as well that Dave was now glad for the way the bunker was set up.
It would make his job so much easier.
If the interior of the pipe wasn’t meshed, or if the mesh was easily removed, the tear gas canister might be contained and sealed inside a small drum which would render it ineffective.
Knowing that wasn’t a possibility, he was confident his plan would work.
He held his breath, said a brief prayer, pulled the pin from one of the canisters and dropped it into the tube.
By the time he repeated the process with the second canister he was already starting to turn blue.
By the time he placed the plastic grocery bag over the vent and tied the ends together he was about to explode.
Finally, he blew out the air in his lungs, grabbed the backpack and quickly made his way back to the second vent.
Dave was lucky in that the first vent opened into the back corner of the bunker. The room where Santos and Sarah met every day to pretend to carry on their sexual relationship.
Manson’s men called it the “flop room.”
Parker didn’t like the term, so the men no longer used it in Parker’s presence.
But when he wasn’t around they continued to use it because to them it summed up the purpose of the room perfectly.
At the time he dropped the tear gas canisters into the vent the flop room was unoccupied.
And that bought Dave some extra time as he was able to transition from one vent to the other before his actions were detected.
Chapter 52
As Dave pulled the pin on the third canister and dropped it into the second vent, gas from the first two finished filling the flop room and was pouring out into the corridor.
As he dropped the fourth and final canister into the tube, John Parker caught the first scent.
A puzzled look came over his face.
The scent was vague, almost nonexistent.
Yet it seemed somehow familiar.
It took him several seconds to figure out why.
John Parker was never in a prison where tear gas was used to quell an uprising or put down a riot.
He’d never been in a tension-charged protest where local police or national guardsmen went too far and tossed tear gas into crowds of protesters.
He had, though, been a member of the United States Army.
And the Army trains its people how to properly don a gas mask.
It had been awhile since Parker went through field training in a chemical warfare environment. So long, in fact, he was trained in an old-style M-17 gas mask.
He knew how to care for it, keep it clean, and wrestle its ungainly filters from the mask and to replace them while holding his breath.
The holding his breath part was essential, for the Army didn’t just pretend to use gas during such training exercises.
They used real tear gas, and soldiers who didn’t do a good job of listening to their training instructors paid a heavy price.
If they weren’t able to change their filters, don their mask and clear it properly the tear gas got trapped inside the mask, where the soldier did not want it to be.
Parker was a better than average soldier back then.
But he still remembered the sharp peppery smell of tear gas.
It was something a soldier never really forgot.
The hairs on the back of Parker’s neck rose like the hackles on a dog when he identified the smell.
“Tear gas!” he yelled.
He knew there were no gas masks in the bunker. He’d made note of it himself early on when he and Manson went through the place, inch by inch, examining their newly-won prize.
As the smoke overtook the bunker and coughing and cursing could be heard in every corner of it he managed to tell, “Dampen a cloth and breathe through it!”
He pulled off his t-shirt and tried his best to hold his breath as he took a half-filled bottle of water and used it to soak the shirt through and through.
Then he wrung out the excess and tied the wet shirt over his nose and mouth.
It wasn’t easy as he coughed and wheezed so badly he saw stars in front of his face.
And it wasn’t very effective either.
But since it was the only thing he had, it was slightly better than nothing.
He did what a leader was supposed to do under such traumatic situations.
He took care of his men.
From room to room he went, telling everyone he encountered, “Get to the front room of the bunker, below the pillbox. The air will be better there. Hold a gun on the pillbox and shoot anybody who tries to enter.”
By the time the gas fully engulfed the bunker everyone… captors and hostages alike… were huddled in the very front of the bunker.
Everyone was hacking and eyes were burning and tears were streaming down all faces.
All eyes, to the extent they could even be opened, were trained on the pillbox. For in light of the circumstances, where they were obviously under attack, all expected an invading force to be crawling into the bunker with guns blazing.
Karen and Sarah surrounded Karen’s small children, wrapped their arms around them, and tried their best to comfort them.
Of all the people in the bunker only Tommy Junior, Karen’s only son and the smallest of her three kids, cried openly.
Oh, everybod
y else looked like they were crying, their free-flowing tears covering their faces.
But that was just the body’s natural and desperate effort to rid the eyes of the stinging and tortuous gas.
They sat that way for over an hour, until the gas slowly dissipated and it became possible to breathe again.
Painfully so, and in very short breaths.
Dave knew there were people in the bunker.
He could hear them cry out in agony, their curses emanating from the front of the bunker into the pillbox and out the firing ports.
It pained him, knowing that some of the people he loved were almost certainly suffering by his hand.
And he’d spend a lot of time, probably the rest of his life, apologizing to them for it.
But trying to smoke them out was the only option he saw.
He knew they had enough food and water to last them for years.
There was quite literally no way to make them come out against their will, other than applying a means of making the bunker intolerable.
There were a lot of things about the people in the bunker Dave did not know.
But he was certain of that.
In the bunker, Parker and his men knew even less about Dave and his situation.
They didn’t know whether their attacking force was one man or a hundred.
They didn’t know whether they’d used all their gas or if there’d be more.
They didn’t know what their attacking force’s end goal was.
Whoever they were, they obviously wanted the bunker.
But what would they do with its occupants?
Would they be shot like dogs as they exited?
Taken prisoner? Unlikely.
Released and told to leave the area?
Equally unlikely, for the victors would realize they’d be angry about losing their prime shelter and anxious to take it back.
One thing they didn’t know, as the gas slowly dissipated:
The battle was just beginning. This was just the opening salvo.
Chapter 53
Dave covered the vents with plastic before the tear gas was able to waft its way back up through them.
He didn’t smell the gas when he applied it.
When he did smell it, from a considerable distance away, he knew it had permeated the entire bunker.
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