by James Hunt
Matt turned the last corner of the road and saw the gate up ahead.
“Almost free,” Matt whispered.
Jim’s jeep came roaring past one of the tents right next to Matt’s jeep, almost running him off the road. Matt retaliated and rammed the side of his jeep into Jim’s. Matt reached for his pistol and fired a few shots. Jim slammed on the brakes and got right behind him. Dust flew up in the air as the jeeps raced for the gate, which was down, but Matt’s speed was increasing.
The guards at the gate shouted for him to stop and fired a spray of bullets at Matt, but he kept his foot on the pedal. They all ducked behind the dash as the jeep burst through the wooden gate, shredding it to splinters.
***
Sweat started to run down Twink’s forehead as the bar moved up to ninety-four percent.
“It’s no use, Twink. We’ve got to go,” Brett said.
“I think I’ve almost got it,” Twink answered.
The bar moved up to ninety-five percent.
“You get out of here,” Twink said.
“Yeah, like I’d ever let you tell me what to do,” Brett said.
The bar crawled up to ninety-six percent.
“My mother always said it would be my stubborn pride that’d kill me.”
The encryption code was almost cracked as Twink made the second to the last number fall into place.
“God, I always hated that woman,” Brett said.
“Well, I hate to prove your mother wrong, but it looks like that stubborn pride won’t kill you today,” Twink said.
Twink hit the enter button, and the bar stopped at ninety-eight percent.
***
The two jeeps raced towards the highway as the ashes of Phoenix smoldered in the distance. Jim pulled out his pistol and aimed for the tires. He fired two shots and blew out the left rear tire. The jeep swerved as Matt tried to keep his careening jeep under control. He pulled out his gun and fired back at Jim. A few bullets went through Jim’s windshield, shattering portions of the glass. Another bullet ricocheted off the hood as Jim ducked behind the console. Jim came back up and aimed the pistol at the other rear tire and fired. It blew out, and the jeep swerved in a circle as Matt was unable to keep control of the wheel.
Dust and sand settled around the jeep as Jim pulled right up to it before slamming on the brakes. He squinted through the dust but couldn’t see the girls. “Sammy! Annie!” Jim got to the jeep and when he looked inside it, Samantha was unconscious and bleeding from the forehead. She stirred a bit when he said her name, and her eyes opened.
“Jim?” Samantha asked.
“Get away from my wife, Jim,” Matt said.
Jim slowly turned around to see Matt’s silhouette in the dust. As it cleared, he saw Matt’s arm around Annie covering her mouth and shielding the front of his body.
“Don’t do this, Matt. Whatever it is you got yourself into, I can help get you out,” Jim pleaded.
“I don’t need your help. We don’t need your fucking help!” Matt screamed.
Annie’s eyes were red with tears as her muffled cries came through her father’s hands.
“Let her go,” Jim said.
Samantha watched in horror as her husband held her daughter’s mouth shut while pointing a gun at her brother. She tried to get up but kept falling back down into her seat.
“You think I’m going to hurt my family, Jim? No, the only person I’m going to hurt is you.” Matt’s finger moved to the trigger when suddenly Tigs leapt from under the jeep, landing on Matt’s leg. She dug her claws into Matt’s thigh, hanging on as he shook her off. Annie fell to the ground as Matt fired his pistol into the side of the jeep, narrowly missing Jim.
Jim sprinted towards Matt and sent him flying into the sand. The two men wrestled as Matt clawed for the pistol just beyond his reach. Jim had him in a headlock, but Matt flew his head back and knocked Jim’s jaw, causing him to lose his grip. Matt scrambled for the gun and grabbed it. As he whipped himself around, Jim grabbed Matt’s arm with the pistol in it and slammed him to the ground. They both rolled over on top of each other again and again, trying to use the momentum they’d gain to pin the other man down.
They finally came to a halt on their sides. Both men had their hands wrapped around the pistol, attempting to point it at the other man. The barrel of the gun tilted back-and-forth slightly between Jim and Matt. Jim gritted his teeth, struggling to gain control of the pistol. Matt’s eyes were wild with rage and both men’s faces were turning red from the strain.
Then the gun went off. Both of them jolted from the sound of the gunshot, each man gasping for air. The color from their faces began to fade. Jim glanced down at the pistol still smoking in his hand.
Blood dripped from Matt’s stomach as he held a hand over his gut, squeezing against the wound in panic. Matt flopped onto his back as Jim rose to his knees, hovering over him. Matt shook and convulsed on the ground. He looked up at Jim with his fading eyes.
“You won’t be able to stop it. Just keep them safe,” Matt said.
The words were barely audible when they left his lips. Matt’s eyes stared up into the sky. Both his arms went limp and dropped to the ground.
Samantha screamed from the jeep as she crawled over the seats to get out. She hit the ground hard and stumbled over to Matt’s side, holding his face in her hands. Annie sat huddled in a ball in the sand with Tigs curled right up next to her. Jim’s eyes rose from the scene in front of him to the charred skyscrapers of Phoenix in the backdrop while his sister’s cries filled the desert air.
Chapter 5
It took a while for everyone to get debriefed after what happened. Locke himself had flown out once he’d been radioed. It wasn’t until his arrival that Jim was finally released. The sand, ash, and blood were still caked onto his sunburnt face as Jim found himself in a tent with Locke, a vacant chair, and another file. Locke motioned over to his assistant, Chris, who came closer.
“Get us some water,” Locke said.
“Whiskey,” Jim said.
Locke nodded and the boy left the tent. Jim stared blankly into the space in front of him. Locke didn’t want to press him for details on what happened, so he honored the silence between them.
“Did you know?” Jim asked.
“Know what?” Locke responded.
“That Matt was the mole.” Jim said.
“No, but I had a thought that he could be. I needed to know for sure. I thought that if I sent someone he trusted, he—”
“Wouldn’t try and kill them,” Jim said.
“Yes.”
Chris returned with a bottle and two glasses and placed them on the table between the two men. Locke reached for the glass while Jim reached for the bottle. He twisted the cap off, pressed the opening to his chapped lips and took a long swig.
“Jim, I can’t imagine what you’re feeling right now, son.”
“You can’t imagine what it’s like to kill your sister’s husband in front of her and your niece? You don’t know what it’s like to have them look at you after it’s done?”
“No, I don’t.”
Jim jumped to his feet with the bottle in his hand. He pointed his other free hand at Locke and started screaming.
“No! You don’t fucking know! You don’t fucking know because you’ve never fucking done it! You could have told me the information you had! You could’ve told me what he might do, what he was a part of, but no, you had to be mysterious with your orders, no matter the fucking cost!”
The last words hung in the air the loudest. Jim’s face was beet red and his breathing was labored. He walked to the corner of the tent and kept his back to Locke, who sat silent and motionless.
Finally, the old general drummed his fingers on his leg and rose out of the chair. He folded his hands behind his back as he spoke. “Your father knew the cost of following orders. The official report was correct when it said that over twenty of his men died, but what the report didn’t mention were the ten thousand people he
helped save in the small city where they were stationed.”
Jim’s grip on the bottle loosened as it hung limp between his fingers.
“It was a classified mission in an area where we weren’t supposed to be. The boys back home had to cover their asses and mark him as a deserter to stop a war from happening,” Locke explained.
“Why are you telling me this? So I’ll understand why you didn’t tell me what was really going on?” Jim asked.
“No, I told you because I thought you should know that your father wasn’t a coward. He wasn’t afraid of what needed to be done.”
“We can’t stop it. That’s what Matt told me when he was holding his guts in.”
“Stop what?” Locke asked.
Jim walked over and slid the whiskey bottle back on the table. “He didn’t say, but it has something to do with the file that Twink stopped from being uploaded.”
“That’s a good place to start looking then,” Locke said.
“Whatever you find out, I want in on it. I want to find the bastards that are behind this.”
“The United States military owes you a great debt.”
“There isn’t anything you can give me to undo what I did.”
Twink and Brett were outside waiting for Jim. Brett embraced him in a hug, then Twink. Coyle stumbled out of the adjacent tent sporting a black eye as he rubbed his shoulder.
“Just a little piece of advice for you boys. Don’t pretend to shoot military personnel, they don’t like it much,” Coyle said.
Jim saw Samantha and Annie in the distance next to a jeep. He stood for a moment then decided to walk over. Samantha saw him coming and she met him halfway. Jim looked back into the jeep and saw Annie staring blankly at Tigs as she rested in Annie’s lap.
“How’s she doing?” Jim asked.
“Not good,” Samantha answered.
The words came out icy, cold. Samantha stood there with her arms crossed, bits of caked mud on her face and a shirt stained with her husband’s blood.
“I know why you did it. I’ll be able to forgive you one day. Just not now,” Samantha said.
Jim simply nodded without a response. Samantha turned and went back to her daughter. As Jim watched her walk away, he’d thought about all he’d lost. He lost his home in San Diego. He lost his family in the desert. He’d been shot at and beaten bloody by people who wanted to hurt him. Now he only had one thing left. He only had one thought on his mind. He was going to find the people behind this. He would hunt them down and make sure they’d pay. He was going to make them feel what he felt, and God help anyone that got in his way.
Resistance
Chapter 1
It was darker than usual. An endless cover of clouds hid the moon from sight. A small crack of a twig, the rustling of leaves and grass, and the hoot of an owl overhead were amplified by the silence of the night.
The subdivision sat on the edge of the highway across from the forest. The homes were spread out on large three-acre lots. The two-story castles sprawled out across them were meant to be places where the wealthy could have their space.
Only the whites of Jim Farr’s eyes could be seen through the camouflage painted on his face as he crouched in the brush near the edge of the highway. His eyes were focused on a house in the distance across the highway from where he sat hidden. Jim clicked the radio around his neck. “Brett. Twink. You in position?”
Brett was just outside the house in the backyard behind a small cluster of trees and bushes. He wore binoculars and peered through the back window of the two-story home. Twink was on his belly, sniper rifle tucked under his arm as he looked through the scope. Both were dressed from head to toe in their camouflage field gear. As they peered through their sights, the two kept watch on the nuclear-age family of four inside the house, who were sitting around the table eating dinner.
Brett flicked on his radio, “Roger that. Target’s still with family.”
“This still feels weird,” Twink said.
Brett dropped the binoculars from his face but kept his eyes on the back of the house. “Yeah, I don’t think we’ll ever get used to being on missions in our own country.”
Jim checked his watch. 8:11 p.m. He shook his head. The family shouldn’t even be there tonight. Jim had done recon on the target for weeks.
“What’s it gonna be, Jim?” Brett asked.
Jim’s steady, controlled breaths made puffs of cold air appear into the night as he spoke. “We give it another hour. That’ll still give us enough time to get to the evac zone. If we can’t get a good bead on the target by then, we abort.”
Coyle sat crouched about a mile away at the landing zone. He leaned back against a tree, his rifle across his lap, looking up into the night sky. He was feeling incredibly hungry. “What are they having?” he asked over the radio.
Brett pulled his binoculars back up and zoomed the magnification to half of its 1,600-yard capacity. He saw the father shovel a piece of pasta in his mouth. “Looks like lasagna,” Brett responded.
Coyle placed his hand over his stomach as he moaned out in agony. He clicked on his radio, and a low rumble echoed in everyone’s ear as his stomach growled. “Do you hear that?” he asked. “If I don’t eat something soon, my stomach is going to give away our position.”
It was close to nine o’clock when the family finally finished their meal. The parents took the dishes into the kitchen as the kids ran screaming up the stairs, chasing after one another.
Brett’s eyes kept a bead on the target and clicked his radio on. “Dinner’s over. Kids are upstairs playing video games. Target is still in the kitchen,” he replied while he watched the man and woman washing dishes through the kitchen window.
Now was the time. Jim’s knees cracked as he rose from the grass and leaves. Hours of stillness had left his body stiff. He darted across the highway, his rifle nose scanning the yard. “Brett, get in position to kill the power and wait for my signal,” Jim ordered. “Twink…keep an eye on the kids and make sure they don’t come downstairs.”
Twink swung his scope up toward the second floor, making sure his finger was nowhere near the trigger. “Copy that,” Twink responded.
Jim ducked alongside the fence on the perimeter of the house. The nearest house to them was three hundred yards away and with the lack of streetlights, he was perfectly hidden in the night. He clicked on his radio as he opened the gate to the back yard, keeping his voice low.
“Coyle, let command know we’ll be in your location and ready for evac in twenty minutes.”
Coyle flopped from his stomach to his back and picked up his radio. “HQ, this is goliath, the package will be ready at 2120 hours.”
Brett made it over to the power box and cracked the cover open with the blade on his knife. Dozens of wires ran up and down the box, and Brett held his blade underneath them, waiting for Jim’s signal.
Jim inched closer to the back corner of the house. Just beyond that corner was the exterior kitchen door. Jim dropped low to his knee at the corner’s edge. “Twink, kids still upstairs?”
Twink looked through the cross hairs of his scope. The kids were still hypnotized by the television. “Affirmative.”.
Jim peeked around the corner of the wall to get a better look at the door he planned to breach. Jim took a soft, slow breath and then pressed his communication link. “Brett, on my mark, cut the power.”
Brett stood at the box poised to cut the wire. He could feel the blade digging into the wax coatings of the wires in his hand as he applied a steady, gentle pressure.
Twink shifted his focus from the kids’ room back down to the kitchen window, where the mother and father shared a laugh as she dipped the dishes into soapy water and he dried them. Only ten feet to the left, Twink saw Jim strapping on his night vision goggles at the corner of the house.
Jim’s breath accelerated as he adjusted his goggles. His heart beat hard against his shirt. He squeezed the grip of his rifle and his knuckles turned white. He inched as clo
se to the edge of the wall as he could without passing it. His thumb flicked the safety lever off. “Kill power.”
The entire neighborhood went black. Jim sprinted toward the back door. He kept up his speed as he swung his leg up and smashed the door open, leaving the doorframe splintered around its edges. Jim viewed the couple through the green hue of his goggles as the husband pushed his wife behind him and backed them into a corner of the kitchen. Jim’s rifle kept a bead on the target even though she was well covered.
“Please,” begged the man, “don’t hurt us. We didn’t do anything. Take what you want.”