by Robert Boren
“Anything?” Jason asked.
“Nope, clean as a whistle,” Kyle said. “You find anything?”
Jason smiled and pulled the bookmark out of his pocket.
Kyle squinted as he looked closely. “That’s a bookmark for a Koran, isn’t it?”
“Could be,” Jason said. “Let’s check the other two.”
Kyle nodded and they walked over, Kyle stopping in the third truck, Jason going to the last one.
Jason inspected the last cab. It was clean. As he climbed down he saw Junior and Kelly carrying white boxes with wires hanging out of them to the back of the pickup truck, placing them very carefully behind the cab. “Need some help, guys?”
“Yeah, there’s quite a bit more stuff,” Kelly said. “You guys find anything?”
“I found something that looks like it might be a bookmark for a Koran, in the second truck.”
“I knew it,” Kelly said. “Bastards.”
“Hey, man, I found something,” Kyle said as he walked up. “Paper with a bunch of phone numbers on it. Look.” He held the curled-up piece of paper out for the others to see.
“Interesting,” Jason said. “Could be nothing. Could be something big.”
“Yeah,” Kyle said. “How much more stuff needs to come out of that tank?”
“Curt said he needed another hour,” Junior said.
“It’ll be almost dark by then,” Jason said. “Hey, Curt, you want me to hitch your Barracuda up to the Jeep?”
Curt stuck his head out of the hatch. “You confident that those tanks can take on anybody who might show up?”
“Yeah, the one on the bluff is being manned,” Kyle said. “We can wait to go back until you’re done.”
“Good, I could use the help. The remote control machine guns are heavy.”
“We’ll be right with you,” Jason said. Then he looked at Kyle. “I’m gonna take pictures of the evidence and text it to Chief Ramsey. Let’s go inside the Jeep for a couple of minutes and get that done.”
Kyle nodded and followed Jason.
Chapter 6 – Rescue
“There’s the chopper,” Juan Carlos said, wiping sweat off his brow. “Hear it?”
“About frigging time,” Brendan said. “We’re almost out of water.”
“That’s a double-rotor job,” Juan Carlos said, pointing.
“They’re going to pick up the boat,” Richardson said, walking away from the edge.
Brendan looked down into the canyon. “That river probably looks the same as it did a hundred years ago. This is freaky as hell.”
“Seriously, dude,” Juan Carlos said. “Can’t wait to find out what they lit off here.”
“Why do they even care about the patrol boat at this point?” Brendan asked. “They’ve got to have bigger fish to fry.”
“They’ll probably move us to the Gulf,” Juan Carlos said.
“Don’t be so sure,” Richardson said. “The Rio Grande is a big river. It might still be navigable with these little boats. We’ve been operating on other parts of the river all along.”
“How about down there?” Brendan asked, nodding towards the drop-off.
Richardson laughed. “Hell, that’s going to be an unsettled mess for the foreseeable future. It’ll take weeks to dry up enough to allow people to climb in and out. At least that will ruin it as a crossing point for a while.”
“That chopper is getting loud,” Juan Carlos said. “How are they gonna pick up the boat?”
“Straps and chains, probably,” Brendan said. “Watched video of that before.”
“With these patrol boats?” Juan Carlos asked.
“Nah, bigger boats,” Brendan said. “These will probably be easier.”
“There it is,” Richardson said. “Get ready to fit the slings.”
They stood watching as the big chopper hovered, getting lower, the slings dropping slowly towards them from the winch over the side door. Another line dropped, and a man got on the rope and slid down to the beach.
“Howdy,” he said, walking over. “I’m Sergeant Reynolds. Ready to get your boat out of here?” He had a helmet and jumpsuit on, wearing heavy gloves.
“Hell yeah,” Richardson said. “What do we do?”
“Help me put these slings under the bow and the stern,” He said. “We’ll have to jockey it a little.”
The lapel radio he was wearing scratched to life. “It situated well enough, Reynolds?” the radio said.
“Yeah, Captain,” he said while reaching for the first sling. He put it under the bow with help from the others. “Okay, reel it up just a tad.”
“You got it,” the Captain said. The boat creaked as the sling lifted the front of the boat.
“Hold it,” Reynolds said. He grabbed the other sling and guided it under the bow. “okay, up on number two a little.”
The boat creaked again as it lifted on the second sling, the first one getting loose.
“Help me pull that first sling back further,” Reynolds said. “We’ll have to go back and forth until we can get the first sling back far enough towards the transom.”
The men helped as the went back and forth, eventually getting the boat about level under the two slings. Reynolds fastened the two straps to the hull so they wouldn’t move, and then looked towards his lapel mic. “This looks pretty good. Take her up.”
The chopper moved up, the boat going up with it. “Look good, Reynolds?” the Captain asked.
“Roger that. Drop this off and come back to us,” he said. “It’s just about Miller time.”
Juan Carlos and Brendan looked at each other and chuckled.
“Where they taking it?” Richardson asked as they watched the chopper fly away with the boat.
“There’s a trailer waiting for it at Government Cove,” Reynolds said. “They ought to be back here in half an hour for us.”
“Good,” Richardson said.
“Pick up many other boats?” Juan Carlos asked.
“No,” he said, grim look on his young, stubbly face. “Most of them went over the falls.”
“Dammit,” Richardson said.
“The enemy took more casualties than we did,” Reynolds said. “A lot more. There’s a couple thousand bodies down in that canyon. Looks really bad from the air. Kinda like the aftermath of that tsunami in Indonesia.”
“Wow,” Juan Carlos said. “Gonna stink.”
“Damn vultures are already showing up,” Reynolds said, sitting on the beach.
“Anybody have an idea what caused the explosion?” Juan Carlos asked.
Reynolds looked at him for a second, then looked away. “Nobody is saying anything. I don’t like it. Got a bad feeling.”
“It wasn’t a nuke, though, right?” Brendan asked.
“No way,” Reynolds said. “I was in the air over the water when it blew up. If it would’ve been a nuke, I’d be dead right now. EMP would have stopped the chopper’s engine, and we would’ve gone over the falls.”
“What else has that much power?” Juan Carlos asked. “We don’t have any conventional bombs that big, do we?”
“I don’t know,” Reynolds said, walking to the edge to stare down into the canyon again, looking as far as he could in either direction. “I doubt that the enemy would have wanted to do this. It’s just made things harder for them.”
“What, you think our side did it?” Richardson asked.
“What’s our side?” Reynolds asked. “We aren’t part of the USA now. There’s been a lot of infiltration into the federal government and the military, from what I’ve been hearing.”
“True,” Richardson said.
Reynolds walked back from the cliff. “There’s one thing that you might not have heard. That explosion was directional.”
“What do you mean?” Richardson asked.
“There weren’t shock waves in all directions. Only shock waves in the direction of the dam.”
“Dude, that means the dam was the target,” Juan Carlos said. “Tha
t wasn’t a random explosion. Somebody did it on purpose.”
“And like I said, a lot more enemy fighters died in this thing than we lost.” Reynolds looked at all three of them. “Kinda hard to know who to trust.”
“I think I hear the chopper coming back,” Juan Carlos said, looking towards the south.
“Wow, faster than I expected,” Reynolds said. “Assuming it’s our chopper.”
They waited as the thumping of the rotors drew closer. Then they saw it descending, slowing, a basket being lowered.
“Who wants to go first?” Reynolds asked, taking hold of the basket.
“I’ll go,” Brendan said. He hopped in and pulled the strap across the front, locking it.
Reynolds turned his head towards the lapel mic. “Pull it up.”
The basket rose quickly, all the way to the door, where a couple of men pulled it in and let Brendan out. Then they lowered it again. The other men followed the same way, Reynolds bringing up the rear. Then the chopper took off for Government Cove, landing in less than five minutes. There were several trucks there, and two patrol boats sitting on trailers.
“Look, there’s Captain Jefferson,” Juan Carlos said, pointing. The men trotted over to him.
“You guys okay?” Jefferson asked.
“Yeah,” Richardson said. “You lose anybody?”
“Not off of my boat,” Jefferson said. “We lost almost everybody else, though. Most of them were too far from shore when the wave was coming towards them.”
“Shit, man,” Juan Carlos said. “What now?”
“Don’t know,” Jefferson said. “We’re still waiting for Wallis to meet with us. He’s busy down in the Gulf. We got a lot closer to being hit than the public is being told.”
“With a nuke?” Brendan asked.
“Yeah,” Jefferson said. “They found one off Kemah just minutes before it was gonna go off.”
“Damn,” Richardson said. “Glad they got to it in time.”
“We were lucky,” Jefferson said. “High command is going crazy. The device is small enough to fit in a good sized truck.”
“The border still closed?” Juan Carlos asked.
“Yeah, but we have to let some trucks in or we’ll start running out of food in a hurry,” Jefferson said. “It’s a nightmare.”
“Maybe we should have thought about that before we seceded,” Richardson said.
“We have trade agreements with all of the neighboring states except for New Mexico,” Jefferson said. “We left the Federal Government, not the other states.”
Juan Carlos looked around as they walked to the headquarters building. “It safe here?”
“Probably,” Jefferson said. “We used F-22s and Apaches to smash what was left of the Venezuelan Airforce before we lost the dam.”
“You know what that explosion was?” Richardson asked.
“It’s classified,” Jefferson said. “And no, I don’t know.”
Chapter 7 – Submarine Warfare
Chief Ramsey paced in his office, waiting for the conference call to begin. It was running late. Everybody should have been on the line ten minutes ago, but nobody had called in yet. Suddenly his office door opened and Governor Nelson strode in.
“Governor Nelson, I thought you were going to join the conference call,” he said.
“Nice to see you, too,” Nelson said, smiling.
Ramsey laughed. “Okay, okay,” he said. “I’m a little worked up. What about Gallagher?”
“He’ll be here any minute,” Nelson said. “Wallis too, and Landry.”
“Good.”
There was commotion outside the office, and the door opened, Wallis, Gallagher and Landry walking in. Ramsey’s secretary rushed past them. “Sorry, sir, they wouldn’t wait.”
“It’s okay, Casey,” he said. “Hold my calls please.”
“She didn’t try to stop me,” Nelson said.
“She recognizes you,” Ramsey said.
“I’d just as soon not be a celebrity,” Wallis said. “Sorry we’re late. That roadblock attack screwed up 183 and 290. The all the roads in the surrounding area are a mess.”
“So sorry about your men, Chief,” Gallagher said. Landry and Wallis nodded somberly in agreement.
“We’ve obviously still got a huge problem in Texas,” Nelson said, “even though we dodged the nuclear bullet.”
“After seeing the specs on the device, I’m even more worried than before,” Gallagher said. “A truck or a train could deliver a bomb pretty easily.”
“We won’t make it easy for them. One of the reasons we had that big roadblock up was to use radiation detectors,” Ramsey said. “Somebody is passing info to the enemy. That attack was aimed at our attempts to protect ourselves from a ground-based attack. They knew what we were trying to do, and sent us a message.”
“Nothing got through that roadblock after they attacked?” Gallagher asked.
“No,” Ramsey said. “They shot up the first few cars in every lane. Nobody could get through. We have a lot of eye-witnesses.”
“Yeah, some eyebrows got raised when you hauled everybody within visual distance to the station,” Wallis said. “They still here?”
“We’re still conducting interviews,” Ramsey said, “but we’ve already let a lot of them go.”
“Let’s get this rolling,” Gallagher said. “I’ve got a lot to do today.”
“Me too,” Wallis said.
“Okay, gentlemen,” Ramsey said. “Have a seat in front of the big-screen there.”
The men sat, swiveling their chairs to view the flat screen TV on the wall next to the door. Ramsey got behind his desk and worked his desktop. A picture came on the screen. It was a piece of brass sheet-metal, cut and shaped in an ornate manner. A braided piece of string was tied to it.
“What is that?” Nelson asked.
“I know what it is,” Gallagher said. “Saw those in the Iraq war. That’s a bookmark for a Koran. Where’d you find it?”
“One of our officers found it under the seat of an Army transport flat bed, just outside of Fort Stockton.”
He switched the picture to a strip of paper with about twenty phone numbers on it.
“What’s that?” Wallis asked.
“Phone numbers,” Ramsey said. “All from burner phones. Found in the cab of one of the other trucks in the same convoy.”
“Okay, we need some details, so stop with the dramatics,” Gallagher said.
“I’m getting there,” Ramsey said. “Been trying to call you for the last several hours, Major General Gallagher.”
“I’ve been busy,” he said. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay. Better to have all of us together on this anyway,” Ramsey said. “So here’s the story. Remember my two officers who were involved in that Superstore attack?”
“Yeah,” Wallis said. The others nodded.
“I put them on paid leave and told them to disappear after the Islamists tried to kill them. They ended up in Fort Stockton with men who fought alongside them at the Superstore attack.”
“Go on,” Gallagher said.
“They heard the attack on the military convoy from the RV Park they’re staying at, just off I-10 by Fort Stockton. They went to the aid of the convoy. Ended up killing all of the enemy fighters.”
“What was the convoy for?” Wallis said.
“Transport of four M-1 A2 tanks, equipped with TUSK,” Ramsey said.
“Holy shit,” Gallaher said.
“You didn’t know these were being transported down I-10, did you Gallagher?” Nelson asked.
“No,” he said. “If this was legit, I would have heard about it from General Walker or General Hogan.”
“That’s what I was afraid of,” Ramsey said. “We have enemy infiltration at Fort Bliss.”
“There are some Muslims who are legitimately in the US Army, you know,” Wallis said. “Aren’t we jumping to conclusions here?”
“I don’t think so,” Ramsey said. “The bookma
rk and the burner phone numbers together are too much of a coincidence. Then there’s the fact that there was no guard detail with the convoy, and the fact that the drivers of the trucks were not killed – by the bad guys, that is. They were killed in the battle, by our guys.”
“Our guys meaning your two Austin PD officers and a bunch of rednecks?” Wallis asked.
“Yeah,” Ramsey said. “And by the way, those rednecks, as you call them, saved a lot of lives during the Austin terror attack, remember?”
Nelson held up his hands. “Let’s not start fighting over this. Go on.”
“Okay, sorry,” Ramsey said. “I’ve got an eyewitness account of several more convoys similar to this one, driving east with no security detail. We have elements of the US Army passing these vehicles to the enemy. Need I remind you what a number of TUSK-equipped M-1 A2 tanks could do to our cities?”
“Son of a bitch,” Gallagher said. “Who else knows about this?”
“Just you guys and the people involved in the battle at Fort Stockton.”
“How about the eyewitness?” Wallis said.
“You’re about to meet him. He’s just down the hall.”
Ramsey pushed a button on his phone. “Casey, call Officer O’Reilly and tell him I’m ready.”
“Why bring him in here?” Wallis asked.
“He’s been all over the backroads of east Texas,” Ramsey said. “And by the way, he’s the guy who tipped us off about the cellphone tracking.”
Officer Sam O’Reilly came in with Eric and Kim, both of them looking nervous.
“Welcome,” Ramsey said. “Have a seat.”
“You’re my brother’s boss, aren’t you?” Eric said.