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Finding Mercy
Copyright © 2012 by D.L. Jackson
ISBN: 978-1-61333-448-5
Cover art by Tibbs Designs
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work, in whole or in part, in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means now known or hereafter invented, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher.
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Finding Mercy
A Prepper Romance
By
D.L. Jackson
~DEDICATION~
To Dad, my inspiration behind Will Evans.
You are as enduring as the West and one of the last great cowboys.
Prologue
Evans Point, Wyoming
June 28th, 2010
If he didn’t know better, he’d think the end of the world had arrived. Will Evans tightened his grip on Bear’s and Sadie’s leashes and tuned in for any cries for help. The fresh smell of rain mixed with the industrial stink of spilled fuel and the ozone from a nearby lightning strike pounded reality home.
Even though they’d merely begun, his bones ached. Fifteen years before, he would’ve torn through the wreckage and pulled out survivors without hesitation. Now, he could only survey the destruction and fight the tears that tugged on his eyes. The scene brought back another time he couldn’t stomach, when he’d seen the Grim Reaper rip a hole between life and death, as he’d done this day.
The storms had hit with ferocity, in the middle of the night, without warning. The roaring of the beast had woken some, but not all. Those alerted had rushed for cover in their basements and cellars and now searched for those who were not as lucky. This was all that remained of the downtown after six tornadoes had torn through Evans Point. In all his eighty-four years, Will had seen only one other battlefield like it.
He swallowed and searched his soul for courage. There would be bodies among the rubble, but hopefully, there would also be living. He had to believe to continue, even though he found his faith tested.
So much carnage. Scanning the brightening horizon, he took in the destruction. Brick buildings were blown apart. Vehicles lay on their rooftops, dripping gasoline and other fluids. Even a pickup had been skewered on a flagpole like one of the carousel horses he’d ridden as a child at the fairground. A toy truck lay at his feet, its red paint bright and clean like it was fresh from the box.
His gaze shifted to the left. Someone’s farm equipment sat on top of a local bridal shop. The five-hundred-thousand-dollar harvester would have to come down in pieces, which meant it would remain there for a while. No one would be able to get a crane into the area for months. It all seemed so overwhelming, and he didn’t have a clue where to start.
But his dogs did.
“All right, we got work to do.” Will squeezed the hooks with his gnarled fingers, unclipping Bear and Sadie to let them do what they did best. Since he’d retired, he’d taken up breeding, raising, and training the Caucasian Shepherds. The dogs originally belonged to a friend who had worked search and rescue in Alaska, but when he’d retired and moved to Florida, he hadn’t wanted to drag the double-coated dogs to Miami, where they’d suffer from the heat.
Not that Wyoming didn’t have hot summers; it did, but they were shorter. When Will had taken the pair on, he’d discovered they made great cattle dogs, and why not? The Caucasian Mountain Shepherds were herding dogs, highly intelligent, possessing giant personalities to go with their enormous size. And the bonus? Mountain lions and wolves thought twice about going after his stock.
Bear barked and dug at a pile of debris that led to a basement entrance of an old bomb shelter under the downtown area. Will picked his way around the rubble, careful where he stepped.
The glass blocks embedded in the sidewalk, part of the old reinforced structure the Army had left behind in the forties, were still intact, and the structure below hadn’t collapsed. An idea woke in his head. Why hadn’t they used it before?
“Hey, over here,” he called out to a couple of firefighters as he tossed a two-by-four to the side. He wouldn’t be much help lifting the wreckage away, but he’d do what he could, and what he could do was get everyone together and make sure this didn’t happen again. Those who lost their lives here would be the last to die because they hadn’t been prepared.
Chapter One
Rule of Threes to Surviving a Disaster:
You’ll die in three minutes without oxygen.
Three hours without shelter.
Three days without water.
Three weeks without food.
Tangi Valley, Maidan Wardak Province, Afghanistan
July 26th, 2010
They’d come from everywhere: over the embankment, from their flanks, and their six. Before Sergeant Justin Redway knew it, the enemy had surrounded his unit, closing off the end of a horseshoe ambush. Now, half the men were a mess of shredded limbs that resembled hamburger more than human body parts.
The Golden Dragons, men of the Second Battalion, 14th Infantry Regiment, took cover in the remains of the convoy, and one only needed to open one’s eyes to see the reason they were in the shape they were in. They’d held off the enemy until right after dark, when a call to prayers had rung out across the battlefield and the Taliban had stopped firing. A couple vehicles, one lying on its side and the other on its roof, were pushed together to form a barricade, in an attempt to provide some relief from the barrage of rounds that would fly when the sun came up.
>
The enemy knew they weren’t going anywhere and would wait for day to break, taking their time to pray, possibly bring in reinforcements, have a warm meal. Thank God for religious conviction and the lack of moonlight. If the assault had continued longer, they’d all be dead.
The break in the fighting gave Justin a chance to treat the wounded. Within minutes, his fatigues were soaked in blood. The metallic stink of raw meat, dust, and sweat saturated every fiber, yet he kept going, knowing one minute’s rest could be the difference between a wounded man surviving or dying.
His company, the closest to the ambushed convoy, had been called in to extract the survivors and shipment. Instead of rescuing them, they’d ended up snared in the same trap, stuck between partially blown buildings in the middle of a small village in the Tangi Valley. Looking at the scene, a person would have a hard time telling the difference between hell and where they’d made their stand.
Members of 75th Ranger Regiment from Fort Benning had been escorting a convoy from the valley when the hostilities commenced. The Taliban rocked their world with anti-armor and rocket-propelled grenades from the high ground in an attack that seemed to go on forever. But even after the onslaught, the cargo they were ordered to keep out of enemy hands still sat in the middle of the kill zone, completely untouched.
It wasn’t the typical “jingle truck” one would see moving supplies. Justin wondered all the more what the Army had hidden inside the trailer, because even the Taliban didn’t have the balls to fire on it.
To add to the mystery, several Rangers, those not critically injured, stood sentinel, warning off anyone who got too close to the cargo. More than once, after finding himself at the business end of a weapon, Justin raised his hands and backed away from a man who needed treatment. Since then, he’d learned to keep his distance from whatever it was they protected. He didn’t need to get shot, and had plenty to worry about elsewhere. The men near the truck seemed healthy enough, so he wasn’t going to push it.
Everywhere, smoke choked the air with the smells of burned hair, blood, and charred flesh. Men cried out from the dark—for themselves, for their friends and their brothers in arms.
He couldn’t get to half of them fast enough, and one he’d found in pieces, only to realize upon seeing a tattoo that the parts belonged to a friend he’d played cards with every weekend. The sight had churned his guts. Seconds later, he left the contents of his stomach a few feet away.
At another spot, a Ranger clung to a friend’s torso, what little was left of it. He’d begged Justin to save the man, all the while continuing to encourage the deceased soldier to keep going. The man hadn’t taken a breath in hours.
Everywhere Justin went there were glassy-eyed stares and mumbles of men too shocked to speak coherent phrases, injured, completely out of their minds. The battlefield was full of zombies. He’d stumbled around until he’d found the radio operator. The kid was dead. He looked over to see a captain, most likely the commander for the Ranger detachment, his leg gone, lying on his belly ten feet from the radio, struggling to breathe. The smear of blood across the dusty ground showed he’d crawled at least twenty feet on his belly, trying to reach the radio. Justin’s gaze followed the trail. The captain’s leg lay under an overturned vehicle, beside a bloody Ka-Bar. Like a coyote caught in a trap, he’d used the teeth of that ugly combat knife and sawed off his leg to get free. It had to have taken him most of the night to finish his surgery.
Justin rushed to the injured officer’s side. He hooked him under the arms and propped him against a tire. He scanned the man’s body, noticing a belt above the hemorrhaging stump, where the man had tried to make a tourniquet. Justin untied the strip of fabric holding it, and twisted the bar under the woven band, tightening it, before he tied the strip back in place. Once satisfied the bleeding had stopped, he went to work on the man’s chest wound. A deflated lung, but if they could load him on a chopper soon, he’d stand a chance.
“You’re going to be okay, sir,” Justin said, not entirely convinced he would be. It was a wonder he was even alive. How he’d even survived the pain of what he’d done was amazing. His pulse was weak and he’d lost a lot of blood, but he’d seen men recover from worse, and he’d be the last one to steal this man’s hope.
The officer shook his head and tried to say something, only managing to cough.
“Don’t try to talk.”
“Do it,” he said in a gravelly voice, more a death rattle than clear words. Until he’d spoken, Justin hadn’t realized he could. A good sign. He still had fight in him.
“Easy, sir. Going to get you all patched up as good as new.” Justin pressed the plastic package that had held the dressing against the hole in an attempt to seal it.
“Call for an airstrike.” The captain wore the thousand-yard stare of a man with one foot in heaven and one on earth. Justin had seen it over and over since the attack, but it was what he saw in his eyes that chilled him far more than anything else he’d witnessed on the battlefield.
Justin studied the man, assessing for any sign of shock, any reason to believe he didn’t have a clue as to what he’d asked. There were few times a serviceman could disobey an order, one being that the officer wasn’t in his right mind.
The silver-haired officer waited, his mouth set in a grim line, his face white, eyes clear, and the blank stare gone. All his focus now was directed at Justin. “You heard me, Sergeant. Pick up that radio and do as ordered.”
Justin blinked. God help them all. He hadn’t imagined it. “If I take the pressure off this wound, you’ll die, sir.”
“Call in the goddamned airstrike. I want that five-ton a smoking hole in the ground. Yesterday.” He tossed a sticky GPS next to him, one Justin hadn’t realized he’d had clutched in his fist. The wounded officer turned toward where the cargo sat, guarded like Fort Knox, coughed, and lifted his chin. “When that sun comes up, we’re done.”
Was this a situation that called for suicide? Apparently the Ranger thought so.
“They can’t get reinforcements into the valley. You got to do it.”
They were all collateral damage, expendable. Whatever was in that convoy, the captain didn’t want the enemy to have it. It had more importance than he’d surmised earlier. A Ranger escort, a company of elite infantry sent in to extract, and more Taliban than Justin had ever seen in one place. Important enough that the Ranger commander had ordered his own death, and the deaths of everyone in the area, to ensure it was destroyed. No man would saw his own leg off and crawl twenty feet if he thought there was another way.
A sinking feeling of doom settled over Justin. No, there’d be no reinforcements. No way could they get here before the fighting started again. It was oh-four-forty, twenty minutes until sunrise, barely enough time for air support to arrive, let alone prepare for the next assault.
The captain pulled his sidearm. He pointed it at Justin’s head and stared. No, he hadn’t been able to reach the radio with his injury, but that didn’t mean he intended to stop trying. He’d found his means to an end and knew it.
“I gave you an order—did you understand it?” The weapon slipped from his grip and hit the ground. He didn’t try to reach it again, but just held Justin’s gaze, waiting for him to make a choice.
Justin let go of the dressing, picked up the blood-covered GPS, and crawled over to the radio, staying low to avoid enemy fire. He gave the commander one last look and called in the coordinates. “This is Sergeant Redway with the Two-Fourteen, Bravo Company….” The rest went by as a blur. As soon as he heard “roger,” Justin released the radio. From that point forward, everything seemed hazy. He rolled to sit beside the dead radio operator, leaned against the roof of a M-ATV tactical vehicle, and swallowed hard.
He kicked the GPS away and turned toward the officer, who sucked in a wheezy breath. “You’re a hero, son. You know it had to be done.”
Yeah, it did. Justin’s guts knotted. It had been the right thing to do, but it didn’t make killing himself
or his friends any easier. They couldn’t go anywhere, only sit here and wait for it to happen. The others—they didn’t even know what was coming.
He clamped his teeth together, doing his best not to call him something that could get him shot. Not that it mattered. They’d all be dead soon enough. They really didn’t have a choice. The cargo must not fall into enemy hands, but did the commander really think he wanted a medal for what he’d done? Posthumously?
“It would be real bad for everyone if they captured what’s in that truck.”
“Just what is in that truck?” The cargo again. Everything pointed back to the cargo. What was so fucking important it outweighed the preservation of human life?
The captain shook his head. “This is a small sacrifice, and I’d willingly pay it ten times over. You would too—if you….” He closed his eyes and his chest stopped moving.
God help us all. Justin rested his head against the vehicle’s door and leaned back to study the brightening horizon. Had he been too late? Could this be the beginning of Armageddon?
***
Justin didn’t know how many minutes it had been, but he knew the jets roaring toward them were answering his call. He tipped his head back and narrowed his eyes, searching the predawn sky.
“Incoming!” someone screamed.
“Get away from the truck!” Justin scrambled to his feet and ran through the wreckage until he reached the end of the destroyed convoy. “Run!” Bullets hit the ground around him, but he didn’t care. He was more concerned about what was coming at them, and fast.
The enemy stopped firing, most likely realizing why he was running. A few unknown words were screamed out in Dari, a form of Persian spoken by a large part of the Afghan population. Justin could only wonder what those words meant, but if he were to try and decipher, he’d guess oh fuck, the same words going through his head as he dove to his belly in a nearby ditch.
Finding Mercy Page 1