Payback: Alone: Book 7

by Darrell Maloney

  Of course, some of the women would likely be killed during the assault. But the ones left standing would make their lives much more enjoyable.

  There was one other reason the men would tolerate Scarface’s surly attitude and craziness a little bit longer.

  They needed him, at least for the time being.

  Some of them had seen combat before they were arrested for various crimes and sent to the military prison at Leavenworth. But none of them had been officers. They’d been in the ranks. Followers who went into battle doing things others told them to do.

  Joe “Scarface” Manson hadn’t been an officer either. But he was a natural leader and despite his craziness had a good head for making plans.

  Parker wasn’t an officer, but he was a brilliant tactician. At least in the eyes of the men in the ranks.

  The men didn’t like Scarface.

  Oh, they’d follow him, just as they did when they wore a uniform and followed the orders of the men who outranked them.

  Even when they hated their guts.

  There would come a day, though, when the bunker was in their hands. And then they wouldn’t need Scarface any longer.

  They were already conspiring against him.

  On the other hand, they liked Parker. He was a lot easier to get along with and a lot less dangerous.

  Scarface and Parker frequently isolated themselves from the men. Again, not unlike the officers in a military operation. They were comfortable with one another, having been cellmates at Leavenworth for several years.

  That gave the men a chance to talk, to make plans.

  Each time Scarface and Parker went off by themselves, or camped in a different place, the whispers started going around.

  The plans started being made, then polished, then tweaked.

  Inmates are very good at keeping secrets, and neither Manson nor Parker had a clue the men were planning a coups.

  Their eventual plan was merely to shoot or stab Manson after they’d taken the bunker, when he started to relax. They’d offer Parker the chance to take over the reins. If he agreed, they’d presumably live happily ever after in their new bunker, enjoying the fruits of their labor. Getting fat off the stockpiled food and using the women as slave labor and concubines.

  If Parker opted out of the leadership role, they’d let him stay on as an equal.

  Manson and Parker knew nothing of their plans and of course wouldn’t be told.

  It was that long-term plan, to do away with Manson, that made it a lot easier for the men to tolerate his bullshit.

  And it was that reason, not that the men liked him, that would make them follow his orders and hang around until Manson and Parker got back from their latest recon mission.

  Besides, word had gotten around that Parker had a foolproof plan to get into the bunker with none of them getting shot.

  And everyone liked that idea, if indeed it could be done.

  The two men, Scarface and Parker, made their way through the woods for more than a mile before exiting and crossing the road. Once north of the roadway they reentered the woods on the other side and started making their way back toward the bunker.

  It was a roundabout way of getting there, but the only way of being assured they weren’t spotted.

  It took over an hour, crouching low in the woods and moving a few feet at a time.

  And despite all the ground they covered, they still weren’t aware they were being watched.

  Jacob and Mason had installed the cameras in the trees the previous winter. It had taken them three days to do it, as the days of their youth were behind them now and climbing trees was something neither had done in many years.

  The cameras were equipped with small batteries which were kept charged with solar cells. Presumably they’d work for years as long as the cells were in more or less direct sunlight for at least four hours per day.

  They were also wireless, needing no cord to feed the images back to the bunker. That was a major plus, since nothing tells a bad guy he’s being watched quicker than a bulky black cord leading from the camera to a hidden control center.

  The cameras and monitors had been saved from damage by the EMPs by virtue of their being stored underground in the big steel storage containers at the time the EMPs assaulted the earth, and should have been a godsend to the people in the bunker.

  Except they were fraught with problems from the beginning.

  Of the twenty seven cameras Jacob and Mason installed, five of them just refused to work. They couldn’t see any logical reason why and finally determined they were just manufactured with poor workmanship.

  There was also the problem of the brothers’ blunder.

  Both were grown men and seemingly able to reason out potential problems when formulating their plans.

  Yet neither saw a problem in mounting such cameras high in the trees in the dead of winter and pointing their cameras toward open areas beneath the trees.

  Neither foresaw that when spring came the camera’s view would be largely blocked by leaves, and would remain blocked for most of the year.

  It also never occurred to them that the solar panels which kept the cameras charged would be shaded most of the time by those same leaves.

  The result was the cameras worked only intermittently, and some didn’t work at all.

  Of those which did work, most transmitted spectacular views of leaves and little else.

  Still, they were better than nothing, and for an attentive observer provided occasional peeks of Scarface and Parker as they snuck through the forest.

  Karen was in the control center on this particular day and relayed their movements via radio to everyone else in the bunker.

  “I see two men crossing the road to our side. Maybe three quarters of a mile to our east.

  “I lost ‘em in the woods.”

  Ten minutes later:

  “Okay, I just got a brief view of those same men. They’re definitely heading our way. No rifles, but both have handguns. Lost ‘em again.”

  Twenty minutes later:

  “There’s our guys again. They seem to be taking a break, sitting beneath a tree just to our north and east. Oops, the wind changed. My view is blocked again.”

  It was a terrible hit and miss method of doing surveillance.

  But it was better than nothing.

  Chapter 50

  By the time Scarface Manson and his buddy Parker arrived at the Caterpillar bulldozer they’d been out of the cameras’ view for several minutes.

  No one in the bunker knew what they were doing with the dozer and in fact didn’t even know they’d found it.

  All they knew was that two unidentified men were lurking somewhere near them in the woods and acting suspiciously.

  It was top of the line, the bulldozer was. A real work horse.

  The Dykes brothers’ land was coded as agricultural, although several hundreds of acres of it were heavily wooded.

  As far as the federal government was concerned, they were farmers, and did indeed farm a good amount of their land.

  As farmers they were allowed to lease the dozer for a year to clear more of their land for farming, and to write the cost off their taxes at the end of the year as a business expense.

  Before the lease was up, though, the world went black and the dozer died in the forest where it still rested.

  Had the Internal Revenue Service known that the dozer wasn’t used to clear forest for farmland, but was instead being used to dig huge trenches in which to bury shipping containers for a massive bunker, they might have had some heartburn about it.

  They certainly would have disallowed it as a business expense.

  But the Dykes brothers were fond of using the old adage, “What they don’t know won’t hurt them.”

  As far as they were concerned, the adage applied in this particular case.

  Scarface wasted no time at all in examining the engine of the big machine.

  “There’s no way to tell for sure without somethi
ng to spark it with,” he told Parker. “But the ignition seems to have survived.

  “We’ll get another one, just to be safe. Write this down,” he instructed.

  By the time he crawled out of the engine compartment and locked the collapsible cover back into place, Parker’s list had almost a dozen items on it.

  Included was a dry industrial battery, a gallon of acid, new battery cables, new fuses, switches, starter and generator.

  “And this is all you’ll need to get this baby running again?”

  “Yep. And five gallons of diesel fuel. With all that she’ll purr like a kitten.”

  “But how are you going to start it without a key?”

  “I’ll hotwire it. It only needs to run once.”

  Scarface sat in the driver’s seat. He’d only driven such a dozer once in his life, when he and his buddies were hunting near his town’s landfill.

  From a distance they’d seen the fender of a 1943 Ford Coupe sticking halfway out of the ground and had gone to investigate.

  It happened to be a Sunday. The landfill was closed, but the equipment was still there, sitting idle and awaiting the drivers who would return to climb on their backs the following day.

  Much of the equipment didn’t need keys to operate, and the bunch of delinquent high schoolers climbed aboard and fired them up.

  The dozer Scarface had been on then was much like this one. The steering wasn’t done with a wheel, but rather by foot controls. To turn left the driver used his foot to stop the left track. The right track, still turning, twisted the big Cat until it made a left turn.

  And, of course, the operator did the same thing to the right track when he wanted to go the other way.

  It had taken him a few minutes to get used to it, all those years before, and he looked ridiculous as he was learning.

  But once he mastered it, he had a whale of a time chasing one of his friends, atop a similar dozer, all over the landfill.

  It was a pleasant memory.

  He looked forward to getting this thing going again so he could drive it, and wondered how rusty his limited bulldozer skills would be.

  But that was still some days away.

  They still had to find all the parts he’d need to do the repairs.

  The pair left the dozer and made their way back through the woods, across the road and back to their own camp.

  They found their men playing cards and sleeping.

  “Sorry to interrupt your nice little vacation,” Parker told them only half in jest. “But how come somebody’s not keeping watch?”

  “We didn’t figure we needed to,” one said. “We’re here to attack the people in the bunker. Not the other way around.”

  “Start standing watch, twenty four seven,” Parker responded. “They know we’re going to attack them at some point. It would be a smart move on their part to try to take some of us out before then. They likely know these woods much better than we do. They can climb the trees and take us out with a rifle one at a time. Or hit us and run, if they know the escape routes. From now on we need to be on our toes.”

  The men didn’t necessarily like the prospect of having to stand guard, but Parker made good sense.

  When the time came he’d make a much better leader than Scarface.

  “Gather around,” Parker said. “We want to have ourselves a little meeting.”

  Scarface took the floor.

  “Mr. Parker and I have found a way in. It’s foolproof and doesn’t subject us to any risk at all.

  “It’s going to take a few days to put the plan into motion. But once we go taking that compound will be a piece of cake.

  “First, however, we need to go shopping.”

  Chapter 51

  “The town of Ely is about thirty miles to the north and east of us,” Scarface said. “I’m sure you remember it. We stopped there to gather supplies about a month before we made our way down here.

  “Ely is a farm town. Most of the residents are farmers or work in a field that supports farming in some fashion. There’s also a quarry not far from town which produces caliche and crushed decorative rock for landscapers.

  “While we were sweeping through the town we went into a heavy equipment and implement company. We didn’t find much there to take. Just a couple of cases of drinking water, from what I remember.

  “I looked around, though, and it seems to me I remember they had a pretty good supply of heavy equipment parts.

  “Mr. Parker will be taking four of you with him to Ely.

  “Your mission is to gather the parts I’ll need to repair a Caterpillar bulldozer the people in the bunker parked over there in the forest.”

  One man balked.

  “There ain’t no vehicles running anymore. You said yourself they’re all ruined.”

  “Wrong. All the cars and pickups are ruined. Farm equipment and heavy equipment are different animals. They don’t have things like electronic ignitions and on board computers. They’re much simpler and have a lot fewer parts.

  “With the right replacement parts I can spend a couple of days repairing that thing. I can get it running again.”

  “Pardon me for asking, sir. Maybe I’m just extra dense and all. But how is a bulldozer gonna help us take over that compound?”

  Had Scarface been in a bad mood he might have taken out his pistol and shot the man on the spot, then labeled him a troublemaker to the others.

  Or he might have belittled him, calling him too ignorant to see what was obvious to everyone else. To be sure, no one else was raising such questions. Manson assumed it was because they’d all figured out where he was headed.

  The truth was this was the only man who had enough courage to risk riling him up again.

  Luckily Scarface Manson was in a benevolent mood and willing to cut the man some slack.

  “Have you ever played football, Reilly?”

  “Way back in high school, sure.”

  “What position did you play?”

  “Safety.”

  “Okay. That’s good. When you were playing in the big game, did you ever make any interceptions?”

  “Yeah. I picked off a couple. Why?”

  “If you picked off a pass, and every single one of your teammates sat down and watched, what are the odds you’d be able to return that interception for a touchdown?”

  The man rubbed his chin, then said, “Probably not real good if my teammates weren’t gonna run interference for me.”

  “And what if they did? Run interference for you, I mean. What if all ten of your teammates got in front of you and led the way, pushing the other team out of your way, and deflecting all tackles?”

  “Shoot. Then I’d go all the way to the end zone for sure.”

  “That bunker out there is the end zone, Reilly. We, all of us, we’re the ball carrier.

  “And that Caterpillar bulldozer out there is our interference. That thing is gonna lead us all the way to the end zone.

  “And there ain’t a damn thing those people in the bunker can do about it.”

  Reilly finally shut up. He sensed Scarface’s confidence and believed in him.

  He was all in.

  “Anyway, as I was saying, Mr. Parker has a list of the parts I need. They’re all specific to a Caterpillar Model D6R XL.

  “These parts are all gonna be heavy. Too heavy for the team to carry back for thirty miles. That’s why in addition to the parts you’ll be stopping by the local supermarket and grabbing some shopping carts. You’ll also get some empty jerry cans and a siphon hose.

  “Just before you get back here you’ll siphon some diesel from an abandoned truck.

  “If you can find me everything on that list, and give me two days to get that dozer running again, we’ll assault that bunker and kill all the men inside.

  “Everything inside will be all ours. Including the women.

  “It’ll be the biggest touchdown any of you have ever scored.”

  Chapter 52

  Dave desp
erately needed something to lift his spirits.

  He was riding south on Interstate 15 now, toward Los Angeles.

  He was within an hour of sundown. He’d been riding since sunrise, only stopping occasionally to drink a bottle of water or eat a can of chili.

  Or to query a traveler about whether they’d seen a red pickup truck conspicuous because of the equine motors which were pulling it.

  He was keeping track of the mileage signs now, and knew he’d covered just over thirty miles on this grueling day.

  That made him feel accomplished.

  He was making good time, and had made up a whole day against the people he was tracking.

  If indeed he was still going in the proper direction.

  If Red was wrong… if Dave’s subconscious which had created Red in his mind… was wrong, he’d opened the gap between them by another day.

  The problem with riding a bicycle all day long with few people to talk to was that it gives one a lot of time to think about things.

  Dave would have preferred less time to think. For the thoughts he was having were torturing him.

  He was beating himself up about his decision to go on.

  He was trying to reconcile himself with the possibility his prey had suddenly turned one hundred and eighty degrees and headed back where they came from.

  And then to Atlanta, of all places.

  Most of all he kicked himself for missing the most obvious flaw in his travel plans.

  That by traveling at night, searching for someone who was traveling by day, he might pass them by at some point and not even realize it.

  He could very plainly see the flaw in his plans now.

  For if he, Dave Speer, was traveling across country in a horse-drawn pickup he’d have to understand its value to others.

  He’d have to see that many others would covet his transportation and want it for their very own.

  He’d have to know it couldn’t be left unattended and in the open as he slept. For someone would surely be bold enough to take it.

  No, if it were Dave traveling in such a vehicle, he’d take great pains to hide it each night as he slept.