The general’s thoughts were interrupted by a firm knock on the other side of the study door.
“Enter!”
He knew it was Colonel Tennison before Tennison even spoke. The general remained looking at the Kennedy photograph, keeping his back to the colonel.
The sound of the door closing preceded Tennison’s voice.
“Sir, it’s been confirmed by the medical response team that General Crow is dead.”
General Thompson said nothing, keeping his eyes fixated on those of a long-dead president’s.
“I was asked to once again urge you to reconsider your position on Protocol X. Admiral Briggs, Director Bell, and Director Pensky, have all indicated their support for the plan, as well as the president and congressional leaders.”
The general noted darkening skies outside. It would likely be raining soon. He could hear Tennison shifting on his feet behind him. Like all but the most well-practiced of traitors, the colonel was nervous.
“Sir, are you willing to reconsider? We need your approval for re-allocation of troop deployments.”
General Thompson took one last look at Kennedy and then closed his eyes while breathing in deeply and then exhaling slowly. He had suddenly grown very weary.
“No, Colonel…I won’t reconsider.”
Tennison’s voice sounded as if it was coming from some great distance away.
“I’m sorry to hear you say that, sir.”
A melancholy almost-frown cut across the general’s face.
He felt so damn tired. Despite the betrayal, he was going to miss Tennison. He was going to miss a lot of things.
For the second time that day, a gun was fired…
--------------------
EPISODE FOURTEEN:
The silence that enveloped the cabin’s interior was broken by the sound of the front door being forced open by someone outside. Tom Dolan tried to hold his breath in the low space underneath the cabin floorboards, knowing his ability to keep himself hidden until just the right moment was essential to his intention of killing those who had just murdered his family.
A boot shuffled just a few feet from Dolan’s position as it moved slowly inside the cabin. Tom squinted his eyes as he tried to make out the form between the narrow cracks in the floor just inches above his face.
Male, average height and build. Is there just the one?
The former Marion, Illinois police chief watched and waited. He could hear the man shuffling toward the back of the cabin, likely searching for Tom’s whereabouts.
He’s trying to take me alive - but why?
Tom knew if they simply wanted to kill him outright they could have destroyed the cabin and have been done with it, or likely shot him dead on his way back from the outhouse.
“You see anything?”
It was a voice from just outside the cabin doorway – a second man. The other man already inside the cabin answered back in a low whisper.
“No, but he has to be close. Maybe there’s another way out we didn’t know about. We need to find him. If he resists, just kill him quick and be done with it - to hell with Tennison.”
Dolan felt his legs beginning to cramp as he searched his mind for the name Tennison and came up with nothing. He had never met anyone by that name.
“Hey, come here! Check this out!”
The second man entered the cabin and made his way toward the first. Dolan smiled to himself in the darkness of his hiding spot. He had pinned a single piece of yellow notebook paper to the back wall of the cabin with the following two words written on it:
“LOOK UP”
It’s now or never. You got to be quick because you know they will be too…
Dolan took a slow, deep breath, closed his eyes and used the images of his dead family who remained lying in their beds above him as motivation to do what he knew must be done - kill those responsible.
With a powerful thrust of his legs, the fifty-seven year old former police chief propelled himself upward through the already loosened floor boards and aimed his assault rifle at the two men who stood staring upward at the low ceiling above their heads.
Both men reacted quickly, their speed the result of both training and natural athleticism. Tom Dolan managed to fire off several rounds first, hitting the man on the right several times in the upper chest but missing the second man who was already diving toward the floor.
Dolan ducked back into the crawl space, his face rubbing up against the dry, packed earth as he scrambled to move away from the opening in the floor. Two bullets hissed past the space where he had been just a half-second earlier. Tom rolled onto his back and aimed his rifle directly above him and fired several more rounds hoping to get lucky. He then rolled over onto his stomach and was once again scrambling to move as the cabin above him erupted in gunfire. A bullet grazed the flesh of his right forearm causing Dolan to cry out in both pain and rage.
There!
Movement could be seen between the cracks in the floor, the underside of a pair of dark leather military boots. Tom’s assault rifle snarled its reply, tearing the wood floorboards into fragments. A loud scream issued followed by a heavy thud.
Got the murdering bastard!
Dolan ignored the throbbing pain in his forearm and crawled as quickly as he could back toward the opening in the floor while making certain whoever he had just hit wasn’t on the move as well. He looked up through the hole in the floor and saw the first man he shot still remained collapsed toward the back of the cabin.
That left the second man unaccounted for.
“It appears we underestimated you, Sheriff.”
Dolan followed the voice to a man lying on the floor with his back propped up against the closed cabin door. The man’s voice was a gurgling frog’s croak, the result of the blood filling his bullet-holed right lung. He was mid-30’s, with closely cropped dark hair and equally dark, brown eyes. His weapon, a SIG 228 handgun with a silencer, lay a few feet away to his left.
Tom kept his rifle aimed at the second man while moving slowly backwards to confirm the first man was in fact dead.
“Oh, you got him good…tore half his throat out. He’s lucky. He was all but dead before he hit the floor. Me? I get to suffer some. You managed to shoot me in the side between my vest. You’re a hell of a shot…or just a damn lucky one.”
Dolan glanced down and saw what the second man said was true. His partner’s throat had been nearly severed by the AK-47. This allowed Tom to turn his full attention to the still alive but seriously wounded, remaining would-be assassin.
“You killed my family – my wife, my kids.”
The man winced as he tried to take a careful breath and then coughed several times, leaving the inner palm of his right hand covered in froth-tinged blood. When the coughing subsided he nodded his head slowly and then shrugged.
“Just following orders.”
Dolan slammed the toe of his left foot into the other man’s chest wound.
“Whose orders?”
The younger man gasped and then began coughing copious amounts of blood again. The former police chief waited for several seconds before repeating the question.
“Who sent you? Who are you working for?”
The assassin closed his eyes tightly as his body shook from pain-filled tremors. He knew his own death to be imminent.
“It doesn’t matter, Sheriff. You’re as dead as me.”
Dolan’s foot slammed into the man’s chest for a second time. He noted how the assassin was incorrectly calling him a sheriff instead of a police chief the same as the FBI agents who had arrived in Marion that terrible morning just a week earlier.
“Who sent you?”
The man fell to his right side, his mouth opening and closing like a fish gasping for oxygen while stuck on dry land. Finally he was able to take a shallow breath that afforded him just enough oxygen to whisper a response.
“You aren’t anything special, Sheriff. We picked up a whole bunch of law enforcement just lik
e you - made examples of them. This is so much bigger than anything you could imagine. It’s all gonna change. Everything is different. Everything is…”
The man’s voice faded, replaced by a frightening, gurgling gasp. Tom Dolan had no compassion for the dying man. He only wanted answers. He reached down with his right hand and grabbed the assassin by the front of his dark blue windbreaker jacket and pulled him back up into a sitting position and then slapped him hard on the left side of his face.
“Look at me! Right here, look at me!”
The man’s eyes slowly refocused on Dolan’s face and then he smirked.
“You were easy enough to find. That jeep of yours…the tracking device made it so easy. We’ve been watching you for a while. I was supposed to bring you back alive. They like to show you to the others, broadcast the story, put on a show…make people afraid. The more chaos the better. The ones we don’t take, most of the others quit. Didn’t take long. Not long at all. The whole country just fell into itself and then they’ll rebuild it all the way it should be. We just had to break a few eggs to do it. Just a few eggs…”
Dolan had no idea what the dying man’s ramblings spoke to specifically, but he also knew there was at least some truth to be found in them.
“Why did you kill my wife and kids?”
The man’s eyes closed and then partially re-opened. Dolan had to lean in so he was able to hear the answer.
“You killed them. That was the story. You killed those two black kids, the feds, the reporter, your own detective…and then you killed your family. You were supposed to be quite the monster, Sheriff. Another hick cop gone bad. Another cog in the wheel that is Protocol X.”
Protocol X?
Dolan looked up at the still far-away but unmistakable sound of an approaching helicopter. The dying man looked up as well with a mouth forming an almost-smile.
“I told you, Sheriff, you’re as dead as me.”
The man began coughing again as he slid back down toward the floor. The coughing worsened for a moment, and then just as quickly, ceased altogether. Tom Dolan reached over slowly with his right hand and pressed it against the man’s neck and found no pulse.
The former police chief stood up and quickly scanned the cabin interior. The bodies of his family remained in their beds, joined by the bodies on the floor of the two men who had murdered them. The chopper’s approach grew louder. It was making its way to the cabin with incredible speed. Dolan knew he had no more than a minute to decide what he should do next.
Part of him considered getting back in bed with the cold, still form of his wife and simply waiting for the inevitable. It would be easy enough. The world offered him little more than the great pain of loss and the loneliness that would accompany it.
Tom Dolan wanted to cry, to scream, to take a gun to his own head and pull the trigger and just end it. Enough was enough. He had tried to protect his family and failed miserably. His wife and kids were dead and he was convinced he should be too.
He reached down and picked up the just-dead assassin’s SIG 228 and put it firmly up against his right temple. The cold, uncaring dark metal felt good against his skin.
Just pull the trigger and it’s over. No more pain. No more regret. No more failure.
“Five, four, three, two…ONE!”
Tom’s finger lightly pressed against the trigger – and then paused. His eyes narrowed slightly as he spotted some kind of identification badge inside the jacket of the man who lay dead on the floor in front of him. He leaned down and pulled the jacket back and confirmed it was in fact a laminated identification badge with the initials EPA emblazoned across the top.
The dead man’s name and title were listed below – Criminal Enforcement Agent Tony Marks.
What the hell are EPA agents doing tracking people down and killing them?
The answer to that question would have to wait as Dolan felt the cabin floor begin to vibrate under his feet. The chopper was getting closer.
Tom recalled several years earlier when his then young son approached him about wanting to quit his Little League baseball team. Max was afraid of the baseball, so afraid in fact he could neither catch it with his glove nor hit it with a bat. Every time the ball flew his way, little Max would flinch and sometimes even cry out in fear much to the amusement of his laughing teammates.
“I’d rather you stick it out, Max. You start quitting now it becomes a habit real fast. Soon it’s pretty much all you know how to do and the whole world will just pass you on by.”
Max fought away tears as he pleaded for his dad to understand how much the laughing and pointing was bothering him.
“I feel so stupid though, Dad! I can’t do it! I’ll never be good enough to play baseball. Everyone says I suck.”
Tom grunted at his son’s remark while waiting for the stoplight to turn green.
“That’s because you do, Max. Be honest – you’re a horrible baseball player. Every time the ball comes your way you look like you’re about to pee your pants.”
Tears began to stream down Max’s ample cheeks.
“Crying won’t change that either, son. Practice will, though – practice and just a little more toughness on your part. How about when we get home we play some catch?”
Max sat silent in the passenger seat of Tom Dolan’s patrol car trying hard to avoid his father’s eyes. He had tried to play catch with his dad a few weeks earlier and then quickly gave up, embarrassed at how poorly he did. Like many kids unaccustomed to the necessities of practice and hard work, Max thought he would somehow just learn by some quiet miracle to not be afraid of the ball in time for his first Little League practice.
That didn’t happen. If anything his fear worsened, complicated by the embarrassment and shame that accompanied the taunts of the other kids on his team.
Tom reached across to the car’s passenger side and gently rustled his son’s hair as he began driving toward home.
“C’mon, kid it’ll be ok. You’ll see, just a little practice and you’ll be catching that ball like it’s nothing.”
Max looked up at his police chief father with eyes pleading for that to be the truth.
“You promise?”
Dolan nodded to his son.
“Yeah, I promise.”
Less than an hour later found Max Dolan crying out as a baseball thrown by his father struck him on the side of his left leg.
“Are you dead?”
Max shook his head while visibly trembling at the thought of another ball coming toward him.
“Does it hurt that much?”
Max hesitated for a moment and then shook his head again.
Tom Dolan smiled.
“See, you were afraid for nothing. You’re tougher than you think, Max. Don’t hide that from the world. Let it know you aren’t afraid of anything it might dish out. If you get hurt, take it like a man – and then give some back.”
Twenty minutes later found Max catching nearly every ball thrown to him, the smile on his face growing wider with each small victory. The memory of his son’s long-ago smile brought a pained smile to his father’s face as Tom Dolan grabbed what he called an already prepared “bugging out” backpack and threw it behind him on his way out the cabin’s front door with the AK-47 still clutched firmly in his right hand and the EPA agent’s SIG 228 jammed down the front of his blue jeans. The pack contained his law enforcement revolver and belt, enough dried food and water to sustain him for several days, as well as ammunition, first aid kit, night vision goggles, ten-inch military grade Bowie knife, a portable short wave radio, extra batteries for both the flashlight and radio, and a detailed map of the United States.
Once he stepped out onto the cabin’s front porch Dolan was inundated by the noise of the low-flying chopper. He could see the machine’s dark shape looming just a few hundred yards beyond the tree-line.
It was time to get moving – fast.
Tom leaped from the porch onto the ground and ran as quickly as he could toward the
back portion of the cabin property. From there he began to follow the downstream path of the creek, knowing it would lead him even deeper into the heavily wooded Shawnee Forest until he would eventually emerge somewhere around Lusk’s Ferry where the Ohio river separated southern Illinois from Arkansas. The area was sparsely populated and afforded ample cover to hide if needed.
After jogging some three hundred feet from the cabin Dolan bounded into a particularly thick patch of trees and then looked back and saw the ominous, dull metallic gleam of a fully armed Apache military helicopter hovering directly over the cabin. The wind from its massive blades pushed against Dolan’s face as he silently pleaded that the chopper turn around and go back to whatever place it called home.
American Survivalist: RACE WARS OMNIBUS: Seasons 1-5 Of An American Survivalist Series... Page 17