Tomorrow War
Page 21
A Spartan lean-to was all we could manage. We slept on the ground next to yet another stealth fire and didn’t have the luxury of playing cards under hydroelectric light, but hey, the sun was coming up anyway. Feast, famine, rinse, repeat, and hope you didn’t get smoked. That was life out here.
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Most recent encoded transmission from Rich:
“Best bet, use [decoded to Appalachian Trail]. Fallout and troop concentrations are [decoded to thin] there. Had to use [decoded to Stingers] here. Sukhois getting thick. Stay on target and godspeed.”
FOUR-LEGGED FRIENDS
24 Jan
Rich’s advice was sound. Using the intel we’d gathered from the people we’d run into after the dam, we were able to avoid two security areas on the highway and make it to the Appalachian Trail. We’d have probably predicted the checkpoints, as they were all on the eastern or northern sides of large bridges, but it was nice to have it marked on our maps to help us make route decisions ahead of time.
The trail was abandoned, with no signs of recent human activity. Every so often we’d come across a snow-covered cache box where wealthy hikers would have their supplies prepositioned to facilitate their midlife crisis hike along the AT. No luck inside any of the caches unless you count the nearly empty roll of toilet paper, which I did.
If we thought the road from Arkansas was lonely, the AT was even more maddeningly silent.
January 19, 0100 GMT
OPERATION HAYSTACK
DIRECTOR’S EYES ONLY
We managed to bring two of our older KEYHOLE SIGINT birds online after reconfiguring a ground station back to analog function. We put a team of NSA operators on the console after we managed to squeeze out satellite orbital adjustment fuel to tweak the HEO of both birds to work in tandem. The team was able to receive a SIGINT hit on a suspected HAVE QUICK transmission on the western side of the Blue Ridge Mountains in east Tennessee. Likely source of transmissions are from captured radios. The geolocation major/minor covers a wide area due to the older equipment and antiquated techniques utilized. The team is working around the clock to exploit the spectrum to ensure we catch the next instance of unauthorized HAVE QUICK radio utilization. Recommend a QRF be on standby near last intercept to conduct rapid direct action when the next SIGINT tipper is received.
————————————— sends.
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We continued north for two days until we were forced to make early morning camp where a rockslide had blocked the trail some time before. Thick moss covered the north faces of the jagged boulders and the bones of a dead animal lay strewn about the rubble.
With GPS being hard down, I’ve had to rely on Molly’s pace to figure out how far up the AT we’d gone. There were surprisingly few trail markers, or at least not many we’d seen along the trail. Our packs were a lot lighter than when we’d left and my belt was about to need another hole to keep my pants up. It wasn’t that we weren’t eating—it’s that we were burning a lot more calories than we were consuming.
That very thought was on my mind as I set out with my carbine and NVDs to poach the king’s game. Before Maggie and I left the camp, we tied the horses so that we wouldn’t accidentally shoot them. When you were hungry, everything that moved looked like cheeseburgers. Hunting on night vision was the only way to fly. Things you couldn’t notice during the day jumped out when you wore seven thousand dollars of technology on your head. The compound eyes of insects shone on the leaves of branches as we stalked our prey.
We moved through the frosted grass and trees for an hour in a concentric circle around the rockslide camp. At high ground, we could see the glow of the fire like a great beacon, and the eyes of the horses as they scanned their surroundings flashed in our NVDs. I was watching the camp, thinking about our next move, when Maggie’s IR laser flashed in front of me and a shot snapped from her muzzle.
The frantic gobble of evading turkeys told me that breakfast was going to be a good one. Maggie sprinted into a turkey fight, the glint of her blade flashing moonlight from the mirror-honed edge. With one swat, the head of the turkey lay snapping on the grass. Maggie waited for a few moments so that the turkey’s sharp talons would stop jerking in defiance of its own demise. Maggie could switch into predator mode quickly, and was an efficient killer.
We built a real fire, not worrying about being seen in this remote area of the AT. The heat reflected back off the avalanche rocks, making me warmer than I’d felt in weeks. It didn’t take us long to prep the turkey, and soon we were eating like tourists at a Renaissance faire. We ate half the turkey and put the rest of the cooked meat inside a plastic bag surrounded by ice and suspended it in a tree away from camp. Ain’t no way I’d keep it in the camp with us. I knew for a fact that the cats and bears were bigger and meaner here. This wasn’t Arkansas, and I had no desire for a Newton County repeat. When the weather is just right, or I’ve had a particularly long day, I can still feel the scars.
We both slept well, knocked out on the turkey drug I hadn’t experienced in so very long.
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Shortwave intercepts—transcribed from Max’s recording device onto paper in the field.
Real State of the Union
0700: “It’s all over, at first it was the government we had to fear . . . you know . . . their brand of order and restoring justice. They’ve all burned out. Most of ’em gone home to their families, unless you’re unlucky enough to be living nearby one of their intel centers. Might as well be a Dark Ages castle. Lords and barons living inside the heavily guarded fusion center forcing their will on the region they are charged to occupy. The provisional government is on its knees, it’s true. That’s why Chinese and Russian troops are on our goddamn soil! The Russians? They are in no better shape than we are, but a helluva lot less dependent on the grid. Besides, who’s going to maintain the Sukhois? I never thought I’d see Flankers on patrol in U.S. airspace. Never.”
0923: “The President has given authorization for the UN to operate in all fifty states to facilitate the restoration of order. Citizens are reminded that the UN troops are only here to help quell the lawlessness occurring along the major roadways and that their presence here is only temporary.”
1202: “Max, whoever you are, wherever you are, we need you now more than ever [jamming phases in and out from unknown source] . . . you did in Arkansas spread more than [jamming]. Everyone listening to this, you are Ma [more jamming]. Flip the script! Long live the Re[some interference].”
1319: “UN troops boarding large helicopters for unknown regions on a regular basis. Government media calling them QRF. Rumors swirl that their sole function is to double down on “unlawful transmissions” and to find and eliminate pirate radio stations like the one you are listening to right now. They can’t stop all of us. Bastards.”
1600: “Hey, America, what’s left of you; the UN is just the enforcement arm of the World Bank. Funny how most of the troops wearing UN helmets come from the countries we owed money! Here is the real kicker: the biggest debtor was the American people! Stop listening to this, get out there, and start shooting anyone in a foreign uniform!”
1822: “Hello, my name is Harold, I worked for the DHS before all this. I resigned last year when things started getting . . . ungentlemanly. I saw the writing on the wall before, stocked up like most of you out there. If you didn’t, you’re dead and most likely not listening to this and are probably inside someone’s stomach . . . well, sorry for that, but it was modeled out. People knew. I’m here to tell you that upwards of 90 percent of the U.S. population is dead. This outcome was briefed to the highest levels as far back as the turn of the millennium. They knew the consequences of a nationwide grid down event and did nothing! They . . .”
—————
Well, it’s been a shitty night, to say the least. Maggie has been shot in the arm—just a graze, but still going to be a problem. Molly was hit in the flank, but seems to be okay enough to st
ill move without too much trouble. Elvis and me made it out with only minor surface injuries.
Bastards.
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12 Hours Ago
We started with a hunt as we’d run out of our turkey meat. We decided to spread out a little farther apart, as seeing Maggie’s laser cross over my shoulder right before she took her shot was a little spooky last time. She was a beast when it came to killing, no hesitation. Yeah, I can swing a pipe too, but not the same way Maggie does. Females are the alpha killers in many species, and Maggie certainly was a lioness when it came to hunting.
We spread out and moved into the forest from the main artery of the AT. After half an hour, Maggie sent me a message on the HAVE QUICK.
“Tracking something,” she said.
I clicked the radio in acknowledgment and began to move faster. As a point of pride, I wanted to kill the next meat instead of letting her go two for two. That all went out the window a few minutes later when her HAVE QUICK phased back into sync with my radio.
“Rabbit down,” she said.
Before I could answer, I heard the sounds of rotor blades beating the cold air over one of the adjacent hills.
“Go dark,” I transmitted before switching off my radio.
I began to head for our distress point, a place we’d worked out nightly before bedding down. Normally we’d pick a spot two hundred paces off a compass direction from the campfire; this time the direction was northeast and the spot was a large boulder with graffiti on it from the people hiking the AT, which I thought was uncharacteristic for the types of folks that hiked the trail, but whatever. I moved to the boulder looking for the glow spilling from Maggie’s NVD.
I ran quickly, fighting off the urge to go back to the camp to secure the weapon and let the horses free. Nearly to the boulder, I looked over my shoulder and saw a large twin rotor helicopter in a hover atop a cliff. IR glow sticks attached to assaulters’ webbing shined brightly in contrast with the darker sky. The twin rotor tips formed twin arcs while the large machine hovered, dropping off its pax.
I counted four.
Based on their landing zone, I had time. I sprinted down to the camp and grabbed the horses and supplies, leading them back into the cover of the trees. Quickly, Maggie and I donned our body armor. I grabbed the three remaining grenades, giving her one of them. The helicopter was already gone, probably headed somewhere to wait on the call for pick up, a call that would occur after Maggie and I were ventilated in these hills. Attaching the grenades to my plate carrier, we mounted up and drove deeper into the cover of the forest in case a drone was loitering overhead, providing a real-time video feed to the team that pursued. I knew the game. I used to play it.
Maggie and I rode hard for an hour until stopping at a natural choke point. Two high cliffs stood face to face twenty feet apart; if we were being pursued, they’d need to come through here. Maggie and I hid the horses and began to set up a trap. We had one EFP remaining and Maggie and I agreed that this would be a damn good reason to drop twenty pounds from our load out.
I set the explosive device up to shoot down the corridor between the cliffs and rigged an expedient tripwire using copper snare and paracord. After checking and double-checking the trap, Maggie and I retrograded back to the horses and found some high ground a safe distance from the pass so that we could pick off any survivors after the blast.
We waited for half an hour until the trap was sprung without warning. The explosion rocked the pass, sending boulders down into the gap. The flash of suppressed muzzles began to pop off like camera flashes, but not in the area behind the blast, to our right, coming from the direction we were now hiding.
They were planning to pincer us!
The blast probably killed one of them, but judging by the chunks of rock that hit my face, they knew that we were out here somewhere. I signaled to Maggie to check her radio as I checked mine. It was off.
Maggie mouthed the word “Sorry” as she pointed to her radio.
They were likely tracking the RF leakage from her powered on radio. They found us with our transmissions, but refined our position off Maggie’s goddamned radio. I thought we were dead until I remembered the one thing that tended to solve most problems.
Grenades.
I signaled to Maggie that I was about to send a frag in the direction of the muzzle flashes. Instead of taking cover behind a tree, she tossed her frag out with mine and we both hit the deck. Explosions once again echoed back and forth between the hills, but there was now less shooting.
Maggie’s IR laser came to life, prompting me to click mine on, too. Our beams crossed like flashlights in an old X Files rerun as we scanned for remaining shooters. One rifle kept barking from a nearby tree, the rounds exploding on the face of a nearby boulder. Glancing at Maggie, I could see that she was bleeding. Her arm was black from the dark blood that covered it and half her gun.
If I fired, it could give away my position, so I decided to lob my last grenade at the base of the tree. I gave Maggie the signal to dive and as soon as she did so, the pineapple left my hands. I heard it hit just before the explosion sent the last shooter to the ground; the shrapnel from the point blank grenade to the torso seemed as if it nearly cut the soldier in half.
Maggie and I waited behind cover for anyone left alive to bleed out. What would be the point to walk up on one of them only to get shot by an AK-wielding possum?
The wait was forever, time marked by our breath shooting into the air from underneath our NVDs back and forth in tandem. After an hour of shivering, our adrenaline wore off and we broke cover to check the bodies.
Chinese. All of them. Their bodies were covered in holes and lacerations from grenade damage.
Their NVDs were of an older generation. We removed and smashed them. We took their AKs and magazines and concealed them inside a plastic trash bag with some duct tape. Marking the location on a map, we hid them away for a rainy day. Part of me wanted to shoot a few rounds through the receiver, but they could potentially save lives if the location of the cache was shared with the good guys.
Yeah, good guys.
Was that even me anymore?
Line is blurry.
—————
28 Jan
Tonight was one of the many times I’d risked using HF/shortwave to send a Morse signal back to Rich at Shire Base. We were about ready to leave for the night, which would put some distance between the transmission and our next camp.
The simple message encoded with Rich’s codebook read, “Firefight, AT. Chinese insert helo. Pressing to objective.”
His response was short, cryptic and terrifying.
“You are compromised via overhead. No more Tx.”
After hearing the dire message, I removed the batteries from the HF radio, pulled the long wire out of the tree, and taped the batteries to the outside of the radio. I tossed the small shortwave transceiver and Morse paddle into the bottom of my pack for the last time.
I then asked Maggie to do the same to her HAVE QUICK unit as I did so to mine.
She asked, “Satellites?”
“Yeah.”
“What took them so long?” she said rhetorically.
With our batteries taped to the outside, effectively neutering our radios, we kept moving east.
Maggie’s shrapnel injury from the fight with the Chinese stormtroopers looks like it’s infected. My horse’s flank is swollen and she’s losing about two hours of travel per night. We’re leaving the AT and heading for antibiotics, if any exist.
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Sparta
Day
I picked a spot on the map and committed, one of the last towns before we crossed into the Commonwealth of Virginia. Molly was hurting, and I wasn’t sure we’d find enough antibiotics and other meds to save Maggie, let alone the horse. Carefully consulting my maps, we avoided the roads leading into the small town for the most part until the map indicated that there was a convenience store a mile up ahead.
I rode ahead, scouting for trouble. Molly complained as I rounded one of the abandoned cars that sat perpendicular to the road.
“Easy, girl,” I said to her, hoping to comfort her.
The gas station was trashed, just like I expected, but I didn’t need anything here except the one thing that probably still remained under the counter. I dismounted, causing another grunt from Molly, and stepped over the broken glass to the front of the store as Maggie caught up. I looked over my shoulder at her and thought of the pale horse verse from the Bible.
I used the business end of my carbine to clear enough glass to safely get inside. Flipping on my weapon-mounted light, the entire floor began to move and change colors.
Fucking cockroaches.
I suppressed my desire to just burn the whole place down and crunched over the stragglers to the register. I hopped over the counter and peered underneath. The only thing I saw was a loose shotgun shell and a roll of scratch-off lottery tickets. I stuffed the half dispensed roll into my pocket as an afterthought and continued to search. Digging through the yellowed and torn newspapers on the floor, I hit my own personal jackpot coming across an ad for a vet clinic located “Just off Main Street, we’ll see you there!”
I snatched up the ad and left the cockroach nest crunching for the light of day where the vermin dare not swarm. After conferring with my maps, we once again headed down the highway into the small town of Sparta.
We didn’t see any movement on the streets as the old stone buildings began to appear up ahead. We passed Persimmon and Olrich before reaching Main, turning right as the road transitioned from regular cracked concrete to older style cobblestone.