Dark Grid (Book 1)

by David C. Waldron

  “About three minutes before I called you,” Coop replied. “We were channel hopping and jumped in at ‘request contact’ the first time. Once we’d heard it all the way through we called you.”

  “How long had you been off of 19?”

  “Four, maybe five minutes tops,” Tony said.

  Clint sighed. “That means they just started transmitting, which means they’ve been thinking about it,” Clint trailed off.

  “Come again?” Tony asked.

  “Earl took that group out of here over twenty-four hours ago. He was supposed to radio in after three hours which means that the U.S. Army has had the entire group in their care for at least twenty-one hours. Do you sincerely think that whoever is in charge over there just now had the bright idea to transmit a meeting request after a day?”

  Clint went back to pacing while he talked. “I don’t think so. They wanted us to stew about our missing people. I know I have been.” Clint was scowling again when he looked up and in the direction of the squad car which he couldn’t see through his trailer. “And as much as I hate to admit it, Kenny’s right. The only people who use your middle name are ‘the law and your momma’ and both of them only when you’re in trouble. Hell, even I didn’t know Earl’s middle name.”

  Tony and Coop looked at each other.

  “What?” Clint asked.

  Neither former policeman answered right away.

  “I said what and it wasn’t in the rhetorical sense. One of you knowing something may be bad news, both of you knowing something and not wanting to share it sounds a lot like ‘no good can come of this’. Spill it, like now.”

  “We actually both knew Earl’s middle name already. He’s kinda got a rap sheet,” Coop replied.

  Clint controlled his temper and kept it to making a fist that cracked the knuckles of his right hand. “Is it Brent?”

  “Yeah,” Tony answered.

  “Sonofa…ok, the next time one of you two thinks of something like this, something that might be, oh I don’t know, IMPORTANT! Let me know ahead of time.”

  “You got it boss, sorry. For what it’s worth, I don’t recognize anyone else in the group as having a prior history.” Tony was the junior of the two and was taking the rebuke harder than Coop.

  “I think I recognize one but if so it’s minor and really nothing to worry about,” Cooper added, letting Tony’s apology apply to both of them.

  “It’s water under the bridge now. What matters is getting them back, if we can.”

  …

  “Why are we screwing around, Top?” Halstead asked as he walked into the command tent.

  “You want the short answer or the long answer?” Mallory replied.

  “Will I like either one?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Well then I’d just as soon have an actual explanation for our little Charlie Foxtrot in the making if you’re willing to give it because I’m pretty sure the short answer is ‘I said so’.”

  “Have a seat.” Mallory gestured to a folding chair across from her ‘desk’ and once she wasn’t looking up at her potentially insubordinate subordinate she continued. “We know who he is, we know where he is, we know how many people are there, and we have a fairly good idea of what resources they have at their disposal. What we don’t know is what is going on in his head,” Mallory tapped her own head to make the point.

  “Ramirez already suggested going in and laying waste to the place in the middle of the night. He made the same suggestion as soon as we actually had a place to lay waste to.” In a slightly softer tone she went on, “That man, I swear sometimes I think he would try the patience of Job.”

  “I’m with you, on both counts,” Halstead agreed with a small smile.

  “We aren’t going to go in and play tornado to their little trailer park though. There are those who feel that the ability to make ethical and moral decisions is a luxury available only to those blessed with a stable, civilized society.” Mallory paused for a second to let that sink in but continued before Halstead could interrupt or respond. “We may not have the same level of stability that we had a month ago but I’ll be damned if we don’t still have a civilized society.” Mallory’s fist came down on her desk at damned and it made Halstead jump because it had come out of nowhere.

  “We could have killed every last one of the raiders yesterday with no warning whatsoever. One second they’re sneaking up on us, the next people are literally dying left and right, and then it’s over. Clint would never have known what happened. We send out a real scouting party, find his group, and wham, done.”

  Halstead wasn’t stunned, but he was silent. Mallory leaned forward with both arms on her desk, “I won’t invoke the almighty Murphy and his immutable law and say we wouldn’t have suffered any casualties but I’d have been very surprised if we’d had anyone so much as injured on our side.”

  “Sergeant, you and I both know that this was probably at least partially a mistake on Clint’s part. You don’t have to agree with me openly or out loud but think about it.” Mallory waited to see how Halstead reacted before she went on. He had the good grace to nod. “Nobody attacks a military base using forty-one civilians unless they have bombs strapped to their chests. It wasn’t a feint--unless the other group got lost and this lot was kept completely in the dark about being the bait.”

  “You’re keeping things close to the vest, though. Do you have a plan or are you playing it by ear?” Halstead asked.

  “Yes,” Mallory replied. “I’m not really keeping it close but I’m sure it looks like it from where you’re sitting. I wasn’t kidding yesterday about not running this whole deal like a military dictatorship. Not now, not ever.”

  Mallory leaned back in her chair and tried to stretch away some of the tension that had been growing for the last week and a half. Two seconds can only do so much though and she had to get back to the task at hand. “I have some general ideas of how to handle this but it depends on how Clint reacts to the situation. You aren’t here to pick my brain, though you clearly have something you’d like to say--more than one something unless I’ve completely missed my guess. Permission granted to speak freely Sergeant, just not too freely.”

  Halstead took a breath to cover the second it took to gather his thoughts and then started with the most troubling aspect of this whole incident. “Top, what are we going to do with the thirty-three people we have here right now who weren’t here yesterday morning? Are they prisoners and if so by what authority do we hold them? Is it a military matter or a civilian matter? How long do we hold them? Do we or can we even let them go? If we let them go, who do we release them to and under what conditions? That doesn’t even get into the eight we have in body bags in one of the empty refrigeration trucks because we couldn’t let them sit out in the sun for a day.”

  Halstead held up his hand when it looked like Mallory was about to begin answering some of those questions. “I’m not quite finished.” At her nod he went on, “We’re in the woods and we simply cannot secure the perimeter of this base like it should be secured, not like a real base. With the number of people here, the mix of military and civvies, and the likelihood that we are going to become more and more town-like, we just don’t have the trained bodies. I guess I’m done for now.”

  “Good, because I was starting to lose track.” That earned a grin. “Our guests are weighing heavily on my mind. I don’t know if they’re exactly prisoners or even enemy combatants at this point. It depends almost entirely on the reasoning behind their being here in the first place. Let me finish, we’re discussing this but that doesn’t mean we get to interrupt each other.”

  Halstead relaxed as he’d been about to protest the disposition of the captured party members. “Some things appear to be obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together. Point,” Mallory held up a finger, “the group was most likely a raiding party and not doing scouting or recon. Point,” another finger, “they were too heavily and similarly armed to have had all of tho
se rifles until after the event and in fact we know that at least three of them still had pawn shop price tags on them. Point,” finger, “unlike us they were willing to shoot first and ask questions later. With absolutely no idea of the tactical situation, nine of their party opened fire. Dumb, dangerous, and frankly a little bit mean if you ask me.”

  Mallory put her hand down, “I’m going to quit counting on my fingers now because you’re a smart kid and at some point if I’m not careful I’m going to give you the bird. The point I was making is that they aren’t prisoners or enemy combatants in the classical sense of the terms but they don’t strike me as innocent either. Rules have changed a bit, I understand that, but this group appears to have already resorted to wholesale theft of firearms, ammunition, vehicles, trailers, food, water, and fuel.”

  “We need to talk to Clint first; we need to see how he couches this. How does he justify what he’s doing and what he’s done? Does he look at us and accuse us of doing the exact same thing but on a bigger scale? Does he claim that the ends justify the means or that the old rules don’t apply anymore because they can’t? We need to know what we’re dealing with and more than that,” Mallory paused and not just for dramatic effect but because once she said it out loud it always seemed more real, “we are going to have to choose our battles.”

  “Aren’t we supposed to be the last bastion of hope and freedom and all that?”

  “Yes, but we’re also supposed to be realistic in the expectations we have of ourselves. We have very limited resources at our disposal with which to be that last bastion. There’s a difference between guarding the gate and going out in search of the dragon.”

  Halstead was silent for several seconds and when he replied he seemed more his old self. “Point made, Top. I’m still mad about being caught off guard. I want to be able to put this to bed but I’m being active stupid.”

  …

  “Now that’s just active stupid, Coop!” Clint yelled.

  “Why?”

  “You really want all the reasons, fine.” Clint turned on Cooper. “First of all it’s not just my word against his; it’s my word against theirs. Forty-one people to one. They were all volunteers and as a group they all heard me talking to Earl. Next, some of those people still have family back here. Do you really think they’re just going to sit idly by while I hang their husbands or wives out to dry? C, or Three, or whatever I’m using to keep track of this list of stupidity, it’s the U.S. ARMY! Maybe I should have listed that as the first, last, and only reason because that should have been enough.”

  “But they wouldn’t be expecting it…”

  “They wouldn’t, huh? Really? And how long did you serve in the military? How many times have you been on a military installation after an incident that caused a heightened state of alert? Exactly what in your past gives you any reason to think that or qualifies you to make that determination?” Clint spat.

  “I haven’t but what makes you so sure that they will? What makes you the expert?” Cooper shot back with just as much fire and a touch of challenge.

  “Fourteen months in the Army before an…unfortunate incident put an end to that. I was in Ranger School. I’ve been on a base during a heightened state of alert, several times. They will be expecting it.”

  “Oh,” was all Cooper could come back with.

  Clint wasn’t ready to let it go yet, though. This was going to be a recurring problem and he needed to know just how big a problem as early as possible. “Yeah. So is there anything else you’d care to question while we’re at it? The decision to send them out in the first place, perhaps? The fact that I put Earl in charge of the group instead of you or Tony? Work details, water rations, the women here not to your liking?”

  “Hey, that’s not where I was going man, honest,” Cooper was backpedaling.

  “Then make sure it’s perfectly clear in the future you don’t intend to go there.” Clint and Cooper locked eyes until Cooper nodded and looked away.

  “Ok, just so we’re clear we are not going to pin the raid on the group as a rogue action and we are absolutely not going to plan another raid on what we now know is the U.S. Army. That having been said, I have no intention of rolling over and playing dead. I got us out of Nashville because there were too many people there for comfort in a crisis and nobody else was stepping up to take charge. The fact that we still aren’t picking up any radio stations and the Army has set up a base in a National Park pretty much cinches the escalation from crisis to catastrophe.”

  Clint was pacing again and thanking his lucky stars or the fact that Venus wasn’t in retrograde, or the fact that his mother had lived a mostly good Christian life, that the weather had been good for the last several days. “Madison was coming unraveled a little more quickly than I wanted to stick around for but Lexington looked to have enough rural area that we could hunker down and start to put things together again without too much outside interference.”

  So far that plan hadn’t worked out too badly as they’d picked up some additional people on the way and found what had appeared to be a promising area. “I have a feeling that our independence here is about to be threatened, or at least questioned. I’m not going to hand everything over just like that. How was I supposed to know that the Army had set up shop there? Regardless of who was in there I wouldn’t have sent my people in unarmed, right?”

  “Of course,” Cooper just nodded and agreed at this point for more than one reason. This wasn’t the first time they had sent a raiding party out into what may or may not be an undefended small town or slowly depopulating or abandoned neighborhood. Each time, Clint would go through this same process, justifying it to both himself and anyone else who would listen. Technically the reasoning was sound; ethically it had more holes than a screen door.

  Each time Clint would tell Earl to give anyone he encountered the opportunity to join up and come back with him but with fairly tight restrictions. None of the new folks could bring guns with them, although Earl could bring their guns for them if they were of the correct type. They had to have a skill that the group needed and be willing to work, hard. They had to bring virtually everything portable that they owned with them and it was pretty much a no questions asked, all or nothing agreement.

  If people didn’t want to join up then Earl should try to convince them to join up. Not like ‘protection racket’ convince but try to help them see the light if at all possible. Ultimately, the security of the group came first and anything that could threaten that had to be dealt with. Anything short of wholesale slaughter was Earl’s call and there had been one time where a group didn’t want to band together but decided to follow Earl and company back. That proved to be a very bad, very costly decision for the hold-outs. Of the four followers only one survived and that was by design--to tell everyone what had happened to the other three.

  In another situation, Earl had confiscated all the firearms he could find and taken them with him when he left. It was part object lesson and part personal protection, as he was sure that as soon as his back was turned they otherwise would have put a bullet between his shoulder blades. To his credit he dropped all the weapons that didn’t meet Clint’s requirements, which was most of them, about a half a mile away. He’d then sent one vehicle back--with enough firepower to ensure its safety--to tell the group where they could find their weapons, but not to leave for five minutes.

  Cooper was wondering what he’d signed on for when Clint turned to him and asked, “So, what do you think? Aside from another raid and passing the buck.”

  Eight years of being a beat cop was all that kept him from asking if there was any way out of this Mickey Mouse outfit, which is not a question that is limited to the enlisted ranks of the military. “I’m working on it. They did give us several days to get back to them. It sounds like they are going to set up duplex repeaters around the base and that’s going to take a few days. Until we answer they can’t know we’ve even heard them.”

  “You’re way off base with
that one as well, Coop. They didn’t send out a broadcast until they knew who was in charge over here. They questioned, or interrogated, long enough to get Earl’s middle name. That might not sound like much, but what doesn’t sound like much to you and I is the chink in the armor that an interrogator uses to get inside your head.”

  Clint sat down for a minute to take a drink under the awning of his trailer. “Coop, we picked up the transmission, right?”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “On what channel?”

  “19.”

  “Which is a simplex channel, correct?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Which means it has definitely not been sent through a duplex repeater, correct?”

  “Yeah. I know how a CB works, Clint.”

  “Then think about how a CB works, Coop. Let’s go back to when the FCC was still around and nobody wanted to go to jail. How far can you broadcast without skipping with the rig and antenna in your cruiser?”

  “Oh, probably max out about sixteen miles. In country like this I’d be lucky to get that.”

  “And let’s say that the Army knows this and they are, say, between fifteen and sixteen miles away from us as the crow flies. I’m making assumptions here but I’m trying to prove a point. If they sincerely didn’t expect an answer until the repeaters were in place do you think they would be broadcasting now? Do you really think that nobody has told them where we are? Someone told them my first and last name and I’m willing to bet that they even still have their fingernails to boot.”

  Clint got up and started pacing again. “Coop, the term Army Intelligence is used as an oxymoron on purpose to lull the enemy into a false sense of security. I’m willing to bet they know where we are, how many people we have left, the layout of camp and even have a decent idea of our resources. Military brass may very well be incompetent but the guys at the pointed end of the stick are usually sharp as hell.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  “Joel, have a seat.” Mallory indicated the folding chair in front of the makeshift desk she’d been using since the final move from the Armory and made yet another mental note to find something more permanent.