Danny looked around at the group. There were more nods, but Danny didn’t seem convinced. “I don’t know if I’m outthinking myself here or not, but that seems like the most obvious plan to me as well, and that’s why I don’t think he’s done that.” He rubbed his forehead. “Let’s say we’re right, and this guy is here and tracking us. How far ahead do you think he’d want to go to wait for us? He has to know we’re not traveling by day. We can’t, or the drones would have found us. If we’re still alive, he knows we’re only moving by night, so Belle Fourche is way too far for us to have gone. You’re right, he may eventually get there, but my money is on him trying to anticipate our next move and cutting us off before we even get that far.”
“So what do you think he’s doing, Danny?” Dad asked.
“I think…there wasn’t a Montana map in that case. We never figured to go through that far west. We knew we had to get to Rapid City as fast as we could. If I were him and I laid out those maps, I’d see a general route we’d be taking. I’d try to get ahead of us, but not too far, and I’d try to cover all our options to be absolutely certain to get us. I don’t think he’s looking at Montana. I could be wrong, but I think he’s set up to cut us off before we get to South Dakota. On this map there are three main routes south. If we take any one of them, I think we’re dead. I think the only way to go is the fourth, through Montana, and hope we sneak by on the outside.”
Again, no one responded. What he said made sense, but then he continued with the thought in the back of our minds. “But.” He again looked at us. “What if he thought there was no Montana map in there because we had that one with us and needed it for our route? What if he is, or isn’t, as smart as we give him credit for? And what if that was his logical reasoning all along? What if that seemed so obvious to him and he took all of his men to the same route? He’d be going all in with his chips, but if that’s what he did and we walk right into it, we’re dead. No doubt.”
Dad finally spoke. “I don’t think he did that, Danny.”
“Okay.” Danny looked at him and waited, suggesting he continue.
Dad started pacing. “In a poker game, that would be like going all in without looking at your cards. Or in chess, like leaving your queen in an open diagonal line with your opponent’s bishop. Maybe you’d get lucky. Or maybe you’d lose your best advantage. I don’t think he plays that way. This guy seems like he understands the way we think. If he does, he can’t be thinking we’d go through Montana. It wasn’t on any of the maps, and it’s out of our way. It’s the longer way to get to where we want to go. He can’t think we’re going there.”
“Let’s say I agree with you,” Danny responded. “How many of you are completely comfortable with the decision to go that way?”
We all raised our hands. Either way we had no way of knowing what we were walking into, and who knew if we would even make it that far. Or maybe we’d overestimated this captain and he was nowhere near us, and our worries about his ambitions were in vain.
“Okay then,” Danny continued. “It’s almost dark.” Pointing at Blake and Nathan, he asked, “You two know the roads around here pretty well, right?” They nodded. “We need to travel as remotely as possible out of this park, and then we need to cut over to Montana without coming close to the interstate. Can that be done?” Again they nodded and started discussing the best possible route. “I’ll leave it to you,” Danny said. “You get me to Highway 7 in Montana, and I’ll take it from there.”
“Got it,” Blake said.
“Perfect.” Danny patted him on the shoulder, walking towards the trucks. “We leave in an hour.”
I could almost hear our hearts pounding off the walls of the cave. He came walking back a minute later with a shovel Tara’s dad had given us. “Let’s clear the entrance out and get ready to go.”
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A little more than 150 miles south of the cave, Captain Eddie had moved his men into concealed ambush positions where the three roads south met Highway 20. Comfortable their THIRST systems could blanket ten miles in every direction, he was satisfied they had the sixteen to twenty mile gaps between their three patrols covered. On the other hand, one outlier still troubled him, and that was the alternative route down through Montana. Two times now he’d had these people where he should have been able to capture them. If they made it past him a third time, he was going to start looking incompetent to his own men, and nothing led to rebellion quicker than incompetence. Highway 323 south through Montana was only eighteen miles west of the men on Camp Crook Road, but that was beyond the extent of their radar. If he was to believe the intel numbers, he was confident he could take a few members from each of the three current squads and send twelve men to guard the Montana route. He had an extra THIRST set, and that would cover every likely American travel scenario, so he decided to do just that. It would weaken each patrol a little, but not enough to hurt them against a dozen or so lightly armed, unsuspecting Americans.
He constructed a fourth patrol, with four jeeps and twelve soldiers, and sent them into Montana due west of the men on Camp Crook Road. He and his brother stayed with the men on the most direct southern road, Highway 85. The clock on the dashboard of his armored truck read 8:05. It was pitch black out. His “lions” had to be on the move.
TWENTY-ONE: “And We Were”
Thursday, October 22, 2020.
Montana to South Dakota.
We left the caves, lights off, under the cover of darkness. Blake and Nathan, in the lead truck, guided us through the back roads of the national park, along the river, and onto a gravel road running adjacent to the interstate. We reconvened in Montana at the edge of Lamesteer National Wildlife Refuge. So far, so good.
We continued down Highway 7, implementing several detours for safety purposes, to the small town of Ekalaka. Nathan had worked at a camp near here for a couple summers, and he believed we could find food and medical supplies there to replace some of what we’d lost at the bunker. Sure enough, a vacant Camp Needmore provided us with a generator-powered freezer and a well-stocked pantry in the main kitchen. We packed two coolers full of ice and meat and grabbed all the canned goods we could. We also found plenty of other supplies, including four relatively new mountain bikes. As we left, we unplugged the near empty gas-powered generator and took it with us too.
We were well behind where we had hoped to be, but still alive, and hadn’t yet run into signs of any troops. We were about one hundred miles from Belle Fourche, South Dakota, now and therefore within 150 miles of Rapid City. Danny’s goal was to get Tara, Emily, Blake, and Nathan close to the backside of Mount Rushmore, close to Tara’s farm, and then move the rest of us deeper into the Black Hills before daylight. At this point, that was going to be a stretch. We knew we were sacrificing the ideal isolation of our current path to head down a more harrowing passage, into a once heavily populated area. As risky moves go, this was a 10.
Exiting the camp, Danny and I traded places with Blake and Nathan as the lead truck. We were about four miles south of the camp when Wes’s THIRST monitor flashed bright red and beeped loudly. Danny flashed the hazards twice and braked to a sudden halt. The three trucks behind us did the same. He shut off our truck and signaled the others to follow suit. We watched the screen, but nothing appeared. We still weren’t sure of the radar’s scope, but we figured it was somewhere between ten and twenty. The system had proven itself incredibly sensitive and accurate. We’d been able to pick up deer, skunks, rabbits, and low-flying birds as tiny red dots on the screen, but none of those had made the screen flash. This flash had been a big one, and the first time the screen had ever made a sound.
This was something new, and it probably wasn’t good. What made matters worse is the red flash hadn’t been a dot on the screen, but rather more an indicator of nearby radar. Ours had overlapped with someone’s, but we had no idea where the source physically was. Chances were, whatever had pinged us had received the same ping back, and they were watching their
screen as intently as we were. But could they see us?
TWENTY-TWO: “What the Truck?”
A little more than ten miles south, where Tie Creek Road met Highway 323, twelve of Captain Eddie’s men had seen a similar red flash on their screen but then nothing else. They ignored it, figuring it was their radar bouncing off the troops to the east, since there were no red dots beyond several dozen likely animals on their screen. Nothing large. Nothing moving fast. Deer were thick out here, and all had about the same size heat signal. This area was so remote there evidently hadn’t been any chemical bombs nearby to kill them. The troops had come across hundreds of deer today alone.
Several of the men had left the jeeps and built a small fire to make some coffee and eat a few rabbits they’d killed earlier. A couple of the others were napping, and the remaining two huddled around the radar and radio, watching for anything suspicious. At one point a solitary red dot got their heart rates up, rapidly approached their position. One of the men raised his rifle, while the other turned a spotlight in its direction. Captured by the light, a curious deer froze in its tracks, and stared the spotlight down. Then it shuffled back off into the night.
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Back up the road, we continued to stare at our THIRST monitor. We still hadn’t seen any more flashes, nothing moving our way. We were either just outside the range of someone’s radar, or they’d shut it off to not give away their position. If they’d been approaching, we’d have seen the red dot or dots coming. But since we hadn’t seen any new dots on the screen, we still didn’t know which direction the radar ping had come from. Sitting out on a wide-open road was not the way to find out.
A hundred yards back we had passed a dirt road on the right. We reversed the vehicles back to that road and backed them into a cornfield, fortunately still full of tall stalks. It was possible while we’d been stocking up at the camp someone had caught up to us from behind, but nothing had shown up behind us on the radar, and if someone had been coming down that road they probably would have kept coming. In all likelihood, the ping was from up ahead. We just had no idea how far ahead.
Danny and Cameron unpacked and dressed again in their “ghost suits.” They grabbed their silencer-equipped Remington R11 sniper rifles, their high-powered Nightforce scopes and goggles, their Springfield handguns, and several clips of ammunition. They unloaded two of the mountain bikes and told the rest of us not to move for exactly one hundred minutes, until 3 a.m. on the dot. Then we were to drive straight down the highway for twenty miles at 60 mph. Somewhere between now and there, we’d hopefully meet up with them and move on together. Hopefully. “Good luck boys,” I said. And they were off.
They had been gone twenty minutes when a large red dot appeared to the north on the radar screen in our truck. It was coming fast, and we had no way to warn Danny and Cameron. I shut off the radar system in case the approaching vehicle had one that might detect ours, but in doing so we lost our ability to follow both the looming threat and the boys.
Sam, Blake, Wes and I each grabbed our night-vision goggles and a Remington 700, and crawled to the edge of the field, peeking out of the corn towards the road as the large red dot—which turned out to be a red pickup truck—blew by us. We’d covered the trucks with Mylar tarps designed to block heat from infrared technology, but we didn’t have enough Mylar blankets or time to cover ourselves, so if the red truck had been equipped with any heat-seeking technology, we’d have been easy to spot. The truck’s occupants didn’t seem interested in us though, as they continued to cruise south. We had to decide, right then and there, whether we needed to follow and help out Danny and Cameron. Wes made the executive decision not to. “They’re the experts,” he said. “We have to stay out of their way.”
Five miles south, Cameron picked up a steady hum and whistled sharply at Danny. They pulled their bikes off the road and down into a drainage ditch under the road a minute before the truck raced by. What the hell? They both scrambled up the sandy ditch wall. Cameron trained his scope up the road behind them while Danny followed the truck south through his. “Cameron,” he whispered. “Let’s go.” They hopped on the bikes and pedaled after the truck. They hadn’t gone much more than a mile when they heard the unmistakable sound of squealing tires and gunfire in the distance. There were several quick shots, ten or so, and then total silence. On a night like tonight those sounds could carry a long way, but the truck had only passed them three, maybe four, minutes ago. Somebody was a few miles ahead of them, and whoever it was had intercepted that truck.
TWENTY-THREE: “False Alarm”
Captain Eddie was on one end of the radio, demanding play-by-play commentary through the audible gunshots. His men in Montana had called in the rapidly approaching single red dot on the screen, and Eddie had nearly mobilized his entire company in their direction. He and his brother had taken off east in their jeep, but as soon as the red truck was apprehended they were called off. “Captain. It not the Americans.”
“How you know?” Eddie demanded.
“Three Spanish men, sir,” was the reply.
Spanish? Mexicans? Eddie pulled to the side of the road. He’d almost made what could have been a critical strategic mistake in moving all his men east. And for what? One stupid truck. He glanced at his brother, and Lazzo’s look said it all. Eddie was letting his emotions control him. “I know, Lazzo.” He waved off whatever his brother was about to say. “I know.” They turned their jeep around and went back to their post.
Over in Montana, the soldiers were celebrating their easy kill. One of them had turned the tape player on in the truck. Another was searching it for any food or items of interest. They had no idea how far the sound from the truck’s radio carried, nor were they paying attention to the two tiny parallel dots—with heat signals like rabbits—approaching their location on the screen. Finally, one of Eddie’s officers hollered to shut off the tape player. They did and headed back to the fire.
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Danny and Cameron were within a mile now. They had concealed their bikes and flanked out to the right of the four encamped jeeps. They were about twenty yards from each other and approaching the fires in the distance. One of the fires turned out to be the red truck. The other was a bonfire surrounded by laughing and singing men. Cameron took position high up on a rock outcropping, about four hundred yards from the bonfire. Through his scope, he watched Danny edge closer.
In their Marine sniper training, the two of them had always been paired together. They were, in fact, the first teenage duo to win the International Sniper Competition, against the world’s best shooters. Their instructors had given them the monikers “Digger,” for Danny, and “Dice,” for Cameron. Danny’s nickname referenced the traits of his home state’s mascot—the gopher—hard to pin down, seemingly everywhere at once, and capable of wreaking havoc without being seen. Cameron’s was less complimentary. He was known as a gambler, in the field and at the card tables in the barracks. He was a risk taker and that didn’t always work in his favor. Danny was cautioned repeatedly that Cameron was going to get him killed someday, but Danny stuck with him.
Danny was qualified enough to move on to the Navy Seals and, with his reputation, they’d have been glad to have him. But Cameron was a different story. His attitude didn’t sit well with a lot of people and he had no interest in more training to even try to become a Seal. Cameron’s reckless, brawler mentality didn’t bother Danny, but it was frequently a distraction, and there was no room for distractions on this particular journey.
Most sniper teams had a shooter and a tracker. The two of them were adept at either role, but Danny’s instincts in competition and field drills were unmatched. Cameron typically relied on Danny’s call and, in this instance, Danny wanted point with Cameron watching his back. Danny needed to get close enough to hear the radio chatter. He was within two hundred yards of the jeeps and the men by the fire now and edging steadily closer. Cameron saw Danny check his watch. It had been eighty-tw
o minutes since they’d left. In less than half an hour, the rest of the group would be here.
Danny counted four jeeps, two on each side of the road, and eleven men. Seven soldiers stood around the fire, two were in the jeep with the radio, and two more were in another jeep. Danny raised his hand and indicated the number eleven. He saw a rock inches to his right light up for a split second with a laser dot. Message delivered and confirmed. Eleven it is. Had it been to his left it would have meant Cameron had counted a different number. This meant the same thing to both of them. This was only a small patrol. There was no sign of Captain Eddie, but these were clearly men from the same army, all dressed in the same red uniforms. Danny took that to mean every road probably had a similar roadblock east of them, blocking all the passages south. Who knew how many more of these groups were scattered along the way? If Danny and Cameron could take these guys out, we might be able to pass by and get away again. But eleven on two was not going to be easy.
Danny and Cameron had to wait for the next radio communication, clear the men in the jeeps first, and then keep the rest of the soldiers away from the radios. If they attacked too early, others would likely be alerted by this patrol’s lack of response and be on the way before the rest of us could get to them. If Danny and Cameron waited too long, we all would be picked up by the radar and called in, and soldiers would be on the way before we even made it there. Danny checked his watch again. Ninety-three minutes. There had been no radio communication in the nine minutes since he’d taken up his current position. Hopefully that meant they were only checking in every half hour.
2020: Emergency Exit Page 10