“I’m not trying to be patronizing. I just want to make sure we all stay focused on the mission, not the bullshit surrounding it.”
“Right,” Lanning said. His voice had taken on the tone of someone trying to be reasonable. “Speaking of the mission, weren’t there supposed to be two of you?”
“The other guy is procuring transportation. Should be along shortly.”
“Can you check in with him?” Greer said, pointing to the radio clipped to my vest. “See where he’s at?”
“Sure. Be right back.”
I walked outside, took a knee, and keyed my radio. “Hicks, you in range?”
No response. I waited a few minutes and tried again. This time, the earpiece buzzed to life.
“Copy Lima Charlie,” Hicks said. “En route. Four mikes.”
“How many did you get?”
“Enough for all of us.”
“Bodies?”
“Dragging along.”
“Nice work. See you soon. Out.”
I went back inside the Chinook and waited with the four Green Berets until the crewman on the minigun said he had incoming. I fired up my IR scope, which I had attached to my rifle earlier in the night, and looked through a crack in the door. Sure enough, I saw the unmistakable outline of Hicks riding toward the Chinook with Red and four other horses in tow. Behind him, being dragged by lengths of paracord, were the slowly cooling bodies of four raiders. I went outside to greet him. The soldiers followed.
“Run into any trouble?”
“Nope. Caught these four bunched together on patrol passing a bottle around. You know what they say. Complacency kills.”
I turned to Lanning. “This is Sergeant Caleb Hicks, First Reconnaissance Expeditionary. We work together from time to time.”
Lanning nodded in Hicks’ direction. “You ever been on a mission like this, Sergeant?”
“Yes sir.”
Lanning did not correct Hicks for addressing him as an officer, confirming my suspicions about his rank.
“I heard of the First Recon,” Duncan said. “Y’all supposed to be regular Army. The hell you doin’ way out here?”
Hicks pointed a thumb at the corpses behind him. “Killing raiders.”
Duncan grinned, his teeth white in the darkness.
“We need to get moving,” I said. “Those raiders will be missed soon if they haven’t been already.”
“Right,” Lanning said, all business. “Let’s get the gear loaded on the horses.”
After packing the duffel bags and securing them to the saddles with paracord, we cut loose the dead raiders, passed around the high-powered radios, did a quick comms check, and set off toward the raider encampment. Behind us, the Chinook’s powerful engine whined to life, its rotors slowly beginning to spin as the pilots went through their checklists.
“Just out of curiosity,” I said to Lanning. “Is horsemanship a part of S.F. ongoing training now?”
“Yep. Has been for two years. Rangers too, some of them. Heard a rumor the Joint Chiefs want to train five thousand mounted cavalry in the next four years, assuming the government can find enough horses.”
“Interesting,” I said, and meant it. The strategist in me saw the utility of mounted cavalry in a world with limited fuel and a dwindling stock of working vehicles. The business man in me, however, smelled an opportunity.
Get through tonight first, I told myself. Stay focused.
“What’s that?” Lanning said.
I had not realized I was speaking out loud. “Nothing. Just thinking.”
“Might want to do your thinking quietly from here on out.”
I accepted the barb with a nod. “Sound advice.”
*****
“All stations, alpha lead. Everyone in position? Over.”
The two SAW gunners spoke up first, followed by the grenadiers, the aircrew, and finally Hicks.
“Acknowledged. Beginning approach. Stand by.”
I raised my head just enough to survey the area with my IR goggles. Now for the hard part.
After leaving Haviland, the raiders who attacked Spike’s caravan rode southward, turned east on Highway 160, then south again on an access road, and finally resumed an easterly path on Highway 44. They set a tough pace, sometimes covering nearly thirty miles a day, often riding long into the night such that Hicks and I had been hard pressed to keep up. Initially I had thought they were fleeing the possibility of federal pursuit. Now I knew better. They were not worried about the Army. They had ridden as hard as they had because they were low on water.
The Chikaskia River ran north of my position and curved sharply to the south before turning southeast about a mile farther downstream. To the north, a thick stand of woodland ran along the northern bank of the stream and followed the curve of the river south and eastward. The raiders had stopped in a field close to the river.
Behind me to the west, two strips of woodland provided further concealment from the highway. One was a thin line of trees running along the ninety-degree angle of the field where the crop boundaries had once been, while the other meandered sinuously along a tributary that fed into the river further to the southeast. My grudging respect for the leader of this outfit went up a notch. This was a good place to make camp—hidden from the road, easily defensible, and near an abundant source of fresh water. Which also told me these men had been through here before. I wondered how long they had been at this game, and how many lives they had destroyed along the way.
I scanned left and right looking for signs of where I had ordered the others to take position. At my low vantage point, I could not spot them. If I had been up higher I might have had better luck, but lying on my belly in the grass, they were invisible. Which was good. If I could not see them, neither could the raiders. The possibility the scumbags camped along the river were equipped with NVGs was strong. There was also the possibility they had gotten their hands on FLIR equipment. A remote possibility, but a possibility nonetheless. I was taking no chances.
Satisfied there were no patrols between me and the raiders, I began the slow process of crawling toward them. I kept my head down, streamers of brush from my ghillie suit obscuring my vision, and let my ears guide me toward the camp. Every ten meters or so I looked up and evaluated my angle of approach. At the fifty yard mark I was on a straight course to where the prisoners were being held.
I keyed my radio. “Eagle, Alpha Lead. Status. Over.”
“Might want to hurry, alpha lead,” Hicks replied. He was waiting with the horses to the south, hidden in the boughs of one of the trees bordering the field in that direction. I had lent him my IR scope, but kept my goggles. “Looks like the booze is flowing and I see a few men gesturing toward the prisoners. I think our luck is about to run out.”
“Any sign they’ve noticed that patrol is missing?”
“No. But it’s only a matter of time.”
“Anybody goes to take the prisoners out of the wagon, put them down.”
A pause. “Won’t that alert the rest of the camp?”
“Yes, but at that point it won’t matter because I’ll give the signal and the raiders will have much bigger problems than their collective libido.”
“Roger that.”
I quickened my pace. The sounds of revelry from the camp were growing louder. The raiders were having some kind of celebration, probably figured they were out of danger from the feds. I tended to agree. The Army, for the most part, stayed close to the main trade routes, waystations, FOBs, and safe zones. It was unlikely they would venture this far south. And if I was honest, they had no reason to. Hardly anyone lived in this empty, remote part of the state. Not to mention the fact the farther south a person traveled, the more likely they were to run into infected. The men in the raider camp did not seem worried, which served as further evidence they were familiar with the area.
When I was within twenty meters of the prisoners I looked to my right and saw the edge of a cable fence within which grazed the raiders’
livestock. Farther ahead, another fence surrounded half the caravan. The rest of the wagons were arranged in a defensive circle outside the fence. The prisoners’ holding area was along this outer defensive layer. If I was careful and quick, I could climb into one of the wagons outside the fence and use it to get inside the perimeter. But then I had to figure out a way past the ring of cables.
One thing at a time.
I covered the rest of the ground without incident. A patrol passed by perhaps thirty yards behind me, but I was well hidden by my ghillie suit and the waist-high grass. When they were out of earshot, I crawled quickly toward the prisoners.
The women were within ten yards now. But before I could help them, I had one other matter to attend to. I crawled to the nearest wagon, took one of the GPS transponders from my belt, and stuck its magnetic side the top of the rear axle close to the wheel where it would be hard to spot even if someone were looking for it. If they were not, it would be invisible. Three wagons and three transponders later, I crawled back to where the prisoners were and examined one of the fence posts.
It was a cylinder of galvanized steel, four inches in diameter, driven into the ground and reinforced from the inside with a stanchion braced at a forty-five degree angle. I pushed on the post. It did not budge, so I tried pulling on it. To my surprise, it moved a centimeter or two in my direction. I smiled in the darkness. The fence was strongly resistant to anything pushing against it, such as a horde of ravening infected, but it was not designed to resist being pulled in the other direction.
Working quickly, I drew my Bowie knife and dug at the dirt around the base of the post. It was still soft from being tilled up earlier and packed in by hand. In just a couple of minutes I had removed enough dirt to destabilize the post if pulled toward me. I moved down the line and did the same with two more posts, staying low and keeping my head on a swivel. When I finished, I backed off and asked Hicks if there was anyone close by. He said there was not. I told him to keep his finger on the trigger, stood up, and hopped into the back of a wagon less than ten feet from the prisoners.
“Anything?” I asked into the radio.
“Nothing,” Hicks said. “No one noticed.”
I let out a slow breath. “Stand by.”
The fabric of the wagon cover made a faint zipping sound as I cut a long vertical slash from the top of the canopy to the bottom. The material fell open, revealing the top of a fence post about chest level to me if I stood on a wooden crate along the wall of the cargo area. I stepped up onto the crate, grabbed the top of the fence, and leapt out and upward as high as I could. My left boot scraped the topmost cable as I cleared it and fell down the opposite side. It was a nine-foot drop, so rather than try to absorb the impact on a pair of knees nearing their forty-second year of service, I did a paratrooper’s tumble and came up in a crouch, ears straining. My suppressed Beretta pistol was in my hand. I did not remember drawing it.
Seconds passed. I heard no one approaching. Behind me, I heard the prisoners speaking to each other in frightened whispers. Someone was weeping, but it was muffled, as if she were holding something over her face.
I keyed the radio. “Eagle, how am I doing?”
“So far, so good.”
“Copy.”
Now was the time for bold action. I slipped out of my ghillie suit, rolled it up, and lashed it to the back of my belt. That done, I went to work on the fence, first detaching the cables from their clips on two of the posts I had loosened and then pushing them over as much as I could. Once the posts were detached, I could plant a foot on one cable, pull up on another, and open it enough for a person to slip through.
It’ll have to do.
I was about to move to the entrance of the one of the prisoners’ wagons when my earpiece crackled.
“Alpha, you got inbound.”
Shit. “How many?”
“Just one, but he’s armed.”
“Keep me posted.”
I went to my belly, rolled under the wagon, and lay on my back with the Beretta clutched to my chest. The swish of legs pushing through grass grew steadily louder until a raider with a pistol in his hand came into view. The wagon creaked as he grabbed a handrail and stepped up onto the buckboard.
“Rise and shine,” a rough voice said. “Vacation’s over. Time to start the party.”
I rolled out from under the wagon, stood, and holstered the Beretta. For what I was about to do, the gun was a liability. I could not risk shooting one of the prisoners. So I drew my knife, held it in a concealing grip along the back of my forearm, and stepped up into the wagon.
In situations like this I knew the key to success was acting as if I belonged, as if I owned the place, as if my actions were perfectly planned and logical and I had every reason to be where I was and to do what I was doing. I kept the knife hidden as I pressed my way into the wagon’s narrow cargo hold. Inside, in the dim light from fires farther within the camp, I saw the bulky outline of a man crouched in front of me and the dirty, frightened faces of eight women of varying ages, each one bound hand and foot with ropes tied to iron rings driven into the floor of the wagon.
“Hey Smith, that you?” I said, gambling that out of two-hundred or so men at least one of them was named Smith.
The bulky form barely looked over his shoulder. “No. Smith is on patrol. What’re you doing here?”
I pushed farther into the wagon until I was within arm’s reach of the other man. “Somebody must have gotten their wires crossed. You here to get the girls?”
“Yeah, Carter sent me. How about you go to the other-”
He never got a chance to finish his sentence. I grabbed one of his shoulders, raised the Bowie knife, and plunged it into the base of his skull with all the force I could muster. The raider’s body stiffened and twitched as I pulled him close to me, then I eased him to the floor and placed a finger over my lips. One of the prisoners opened her mouth to scream, but an older woman sitting across from her lunged forward, pressed a hand over her mouth, and hissed at her to shut the fuck up.
When the girl went quiet, the older woman looked at me. “Who are you?”
“I’m with the Army,” I said. “I’m here to get you out of this place. But we have to move quickly.”
“The Army?” another woman said. “Is this a rescue?”
“Yes,” I said impatiently and looked to the older woman. “Can you get them moving?”
She nodded and began hissing orders. I cut loose her bindings and handed her a pocket knife so she could help me do the same for the others. In less than a minute, they were all free.
The women seemed to regard the older woman as a leader and did as she said. I cut a slit in the side of the wagon facing away from the campfires, hopped out, and began helping women to the ground. I told the first one of them to hold the cables open so the others could get outside the fence. She moved to comply. As each prisoner emerged I whispered to them to stay quiet, pointed out which wagon I wanted them to hide behind, and told them to stay there until I came for them.
The older woman came out last. “There are others,” she said.
“I know. Let’s get them.”
TWENTY-FOUR
I led the way to the next wagon and kept a lookout while the old woman went inside. Hushed voices spoke in the darkness. I keyed the radio again.
“Eagle, Alpha Lead. How we doing?”
“Rider headed in from the north,” he replied. “Might be pertaining to the missing patrol.”
“Copy. Keep us covered. Just about done here.”
“Roger.”
Above me, the point of my pocket knife pierced the wagon’s cover and traveled downward. The older woman leaned out and motioned to me. I moved closer and helped the women from the wagon and told them where to go. There were supposed to be only thirteen of them, but I counted eighteen. Most looked like they had not been used too badly, but a few were in terrible shape. Bruised, bloody, eyes sunken, faces gaunt with fear, the haunted look of people who have
given up hope for anything but a swift death. It occurred to me the raiders may have taken prisoners before finding Spike’s caravan. It also occurred to me what probably happened to them during that time.
Not now, Garrett. Focus.
I followed the last of the prisoners to the wagon where the others were hiding. To the old woman I said, “What’s your name?”
“Lynn. Lynn Bristol.”
“Okay, Lynn. Help me get these women into a single-file line.”
She did as I asked. When they were lined up and hunched low in the grass, I took a handful of infrared reflective patches from my vest and put one on the first girl in line, the fourth, eighth, twelfth, and the last.
“What’s this?” one of them asked.
“Reflector,” I said. “So the helicopter can see us from the air.”
“Helicopter? There’s a helicopter coming?”
“Yes,” I said, and moved on. The girl had more questions but Lynn hushed her.
“Stay quiet, girl. Do you want to get us all killed?”
The girl shut her mouth.
Finished with the patches, I pressed the transmit key. “All stations, Alpha Lead. Have eighteen souls. Repeat eighteen souls. We are outbound at this time. Alpha Strike, begin your approach. All other stations, wait for my mark.”
To the prisoners, I said, “Time to go. Follow me, and make sure you keep a hand on the back of the person in front of you. If you get separated I won’t have time to go back for you, so stay close. And for God’s sake, keep your heads down. There’s about to be a very large number of bullets flying around us very, very soon. So stay low. Let’s move.”
The woman at the front of the line grabbed the back of my belt and held on tightly. I pressed through the grass as quickly as I thought the prisoners could keep up. The grass around me was a washed-out shade of white through the filter of my IR goggles. The sky overhead was a yawning ocean of grayish-black. I saw a rider gallop into camp about seventy yards to my right. Bad news. The raiders would soon know about the missing patrol, and not long after, would probably notice the prisoners were gone.
Surviving the Dead (Book 7): The Killing Line Page 21