Patriots Awakening

by R. M. Strauhs

  ~~~

  Ryan, who used the call name Garbage Can, had his team playing havoc with the enemy in Alabama and Tennessee. Somehow they’d managed to blow up the planes at one airport and the ammo dump near by. His commando team consisted of only eighteen men and eight women, but they were relentless. And, they were used to traveling through the hills and hollers at night to avoid detection. Ryan started out with a fighting force of twenty-five people, but lost seven on one particularly difficult mission.

  ~~~

  Applegate, known as Charley, hit everything he could in the North Carolina area. He had a fighting force of nine men and four women. By the end of September, he had lost six of his small squad.

  ~~~

  George, or Captain Terror, was busy with his band of outlaws in the Massachusetts area. He had twenty men and twenty women, all well trained. A large supply ship exploded in the Boston harbor thanks to them. They had raided a National Guard armory and had a huge cache of weapons. George’s team then downed incoming flights full of World Soldiers and supplies with their stolen SAMS.

  ~~~

  Mr. Twister, Tom in Arizona, had a group of thirty men and five women out fighting. One morning, the group managed to blow a World Army headquarters building full of the enemy right after they’d reported to work. A bazooka attack played hell with a barracks filled with soldiers in another area. Hit and run was the rule. They’d been lucky and had lost only two fighters.

  ~~~

  No group knew what the others were doing and didn’t need to know. They only did as much damage to the enemy as they could in their immediate areas.

  ~~~

  In Nebraska, a group had formed to protect themselves. This was all preplanned, of course, in the event something ever did happen in America. Country Rats commanded this group. He had members all over the area, and they were out attacking the enemy day and night.

  ~~~

  Thunder had his group of Cherokees going constantly in Oklahoma against the oncoming forces, as did Pony Rider, the Apache, in Arizona and New Mexico. Mud Duck of the Sioux tribe in North Dakota, was having good luck picking the enemy off.

  All the tribes in North America went to war again. Combining the military training many had received, they reverted back to the ways of their grandfathers, and the tribes hit the warpath.

  ~~~

  Dew Drop ran a large contingent of Freedom Fighters in Montana, protecting the northern flank.

  ~~~

  Copper Penny, led his group in the West Virginia area, and Wicked Betty led her team in Georgia.

  ~~~

  This is the way America responded to the advancement of the New World government forces. Unknown teams hitting anywhere, everywhere, and taking supplies from the dead as they ran. The enemy was on unknown land and fighting the locals who knew every nook, cranny, and cave. Americans were not going to lie down and roll over that easily and the enemy was learning this the hard way.

  ~~~

  Sure, there were those who’d gone into the camps for food and shelter and signed on with the New World government. They would either be dealt with accordingly by the patriots, or learn the truth and turn and fight against the new leaders.

  ~~~

  One of these people was a boy of nineteen, Trevor Manning. He saw through the lies and didn’t want to live under a dictatorship.

  The explosions blasted through the night sky as Trevor, Jacob, and Reese hugged the ground. They had just blown a bridge as a train filled with fuel tankers started across the trestle of a gorge.

  “Let’s make tracks,” Trevor yelled, and took off through the dark forest as fast as he could run to clear the area.

  Their first job as commandoes had been a large success, and the boys were proud of themselves. All three boys were under twenty, but knew where their future lay in destroying the enemy.

  Dad, I’m trying, really trying, Trevor’s thoughts screamed as he ran. He’d worshiped his father but was never good enough for the career military man. Trevor had made Eagle Scout, and straight A’s through high school, but his father hardly noticed. Maybe me being a guerilla fighter will make you happy, Dad.

  Lt. Colonel Arnold Manning, his wife Jean, and two daughters died in a hail of bullets one day when they resisted arrest. Trevor had been captured when a former classmate had him at his house under the pretense of forming a militia. It was a set up.

  Trevor was smart enough to play along with what the officials offered him. He knew one day he would make a break for it and paybacks would be hell. That day finally arrived. Trevor, Jacob, and Reese overpowered two guards by hitting them in the head with pieces of galvanized pipe ripped from the plumbing in their barracks at an internment camp. They took the guards’ weapons, dressed in their uniforms, and simply walked away from the camp.

  The Lt. Colonel and his son had made a secret stash of supplies ten miles from the camp’s location for just this reason.

  “You sure they’re still here?” Reese asked, and kept looking around like a scared chicken.

  “Guess we’ll find out in a couple minutes,” Trevor answered. “Give me a hand to lift this flat rock.”

  A few minutes later, all three boys were well supplied, clothes changed, and heading off toward a cave some thirty miles away. Trevor had discovered the hidden cave while out with the Boy Scouts a year earlier. One package Trevor carried in his pack was plastique explosives.

  ~~~

  Max Taylor, with forty-two other men, escaped from a camp in what was left of Tennessee after the quake. The opportunity arose when guerrilla forces hit the adjoining landing strip. Of course, several guards were killed and a supply shack emptied of guns, ammo, and explosives. Max was an ex-Seal and took charge of the group.

  His main task was to destroy as much shipping as possible coming up the wide body of water that used to be the Mississippi River. They figured if enough barges and ships were sunk and blocked the deepest channel, the flow of supplies and troops heading north would be stopped or at least significantly slowed down.

  It didn’t take the team long to commandeer a tugboat and head out into the wide channel looking for a good target. An hour out, Max spied a string of three barges hooked together. Barrels were stacked on all three, and he figured it must be fuel. Pulling up to the last one, he jumped onto it and connected explosives set on a timer. He repeated the process on the other two barges. The boat pilot must have been asleep as he never noticed a thing . . . or felt a thing when all the fuel erupted into a large fireball.

  ~~~

  Captain Mark Chapin looked through the periscope of his submarine and grinned widely as he saw the line up of vessels in port on what was left of the west coast after the earthquakes. All they had to do was take out the tanker sitting between four other ships. From their range, it would be a simple torpedo shot, and as soon as the torpedo left its tube, he ordered full astern and backed away from the coast. When he raised the periscope as they turned to run back out to sea, there was nothing but huge fires and smoke where the ships had been tied. After running the scope back down, he told his exec, “Take her down, John. Turn to course 320 and level her at 600.”

  “How many of those can we claim?” the executive officer asked.

  “All of them. Counting what we’ve destroyed at sea, we’ve taken out fourteen of that bastard’s ships.”

  ~~~

  Mike Freed lived and worked in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. His job was to run the first pumping station for the Alaskan Pipeline. Mike turned the main valves off to stop the flow of oil and sabotaged the diesel generators. He then traveled two miles down the line and placed two sticks of dynamite on the 48” pipe and lit the fuse. His friend, John Haywood, blew up Pumping Station Two an hour later.

  ~~~

  Jerry Sullivan sat on a hilltop in Maine watching the shipping and the port. Before him lay the answer to his dreams . . . the dream to become an honest to God guerilla fighter. The enemy’s ships sat there, waiting for him to blow their fuckin’ bottoms right
out from under them. Jerry had watched the harbor for a week as more and more ships came in and dropped anchor. They rode low in the water, so he knew they were fully loaded. All the hours he spent watching the harbor, hatching his plan of attack, he’d seen nothing unloaded.

  Jerry was an engineer in the Navy and knew the workings of all the ships. He knew where their weak points were, how to set off explosives that would blow their way from one part of the ship to the next with the help of the fuel on board and perhaps the cargo itself. He figured at least some of them carried munitions. The ships were fairly close together, so he was sure an explosion would spread from one to the next, to the next, and so on.

  Jerry wished he could stay to see it all happen, but he knew the enemy would be hot on his trail when their ships began blowing up. He was specifically on a list of the enemy’s most wanted, because he had not been accounted for, and they knew he had been responsible for an earlier explosion of a submarine the enemy had captured from an Italian crew.

  His plan was to approach the ships underwater, place three timed charges on three ships, swim back to shallow water and abandon the scuba gear before swimming to shore.

  He had an old motorcycle hidden underground in a huge survival room his dad had built all the way back in the days of the Cold War. Some time ago, he fitted the Hog with cross country tires, huge saddlebags, and a large metal box mounted on the carrier behind the seat. He also had two rifle holsters to hold the two M16’s he’d managed to come by at the naval reserve warehouse where he had stolen the scuba gear, explosives, and timers. It started out as a plan just to escape, but when all the ships began coming into port with all those blue helmeted bastards, his plans changed to include killing and disrupting as many of the enemy as possible.

  Dusk fell, and Jerry worked his way down the hill toward the spot at the shore where he had hidden the explosives, his scuba gear, and the M 16 wrapped in waterproof film. Music blared from loud speakers on the outside of several buildings about a block from the water. Loud voices and laughter filled the air along the docks. It seemed the enemy was having some kind of a party. Well, he was going to fuck their party up big time. He squatted in the brush where his gear was hidden and scoped out where the people were. He didn’t want to walk into some kind of patrol. The men were indeed having a party and evidently drinking far too much. They yelled and carried on like a bunch of drunken sailors. Jerry watched, biding his time.

  A sailor walked towards Jerry’s trees . . . unzipping . . . and starting to pull down his pants. The minute the sailor squatted, Jerry bashed him in the head with a large rock.

  Within minutes, a sailor walked from the trees, a rifle slung on his shoulder. The man stopped and looked across the water toward the ships. It seemed there was only one sailor standing guard as the others partied. Jerry walked toward the guard, patting his pockets as if looking for a lighter for the cigarette hanging between his lips. The guard held out his lighter and turned his head towards the party up the street. The man spoke with an accent but not for long.

  As he said, “Looks like quite a par . . .” Jerry drew the razor sharp bowie knife hard across his throat.

  Cautiously glancing up and down the shoreline, Jerry didn’t see anyone else. Five minutes later, he had donned the scuba gear, tied the bags containing the explosives packs to his belt and slipped into the water. He swam to the ship farthest out in the harbor that he planned to attack. He wanted to attach the explosives on the ships as he swam back toward his escape. It took but two minutes to work the first explosives pack out of its bag, stick it on the ship with its magnetic case and twist the timer for thirty minutes.

  As he swam barely below the surface, momentarily bringing his head far enough out of the water to be sure he was moving toward the next ship, he thought, One down, two to go.

  After placing the explosive on the second ship and heading for the third, the worst thing that could happen happened. The damned third bag had slipped from his belt, and he didn’t know where. If he screwed around searching for it in the murky water, he’d be dead from the concussions of the other two ships exploding. Maybe there was another way.

  The third target was tied up at the dock. He got rid of his scuba gear and stuck the knife in its sheath in the back of his pants. When he got close to the gangplank, he began yelling and sputtering as if he was drunk and drowning.

  The two guards standing watch at the bottom end of the gangplank laughed as he grabbed the edge of the pier and pulled himself drunkenly out of the water.

  Jerry staggered toward them and yelled, “You guys got a smoke? Got mine all fuckin’ wet when I went overboard from the dock. Some motherfucker pushed me!”

  As the two continued to laugh, one of them pulled a pack of butts from his pocket and offered it to Jerry. Jerry whipped the knife from behind, slammed it into the man’s heart, coming up under his rib cage. The man’s eyes popped open wide, and he slumped toward the ground. Before the other guard realized what had happened, Jerry whirled around and slashed the knife across his throat. As the man staggered backward, Jerry shoved the knife into his neck as hard as possible. This enemy hit the planking of the pier, his body jerking wildly for about ten seconds before he lay still.

  Jerry removed both weapons from their shoulders and slid the bodies over the edge, into the water. Without the slightest hesitation, he slammed a round into the chamber of the automatic rifles and ran up the gangplank, and he entered the ship on about the third deck down. He had no specific plan in mind about how to sink or blow this bastard up, but he knew where the one weak point was, where he could start a fire. Only problem was, it might kill him in the doing. Well, what the hell.

  As he raced along the outer companionway of the deck, he thought about the old saying, “A coward dies a thousand deaths, while a hero dies but once.” He smiled and whispered, “Yeah, sure. You’re just as dead either fuckin’ way.”

  One thing for sure, he had to be one of the luckiest bastards around. His target was the fuel transfer connection. This was a large flexible hose that connected to a tanker for refueling at sea. Jerry’s luck held as he reached the pumps, and there was no one in sight. He supposed they all felt safe enough to go partying ashore. Try as he might, he couldn’t cut the hard rubber line, but as he looked back along the line, a large wheel atop a valve caught his eye. Damned if it wasn’t a bleed valve that would empty right onto the damned deck if he could get it open. Again, his luck held, and a flood of fuel began pouring out of the valve, covering the deck. He wished he had some way to ignite the shit without killing himself.

  As Jerry hurried to the hatch that opened onto a catwalk next to the refueling room, he thought, Well, what the fuck. You can only die once. He was well aware he would have but seconds to get off the ship once he ignited the fuel. His chance of survival sucked. Then, he remembered the explosives on the other two ships and glanced at his watch. Without meaning to, he spoke aloud. “SHIT! Three minutes!” He ran as fast as he could toward the gangplank, down onto the dock, and into the trees ashore. He hated to leave his M 16, but he had to get outa there without going up the shore to retrieve it. As the fuel sloshed over the edge of the catwalk, Jerry took careful aim and pulled the trigger. A hail of bullets sprayed across the catwalk, and it erupted in flames.

  Jerry was about two hundred feet into the woods when the outer ship blew, followed seconds later by the second ship. The concussion of the blast knocked him to the ground, and as he struggled back to his feet, the damned ship at the dock erupted in a massive explosion and fire. The heat seared his face and knocked him to the ground. This time, he wasn’t so sure he would ever get up again. A huge wave of fire moved at hurricane speed above him in the treetops. Then, it was dark again for a moment, and he managed to get to his feet and run like hell before another explosion or firestorm killed him.

  He got lucky once again. When the next explosion reached high in the sky, he had crossed the top of the hill and fell to the ground. As anxious as he was to get as fa
r away as possible as quick as he could, he had to see the destruction he had wrought. Running, and then crawling back to the top of the hill, he peered at his own private battlefield and laughed hysterically. Then he stood and yelled, “Take that, you bunch of lousy motherfuckers! Fuck with my country, will you?”

  The wind made Jerry’s burned face hurt even worse, but as he rode all through the night, taking the country lanes and roads where possible, or cutting cross-country where it was necessary, he alternately laughed and smiled and cried from the pain. But he knew he would never die a coward. His main thoughts centered on his parents and the little brother the bastards had killed. He’d paid them back some but not nearly enough. Jerry Sullivan had been forced into being the warrior he had dreamed of being and, by God, he wasn’t too damned bad at it, nor was he finished with the enemy.

  ~~~

  Helmut Schultz pulled an old crop duster plane out of the hangar in Western Oklahoma. He’d filled the tanks with fuel instead of crop spray, because he had a plan and was going to carry it out at dusk.

  Helmut, close to death with cancer, had been alone since his wife died during the winter, and he didn’t give a damned if it was the last time he ever flew or did anything in this life.

  A camp of soldiers had set up in the old town nearby, and Helmut decided they had to go. He smiled as he circled the old home place of fifty odd years for one last goodbye, and then headed straight for the target. He flew in low, spraying the fuel on the dry old buildings, which he knew would go up like kindling. By the time he made his turn to make another run, the soldiers were firing at him. Helmut managed to fly through the hail of bullets and make another turn. Severely wounded, he pointed the nose down and dove into the enemy’s command center, located in the largest building in town.