Military Fiction: THE MAC WALKER COLLECTION: A special ops military fiction collection...

by D. W. Ulsterman

  “Well played, Mr. Meyer. You can bet they are calling it in right now though. I would estimate they’ll be back out here within seventy two hours. maybe less. If I find out for certain when, I’ll try to get word to you. That’s the best I can do.”

  The soft whine of Officer Denny’s electric-powered vehicle faded as he made his way back down the road and away from Dominatus.

  The unmistakable sound of a gun chamber being loaded was heard as Bear brought out a handgun and pointed it in the direction of Carol Denny’s departing vehicle.

  “That’s the last time I let anyone take a weapon from me, Mac.”

  Bear and the others returned to their snow machines and rode off, leaving myself, Mac, Dublin, and her grandfather behind. The Old Man first addressed Mac.

  “Mr. Walker, please take appropriate measures to prepare a defense of the road. I will assume the drone made its way here at a very low altitude, and that is how it arrived without our sensors picking up its presence until much later?”

  “Yeah – it was flying well below a hundred feet. I can adjust our monitoring equipment to compensate for that, but no guarantee it won’t happen again. And the next one…the next one could be armed. I say we shoot the next one down. To be safe. I know you have wanted to avoid that. It gives them an excuse to come at us, but if the next one is armed, we can’t allow it to just fly over us like that.”

  The Old Man nodded his agreement.

  “At this point, that would be prudent. Yes, I have no objections to that, Mr. Walker. I will communicate to my sources, try to find out why the officers arrived here so quickly. I had been assured that would not happen. It would seem my influence, has suffered some.”

  Alexander Meyer then looked to me, his ancient face breaking into a warm smile.

  “And what of my dinner guest for this evening? I hope our little interaction with the authorities has not dissuaded you from joining me this evening, Mr. Neeson. I can have Dublin pick you up within the hour and bring you to the cabin, if that is still acceptable to you.”

  “I would be honored, Mr. Meyer.”

  “Good. Dublin will be back here shortly to pick you up. Now, I do fear I am in need of some rest before that. Dublin dear, please take me home.”

  X.

  I watched as Dublin’s snow machine slowly disappeared over the nearest hill, her grandfather clinging to her from behind. Mac’s hand clapped onto my shoulder as he too watched their departure.

  “I need to sit down, kid. I haven’t tangled like that in a long time. Every bone in my body is screaming at me.”

  We both walked back into the Freedom Tavern, the music from Mac’s jukebox welcoming us back inside, this time from a song titled One Headlight by Jacob Dylan – who also happened to be Bob Dylan’s son.

  Mac disappeared down the hallway toward his office for several minutes before returning to behind the bar where poured two glasses of his home brewed beer. I noted he walked with a slight limp, his face grimacing slightly with each step.

  “You gonna be ok, Mac?”

  I sat at one of the small tables in the tavern, watching as Mac slowly made his way back to join me.

  “Sure…a little rest and some anti-inflammatory and I’ll be right as rain.”

  Mac’s grimace returned as he gingerly sat down in the seat across from me, followed by his taking a long slow drink from his glass.

  “Feeling better already.”

  “You mind if I ask you some more questions while I’m waiting for Dublin?”

  Mac exhaled slowly, moving his head from one side to the other, trying to stretch it out.

  “I don’t care…sure.”

  “The guy you fought with, Officer Hess, they said he was Special Operations. You mentioned Grant County. That this Hess might have been part of Grant County.”

  “Special Operations Division, that’s the people who go in and wipe out the ones who won’t follow the mandates. Grant County, Washington State, that was four years ago. They were pretty much living just like we are up here. Minding their own business, growing their own food…they had their own weapons. There were a few hundred of them out there. A wasteland…hot as hell in the summer, cold in the winter. It had to have been a very hard existence, but they were free. Or thought they were. Compliance officers came out there, wrote up some reports. The people didn’t comply, and then they were wiped out. I heard it was the American flag. They would raise it every morning on this makeshift flag pole. That’s what the compliance officers really got pissed about. Their flag didn’t have the New United Nations emblem on it. All other flags before then had been banned.

  “All their homes, huts really…they were out in the open. The drones came in and bombed the shit out of them. Then came Special Operations, people just like that Officer Hess…likely he was involved himself. They murdered anyone who survived the drone bombings, dug a huge grave, and just dumped everyone and everything in it. Covered it back up and it was like all those hundreds of people living out there in Grant County never existed. There were at least thirty children living there. Just…gone. All of them…gone.”

  Silence hung in Freedom Tavern as Mac finished his remark. Even the jukebox now sat silent.

  “They intend to do the same here don’t they? You can feel it coming. They are going to erase Dominatus.”

  Mac’s silence remained, his eyes looking somewhere far beyond the walls of the tavern. After several minutes his eyes refocused on me and he gave a slight shrug of his shoulders.

  “I learned a long time ago that you should worry about the things you have control over and forget the things you don’t. Whatever is or isn’t coming to us tomorrow, or the next day, or next week…all I can do is act on it when it does. Like I told you before, we’ve always known it was gonna happen eventually. It was just a matter of when.”

  “The Old Man said yesterday, he told everyone at the operations center they would be safe for a while. That Carol Denny would not be visiting again for a while. Less than twenty-four hours later we have a visit from three N.U.N. officials. Wouldn’t that indicate that Dominatus is a lot more on the radar of the New United Nations than even the Old Man was aware of? And that the drones could be coming tomorrow, or tonight?”

  Again Mac shrugged.

  “Sure it could…yeah. It’s likely something like you just described it.”

  “And that doesn’t concern you?”

  Mac held up a hand, signaling his disagreement.

  “I didn’t say that – it concerns me a lot. A hell of a lot. These people, at least in part, depend on me to help protect them. We’ve updated our drone trackers, already have people positioned to shoot any drones down on sight - just sent out the ok for them to do that. Keith is back at the cave right now making sure we’re stocked up on food, water, weaponry, ammunition. We’ve been preparing for this for years. So all of that I have control over, and things are proceeding just like we planned. The rest of it? Whatever that Hess or Chu, or the people pulling their strings, whatever they are planning I don’t have any control over. So for now, I’m sitting here talking to you and finishing this beer. After Dublin picks you up to take you to the Old Man’s cabin, I’ll be doing more prep work at the operations center. We’ll be ready – as ready as we can be.”

  “But it won’t be enough. There’s no way a hundred people, there’s no way you can win this thing. Not against the New United Nations.”

  Mac gave that thin smile of his again, the deep lines around his eyes flaring out across his cheeks.

  “I’ve already won Reese. That’s the part of me, the part of Dominatus you still don’t get. I was sent to prison for life. Your dad got me out, and I was given a chance up here to live as a free man. To run my own business, to talk openly and honestly with other people, to watch the seasons change. To hunt and fish, to know joy and pain and happiness and regret, all of it without the hand of the mandates, without the New United Nations pressing down on me every moment of every day.

  “How h
as life been for you in the Lower 48? How many check points did you have to report to as you made your way up here? How many times have you been detained and questioned over the years without anymore reason than that is what the authority now allows? How many churches did you see closed down? How many new end-of-life facilities have been built where the elderly are shoved into beds by the thousands and then assessed by N.U.N. healthcare administrators and promptly given medication that terminates their life within days of their being placed there? That’s how your father went, right? The government no longer allows people to die at home – the old and sick are forcibly placed into those end of life facilities and snuffed out thousands upon thousand every day. The death panels we were warned about that have existed for almost twenty years? All part of that healthcare bill that was passed in 2010, and then amended to include the population control mandates.

  “That’s how you have had to live for most your life Reese. Me? I’ve lived up here away from all of that. I feel sorry for you. You’re just now getting a chance to experience what America, what all of America used to be like.”

  I sat silently, contemplating Mac’s words. He was right. Most of my life had lived under the oppression of the mandates, of a police state where nearly every action was dictated by some governmental authority. Where I traveled, what jobs were offered, the information that was allowed to be obtained, all of it controlled by the massive central authority of the New United Nations. Nearly since birth this authority attempted to control what and how I was to think. If not for the dedication of my father to instill the ability to see through the haze of thought-controlled disinformation, I might very well be among the hundreds of millions in the United States currently living that life of a near mindless existence.

  “You know something Reese, today…when me and that Hess were squaring off?”

  Mac’s question cut through my thoughts, bringing me back to the present

  “What?”

  “That’s the most alive I’ve felt in a very long time. I forgot how much I enjoyed that kind of thing, the thrill of battle. And Hess, I could sense he was feeling the same thing. He misses it too. I’m guessing he spends most his time cooped up behind some desk. Today he got to draw a bit of blood, and taste a bit of his own. Him and me…we ain’t so different Reese. Not sure I like to admit that, but it’s true. My body…it’s howling at me right now. Gonna be sore as hell this time tomorrow, but man, I looked over at him, saw the kill in those eyes of his…knew he was seeing the same thing in mine. That rush, the adrenaline – I do miss it. Still comin’ down from it. Back in the day, what I did, I don’t want to brag about that kind of thing but, I was good at it. And killing, taking human life - that was a part of it. And that scares me just a bit, how easy I could fall back into old habits. Wanting a mission. Wanting a chance to do that again. The same way Hess wants it.”

  “Mac, Hess is a killer. He works for the New United Nations. He’s wiped out innocent people, defenseless people, people whose only crime was their refusal to go along with every one of the mandates. People killed for giving recognition to the old American flag. That’s nothing like you…what you did was a different time. Different government. We were the good guys. You went after the bad guys.”

  Mac’s eyebrows raised, and his head shook slowly.

  “Reese, the people I worked for, the government, killed my team. Tried to put me away for life. Back then, if they had left me alone, maybe I’d have kept right on working for them. I enjoyed it. That’s what I’m trying to explain to you. What happened today between Hess and me, you know it took every bit of self control I had not to finish him off? How much a part of me wanted to snap his neck, rip out his throat, thumb his damn eyeballs into the back of his head? There was a second or two, it could have gone that way. So much of me wanted to do it…to kill him. Decades of training, of experience, it all came rushing back to me out there today. And man.., did it feel good. The only thing that stopped me, and it pisses me off to admit it, the only thing that stopped me was I was so damn tired. Could hardly breath. Seventy-three years old ain’t no picnic. This getting older, it ain’t for cowards.”

  “Seventy-three or not Mac, I watched you kick the shit out of a much younger man who I know thought he was going to do the same to you. Nothing less than impressive about that. Thirty or forty years ago, you must have been one of the most dangerous human beings on the planet.”

  Mac snorted, his hand running across the close cropped hair of his scalp.

  “My team, they had a name for me. My code name was Abaddon. From the Bible. It means the destroyer. We were all good – maybe the best. Me though, when there was killing to be done, they deferred to me. That was my gift. Gun, bomb, or by hand, it’s what I did best.”

  Mac held his hands over the table, turning his palms so they faced upward.

  “Sometimes I try to remember how many lives I took – their faces. Some I do, but so many of them I can’t. They just start to drift into the rest…faceless…nameless…”

  “You might have been a destroyer before, Mac, but now, here in Dominatus, you’re the protector. Maybe that’s your redemption?”

  “Redemption? For me? Don’t know about that, better be a mighty forgiving God then. Otherwise, I’m pretty sure I’m shit out of luck.”

  The sound of an approaching snow machine’s grumble made its way into Freedom Tavern – likely Dublin on her way to pick me up.

  “Tell me something, Mac, if August Hess walked through that door right now with a handful of his own men and demanded every person in Dominatus be rounded up and sent to a re-education facility, what would you do?”

  Mac answered without hesitation.

  “I’d kill him. All of them.”

  “And why is that, Mac?”

  This time Mac paused, his eyes narrowing slightly as he considered the question.

  “It’s what I know how to do.”

  I shook my head.

  “No, that’s not it. Why would you take on those odds? Why take on Hess and his men? What would really motivate you to risk your life doing that?”

  Again Mac hesitated, his eyes looking through one of the small windows to the outside.

  “This is my home. I care about these people. They’re my family. Been my family, some of them I’ve known for twenty years. I feel…Dominatus gave me a life. It’s my duty to try and protect them.”

  I nodded in agreement.

  “Exactly, Mac. You’re not following orders. You’re not fighting because it’s what you’re good at, or what you know how to do. It’s why you were able to go up against Hess today – you’re fighting for your home. Your way of life. Your family. You’re doing it because it’s your duty. Maybe for the first time in your life – you know in your heart you’re doing it for the right reasons, and that makes you a far tougher and more dangerous soldier than you ever were before.”

  Mac stared at me, his face betraying almost no emotion before his voice finally broke the silence.

  “You really are your father’s son. Thank you for your words, Reese – I mean that. Thank you.”

  The sound of Dublin’s snow machine was just outside Freedom Tavern.

  XI.

  As I sat upon the back of her snow machine, Dublin indicated she wanted to show me the place where she spent most of her time – the large greenhouse facility that sat approximately a hundred yards from the Dominatus operations center I had visited earlier. A light mist-like rain fell down on us as Dublin expertly operated the snow machine over the small hills leading to the greenhouse. Within a few minutes we had arrived there.

  Like the operations center, it was a long single story building, though unlike the operations center, the greenhouse roof was covered almost completely in solar paneling. Near the entrance a small pump house could be heard running – I assumed powered by the energy being harnessed by the large solar panels. Dublin noted my attention to the pump house and stopped to explain how it worked.

  “We have two genera
tors in there. The main one is run off of a battery bank charged by the roof panels. A back-up coal-powered generator will kick on if needed, though that only happens maybe once or twice a week during the winter months. A line runs directly below the pump house about forty or so feet where it hits the natural aquifer that is below us. That’s where we get our water supply for Dominatus. Pure, clean water. No filtering needed.”

  Dublin motioned to the entrance, a wide smile breaking out across her face.

  “Wanna see inside?”

  “Absolutely.”

  As the door opened, I was greeted with the smell of freshly worked earth and felt the warmer temperatures of the greenhouse’s interior. Various growing beds were set up, from vegetables of all kinds, to a row of raspberries and even a corner set up like a small indoor apple orchard. Dublin pointed proudly to what appeared to be some kind of small overhead heating or watering unit that hung from the center of the room.