Payload

by RW Krpoun

  Orienting himself, he took a compass sighting and set off. The bar was two miles cross-country, and he expected it would take him three hours to reach it, moving for stealth rather than speed. Moving through the wet brush, rain pattering down all around him, he felt better than at any time since the chopper crashed. It felt good to be on the move, hunting rather than being hunted, acting rather than reacting. This was what being an Airborne Ranger was all about: moving through the darkness to find, fix, and finish the enemy.

  Blood humming in his veins, nerve endings sparking with the rush that only comes from hunting violent men, Marv slipped through the night.

  The triple-B was a typical roadside bar: a rambling single-story wood structure painted white sitting at the rear of a large asphalt parking lot. There had been a large sign mounted on tall vertical pipes, but the entire assembly had been cut down and unceremoniously dragged off into the brush. Marv lay behind one silver-painted leg of the sign and studied the scene before him.

  How they had found them was partially apparent: squatting in the center of the parking lot, and the reason the sign had been cut down, was a small helicopter, roughly the size of a Bell Jet Ranger. It was tied down for the night, with tarps over the engine.

  A cargo truck pulling a fuel trailer was parked nearby-Marv guessed that the bird’s ground crew drove that rig, ready with tools and fuel when the air crew had completed their mission. There were two dark-colored SUVs and a white panel van parked at the main doors of the bar, dim light showed through the barred windows, and somewhere nearby a generator purred softly.

  A sentry was posted, sitting in a lawn chair out of the rain, the bright hot dot of a cigarette glowing and ebbing. If it weren’t for the cigarette Marv would have guessed the guard was asleep; he wasn’t using NV gear, and the butt’s ember should ruin his natural night vision.

  The size of the operation made this business tricky-if Marv had had his full gear and a fire team he wouldn’t have hesitated, but being by himself made things risky.

  Resting the googles on the cold rough metal of the many-times-painted pipe, Marv watched the sentry. It was a young man, he decided, slender, tall, and with an AK-style rifle across his lap. At first he though the object on the man’s vest was a magazine pouch, but when he activated the Yukon’s IR infrared illuminator (which looked like a spotlight when seen through the goggles, but was invisible to Human eyes) he realized it was the control unit for a perimeter security system.

  He grinned-odds were it was the military’s PEW: Platoon Early Warning system, a series of units which would detect seismic noise, such as footsteps, or even incautious crawling. A decent system, but it was only as good as the guy who installed it, and the guy who monitored it. Marv was betting he was better than both.

  Fading back into the brush, he circled the building, noting points of entry and egress. The generator and the helicopter were the keys to his plan: they chose a place that sat on asphalt to avoid slinging gravel everywhere, and PEWS was useless on asphalt. The generator was in a silencing housing which did a good job-it wasn’t audible at a hundred yards, but the housing did nothing for the vibration.

  The generator squatted at the rear left, or southwest, corner of the building, and as Marv expected it was sitting under a tarp at the end of the asphalt so the grounding rod could be driven into the soil without having to punch through asphalt.

  Powering up the IR infrared illuminator, the Ranger spotted the PEWS box and nodded to himself: too close to the generator, whose grounding rod transmitted vibrations to the soil. The PEWS system was sophisticated, and would filter out a nearby source of constant seismic noise so as not to constantly set off the alarm. If the FASA geeks had bothered the read the entire manual, Marv knew, they would know that those same filters being engaged drastically reduced that particular sensor’s effectiveness.

  Centering himself on the grounding stake, Marv low-crawled, M-4 cradled in his arms, moving one slip forward, pausing, then another, pausing, then eased a foot sideways, pausing, and then one forward. With the PEWS’ units efficiently reduced by the cut-in filter and the irregular nature of his movement, Marv was confident he was invisible to the device. Employed as an aggressor in training operations with conventional units he had bypassed PEWS systems on several occasions.

  Easing up onto the asphalt, he checked his watch: zero five twenty-five. Dawn was at zero seven hundred, give or a few minutes, meaning he had a solid hour of darkness to work with. After scraping off as much mud as he could and getting a count of the content status of the gas cans lined up under the building’s eaves, he eased up to the back door. The anti-burglary iron cage outer door was propped open with a cinderblock, and when he tried the knob on the back door he was surprised to feel it turn.

  Switching on the IR infrared illuminator, he slipped through the doorway, pistol in hand, and found himself in a clean but disused kitchen taking up the rear third of the building. A double doorway opened into the bar proper, and he could hear snoring from that direction. Silently wishing he had a frag, or even the CS grenades that had been stolen from him, he eased another step into the room.

  To his right was a walk-in cooler that was chained shut, and to his far left was an office with the door all but closed. Panning back and forth he noted a wooden kitchen chair flex-cuffed to the stainless steel serving counter with a scattering of tools nearby. The splatter and stains told the story and it wasn’t a happy one: interrogation with extreme prejudice. An object amongst the clutter caught his eye; it looked like the offspring of a stun gun and a cattle prod, a short thick rubber-coated truncheon with two electrodes jutting from the business end. When he depressed the recessed button a vivid blue arc leapt between the posts, dazzling his goggles.

  Tucking the device into a thigh pocket, he moved to the other side of the dual counters and found a neat array of canned goods, survival rations, candy bars, and bottled water laid out with military precision Pocketing a Payday bar, he slipped past the double doorway. He almost missed the rows of tactical equipment at the far end of the foodstuffs: hiker radios, Yukon night vision goggles, Streamlight tactical flashlights, and boxes of batteries. He hung three goggles on the back of his MOLLE vest, and stuffed two flashlights and a full box of batteries into his other thigh pocket.

  Moving to the office door, he eased it open another inch and peered through. He could see a map on the wall with pins in it, part of a desk covered in papers, and the corner of a cot occupied by a sleeping subject. He desperately wanted to get his hands on that map, but he knew there were more than one person racked out in the bar area, and that the odds of getting the map without waking the person on the cot was nil. He was only going to get one shot at this operation, and he had to make it count.

  Retracing his steps, he grabbed a soiled screwdriver from the pile by the chair. Outside he eased the cage-door closed and slid the screwdriver through the latch. Choosing two full gas cans, he carried them to the northwest corner, moving quietly and easing the cans down.

  Kneeling, he took a tactical glance around the corner: the sentry was still in his chair, looking more asleep than awake. Checking the surroundings, he ran through his plan one more time before straightening.

  Marv came around the corner walking softly but striving to make his gait and bearing as normal as possible. The sentry heard him and sat erect, turning to look as the Ranger closed, not completely alarmed. The young man gave a startled sobbing rattle as Marv jammed the posts on the stun gun into the sentry’s throat and hit the switch. A high-pitched whine escaped his lips as his body convulsed; Marv caught the monitor unit for the PEWS system as it started to fall, then swung the stun gun in a vicious arc that connected with the sentry’s left temple.

  Setting the control unit and stun gun on the sidewalk, the Ranger pulled the AK off the incapacitated sentry and slung it over his own arm. Moving briskly, he recovered the gas cans and headed for the helicopter, hearing a voice call from inside the bar but ignoring it.

  Ope
ning the left front pilot’s door to the helicopter he set a gas can on the seat and unscrewed the cap. Noticing a binder on the other pilot’s seat, he grabbed it before tipping the gas can over. Bracing the door open with the AK, he trotted to the cargo truck and set the gas can on its hood, unscrewing the cap and then tipping it over. Heading back to the fuel trailer he unscrewed the fill valve and headed towards the sign, pausing mid-way to reverse his cap and flip up his goggles. Striking the first road flare, he heaved it into the helicopter’s open door; the other he threw onto the truck’s hood.

  Shouldering his M-4 as the chopper’s interior exploded into an inferno and flames engulfed the front end of the truck, he set the doughnut on the front door just as a shirtless man carrying a rifle charged out, shooting him twice center mass and then putting a bullet through each of the windows, rapid fire.

  As he ran into the underbrush the gunfire started behind him, and it did not stop until he was a half mile away.

  The east was brightening when Gnomehome picked him up. “These CBs are pretty useful,” JD observed from behind the wheel as the Ranger swung himself on board. “Man, you look like hell.”

  “Nothing a shower won’t fix.” Marv tossed Bear the damp binder. “Let’s get rolling west-I highlighted the general route in the atlas. The reason they knew where to go is that they know what we are driving, and they had a helicopter.”

  “They ‘had’?” Dyson made air quotes.

  “Yeah, some bad luck with a gas can and a road flare took it out of the picture. The bad news is these guys are well organized, and that’s not their only team in the area-I got a look at a situation map, but couldn’t steal it.”

  “How did they know what we’re driving?” Bear asked, thumbing through the binder.

  “Berlin. There’s a security camera picture of me standing at the pumps refueling. They knew we were on I-75, and given the terrain and conditions Berlin was a pretty obvious choice, especially since they figured I would head straight for the nearest military establishment. There wasn’t much traffic, so even if they didn’t have a clear picture of us as individuals it wouldn’t take much to figure out which one we were.”

  “Why would they have any idea of what we looked like?”

  “If they had a spotter coordinating the zed release from the Wal Mart truck and the pick-up doing the exfiltration of the Wal Mart guys, he could have gotten a look at us, or even just our vehicle. Probably he noticed the guy in ACUs shooting up the interior of the pickup.” Marv didn’t want to bring up the fact of his initial communications being compromised.

  “Well, they definitely know what Gnomehome looks like,” Dyson observed, passing the binder to Addison. “Should we ditch it?”

  “I don’t want to lose the time,” Marv shook his head. “Without the bird it’s not a problem until we reach the Mississippi River. Even if they steal or get another bird into the area, it’s not that uncommon an RV.”

  “Pictures from the Net,” Addison mumbled, holding up the binder. “Commercial photos, except the one of you. We just change the outside a little, make it look less new.”

  “Good idea.” Marv got his other ACU out of the dryer. “I’m heading for the shower. Oh, here, I picked up some more gear last night.”

  The shower lifted some of the strain from his shoulders. He wondered if the sentry had died, but drove the thought away. This was war, same as Afghanistan, and everyone choses a side and lives or dies by that decision. That kid was part of the team that set infected subjects loose on the Mighty Quinn and I-75, and that meant there was no point in ‘what-ifs’.

  Bathed, he put on clean ACU bottoms and clean socks and dialed the board-mounted sat phone, wincing at the memory of Doc being hammered backwards by the incoming fire. The little goober had been a pain at times but he stood up when his country and his fellow man needed him, and there was a great deal to be said for that. Sitting on the toilet lid, every scrape and bruise aching, Marv suspected that more Gnomes, and especially himself, would be seeing the short madman again soon.

  Colonel Nelson picked up on the third ring, sounding weary. “Nelson.”

  “Fastbox Two, sir. We’re rolling west. We got hit in an RV park around midnight, zeds and a ground attack. We got clear, but we lost two members of the team KIA. The payload is secure.”

  “FASA?”

  “Yes, sir. They got our vehicle description from where we gassed up in Berlin, and used a light helicopter to shadow us. We killed at least two of them, and I recovered some intel off one of them which led me to a bar they were using as a base. I destroyed the helicopter, and wounded two more. Colonel, these people are well-equipped and fairly disciplined.”

  “Good work, Sergeant,” Colonel Nelson hesitated. “We know they’re good-they have raised havoc all over the country.”

  “When can I expect a link-up, sir? These guys I’m with are willing, but they’re out of their league. I signed on for this, but I really don’t like leading civilians to their deaths. Sir.”

  The officer was silent for a moment. “Sergeant, there’s no good way to tell you this. FASA killed the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs last night, and they’ve gotten a half-dozen members of Congress and a couple Cabinet members as well. We’re purging the military and Secret Service of infiltrators and turncoats, but there is a massive demand for everything, and especially for personnel with clearances that ensure they are outside of FASA control.”

  “Colonel, all I need is one chopper and one guy to hand off the payload.”

  “A chopper crew who is absolutely non-FASA and dedicated,” Colonel North said quietly. “You’re the five million dollar man, Sergeant. That’s what FASA is offering for you-it went out on the Net not long after midnight. Five million scoots’ worth of gold and ten inoculations for the flu is the reward for your payload.”

  Marv stared at the shower doors. “Sir, there’s no inoculation, at least not from FASA.”

  “Well, you and I know that, but in desperate times people do desperate things. You’ve already seen that with the Coast Guard crew.”

  The Ranger sighed. “I see your point, sir. All it would take is one dumbass. Are you sure that I can’t just torch the damned can?”

  “Absolutely. The initial reports are extremely positive from the lab work on Fastbox One’s sample. With your material they say we will be able to accelerate progress. An inoculation is a long ways down the pipeline, but they’re saying an immediate counteragent is possible, and soon. Our entire inventory of atropine auto-injectors for chemical warfare is being assembled and prepped for re-deployment as we speak.”

  “Counteragent, sir?”

  “If you’re bitten or otherwise exposed and can get the counteragent into play fast enough, you live. As in, remain uninfected. In any case, a helicopter is not a viable option for at least six hours, probably more. I’ll contact you when I have a confirmed event window.”

  “Sounds good, sir. We’re keeping on with the mission, sir. My battery is fading, so I’ll sign off. I’ll contact you again at eighteen hundred, or sooner if I have something to report.”

  “Good luck, Sergeant.”

  Marv slumped against the toilet tank. Things just kept getting worse. He was tired, beat-up, and fed up. Uncle Sugar certainly wasn’t living up to his end of the contract. “Deb, I don’t think I’m gonna get out of this one,” he whispered to himself.

  Hooking up the battered sat phone to the trickle charger Doc had rigged up, Marv moved to the center of the RV’s main area. “Guys, I got some news: FASA put a bounty on our heads. Big money, enough so we have a double reason to avoid contact with any organized group. They’re promising payment in gold and inoculations, which means anyone trying to cash in will be zombies in the next terror attack.”

  “Anyway, anyone who wants out will be dropped off at the next place we pass where they can find a ride, no hard feelings. I’m gonna need to keep the RV-I still need to complete my mission. I know things are a lot rougher than any of you expected when
you signed on, and losing Doc and Captain Jack should be a wake-up call. FASA wants the Yard Gnomes dead.”

  “You’re supposed to draw a line in the dirt with a sword,” Bear grinned. “The one time that damn katana would have been useful, and it’s not here. Anyway, I’m in. Those bastards cost me my hog.”

  “I’m in,” Addison mumbled.

  “I fight for country,” Brick thumped his chest. “FASA can kiss ass.”

  “Doc and Captain Jack…they weren’t really what they said they were, but they were good men,” Dyson said slowly. “I can’t walk away without feeling like I’m betraying them. I’ll see the job done”

  “I’m not a quitter,” JD said from the driver’s seat. “And those bastards owe me for a Cadillac and the worst trip of my life, just for starters.”

  “I was scared shitless before you told me there was a bounty on you guys,” Chip said unhappily. “I doubt I’m much good at any of this.” The heavy young man rubbed his scraggly beard. “But they set fire to that trailer just for a diversion. They’ve been killing people for…I dunno what for. I don’t care what for. Like Brick said, they can kiss my huge white butt. If you think I can help, I’m in, dude.”

  “I’m glad to be serving with you guys,” Marv said, and was mildly surprised to realize he meant it. “Unless anyone objects, I’m going to grab some Zs. Let’s keep at least two plus the driver awake at all times, and our eyes peeled. We need fuel, food, and firepower, the three Fs.”

  “Take the bed, I put clean sheets on it,” Chip stood. “I’ll get the laundry going. I don’t mind being one of the ones to stay up-I couldn’t sleep if I tried.”

  Doctor Davenport studied the reports coming in. They should have had the sample by now, but apparently the brutes had fought their way out of that absurd RV park despite a massive expenditure of resources employed in the attack. They had left behind at least two of these ‘Gnomes’, both deceased, and it was no surprise that both were part of the trio who had escaped from the mental institution. However lacking his organization might be in the application of force, their data collection was first-rate.