The Collapse Trilogy (Book 1): Free Fire Zone

by Rod Carstens

  He placed the explosives carefully and set the timer. He slipped his arm back into the pack’s shoulder strap and was about to turn and follow Matos and Cat when a Special Action Team broke cover. They sprinted across the street toward the building Tanner had just left. They hadn’t spotted him yet. Tanner knelt, took careful aim, and opened up. The explosive rounds tore into the Special Action Team. Two went down, torn apart in spite of their armor, and the others took cover.

  That should hold them, Tanner thought. He turned and raced down the stairs into the subway. He could see Cat’s and Matos’s headlamps bobbing as they ran ahead. Tanner was sprinting through ankle-deep water away from the entrance, and still the explosion almost knocked him down with its force. The door was sealed behind them. Now where to come up and out?

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Special Action Team

  1805 hours

  “What?” Lieutenant Muller yelled into her radio.

  “Yes, ma’am, they crossed at 97th and are down into the subway. They sealed the entrance behind them with explosives,” the first-squad leader reported. “I’ve got two troopers down. Request permission to load them into the troop carrier.”

  “Yeah, go ahead,” she snapped. “What happened?”

  “They fired on the gunship to cover their escape into a subway entrance. We were right behind them, but when we broke cover one of them was waiting and opened up on us.”

  “What is the status of the two down?”

  “They were using explosive rounds. Both are dead.”

  “You dumb shits. Did you forget who you were chasing?”

  “But Lieutenant…”

  “Never mind.”

  “Headhunter, this is Guns One. I’m going to have to return to base. I’ve got several red lights. Some of their rounds damaged my oil system.”

  “Just fine. Three people on the ground with small arms take out two of my people and put an armored gunship out of commission. Get out of here,” she snapped.

  Muller was furious. How could those idiots have let Tanner escape? They were right on his tail. She should have been cleaning things up now, and instead everything had changed. She knew they would not stay long in the subway before they came out. If they stayed down there, it would be much easier to hunt them down. So she knew they would surface, but where would they come up? Where were they going?

  She opened her combat computer and pulled up a schematic of the subway within two blocks of her position. They could go in four directions: north, south, east, and west. She had already entered the profile of the targets, so she typed in “escape and evasion” and input their current location. An icon of a man appeared on the small display in front of her, with a compass superimposed on the map. A percentage showed at each of the four compass points on the map. East took them directly back into the Free Fire Zone with the sweeps starting soon. Five percent. North and they would leave one Free Fire Zone for another. South would lead them to a quieter zone with less gang activity, but it would not get them any closer to getting out of the city. A three-percent chance according to the computer. West would get them to the closest border and several emergency supply caches. They would know about those supply caches and they had been out on patrol for almost a month. They had to be low on everything. The computer said ninety percent for Tanner and his team to head west. If she were running that was the only thing that would make sense. She agreed. So westward it was, she thought.

  She selected the western zone and asked for the best place to ambush them. A section of the boulevard suddenly glowed red, after the program calculated the nearest subway exits and the positions of the emergency caches. They would have to cross it if they went for the caches or tried to escape. Good, that was simple enough. She would catch them crossing the boulevard.

  “First squad, get to the nearest roof for pickup,” Muller snapped into her radio. She had lost a gunship but she still had a gunship and the troopship. That should be enough.

  “Troop One, pick up first squad. They will squawk their position as soon as they are ready.”

  Lieutenant Muller switched frequencies and called the dispatcher. “Headhunter Actual to Dispatch.”

  “Go, Headhunter.”

  “I need a replacement gunship. One of mine had mechanical problems.”

  “Check, Headhunter. ETA should be ten minutes.”

  Muller did some quick calculations in her head. They had to pick up the first squad. Determine the new positions. Insert the squad in those positions. All of that would take at least ten minutes, and by then she would have her second gunship back.

  “Roger, Dispatch. That sounds good. Headhunter out.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Resource Security Force

  Team Sixteen

  1815 hours

  Tanner held up Cat and Matos at the bottom of an old escalator. They had been moving through the darkness on wet and slippery landings for some time now. The subways had flooded more than once, and the landings, walls, and stairs were covered with mold, mushrooms, and anything else that liked to grow in the dark. What sunlight that did filter through the sidewalk grates on the street was fading as sunset approached. The track itself was now a small, stagnant river. It was a concrete swamp and had the dank smell of rotting plants mixed with oil. They had been moving long enough to know no one had followed. It was time to get their bearings. Tanner pulled out his pad. The batteries were almost gone, but he could still see the schematic of the subway.

  “The quickest way out of the Free Fire Zone is west. There are several supply caches in that general direction,” Tanner said.

  “But we'll have to cross Washington to get there,” Cat observed.

  “I know—."

  “Wait a minute,” Matos said. “What are you talking about? This has all got to be some kind of mistake. All we have to do is wait for the sweeps in the morning by regular troops and give ourselves up.”

  “There has been no mistake,” Tanner said quietly.

  “But we haven’t done anything wrong. Why would anyone want to have us killed?” Matos asked.

  “I don’t know why for sure, but I may be the cause.”

  “What are you talking about?” Cat said.

  “When we got the Free Fire Zone notification I protested. Dispatch ignored me so I requested a Field Emergency Patch with Steiger. They patched me through and I argued with Steiger that this area does not meet the criteria for being declared a Free Fire Zone.”

  “So?”

  “When he still wouldn’t listen to me, I told him I was going to turn in my papers and file an IIRS on this decision. I was going to make a big stink.”

  Cat and Matos could only stare at Tanner.

  “You did this without talking to us first? You know what a big deal an IIRS is. You knew you were going to twist some very big tails by doing that, and we're standing next to you. What you do is what we do. You didn’t fucking ask us!” Cat snapped.

  “I know. I know, but I just couldn’t stand by and let them kill a bunch of the innocent men, women, and children. I had to stand up to them. I would never have done it if I’d had any idea this would happen. I should have kept my mouth shut until we got back to the base.”

  “They why did you go off the rails without thinking it through? You know how things can go,” Cat said.

  “Look, you know what it was like when we started. I bought their bullshit hook, line, and sinker. We did some good back in the day. Put down the food riots, made sure the right people got their rations, took out the gangs that were stealing food and selling it on the black market. Rode shotgun on the food convoys. All of it. It was why I joined. Now…now we’re just a fucking army to keep the poor down. Free Fire Zones, gang ambushes. We kill for those fucks up there!” Tanner said.

  “So? We all saw it coming, but what are we going to do about it? You know what happens to people who stand up to them,” Matos snarled. “We can’t change any of that. We can only get killed.”

  “Fu
ck!” Cat snarled and walked a few steps down the landing, her back turned to Tanner.

  “Shit, man. What the fuck were you thinking?” Matos said, staring at Tanner.

  “Look. I didn’t have any time to tell you guys. We barely had enough time to make the extraction.”

  Neither Cat nor Matos said a word. They each just stood there, lost in their own thoughts. Cat suddenly whirled around and said, “You know we're now no better off than the settlers out here, except we’ve got better weapons.”

  “Cat, please…”

  “Look, I know how you feel, but we are now worse off than the homesteaders. They want us dead. You, me, and Matos dead for some reason we don’t even know. Goddamnit, how could you do this to us?”

  “I didn’t do shit to either of you. They did. It’s them trying to kill us, not me. If it wasn’t this mission, it would have been the next. Don’t you see we know too much?. We know how they operate. We're at the shitty end of things. Eventually we would go on a mission and just disappear. Do you know of anyone who has completed their tours and retired?” Tanner yelled.

  Cat and Matos were both silent. Nobody knew of anybody who had retired. You just eventually disappeared, or if you were very lucky you were promoted out of the field. But that was a very small pyramid with few slots for people off the street.

  “At least this way we choose our way out. We stand up to those fucks for once. We stop doing their dirty work,” Tanner said.

  Matos looked at Cat but said nothing.

  “What do any of us have to go back to? Nothing. Just more missions,” Tanner said.

  Again Cat and Matos exchanged glances.

  “What about Johnson and her team?”

  “That’s a fucking urban myth,” Cat said. Again turning her back to Tanner.“That was close to fifteen years ago now. We weren’t even on when she was supposed to have walked. No one has walked away.”

  “Bullshit,” Tanner snapped. “You know we’ve all talked about it. Walking away.”

  “We were fucking drunk,” Matos replied. “None of us was serious.”

  Cat was silent. She lit a cigarette. Her back was still to Tanner. The only sound in the subway was the dripping water from the street above. Fading sunlight came through a grate above them, casting prisonlike shadows over them all.

  “If we had planned, we might have had a chance of walking. But now they are hunting us for some fucking reason we don’t even know. Goddamnit, Vin, you have really got us in deep shit,” Cat almost yelled.

  “I didn’t know that my protest would do something like this. I never would have done it. You know that. This Free Fire Zone declaration smells and you know that too. There must be some serious shit surrounding this thing. Maybe we have a chance to really hurt these one-percent fucks for once.”

  Cat turned around and stared at Tanner for a long moment. “I stopped trying to save the world years ago, Vin. I am not going to go tilting at windmills now.”

  Tanner could see her face in the glow of her cigarette as she took another drag.

  “Do we have a choice?” Tanner said.

  Cat looked over at Matos. His dark eyes revealed nothing.

  “Fuck me,” Cat said in disgust. “No, we don’t. Not anymore.”

  “Yeah, shit,” Matos said. “We don’t have any choices left. So now what?”

  They turned and looked at Tanner.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Special Action Team

  1820 hours

  Lieutenant Anke Muller waited as the patch to Steiger was completed and the scrambler hooked up. Getting the gunship and her troops was taking longer than she had expected and now she was waiting on Steiger. This whole mission was getting to be a pain in her ass.

  “This is the Six, go ahead.”

  “Sir, the targets have evaded us.”

  “What! How did this happen?” Steiger snarled.

  “There were at the extraction point as you said they would be, but when they saw us, they ran.”

  “Why did they run? What did you do to tip them off?”

  Muller could have predicted this from Steiger. He was already building his case that it was her fault.

  “We did nothing. If I had to make a guess, Tanner saw two gunships and a troopship and figured it out.”

  “Really. Is that your story? That he just guessed right and ran? That’s not going to go far with the higher-ups.”

  “This boy is one smart, tough guy. Don’t underestimate him. I’m not going to after what I've seen already,” Anke said.

  “I don’t have to tell you how important they are now. We just released the story to the press about them being killed by gangs,” Steiger replied.

  Anke was not concerned about Steiger, but she was concerned about Rand. He had enough power to make even her sweat.

  “Yes, sir. We will find them. It is only a matter of time,” Muller said.

  “Time is something we do not have much of, Lieutenant. And they will be difficult to catch. They’ve already proved that, haven’t they?”

  “Sir, if I may make a suggestion? Tell the regulars making the sweeps tomorrow that you believe the gangs have their uniforms and weapons and to shoot on sight anyone seen in them.”

  There was a pause on the other end as Steiger thought about her suggestion. Anke was sure that it would be his idea when he made his report.

  “A very good suggestion, Lieutenant. I will do just that. But let’s hope that we won’t have to depend on somebody else doing your job. Otherwise I’m going to have to tell Mr. Rand what has happened, and trust me, I am not going to take the blame on this one. He is more than a little interested in the outcome of this operation.”

  Very few things scared Anke, but the thought of a corporation vice president looking for a scapegoat was one of them.

  “Sir.”

  “On your primary target—it’s rather ironic, but Tanner gave us our best lead to where the primary target is hiding. In Tanner's last sit rep he reported a group of settlers who were very well organized. In fact, he thought they had Service training. He gave us an address. Between that bit of information and what we already knew, we are sure that is where your primary target is hiding. When we ran it through the sim, it gave us a ninety-percent probability. So clean up Tanner and his team and get on your primary.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  “It appears your target has a rather extensive settlement with weapons and trained people, but I am sure you and your people can handle any problems that might arise. The address is 1206 86th Street.” She entered the address into her computer.

  “I have it, sir.”

  “Good, now get to work. You have a lot to do in the next few hours. This is Six out.” Steiger snapped off his radio.

  Muller glanced at her map. The address was back across Washington Boulevard. She pulled up a schematic of the building on that block. It could be made into quite a complex for the settlers if someone knew what they were doing, and her target did. She would need that other gunship as well as her manpower, but right now she had more pressing problems. Tanner and his team were proving to be a little more than interesting. She needed to get her team in position for that ambush.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Resource Security Force

  Team Sixteen

  1830 hours

  Tanner, Matos, and Cat were splashing through the subway muck and slime. They had decided to try and make it to Soldiers Park then go up to the surface and use the cover of the overgrown park to start to move west. If they could get to the caches they would have a chance.

  There was a set of stairs and an escalator leading to the surface. Tanner took the west edge and Cat took the east edge. Tanner eased his head up until he could just see over the edge of the escalator. It was totally dark now Tanner flipped down his night vision, he scanned the area. The park had long ago gone back to the original forest. It was thick with bushes and trees. It was a perfect place to move, and it was also a favorite of the gangs, which po
pulated it for ambushes. Tanner waited patiently. You didn’t move quickly through an area like this if you wanted to live. He waited. A raccoon came waddling by searching for food. He heard an owl, then something moved through the bushes not far from the entrance. A feral dog pack moved past. The wind was in Tanner’s face, so the dogs wouldn’t pick up his smell. Tanner waited another five minutes. Still nothing. Finally he whispered on the team’s radio.

  “Anything?”

  “Negative,” Cat replied.

  Matos was on point. “Nothing,” he said.

  “Everybody, let’s change from explosive rounds to normal ammo with silencers.” Tanner carefully removed the magazine filled with explosive rounds and replaced it with normal rounds from his MOLLE. He reached into a pocket on the left side of his MOLLE, pulled out his silencer, and carefully screwed it onto the barrel of his pistol, and then put the pistol back in its holster.

  “Ready?” Tanner said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Ready.”

  “Matos, stay on point. Let’s move west toward 98th Street.”

  “Check.”

  Matos was the best point man when they were moving as a team. Tanner was in the middle and Cat was their Tail-End Charlie. They moved slowly, their heads constantly moving. They were targets now, like anyone or anything else on the ground. Matos held up his hand for them to halt. He had found a trail leading away toward the north. It was well-worn. He dropped to the ground and slowly eased his head out so he could look one way then the other to see if the trail was clear. With his head so close to the ground, anyone looking would never be able to distinguish Matos from the brush.

  Matos’s hand went up, and he slowly lowered it to the ground. Tanner and Cat carefully lay flat, their weapons pointed toward the trail. Matos reached down and pulled out the knife he kept in his boot. That was when Tanner heard the voices. They weren’t trying to be quiet.