“I became CO when the last army-trained officer, General Wistick, died. We held an election and I got stuck with the job. Since then I’ve read everything on the base about how to be an officer, and I used my father as an example, but there’s still a lot I don’t know.”
“You were elected a colonel?”
“It was common during the Civil War.”
“I can’t…” Jane stopped herself. “Never mind; let’s see where we are now. Unless we get help, there’s nothing to stop the Chinese from overrunning this place. Are we agreed on that?”
When Lamar and Bob both nodded, she pressed on. “So how can we get help? That’s the question we have to answer. As I see it, there’s only one possible choice. We have to contact those people down south. Whoever they are, they aren’t friends with the Chinese.”
“How do we do that?”
“Don’t you have radios? This was… is… an army base. You’ve got to have some kind of communications gear.”
“Lots of it. What we don’t have is power to use them. We haven’t had electricity in at least twenty years.”
“I can’t believe the Army didn’t have emergency backups. I’ve even seen generators like bicycles, where you pedal and it charges a battery. Do you mean you don’t have anything like that?”
“My father explained to me that the base did have some of those, yes. But not long after The Collapse, a group of soldiers struck out east, taking with them anything and everything they wanted, including the manual generators. Vehicles, too, all the good stuff. Apparently they received a message for all units mobile enough to congregate near Chicago. I was too young to notice, but that’s what Dad told me. General Wistick verified it.”
“Have you tried rigging up a hand-cranked generator?”
“We tried that. Or, rather, the one guy who said he was an engineer after The Collapse was over tried it. He built something that sort of worked, but it didn’t generate enough voltage to do much of anything. It’s still here somewhere. We’ve also tried wind generators, but you’ve got to remember that most of the specialists left with the others. The garrison members who remained were those with no special skills. Even the solar-powered system failed after thirty years.”
“Damn, damn, damn. Without help, everything on this base is gonna wind up in Chinese hands, and they do have fresh fuel. Bob, how fast can you make it to Prescott?”
He whistled. “That’ll take a while.” He scratched the stubble under his lower lip. “Normally, I’d say a month or more, riding during the day. Jane can tell you, Colonel, that if you’ve got a trail to follow, you can make better time at night, but that’s also when the big predators are out. A full-grown mountain lion might attack a mounted rider, if it’s hungry enough. Same for a coyote pack. Wolves are the real worry, along with rattlesnakes. You just can’t see them in the dark and if you stick to the old roads, they like to lie around on the warm pavement.
“But if I do ride at night and don’t get eaten, I might make it in two and a half weeks. Maybe. Three at the outside and that would be hard riding, but it could be done. You don’t have any working flashlights, do you?”
They both turned to Colonel Lamar.
“We have a few flashlights that you shake and it recharges the battery, but the bulbs are all burned out.”
“If we’re gonna stop the Chinese, I don’t see any other choice but you riding south, do you?” Jane said. “No? Then you need to get some sleep and leave by midnight. We’ll take care of packing your saddlebags. That should give you and your horse some rest. Once you’re on the road, ride like hell and don’t stop for anything. Anything special you need?”
“Luck. Oh, yeah, and some aspirin, if there’s any around here.” He lifted his eyebrows at Colonel Lamar.
“I’m sorry, any medicine worth taking is long since gone. But… when was the last time you had coffee?”
“Real coffee? I don’t know, years, decades?”
Lamar smiled. “That we have. For some reason, the base had fifty tons of freeze-dried coffee stored here when the shit hit the fan. We’ve barely made a dent in it.”
“Hell fire, I’ll take coffee over aspirin any day. Gimme a couple of pounds and I’ll get out of here. You comin’ with me, Jane?”
“No, I’m gonna stay here and get ready to fight. But if you happen to see Nado, tell her I love her.”
“Nado?” Colonel Lamar asked.
“Lucia Tornado Alvarez. My twenty-year-old daughter.”
“Your daughter’s middle name is Tornado?”
“If you knew her, you’d understand.”
#
Chapter 12
Follow me if I advance, kill me if I retreat, avenge me if I die.
Mary Matalin, among others
Plumas National Forest, CA
1655 hours, April 11
Bear shaded his eyes as he stared southwest into the setting sun. He balanced on the roof of a ruined shack atop a rocky hill a thousand feet high. Three miles away, the Chinese worked on bridging a wide gap over a deep ravine that looked like a crack in the world. After that, they’d have to repeat the process less than a quarter mile away where the road had collapsed into another crevasse. With open desert on either side of the road, neither spot offered the chance for a hit-and-run attack.
A petite blonde named Lissa stood next to him on the side of the roof, where the frame made a cave-in less likely. The rest of his little band lay in the shade of the nearby trees.
Bear couldn’t stop grinning as he watched the faraway Chinese. At three miles’ distance, they seemed like ants swarming to build a nest for their queen.
“Is it a boy or a girl?”
“I don’t know, silly. I’m not even showing yet. Much.”
“Me, a dad. I just… wow.”
“So you’re happy about it?”
“Happy, worried, afraid… but yeah, I’m happy.”
“That’s a relief. I should have waited to tell you until after we got done spying on the Chinese, so let’s finish that and then we can talk.”
“Or we could strip and do it right here on this roof.”
She giggled like the young woman she was. “Stop it and concentrate. We can do that later.”
“And later, and later, and later… all right, I’ll stop!”
“We can’t do anything until they get closer to the hills.” She pointed toward the Chinese, redirecting his attention to the job at hand. “Unless you want to risk a night raid.”
“I’ve thought about that,” Bear said, re-focusing on why they’d come to that exposed spot. “But phase of the moon means we’d have to kneel and crawl most of the way, and the chances of running into a scorpion or a rattlesnake, or even a black widow, are just too high. The first time we hit them, we need to hit them as hard as we can. We need—” He frowned, listening. “What’s that?”
Lissa turned completely around, scanning for what could be making the strange whump-whump noise. “What’s that?” She pointed at the sky to their north.
Bear had never actually seen a helicopter before, but he’d heard enough about them to know one when he saw it. “Scatter! Scatter!” he yelled.
But it was too late. The helicopter’s narrow nose came straight at them as flashes hid its gun pod from view. Twenty-millimeter shells smashed into the wooden shack, exploding in splinters of wood and hot steel. Bear and Lissa had no time to flee before the structure began to collapse.
Their eyes met as he reached to throw her off the roof, but in the instant before their fingers touched a shell struck her in the upper chest. One second he was staring into her cornflower blue eyes, and in the next all her body from the waist up had vaporized into a spray of blood and organ tissue. He lost his balance and fell backward.
Stunned, he glared up as the Chinese gunship sped by, less than fifty feet overhead. It was so close, he saw the pilot’s helmeted face looking down at him. Turning over, he almost rolled into the heap of gore that seconds before had been Lissa.
“No! No, no, no, no, no!”
Three more of his crew lay near the shack, torn apart by the cannon shells, while the others ran for cover in some rocks. The sound of the helicopter kept him in the moment, and the wits that had kept him alive all those years shoved Lissa’s death into the background.
The shack had slumped over to one side and remained partly upright. As the helicopter banked for a second pass, Bear crawled under the wreckage and out of sight. Between cracks in the rubble, he watched the Chinese aircraft searching for targets. While crawling to another spot to keep it in sight, his hand landed on something metallic. It took his eyes a moment to focus in the darkness under the rubble, and then he saw what he’d touched: Bob’s RPGs. A plan formed in his mind.
He cupped his hands and screamed through a gap in the wreckage. “Who’s over there? Can you hear me?”
“It’s Artu, Tamika, and Stuttering Steve. Is that you, Bear?”
“Yeah. Listen up. Here’s what we’re gonna do!”
It only took a few seconds to relate his plan. Then, as the gunship hovered a mere twenty feet over the hillside looking for targets, Bear’s three followers rose from behind a huge boulder and opened fire with their rifles. Rounds pinged off the helicopter’s armored belly and smacked its canopy. With a quick turn, it brought the twenty-millimeter guns to bear and fired back, sending them diving for safety.
Bear saw his chance. The gunship’s stern hovered fifty feet from the shack. Intent on destroying the ones who’d shot at them, its crew never saw their own death coming. He wriggled through broken boards into the open. Standing in the dust storm thrown up by the rotors, Bear took aim and pulled the trigger.
One point six pounds of high explosives tipped the warhead that a gunpowder booster charge shot out of the tube at one hundred fifteen meters per second. After thirty feet, the rocket propellant kicked in, increasing the deadly grenade’s speed to two hundred ninety meters per second. Less than a second after Bear fired, the round struck the helicopter below the tail rotor. The blast threw the machine up and forward, on its nose, and blew off the last third of the fuselage.
With its top rotor still spinning, it crashed face first into the hillside. A fireball set off the twenty-millimeter rounds and sent a pall of smoke skyward like a mushroom cloud. Intense heat drove Bear back five steps. From the midst of the pyre, he saw movement. The pilot had been thrown free and crawled through the dirt at the edge of the fire.
Bear dropped the RPG and drew his sidearm, a Glock 22. All he could think was to blow out the man’s brains. There had been no chance to process Lissa’s death, so his only emotion was overwhelming rage. But when he got to the man’s side, he saw the flesh on his face hanging in strips, exposing his gums and cheekbones. His lips were gone and so was the tip of his nose. Flames licked through holes torn in his fireproof flight suit and the fingers of both hands had curled into blackened claws.
An acrid reek, like burning bacon, drove Bear back. The dying Chinese reached a hand toward him, and then pointed at himself with the nub of his index finger. Clearly he was begging Bear to shoot him and end his misery. Instead, Bear watched him burn.
#
Chapter 13
On wrongs swift vengeance waits.
Alexander Pope
Outside Vinton, CA
2230 hours, April 11
“You’re not thinking straight, man,” Artu said.
“You don’t have to come if you don’t want to,” Bear said. “But I’m going to kill every one of those fuckers I can. That shed is perfect. It’s a big pile of rusty metal that’ll make for great shrapnel, and it’s blocking the road. They won’t go around it unless they have to, because you can break an axle fast with all the holes out there in the sand. When the shed blows up, they’ll think they’re under attack and deploy.”
“It won’t delay them more than an hour or two. Come on, Bear, don’t do this.”
“I told Jane I’d delay them as long as I could, and I mean to do that. Every hour counts and they’ll have to check out every house and barn in the area before moving on. They’ll be looking over their shoulders. They might even stop for a while… damn, I wish we had enough gunpowder to rig some houses, too. I should’ve thought of that.”
“Look, Bear, I’ll follow you into a volcano if you ask me to, but this is nuts. Ever since Lissa died, you’ve been checked out. Suicide ain’t revenge.”
“Don’t bring Lissa into this!” Bear pointed his thick right index finger at the smaller man. “Don’t mention her again.”
“I’m just sayin’, something clicked over. You went from protecting our territory to wanting to kill every one of the fuckers. There’s a difference, you know.”
“I’m stuffing that shed with gunpowder whether you help me or not.”
“You know I’m coming, but why not find a choke point? Even if you blow a chunk out of the highway, they’ll just go around it. Holes in the desert can be filled.”
“I know. That’s what I want them to do. Next time, we put IEDs out in the desert.”
“Huh?”
“You’ll see. Now, are you coming?”
“I said I was, and the others are, too. But without Lissa here…” He stopped. Lissa had always been the voice of reason in Bear’s ear, but by default Artu had taken over the role. “Yeah, we’re in.”
“Then quit fuckin’ around and let’s go. It won’t stay dark forever.”
#
0457 hours, April 14
The metal sides and roof of the old barn had long since fallen onto California Highway 70 in the tiny settlement of Vinton. The Chinese had gone on high alert after the destruction of their helicopter, and it had taken Bear’s group most of two nights to pack the homemade gunpowder into the wreckage. He’d insisted on using charcoal from the arroyo willow tree to make the explosives, because it burned hotter and faster than other woods and created a more powerful blast. The Enclave’s resident gunpowder maker, Ristov Kurov, hated using it for that very reason, but Bear insisted and he was their leader. Bear had personally made the two-hundred-foot-long fuse.
The house where he crouched, watching the Chinese approach the trap, lay in ruins around him. The floor had partly collapsed, so Bear traced his getaway path with care. He weighed close to two hundred fifty pounds, but the joists underneath remained sound enough to hold his bulk without collapsing. At least, he hoped so.
He’d laid the fuse in such a way that it ran from the pile of metal, through and out the back of the ruined shed, then along the back of the two houses, before it came to the rear door of the one where he lurked. The fuse he’d made burned fast and would take no more than seconds to set off the detonation. From an escape standpoint that was dangerous, as he needed to be on his horse and galloping away before the Chinese could react after the explosion. But from a standpoint of maximum damage, it wouldn’t give any Chinese clearing the wreckage enough time to escape, even if they spotted the burning fuse. In that moment, Bear cared more about killing Chinese than he did personal danger.
It all happened exactly as he’d planned. The Chinese backed up a six-wheeled armored personnel carrier to within ten feet of the heap of metal and wood blocking the highway. Seven men scrambled atop the wreckage, attaching chains to sheets of metal and the other ends to the APC. When all seven stood atop the shed at the same time, Bear lit the fuse and should have run for the back door, but he didn’t. Instead, he watched and waited.
The blast was like a giant anti-personnel bomb going off. Two of the Chinese died instantly, torn to pieces by the explosion itself, and the other five flew backward as jagged bits of metal tore into them. The rear of the APC reared up and then slammed back down. Shrapnel flew fifty feet in all directions.
“That’s for Lissa, motherfuckers,” Bear said.
#
Chapter 14
It is essential to understand that battles are primarily won in the hearts of men. Men respond to leadership in a most remarkable way and once you have wo
n his heart, he will follow you anywhere.
Vince Lombardi
Plumas National Forest, CA
0937 hours, April 14
“Uhh!” Bear woke and jumped to his feet, ready to fight.
“Bear, whoa! Ice, man, ice. It’s me, Artu.”
The big man wiped his eyes and combed his hair back with his fingers, all in one motion. “Sorry, bad dream.”
“Lissa?”
“Yeah.”
“Junker Jane brought some righteous toys to shove up the Chinese’s ass.”
“Show me.”
They found her in a small clearing, wiping down her horse. Her saddle lay to one side, giving the sweating animal a chance to cool off in the shade of a tall pine tree. On the ground near the tree lay a stack of four large-bore pipe-shaped objects. Beyond a line of trees and bushes, a gang of workers scrambled around a collapsed bridge like slow-moving ants, riflemen deployed around them. As the road slanted toward the forest, the Chinese repair efforts no longer seemed hidden or distant. If Bear listened, he could hear voices on the wind.
“I’m glad you’re back, Jane. The distance between the road and the forest has gotten dangerous. We can’t sneak up on them Chinese any more. Artu said you brought us a new gadget so whatever it is, I hope it’s something long range.”
“Sorry it took me so long. I heard about Lissa,” she said, throwing the towel in her saddlebag. “I’m sorry, Bear.”
“Yeah.”
Jane wanted to put her arms around his massive shoulders. She wanted him to bury his head in her breast and hold her tight and let her comfort him. Deep lines creased his round face. But combined with the dark circles under his eyes, she saw the pain of his wound was too fresh, and said no more about it.
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