“Hold on, Sergeant Turner,” Jake said, raising a hand. “I need a minute.”
“Shit,” the older man grumbled, then called out, “Okay, everyone. The LT is gonna try to get some information. Keep your heads on a swivel.”
Jake walked over to a stall where a pretty young woman sat on an old milk crate. Surrounding her were probably a hundred bottles of water stored in all manner of containers. She stood quickly and Jake noticed that she was fairly clean, compared to most of the people he’d seen.
He pointed to a bottle and asked what was in it. “Are you fucking dumb?” she asked. “It’s water. Do you want it?”
“Ah… Where’d it come from, and is it clean?”
“Don’t play stupid, soldier-boy. You know it’s clean. Jefferson wouldn’t allow our permit if we sold shitty water.”
“Jefferson?”
Her guard turned slightly toward him and leaned over menacingly. “Are you interested in buying the lady’s water or not? If you aren’t, move along.”
“I don’t have any money…” he admitted.
This sent both the woman and the guard into hysterical laughter. After a moment of deepening redness on Jake’s cheeks, the girl composed herself. “We don’t want your damn money, fool. What do you have to trade?”
“I like that rifle,” the guard said, pointing his police baton at Jake’s suppressed M-4. “Had one almost just like it when the force was still operational.”
“Not happening,” he replied. “Um, I have an MRE that I could trade in exchange for a jug of water and some information.
The two of them conferred for a moment and then the girl picked up a small plastic water bottle. “Deal.”
“No way,” Jake said. He pointed at the milky white gallon jug. “I want that one.”
The two began talking secretively again. Then she set the water bottle down and picked up a larger one, which looked to be about twenty-four ounces, but not the one he’d pointed to. “This is the best I can do.”
“It’s water,” Jake said, emphasizing the word. “The city is surrounded by it. I can just go—”
“It’s water,” the girl mocked. “Do you have any idea how dangerous it is down at the waterfront? The Reapers, the Killers, the Bloods, the Crips, the Latin Kings…everyone hangs out down there looking for their next victim. We have to contract out armed guards—additional armed guards—to escort us down there, just to get the water. Then I have to trade for stuff to burn so I can boil the water. It’s a whole operation, just so I can get some dick playing army to complain about my prices.”
Jake tried a different tact. “Okay, I’m sorry. I’m Jake, you are?”
“Connie. Do you want the damn water or not?”
“Yes, please,” he answered, slipping his pack off of his back. “Who is this Jefferson guy?”
“What the fuck game are you playing, bro?” the guard asked.
“What?”
“You guys a new gang looking to make a name for yourselves?” the guard inquired as he pointed at Jake with the baton once more. “You got the hardware.”
“We’re here from the United States Army,” Jake replied in confusion.
“Yeah, we’ve heard that before, pal. What are you really doing all dressed up like you’re going to war, asking about Jefferson?”
Jake understood then. “Ah. Um, no. We really are from the Army. We came in by boat a couple of days ago. We’re trying to get up to Columbia University to help find a cure for the virus. Figured there might be a chance that some scientists or students are left alive that could help out.”
“Wait, you’re serious?” Connie asked. “There are still people—regular people—outside of New York?”
“There are. Not many, but we have a lot of little pockets of humanity out there.”
“Hey, sir,” Sergeant Turner interrupted the conversation. “The natives are getting restless and the boys are getting jumpy. What’s the hold up?”
The guard hooked the baton onto his belt, then stepped forward offering his hand. “Sergeant. I’m Doug Stein. I was a cop before all of this went down. This fella wearing officer rank says you guys are from the real US Army.”
“Nice to meet you, sir,” Turner replied. “Yeah, we’re up here on a mission to save the world—if you can believe that.”
“You guys are gonna want to meet Jefferson,” the guard stated.
“Who is Jefferson?” Jake asked for what felt like the hundredth time.
“He was a scientist before all this went down,” Connie said. “Up at Columbia University, just like you wanted. Now he runs this part of the city.”
“No shit?” Turner grumbled.
“No shit,” Doug Stein agreed.
“Then he’s the guy we need to talk to,” Jake blurted out, unable to control his excitement.
“You guys have already been noticed,” the guard said with a wide grin. “Don’t worry about going to look for him. He’s already found you.”
Jake turned to see a force of ten or twelve big men enter the market. They wore variations of riot gear and heavy winter coats to ward off the chill. Jake still didn’t see a single gun amongst them, but the long, bladed spears they carried looked like a nasty replacement for a close-in fight.
“Is this the welcoming committee?” Jake asked dryly.
“Sure is, pal,” Doug Stein replied. “Welcome to Manhattan, the last civilized place in America.”
13
* * *
NEAR LIBERAL, KANSAS
MARCH 5TH
The backpack’s straps dug into Sidney’s shoulders. It was heavier than she’d anticipated when she packed all of their explosives into it. She wasn’t even sure what to do with half of the stuff because it was labeled with Middle Eastern text. The letters and symbols meant nothing to her, but she was confident that if she put those explosives alongside the C-4 she’d gotten from the Army guys, then it would explode anyways.
She sniffed the snot that threatened to escape her nose back inside and wiped what she hadn’t gotten onto her sleeve. She tried to convince herself that it was the cold that made her eyes water and nose run. It wasn’t that she might never see her baby or her new family again. It was not because of that, she reasserted, lying to herself.
Sidney hadn’t wanted to delay her departure any longer. It was difficult enough as it stood, but listening to Vern and the girls implore her to stay one more time was more than she could bear. So, she’d slipped out of the house in the middle of the night. The only person who knew she’d gone was Carmen, and that was simply because Lincoln needed her care. If her son was ever going to grow up in this world, she had to force the Iranians to stop hunting them.
The ironic thing was that her actions, her decision to be the badass partisan fighter is why they’d been hunted relentlessly in the first place. If they’d simply melted away into the night, leaving the Iranians alone, then they’d have never known the family existed and wouldn’t have exerted their resources to find them. But she’d thought that fighting them was the best thing to do, and now she had to live with the consequences of her actions.
There was a sound behind her. Faint. It was the scrape of a shoe on the pavement she walked down, carried to her by the wind. She glanced quickly and saw him silhouetted against the road in the moonlight. He’d been with her from the start, following her from the family’s current hideout, a shadow that wasn’t very good at being a shadow.
Sidney sighed, then stopped. She knew who it was, but needed him to understand the seriousness of the game he played, so she spun, kneeling as she did so. Her rifle fit snugly into the pocket of her shoulder and she considered firing a warning shot, to scare him away. It would certainly send the message, but at what cost? At over a hundred yards away, she could easily miss and accidentally hit him.
She swept the rifle’s barrel far to the side, firing off into the fields beyond the road. Even at that distance, she knew she’d missed him by a full fifty feet, but the muffled sound of her
suppressed M-4 still had the desired effect.
The figure dove to the side of the road. “Sidney!” he shouted. “Don’t shoot!”
Sidney sighed again, more loudly this time, and put her weapon on safe before using the stock to help leverage her to her feet. The pack threatened to pull her backward, but she leaned forward against the weight.
“Get over here, Mark,” she hissed, hoping the sound would carry to him so she didn’t need to shout. The infected were still a concern, regardless of how thinned their numbers were.
The boy stood and stumbled down the road toward where she waited. “Hi,” he said, waving his hand awkwardly.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m going with you.”
“No, you’re not.”
“You always tell me that we have to go out in pairs to cover each other. You need somebody to watch your back and keep an eye out when you’re putting down those explosives.”
Her lips thinned. He was right, it was extremely dangerous to be on your own out here. But, dammit, she didn’t want the burden of keeping him safe during this trip. She wanted to go in, blow something up that would force the Iranians to leave them alone, and go back home to her family. “Mark, you need to go home.”
His features shifted in the moonlight, a range of emotions displaying in mere seconds. Finally, he settled on a grimace. “No,” he replied. “You can’t make me go home. I want to be there to back you up. You need me to back you up.”
“No, I need you to keep Lincoln safe—and the girls and Vern. Carmen and Miguel and Patricia… That’s where I need you to be. They need you.”
“Then we need to hurry up and follow through with your plan. I’m sick of running too, Sidney. Every time we think we’ve found a good place to settle, they come after us. I’m sick of it. Sooner or later, they’re gonna get to us like they did the other day, but we won’t be ready for them. I want to kick their asses so bad that they just stay away forever.”
She smiled. “I know you do, but it’s not that easy. This,” she gestured vaguely toward Liberal, “might be a one-way mission. I don’t want it to be, obviously, but I’m prepared to do whatever it takes to keep Lincoln safe. If that means dying when I wipe out a bunch of these guys, then so be it.”
“You guys are my family,” Mark stated. “You’re my responsibility too.”
“Go home, Mark.”
“No. I’ll just follow after you like I did tonight.”
“Don’t.”
“I’m not going back home—back to that place where we’re staying. I’m going to help you. You need it.”
“I don’t need your help,” she grunted, adjusting her backpack. “But I need to get moving.”
He turned and wobbled his shoulders. A mostly-empty backpack shook across his back. “I’ve got plenty of room to help you with all that weight.”
“Ugh. You’re not going back are you?”
“No. We’re a team, Sidney. We always go out hunting together. This is just another hunt.”
Against her better judgement, Sidney acquiesced and slipped the pack from her shoulders. “Fine,” she said. “But if things go bad, promise me that you’ll leave and go home.”
“I promise,” he replied, holding up his thumb.
“Okay, fine. Let’s split up the explosives and then get moving.”
14
* * *
FORT BLISS MAIN CANTONMENT AREA, EL PASO, TEXAS
MARCH 6TH
“Good morning,” the general said as he stood up from his desk and walked around to the conference table. He stuck out a hand and said, “Neel Bhagat.”
“Hannah Dunn,” she replied, taking his hand and shaking it.
General Bhagat gestured to the table. “Please, have a seat.”
As everyone got situated, Hanna looked around the room. Besides the Aviation Brigade commander and intelligence officer, whom she already knew, there were two full colonels, a command sergeant major, a lieutenant colonel, a couple of majors, a lieutenant—probably the aide—and an E-5. The sergeant seemed nervous. He sat at the far corner of the table, away from the officers.
“Before we get started, let’s all introduce ourselves to Ms. Dunn,” the general said, placing both hands on the table. “We’ll start with our esteemed Air Force colleagues on the phone.” He pointed to the speaker phone in the middle of the table.
“Colonel Dan McTaggert,” a tinny voice from the speaker stated. “Commander of the 49th Wing at Holloman Air Force Base.”
“Welcome back, Dan,” the general said.
“Thank you, sir. We’re glad to be back in comms with you guys. It got pretty lonely over here.”
The general nodded. “We’ve got Sergeant Pollard in here with us. He was the team leader who eliminated the jamming site.”
Ahh, Hannah thought. That’s why the random E-5 was in the room. He’d been involved in the mission to destroy the jamming equipment that had been interfering with communications between the Air Force base and Fort Bliss. She’d heard about it hanging around the Aviation Brigade’s operations center.
“We certainly thank you, Sergeant. Now that we can talk to one another, we’re excited to resume close air support for your troops on the line. I’ve got my staff with me here in the room, sir.”
“Thank you, Dan,” General Bhagat replied. “Sergeant Major?”
The senior enlisted man to the right of the commander cleared his throat and said, “Sergeant Major Strathbourne. I’m the Division Command Sergeant Major.”
“Colonel Dave Morales,” the next man in the row said. “Division Chief of Staff.”
“Colonel Dave Tovey, First AD Ops officer.”
“Lieutenant Colonel Tim Sewel, First Armored Division Current Ops officer.”
“Major Todd Blackledge, Division Intelligence Officer.”
“Uh, Sergeant Will Pollard,” the E-5 said, obviously uncomfortable at being in the room with the division’s senior leadership.
Finally, it came back around to Hannah. “I’m Hannah Dunn. I work for The Havoc Group—well, worked for them. They probably don’t exist anymore.”
“I’m not familiar with The Havoc Group, Ms. Dunn. Can you explain their role?” the general asked.
“Yeah, sure. We provide a wide range of security and operational support to the US Government as well as advisory support to foreign governments. We operated closely with the CIA as a subcontractor of sorts on clandestine operations—I’m not entirely sure about previous missions before I joined the Group, but the mission I was on…” She paused, looking intently at the young soldier at the end of the table. “Um, what is the classification level here, sir?”
“We have a Secret phone line to Holloman,” General Bhagat stated. “But that’s strictly for the end-to-end encryption that it offers us for defense against the Iranians spying in on our conversation. Given the way things are now, I don’t think it matters if you disclose the specifics of a previous operation. We don’t even have anyone to turn you over to.”
She chuckled nervously. Talking openly about a Top Secret—No Foreign classified mission with uncleared personnel who were not “read on” to the project went against everything she’d ever been taught, but he was right. There were maybe a few hundred million non-infected humans worldwide, what difference did it make?
“Gotcha, sir,” Hannah said. “The mission that I’m about to discuss—the one to try to stop this virus from getting out—was extremely hush-hush. Very few people even knew of its existence. Maybe if we’d gotten more support from a larger force, we could have ended it before it began, but—”
General Bhagat placed a cold, dry hand over hers to quiet her. “Ms. Dunn, there is nothing to be gained from second-guessing yourself or your organization in this. Believe me, I fell victim to doing that as well when I discovered that a former colleague and friend was a traitor. It’s been a trying year with lots of mistakes, but also with a whole lot of successes. The only thing we can do is move forward, learn
from our errors, and take care of the people who are left. Understand?”
She nodded, wondering what he meant by a friend being a traitor. Regardless, she was thankful when he removed his sandpaper-like palm from her hand. “Please, continue.”
For the next forty-five minutes, Hannah recounted the operation she was a part of in the days before the worldwide infestation of crazies. She finished her narrative by telling the group of her personal failures at the Brazilian site to save her teammates after her weapon jammed, including her own shameful actions of running away. It was the third time in as many days that she told the entire story and it felt good to get it off of her chest, even if the men at the table all looked as if they didn’t believe her.
When she finished with the part about landing the Blackhawk at the airfield, the general looked to Colonel King. “Carol, does this jive with the story she told you?”
“Yes, sir. All the details are the same. I believe her.”
“Thank you,” General Bhagat said, shifting his gaze back onto Hannah. “You have quite a fantastic story, Ms. Dunn. One that I certainly wasn’t privy to before all of this. What do you think we should do with this information?”
Hannah’s blood froze. “Um, I don’t know, sir. I was just told to brief you on how I ended up here in a Mexican helicopter. I mean, it’s good background information, sure, but I don’t know—”
Once more, the cold hand fell upon hers, silencing her. “Ladies and gentlemen, I see an opportunity here. There’s no telling what information we could glean about the virus from that facility.”
Bhagat paused, but did not remove his hand, making Hannah feel immensely uncomfortable as it lingered there. “As I’m sure you’ll all remember, we had a research facility here on base when this whole thing started, ran by my good friend Dr. Aarav Sanjay. He was working on a cure or at the very least a vaccine to prevent further infections based on individuals who were immune—like Ms. Dunn here. When his research ended abruptly, all work stopped on a cure as far as we know.”
Five Roads To Texas | Book 11 | Reciprocity [Sidney's Way 3] Page 9