Five Roads To Texas | Book 11 | Reciprocity [Sidney's Way 3]

by Parker, Brian

  Sidney sighed. These were the things she had to think about while they waited, deep inside the cover of a small group of spruce trees, for yet another patrol to drive by the fence line. The Iranians didn’t seem to be taking any chances. They had a vehicle circling the airport’s perimeter every thirty minutes or so to ensure that there were no breaches and that everything appeared normal.

  Sidney and Mark had watched the base for hours to get a feel for how the operation ran. The Iranians seemed very concerned with the perimeter, but not a lot else. Soldiers inside didn’t try to keep their movements hidden from passing infected and didn’t appear to have any sort of real purpose as they lounged around in the afternoon sun. Now that night was upon them, all of the soldiers had disappeared inside the terminal. They wouldn’t get a better shot at completing their mission.

  “Are we doing this?” Mark asked, sensing the time for action was almost upon them.

  “Yeah. I’m ready.” The closeness of the spruce, which had grown together over the years made Sidney feel claustrophobic. She could barely move and their body heat was more than enough to keep them warm. In fact, Sidney was soaked through with sweat from the ordeal and probably smelled as bad as one of the infected. She would do just about anything to finish her mission and get out of there.

  “Okay. Let’s do this,” he whispered, shouldering his backpack and jostling her in the process.

  “You remember what I showed you?”

  Mark nodded. “We’ve gone over it fifty times.” He pointed at his watch. “What are we setting the timers for?”

  Sidney referenced her own watch that she’d pulled off a dead Iranian back at the outpost. “Whatever you set the timers for, they need to explode at one a.m.”

  “I can do that.”

  She stood on her tiptoes and kissed the young man on the cheek. “Good luck tonight, Mark.”

  He fiddled with the backpack’s shoulder straps. “Um… Okay. You too.”

  Sidney led the way out of the trees. The night air felt welcome on her skin, instantly cooling the sweat that glistened across her body. It would get cold quickly, but they only had to worry about it for an hour or so. Then it was game time.

  The night was overcast as they jogged to the side road leading into the airport. It was an old access road, one that delivery trucks and such would have used back in the days before the infected. They’d decided that was the best place for them to target since it didn’t have a large compliment of soldiers like the main gate did.

  They followed along the road through the ditch until they could see the fence line. A truck was pulled across the access road leading into the airport on the opposite side of a pair of double gates. Two Iranian soldiers sat in the cab, heads down reading or watching videos. If she could line up the shot correctly, then Sidney was sure she could take both out with one shot.

  “Don’t even try it,” Mark grunted when she told him. “That doesn’t work in real life.”

  “So, what should we do then, smartass?”

  He pointed at her rifle. “You gotta make two quick shots. Pop ‘em both.”

  “Let’s get closer.”

  They crept as close to the fence as Sidney felt was prudent. They were maybe fifty feet from the truck when she dropped to the ground. Using her pack as a base, Sidney lined up her shot. She chose to aim at the driver first. He was on the far side of the vehicle.

  “You can do this,” Mark said. He’d knelt beside her and had his rifle up to his shoulder in case she didn’t complete the task and they got into a world of shit.

  The man’s head filled the optics on her M-4 as she centered the reticle on his ear. She blinked and closed her eyes, allowing herself to breath slowly and naturally without fatiguing her eyes. Then she opened them and looked through the scope, reacquiring her target.

  Breathe. Pause. Squeeze.

  The rifle bucked against her shoulder and she pivoted slightly. The passenger was already reacting, yelling something. She fired again. This time, she saw the soldier thrash wildly as the bullet impacted into him. She fired one more time into the passenger’s head, ceasing all movement.

  They waited a full minute to see if there would be any response from the camp, but nothing came. Apparently the guards at the main gate were used to gunfire as soldiers around the perimeter killed wandering infected.

  “Let’s go!” she hissed.

  Mark helped her to her feet and she stumbled up the embankment to the gravel road. Clouds had covered the moon in the last few minutes, making it nearly impossible to see. They ran the final fifty feet to the fence. “You know what we talked about,” Sidney said as she pulled the chain keeping the gates closed through the wire. Thankfully, they hadn’t bothered to lock it.

  “Yeah. Blow a hole in the side of the building big enough for a truck to drive through. I got it.”

  He jogged into the darkness toward the terminal. She watched his retreating form for a moment, then got down to her own tasks.

  Setting her pack down, she dug through it and emerged with the explosives. She had a mix of American C-4 and the Iranian stuff. She couldn’t read the labels, but it had the same appearance and consistency as the C-4, so it had to be explosives.

  She allowed herself a momentary pause and a laugh, wondering if she’d brought some form of shelf-stable bread dough along with her instead of explosives. Then, she busied herself with placing a brick of the stuff on each gate post and pushing the blasting caps into the clay-like substance. They’d pre-wired the blasting caps to the detonators, so all she had to do was set the time.

  Twenty-two minutes. That’s all they had.

  She finished her task quickly. Mark’s was, by far, the more dangerous. He’d chosen to go into the belly of the beast to set up their explosives inside the perimeter. Sidney glanced at her watch. Eighteen minutes left.

  She decided to place another brick of explosives about twenty feet farther down along the fence line to ensure there was a big enough hole for the infected to come through.

  Suddenly, she had a thought. What if the infected didn’t come? Their whole plan hinged on the predatory nature of an unpredictable creature. If the sights and sounds didn’t create enough of an incentive, would the infected even bother to investigate? They needed a beacon. Something that would call the infected from miles around. They needed—

  Sidney knew what would do the trick. Dammit! Why didn’t I think about that before? she scolded herself.

  Her eyes strained as she stared into the night. Where was Mark? Had he been captured? She hadn’t heard anyone raise an alarm. The clouds parted overhead long enough for her to determine that she couldn’t see shit. Then they covered the moon, once more sending the base into near total darkness.

  The Iranians were under strict light discipline and nothing showed from inside the terminal or the complex around it. She took off at a jog in the direction of her target. She knew where the behemoth was located, the only problem was that there was likely to be a guard or mechanic or something around it. That’s how it always went in the movies, right? There was always an errant guard that nobody accounted for.

  Couldn’t be helped. Sidney had to get that beacon lit.

  Her feet hit pavement and she knew she was close. She’d seen the damn thing parked at the edge of the terminal all day. She slowed to a brisk walk, her rifle ready to fire blindly at anyone who emerged from the darkness.

  But no one came. There was no mechanic working late into the night. She was all alone as she slid up next to the giant Iranian plane. She unwrapped a brick of C-4, the American stuff, and pushed it against the metal, but the damn explosives wouldn’t stick and they started to fall to the ground. She didn’t have any tape and the explosives weren’t sticky enough on their own to adhere to the side of the plane.

  She cast about for anything to help, but it was nearly pitch black. “Dammit,” she muttered, her hand trailing along the side of the plane. She hefted the brick of explosives. Would this be enough? She had litera
lly no clue how much to use and had already placed three of them back at the fence.

  Surely two of them was enough to do some major damage and hopefully ignite the fuel inside the plane. Finally, she came to the landing gear and pressed two of the bricks into place. Each of them got a separate blasting cap and detonator.

  Eleven minutes. She set the timer and turned into the darkness.

  Sidney wasn’t totally sure of the way, so she jogged back in the general direction that she’d come from. She made it to the fence and then searched the darkness for the truck. There! She’d missed it by a good twenty feet.

  “Sidney? Is that you?”

  “Yeah. It’s me,” she replied, answering Mark’s question.

  “Where the hell did you go?”

  She trailed her fingers along the chain link until she made it to the gates. Mark stood there off to the side. “We need to get away from here.”

  “Back to the spruce trees?”

  She nodded, but then cursed herself slightly. He couldn’t see her nod. “Yeah, let’s go.”

  They barely made it to the cover of the trees when the world erupted in light and flame. Sidney’s eyes widened in shock as the C-130 was blown literally in two. Flames rose into the night, sending a dark cloud of smoke to mingle with the low clouds. Next, the explosives along the fence line blew, creating a large gap in the perimeter fence that protected the facility.

  Shouts of alarm reached their ears, carried on the wind as men began to emerge from the building. Then, Mark’s explosives went off. He’d placed several of them at the corner and the side of the terminal building to create as large of a hole into the Iranian fortress as he could. In the light of the burning plane, Sidney could see that part of the building had completely collapsed. They’d done a damn fine job with destroying the base’s perimeter and the terminal building. All they needed was some cooperation from the—

  They sank deeper into the spruce. So deep that they were pressed closely to one another and could barely move. The smell filled Sidney’s nostrils and the world shrank down to the few inches in front of her nose that she could see.

  She didn’t care about the closeness this time. It offered safety from their prying eyes. It kept them safe away from the claws and teeth. From certain death.

  The infected had seen her beacon and they were here to see what all the fuss was about.

  34

  * * *

  MANHATTAN, NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK

  MARCH 15TH

  “Are you sure you don’t want to stay?” Jefferson asked. “We could use people like you.”

  Jake smiled sadly. “You don’t need people like me.”

  “You’re still a trained tactician, Jake,” Manhattan’s leader said. “We’re doing good right now. The Latin Kings were some bad dudes. Thanks to you they’re out of the picture. But, there will be more. The gangs in this city are like rats: We can’t ever totally get rid of them and they’ll always try to find a way back in.”

  “You guys will be fine,” he said, looking over to Harper and Taavi. “Most of the platoon decided to stay here. I’ve got a few guys on the fence, but you’ll get at least twenty soldiers who can help to defend Manhattan from any other gangs that may be trying to move in. I’ve got unfinished business that I need to take care of back in Kansas and Sergeant Turner is hell-bent on returning the Strykers to Fort Bliss—which was his original mission all along.”

  Jefferson nodded. “And you’re sure you want to leave, Grady?”

  The operator nodded. “Absolutely. You’ve got a nice little set up here, but I feel cooped up, like a wild animal stuck in a cage. There’s plenty of work for a guy like me out there. I mean, millions of things. I could spend my entire life hunting the infected and never run out of targets. Do you know how satisfying that is to a guy like me?”

  Jefferson shrugged. “I mean, I guess.”

  “Besides,” Harper continued. “If I stick around here, I’m just going to keep getting poked and prodded. I think a week’s worth of donating blood, tissue, saliva, hair, and even a few semen samples for some idiotic reason is more than enough.”

  The scientist shrugged. “I do have a lot of samples to work with, but I’m always willing to take more.”

  Harper raised his sleeve. He had a dozen small scabs along his veins. Jake knew from what the man had told him that the scientist had taken more than enough samples to keep the guy in stock for a long, long time. “Yeah, I know you are,” Harper replied. “No, thank you. Just keep the power up to those refrigerators and you’ll be fine.”

  “We will. We’ve got solar to run them as well as a diesel generator for backup at both sites. I’m not willing to lose your samples.” He clapped his hands together before continuing, “Good luck, then. I really do appreciate all that you’ve done for us.”

  “You say that now,” Harper replied. “Wait until the boys have eaten everything you own and gotten all the women pregnant, then you won’t be saying that anymore.”

  Jackson Jefferson chuckled. “We’ll get it figured out. Ah… What about Mandy and Carla? People have tolerated them because they’re with you, but everyone knows they ran with the Kings. As far as I know, they didn’t do anything themselves, but they’re guilty by association.”

  “They’ll be coming with us,” Harper stated.

  “Really?” Jake asked incredulously. “What are they gonna do if we get into a firefight on the way back?”

  Harper’s eyebrows shot up. He didn’t say it, but Jake knew exactly what the man was thinking. What would he do in a firefight? He was a cripple. He couldn’t exactly ride in the targeting station the entire time, so he was going to be pretty useless in a firefight too.

  Jake sighed. “Okay, so the girls are coming with us.” He pointed to the Iranian major. “Taavi will be staying here. He wants to be on the first international flight back to Iran so he can pay a visit to his former bosses. The best place to do that will probably be from New York.”

  Jefferson nodded. “I agree. Plus, if these guys are headed back to Kansas, you’re gonna stick out like a sore thumb there.” He pointed a thumb at himself. “Me too. Bunch of rednecks in overalls out there.”

  Jake chuckled. “It’s not that bad. Most of those types are dead now.”

  “Good riddance.”

  “So…” the lieutenant drew out the word.

  “You want the boats?” Jefferson surmised.

  “Yeah, that’d be way better than walking all the way back through New York City to our other ones.”

  “We should be able to get you back to the Jersey Shore. Just gotta watch out for some assholes on the bridges.”

  Jake frowned. “Now that we know the score here in the city, we’ll shoot any MF’er that we see when we get close to the bridges. That’ll keep ’em from messing with us too bad.”

  “I’ll have Phil get it set up. Maybe tomorrow morning if we can get one of the fishermen to agree to it. We’re gonna miss you guys.”

  “We’ll miss you too,” Jake replied. “We didn’t know what to expect here in the city, but you’ve done a very good job keeping everything together. Hopefully, we can get this shit under control soon and reunify the nation.”

  “Wow, LT.”

  Jake looked over at Harper. “What?”

  “You really believe all that, huh?”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  The operator shook his head. “We just gotta take care of our own, man. Carve out little safe havens and expand from there. It’s gonna take a long, long time.”

  “Good thing we got nothing but time, Harper. We will get this shit under control and we will reunify our country.”

  Harper shrugged. “Just keep my rig full of ammo and I’ll bust skulls all day and all night. That’s the fun part right there.”

  Jake looked at him and for the thousandth time, he wondered just what made the man tick. He was a unique breed. All he wanted to do was to kill the infected. Jake actually sort of envied him. Everything was so s
imple in Harper’s mind. Target comes up, target goes down. Repeat.

  “Well, you’ll have a whole lot of ammo once we get back to the trucks.”

  “Let’s go then,” Harper grunted, standing up from the couch.

  “Uh, yeah. I guess that’s our clue to leave…” Jake mumbled, attempting to stand as well. Then he remembered he was strapped to a wheelchair. “Fuck.”

  “Ahh…” Jackson Jefferson reached out a hand to Jake. “I’ll have Phil get the boat ready. He’ll come get you in the morning when it’s time to go.”

  “Sounds good. See you then.”

  He spun the wheelchair around and pushed off. The movement caused the pain in his back to flare up with an excruciating vengeance. He needed another dose of pain killers, but he wasn’t about to let Harper see him as a burden of any kind.

  “Harper,” he called after the operator once Manhattan’s leader had closed his door.

  “What’s up, LT?” he called over his shoulder. The bastard didn’t even bother to turn around.

  Jake pushed at the wheels harder. He’d need some damn gloves too. “Try not to go out tonight. We don’t need you going on one of your hunting trips and then screwing up our departure in the morning.”

  That made him stop and turn back toward Jake. “Don’t worry, LT. I’m not gonna miss SP.” He turned back and continued his leisurely saunter back toward his apartment.

  Jake really hated the guy. Despised him. He was so fucking cocky, and…and good at killing. It simply wasn’t fair. “Life ain’t fair, Jakey-boy,” he groaned as he started down the hallway once more.

  He had to tell Sergeant Turner that they’d be leaving in the morning and to gather the men. They had to get a final count of who was staying and who was going. The bare minimum was three guys so each of the Strykers could have a driver, but it would take at least six if they wanted to have someone manning the guns.