Minus America Box Set | Books 1-5

by Isherwood, E. E.

  NORAD Black Site Sierra 7, CO

  “Of course I want to escape,” Tabby replied to the president. “Don’t you?”

  He laughed. “Oh yeah, but I’ve given up hope. These folks can’t be defeated, if what they say about erasing all our people is true.”

  “It is,” she replied. “But you shouldn’t give up hope. You’re still the president. You can order attacks. Nuke them, or whatever. All we have to do is get you up top and back to US forces, wherever they are.”

  “Oh, is that all?” He tried to laugh.

  She did not.

  “I admire your spirit, I really do. David put me down here, saying it’s the most secure prison he could find. However, if I ever left without his permission, he has a… I don’t know what to call it. A box of light? A machine of some kind—”

  “I’ve seen it,” she said dryly.

  “Then you know. If we leave and get caught, it’s into the light we go.” He walked through the entryway of his makeshift home, back toward the elevators and the window looking out into the ten-foot-wide tube. “Our best bet is to wait this out. I may be out of action, but I guarantee there’s a general or admiral overseas who’s putting together a rescue mission at this very minute. I know how those men think.”

  “It isn’t hopeless to fight back. I came down here without seeing anyone. We’ll get in the elevator and retrace my steps. Instead of getting out at the station I started at, we’ll go to the very top. I’ve been there. We’ll arm up with pipes or wrenches. Whatever you’ve got down here. You can hit them over the head, sir.”

  He stood by the glass, looking up. “It’s a great plan, but the call elevator button doesn’t work here at the bottom. You need a key to open the doors.”

  “Well, that’s unexpected, but maybe it makes sense. If you’re in jail, they wouldn’t want you wandering around.”

  “Like you,” he interjected.

  “Yeah, like me.” She tried to find interest in the tube of flashing lights, but it was a bunch of conduits and wires, nothing too exciting. Except, almost by accident, she realized there was a ladder next to the window. The curve of the tunnel was severe enough she was able to make it out. “Hey, can you get in there?”

  Tanager shot her a confused look. “Out there?”

  She nodded.

  “Well, yeah, actually. There’s a service hatch the tech guys have used to go in there. They don’t tell me why, of course, but I’ve watched them do it. It’s right over here.” He pointed beyond the edge of the window to a place she guessed was directly next to the ladder. “You can barely make it out from here.”

  Her next question was the most important. “Do you think the ladder goes all the way up?”

  He cracked up laughing. “Your escape plan is to climb a ten-mile ladder? You might be able to do it, young lady, but I’m sixty-seven. I wouldn’t make it a hundred yards with the shape I’m in. Plus, you’d have to be in an environmental suit. It’s supposed to be several hundred degrees in there.”

  She tried not to let his constant negativity beat her. “Where are the suits?”

  “They have a closet full of them. It’s next to my living area. Trust me, none of this is going to make a bit of difference. Even if you did make it up to the top, inside or out of the tube, David probably has men guarding everywhere. You’d never make it past them without a gun.” He pointed at her blue outfit. “Especially being dressed as you are.”

  A plan formed in her mind. She’d gotten Peter, Audrey, and Donovan out of the mine back home. She could get out of this one, too.

  “Sir, with all due respect, I gave tours in a mine where I came from. If I say you can climb your way out of this mess, I guarantee you can. I’ll be with you the whole way. To raise our chances, we’re going to have on those suits. Once we get to the top, there’s no way they’ll know who we are. We’ll walk right on by.” She pressed her hands together with anticipation he’d agree to her plan.

  As she waited, the elevator dinged, causing both to whip around to see who’d arrived.

  “I’m afraid you’re going to be caught, my dear,” Tanager said sadly.

  The door opened and a tall young man, dressed in blue, warily exited the car.

  “Victor?” she said, both surprised and disappointed it was him.

  Tanager shoved past her. “Don’t let the door close!”

  CHAPTER 23

  Lamar, CO

  “Hold up, fella,” the man exclaimed, walking up to the side of Ted’s SUV with a clipboard. “We just got a new directive to confirm every vehicle’s occupants. I would have let you go, because frankly, it sounds like a bunch of busywork—”

  Ted didn’t let him finish. “Cool then. I’ll be on my way.”

  The guy kept on talking as if they were engaged in routine checkpoint pleasantries. “But I saw you have what looks like a bullet hole in your rear glass. You want to explain it?”

  He couldn’t believe all his good luck was about to be washed away by an inconspicuous hole in his window. He tried to think of a viable excuse and waved the man closer as if about to tell a good story.

  “I was honestly hoping no one would notice it. You know what it’s like out here in this part of the world. There’s nothing but endless farmlands and too much grass. You can see from sunrise all the way to sunset, with nothing in between. Makes for some boring guard duty, you know?”

  He prayed the official would commiserate with him but gave nothing in return but a grunt.

  Ted pressed on. “Well, I set up a few plastic bottles and began shooting them for target practice. I had the entire plains around me and what did I hit?”

  “Your own truck.”

  “My own truck,” he said with high drama.

  The man looked into the rear seating area. Emily was hunkered down behind the second row. The windows back there were tinted, giving her a little more cover. If the man saw her, he didn’t show it.

  “And what about that?” The guard pointed behind him.

  “What?” he said, locking his spine like a high-tension electrical wire.

  “That!” The guy pointed to back of Ted’s head. “You have a welt the size of a golf ball back there. Looks like you’ve been struck on the head.”

  Ted sighed with relief, which instantly made him wish he could control himself. He was displaying every sign of someone who had something to hide while passing through a security checkpoint.

  It wouldn’t be proper to explain he’d fallen in a farmhouse kitchen while running from search drones. “You aren’t going to believe this. After shooting out my own window, I hit my head on the rear liftgate.” He sighed again, this time sounding more upbeat. “It’s been a long freaking day.”

  “Well, you can take a break while we’re talking,” the guard walked toward the bullet hole. His two buddies watched from about twenty feet away, as if unsure if they should be with their leader or stay there. “I guess it wouldn’t hurt to see the stamps on your book. You know, just to make sure you have clearance to travel.”

  “I understand,” he said, careful to hide the bomb blast of anxiety going off in his chest. He had no papers and there was a diminishing opportunity to talk his way out of the encounter.

  From the rear corner of the truck, the guard tapped metal with his clipboard. “Mind opening the back? While we’ve got all this paperwork going, we might as well confirm cargo, too.”

  He sat frozen in his seat. At the same instant, he took a mental snapshot of the roadblock. The two men were still in the far lane, looking suitably bored by their mission. The nosey guard had gone around to the rear, waiting for him to pop the hatch. Emily was somewhere in the cargo space.

  He acted like he was getting papers from the passenger seat so he had a private moment to communicate with her. “It looks like we’ll have to shoot our way out.”

  “I’m ready,” she whispered.

  The man called out again. “Whenever you’re ready, bud.” A touch of anxiety was in the guy’s voice, as
if he was wondering why there was such a delay.

  “All right,” Ted replied in a bored tone out his window.

  The second the liftgate went up, it sounded like a grenade went off inside the cramped compartment. Emily fired the shotgun a second time, which seemed to blow his hair with the concussion.

  He’d been ready with his pistol the entire time; it came over the edge of his door, aimed at the two clueless men. They figured out what was taking place, but they’d been caught in the open. He counted off six shots.

  Emily added multiple shotgun rounds to his attack, putting both men to the ground in less than ten seconds. They never even got a chance to fire in return, which made Ted extremely proud.

  His ears rang louder than he ever remembered.

  “We’ve got to clean this up!” he cried out.

  They both hopped out of the truck. He immediately looked back to Lamar, which was about two miles away. A few vehicles moved on the road, with at least one heading for the roadblock. Unless they were Americans in disguise, like them, they had to assume bad guys were approaching. The last thing he wanted to do was get into an endless firefight with arriving vehicles.

  “Grab what you can. We’re taking a Humvee.”

  “Are you sure?” she asked, already reaching into the cargo bay to grab some gear.

  “We’ll blend in better if we take the same vehicles they use. This truck has been a workhorse for us—” He tapped the door of the silver SUV. “—but she’s been on the Fort Collins news by now. They’ll recognize it from the roadblock on the other side of town. I can’t help but think the guy’s change of orders came in because of us.”

  They scrambled to get what they could in about sixty seconds. Once they had all the guns, most of the ammo, and some of the food, he reached down and grabbed a radio from the dead man. The Humvee didn’t require a key, so he set its ignition switch to ‘run,’ waited for the ‘wait’ light to turn off, then cranked it over to ‘start.’

  The rumble of the engine was annoyingly loud compared to the truck he was giving up.

  Emily got in a few seconds later. “Wow, this thing is loud!”

  “It is what it is,” he said, channeling his time in the military. “Here we go.” He turned the truck around and got away from the blockade and the dead men.

  It didn’t take long before the radio chirped, but it wasn’t about them. Two men talked back and forth about picking wives, or some nonsense. He didn’t care, as long as they avoided mentioning runaway couples. As he looked back, Ted was certain the vehicle behind them must have reached the grisly scene.

  Minutes down the road, Emily squirmed like she needed to hit the head.

  “What’s on your mind, partner?” he asked over the road noise.

  She got closer to him, which was a requirement in the wide cabin of the military truck. “I know you’re the expert at this stuff, but why are we going so slow?”

  He gave a fatalistic chuckle. “When I ditched our ride, I didn’t really appreciate what I was getting us into. This thing was made to go up hills and through mud bogs. It wasn’t designed for the highway. I’ve got the pedal all the way to the floor.”

  The brisk wind blew at them from directly ahead. The speedometer only went up to sixty miles-per-hour, and it hovered around that number.

  “Oh, crap,” she said dryly.

  They passed several cars and trucks heading back to Lamar, including a convoy of six or seven empty tractor-trailers. After each one passed, he leaned to check his mirror to confirm they weren’t turning around.

  For many miles they drove on the knife’s edge of waiting to be pulled over, waiting to hear a call to arms in the radio, and the frustration of feeling like they were going slow enough to pick up a hitchhiker on the fly. Eventually, an hour into the drive, they saw a lone mountain rise on the western horizon. Its bare peak was a distinctive contrast to what he thought of as the snow-capped Rocky Mountains.

  “We’re almost there, Em. Look. NORAD’s very close to Pike’s Peak. We can use the mountain as our guide.”

  “Great,” she said with relief.

  He still looked over his shoulder, positive someone had put the pieces together about what happened at the roadblock. Surely an enemy smart enough to invade America would have the capability to figure out it was the same perpetrators who’d been in Fort Collins and had killed the bikers on the dusty streets of Nowheresville.

  Emily jumped in her seat. “Oh my God!”

  “What is it?” he replied, holding the wheel steady as he checked for threats.

  She looked at him like she’d seen the Grim Reaper. “Do you think this truck has one of those tracking devices on it?”

  It came down on him like a piano falling from the sky. “How did I overlook that?”

  Pike’s Peak suddenly seemed a lot farther away.

  Pike’s Peak, CO

  “This brings back memories,” Kyla shouted to Meechum as they huddled next to each other on a long 3-person bench bolted to the outside of the tiniest helicopter she’d ever seen. There was one soldier on the other side of Meechum, sitting with his rifle ready for action. Three other soldiers were on the opposite side of the craft. It was nothing like their prior ride in the sky, where she and Meechum had the entire interior compartment of a much larger helicopter all to themselves.

  It was also far less comfortable. Even Meechum had to twist her body between Kyla’s direction and the rider near the front to keep from cramping up. During one such contortion, Meechum winced in pain.

  Kyla became concerned. “Is it your wound?”

  The woman composed herself. “I’m fine!”

  “But—”

  “I’m fine!” she repeated before changing the subject. “These MH-6s are pretty cool, but I don’t think I’d want to be on them all the time. I preferred the bigger Sikorsky Seahawk.”

  The man overheard her shouting. “Trust me, we would, too. The colonel brought these two Little Birds so we’d have a low profile on enemy radar.”

  Meechum turned and spoke to the guy, but when she reoriented on Kyla, it must have been obvious she didn’t hear what was said. “I told him thanks again for the lift. It sucks we were captured so easily—I’ll have to work on that—but this is going to catch us right up to your uncle and the president.”

  Kyla leaned closer to the Marine. The other woman had short hair, but Kyla’s blew wild, making it difficult to concentrate. Still, being close was the only way to talk privately. “Do you trust these soldiers?”

  “No,” Meechum said without hesitation, “but I took a risk. Once I knew they were aware of you in the bushes, I had to make sure they didn’t go in shooting. The thing about the president sucked to give away, but it was the only way to keep us in the game. If these guys turn out to be with the enemy, we’ll take ‘em all out.”

  Kyla leaned forward, worried the other passenger was going to overhear their conspiratorial discussion, but the wind and rotor noise made it impossible, as long as they weren’t shouting in the open. She was satisfied the soldier was oblivious.

  Still, the Marine’s braggadocio was legendary. “How are you going to fight back? We don’t even have a stick to our name.”

  Meechum laughed like she didn’t have a care in the world and motioned for Kyla to come closer. “I have my pistol. The colonel collected our weapons and put them in a duffel, but a soldier picked it up and carelessly shoved it in the back compartment of this helicopter. When I stretch my back, I reach in and help myself.”

  Kyla sat in wonderment at her travel companion. If anyone could take out two helicopter’s worth of men, it was Meechum. However, she sincerely hoped it didn’t come to it.

  The pilots of the two choppers kept them a few feet above the treetops as they got into the foothills of the Rockies. The colonel wouldn’t tell them where he planned to take them, other than toward her uncle. As they traveled from the grassy nothing of Wyoming and into the hills and mountains, she assumed they’d gone into Colorado.
Once the white-capped mountains appeared, she was positive of it.

  They stopped once at a remote pasture that happened to have aviation fuel hidden next to what looked like an abandoned log cabin. Meechum suggested it was probably an off-the-books Air Force installation.

  An hour later, the man sitting on their bench tapped Meechum on the leg. “That’s our destination! Pike’s Peak!”

  She and the Marine looked forward. They were still traveling at tree-top level, which made the freestanding mountain seem even more impressive. As they neared the base, the pilot tilted the nose, taking them in a diagonal up the steep grade. The trees eventually thinned out as they neared the summit. At the top, there were no trees at all. It was made up of rocks, patches of moss, and a large gravel parking lot.

  “I didn’t expect to be able to park up here,” she joked to Meechum.

  “Me, either.”

  The helicopters landed about two hundred yards apart, which spoke to the sheer size of the flat space at the summit of Pike’s Peak. When she unstrapped from her seatbelt and hopped off, Meechum tucked her pistol into her front trouser pocket. Kyla stretched, in an admittedly clumsy attempt at drawing attention away from her friend, but it was all for nothing. The commandos spread out and looked everywhere except at the two of them.

  “Come on,” Meechum said in a closer-to-normal voice as the rotors slowed. “Let’s see what these boys have planned. I think we’re still a good way from Colorado Springs.” She pointed to the east.

  It was difficult to judge distance from the top of the mountain, but the high plains of eastern Colorado started like a flat carpet of grass and scrub about ten miles away. The city of Colorado Springs seemed to be painted onto the ground; the dense city blocks were dull gray and dark green. Between the city and their position on the mountain, there was a series of comparatively small ridges. They were grouped together like islands on the high seas. Most were covered in trees, though a couple of the taller ones went above the tree line.

  Colonel Avery appeared out of nowhere. “NORAD is inside the mountain closest to the city. You can drive right in from the other side.”