The Humvee continued past without stopping, its engine signature fading in the distance as John sat lost in his thoughts on coping with the aftermath of a complete implosion of civilization.
“You think they’re coming back?” Stephani asked, breaking the silence.
John cocked his head. “I sure do. They’ll come back for the Humvee on this side of the river. A running vehicle is a valuable thing right now, and the colonel at the base there has lost a lot of equipment lately. We whacked his last helicopter back at the base, and from what the SEALs are saying, someone out there took down the only other helicopter Carnegie had, so these Humvees just went up in value.”
“Jared and I did it,” Stephani murmured, dropping her eyes. “I have never seen anything so horrible.”
John didn’t understand. “Did what?”
Stephani’s eyes came up, meeting John’s. “The other helicopter, Jared strung up cable and made it crash,” Stephani repeated hesitantly.
John’s lips parted as he stared at Stephani in astonishment. “You’re telling me you and Jared destroyed a Black Hawk?” he asked, wanting to make sure he was hearing her correctly.
Stephani bobbed her head, looking like she’d done something wrong. For the next few minutes, Stephani recounted what had happened at Clarence’s homestead, including the original ambush of the soldiers and the fact that Jared had stored the Humvee in Clarence’s barn. Other than a couple of questions, John listened silently in genuine amazement. What he was hearing from Stephani was a true testament to the adaptability of humans. Six months ago, Jared had been pecking away at a computer all day every day. Since the solar flare, Jared seemed to have morphed completely into a guerilla fighter, and a damn effective one at that.
“Coming to ya,” came Matt’s soft voice from the side of the house.
“Come on in,” John responded, still trying to grasp the concept of his buddy having the wherewithal to destroy an American flying war machine.
Matt stepped onto the porch and ducked inside the little house. “The boys will be coming up in a second. They got the Humvee rolled over, and it still runs. Took a while to clean out all the—” Matt glanced at Stephani nervously “—the mess.”
John nodded just as the faint sound of the Humvee’s diesel engine reached their ears. “I say we beat feet before they come back for their truck,” John suggested.
“My thoughts exactly,” Matt answered. “Your buddy is saddling their horses now; he says they have another Humvee they took from Carnegie’s guys a few days back. He’s also the same crazy bastard who took Josh and his boys down.”
John smiled at Matt while slowly shaking his head. “Stick around, bro. These people will amaze you.”
Several hours into their trip south, Jared sat in the saddle, scanning the odd assemblance of horses, humans and vehicle. The SEALs were piled into or on top of the Humvee, with several SEALs choosing to walk rather than be either crushed together in the vehicle’s interior or cling for dear life to its exterior.
Jared and John traded off riding Jared’s mount while Devon, Shannon, Essie and Stephani rode single file behind the Humvee. Jared knew it was only a matter of time before Devon got the itch, ditched his horse, and took off with Crank to scout their route to Clarence’s homestead, at which time, John would assume Devon’s spot in the saddle, and both his and Jared’s feet would be better for it.
Everyone in the strange caravan kept a constant eye on their immediate surroundings, especially the men who’d recently lost two brothers in the fighting the evening prior. The SEALs were exhausted, as was John, but like men of their mettle, they remained silent on the matter. Jared assumed the men inside the Humvee, minus the driver, were catching a short nap before the men rotated to either walking positions or one where they clung to the exterior of the Humvee.
As Jared and John both suspected, Devon approached them, murmured something about making sure the path to the homestead was clear, and waited for their approval. John, who was walking at the time, shot Jared a wide grin. Devon hesitated, rooted to his saddle, unsure if John’s smile was one approving his departure or not. Sensing the teen’s unsureness, John hollered to Ray, “Hey, long gun.”
Ray was seated on the roof of the Humvee with his legs dangling over the front of the vehicle’s windscreen. Hearing the reference to his weapon, he turned back and caught John’s eye with a nod.
“What up?” was all Ray said, the fatigue evident in his tone.
“Devon’s heading out with the dog. He’s gonna do some scouting, make sure we don’t have any surprises before we get to the other Humvee. You mind scoping our front before he leaves, way out front, I mean?”
Wordlessly, Ray turned and pounded on the vehicle’s roof with a rough hand. The Humvee came to a stop, and Ray leaned over the side, speaking briefly with the driver before pulling the rifle scope to his eye in search of anything or anyone who might pose a danger to Devon. The road was a graveyard of vehicles, any of which could be concealing an ambush that would likely fail against the SEALs, John, and Jared’s group, but would certainly make short work of a single boy carrying only a Ruger .22-caliber rifle.
As Devon climbed off his mount, he stared up at Jared. “He doesn’t have to do that; I’m not going that way.”
Jared caught John’s eye and saw they both felt the same way about calling off any sort of safety measure. “Just let him finish if for no other reason, it may make it safer for us,” Jared chided gently.
Devon relented, squinting up as John swung into Devon’s saddle. “I’ll see you around, John.”
John almost laughed at the peculiar teen, but realized it must have taken a lot of courage to call him by his name while maintaining eye contact. “You bet your ass you will. Now get the hell out of here and go clear the way.”
Devon smiled clumsily, then gave a short series of clicks with his tongue, summoning Crank. The two headed off, not down the road, but out west into the surrounding flatness of the agricultural lands. At first Devon walked and appeared to be speaking in hushed tones to Crank before breaking into a jog.
Ray came off his scope and gave John a what the hell look. John shrugged. “The kid’s special. He’s not going to walk down main street, I guess.”
Ray gave Devon’s shrinking figure another look before bringing the scope back to his eye. Ten minutes later, Ray was finished, and Devon was no longer visible to anyone, including Ray, who took a minute trying to locate the boy and his dog to no avail. Again, silent communication between John and Ray, which concluded with Ray giving an all-clear shrug, then slapping the top of the Humvee, and just like that, the caravan was underway minus one of its members.
Chapter 32
After Josh exited Carnegie’s office, the colonel set to penciling in a rough draft of his next thirty days. This included foraging from the nearby Defense Depot that had in the past doubled as a FEMA staging area. Carnegie was hopeful he would hit paydirt in the way of supplies for his base when they hit the Defense Depot. There were other things that needed to happen first though, and these were the details he jotted down in the solitude of his office.
When a sharp rap sounded at the door, Carnegie thought briefly about drawing his pistol and firing an entire magazine through the door, into whoever was interrupting him. Instead he barked loudly, commanding the intruder to enter. When the door opened, revealing a young woman’s uncertain face, Carnegie stared blankly at the woman, barely able to contain his irritation with her invasion. The woman reluctantly slunk into the colonel’s office, a bundle of documents clutched tightly to her chest.
“Well, what, already?” Carnegie snapped.
The woman tensed, and for the briefest of moments, Carnegie actually thought she might flee without stating her business, which he would have been absolutely fine with.
“I, ahh, I am—”
But Carnegie had heard enough. “I don’t give a good Goddamn fuck who the hell you are. Why are you here? State your business or get the hell out of
my office.”
Carnegie’s booming voice had the opposite effect on the woman from what Carnegie guessed it would have. She straightened slightly as her jaw lifted half an inch. The woman drew a deep breath and began speaking.
“I have some information I am sure you will want to hear. If you’d like, I could come back tomorrow or the next day if the colonel is too busy to discuss information regarding obtainable targets from NORAD’s original list,” the woman announced in a voice that said she wished mightily to regain at least a little footing in this conversation.
Carnegie sighed deeply before speaking. “Out with it.”
“I have been working on all your drone footage, looking at it from an analyst’s point of view. I’ve found some interesting things from the footage taken at the place John Buckley stayed at after the crash. We found Buckley and didn’t really give the footage a lot of attention until we’d caught up on a few other things. What we found was two people from that place match two people on the original list.”
Carnegie was interested now and leaned forward in a nonverbal way of conveying this to the young woman. “Go on,” he said in an only slightly more pleasant voice.
“Strange as it may seem,” the woman continued, “it gets even weirder. One of the targets is the man Buckley was after the night his helicopter crashed, after which we find them living and working together. The second target is Jared Culp—basically helped build the world’s largest search engine, not political or business minded, just a workaholic with a brilliant mind in both hardware and code writing. No wonder they had running water and solar power with those two living on the property,” the woman added for effect.
Carnegie was perplexed by the end of the woman’s report, leaving him wondering how in the world John had connected with the target after the crash unless the story about the crash was an outright lie. Carnegie couldn’t see John Buckley killing his teammates along with the aircraft’s crew. He just wasn’t that kind of guy. By the drone footage Carnegie had seen of the crash site, the aircraft hadn’t been destroyed on the ground. The debris pattern was consistent with forward flight coupled with a catastrophic loss of altitude and the subsequent impact with the ground.
“Where are we at with the drone? Can it still fly?” Carnegie inquired.
The woman nodded with a grimace etched on her face. “It can fly, but many of the parts have timed out, and a rough estimate is that 70 percent of the aircraft’s parts and flight systems are past due on three essential inspections. So yeah, it will fly, but for how long is the million-dollar question.”
“Parts?” Carnegie asked with a raised brow.
“Don’t have them,” the woman answered flatly.
“Get the damn thing inspected and do whatever you have to do to get it up,” Carnegie ordered tersely.
The woman shook her head. “No can do. Your chief mechanic was killed last night chasing those guys from the Navy.”
Carnegie’s nostrils flared, telling the woman she should drop some good news on the colonel and then affect her escape from the dragon’s lair.
“We will get the thing in the air and find your targets; you just need to have a way to get out there and retrieve them both.” Without waiting for the colonel to answer, yell, or shoot her, the woman dropped the documents on Carnegie’s desk, whirled, and exited the office, pulling the door shut behind her. The latter was done more out of self-preservation than because the door had been closed when she’d arrived. Were the door standing wide open upon her arrival, the woman felt she would have still closed it during her departure in order to erect a barrier between herself and the demon behind the desk.
As the door slammed shut, Carnegie’s mind raced over nearly a dozen potential scenarios that would have ended in John and these two targets being together. Nothing aligned in his mind, leaving him more frustrated than ever. Well, at the end of the day it didn’t really matter why something went sideways, he supposed. Even when an operation went south, the only reason Carnegie gave a fairy’s fart about why it hadn’t worked out was due to his thirst for mission success. When the briefings inevitably steered toward the loss of life and what great men the fallen soldiers were, Carnegie would internally roll his eyes and glaze over.
Unable to come up with a sound theory on how one John Buckley came to live with two people from the list, one of which Buckley himself had been tasked with recovering, Carnegie got up and opened his office door, where he called out to a Specialist sitting at a desk in the hallway.
“Get Talley in here ASAP,” Carnegie ordered before slamming the door shut.
Josh arrived a short time later with a slight limp, which Carnegie ignored, instead going immediately over the information given to him regarding John and the men from the list. Josh was as baffled as the old colonel, wondering how on earth the three came to be living together out there at the little ranch house. Josh felt it paradoxical that the three came together simply by chance. In Josh’s world, things left to chance got guys killed, but never helped anyone, leaving Josh to view this possibility as inconsequential.
Not wanting to waste another second on a puzzle he couldn’t quickly solve, Carnegie slid a sheet of paper to Josh. “I’ve made a list of things that need to be done. They’re all on that list, and time is not on our side. I want my two Humvees back. The coward who got his team killed up there before we lost the Black Hawk said the guys who hit them didn’t have anything bigger than a rifle, so that vehicle is out there somewhere.”
Josh glanced at the list, then up at Carnegie, almost protested, but thought better of it. The list under ordinary conditions would have been something Josh would have given to a junior enlisted supply soldier, but now Josh knew he would struggle to complete the assignment himself. This was mostly due to the lack of resources like competent men and women, vehicles, and things he could fly in, like the charred hulk of the luckless Black Hawk out on the tarmac.
“The drone?” Josh questioned.
“It’s being held together by spit, some gum, and probably a little duct tape, but they say she’ll fly,” Carnegie grumbled irritably.
“But for how long?” Josh pressed.
Carnegie gave a pursed-lip cock of his head that told Josh the drone would fly till it didn’t fly. Well, so much for redundant systems, thought Josh. Throughout his entire career in the military, Josh had enjoyed some of the finest equipment at his disposal. Now, however, he was metaphorically working with a stick and stone, which, figuratively speaking, left an acerbic flavor across his tactical palate. As Josh sat studying the list Carnegie had handed him, there began to form the faint outlines of a plan in his mind.
First, he would need intel from the drone on where the two Humvees were. This could take time, and time was something Josh knew the drone probably didn’t have a surplus of. The life span of the drone was an unknown quantity; therefore Josh viewed it as a thin string supporting the heavy load of his operation. That string could break at any time, leaving Josh without its coveted intelligence, which required a plan B and possibly a plan C and D if things were to be completed in the manner the colonel wished.
The camera equipment on the drone was highly sophisticated, possessing remarkable zoom capabilities along with night vision using infrared. Josh planned on using the drone’s onboard camera’s capabilities to zoom instead of programming the craft to fly a search pattern. This would extend the drone’s life span, even if only a little. The pilot would have to work twice as hard, but if Josh could squeeze a few more hours of flight time out of the dying aircraft, then Josh would put the pilot to task.
When Devon slipped away from the group, he headed not ahead of them, but west in order to create separation from the group. After running at a slow jog for nearly fifteen minutes, Devon looked back and could only see the faint outline of all the stranded vehicles left on Highway 5. He turned south, paralleling the ominous highway with its surface speckled with the dead husks of a society’s former modes of transportation. Devon hadn’t driven befor
e the solar flare, which was why now he didn’t view the loss of vehicles the same way Jared and John might have.
To Devon, not much had changed from before the solar flare to now in regard to his getting a ride. His parents worked so much he rarely was ferried from place to place by them, so he’d learned how to use public transportation or, when on foot, leave early enough to reach his destinations on time. Devon had no friends to speak of; therefore he hadn’t enjoyed the luxury of calling on someone who had a license to pick him up. If he’d needed to go somewhere, Devon walked; if he needed to get there a little faster, he ran. With no girlfriend, showing up sweaty and out of breath hadn’t been a problem for him.
Crank was just happy to be with the teen and stayed mostly heeled at Devon’s side. If Devon ducked, thinking he’d seen something ahead, Crank would crowd the teen’s side, sensing his master’s caution and taking his own cautionary action. Devon had never had a dog before Crank, but he liked the little guy. The dog was smart, and most of all he was faithful, which went a long way for a boy who’d been shunned in school and never quite fit in with any aggregate social cluster.
Social cohesion in Devon’s schools consisted of people with commonalities, such as shared interests, economic standing, ethnic and even social backgrounds, none of which he ever seemed to align with. For most kids in Devon’s school, the different groups were like thinly barriered communes. Kids chose a collection matching their taste and after minimal effort were able to break through the barrier’s thin shell. At a young age, Devon found the blockades more like armor plating, unable to break through any of the school groups’ tough ramparts.
The Jared Chronicles | Book 3 | Chains of Tyranny Page 31