By the Dawn's Early Light

by David Kershner

  “And are we?”

  “So far.”

  “What did you do before… you know, before all of this loveliness?” Tim asked as he gestured wildly.

  “Engineer,” he answered truthfully. “And you?”

  “Hey, buddy,” the capo holding Tyler said. “We’re askin’ the questions.”

  “Be nice, I’m conducting an interview,” the gang leader stated as he put his man in line. “What kind of engineer?”

  Eustace smirked. “Chemical.”

  “How do I know you’re not here to kill me?” Tim asked. “Sneakin’ around in the middle of the night to make clandestine phone calls appears a little unseemly, doesn’t it?” he continued.

  In a building several hundred yards away, the back-up team observed from the safety of their nest. Tucked behind some over turned office furniture, the pair watched the exchange.

  “Can we shoot this clown?” the man asked as he adjusted the focus on the scope slightly.

  “Negative. We are to observe only. You know that.”

  “Well, it looks like our Lieutenant has found himself cornered. At the very least we should radio this in.”

  “Agreed. You keep watch… no shooting,” he concluded forcefully. “I’ll head up to the roof to try and get a clearer signal.”

  The man on the McMillan TAC-338 rifle continued to watch as Tim and Stokes conversed. If he didn’t know better, it seemed as if his CO was casually repositioning himself to make an escape.

  “So what kind of skills do your men have? You’re pretty good with a pistol. How much ammo do you guys have?”

  “Well, since we’re courtin’ now, let’s just say we’re a helluva lot more skilled than those lame ass hunters you sent to Logan. Hell, one guy took three of ‘em down and was about to plant Tyler six feet under before we arrived.”

  Tim wobbled as he half smirked and half laughed at the comment. “Pussies. Never liked them anyway, always trying to get free pokes at the honeys for bagging some game.” In a moment of clarity, he declared, “Hey! We’ve got some openings now that this young lad has met his end. You guys wanna join up with us?”

  “Boss, you think that’s a good idea?” the capo asked. “We don’t know anything about this guy, or his friends. I’m telling you man, we shoulda just rolled into McArthur and that park and taken them all out.”

  Flipping a switch, Tim lashed out and struck him with a back hand. “I told you, Todd! HE was there… in Chillicothe… som-bitch had a bazooka dude! The only thing missing was the Ride of the freakin’ Valkyries theme music!”

  Oh, crap. Play it cool, Eustace.

  “Who?” the engineer asked casually.

  “A guy from my former life in the ‘burbs. Mister goody two-shoes.”

  Silence permeated the rooftop as Tim hung his head. The Lieutenant thought TK was going to pass out on his feet until he abruptly moved.

  “I got it!” he proclaimed. “Are you and your friends up for a test? Ya know, to see if you’re worthy of joining our gang?”

  Smiling, Lt. Stokes said, “I thought you’d never ask.”

  “Excellent! Come find me in the morning, we’ll talk it over.”

  “Sounds good,” Eustace declared then added, “Boss.”

  “Oh, one more thing, how are you going to contact your people now that you’ve thrown the radio off the roof?”

  “I guess I didn’t think that all the way through. You guys have a means to communicate or something, right?”

  “Sure,” TK slurred reassuringly. “Just give Todd here the channel number and any safe words we might need and he’ll get them the message.”

  Eustace actually started laughing at the man. “Look, Tim. Those are my men, not yours. Any calls go out to them, they’ll be sent by me.”

  “Uh oh,” the gang leader declared.

  “What?”

  “I introduced myself to you as TK. Who told you my name?”

  Lt. Stokes swallowed hard and quickly tried to recover. “Beats me. I must have heard it somewhere. I think he might have told me. What does it matter?”

  “Shoot Tyler in the leg please,” Tim ordered nonchalantly.

  Without warning, the man holding him took a step back and shot him in the calf, dropping him on to the roof in wailing heap.

  “Whoa! I thought we were just having a conversation!” Stokes barked. “That’s what you said, remember?”

  “Oh, I do. I also gave an order forbidding anyone from speaking that name. Tyler knows this. My name is TK, not Tim. Now, what’s the channel? Are there any safe words? I’m not going to ask again.”

  When nobody answered, he added, “How about this, first one to answer gets to live.”

  The Lieutenant stood still and said nothing. He wanted to withdraw his sidearm and blow the pair away, but couldn’t. There was already a gun being pointed at him.

  From the ground, Tyler weakly offered, “Channel 12, call signs are ‘Viper’ and ‘Pumpkin Patch’.”

  “Shut up!” Eustace barked at the injured man.

  “Woo! There we go!” their leader exclaimed loudly. “Don’t stop now! Is there anything else?” Tim asked as he squatted down toward him. “A safe word?”

  There was no other alternative. While TK and his goon had their collective attention on the bleeding heap, Stokes quickly went to withdraw his sidearm. Tyler saw it.

  Just as he was about to pull the trigger, he said, “Briar.”

  The Lt. couldn’t believe his ears. The man had given them the wrong intel.

  Eustace paused as Tyler nodded ever so slightly. Eustace inferred it as a signal that it was okay to put him out of his misery.

  He quickly fired before the gang member’s collective attention returned to him. The round entered just above his forehead, blew out the back of the fallen man’s head, and then lodged itself in Todd’s shin.

  Reflexively, the pair jumped. Once Tim’s goon realized he was hit, he threw himself onto the roof and began writhing in agony.

  With his gun up and aimed at TK, Lt. Stokes said, “I think I’ve seen just about all I care to see of this little gang of yours.” Then added, “Tim,” for emphasis.

  Moving quickly, Eustace went around Tyler’s corpse and retrieved Todd’s weapon. “You want me to end your suffering to?” he asked the wailer as he circled toward the roof top door.

  “Go to hell, you son-of-a-bitch!” the man shot back.

  “Have it your way,” Stokes declared as he yanked open the door.

  He was met with a blinding flash and an ear splitting ‘boom’. The Lt. was lifted off of his feet as he fell backward. It felt like he had just been punched in the chest by three heavyweight champions at the same time. All of the air immediately left his lungs.

  “Watch that first step! It’s a doozy!” Tim declared tauntingly as he took the two weapons away from Eustace. “Rock salt’s a bitch, ain’t it!”

  TK turned his attention to the two men exiting the stairwell. “Pick this piece of shit up,” then continued his taunting.

  “Hurts like a mother, but it’s non-lethal,” his interrogator stated as they threw him against the wall.

  Stokes dug at his chest in an attempt to brush off the burning sensation. Nothing helped.

  The man on the Secret Service’s McMillan rifle bolted from his nest and sprinted up the emergency stairwell toward his teammate. By the time he reached the roof, his partner was already on the line with someone, calling in the play by play and begging for permission to shoot.

  As he approached, he heard, “Listen little girl! That’s our friend over there!”

  The airwaves burst alive with Katherine’s contempt, “You call me that again, I swear I will stomp a mud hole in your ass! I said stand down and you better damn well do it!”

  The man wanted to scream in protest when the crack of a round discharged, stealing his attention. “Someone’s shootin’. Hold one!”

  Eustace screamed out as the bullet tore through his inner thigh. Instinctively, he
glanced down, willing himself to clamp his hand on the hole in his leg.

  “Awe, that looks like it hurt. Here,” Tim said as he squatted down and offered the roach from his joint. “It’ll help with the pain.”

  Stokes waved him off as he attempted to stand.

  “Boys, give the Lieutenant hand.”

  “How did you –,” he started to say.

  “Did Josh honestly think after his sidekick bulldogged me that I’d just let it go?”

  “You don’t know anything!” Stokes said defiantly as his body began growing weak. As he leaned against the sidewall of the roof, he knew he didn’t have long. The leg was pouring blood quickly.

  With all of the bravado Tim could muster, he loudly proclaimed from the rooftop, “You idiot! I know everything! I have a mole in your camp!” He declared as he laughed mightily at the pronouncement. “He’s one of the governors!”

  The man holding the radio nearly dropped it onto the gravelly surface. Catching himself, he clicked in on the hand set, “Be advised, one of the camp leaders is a mole for TK.”

  Disbelieving what she just heard, Katherine stated, “Say again. A Governor is a mole?”

  “Roger that,” the man said as he continued to watch. “It’s either Benjamin or Jerod,” he clarified in a demoralized tone.

  “Copy that,” she replied.

  “Now, what I want to know is,” Tim began. “What does Josh have over there? Weapons, men, vehicles… I need a full accounting of all of it... since he’s done such a masterful job of hiding things from the people in the camp.”

  “Go to hell,” Stokes replied.

  “Oh, you’ll be there long before me… but I’ll be sending Josh there to keep you company real soon.”

  The Lieutenant smirked at TK.

  “Something funny, soldier?”

  Eustace chuckled. “Yeah, you hit my femoral artery. I’ll be dead in about a minute and half so I ain’t tellin’ you shit… roll that up and smoke it, mother –,”

  The Lieutenant never had the chance to finish his last defiant statement as Tim lunged forward and shoved him over the ledge.

  As they watched their friend, and commanding officer, tumble to his death, Gregg’s secondary team filled with rage. They wanted nothing more than to flip the bipod legs down, take a position, and send every last one of those men to an early grave, but orders were orders and they had them… stand down.

  “Be advised, I say again, be advised… BB is down,” then added in cracked voice, “He’s gone, ma’am.” After a long pause, he concluded, “Resuming over watch.”

  What they couldn’t see on the other end were the tears streaming down Katherine’s cheeks. She took a few silent moments to compose herself. “Copy that,” she finally replied and threw the mic on the table in disgust.

  While she held her face in her hands and silently wept for Eustace, she heard Hoplite say from across the room, “The first one’s always the toughest. I’m sorry.”

  Katherine didn’t ask for his pity. She was angry.

  “You stow that shit, Carlos,” she spat. “Brent, Dallas, James… on me. We’re going to go and have a little chat with the Governors. If either one of them jack rabbits, make sure you shoot ‘em in the ass! I want ‘em alive!”

  Chapter 22

  The moonlit night was muggy, the air heavy. Everything on their bodies was sticky from the humidity, but Katherine was on a mission. She had been handed operational control of the entire attacking force by Brent and her father and the burden was weighing on her. A man, a friend, was dead. Her gamble hadn’t paid off. The three men with her were content to let her ride several yards ahead. She needed to clear her head.

  Breaking the silence in a barely audible whisper, James asked, “Are you still confident in your decision to give her this much responsibility?”

  The retired General thought for a moment before he replied, but Dallas answered first. “She knows what’s at stake. She knew enough to not take a vehicle when there were two parked right out front of Juan’s. No, Katherine’s working this through, you’ll see.”

  “You and I have faith in her,” James inserted. “I’m asking about her ability to handle the rigors and stress as a field commander.”

  “She has all of the requisite qualities,” Brent offered. “Josh may not have realized he was doing it, but both those girls have been in OCS for the last decade.”

  “You know I can hear you, right?” Katherine said into the darkness of the night.

  The trio snapped their heads in her direction.

  “Good,” the four star replied. “Now explain to me why you barked at an enlisted man.”

  “He was questioning my authority and decision making abilities even when he knew I was in command. Next question,” she stated unemotionally.

  The three men glanced at the others, then gave each a half shrug, as if to say, ‘why not’.

  “Why not take a car or truck? We could have been there by now,” Dallas asked.

  “Needed to cool off. I want answers, not another corpse. Next question.”

  “What’s in your head?” James questioned metaphorically.

  “A brain,” she replied in the literal. “Next question.”

  “You know what I mean,” he corrected.

  “I know,” she said with a sigh as she brought her horse to a stop. A few seconds later, the three men caught up and she prodded hers to fall in line.

  “Questions are what are in my head.”

  “Go on,” Brent offered encouragingly.

  “I want to know why one of them betrayed us, more for my own edification than anything else. I want to know what was shared. I want to know when, and I want to know how they were communicating. I can’t adjust without the variables.”

  “The ‘why’ is immaterial. Focus on the ‘what’, ‘when’, and ‘how’. Explain those to me.”

  “I think, in terms of order of priority, ‘when’ is the most important. If he hasn’t communicated in a few days, then Tim isn’t aware of what we removed from the park in plain sight of the Governors. Gregg said they were pretty upset that they weren’t in the loop.” Katherine paused briefly. “Hey, Dallas, you and Brent handle the OP logs regularly. How many times did either of the male camp leaders take coastwatcher duty?”

  The two men looked at each other.

  “Every couple weeks, no more than anyone else,” Dallas offered.

  “That sounds about right,” Brent confirmed.

  “Which outpost were they stationed at? Did they request a specific structure?”

  “Why do you ask? Where are you going with this?” the General stated earnestly wanting to know where she might be headed.

  “I’m thinking that Tyler and those guys weren’t there looking to set up a deer camp at all. Maybe they were there to meet Benjamin or Jerod, or both. According to Heather, one vehicle approached, radioed, then the others followed.”

  “That little –,” Dallas muttered. “I know who it is.”

  * * *

  Josh and Sam approached the cabin, but with no lights or candles lit, the entire structure was completely hidden from view. The yellowish headlights from the deuce bounced and danced on the glass like the glow of a firefly. Once the truck was stopped, Josh went around to help her out of the workhorse vehicle.

  “Welcome home, Mrs. Simmons,” Josh proclaimed as her feet touched the ground.

  “Why thank you, Mr. Simmons,” she responded in a mock Scarlett O’Hara style accent.

  Her husband bowed in a grandiose manner then stood upright.

  With a smirk on his face he declared, “Me man! You woman! Me take!”

  Samantha hiked her dress up to the knees and started running for the door. She was quickly and playfully caught then scooped up into his arms.

  With their faces so close, Josh whispered, “Welcome home, Sam.”

  “You too, hun,” she replied before leaning forward to kiss. “Now, carry me across the threshold so I can take off this dress.”r />
  “Wow! Alright!”

  Realizing what she had just said, his bride playfully smacked him on the shoulder. “Very funny. Not for that, I have to pee.”

  “Ouch, buzz kill,” he answered woefully.

  “Oh, stop your pouting. We’ll get to that. I’m sticky from this heat and humidity. I was thinking of taking a shower.”

  Josh immediately picked his head up and smiled broadly.

  “Want someone to wash you back?”

  “Sure,” she answered with a return smile.

  He quickly responded like an eager teenager, “Want someone to wash your front?”

  “Maybe,” she replied coyly.

  * * *

  James and Dallas sat in the darkened cabin waiting for its occupants to return. As with all park inhabitants, Benjamin and Jerod were forced to share accommodations. The rumor mill, being what it was, indicated that both had lost wives and family escaping from the suburban hell they had once enjoyed. However, given their former occupations as managers with large staffs, the residents had voted the pair, plus Susan, as the camp’s first Board of Governors.

  Most of the occupants had already returned from the festivities in downtown McArthur and were preparing for the much needed rest. Since the power had been knocked out six months before, everyone’s daily routine and schedules had to be recalibrated. There was no need to stay up until the wee hours burning the midnight oil for an ungrateful boss or that report that had to be ready by 8:00 AM. Distractions like TV, video games, email, and cell phones were replaced by the exhaustive tasks necessary to survive. There was food to collect, crops to tend, firewood to be split, and water to be hauled. As a result, sleep came easy and early. By now, everyone was unaccustomed to being up so late.

  When the last of the trucks pulled up, Katherine emitted her distinctive bird call to alert the pair in the cabin that she had a visual. She and Brent slowly slid back into the shadows and waited. They watched Ben and Jerry, as Gregg like to refer to them, exchange goodbyes with other residents as they made their way to the cabin.

  “I can’t wait to crawl into my bed. I could probably sleep for days if someone let me,” they heard Jerod say.