A Tearful Reunion

by Darrell Maloney

  And that’s okay. Because that’s not what they were designed for.

  As the dozer got within a hundred feet of the pillbox it started its ascent up the hill.

  Jacob and Jason desperately tried to disable it by spraying rifle fire into the operator’s controls. Their hope was a lucky shot could knock it out of drive mode, and maybe cause some damage to the transmission.

  It was really the only option they had. The huge hardened steel blade laughed at the bullets, and provided impenetrable cover not only for the attackers, but for the vehicle’s engine as well.

  Mason, sleeping soundly after working the night shift with Karen, ran to the pillbox to help his brothers.

  He wouldn’t get there in time.

  The first of the anti-personnel mines exploded beneath the track of the huge vehicle.

  The track scoffed at it.

  A second mine went off beneath the other track.

  The big Cat kept moving.

  The men behind the earth mover felt almost invincible.

  As long as they walked on the ground already crushed by the tracks.

  Slowly, together, as a single unit, they all lumbered up the hill.

  The sentries continued to fire wildly, even knowing their bullets were being wasted.

  It seemed all they could do.

  The blade finally struck the heavily-fortified concrete of the pillbox and came to a complete stop.

  At a faster speed, the dozer would have likely taken out the concrete and left a trail of crumbled pieces.

  But not on an uphill grade, and not at half a mile an hour.

  There was a momentary impasse.

  A casual observer might have breathed a sigh of relief. Might have gotten the sense the people in the pillbox had been spared.

  But that was hardly the case.

  The dozer had done its job. Now it was on to the second step of their plan.

  Dynamite fuse was very hard to find. Most all explosives were now detonated electronically, using blasting caps. At least before the big blackout.

  But Scarface Manson was old school.

  The dynamite had cost him a pretty penny. The fuses another one.

  But they worked as promised.

  Manson lit the fuse on the first stick, then quickly exposed himself around the side of the blade.

  It was only for a split second.

  But that’s all it took.

  Chapter 19

  He caught the Dykes brothers off guard. They simply didn’t see him in time to line up a shot.

  What they saw instead was a lighted stick of dynamite flying through the firing port of their bunker.

  It was the last thing they’d ever see.

  A split second later they were dead, their bodies horribly mutilated. Their blood covered the walls on the inside of the pillbox.

  They simply never had a chance.

  But instant death wasn’t good enough for an insane man.

  Joe “Scarface” Manson felt a need to assault their bodies even more.

  A second stick of dynamite came flying through the same firing port.

  “Just to be sure,” Manson yelled to his men.

  It was classic overkill by a man who’d never taken a life until a few days before.

  Now, once he’d decided he liked killing, he couldn’t get enough.

  Two days before, so they could beef up the sentries in the pillbox, they’d moved the surveillance monitors in.

  The thinking was whoever was monitoring the feeds from the tree-mounted surveillance cameras could provide instant backup to the sentry if the bunker came under attack.

  On the face of it, it appeared to be a brilliant move.

  They’d essentially get two sentries for the price of one.

  But they didn’t think it through.

  By taking the surveillance monitors out of the bunker itself, the people left inside the bunker were left in the dark.

  They couldn’t see the bulldozer come to life and start rolling toward the pillbox.

  They couldn’t see the aggressors huddled on top of and behind the dozer. They couldn’t see that the aggressors defeated their minefield by letting the heavy steel tracks detonate the mines as it rolled over them.

  They couldn’t see Jason and Jacob inside the pillbox, firing desperately at the big Caterpillar in a vain attempt to stop the assault.

  They couldn’t see the futility of such a move as the brothers’ bullets simply bounced off the bulldozer’s hardened steel blade.

  Jacob and Jason finally, at the last moment, stopped firing at the dozer and instead held their ground. They waited for the aggressors to scramble off the dozer and to rush the pillbox. Their plan was to resume fire then.

  Instead they saw a stick of dynamite fly past them and detonate before they could do anything about it.

  The second stick wasn’t needed. They were already dead.

  Game over.

  Inside the bunker itself the two blasts were deafening.

  All fell silent.

  Mason knew instinctively his brothers were dead.

  The blasts were powerful enough to blow a box fan, set up in the pillbox to blow fresh air into the bunker, through its housing and into the bunker in pieces.

  The pieces were covered in blood, as was the bunker wall they bounced off of.

  Mason flew into a rage.

  This was their home, his and his brothers.

  No one had a right to force their way in.

  No one had a right to blow his brothers to bits.

  Had he thought things through he might have hesitated. Might have done things differently.

  But he’d lost the only two family members he had left.

  Perhaps he was overcome by a need for revenge.

  Or perhaps under the circumstances he’d lost the will to live.

  Maybe his actions weren’t rash as much as they were a desire to end it all.

  Maybe without his brothers he no longer saw a need to live.

  Whatever his reasons, he grabbed an AR-15 rifle and climbed headlong up the ladder to the pillbox.

  Without having a clue what or who he might face when he got there.

  The first thing he saw, on the floor of the pillbox, were the horribly mangled bodies of Jason and Jacob.

  It was obvious, from the condition the bodies were in, that they died instantly and without pain. So there was that.

  But it didn’t help to temper his rage.

  Next he saw, outside one of the viewing ports, something large and shiny and silver, almost chrome in color.

  It took him a moment to figure out what it was.

  And then he was puzzled. He was overcome by confusion.

  Why in the world would a bulldozer blade be rammed into the pillbox’s exterior wall?

  In his last moments he figured out what had happened.

  His last thought wasn’t of his brothers.

  Or his parents, who he was surely on his way to see again.

  His life didn’t flash before his eyes, although he certainly knew he was about to die.

  Instead he marveled at the ingenuity of the plan.

  And he wondered about the bastards who were carrying it out.

  As he expected, his presence in the pillbox was detected as soon as he entered.

  And as he expected another stick of dynamite came flying through the port.

  It seemed to take forever, though he’d only been in the pillbox for about two seconds.

  His last thought was what an irony it was that they’d all been set up to die by a piece of their own equipment.

  Chapter 20

  At the first sound of gunfire, as Mason went running through the bunker toward the pillbox, he’d shouted to the women and children.

  “Get to the back of the bunker and stay there. We’re under attack!”

  They turned out to be his final words.

  But Karen and Sarah didn’t know that. Kara didn’t know that, nor did she know she’d lost her husb
and just seconds before.

  Mason’s final words were followed almost immediately by two blasts, then a brief delay and another blast.

  Each blast sent a shudder and a deafening roar through the bunker, from one end to another.

  There was simply no place to hide.

  Krista, Kara’s baby, immediately started wailing.

  No one could hear it though, for they were all temporarily deafened.

  The scene was surreal.

  Dust fell from the ceiling throughout the bunker, and a large wall of dust made its way from the pillbox through the first two containers.

  Some of the dust cloud consisted of blood, and would coat the bunker walls with a sickening reddish-brown color.

  In the farthest corner of the bunker, hidden behind a stack of MREs, the women and children sat huddled, confused and frightened beyond belief.

  Every one of them except Sarah was crying. Sarah was desperate to stay strong for Lindsey and the other children.

  Her thoughts, though, were in high gear. In her mind she was back at Karen’s farm on the day Swain and his men came in and shot up the place.

  By the end of that day Karen’s husband Tommy lay dead, along with all the other men.

  She couldn’t believe it was happening again.

  She suddenly realized her eyes were tightly clamped shut. As though closing her eyes would block out the horror taking place around her.

  She opened her eyes and looked at her sister, realizing Karen was having similar thoughts.

  She reached out a hand to her.

  She’d have opened her arms and held her, but her arms were full of Lindsey. Karen’s arms were full of her own children.

  And poor Kara, just twenty years old and still unaware she’d just become a widow, held onto her wailing baby.

  Despite all her pain, Sarah couldn’t help but wonder if the baby was best off.

  At least she didn’t know what was going on.

  Outside the bunker, atop his bulldozer, Scarface Manson stood and raised his rifle to the air.

  He thought himself a conquering hero and wanted to look the part.

  His men, for a change, were impressed.

  They’d been leery of his plan from the beginning.

  They’d doubted his ability to get the bulldozer running again.

  They’d wondered whether the dozer would really absorb the explosive mines as they went off one at a time beneath its tracks and keep right on rolling.

  They wondered whether the heavy steel blade would be enough to shield them from bullets coming from the pillbox.

  Most of all they questioned Manson’s word, for he was a blowhard of tremendous proportions.

  But this time his plan went off flawlessly.

  So far.

  “Great job, Joe,” Parker said. He alone in the squad was allowed to call Manson by his given name.

  Manson could have taken the high road and accepted his lieutenant’s accolades with grace.

  But he didn’t have it in him.

  “I told you morons it would work. None of you believed me. I could see it in your eyes. I could hear you when you snuck off into the woods or when my back was turned. Like you thought I was too stupid to know what you were whispering about.

  “I guess I showed you all, didn’t I? I guess you won’t doubt me again, will you?”

  He’d taken the jubilation out of a glorious moment for his men.

  It was how he was.

  Parker had to bite his tongue, for he was very tempted to point out the obvious.

  One of the other men, Vega, wasn’t exactly known in the group for his tact or his intelligence.

  Vega said it for him.

  “We ain’t inside yet.”

  Manson couldn’t argue the point.

  Parker, as diplomatically as possible, asked, “What’s the next step, boss?”

  Manson didn’t know. He’d pulled off a long shot. He’d devised a plan to quiet the pillbox and had done so without taking any casualties. It went off flawlessly.

  In his mind, he’d done his job.

  Besides, he was on a roll. If he were to develop a plan for entry into the bunker, and if it didn’t work out, it would tarnish his record as a grand schemer.

  He was one and oh.

  It was time for him to retire as a military strategist.

  And he’d spend the rest of his life boring people with his campaign prowess.

  No sense screwing that up unnecessarily.

  “You’re the combat expert. I got us here. Now you take us home.”

  To Parker it was no surprise.

  It meant, in effect, that Scarface hadn’t a clue how to proceed from here. He’d let Parker decide how to get in. If it worked, Manson would take the credit.

  If it didn’t he’d blame Parker.

  It wasn’t an unusual tactic. Army colonels used it all the time.

  That was okay, though.

  Parker didn’t mind.

  For unlike Manson, he had a good idea how to proceed.

  Chapter 21

  Parker led the way down the ladder and into the pillbox. It was something Manson would never risk doing.

  But then, the entire squad knew that Manson wasn’t really a soldier.

  Inside the pillbox Parker looked around and saw the carnage his leader had wrought.

  Parker felt a bit of sorrow for the three mangled bodies he saw.

  That wasn’t uncommon for soldiers. Even though these men were technically their enemies, they fought with honor and dignity. They didn’t pull any chickenshit stunts like Manson did when he threw one stick of dynamite after another, wasting firepower on men who were already dead.

  The men in the bunker died trying to protect their own.

  Parker had to respect them for that.

  In one wall of the pillbox was a hole about twenty four inches square. It was the hole where a fan blew fresh air into the bunker until the fan was blasted through the hole in a hundred pieces.

  Now there was nothing to block his view and Parker could easily see inside the bunker for the first time.

  He put the muzzle into the hole and sprayed the bunker with gunfire.

  In the back of the bunker, at the sound of the gunfire, the women and children cringed.

  At the same time, though, it gave them reason for hope.

  For if there was gunfire at the other end of the bunker, it meant the fighting was still going on.

  And just as it takes two to tango it also takes two to fight.

  And that meant, logically, their men were still alive.

  Didn’t it?

  After spraying the bunker a second time, and theoretically forcing the survivors in the bunker to take cover, Parker dropped through the hole and into the buried shipping container which made up the bunker’s north end.

  He immediately ducked behind a heavy cabinet and aimed his rifle down the corridor.

  He sprayed the corridor with gunfire, advanced a bit farther and looked back to find his men were still in the pillbox.

  “Well? What are you fools waiting for?”

  Two minutes later they were all inside and working their way through the bunker, one shipping container at a time.

  By the time they were halfway through the bunker and hadn’t gotten any resistance they switched tactics.

  “Okay,” Parker directed, leaving Scarface completely out of the process. “We’ve got to consider the possibility the only ones left are the women and children. From here on out, be on your toes but don’t shoot unless you put eyes on your target and he’s a threat. I don’t want to shoot any kids if we can help it. And I don’t want to shoot any woman unless they’re armed.

  “But…”

  He qualified his statement.

  “If you see anybody with a gun in their hand… man, woman or child, take them out.”

  The problem, as Parker saw it, was that they didn’t know how much farther the bunker went on. They’d already passed through four shipping cont
ainers. There could be one more, or there could be twenty more.

  If they’d all been installed in a single line it might be easy to count the overhead lights to determine how much more of the bunker they had to conquer.

  But the containers were welded together at right angles. Some pointed north and south, others pointed east and west.

  And that made it a lot harder to know who might be tucked around the next corner.

  Parker yelled down the dark corridor, “We’ve taken the bunker. If you can hear my voice you’re the only survivors. Your men who were on watch have been killed.

  “This is your one and only chance to surrender. If you don’t come out with your hands up in two minutes we will proceed, and we will spray the bunker with gunfire as we advance.

  “You have two minutes. Don’t waste them.”

  Karen looked to Sarah for help.

  Sarah had none to give.

  It was Swain’s raid all over again. They were hostages once again, and at the mercy of vile men who murdered men they loved.

  Sarah looked at Kara, who stared into space. She appeared to be in shock.

  She released Lindsey to reach out and place an arm around Kara’s shoulder.

  Kara, still grappling with the news her husband had been murdered, didn’t even acknowledge the gesture.

  “Do you think they’re bluffing?” Karen whispered loudly.

  “No. If our guys were still alive they’d have yelled, or called us on the radio.”

  “What if they left, went into the woods to regroup? What if they left their radios behind?”

  Karen was grabbing at straws.

  “No. They’d never abandon us.”

  It was true. Karen knew it to be true. But she wouldn’t let herself accept that the men were dead.

  It just hurt too much.

  “Come on,” Sarah said. “You guys follow me.”

  Lindsey spoke for the first time since the ordeal began.

  “Mom, are you crazy? We can’t go out there.”

  “Honey, you heard what he said. We have no choice.”

  “But if we go out there we’ll be their slaves.”

  “And if we don’t we’ll likely die. I’m sorry, Lind, but we’ve gone through too much for me to lose you now.”

  She stood and reached out for Lindsey’s hand.