Whiskey Black Book Set: The Complete Tyrant Series (Box Set 1)

by L. Douglas Hogan

  Sometimes, when Tori would fall asleep first, she would watch her. Other times she would be awakened by Tori’s dreams. Tori had nightmares on a regular basis, and not just at night. Sometimes, on the road, she would doze off and wake up yelling. Nathan was always there to calm her down and to reassure her that it was just a dream, but not this time. Tori woke up screaming and had a knife in her hand. The men of the group had grown so accustomed to her yells that sometimes they were not awakened at all.

  “Put the knife down, Tori,” Jess told her. She could see a deep hollow hole in Tori’s eyes. This was what intimidated her. That was the look that worried Jess. She would get this look in her eyes, and when that happened, you couldn’t talk any sense into her.

  “Put the knife down,” Jess said a second time. This time it was louder, hoping to wake the men.

  They didn’t stir at all.

  Tori had a nine-inch tanto blade in her dominant right hand.

  Jess uncovered herself and stood. If she was going to die, it wasn’t going to be lying down.

  No sooner than Jess was on her feet, Tori looked back at Nathan and saw that he was still sound asleep.

  Jess didn’t hesitate. She had been trained for years in her work as a police officer before the Flip went down. Hesitation was always the number one killer of police officers. Sometimes that trained quick response ended in an unnecessary death, but other times it saved the officer’s life. In that split second that Tori looked over her shoulder at Nathan, Jess had to weigh every possible scenario. The good, the bad, the environment—everything had to be analyzed. These were the things most people never understood about law enforcement. The requirement to make a split-second decision where life and death was in the balance was a heavy burden. After the decision had been made and the action had been carried out, a judge or a jury had all the time they needed to analyze the same information that the officer had to make in less than a second. That was the old way. This was the apocalypse and Jess wasn’t going to be tried.

  Jess lunged at Tori and the two of them fell to the floor, but Jess failed to protect herself from Tori’s quick reflexes. She had firm control of the knife. She plunged it deep into Jess’s chest. The double-edged tip made it easy to pierce her sternum.

  Jess gasped for air and groped at her chest. She looked into Tori’s eyes one more time, but it wasn’t Tori at all. It was Cade Walker, the man without a soul. The man Tori had killed. That was when Jess realized she was in a dream.

  She pulled herself out and opened her eyes.

  They were still driving down the road, albeit through the night. It was early morning and the moon had barely sunk below the horizon. The sun was not yet visible, but its warmth was already filling the air, as was the welcomed light it brought with it. There was no way to tell what the exact time was. The moon hadn’t been down for long, and the posse had been taking turns at the wheel, driving in two-hour intervals.

  Looking to her left, she saw that Nathan was asleep with his head resting and bumping against the window. To her right was his best friend Denny. She couldn’t be sitting between two better men. She had no reason to be the bearer of bad dreams.

  I guess my conscience is beating me up, she thought.

  Leaning forward, towards the driver, she asked, “How far out are we?”

  “Shouldn’t be long. I suspect we’ve been on the road five or six hours. We’ll be coming up in Chi Town pretty quick.”

  Chi Town was kind of a nickname that many of the locals used for Chicago.

  Chicago had always been Illinois’s largest city and the hub for all the political activity in the state, despite its capital being Springfield. It was the heart of Illinois bureaucracy and the reason for failed policies. Chicago was about Chicago, and if anybody knew anything about Illinois politics, they would know that Chicago politics ran Illinois.

  Up ahead in the convoy, Sergeant Banks was growing concerned about the Chicago suburbs. He was noticing that roadside destruction was looking a little worse as they closed in on the windy city. At first it was a few random cars sitting unoccupied in the middle of the street. Then it was entire lines of cars with the doors wide open. He didn’t know if they were pulled from their vehicles or if they had evacuated them.

  “Slow down,” he told his driver. “We don’t want to drive into a problem where we can avoid one.”

  The whole convoy started to move a little slower. The change in velocity and motor sounds stirred Nathan from his catnap.

  He winced in pain as he groped his head.

  “’Bout time you woke up,” Jess said.

  “I have a headache.”

  “No time to start whining now.” She nodded her head toward the scene outside.

  Nathan looked out the window as they slowly passed by the abandoned vehicles.

  “Where are we?”

  “The last sign I saw said Kankakee.”

  “Wake up, Denny. None of this looks kosher.”

  Jess nudged Denny.

  “Hey, sleepyhead. Wake up.”

  He was putting off a lot of body heat. He had one of those high metabolisms that made people envious. He could eat anything he wanted and seemingly lose weight. Instead of packing on the pounds when he slept, his body would crank up the metabolic rate. Denny lost weight by sleeping.

  No sooner than Denny awoke, the convoy came to a standstill.

  Denny responded by grabbing his rifle and placing the buttstock into his shoulder.

  “It’s cool,” Nathan reassured him. “We’re probably stopping to collaborate and assess. I’m thinking UN activity was once pretty heavy right here.”

  The sun was not yet visible but was offering up a bright luminescence that reminded them of dim streetlights.

  Denny looked out the window at several hundred cars, all abandoned, most with their doors wide open. He took notice of several street signs that were hastily put up by the UN, similar to the way temporary road construction signs would be set up. One sign said “UN VEHICLES ONLY,” and another said “TRANSPORTATION RESTRICTED TO FEMA.”

  “Well, boss, now we’re in the thick of it,” he remarked.

  The entire scene was a wake-up call for everybody in the convoy. One by one they piled out of the collage of vehicles.

  Before Troy and his three-percenters joined, there were only a couple of privately owned vehicles in the group. Sergeant Banks had the military vehicles in the front and the POVs in the rear. Uniformity was still important to him, unlike Nathan, who had been out of the Marines for some time. He still had his organizational skills, but didn’t see how it all fit in this new world.

  “I remember seeing this stuff in the movies,” Tori recalled as she joined Nathan, Denny, and Jess. “It was an action drama, now it’s a horror story.”

  Troy walked up next to them and said, “Do you remember in The Lord of the Rings when Frodo and Bilbo had to traverse through Mordor to destroy the one ring?”

  Nathan and Denny looked at each other and smirked.

  Troy caught the smirk and bantered back at them, “Like you guys never geeked it up.”

  “It’s nothing. Don’t worry about it. It’s just that me and Denny thought we were the only two characters from the old world that watched that stuff,” Nathan replied.

  “So what’s the plan?” Denny asked.

  “Let’s go check in with Banks and see if we can collaborate on a POA.”

  “I hope your plan of attack includes settling down somewhere with that Iranian so we can get some intel out of him,” Tori said, with a hint of sarcasm in her voice.

  Tori was a bit bloodthirsty and had been since the death of her husband and two daughters. She felt little remorse for anybody she deemed evil. UN soldiers, homeland brigands and bandits, American soldiers that failed to honor their oaths—they were all on her most hated list.

  Sergeant Banks arrived on foot. He had walked up just in time to hear Tori’s comment.

  “You’re not killing another source of intel until he
has been fully and completely vetted by me.”

  Tori looked at him with disdain at his tone and squared off with Banks. Her hand was behind her back, and Banks knew she was grabbing for her 1911 pistol.

  Nathan jumped between them. “Easy, guys, we’re on the same team,” he interjected.

  Tori’s eyes were locked on Banks. She wasn’t intimidated, and he realized that he had failed to assert himself as her alpha.

  Banks withdrew himself from the confrontation by sidestepping Tori. “The last prisoner we captured met an untimely death on account of your rampaging around.”

  “He had given us everything he could give us, and that rendered him useless by my account,” she defended.

  Troy didn’t know what they were talking about but knew there was some kind of rough history. He thought he could lighten the mood by proposing his own idea.

  “I’m new here, but if the pretty lady wants blood, I say we give it to her. The Iranian officer is deadweight after we’ve extracted what—”

  Nathan and Sergeant Banks interrupted almost simultaneously. “Officer?” both asked.

  “Yyyyeah,” Troy responded, carrying out the Y sound to exaggerate his confusion.

  The group had found out earlier, from the Iranian soldier Tori had killed, that only the officers carried the alternating radio frequencies. It was the prize they had been waiting for.

  “I wish we had known earlier he was an officer. We’ve lost valuable time that could have been used on the comm.”

  “What’s the big deal with his rank?”

  Nathan started walking back to the three-percenters’ group of vehicles toward the rear of the convoy.

  Troy, Denny, Jess, Tori, and Sergeant Banks followed.

  Northwest of South Holland, Illinois

  Captain Richards’s decision to save fuel put the convoy of HMMWVs in dire straits. Richards considered himself a decent tactician. By traveling the shortest route, he had hoped to preserve their precious resources. Even before his team of soldiers had picked up Pastor Rory Price, they were heading straight through some of the heaviest Chicago suburbs in the area. Their recent run-in with the small UN group of armored personnel carriers yielded up heavy casualties for Richards’s men.

  Earlier in Richards’s trip, they had taken down a few small enemy mobile command groups. In the process, their shakedown offered them paperwork that gave them near unprecedented access to everything the UN and FEMA command units were communicating.

  Of all the intelligence they had gathered, the most valuable was news of a large coalition of US Marines near the base of the Black Hills National Forest in South Dakota. The original plan was to join up with the resisting forces there and coalesce into a formidable rebellion. That ambition, it seemed, was not going to come to fruition. They had stumbled upon a massive FEMA convoy that was moving in a northward direction on Interstate 294. There was an armored personnel carrier leading the convoy and two soft-top HMMWVs in the rear, most likely carrying ten to fifteen additional personnel per truck. In the middle of the convoy were ten UN-labeled shipping containers. It was these shipping containers that caught the eyes of everybody in the group.

  “Pull over up here,” Captain Richards commanded his driver. He was pointing to a small field just off of Route 6, where they had been driving. His intentions were to monitor the convoy without drawing attention to themselves.

  “Let’s hope they haven’t seen us,” Rory said.

  “I was hoping you could say a little prayer about this, Lieutenant. We can’t sit idle while those people are sent to their deaths.”

  Captain Richards had recently field promoted Rory to chaplain. In different times, he would lack the authority to do this, but these times called for compromise and a change of mind-set. Rory was recognized by the men as a lieutenant. Traditional responsibilities called for chaplains to have an assistant who was responsible for the chaplain’s safety. He was to have no combat responsibilities at all, but that was the traditional way. Rory packed a service rifle and was wearing body armor. His skills were limited in the art of combat, but he was a good marksman and could shoot a dime off a field post at fifty yards. He was willing to be whatever the men needed him to be as long as he knew the motives were clean.

  Rory bowed his head and said a prayer of safety and security for the men. He prayed for the people in the shipping containers and their safe recovery. When he had concluded, all the men said, “Amen.”

  Richards turned the radio up. For the most part, it had been quiet. Anticipation filled the Hummer as they tuned their favored ears toward the radio, patiently waiting for something to be said. When the sounds of the radio came alive, it was in Persian.

  Richards slammed his fist on the dash. “Something’s not right. We haven’t heard a single English word on these radios all last night or today.”

  After a brief pause and a quick thought, he continued, “We’re going to have to ambush them before they reach their destination, and we have no idea how far out that is. We’ll have to be careful and try to grab a prisoner. We need a translator, and to know where they’re heading would be great.”

  Suddenly the UN convoy veered off of I-294 and took the off-ramp onto the road where Richards’s convoy was sitting idle.

  “Take offensive positions,” Richards shouted on their own radio.

  The UN convoy was now headed east on US Route 6 and would meet them within a minute. The HMMWVs backed off the road, and the soldiers found themselves taking cover behind trees and broken-down cars, in ditches, and wherever else they could rapidly deploy. They had their service rifles pointed in the direction of the UN convoy now just seconds away.

  San Diego, California

  Sergeant Briggs and Specialist Edwards had reached Edwards’s ex’s house the night before. Now they were rummaging through the house and had found her ex-husband’s Faraday locker. It was a large wooden chest. Inside of the chest were three items wrapped in aluminum foil. Edwards tossed one to Briggs to help her unwrap the items.

  “Hopefully these are the items we’re looking for,” she said, hoping not to be embarrassed by the previous day’s statement about her ex possibly having communication equipment protected from EMP.

  They carefully began peeling away the layers of aluminum foil.

  “I count four,” Briggs said.

  “I’m almost there. Yeah, four,” she replied.

  Beneath the four layers of aluminum foil, they found the items were sealed in plastic wrap. Under the plastic wrap, the items were tightly swaddled in cloth.

  “Finally,” Briggs said, revealing a two-way radio.

  Looking over to Edwards, he could see that she was unraveling the cloth to reveal a portable crank-powered radio.

  “Awesome,” she said. “What’s in the third one?”

  Briggs was carefully unwrapping the third item. It was a second two-way radio.

  “We’re in business now,” she said.

  Briggs turned the radio on, but it was deader than a doornail.

  When Edwards heard the click of the radio dial being turned on, she looked at Briggs, but saw a frustrated expression on his face.

  “Now what?” she asked.

  “What’s the point of securing handhelds from an EMP attack if you have no way to charge them when the power’s down?”

  “How am I supposed to know? This was his project not mine.”

  “What about the crank radio?”

  She began cranking the radio and noticed a power meter on the face of the device. It was rising very slowly. They both realized she was going to be cranking for a while.

  After a while of cranking the radio, she switched the power button to the on position while they listened for traffic.

  “That’s a low-frequency tuner. You should be able to pick up the signals we need,” Briggs said.

  Most of the signals they were receiving were being used by men speaking a Middle Eastern language. The whole process was frustrating both of them. Briggs stood up and
walked away towards the window of the front room. All of his men were standing out front.

  “What are you guys doing out front?” he said before he was even finished opening the door. “Grab your gear and hang out in the backyard. You’re going to get yourself killed standing out in the open like that.”

  Briggs walked back to Edwards and said, “We just had a firefight with blue hats yesterday. Have they forgotten that?”

  Edwards was ignoring Briggs. He saw that she had found an audible station with English chatter and she was listening intently.

  “What did I miss?” he asked.

  She shushed him.

  The radio was alive with communication.

  “Eagle’s Nest from Oscar Six Bravo.”

  “This is Eagle’s Nest. Over.”

  “Eagle’s Nest from Oscar Six Bravo. India, Kilo, Lima, and Whiskey are a go. Over.”

  Black Hills Army Depot, South Dakota

  “Oscar Six Bravo, I copy,” Commandant John James said into his radio.

  He had spent the last several minutes in an undisclosed location, waiting for Colonel Buchanan to contact him. He had sent him out to a predetermined area of operation, where his orders were to wait on the impending attack.

  The entire Black Hills Army Depot bunker site was a vast array of underground bunkers. The ordinance depot was built during WWII and was used for the handling and storage of large amounts of munitions. For years it had served as a community of government workers, complete with a school, hospital, etc. It was remote, which was good for hiding, but when the antiquity of the depot was bested by technology, it was time to move on.

  Just prior to North Korea’s EMP attack just off the western coast of the US, Executive Commander Abdul Muhaimin had discovered the location of the military forces at the Black Hills Army Depot, using technology supplied to him from the Chinese. The upgraded technology allowed him to ID many of the prominent military personnel that were staged there. The UN leadership, in coordination with FEMA, communicated their intentions to destroy the patriot resistance. John James knew they were coming, but didn’t know where or when. Soon after this radio traffic was conveyed, the invaders switched their tactics, restricting the use of language in communications to Persian and simultaneously rotating out frequencies.