Foreign Enemies and Traitors

by Matthew Bracken

  Okay then, she thought, let’s see what a .45 caliber bullet will do. She stood back with her right arm extended and turned her body to the left, to shelter the baby from any ricochets. She carefully aimed an inch to the right of the deadbolt’s keyhole. The compact gun light protruded a bit beyond the end of the pistol barrel above it. The light was almost touching the white door, reflecting a brilliant glare down onto the snow. She knew the shot would be loud, and she steeled herself against it. She had walked several miles, and she hoped that she was far enough away from the burning house so that the foreign soldiers would not hear the gunshot. With her uncle’s Glock, she only had to pull the trigger back a little way, maybe half an inch, for it to fire. Her right index finger continued to squeeze the trigger by fractions of a millimeter. Jenny didn’t know at what point she would hear the booming shot, cringing at the thought of metal fragments and wood splinters flying back at her.

  Instead of the expected earsplitting explosion, the door swung open away from her! Jenny’s heart skipped, her index finger froze in mid-squeeze, and then she released the trigger. A boy about ten years old, dressed in an oversized red mechanic’s suit, stared for a moment into the bright white light on her gun. Then he shrieked incoherently and ran away hobbling awkwardly, hands clamped over his eyes.

  A female voice came from within the trailer. “Ramsey, you quit your fooling and get back inside! Arthur, I didn’t hear your truck; what took you so damn long? The fire’s gone out, and it’s freezing in here.”

  Jenny quickly scanned inside the trailer with her gun light. There was a black stove in the center of the room, with a chimney pipe going straight up through the roof. The interior of the full-width living room was cheaply paneled in fake wood; the kitchen was off to the left. A bed was against the opposite wall in the far corner, with someone lying in it. The boy who had opened the door was leaning over the bed, wailing. He was wearing bright red and black coveralls, covered with patches and letters. It was a promotional version of a NASCAR racing driver’s jumpsuit, made for a child. An old woman was on the bed, her body covered in quilts. A simple cross was nailed to the wall above the head of her bed.

  There was no one else in the room.

  Jenny said, “I’m not your Ramsey or your Arthur. Is anybody else at home with you, ma’am, besides the boy?”

  “Ain’t Arthur? Ain’t Arthur? Well then, who are you? You sound like you’re just a girl.” The old woman stared up at the low trailer ceiling, only her pale white face visible above her bed covers. A blue knitted nightcap was pulled down almost to her unblinking eyes. Her elderly voice was quavering, but not weak. She was at least eighty, by what Jenny could see and hear. The boy in red moaned an unintelligible question to her, then ran clumsily into another room and slammed the door.

  “My name is Jenny, ma’am.” The temperature inside the mobile home was not much above freezing, but still it felt wonderful to be inside, out of the wind and blowing snow.

  “Jenny is it… Well, Jenny, can you please tell me what time it is? I can’t see, except I can tell you got a powerful strong light.”

  “I don’t know, ma’am, I don’t have a watch. It’s late, probably sometime after midnight I’d guess.”

  “So what’re you doing out traipsing around the countryside after midnight, young lady?”

  “I don’t think you’d believe me if I told you.”

  The old woman cackled. “Oh, I’d believe most about anything these days.”

  “I found a baby, ma’am.” Jenny hardly had to say so; the foundling was crying again.

  “I can hear that plain enough—I’m blind but I still got ears. It’s not your own baby?”

  “No ma’am.”

  “So where did you find this lost baby?”

  Jenny couldn’t form the words to describe the ravine massacre. She had to think of something else to say first. “Ma’am, were you expecting someone to come home tonight?”

  “I still am. My son and my nephew. They should have been home before suppertime.”

  “Were they in Mannville today, at the market?”

  “That’s right, they were. How did you know that? They were selling good usables, like they do every Saturday. Stoves and such, made from our junkyard. Did you see them? Did they send you here?”

  “No ma’am. That’s what I have to tell you. I was in Mannville today too. Foreign soldiers came, on horses and in big trucks. I’m so, so sorry to tell you this, but…but the foreign soldiers put everybody onto school buses, and took them to a ravine not far from here. Then, well—they shot everybody, ma’am. Everybody. If your kin was in Mannville today, then I’m real sorry to tell you this, but…they’re probably not coming home.”

  The old woman was silent, staring up with unseeing eyes. She sighed audibly and said, “I was afraid it was something like that. I heard the shooting today. Five or six big volleys like crackling thunder, about a half hour apart. Or maybe more than that. I can’t see, so I can’t tell time, but that’s my guess. It was a powerful lot of shooting.”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “And you got away, with a baby?”

  Jenny answered in just a whisper. “Yes ma’am, I did.” She stood very close to the stove, where it was a few degrees warmer.

  “God must love you more than most, Jenny. Is it a boy or a girl baby?”

  “A girl, I think. I just found her. She’s tiny, maybe less than a month old.”

  “Well, she’s hungry, that’s certain. What do you have to feed her?”

  “I don’t know. I found a diaper bag near her. Do you have a lamp that works? I don’t know how long this flashlight is going to last.”

  “On the table. There’s a lighter by it.”

  Jenny lit the big oil lantern with an old-fashioned silver Zippo. She took off her fur hat and dropped it on the table, then pulled off the diaper bag and let her pack slip to the floor. The infant remained snuggled in its nest, between Jenny’s torso and the parka, supported by the pistol belt. She unzipped the diaper bag on the table, and checked inside it with her gun light. There were folded diapers cut from old cloth rags, a pair of clean outfits, a crocheted blanket, rattles and toys and a pacifier…but no baby bottles, and no baby formula.

  “Ma’am, there’s nothing to feed the baby in this bag. Nothing!”

  “No? Well, of course not—the baby was breast-fed. Where would a momma find such as baby formula these days? These days, it’s the old way or no way. Listen Jenny, don’t give up quite yet. We have a box of instant milk, and I can tell you where to find a baby bottle. Look for a big orange box in the cabinet over the sink, that’ll be the milk powder. And there should be a baby bottle or two left in…in…let me think… Okay, if there’s a baby bottle left, it might be in the bottom cabinet on the other side of the fridge. Probably way back in the corner, past all the plastic cups and Tupperwares. Way in the back, if it’s still there.”

  Jenny found the carton of instant milk first. It was the size of a small cereal box, and judging by its weight, it was more than half-full. Then she went to the bottom cabinet and began pulling out plastic pitchers, bowls and cups. She cradled the baby inside her jacket with her left arm while she crouched down to search, using her gun light to push and probe through the forgotten glass and plastic relics. When she located the simple treasure standing in the beam of her light, she called out, “I’ve got one!” It was a tall, clear plastic baby bottle, with a golden rubber nipple still attached to its neck

  “The Lord be praised!” the old woman joyfully replied. “Okay Jenny, we’re in business. Let’s make some milk for that baby, and it has to be warm. First, you’ll need to stoke the fire. I can’t do for myself, and the boy ain’t right. He can’t mess with the fire, so when it goes out, it’s out. My son and my nephew, they build up the fire in the morning, and let it go until they get back. Now I guess they ain’t never coming home… Well, that’s that. The Lord’s will be done. I’ve seen it coming for a long time. Now my time on this mortal world
is small. I can’t see and I can’t walk, so I don’t reckon I have much time left. That’s all right; I’ve lived a good long life. I’m not afraid, not for me, oh no. One door closes, another opens. A better one… Oh, listen to me prattle on! There’s wood for the stove by the door.”

  In the last year, Jenny had encountered similar hopeless situations. People who were doomed when their medicines ran out, or who couldn’t get kidney dialysis, or who were simply too feeble to gather firewood and keep from freezing. It was the way the new world was: merciless toward the weak and helpless. The elderly more often than the young seemed to accept their fate with equanimity.

  Jenny opened the stove’s iron door and felt inside. It was still very warm. A metal teapot lay on the flat stovetop, also warm. She hefted it, and determined that it was half-full of liquid. She fetched an armload of split wood and fed the pieces into the stove’s open belly. Once stirred, the coals were hot enough to ignite the new fuel. Soon, heat began to radiate from the black stove, pushing back the chill.

  On the kitchen counter next to the sink was a five-gallon water jug upended into a ceramic crock with its own spigot. Jenny found a spoon in a drawer and scooped milk powder into the bottle, then filled it with water and shook it up. Then she placed the baby bottle into the open teapot on the stove to heat it. Every few minutes she tested the milk formula by squirting it on her wrist. When the bottle was warm enough, she sat down on a padded kitchen chair near the stove, unzipped her jacket, and put the bottle’s nipple into the crying baby’s mouth. The tiny girl instantly began sucking; her eyes flicked wide open and she looked up at Jenny. The room was silent except for the crackling of the wood in the stove. Jenny thought, I’m so sorry, little one. I know that this doesn’t taste anything like your momma’s milk, but it’s the best I can do.

  “Does the baby have a name?” the old woman softly asked.

  “A name? Does she have a name?” Jenny stared down into the bright eyes above the rosy button nose and the busy little angel lips. A tear fell onto the baby’s forehead and slid into her eyes, so that she blinked but did not remove her gaze from her savior. “Yes ma’am, she has a name. Her name is Hope.”

  ****

  Through the Subaru’s windshield, Boone Vikersun’s night vision goggles turned the darkness into a green day. The Tennessee countryside was covered in a shimmering blanket of lime-colored snow; the windblown flakes were a million sparkling fireflies. He had spent so many nights of his military career peering into this alternate universe that its strangeness no longer struck him, but falling snow was still something special. The last time he had seen the bright green snow was in Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush Mountains, above 10,000 feet. On that occasion he had been chasing Taliban insurgents, and the Predator drones had been on his side.

  The PVS-7 goggles were Army issue, one of the many tactical tools he had taken with him when he left active duty without official permission. But even with night vision, Boone could not have navigated the Subaru wagon through this labyrinth of back roads and dirt farm tracks without extensive local knowledge. Especially with his peripheral vision severely restricted by the goggles. Boone drove mainly by memory, steering from landmark to landmark. He had grown up in this part of Western Tennessee, not far from where the Tennessee River left its excursion through northern Alabama and rejoined the state of its origin.

  He had roamed these hills, creeks and ravines as a boy and hunted among them as a teenager. Although he was a high school football standout, a knee injury his senior year killed several college scholarship offers. He enlisted in the Army a week after finishing high school, graduated from Ranger school while he was still a teen, and earned his Special Forces Green Beret when he was twenty-three. The badly timed knee injury that aborted his college aspirations never bothered him again. For most of the past two decades, he had been away on his country’s military business, but he had not forgotten the nameless hidden places of his youth. The past six months of operating in this region had renewed his old familiarity, and revealed many new trails, back roads, caves and thickets to move through and hide in.

  Two centuries of European settlement had left Tennessee with evidence of habitation from every period of American history. The current generation preferred to build on bare hilltops. This had not always been so, particularly in the much longer era before climate controlled central heat at the push of a button. It was rare to find a parcel of land without overgrown foundations, forgotten chimneys, and tumbledown shacks, even deep inside woods and thickets.

  On his mother’s side, his Tennessee roots went back nearly two hundred years. Forgotten dwellings and barns were some of his most dependable hiding places, besides providing him with a constellation of back-road signposts to guide his way. Everything from pioneer cabins to millennial McMansions had been abandoned over time, and Boone had committed the locations of hundreds of them to memory. Even forgotten water wells and stone springhouses covered by eons of vegetation had their uses.

  The ten-year-old Subaru Outback wagon was well suited to his nocturnal travels. Its four-wheel drive kept it moving in mud and snow, even up the few steep slopes. If it got stuck, it was light enough that its four passengers could push it free. In daylight, the mini-wagon looked like a beat up and worn out piece of junk, with its faded and rusting forest green paint job. Only a close look at the deep and knobby treads on its tires or a close listen to its smoothly revving engine might have revealed its secret. The Subaru’s performance upgrade was a gift from a service station owner, an American who had recently been encouraged to support the patriotic side during a nocturnal visit. The gas station operator supplied the foreign occupiers; he had little choice in the matter. This was acceptable, as long as the man also supplied Boone with fuel and other logistical help. There were few clear lines of division in this guerrilla war. It hadn’t been much different in the first Civil War, when Tennesseans had been bitterly divided in their loyalties between the Union and the Confederacy.

  Boone Vikersun was a longtime student of unconventional warfare and counterinsurgency, both through reading and in actual practice. He understood the many advantages the foreign enemies (and the American traitors allied with them) enjoyed in pursuing the freedom fighters. These advantages were never to be underestimated. But he also understood their limitations. The foreign soldiers had no local knowledge and few reliable guides to lead them to the thousands of potential guerrilla hiding places and caches. The UAV drones operated by American traitors were a fearsome weapon; there was no point in denying that obvious fact. However, they could not be everywhere at once, and they could not fly in the gusty winds beneath the turbulent clouds that were so common in the Tennessee winter and spring.

  He knew that unless the traitors who controlled the UAVs were acting on specific intelligence from informants, their drones patrolled randomly only above the cities and the larger towns, and along significant roads and highways. There simply were not enough UAVs to cover more of Tennessee than that without pinpoint targeting information. To be a guerrilla in Tennessee today, one had to acknowledge the odds and accept the chance that a deadly missile might plunge down without warning at any time. Zack Tutweiler, sitting behind him, certainly understood the danger after what had happened to his father. It was a gnawing fear that ate at all of them. But a hungry mouse could not live forever in its burrow, despite the existence of unseen hawks and owls. To live and to fight in Tennessee was to court sudden death.

  Tonight’s snowfall was not going to last much longer. An accumulation of more than a few inches was a rare event in Western Tennessee. Every fresh inch of snow would obscure and then erase the car’s tracks. Their timing was tight, but they would make it to one of his best hideouts before dawn. He knew from information passed on to him from Fort Campbell that the Predators were grounded during the passage of these cold fronts. Better still, he knew that once they were grounded, they were never relaunched at night.

  Like most rear-echelon troops, the UAV crews tended to f
ight this war like postal clerks who were working on a schedule under union rules. Once the birds were hangared for inclement weather, their crews would be sent home. The next shift would not report for duty until 0700 hours, and they would not launch new UAV missions until mid-morning. That was only if the weather cleared. The traitor UAV operators at Fort Campbell were responsible for covering all of Tennessee and Kentucky with only twenty functional Predators, along with a variety of smaller tactical UAVs. The smaller UAVs had even shorter ranges and tighter weather restrictions than the Predators. They had lost two Predators over the past month, and now their prime directive was to safeguard them, and not put them at any unnecessary risk. This was war as fought by bean counters, and it gave the patriotic forces one of their only exploitable operating margins.

  It was much the same with the traitors’ helicopters and other aviation assets. They were spread too thinly to give them effective coverage of their entire operational area. With the national economy and its industrial base in a shambles, spare parts and aviation fuel were in short supply. It was true that the drones and helos occasionally found freedom fighters out after curfew and killed them. This is what had happened to Morgan Tutweiler. These missile attacks were unquestionably demoralizing, and they dissuaded many potential fighters from joining in his efforts, but they were too random and unlikely to deter Boone Vikersun from conducting his own guerrilla war. Foreign enemy soldiers were operating in Tennessee, and he would harass, snipe and bomb them—and the American traitors—for as long as he could.