Foreign Enemies and Traitors

by Matthew Bracken

  There were only a few more hours of darkness ahead of them. There was always the remote chance of encountering a night ambush, but it was not the way the foreign troops preferred to operate. It just wouldn’t have been productive: almost nobody moved at night, and even less frequently on these scarcely known dirt tracks. Civilians were afraid to be out after dark; they preferred to hunker down behind fences and walls. Nighttime patrolling was performed from high above, by the unseen UAVs—but not in bad weather.

  Daytime movement in force was the standard operating procedure of the foreign troops. They preferred to conduct cordon and search operations, and set up mobile checkpoints. But as happened so often, the inevitable drift toward routine limited the effectiveness of their operations. They returned consistently to the same patrol patterns and checkpoint locations. Boone knew where almost all of their most regular checkpoints might be, and he avoided them, rarely moving on the main roads. Instead, he traveled on foot or even on horseback. When he used a car, it was mostly off the pavement, on private farm tracks that appeared on no maps.

  Now it was time to put the Subaru wagon back into hiding, and move on foot to their next laying-up position. With snow on the ground and warmer weather coming they would hide, and wait for another frontal passage before they made their next move. In Tennessee during January, fronts blew through every three or four days almost like clockwork. Snow was uncommon but it rained frequently and for long periods. The enemy soldiers hated to spend time outside in the raw, bone-chilling weather. This was especially true for the Mexicans and the other Central Americans of the North American Legion—their combat effectiveness went down with the mercury.

  The compressed parallel tracks left behind the four-wheel-drive Subaru could not be prevented. It was still snowing hard, and the new accumulation would soften and obscure the tread marks, but not wipe them out entirely. Enough new snow to accomplish the complete erasure of tire tracks was unlikely. But this part of Radford County was only rarely patrolled on foot by any foreign soldiers. It was almost a sanctuary zone for the few remaining rebels, a buffer between Mississippi and the occupied counties to the north, where the real guerrilla war was taking place. Like the horses, the old Subaru Outback wagon was a link in his transportation chain, but Boone could not drive it much further north without risking an enemy checkpoint, even at night and in bad weather.

  He approached the hiding place at crawling speed, in low gear. He followed a dirt farm road into thick woods, turned off at an unlikely looking trail, driving on a left-leaning slant on the side of a hill, and then he turned downhill and took aim directly between two massive holly trees. Boone stopped the vehicle and said, “Everybody out. Get everything off the roof first.” They stripped the baggage from the Subaru’s rack: the ceiling of the car’s hiding place would clear the roof rack only by inches. A minute later, the lower branches between the two holly trees were raised as Doug hauled down on a concealed rope, which was attached to a pulley far up one of the trees. With the bottom branches up and out of the way, Boone pulled the Subaru forward a dozen feet, sharp holly leaves scraping down the roof and sides.

  The holly trees were enormous, each covering a diameter of more than thirty feet with dense, waxy leaves, which were opaque to visual or IR observation by day or night. The prickly-edged holly leaves would also deter any unlikely passersby on foot from exploring deeply within their domain. But the holly trees were not the only element of this vehicle hide. A small roof of corrugated fiberglass greenhouse panels had been erected over scrap lumber corner posts, just high enough to conceal the car. The makeshift roof was piled with a layer of dirt, and intentionally overgrown with weeds. The dirt and weeds would further obscure the IR signature of the metal car hidden beneath the fiberglass roof. Military camouflage netting hung down from the sides of the car shelter, and all of this was hidden beneath the opaque holly leaves.

  This was one of a half-dozen vehicle hides Boone used. Others were less elaborate. Serviceable cars could often be left in woods disguised as abandoned junk, with their charged batteries removed and hidden nearby. This four-wheel-drive Subaru mini-wagon was his first choice for nighttime off-road driving, so it earned his best hiding spot. Tonight they would leave the car’s hiding place quickly, while it was still snowing. If their fresh tire tracks were discovered, enemy patrols might follow them and, holly trees or not, the car would be discovered.

  The last leg of their journey would take place on foot, while it was still dark. He had two new recruits in tow, but at least they had proven quiet and stealthy. Phil Carson had been a Special Forces operator, even if his experience had been decades before. Boone’s only concern was that Carson might not be physically able to make the last mile-and-a-half hike. He was over sixty, and if he slipped, he could sprain an ankle or break something. Well, the old man had walked out of Mississippi as far as the Tennessee line, and he had made a rapid recovery from an arrow wound. Even so, he was old, and that meant his strength could fade quickly and without much warning. It would not be wise to overburden Phil Carson by regarding him as the man from his father’s war stories.

  Boone knew he could trust Zachary to be quiet and sure-footed. The teen was a natural hunter, trained by his father and raised in the Mississippi woods. Stealth was a skill better learned in the forest in pursuit of game than on any military training ground. Getting within bow-and-arrow range of a deer was much more difficult than finding and shooting men, even soldiers of above-average skill.

  Since Boone was the only one wearing night vision goggles, he knew that to the others, it would appear that the Subaru had just driven into a black bush. The branches and prickly holly leaves scratched and creaked down both sides and the roof of the car. When the car was all the way inside, he killed the motor. He pushed open his door against the camouflage netting, and slid down the side of the car and out the back of the hiding place to where the others were waiting. He spoke quietly to Doug Dolan and his two new volunteers. The snow-covered woods would swallow his whispered words.

  “I’m going to scout around the area before we leave. I’ll sweep up our tracks, back to where we turned off the last trail. Then we’re going somewhere else on foot. It’ll take us a half hour or forty minutes, depending on how fast we can move. Then we’ll reach a safe place where we can lay up for a few days. We’ll move out of here as soon as we unload the rest of the gear. We’ll carry as much as we can, and leave the rest inside the car and get it on another trip. I’ll be back in a few minutes. Doug will show you what to do.”

  ****

  Leaving the warm trailer was difficult, but Jenny knew that she couldn’t stay there, not so close to the ravine. There was no way that the people who had committed the massacre would allow any witnesses in the area to survive. The old woman was already resigned to her fate. Jenny had seen it before. She could do nothing to help her, besides making her some warm tea and building up the fire in the wood stove before she left. Jenny offered to take the boy, but she had been rebuffed. “If you want to take him, you’ll have to tie him up and carry him. He won’t leave this place. He don’t understand any other life.” There was no point arguing; Jenny knew the old woman was right.

  After changing the baby girl’s cloth diaper and outfit, she prepared another bottle of formula from the milk powder and put the box into the diaper bag. She heated the bottle so that it would be drinkable for a few hours. She packed two folded bed sheets in the diaper bag, to cut up for extra diapers. The old woman told her where to find some road maps, and told her how to get around the checkpoint she had seen by the store. “Take the other way around the junkyard, go to the left, it takes you up a steep path but you won’t have to go up the ravine.” Jenny put a county and a state road map into the left cargo pocket of her trousers. The Tennessee state road map showed a strip of the northern edge of Mississippi. It would be enough. She closed the trailer’s door behind her, with baby Hope tucked again inside her camouflage parka. It was still snowing, and the accumulation had bu
ilt up to perhaps four inches.

  No tearful goodbyes, not after what Jenny had seen tonight. She didn’t know the old woman. Maybe her son Arthur was still alive. Maybe he had been somewhere else yesterday and not at the swap meet. He could still come home. In any event, it wasn’t Jenny’s problem to worry about the old woman. Stopping at the trailer had been a lucky break for her, but that was all. There was no need to grow overly sentimental; no good would come of it. Sentimentality would only slow her down, make her hesitate. The woman was elderly; she’d lived a very long life. Not so Jenny McClure, who would be fortunate if she could live half as long—or if she could even make it through another year. Not to mention the baby, who had not lived much of any life at all, and who was already an orphan without ever knowing her parents.

  Time was of the essence. It was early morning, and when the moon set, Jenny would be blind. Even hidden by unseen clouds, the diffused moonlight made it possible for her to move fast. She had to go now, and make rapid progress to the south. At least the old woman had been able to give her a starting direction. She even had a pair of road maps to study tomorrow in daylight. If she could just get five or ten miles away from the ravine before dawn, she’d find somewhere to hide during the day.

  After she closed the door behind her, she used a trick her uncle had taught her. It had seemed like a silly joke when he had showed her how to do it on a muddy trail. She walked off the porch and away from the trailer backward, carefully lifting her feet and leaving prints that pointed back to the mobile home. Uncle Henry had told her that an expert tracker could easily detect the fakery, but ordinary folks could not, and experts were rare. She had never imagined actually using this ploy, much less in snow.

  As the old woman had informed her, the path to the left side around the junkyard was better than the route that had led her up to the massacre site. At the bluff behind the junkyard, a jeep trail ascended the steep slope, and then she was on top of a plateau. After laboriously crossing a tightly strung barbed wire fence, placing her pack, her bag and the baby on the other side and climbing over, Jenny sensed that she was on some kind of a farm. She struck out at right angles from the fence. The trees thinned and turned to pasture on a slight downgrade, and then she encountered a stream, shining black between two curving borders of snow. Unable to determine its depth, and unwilling to risk soaking her feet in ice water, she backtracked and turned roughly parallel to the watercourse, walking downhill.

  Within a half hour, Jenny was lost again, with no residual sense of her direction. She found what she thought might be another jeep trail. Once again, her choice of directions came down to a mental coin toss. Something told her that right would take her south, so she kept walking that way, depending again on fate. Fate had brought her this far. Each of the night’s directional coin tosses had been in her favor. Even being selected for the rape house had turned out to be lucky, because it had led to her escape.

  For Jenny to live to see her next birthday would require a miracle. The old woman in the trailer had already lived at least fifty or sixty years longer than she had. There was no reason to pity the old lady. She had lived a full life, and raised children and grandchildren. She had outlived hundreds of younger, healthier people who had been killed today in the ravine. No, there was no reason to pity her, even as she thanked her for the gift of shelter and the milk powder that had fed the baby. Jenny kept walking through the snow, which now was up to her ankles. The dead traitor’s boots were excellent. Inside, her feet were still practically dry, and not too cold. She just had to keep moving south.

  She left the sloping pasture near the stream, when it passed back into woods. The bare trees allowed most of the moonlight to reach the snow and gave the world a soft glow, but gradually the light dimmed until her eyes strained to see where she should place each footstep.

  The cloud-hidden moon must be setting. Soon it would be too black around her to see her gloved hand in front of her face. Then she would have to use her pistol’s bright flashlight, and risk being seen by the foreign troops. Either that, or try to move forward much more slowly in the darkness, almost by feel. Jenny McClure had experienced both forms of night travel during last year’s escape from Memphis. On that journey she had not been afraid of foreign soldiers, but of the desperate, starving refugees pouring out of the city, and of the thousands of inmates who had escaped en masse from prisons, jails and insane asylums after the earthquakes.

  ****

  Boone pulled his Randall fighting knife from its sheath. It had been a gift from his father when he had completed the Special Forces qualification course. The blade was eight inches long, and sharp enough to shave a clean swath of hair off his arm like a razor. He selected a pine bough, sliced through it at an angle, and resheathed the knife. The branch was six feet long and thick with pine needles, a natural broom. Walking backward, he used the feathery end to sweep away the tire tracks and his footprints back to where the car had left the trail and driven into the holly thicket. The tracks were clearly visible in the bright green image seen in his night vision goggles. The moon was setting, but his light-amplified view was more than adequate.

  Snow was still falling, and with luck, there would be enough fresh accumulation to obscure the Subaru’s twin tire tracks. He knew that there was no way to elude professional trackers, if they were searching hard after them. So much was a matter of chance, based largely upon the vagaries of tomorrow’s weather. Tonight the snow was a blessing, but tomorrow it could be a curse if the car’s compressed tracks were preserved by a hard freeze. The odds were good that the foreign troops were inside on a night like this, staying warm and probably getting drunk. They rarely mustered the motivation for night patrols, relying instead on the missile-armed UAVs to deter curfew violators. Bad weather at night left a seam in the enemy posture that Boone had learned to exploit. Tomorrow this luck could turn against him, if their tracks froze solid.

  Once the tracks were obscured back to the trail and a few dozen yards further on, he would circle around to the other side of the holly thicket, sweeping his footprints behind him as he went, and leaving a confusing pattern left by backward and forward walking. None of these tricks would stop a professional tracker or a tracking dog, but they might be enough to confuse ordinary troops, and buy them a head start. If it kept snowing for a few more hours, the swept tracks would disappear altogether. So much depended on tonight’s and tomorrow’s weather. The snow might melt completely, or freeze hard. Clear weather tomorrow would also mean Predators aloft and new aerial surveillance. Seen on the UAV’s infrared, warm human bodies would stand out against the snow like blazing torches.

  Boone was standing next to a bare maple tree, scanning his head side to side and evaluating his efforts, when movement to his left caught his eye. Peripheral vision was almost nonexistent with the night goggles. He slowly turned his head to focus his vision in that direction. This was beyond where he had driven the Subaru off the trail and into the hiding place. Even in the open areas, his vision was limited to no more than two hundred feet because of the falling snow. With the winding of the trail through the evergreens and bare hardwoods, in many directions his vision was limited to only a dozen yards. Again, the movement caught his eye. What was it, a black bear or a deer? No, they would not be moving on such a night. His heart churned—someone was coming! He had been paying too much attention to the snow beneath his feet, and so he had missed the silent approach of an intruder. Boone slid against the foot-thick maple beside him, putting its trunk between himself and the person approaching.

  A single foreign enemy meant a recon scout, or a point man for a patrol. The man was wearing a Russian fur hat and a uniform, and was walking toward him, now less than a hundred feet away. In Tennessee, only the Cossacks wore those hats and that uniform. But the man was not wearing any night observation device, and he appeared to be carrying no rifle. To an enemy without NVGs, it would be difficult even to follow the path without tripping over obstacles. Boone knew that he would be invi
sible as the soldier passed by. He looked back up the jeep trail. He could now see a hundred feet beyond the single trooper, but there was nobody following behind him. In this wooded terrain, in this darkness without night vision, soldiers following one another would have to be no more than a few feet apart, or they would quickly lose each other.

  That’s what must have happened, Boone decided. This solitary soldier must be a straggler, separated from his squad and lost. Or perhaps a deserter, although he had never heard of a Cossack deserting. To whom could he desert? Except for a few officers, the Cossacks couldn’t speak a word of English, and they were universally hated by Americans. The officers spoke Russian and some English. This solitary soldier must have become separated from his unit, but that did not take away from the danger. His unit must be nearby, certainly within hearing range of gunshots. A platoon or more of Cossacks might even be laying up for the night in this very same area!

  If the Cossack continued beyond the Subaru’s hiding place, even without NVGs he’d be bound to notice the two fresh tire tracks in the snow. The car had compressed the four inches of white powder down to a slippery hard-packed crust. Even in the last moonlight that filtered through the clouds the parallel tracks would be noticeable. He might even feel the compressed tracks with his feet, and then examine them further with a flashlight. When the soldier eventually found his unit, he would report the fresh tracks, and his comrades would easily be able to follow their trail straight back to the car’s hiding place.