Foreign Enemies and Traitors

by Matthew Bracken

  Western Tennessee was certainly not classic guerrilla country in the way that Eastern Tennessee with its mountains was. This was subtle terrain, shifting and blending, giving barely adequate concealment even to those who understood its hidden folds and textures. But after tonight, he was done with it. The Cossacks had won, and for now it was time to leave. The most important weapon he carried tonight was contained within the memory chip of his digital camera, but that weapon was useless here in Radford County.

  They were about two miles north of the cave, so that meant they were almost four miles from where the Subaru had been hidden. If the explosion had killed a few more of the Kazaks, they’d be mad as hornets and out for immediate revenge tonight. Especially if they had found the bodies of their three dead comrades at the massacre site. Any Americans remaining in the area would be targets for reprisal attacks. The faint echoes and cracks of small-arms fire reached the three men, possibly from the other side of the cave. The louder but slower thumping of a .50 caliber machine gun was unmistakable. The Kazaks might be doing random recon by fire, or they could be gunning down American civilians on the road or in their homes. It was impossible to know. Mostly he hoped they were not shooting at Zack and Jenny. The shots were too far away for that, he hoped.

  The lack of any helicopters above them puzzled Boone. Normally, helos would rapidly arrive over the scene of a rebel-caused explosion, both for medical casevac and to search for the rebels who had planted the explosives. But there was no faint whine of turbine engines or rotors beating the night sky.

  That did not preclude the possibility that a UAV was already high above them, searching in expanding circles around the Subaru for the thermal signatures of humans. The bare branches above them provided cold comfort; they were no barrier to the heat given off by their bodies. Boone kept under and between the occasional evergreens as much as he could. In the pines, they might be missed entirely, or mistaken for deer. Under the bare branches of deciduous trees in winter, they were naked prey, upright walking bipeds carrying packs and weapons. He kept to the thickest cover, bushes that still held some leaves, following a stream as it wound gradually downhill. If they were spotted from above, they would never hear the missile coming.

  He consulted the captured military GPS unit, its screen dimmed down to its night vision setting. They were approaching the narrow waist of an hourglass-shaped section of woods. According to his memory, this stream threaded its way across the narrow point of the woods. He remembered often seeing cattle moving through it on their way to lower pasture. The woods ahead of them thinned out until they provided almost no cover, a danger area for sure.

  Ahead Boone saw a flash, and he froze in place and slowly sank down. He turned around. Carson was only a step behind, also crouching silently below the level of the bushes that provided their only concealment. Doug closed up the gap, waiting. Boone turned back to his front, and watched. Again he saw the flash, and this time he thought he saw it flicker. It could be someone with a flashlight, moving in the woods, swinging the light side to side. He pushed his NVGs up on his head, straining his eyes, but saw only blackness, his night vision ruined by the magnified light of his goggles. He slid them back down over his eyes, and waited. After a few seconds, there another series of flashes. An infrared strobe?

  He crept to within inches of Carson, and with a hand gesture waved Doug in for a conference. “I saw a light ahead. Phil, did you see anything?”

  “No. Nothing.”

  “I can see it,” whispered Doug. “Infrared?”

  “I think so.” Boone didn’t need to explain further. Infrared meant foreign enemies. No civilians were out tonight with IR lights. “Let’s get a little closer. We have to cross an open area before we get back into some more woods. It’s the only way to the boat. If it’s blocked, we might have to backtrack for miles, or lay up here until they’re gone.” He hated to talk so much when they might be approaching enemy forces, but he had no choice. Sometimes you just had to. He gave a thumbs-up sign, which was returned by both men. Boone noted that at this distance, in this light, even Carson could see a thumb. This was important to know. Boone gave the “move out” sign, sweeping his right index finger forward, and continued forward, but in a low crouch, at a slow pace, stopping every few steps to look and listen.

  A hundred feet further forward, and he could more clearly make out the light. It was blinking dash-dot-dash. That was Morse Kilo. Kilo for Kazaks. The Morse strobe repeated every ten or fifteen seconds. The signal, invisible to the naked human eye, was meant to prevent friendly-fire mistakes. The Kazaks must be feeling supremely confident, certain that no one but themselves possessed the black magic of night vision in their area of operations. They clearly perceived that the risk of accidental misidentification on their night operation was greater than the risk of being seen by some local insurgent with NVGs.

  When the trees began to thin, Boone halted them again, this time using only hand signals. Now they could all hear muffled engines and catch whiffs of diesel exhaust. The infrared blinks and the engine sounds grew as they drew closer. As he had remembered, the trees disappeared at the narrow waist of the hourglass of woods. He hid behind a rotten stump and took in the scene. A stream flowed from the woods, and then ran down into a lower pasture to their left. An armored security vehicle like the ones that Jenny had seen in Mannville was only seventy or eighty meters ahead of him, moving forward slowly to the left. There were four big tractor-sized wheels supporting an angular metal rectangle, the whole vehicle was about twenty feet long. The side and front armor plates angled outward in a sideways V, to deflect incoming fire. On top was a turret mounting both a .50 caliber heavy machine gun and a 40mm automatic grenade launcher parallel to it. Sporadic rifle and machine-gun fire was still audible a few miles away, but this armored vehicle was silent except for its well-muffled turbo diesel engine.

  A second ASV was fifty yards further to his left in the lower pasture, not moving. It took Boone a minute of watching to put the scene together. The ASV in the pasture was stuck. The stream came down from the woods, and then fanned out into the pasture like a miniature delta. Cows’ hooves had churned the bottomland into muck. On this cold night, with most of the ground frozen hard, the ASV crews were probably feeling good about their ability to drive off-road, but the muddy stream had trapped the first armored car.

  Stopped or moving, the ASVs presented a deadly adversary, capable of destroying any unarmored vehicles or people out to several thousand yards with its two heavy weapons. If the three fugitives were detected, they were virtually at point-blank range from the armored car, and his tree stump might as well have been a fern, for the protection it would afford. Boone guessed that the armored vehicles had been sent sweeping north behind the hills that hid his cave, to cut off their possible escape. This meant the vehicles were heading in the same direction as his hidden Jon-boat, their intended means of crossing the Tennessee River. To continue on, they would have to find a way around the ASVs.

  The nearer vehicle stopped at the beginning of the lower pasture, having moved ahead as far as it could without getting itself trapped in the bog. A Kazak walked in front of it, gingerly testing the ground under his boots, and disappeared around the front. A minute later he reappeared, dragging a retrieval cable forward, across the bog toward the stuck ASV. These armored vehicles had a retrieval winch built into their fronts, but only their fronts. Because of this, the stuck ASV’s own winch was uselessly facing in the wrong direction. They would have to drag the trapped vehicle backward, toward the ASV closer to the three Americans.

  The turret on the stuck vehicle was still pointed forward, away from the three men. The turret on the recovery vehicle faced rearward, to their right and uphill. This was standard operating procedure for a two-vehicle patrol, covering their front and rear with their most potent weaponry.

  Boone could see only the left side and back of the nearer ASV, so it was impossible to tell if the driver and vehicle commander were inside or if they
had dismounted. The driver’s hatch was open, flipped out to the left of the vehicle’s hull, just forward of and below the turret. The vehicle commander in the right seat wouldn’t be out dragging the cable through the mud. That task would probably fall to a junior crewman—the driver. The driver would haul the wire, leaving the turret gunner in place for security. The commander would merely push the button and activate the winch, spooling it out as his driver dragged it forward across the bog. Once the cable was attached to the back of the stuck vehicle, both ASVs would use their combined four-wheel-drive power, plus the winch motor pulling the wire, to try to free their comrades from the mud.

  The soldier dragging the cable forward held a small white flashlight in his left hand, casting a brilliant pool of green light as seen in Boone’s night vision goggles. The mud was up to the soldier’s ankles as he crossed the bog. While Boone watched, the soldier lost his balance, slipped and fell down, dragged backward by the weight of the heavy wire hooked over his shoulder. He tried to sit up and rolled onto his belly in the slime, yelling in what must have been Kazak, obviously cursing his crewmates, who began cursing back at him, as well as laughing. Boone didn’t need a course in Kazak to understand the situation; it was one that any soldier could readily interpret. Their lack of discipline in what should have been a serious tactical situation, despite its undeniably humorous aspects, gave him hope, leading to a new idea.

  A brighter light switched on from the recovery ASV, causing Boone’s NVGs to momentarily flare out, so he pushed them up on his forehead. The recovery ASV had turned on one of its secondary spotlights and directed it forward at the man dragging the wire, and thereby across the pasture to the stuck ASV. The small moveable spotlight was mounted atop the left rearview mirror, which stuck out a yard from the front corner of the vehicle. The man pulling the cable hollered something, and there was an immediate call back to him, probably to shut up and do his job. Another shout came from an unseen voice. The big side door of the closer ASV opened up, with the top section swinging back first and then the bottom part flipping down. Another crewman stepped out from the vehicle onto the ground. Without speaking, he marched forward in the white searchlight’s glare, slowing his pace as the firm ground changed to muck. Boone understood the situation: the two ASVs wanted to get out of this mudhole by themselves, even if it meant breaking light discipline. It was typical “Snuffy” thinking: they were probably more afraid of incurring the wrath of their superiors for getting stuck, than of the remote chance of encountering American rebels lurking nearby.

  Boone slid back behind the stump, beckoning his two buddies in whisper-close. The noise from the two diesel engines allowed him to speak softly without fear of detection. “New plan: forget the boat. Here’s the situation: two men from the close one are dragging out their recovery cable. It’s almost always a three-man crew in those things. You can’t fit a fourth man unless you’re not carrying any extra ammo or crew gear. I think the turret gunner just got out, so that leaves just one man in front. It’s probably the vehicle commander in the right front seat, under his own hatch, but it doesn’t really matter. He’s running the winch motor—he has to stay inside, to spool it out. So there’s just one guy left in this ASV, and he’s looking away from us. The three Cossacks in the other one are light-blind from the spotlight—they can’t see shit looking this way.”

  Doug asked in a whisper, “So, we’re going to sneak across here, behind them?”

  “Nope. We’re going to take the close one.”

  “Take it?” asked Doug. “What do you mean, ‘take it?’ We’re going to hijack an amored car?”

  “Damn straight we are.”

  “Our rifles won’t even put a dent in those things,” said Doug.

  “They won’t have to. Phil, you know how Glocks work?”

  “You just pull the trigger, and they go bang.”

  “Right. Here’s the new plan…”

  20

  Hope was cradled between the straps of Jenny’s pack, kept from sliding down by the dead traitor’s pistol belt. She had exchanged his Kazak uniform for ill-fitting men’s jeans, cinched tight with a leather belt, a sweater, a fleece jacket and a green plastic raincoat that fell almost to her knees. The baby was nestled vertically like a papoose, between the wool sweater and the fleece jacket. The webbing pistol belt and its holstered .45 pistol were now hidden under her newly acquired rain slicker. An ear-covering hand-knitted wool cap was covered by the slicker’s hood. She still wore the dead traitor’s insulated gloves and his boots. From the knees down, her pant legs were soaked from walking through wet grass and bushes.

  In a way, it irritated Jenny that she had to follow Zack. He had not proven himself to her. Zack had even lost his Winchester rifle when they crossed the swollen creek, after exiting the cave. Lost it! If he could lose his damn rifle, what else would he screw up? At the same time, Jenny was glad not to be alone on this stage of her journey. Zack was good at finding his way through the woods, she had to admit. He didn’t walk too fast for her to keep up. He went forward six or ten steps at a time, and then paused to look around and listen.

  Without his rifle, Zack walked with his bow at the ready. His tiny red light, attached to his bow, painted an almost unnoticeable pool of light just ahead of his feet. She had no trouble following his shadow. It was a new experience for her to follow somebody else at night, first on the way to the cave, and now with Zack. To be honest, it was a relief to allow somebody else to find the path for her.

  Most importantly, she was finally leaving the hell that Tennessee had become. With luck, they would cross into Mississippi sometime around dawn. She would bring the baby to a hospital, deliver it to the staff, and her responsibility for the foundling would be over. Then after resting up, she would decide whether to continue on to Florida, or perhaps head the other way to Texas. Someplace warm, not like freezing cold Tennessee. Somewhere more or less free, where she could live a normal life.

  Someplace where people weren’t hungry and cold all the time. Someplace where foreign soldiers didn’t herd Americans into ravines and machine-gun them.

  But first, they had to sneak out of the last few miles of Tennessee, and Kazak soldiers were roaming all over the area. Cossacks, Boone called them. The Cossacks seemed to be some kind of crazy cousins of the Russians. Maybe they really were Russians, at least some of them. Even President Tambor couldn’t get away with bringing actual Russian soldiers into America, but if he claimed they were Kazaks…maybe so.

  Sporadic gunfire echoed, they heard distant machine-gun bursts and random explosions. Zack followed the stream from the cave for the first hour, mostly in woods, crossing no roads. Boone had sounded sure that the Kazaks would stick to the roads, because they depended on their vehicles for mobility. Their intention was to drive the remaining Americans away from their farms and their homes, and these were all reachable by roads. Stay off the roads and you’ll avoid the Cossacks, that’s what Boone had said…but maybe he was just trying to boost our confidence, she mused. Boone didn’t mention the Cossack cavalry. Jenny had seen their horse troops at the Mannville high school, close enough to hear and smell them. Horses didn’t need to stay on the roads, nor did they make engine noises, which could be heard from far away. A troop of mounted Cossacks carrying those Russian Kalashnikov rifles could be hiding inside any stand of trees, or behind any barn or house.

  The woods grew sparse again, and they were forced to cross an open field. Zack stopped by a timber fence made of horizontal rails set into posts every dozen or so feet. The top rail was above Jenny’s chest, almost to her shoulders. It was a fence made to keep in horses, she knew that much. Cattle rated only barbed wire, and not as high. The fugitives crouched together by a fence post and surveyed the open ground ahead, moonlight reflecting off patches of icy snow. The moon itself was not visible through the clouds, but the entire sky cast a glow.

  “How’s the baby?” Zack whispered, checking his compass. It was attached by a string to his jacket collar, an
d kept in his coat’s left breast pocket so that it could not be lost. Unlike his rifle, Jenny thought.

  “If you don’t hear her crying, she’s okay.”

  “You think we should cross here, and stay near the creek, or swing back around and try to find more cover?”

  She considered. “If we’re going to make Mississippi by tomorrow, we’ve got to keep going as straight as we can. If we double back, it’ll take hours and hours. Then we’ll be stuck here in daylight. I say we should follow Boone’s route and just keep moving. Even if that means we have to cross some open ground.”

  “Can you get over this fence with your pack on?”

  “Yeah, I can, as long as the boards are steady.” They were whispering, crouching nearly nose-to-nose, as Jenny also studied the green dial of the compass. “Zack, I’ve got to ask you. How did you lose your rifle?”

  He looked away, embarrassed. “It…it was on top of my pack and my clothes. I thought it was on there good. I kind of slipped on some rocks, and I almost went over. I caught my balance, but my rifle slid off. My hands were full holding my pack, and I couldn’t grab it.” He paused. “You must really think I’m some kind of a dork.”

  “No, that’s not why I asked. I just wanted to know. Come on, let’s go.” Jenny put a boot on the middle rail, climbed up and swung her leg over while holding the top of the post. She had to be careful not to squeeze the baby against the top rail. Zack grabbed her pack and steadied her. She turned around, straddling the top rail, swung her other leg over and hopped down, facing him. She knew that if an enemy was out there somewhere with a night scope on a rifle, they’d be easy targets. The distant firing continued, low pops and thumps indicating the shooting was some miles away. Orange reflected off the low clouds to the west, the direction of the shooting. Still whispering close, she asked, “What’s that light?”