“I’m doing my best!”
Before they reached the trees, they encountered another timber fence and climbed it with practiced ease. There was indeed a one-story home partially concealed within a few lightly wooded park-like acres.
Zack pointed and said, “That other fence over there must run along a road, or maybe a private driveway. If the Cossacks come, they’ll come from that way. Let’s get behind the house, and find someplace to hide.”
“Maybe the house is open. Maybe we can just sneak in and get out of the cold.” Jenny was almost out of breath, from trying to keep up with Zack.
“Jenny…they’re burning houses.”
“Oh, right.”
A dirt driveway ran along the side of the home, and they followed it to the rear. A small barn or stable stood a few hundred feet behind the dwelling.
The firing was getting close, very close. They stopped inside the first trees and looked back. They heard the ripping of full automatic rifle firing, and a few louder blasts spaced apart. “Somebody’s shooting back, I think,” said Zack. “The big booms sound like a shotgun. The quick ones are the Cossacks firing their AKs.”
“Do you hear that?” asked Jenny.
“What, the shooting?”
“No, no, not that—horses! Horses, can’t you hear them?”
“Come on Jenny, run for the barn!”
The trees were spaced too far apart to provide concealment, and there wasn’t enough low ground cover. Until fairly recently, somebody had been maintaining the landscaping, and since it had gotten cold nothing much had grown back. A hundred yards behind the house was a low barn, about fifty feet wide, with a sloping metal roof. Next to and extending from the small barn was a matching tin roof for farm equipment. Wooden poles supported this open shed. Stacked against the barn beneath this shed was a wall of hay bales, then a flatbed stake-side truck, a combine harvester and a tractor. Past this covered shelter was a collection of farm clutter: an old rusted tractor, giant plastic barrels, a hay trailer, and an ancient towed harvester with upward-pointing rows of wicked steel tines. Zack headed into the middle of this private junkyard, crouching low, Jenny right behind him. He knelt behind an old white enamel meat freezer, his senses straining. He heard the hoofbeats getting closer, heard shouted voices and neighing horses. He heard a crash of glass, and in a minute the home was lit from within by fire.
Searching for better cover, his eyes fell upon a low flat shape. It took a moment to realize that it was a camper shell from a pickup truck, lying on the ground. He scurried to the back of it, grabbed the handle and turned it, then pulled up the hinged rear window. “In here, Jenny,” he whispered, but she was already on her knees and elbows and crawling inside the yard-high shelter. Her pack hit the top, and Zack took hold of it, allowing her to slide her shoulders out and get all the way underneath. Zack slipped off his own pack, laid it on the ground and unfastened his bow. It had been too much hassle trying to navigate with the compass and cross fences and downed timber while holding the compound bow at the ready, so he had put it on the side of his pack with a bungee cord. He removed the bow and shoved his pack inside the camper shell. Then he began to push the door back down from the outside.
“What about you?” asked Jenny, her face at the opening.
“I’m staying outside, just in case.” He lowered the door and turned the silver handle. Zack knelt between the old freezer and the camper shell, crouching low. The white meat locker was about a foot higher than the camper shell. He had briefly considered hiding inside the shell with Jenny, but decided not to. He didn’t want to be trapped like a rat inside it. What if the Cossacks fired randomly into likely hiding places? What if they could see inside the plastic side windows with flashlights? From outside, the windows appeared black, no doubt they were tinted a dark shade, but flashlights would probably probably penetrate them. He could do nothing to protect the three of them if he was also trapped inside. If it came down to it, he might be able to draw the Cossacks away from Jenny and the baby by creating a diversion.
The house burst into flames, fire pouring out of one window after another. Zack prayed that the home had already been abandoned by its inhabitants. Nobody came running out the back door, and the Cossacks were not firing their rifles. Zack’s bow had its own rack of four broadhead hunting arrows attached. He removed and nocked one, making it ready if it was needed. Realistically, he knew arrows wouldn’t be much use against Cossack riders armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles…except for drawing their attention, in order to pull them away from Jenny and Hope.
A single horse and rider appeared behind the house. The Cossack reined his mount in a tight circle, observing that the home was fully engulfed on all sides. Then he cantered toward the barn, toward their hiding place. The twin doors of the barn stood open, any livestock or horses already taken away or released. The rider was mounted on a dark horse; Zack could see him outlined against the burning house. He stopped his mount near the barn, and then spurred him inside. He’s probably seeing if anything is worth stealing, thought Zack, staying low, concealed in his nest of farm junk and rubbish. The horse and rider reappeared from the barn. The soldier stopped the horse with a sharp pull on the reins. He looked back toward the burning home, removed something from a pocket and upended it to his lips. He was drinking something. Probably alcohol, thought Zack. Maybe he doesn’t want his friends to see him drinking, so that’s why he rode behind the house. The horseman was close enough that Zack could see the Kalashnikov rifle slung across his back. Some kind of bag or satchel was hanging across his front, like a mail carrier’s sack. He wheeled his horse, looking in all directions.
The Cossack removed another bottle from this sack, and a little spark and flare erupted from his other hand. Zack realized this was a cigarette lighter, but instead of lighting a cigarette, the soldier lit the end of the bottle he was holding in his right hand. Zack knew what this was: a Molotov cocktail, a gasoline bomb. This explained how they were burning the houses. At least the American Army wasn’t giving them incendiary grenades to do this job, Zack thought. They didn’t need to. Old-fashioned gasoline bombs worked just as well on houses.
A small wick at the end of the clear bottle ignited in flame. The rider held the bottle at arm’s length, and then lobbed it overhand through the two open barn doors. Then he prepared a second bottle, and turned his horse back toward the covered shed, with its tractor and truck, and the junkyard next to it. Searching for a readily flammable target, the Kazak cocked his arm to throw. Then the horse wheeled, and from fifty feet away, the Cossack’s face turned to Zack. From his perch atop the horse he locked his eyes upon the shivering teenage boy hiding between the freezer and the camper roof. His greater height up on the horse allowed him to see down between them, something Zack had not reckoned on when he selected his hiding place.
The bottle’s fuse was still burning as the rider turned the horse and took new aim. Zack could not know where he was going to launch the flaming gasoline bomb, or even for sure that the Cossack had seen him. But in that moment of uncertainty, Zack decided to take his destiny in his hands, instead of waiting to find out where the firebomb would land. Without planning or pondering the consequences, he stood straight up from his hiding place in a bow-shooting stance, extended his left arm straight out while pulling the string back to full draw, and let the arrow fly.
Zack saw a brief look of alarm on the Cossack’s face when the arrow whizzed past his jaw. In a second Zack had prepared another arrow, but before he could fire a second time, he saw the Cossack’s free hand move to his neck. He had not missed after all! The razor-sharp broadhead must have grazed him, or even passed through his neck or face. Perhaps it was even a fatal wound! He pulled his second arrow back and loosed it all in one smooth motion, this time nailing the rider, he was sure of it. Both of the Cossack’s hands reflexively went to the arrow shaft protruding from his left shoulder. The lit Molotov cocktail fell into his open sack, which instantly erupted upward in a volcanic infern
o. The horse wheeled and reared, neighing loudly in terror as its rider was engulfed in flames from the waist up. The Cossack madly swiped at the flames, while also attempting to remove the strap of the burning sack of gasoline bottles from around his neck. The horse twisted, spun a tight circle like a dervish, reared up and then took off in a panicked gallop. The Cossack was still in his saddle as the horse went racing toward the side of the burning house, jumped a fence and continued across the open field, trailing flames. The rider had become a human torch.
Zack heard men shouting and the sounds of many other horses. As he watched, the burning Cossack rider continued galloping away, pursued by his compatriots on their own mounts. Zack stared in amazement until well after the horses disappeared and he was satisfied there were no more Cossacks lurking around the farm. Then he opened the back of the camper shell and crawled inside. Jenny was sitting Indian-style, the baby cradled on her lap, feeding her the bottle of milk that had been prepared back in the cave.
“She was awake, and I wanted to keep her from crying.” The plastic bottle had been kept against Jenny’s skin during their hike to keep it warm. Flickering orange light from the barn and the more distant house illuminated the interior of the camper shell through its plastic side windows. The barn had caught fire, but did not yet appear to be fully engulfed. It didn’t matter, they could do nothing to fight the fire anyway, and they were a safe distance from it. “I watched you through the window,” Jenny said. “I couldn’t tell if you hit him until I saw him catch on fire. And you know something strange? Now we’ve both done it. What are the odds of that?”
“Done what?”
“Burned one. Set them on fire. Only mine was an American traitor, and yours was a Cossack.”
“That’s a bad way to die,” Zack observed, sitting up and facing her. “Maybe the worst.” The roof of the camper shell was high enough for him to sit up only if he tilted his head over. He opened his backpack on his lap.
“After what I saw in the ravine last night, I wish we could burn every one of them.”
“Do you think they’ll come back?”
Jenny considered. “If they don’t find an arrow sticking out of him, they’ll probably think he just screwed up and lit himself on fire. They burned the house and the barn, so there’s no reason for them to come back here. Anyway, I’m too tired to walk any further tonight, and this is a good place to feed the baby.”
“Let’s eat some of the rice from the cave.”
“Okay, as soon as Hope is done with her milk. You know, we got lucky here.”
“Yeah, damn lucky. It might have been us on fire.”
“Not just that, this camper. Check it out; this was already somebody’s hiding place.” Instead of a dirt floor beneath the fiberglass shell, there was a dry blanket on top of a slab of foam, and under that was a sheet of plywood.
“Either that, or it was a playhouse for some kids,” said Zack. There were toys and children’s books scattered on the sleeping pallet. He took a plastic jar from his pack and began eating his sticky rice and vegetables with a spoon. “I wonder where the kids who played in here are now? I wonder if they made it out.” Unspoken was the other alternative. Maybe this family had been in Mannville on Saturday and had been shot. Or perhaps they had fled the county a year ago, after the earthquakes. Or maybe they had been killed by marauding bandits, or died from hunger and cold and disease, or from a dozen other causes. There was just no way to know. Now that their home was on fire, perhaps nobody would ever know what had happened to them. Their story might be lost, like the stories of tens of thousands of other Tennesseans who had died since the past year’s chain of calamities had fallen upon them. Cossack nightriders were just the latest disaster to sweep through Radford County.
22
Phil Carson walked with his head down, his hands stuffed in the pockets of a faded green Army field jacket. It was one of the items he had retrieved from Boone’s grab bag in the cave. It was 1970s vintage, a pre-camouflage-era relic of the past, but still serviceable. Like himself, he hoped. Before he left the black pickup, he changed from his modern ACU camouflage uniform into civilian clothes, the green coat notwithstanding. The old Army surplus field jackets had been standard cold-weather wear among the working poor for decades, so today it was another form of camouflage.
Boone Vikersun and Doug Dolan were two miles back, waiting behind a semi-demolished restaurant on a bypassed county road. The place was so unwanted that even its demolition had run out of steam before reaching completion. Boone had driven the pickup truck right into the back of the forgotten restaurant, pushing through a halfheartedly boarded-up section of ruined wall. They could use the truck again if they had to, or leave it where it was without much fear of its premature discovery.
Technically, it was a curfew violation for Carson to be out walking at night without a special travel permit. Boone had assured him that a solitary old man would not be hassled just before dawn on the outskirts of the small crossroads town of Carrolton. If he were seen, authorities would assume that the old man was just getting a head start in walking to his assigned place of employment, and they were unlikely to stop him to check his papers. His 64-year-old face had become another form of camouflage. Carson didn’t disagree with Boone’s logic in choosing him for this mission, but he also couldn’t help but consider that of the three, maybe he was the most expendable. He didn’t much disagree with that unspoken assessment either, and he accepted the assignment with calm resignation.
It was the coldest part of the night, and Carson was glad to be gaining the warmth generated from walking. Boone and Dolan would be shivering back in their hiding place, forced to remain motionless, waiting for him to return with a new escape vehicle. The moon had set sometime after midnight, and now it was almost perfectly dark. There were no streetlights of course, and almost no light coming from houses or businesses, so he had to literally feel his way along the paved edge of the road until he reached Carrolton. Wearing night vision goggles, obviously, would have blown his cover as a harmless old civilian on his way to work. A harmless old civilian…with a .45 caliber Glock pistol hidden inside his coat, its suppressor already attached. The left inside pocket of the field jacket was slit at the bottom to accommodate the suppressor’s length, which reached to Carson’s left hip.
The black Dodge Ram pickup they had taken from the Nigerians was marked in white letters with N.P.F. on both sides and the tailgate, and after last night’s fracas, it could not be driven over the well-guarded Tennessee River bridge. Today, any Nigerian vehicle spotted outside their area of operations was going to cause major alarms to go off. Not to mention the utter futility of Boone Vikersun and company trying to pass themselves off as members of the Nigerian Peacekeeping Force! Not even Mexicans from the North American Legion were going to buy that one.
The final mile of the approach to Carrolton could not be made in cover; Carson just had to brazen it out. Boone had estimated that it would take twenty minutes to walk to the service station, where he would pick up their next vehicle. Carson would give the agreed-upon secret hand signal to the owner of the station as he opened up for the day. The owner would then supply a new vehicle with the necessary decals and permits, as simple as that. A few minutes later, he would pick up his two confederates, and they’d cross the bridge into Middle Tennessee. Then they would drive up toward Clarksville and Fort Campbell, the home of the 5th Special Forces Group.
After the earthquakes, the new Route 214 bridge over the Tennessee River had been deemed repairable, while the older Interstate 40 bridge, fifteen miles north, was still down. Boone said that the more modern concrete towers of the 214 bridge had been left standing, where the entire I-40 bridge had simply disappeared into the deep river, due to some fluke of underwater geology. This had given the sleepy town of Carrolton sudden strategic importance, and its gas station was needed by the government and the foreign so-called peacekeeping troops. But according to Boone, this gas station owner was also secretly working for
the resistance forces. He had even provided the four-wheel-drive Subaru wagon that they had driven to the hiding place near the cave.
Carson didn’t need a map or GPS to find Carrolton; the line of demarcation was clearly visible by its working electric lights. Carrolton was back on the power grid, part of an electrified enclave on the west side of the Tennessee River. He turned the corner from his residential approach street onto State Road 214 for the final two blocks to the gas station. It was still dark; there was almost no traffic on the road, just a few delivery vans and an occasional eighteen-wheeler rumbling past. People who had a legitimate reason to be out before dawn, before the curfew was lifted for ordinary folks. He passed an out-of-business donut shop, and a pawnshop that was full of merchandise, but closed for the night. Stout burglar bars covered its windows. Across from the gas station was a vacant business that Carson couldn’t identify. He found a dark alcove on the side of the pawnshop, and began to wait.
****
Stanley Fromish opened his garage at 6:00 a.m. on Mondays. In January, this meant it was still dark outside. He pulled the chain and rolled up the steel doors over the service bay, and was turning to go to his office when he was jerked back around by his shoulder. He hadn’t heard a car or a truck pull in; they rang a bell when they crossed his rubber strips. Neither had anybody left a vehicle out front for repairs overnight, and so he was taken completely by surprise. There was no time even to reach for the .38 revolver he kept in the pocket of his insulated jacket, before he made initial eye contact with his grabber. He wondered if this fellow was just an aggressive panhandler, or a robber, but then the stranger made the sign, the insurgents’ blackmail sign, holding up two crossed fingers and then tapping them on his heart.
The man spoke before Fromish could even form a thought. “Don’t worry, Stanley, this is just business, not a robbery.” He’d never seen this man before. He appeared to be in his sixties, but with a hard look to his lean face. The man was wearing a plain old Army coat, with a black watch cap pulled down to his eyebrows.
Foreign Enemies and Traitors Page 54
