by Glen Tate
“Got it,” Grant repeated. He didn’t want to say, “I’ll quit being an overexcited and inexperienced military commander with visions of flag-waving in my head.”
Ted smiled and saluted, which was not customary in the battlefield, or in the cab of a vehicle, but Ted realized that Grant needed a salute.
Grant returned the salute. Man, that felt good, he thought. He jumped down from the running board on the cab. He ran, full sprint, to Mark’s truck. He was re-energized. It could have been the good news about the regular units advancing, or it could have been the food. Perhaps, though, it was the realization that he was now the scout leader who was going to get them there alive.
“We’re the scouts,” Grant yelled to the Team as he got up to Mark’s truck. He yelled so Ryan and Wes could hear from the back and all the occupants in the front and rear cabs could also hear.
“Hell, yeah!” Pow said. He had been itching to do some fancy work, and now he was going to have the chance. He loved fighting. He especially loved fighting alongside these guys. His guys. Guys who were way better than the jack-ass punks they’d gone up against so far. This was the time of Pow’s life. Right now. The next few hours heading into Olympia. This was when legends would be born. And William Kung “Pow,” a tough-ass Korean, would be a Patriot legend.
Bobby and Scotty soaked it in. Scouts, huh? Okay. They were up to it. So were Ryan and Wes. They felt a little exposed in the back of the truck with only a tarp to shield them from bullets and shrapnel, instead of the cab of the truck like the others had.
“Hey,” Pow said, coming to life. He was on fire. “That sniper and spotter thing me and Donnie did worked pretty good. We can spot for you guys as we head up toward an overpass.”
“Great idea,” Grant said. “He can fit back here,” he said, referring to Donnie in the rear cab. Grant pointed at Pow. “You two can get out a few hundred yards behind us and watch for problems as we move ahead.”
“They’ll need a radio,” Scotty said.
“Yep,” Grant agreed and then ran over the semi. He went up to the cab and told Ted the plan to use Donnie and Pow and that they needed a radio, an intra-unit radio, not some CB that required Scotty to carry two and communicate between both.
Ted nodded. They had two extra intra-unit radios. HQ sent the extras for this type of situation. “One is none; two is one” was the phrase Ted always used to describe why extra equipment was always needed. It was amazing how many things broke or got lost in operations.
Ted gave Grant an extra radio. It was exactly like Scotty’s. They had all been trained on them back at Marion Farm. The Team and others had received more intensive training. But, then again, the Team had been using radios of various kinds for months to talk to each other in tactical situations. Pow would have no problem using the radio and using it well.
Grant ran to the chase truck and got Donnie.
“Grab your gear and all the 300 Win. Mag. ammo you have,” Grant said to a surprised Donnie. “You’re coming with us. We’re the new scouts.”
Donnie nodded. He’d had an enormous adrenaline rush working with Pow and taking those shots earlier. He loved it and wanted more.
“You got a pistol?” Grant asked, looking at Donnie sitting in the rear cab of the chase truck.
“Yep,” Donnie said. He purchased a Glock 21 right before the Collapse, when he realized his hunting guns were not precisely suited for what he suspected was coming. A Glock 21, chambered in .45, was extremely well-suited for what came.
“You got rain gear?” Grant asked as he looked at the trees, which were starting to blow from the increasing wind.
Donnie shook his head. Grant looked at the driver, who had a Gore-Tex jacket. “Give him your jacket,” Grant ordered, knowing that the driver wouldn’t need it since he would stay dry in the cab. The driver jumped out of the cab and handed Donnie his jacket.
“Let’s go,” Grant said to Donnie, who was out of the cab and assembling his gear together.
Grant and Donnie ran over to Mark’s truck. There was some light from the highway light, which was helpful because running in the dark was a bad idea. A twisted ankle right then would be a very, very big deal. How could Grant tell his grandkids that he was the commander of a brave irregular unit and almost got to Olympia for the big battle … but he twisted his ankle and had to spend the war sitting in the back of a pickup.
Pow scooted over to the middle of the rear cab. It would be tight for three full-sized guys with gear. Once they were sitting in the cab, Grant and Pow checked their ARs to make sure they were on safe. Of course they were. Grant and Pow smoothly put their ARs between their legs; it was like putting on a seatbelt or something they’d done a million times before.
Donnie was a little nervous about having a loaded gun in the truck. He was an experienced hunter and hunters just didn’t carry guns around like that. They put them in the back or, better yet, in a gun case. But years of safe hunting practices had been thrown out the window. He needed to travel in a cramped cab with his rifle in hand. This wasn’t a hunting trip in Montana.
Donnie pointed the muzzle up instead of putting it on the floor. “Protecting the crown,” he said, referring to the part of the gun at the very end of the barrel. The crown was the last point of contact between the bullet and the barrel as the bullet flies out. A microscopic nick in the crown could cause the bullet to wiggle just a millionth of an inch and set the bullet on an incorrect path. Donnie’s rifle had a recessed crown that minimized this risk. But still, Donnie could not bring himself to put his muzzle down on a floor. Grant’s and Pow’s ARs had flash hiders on the end of the barrels protecting the crown so they thought nothing of putting the muzzle down on the floor.
Donnie looked at Grant and Pow seated next to him. He knew that Grant was a lawyer before the Collapse and that Pow was some insurance salesman. Now they looked like experienced military contractors. He was struck by how quickly things changed after the Collapse; how reality had completely shifted.
This was true of Donnie, too, to an extent. He was riding around in a truck with a loaded rifle between his legs. He would never have done that in the past. He would likely be pointing his rifle in unsafe directions, potentially at human beings, which was a strict no-no in his decades of hunting. Donnie was breaking years and years of ingrained safety rules. He, too, had gone from a normal person to a fighter.
Everyone was silent as they went slowly from the shoulder onto the highway and under the overpass. Scotty was using Donnie’s good binos.
Bobby knew that Scotty needed it dark in the cab so he wouldn’t lose his natural night vision. And Bobby knew that they needed to be as stealthy as possible as they drove down the highway. So, without saying a word, Bobby turned off the headlights. It was terrifying. Even without normal traffic, driving down a highway without headlights was frightening.
No one was talking. They had important work to do, observing for threats. Especially Scotty. This was no time for chitchat.
Luckily, the highway lights provided some illumination on the road. But there were dark spots in between the lights; dark spots where a log could be hiding.
“We’re only going about ten miles per hour,” Bobby finally said, to break the tension. “And we have air bags—up front at least. Too bad for you guys in the back,” he said jokingly.
They crept along. Grant looked behind them. The rest of the convoy was not behind them. They were waiting to get the word that the next overpass was clear.
Decades of zooming down highways at sixty, seventy, or eighty miles an hour made it hard to go so slow. Grant’s impatience was coming back. “Let’s go!” he wanted to yell. But he knew that this was as fast as they could go.
Everyone was looking out their windows, which were rolled down even though it was cold outside.
“Why are the windows rolled down?” Donnie asked. “To see better?”
“That’s one reason,” Pow said. “And because you could shoot out of an open window and not spray yo
urself and your buddies with glass.”
“‘That’s what the heater’s for,’” Bobby said. “Remember when Ted used to say that?” That was a few years ago, back when Ted was still an active duty soldier spending his weekends at the range with the guys who became the Team. Ted taught them so much, like driving around with their windows down when they might need to shoot out of the car. Ted taught them PSDs, which stood for Personal Security Details. Riding with someone who was being protected, getting out and moving the person, and engaging the enemy and then getting back into the car and taking off. They did all this. It was this unusual training – unusual for civilians – that allowed the Team to be so effective when they picked up Grant’s family right after the Collapse and got them out to the cabin.
“Remember how Ted used to …” Pow started.
“Sorry, man,” Grant interrupted. “We gotta concentrate here. When we take Olympia, we’ll have several beers and talk about this stuff. Okay?”
“Yep,” Pow said. Grant was right.
Everyone was silent and peered out the window. No threats. Just pitch black. The highway lights were gone because they were on a stretch of highway without them. It was absolutely black, even a few feet in front of them. Bobby slowed down to a crawl. The truck was hardly moving at all.
Grant, who knew the highway well from all the trips over the years he’d made back and forth to his cabin, knew that an overpass was coming up around the next bend.
“Full alert, gentlemen,” he said to everyone in the truck. “There’s an overpass right ahead.”
Sure enough, as they slowly rounded the bend, there was the overpass. That overpass that he sped past many times before without giving it a second thought now felt ominous.
“How far to the overpass from here?” Pow asked.
“Dunno, never had to think about it,” Grant said. “Let’s get out and see.”
Grant, Pow, and Donnie got out and looked at the overpass. There did not appear to be anything on it, or around it. But that wasn’t good enough.
“How far?” Pow whispered to Donnie, who was getting his laser range finder.
“Seven hundred fifty-six yards,” Donnie said.
“We’ll get closer for you two to watch us,” Grant said to Pow and Donnie. They got back in the truck and slowly crept toward the overpass. Scotty radioed in what was happening.
Donnie was getting new laser readings as they inched forward.
“How about, say, four hundred yards?” Grant asked Pow. “That should be far enough away that anyone on the overpass will have a hard time hitting us, but close enough that Donnie can hit them.”
Pow nodded. “Four hundred yards means an amateur like that last guy can’t hit us,” he said. “But a trained guy can take us at that range. Easy.”
Grant shrugged. They would have to take this chance. The Limas probably didn’t have trained snipers out tonight, at least not in this area. If they did, they would have put their good ones on the first overpass and really tied up any advancing Patriot units. Besides, Donnie wasn’t a pro, and four hundred yards was about his effective range given his nerves and experience level. So they needed to be within Donnie’s range.
“Four twenty six,” Donnie read off of this laser range finder.
“That’s good,” Grant said. “Let’s go.”
Bobby stopped the truck. Scotty handed Pow a radio set to the intra-unit frequency.
“Test,” Scotty said into the radio, which came through loud and clear on Pow’s radio, with a little feedback.
“Test,” Pow replied and his voice came through on Scotty’s radio, also with feedback.
“Time to go to work,” Pow said to Donnie with a smile. Donnie grinned back.
They got out and set up with a good angle on the overpass.
“Let’s go be scouts, Mr. Doggett,” Grant said to Scotty.
Scotty nodded, got out of the truck and did a press check. He had a round in the chamber and the safety was on. Of course. He checked his Aimpoint red-dot sight. It was on. Of course. They had a battery life of several years.
Grant did the same. Same deal: round in the chamber, safety on, and his EOTech red-dot was on.
“I’m ready to go get you guys if there’s trouble,” Bobby said. “And I know where Pow and Donnie are, so I’ll get them, too.”
Well, kind of. No one really knew how to be a scout. They were making it up as they went. What else could they do? This was an irregular unit in an irregular war. “Play the cards you’ve been dealt,” Ted would always say.
Scotty took the point. Grant was spread out from him, so a mortar or grenade would only kill one of them. Nice thought, Grant remarked to himself. Very cheery.
They walked slowly, but not too slowly. Their hearing was sharp. They could hear every tree rustle. Without all the usual noises of modern life, the wind sounded amazingly loud as it swayed through the huge evergreen trees surrounding them.
Grant and Scotty alternated by looking through their weapons’ optics and then without them. They wanted to be able to have their rifle up and ready to shoot, but they also wanted to have the wider field of vision that came from not straining through an optic. They were grateful for their red-dot sights. They were also glad that they had flashlights on their rifles. This was no time to be fumbling for a flashlight and trying to use one hand to shine and the other to point a rifle.
Grant and Scotty moved effortlessly toward the overpass with weapons up, then down, searching and assessing. They had the “combat glide” down, which was the term Ted used for describing how to walk while advancing on a target with their rifle up. They looked very professional doing that. It took no effort to move like pros. They’d done it for hours in training at Pierce Point and before the Collapse, and they’d moved in on real targets, raiding the meth house and on several other call-outs in Pierce Point that never resulted in shots fired.
Pretty soon, Scotty and Grant were right up on the overpass. All they heard was the humming of the sodium highway lights and the wind. The lights were surprisingly loud.
From training so long together, Scotty and Grant knew what each other would do without saying a word. They went under the overpass, each one on different sides of the highway—Scotty on the right and Grant on the left—scanning it for obvious booby traps. They wouldn’t turn on their flashlights and do a real search until they knew that no one was around waiting for something easy to shoot at, like a beam coming out of their flashlights.
They moved on the highway and went under the overpass where they immediately turned their rifles upward to see if anyone was above them or on their flank. Nope. No one.
Then they kept their rifles on their flanks and looked to see if anyone was along the onramp to their sides. Nope.
They kept moving this way, silently in the dark. Without their lights on, and with their dark colored fleece jackets, it was nearly impossible to see them. The highway lights illuminated them somewhat, but not too much. They kept looking for their next piece of cover as they advanced, just like they’d done a thousand times. They had this down.
They went all the way down to where the onramp merged onto the highway, which was several hundred yards. Grant realized that they’d overrun their sniper coverage. The sniper team was four hundred yards back from the overpass, which was now a thousand yards from where Scotty and Grant were. They would need to come up with a better plan for this next time.
Then again, Grant thought, maybe not. The main attack would come from the side of an overpass facing the convoy, not the back side, which was what the enemy on the overpass would want to stop: the coming convoy, not two scouts that had gone past the overpass. So the sniper team would stay where they were in future scoutings to protect against an attack on the convoy.
Once they got to the end of the onramp, Grant pointed up toward the on-ramps and made a motion for them to go up it and meet back up on the overpass. Scotty knew exactly what Grant would want to do, so his motions made sense to him, even if t
hey wouldn’t have made sense to anyone else.
“Making this shit up was we go,” Grant whispered to himself. They were. Like that thing about going up the on-ramp and back to the overpass. They just made it up. “Free styling” as Lt. Col. Hammond said back at the Boston Harbor briefing. Free styling, indeed.
Scotty and Grant were moving up the onramp and getting closer to the overpass.
Oh God. Grant had a horrible thought. He and Scotty would be on the overpass and Pow and Donnie wouldn’t know it was them. The sniper team might think they were bad guys. Grant wanted to yell to Scotty to radio in that they were the ones about to be on the overpass, but he couldn’t yell, and Scotty was far away.
Of all the ways to die, getting shot by your own sniper was the worst one. Oh well. He had to secure this overpass, and fast. The convoy was idling back there and needed to get to Olympia to get in the fight.
Grant got to the overpass. He looked over and Scotty was there, too, on the other side. Scotty looked, and to Grant’s relief, he was on the radio and waving his arm for the sniper team to see. Scotty knew to radio in that they were the ones on the overpass. Grant was relieved to have smart and well-trained team members. They went down the off ramp and headed back toward the truck, moving much more quickly now that they knew that there were no obvious ambushes or booby traps.
Now they could use their lights. When they were down the off ramp where it met the highway, Grant turned on his weapon’s light and motioned for Scotty to go down the highway with his light and look for any booby traps, which he did.
