by Glen Tate
They took their time on this phase. They had just done a semi-quick sweep of the area without their lights. Now they could look for odd packages on the side of the road or wires, although those were hard to see even with the 200 lumens from their Surefire weapon lights.
It took a few minutes to go the length of the highway and then past the overpass with the lights on. Grant was getting tired. He had walked a lot with a tactical load, and was concentrating very hard. He was shouldering his rifle and sweeping the areas in front of him. His rifle was relatively light, but after about twenty minutes of moving with it, he was tired.
Finally, when they got to the far end of the back side of the overpass where the onramp met the highway, they were satisfied the area was clear. Grant gave a thumbs up to Scotty and he did the same. They jogged back to the truck with their weapons’ lights on and swept the area one last time.
That jog was getting tougher as Grant went. He was in good shape, but this was hard work. Plus, he had that fleece jacket on. He was boiling. He felt sweat on his baseball cap. It was his favorite one, the tan Survival Podcast “ant” hat. He didn’t want to get sweat stains in his favorite hat.
Wait, he thought. “You’re in combat and don’t want to get a hat dirty?” he asked himself. That hat was going to get sweat stained. It would give it character.
They jogged up to the area where Pow and Donnie were. They couldn’t see them because the sniper team was hidden and Grant and Scotty’s night vision was gone with all the lights they’d been using.
As they ran by Pow and Donnie’s area, Grant heard Pow’s voice.
“Cover us.”
Grant and Scotty stopped and got down on the ground in a prone shooting position. They covered the overpass, which they knew was clear, while Pow and Donnie ran back to the truck.
It felt natural for Grant and Scotty to get on the ground and cover their teammates. They’d done it so many times in training that they didn’t even think about it.
Grant enjoyed the time on the ground to rest. His heart rate was so high from all the running that his EO Tech red-dot was jumping all over the overpass target. He would be worthless as a sharpshooter at this point. That was okay. There wasn’t anyone on that overpass to shoot at.
Scotty’s radio crackled. “At the truck,” said Pow.
Grant and Scotty got up and jogged back, slower than before. They were tired. Even twenty-three year-old Scotty was slowing down. Grant, who was twenty years older, didn’t feel so bad about being tired.
Mark’s truck never looked so good. They had made it back safely and now they could rest. They took off their tactical vests so they could remove their fleece jackets and cool off. It felt great to get that jacket off.
“Get in guys,” Bobby said. “I want to be all the way past the overpass when the convoy comes through. I want to be well ahead of them.” He was smart.
Grant and Scotty threw their vests into the truck and got in. Mark’s black Silverado slowly started up and drove straight toward the overpass that had seemed like a death trap earlier. It was a regular overpass now; a dark, empty overpass. They went under it and everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Now on to the next one.
Chapter 282
Road Trip
(January 1)
The sun was starting to come up. It was 7:20 a.m. according to Grant’s watch. There he sat, with all his friends cruising through a sunrise. It was just like a road trip: his buddies, a long ride, a sunrise; except for the part about people trying to kill him.
With the sun rising and the fact that the last few overpasses had been clear, everyone was lightening up on the strict no-talking atmosphere from the beginning of that long night.
“Dudes, I’m starvin’,” Grant said. That MRE wasn’t keeping him satisfied. They were pretty filling, but he’d burned off several hundred calories running around overpasses since he last ate.
“Want my HOOAH bar?” Bobby asked. “I’ve been just sitting here in the truck. I haven’t been running all over like you. And I’m not an old man.”
“Hell, yes, I want your HOOAH bar,” Grant said. “And your momma says I’m in great shape.”
Everyone laughed. They needed that release. It had been the first laugh in hours, which was rare for the Team. They realized that they were making lifetime memories right then. This would probably be the biggest and most memorable day of their lives. They were soaking it in. After a couple minutes of joking around, mainly about Bobby’s momma, it was lighter outside and they were going fairly fast.
“Hey, next overpass. Let’s get Ryan and Wes out of the back to come along,” Pow said. “They’re probably getting sore back there and we could use the extra rifles.”
Great idea. Plus, after doing one overpass, Ryan and Wes would know how to get through them in the future and could teach others, if necessary.
“Whoa,” Bobby said as he put on the brakes. It was barely light, but Bobby could see a vehicle ahead, parked on the side of the road.
“SUV on the side of the road at…” Scotty said into the radio. He checked the area and his map and added, “At about mile marker 21. We will check it out. Stop the convoy.”
“Roger,” Jim Q. said over the radio. Pow had his radio off to prevent feedback.
“Time for Ryan and Wes’s first scouting mission,” Grant said. They stopped the truck four hundred thirty-five yards from the SUV, according to Donnie’s laser range finder.
“Escalade,” Scotty said after looking through Donnie’s good binoculars. “Fancy one.”
Gang. That was a gang vehicle. They were the only ones who drove Escalades, and just about the only ones who could get gas.
Donnie and Pow set up near the truck. Grant and Scotty got out. Grant went to the back of the truck. “Get out, guys. We have a vehicle on the side of the road to check out.”
The tarp flew up and Ryan and Wes sprang out of the pickup bed. They were ready to finally see some action.
Grant quickly explained how it would work with the sniper team cover and the four of them moving up on the vehicle.
“Ten bucks says it’s an abandoned gang rig because they ran out of gas,” Ryan guessed. He was probably right.
The four of them took off toward the Escalade. They were spread out and had four different angles of fire on the vehicle, but not into each other. Dang, Grant thought to himself as he watched Scotty, Ryan, and Wes advance on the target. They had a very smooth combat glide.
Scotty was the first to get close. “Looks abandoned,” he whispered into the radio mic he had clipped to the left shoulder of his tac vest. There wasn’t much highway light on the SUV and there wasn’t much sunlight from the dawn yet. Scotty was basing his assessment of abandonment on the fact that no lights were on and there was no movement. That didn’t mean there weren’t people in it. Or hiding near it.
How to see if there were people in the SUV? Wes beat him to it. Wes motioned for everyone to hold their positions, which were about twenty-five yards from the SUV. Wes bent down and got a rock, which he threw at the SUV.
He missed. He tried it again and made contact.
“Ping!” The rock hit the rear door of the Escalade.
Nothing. Wes threw another rock. It hit and nothing happened. Finally, Wes got closer, got a bigger rock, and threw it at the rear window. It cracked.
Nothing. The Team advanced on the SUV. It was locked. Ryan took the muzzle of his AR and broke the driver’s side window. It took a couple of good thrusts to do that. The safety glass wasn’t shattering, just staying together like it was made out of fabric. But after a couple of good pops, Ryan had the window broken.
“Trick I learned in the Marines,” he said with a big smile and pointing to the flash hider. Those brakes were coming in handy, Grant thought, as he remembered how he had used one to disable an oncoming threat at the meth house.
Ryan had gloves on, as did most of them, so he could unlock the door and open it without worrying about broken glass.
Nothing.
The thing was empty.
“They’re into the vehicle,” Pow’s voice said over Scotty’s radio. Everyone looked at Scotty. He had forgotten to turn down the volume. He quickly fixed that.
“Probably ran out of gas,” Ryan said. They searched the SUV quickly. No bombs or booby traps, but that wasn’t a surprise. These were just gang bangers, not sophisticated terrorists.
Grant found some notes written in Spanish. He took them and would get them to Ted later so that one of the Spanish speakers in the unit could see if they were of importance. Probably not, but it didn’t hurt.
“Let’s let everyone coming past thing in the future know that it’s not a threat,” Grant said. He took his AR and started using the flash hider to break out a window. The rest of the Team did, too. It felt great to be smashing up a gang car. Everyone else in a fifty-mile radius would be terrified of that Escalade. The Team felt somewhat powerful breaking something that others would be afraid to mess with.
“We’ll be doing more to the gangs than just smashing their windows when we get to Olympia,” Wes said. “Their teeth. They’ll be lucky if that’s all we smash.”
“Testicles,” Ryan said. It felt great to talk shit and break stuff. It was a tremendous release.
Grant realized that their work was done. He opened up all the doors on the SUV and popped the hood, which would make it clear to anyone that this vehicle was not going anywhere.
Ryan took out his K-Bar knife, the one he got in the Marine Corp, and was under the hood about to cut lines to render the vehicle inoperable.
“Stop!” Grant yelled. “Our guys might need a gang-looking car for when we’re cruising around Olympia. I mean, its windows are smashed up, but we still might be able to use it.”
Ryan nodded. Good idea.
After getting some pent-up aggression out on that SUV, they all went back to Mark’s truck.
“Have fun?” Pow asked.
“Yep,” said Wes. “We’ll let you break stuff next time.”
They all got back in the truck. “Safe to proceed,” Scotty said into the radio. “Vehicle abandoned and neutralized.”
The Team took off, a little faster than they had before. Everyone felt like they were going quicker and quicker, and conditions were becoming safer and safer.
They were heading toward the next overpass when raindrops started to hit the windshield.
“Great,” Bobby said. “It’s fucking raining.”
“This actually is great,” Grant said.
“Why?”
“Politics.”
“Politics?”
“Yep,” Grant answered. “We’re motivated. They’re not. They won’t stay out in the rain. We will.”
“Are you serious?” Pow asked. “You don’t think they’ll fight just because it’s raining?”
“No, I don’t think they’ll fight nearly as hard now,” Grant said. “I think these National Guard kids, who have no idea why they’re fighting us, will huddle under overpasses in the rain and see our convoy as a place to get warm and dry after they surrender.”
They all thought about that.
“Gun fights aren’t just about guns,” Grant said. “They’re about the will to fight, and politics affects that.” It made sense.
They saw another overpass and slowly came to a stop. They were four hundred seventy-one yards to the overpass. It was almost light now. That overpass was much less scary in the light where they could see there were no apparent tank columns waiting for them.
In a matter of minutes, they had that overpass cleared. They found one of those log obstruction booby traps, still all bound up with the ropes. Whoever was supposed to release it, took off. Scotty radioed all this in.
“Proceed at full speed,” Scotty said.
“Wait!” Ryan yelled out.
Everyone froze and quickly turned toward Ryan.
“I got a body here,” Ryan yelled. Everyone took up defensive positions and formed a hasty perimeter. They were ready for an attack. They weren’t sure why they’d be attacked for finding a body, but they reflexively got ready for an ambush.
Scotty radioed in for the convoy to stop.
Ryan, who had done this several times, walked up to the body, looked for obvious booby traps, and put the flash hider of his rifle on one of the dead man’s eyes. If the apparent dead man was faking it, that would get a reaction out of him. It was physiologically impossible for a flash hider on an eye to not produce a jerking reaction.
Nothing. The dead man had a gunshot to the back of the head. Nearby, was a yellow hard hat.
“FCorps!” Ryan yelled. “Some FCorps douche bag.”
“He musta been the one who was supposed to pull the rope on the logs when we came,” Grant said.
“But the gang bangers must have needed a ride,” Pow said. “His ride.”
“Yep,” said Scotty, who called in that there was an enemy body, but that the convoy could roll on.
Ryan got the FCorps helmet. “We might be able to use this,” he said.
They all ran back to the truck. The rain was growing steadier. Their fleece jackets were getting wet and heavy.
Seeing Ryan put his rifle in that man’s eyes was haunting Grant. This war shit was nasty. There was something sacred about a person’s eyes; it was barbaric to stick something in a person’s eye, even if he were an enemy soldier. Grant couldn’t remove the mental image of Ryan jabbing a rifle into that man’s eye. War was different than normal life. Different things happened in war, and jabbing a man in the eye was one of them.
They got back in the truck and kept going. Grant got a bottle of water and popped a caffeine pill. Even with all this excitement, he was getting tired and could feel his senses were getting dull. He offered caffeine pills to everyone else, and they gladly took him up on the offer. He made a mental note to get some to Wes and Ryan in the back of the truck the next time they stopped.
They went along for the next three hours, crawling along and checking out overpasses. They found another with the log booby traps, but no one to pull the rope. They didn’t find a body this time. The Lima assigned to pull the rope must have just taken off or been taken by the gang. Who knew? Who cared? The Lima wasn’t around to attack them and the convoy could keep rolling. That was all that mattered.
“Next overpass is Delphi Road,” Grant said. He remembered that was the exit to Jeff Prosser’s house and wondered how Jeff was doing on his farm. Was he okay? Was he hiding any WAB people? Grant hoped he was.
Grant hadn’t thought about his WAB colleagues in a while. They were POI, like Grant. They didn’t have a cabin to go to. Grant would have offered up his place, but things moved too quickly when he shot the looters and had to bug out. Besides, Grant remembered them as the guys who never took him up on his suggestions that they prepare for what was coming. If he’d invited them to his cabin, they would have shown up without any supplies. Grant had the room, and the obligation, to have a place at the cabin for his family and the Team. Co-workers, even close friends, were a second priority. It was just how it was.
Grant assumed Tom, Ben, and Brian had probably been rounded up in Olympia. God only knew what had happened to them and their families. Grant tried to put it out of his mind. Then he thought back to smashing the Escalade’s windows. That felt good. The reason it felt so good was wondering what the government and the gangs had done to good people like the Fosters, Trentons, and Jenkins. Killing those Lima bastards who had done this to good people like them would feel even better.
No. Don’t enjoy that. You need to set an example.
Whoa. That came from nowhere. But Grant thought about it. He could see that path again, like he had before. He was supposed to stop the killing once the bad guys had been chased out. He was supposed to make this more like the American Revolution, with reconciliation and rebuilding, than the French Revolution, with decades of terror and revenge killings.
Yes.
Chapter 283
Pumpkin Pie … with Whipped Cream
(January 1)
The rain sucked. Those wearing fleece were soaked. A few guys on the Team had Gore-Tex jackets, which were very common in a rainy place, like the Seattle area. Gore-Tex kept them dry.
But no one really noticed the rain. They were focused on clearing each overpass, and in between overpasses, they were in the truck with the heater cranked and the windows down, joking around and having the time of their lives. It was actually fun. Less fun for Ryan and Wes in the back without the heater, but still fun.
“HQ reports that the exit after mile marker 32 is held by friendlies,” Jim Q. said over the intra-unit radio. Delphi Road, Grant thought. That made sense. Grant knew, from his visits out to Jeff Prosser’s farm before the Collapse, that Delphi Road was full of self-reliant country people. They were a lot like the Pierce Point people. And, being this close to Olympia, people on Delphi Road were probably being abused by gangs and government officials coming out on looting runs.
“We’re about a mile from there,” Grant told Bobby. “We’ll take this overpass slowly. There will probably be pickets and guards on it. Friendlies. Supposedly. But we’ll see. So this one isn’t a quickie look-n-cruise like the others.” Everyone nodded.
They saw the sign for the Delphi Road exit. “Go ahead and park here,” Grant said to Bobby. “We’ll walk it in to the guards up there.”
“You sure they’re friendlies?” Pow asked.
“Pretty sure,” Grant said. “HQ says so and, from what I know about people out here, they probably are, but we shouldn’t assume. They could shoot at us by mistake. Proceed accordingly.”
By now, the truck had stopped. Pow and Donnie set up to cover the overpass.
“We don’t need to cover this overpass,” Grant said. “We’ll need cover for the people at the exit.”
Scotty’s radio crackled. “Standby for runner with code phrases,” Jim Q. said on the radio. “Utility truck will be coming up on your rear to deliver the message.”
“Roger that,” Scotty said. He turned to Grant in the back seat. “Radios aren’t secure enough, especially this close to Olympia, for us to relay code phrases.” Everyone nodded.
