Ranger (The Bugging Out Series Book 5)

by Noah Mann

  He reached to a mouse and clicked an icon on a computer screen, activating a sound file.

  “Ready?” Martin asked.

  “Go ahead,” Mayor Allen said.

  Martin clicked play and sound rose from the speakers. The familiar at first.

  “Ranger... Ranger... Ranger...”

  The same repeated again, and again, and then the speakers went quiet, only the hush of a white noise static hissing from them. And then, a few seconds into the silence, a fast and sharp bee-ee-eep sounded, followed by more nothingness until my friend’s voice returned.

  “Ranger... Ranger... Ranger...”

  “What was that?” Elaine asked.

  “I don’t know,” Martin said.

  “Play it again,” Schiavo said.

  Martin repeated the transmission a second time. Then a third. And a fourth.

  “It’s just a high pitched beeping sound,” Mayor Allen said. “It sort of stutters a bit.”

  “Maybe it’s just an anomaly,” Elaine suggested.

  Martin nodded, allowing the possibility.

  “Maybe,” he said. “But if it’s not...”

  Schiavo thought for a moment, then looked to me.

  “Go get Westin for me, Fletch.”

  * * *

  Ten minutes later the garrison’s communications specialist sat at the workstation, the five of us standing behind him as he played the transmission over and over, first through the speaker, and then through headphones.

  “It’s local,” he said, slipping the headphones off.

  “How local?” Schiavo asked.

  “Very,” Westin said. “It’s low power, probably within a mile of where we are right now.”

  “That puts it in town,” Martin said.

  Mayor Allen looked to Martin and nodded.

  “You were right,” the town’s current leader said to his predecessor.

  Westin puzzled mildly at the exchange, and at what it might indicate.

  “Ed, I need you to keep anything you hear right now confidential,” Schiavo said, addressing the private almost maternally.

  “Absolutely, ma’am,” Weston agreed.

  “Is there any way to pinpoint the source?” I asked.

  Westin thought for a minute, his face twisting as he considered the possibilities.

  “If we know when it’s broadcasting, possibly. But the power is so low and the transmission is brief. We’d also have to have multiple direction finding units, and we don’t even have one.”

  “Could we build them?” Martin asked.

  “Sure, possibly, but there’s something else,” Westin said. “This transmission is recorded.”

  “You can tell that?” Elaine asked.

  “Yes. It has the same acoustic signature as the Ranger Signal, which we know is a looped recording.”

  I was starting to understand his reluctance to embrace the search idea.

  “You’re saying this could be transmitted from a remote spot when no one is there,” I said.

  “Precisely,” he confirmed.

  “Okay,” Schiavo said. “Finding it might be pointless because the transmitter could be low power, small, and highly mobile. So let’s focus on the other big question—what sort of use would our enemy get from a beep?”

  Westin smiled, getting into his role as com sleuth.

  “That’s just it,” the private said. “It’s not a beep. It’s a series of beeps compressed. Listen.”

  Westin dragged the audio file into a simple processing program which Micah had used and slowed the playback down by a factor of sixty. When the transmission was played at this much reduced speed, the singular stuttering beep became a minutes’ worth of long and short tones whose purpose was unmistakable.

  “Morse,” Martin said.

  With its universally recognized auditory dots and dashes, what we were listening to was some message that had been condensed, much like the burst transmissions we’d been bouncing off a satellite. Here, though, the recorded message was being broadcast locally. From within our very town.

  “Can you decode it?” Schiavo asked her com specialist.

  Westin nodded and slipped the headphones back on. He faced the computer screen and watched the sound pulses on the display as he listened, no pen or pencil in hand to jot down the words he was deciphering. When he was finished he removed the headphones and looked to those of us standing behind.

  “Supply ship not arrived. Resident anxiety growing. Patrols increased in northern sector.”

  The private’s recitation of the message hung there for a moment, absolute confirmation that we had a traitor in our midst.

  “That patrol increase order went out at the morning briefing to residents yesterday,” Elaine said.

  “Anyone at the briefing could have turned on us,” I said. “Or anyone who heard it second hand.”

  “Meaning everyone in town,” Mayor Allen said.

  Schiavo said nothing at first, looking to her husband, the man who’d seen this development before anyone, then turning to her private.

  “Ed, absolute silence on this,” Schiavo said. “I’ll get Sergeant Lorenzen up to speed.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Westin affirmed, then rose from his place at the workstation, took his weapon in hand, and left the room without further prompting.

  “What about the searches?” Martin asked once the private was gone.

  It wasn’t Schiavo who answered. She looked to Mayor Allen, under whose authority any such decision would have to be made. After a moment, he looked to Martin and shook his head.

  “Practicality dictates my answer,” the town’s leader said. “By the time the first search was happening, the whole town would know. Including the traitor.”

  “They’d ditch or hide any incriminating devices, transmitters, whatever,” Schiavo told her husband.

  To his credit, Martin didn’t protest. But he wasn’t pleased.

  “We can’t just do nothing,” he said.

  Schiavo looked at him with a thin, almost knowing grin.

  “Somehow I think you haven’t been.”

  Martin did not react to his wife’s subtle accusation. He simply let that unspoken truth exist between the five of us.

  “There is something we do need to do,” Schiavo said. “This is also courtesy of Martin. I want to do an inspection and audit of our supplies. We need to see what we have, and what’s vulnerable.”

  “You think this may drag on now?” I asked the captain.

  “If they have someone inside, that’s a force multiplier. They may feel that they don’t need to push. That they can peck away at our preparations. Weaken us without destroying us.”

  “That’s what they want,” Mayor Allen said. “It’s what they need. A live colony to add to their ledger.”

  “The term subjugated comes to mind,” Elaine said.

  “Unified,” I corrected her. “Unification is all the rage.”

  My wife chuckled. It might have been that, by marriage, she felt obligated to laugh at my attempts at humor. I doubted I was that funny. In any case, I liked hearing her express silly joy. I loved the look of her when she was happy, especially in times that worked against that emotion.

  The fact was, I simply loved everything about her.

  “Tomorrow we start our survey,” Schiavo said, looking to her husband next. “And you continue with your project.”

  Martin smiled and nodded.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Twenty

  We returned to our house after stopping in to check on Grace and the children. A pair of neighbors had stepped up and were helping her, cooking and tending to Brandon when Grace needed to sleep. It was impossible to say that she was doing fine. But she was alive, and with us. She was home.

  I wished I could say the same for my friend.

  “Fletch!”

  It was our neighbor, Dave Arndt, calling out from the front yard of his house two down from ours. He jogged the short distance and met us at our front gat
e, holding a sheet of paper in his hand.

  “Dave,” I said. “What’s up?”

  “Have you seen this?” he asked, holding the paper out to us.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  Elaine reached out and took the item. It was a flyer, crudely printed, with a very clear message in the words upon it.

  “Residents of Bandon, we are your brothers and sisters in liberty,” Elaine read from the paper. “Join us. Cross your borders unarmed and you will be welcomed.”

  “The Unified Government,” I said, reading the final mark upon the page.

  “Propaganda,” Dave said, irritated bordering on angry.

  “Where did you find this?” I asked.

  “A lot were found on the routes between town and the checkpoints,” he explained.

  “They’re sneaking inside our perimeter,” Elaine said, crumpling the flyer in her hand and tossing it into the street.

  “Were these reported?” I asked.

  “Sergeant Lorenzen found one, too,” Dave said.

  “I’m going inside,” Elaine said, turning abruptly and leaving me standing with our neighbor.

  When the screen door slapped shut, Dave took a step closer to me and spoke in a quieted tone.

  “Fletch, some folks are taking this offer seriously.”

  “It’s bait,” I told him. “Just one part of their plan to weaken us. They get ten, twenty, thirty people to cross over and we lose people who can stand up and fight.”

  “People are tired of fighting,” Dave reminded me. “Everything since the blight hit has been a fight.”

  Dave Arndt was a Bandon original. He’d lived here before the world fell apart. A realtor by trade, he now helped repair abandoned houses when he wasn’t standing watch with a Remington 12 gauge in hand and a Smith & Wesson .50 caliber hand cannon holstered on his hip. I knew that he didn’t share the sentiment that some might be considering, but that didn’t lessen the truth behind it. Even in a tight knight community which had overcome so many obstacles, there would be some who would seek a simpler path—even if it was an illusion offered by strangers.

  “I just wanted to make sure you knew about this,” Dave said, nodding toward the discarded flyer.

  “I appreciate you telling me,” I said.

  He looked past me to the house.

  “I’m not sure Elaine does,” he said.

  I shook his hand and joined Elaine in the house, closing the door and putting my weapons down next to where she had already stowed hers near the closet just off the living room.

  “Elaine,” I called out quietly, waiting for her to reply from the kitchen, or the bedroom, or the bathroom.

  But silence was all I heard.

  I looked down the hallway. A soft light spilled out from the bedroom.

  “Elaine...”

  Again I heard nothing. I might have been worried, even frightened that something had happened in the few moments we’d been apart since returning home. I flashed back to the morning I entered Neil’s house and found it empty, abandoned, he and his family gone.

  This was not that.

  “Hey,” I said as I reached the bedroom door.

  Elaine stood inside the room, between me and our bed, wearing a sheer half robe and nothing else, the thin garment leaving little to the imagination of what it only vaguely concealed.

  “I don’t want to think about anything out there,” she said. “Not tonight. I just want to think about you, about us. I want everything else to stop for a while.”

  She stepped toward me then, peeling the robe back and letting it slip to the floor. Her hands reached to my shirt and began undoing the buttons, slowly, one at a time. She leaned forward and planted a soft kiss on my exposed chest, then looked up, into my eyes.

  “Make love to me and don’t stop,” she said.

  I reached around her waist and lifted, kissing her as she wrapped her legs around me. I carried her to the bed and eased our bodies down upon it, together.

  Twenty One

  No!

  Eric, wake up...

  Stop!

  Eric...

  Don’t!

  “Eric!”

  My eyes snapped open, Elaine hovering over me. Around her, around us, was familiarity. Curtains. Furniture. Wallpaper.

  Our bedroom.

  “You were having a nightmare,” she said to me.

  Sweat drenched me. Soaking the sheet beneath me. Beading cold on my face.

  “You’re okay,” she assured me.

  I pulled myself up so that was sitting against our headboard. Elaine put her cool palm against my head and brushed the damp hair from my brow.

  “What were you dreaming about?”

  There was no trouble recalling the imagery that had tormented me as I slept.

  “Neil,” I said.

  How was it that he had invaded my dreams? This night? After the wondrous time I’d spent with my wife, holding her and knowing her as I’d known no one in my entire life. So close we’d become during our time of passion that I’d truly, ignoring any cliché attached to such an impossibility, felt as though we were one body. One soul.

  And yet, after that, after the beauty and the love and the intense physical and emotional connection we’d shared, it was my absent friend who’d come to me in my sleep.

  “He was running away from me, toward a cliff,” I said, recalling the vivid imagery of my friend, my oldest friend, sprinting toward his death, willingly and with some impossible joy. “And he was smiling. He kept getting closer and I kept screaming for him to stop. But he wouldn’t.”

  Elaine said nothing, her hand softly stroking the side of my face.

  “And he ran off the edge of the cliff,” I said. “And he was still smiling as he fell.”

  I fell back against my soaked pillow.

  “You can’t choose your dreams,” Elaine said. “Not the ones while you sleep, at least.”

  Her words, simple as they were, soothed me, entirely because she was the living embodiment of the statement she’d just made.

  “I should be dreaming about you,” I said, not embracing her words of wisdom just yet.

  “You don’t have to,” she told me. “I’m right here.”

  She eased in and kissed me, soft and quick. But time was no determining factor in the effect she had on me. A look. An innocent touch. A calming kiss. All made me want her. I reached out to pull her closer once again.

  That was when we heard it.

  “Another flyover,” she said.

  Yes, another one, but this time it was different.

  “That’s a lot lower,” I commented.

  We got out of our bed together, slipping into clothes and making our way to the yard behind our house. A fog had rolled in from the Pacific as we slept. Above us and all around us, the thick, cool mist obscured everything, from the unseen craft above to the house we’d exited, just a few yards away.

  “It’s flying west to east,” I said.

  Elaine nodded as we tracked the aircraft’s progress, heading inland from the ocean. It did sound different than the one we’d been alerted to by Corporal Enderson. At a reduced altitude, yes, but the engine propelling it had a higher timbre. Almost a whine.

  This was a jet.

  “They have more than one plane,” Elaine said, picking up on precisely what I was.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  But that realization only held a paramount place in our thoughts for a moment as the same baffling question arose.

  “Why are they flying in this?” Elaine asked, the whitish weather shrouding everything above—and below. “They can’t see anything down here.”

  “The plane could have sensors,” I said.

  “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe.”

  She wasn’t convinced of my suggestion. Neither was I.

  “There’s nothing we can do, is there?”

  I shook my head and stared up toward the aircraft as its sound receded, growing faint as it cruised toward the hills east of
town.

  “Not right now,” I said.

  The enemy could fly over us with impunity, it seemed. We weren’t protected by any anti-aircraft weaponry. That simply hadn’t been a worry. And, even if the garrison had come so equipped, shooting down one of the Unified Government’s aircraft might do nothing more than ignite a conflict that was being held in abeyance for the moment.

  “That was low.”

  The voice, clear and familiar, came from behind us. We both turned to see Martin standing at the end of the narrow walkway that ran down the east side of our house.

  “Martin, what time is it?” I asked.

  The man looked at his watch.

  “Three thirty,” he said.

  Sunrise was several hours off, yet the town’s former leader had found it necessary to seek us out. Something was up.

  “There was another one,” he said. “Another message. The Ranger Signal went down for thirty seconds at the same time as the night before, and in that quiet was a compressed Morse transmission.”

  “We need to get Westin to decode it,” I said.

  “Already did,” Martin said, holding a small slip of paper out to us. “Micah had books on Morse code, and I watched Westin decompress the message yesterday, so I did it.”

  Elaine looked to me, then reached out and took the slip of paper.

  “Confirm psyops delivery. No supply ship. Defenses scattered.”

  “Pysops?” Martin wondered aloud after Elaine had finished reciting the decoded report.

  “I think I know what that refers to,” I said, telling him about the propaganda leaflets found just hours earlier, items that could easily fit within the definition of psychological operations.

  “This person inside is important to them,” Elaine said.

  “They have eyes above us,” Martin said, the skies fully quiet again. “And eyes on our very backs.”

  “Do you have any ideas on who the traitor is?” I asked.

  Schiavo had de facto blessed her husband’s hunt for the turncoat working with the Unified Government forces beyond the town. I sensed that Martin Jay was taking that role he’d adopted as serious as anything since I’d known him.

  “Some,” he said.

  “You care to share?” I asked.

  He shook his head, eyeing both of us with an appraisal that was not born of suspicion, but caution.