Harden

by D. J. Molles

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Do you have any suspicions as to who it might be?”

  “No, ma’am. But there is something else that you need to be aware of.” Carl appeared to relax more, now that they were off the topic of Tomlin’s death. “We’ve talked about it amongst ourselves. We don’t believe that El Cactus had direct contact with anyone from the UES. The chance is simply too slim. There were limited number of people that knew the details of our mission, and I can’t see a motive for them communicating with an oil cartel from the Gulf States.”

  Lee heard the frown of confusion in Angela’s voice. “How’d he get the intel on us then?”

  “Well,” Carl sighed through his nose. “We think a more likely explanation is that someone is leaking information to Greeley, Colorado. And the Nuevas Fronteras are in league with President Briggs.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  ─▬▬▬─

  CO-ORDIN-ATIN’

  “In league with President Briggs,” Angela echoed, her finger questing up to rub her eyebrows, then her whole forehead. The question came to her head about why President Briggs would get in bed with a cartel, but then she answered her own question. “For the oil.”

  It was Lee who spoke up. “There are pipelines that go up that way, just like there’s pipelines that head to us.”

  “I would think he would try to access the northern pipelines,” Angela said, trying to find a hole in this unpleasant concept. “Out of Alaska.”

  “That’s a possibility,” Lee said. “It’s also possible that he’s more interested in denying us the oil. He knows as well as we do that that’s the next step to independence. He knows if we can’t provide energy for ourselves we’re dead in the water.”

  Dead in the water.

  Dead in the oil.

  Like Brian Tomlin.

  Maybe the bad news. Maybe the exhaustion of overworking her recovering body. But she felt like puking. Her mouth started to sweat. She sat down on the edge of her bed.

  There was a knock at her bedroom door. “Yes,” she said.

  Kurt opened the door and Colonel Staley squeezed through. He was wearing a tan shirt tucked into green athletic shorts. He looked sweaty. Angela tried to remember seeing him out of uniform and couldn’t.

  “I was taking an evening run,” Staley explained. “What’s this about?”

  Kurt closed the door, so it was just Staley and Angela in her bedroom. She thought peripherally that she should feel awkward—the bed wasn’t made, the covers still tossed—but she couldn’t feel anything but the situation bearing down on her like a truck.

  “I’m on the line with Lee and his team. They’re in Butler now.” She frowned. “Lee, can I put this thing on speaker?”

  “How comfortable are you with Kurt?” was Lee’s answer.

  “Comfortable.”

  “Then go ahead.”

  Angela pulled the phone from her ear and put it on speaker.

  The colonel furrowed his brow and spoke. “Lee, it’s Colonel Staley. How is your team?”

  “We’re safe in Butler, sir. What’s left of us.”

  Staley glanced up at Angela.

  “They lost Tomlin,” she said quietly. Then she quickly brought him up to speed.

  Staley listened, his frown deepening.

  “Angela,” Lee spoke up again. “You mentioned that you’d dispatched someone to Butler, reference my message.”

  “Mitch is on his way with four others,” Angela answered. “He left this morning. Right after we got your message. He said he should be there tonight. I also asked Colonel Staley to run up some plans and prepare to dispatch a force of Marines to Butler if the situation calls for it. I just wanted options.”

  “I think that was a good idea,” Lee said. “I’d like to hear what the colonel has.”

  Staley swiped a trickle of sweat from his eyebrow and patted his thumb dry on his shorts. “Well, the situation’s not ideal. Angela asked me to run some numbers based on our available fuel. Which, unfortunately, is less than we thought. And what’s left is only there if we suspend all farming operations. Which we have done, until we figure out what we’re doing.”

  “You can’t suspend the farming operations,” Lee said, sounding surprised that they’d suggested it. “The whole reason we came down here was to keep them going. If we don’t plant, we’re not gonna have anything to eat.”

  Angela felt her grip on the satphone tighten. “If we don’t get those fuel lines open, we starve by next year anyways.”

  Staley nodded, making eye contact with Angela. “She’s right. But let me run through my numbers. I think we might have a solution in here somewhere.”

  “Alright,” Lee said. “Give it to us.”

  “If I send them with full support, I can send one platoon. If I send only the Marines and their loadouts, I can send three platoons. That’s almost a hundred and fifty Marines.”

  “As much as I want to burn their shit to the ground,” Lee said. “That might be…unweildy.”

  “You are talking about possibly invading the land mass of what amounts to a small country. If these bastards are as bad as they sound like, you do not want them sneaking around your rear. You’ll want protected flanks. And when you think of it like that, then you see that three platoons doesn’t even scratch the surface.”

  “Exactly,” Lee said. “We obviously don’t have the resources to do a full invasion. I’m not even going to entertain that as a strategic possibility unless you, sir, see some reason why we should.”

  Staley shook his head at the phone. “No, I don’t think that is our best option.”

  “I think small and well-equipped is what we want. We’ve got a limited amount of time to get this done, so there’s no reason to have a Marine detachment that’s outfitted for a long deployment. If we don’t have this shit solved within the month…well, then I don’t think things are going to go our way.”

  Staley cracked a grim smirk. “I believe we’re on the same page here, captain. Which is why I decided to run an additional calculation.” He looked up at Angela, as though to ask her permission to proceed.

  Angela stood there holding the phone with one hand, the other hand latched to her face, and as Staley’s look interrupted her tumult of thoughts, she realized she was gripping her face hard. She pulled her hand away and gestured for Staley to continue.

  “If we keep enough fuel here at Fort Bragg to continue farming operations through the end of the month, then we’ll have enough fuel left over for me to send one squad of Marines, with enough food, water, and ammo to last them two weeks.”

  Angela held up her hand in a pump the brakes motion. “Sorry. Civilian here. How many men are in a squad?”

  “Thirteen men in a squad,” Staley answered. “But I’m also leaving room for four additional, depending on Captain Harden’s requests. Mortar teams. Assault weapons team. That sort of thing.”

  Angela’s eyebrows went up. “Is that enough? It doesn’t sound like enough.”

  “No,” Lee interrupted. “It’s enough. I know a squad of Marines can do plenty of damage. And we want quiet, too. We want quiet, and fast, and mobile.”

  “And,” Staley said, with an obvious note of displeasure. “If we really are dealing with a leak here at Fort Bragg, we don’t just need them quiet in the field. We need to be able to dispatch them quietly too.”

  Angela caught herself about to chew her sore fingers again. She forced them down, feeling childish for it. “If we do it too quiet, it’ll be like whispering when you don’t wanna get noticed—it’s guaranteed to get you noticed.”

  Staley pursed his lips. “We can send them for another reason. To another location. On paper anyways.”

  “Pick an outpost away from our operation,” Lee advised. “Something small. Say they’re having an issue with the primals while they get their fencing set up. Some place believable, but that folks in Fort Bragg won’t necessarily concern themselves with.”

  “We can do that,” Angela
nodded. “That’s believable. Not a fan of lying to the public, though.”

  “Don’t think of it as lying to the public,” Lee countered. “Think of it as misinformation to whoever is leaking intel to Greeley.”

  Angela blew a faint, tired raspberry noise, but said, “Alright.”

  Staley shifted his weight. “Lee, what’s your primary objective here?”

  “Primary objective hasn’t changed, sir. We’re here to try to get fuel for Fort Bragg. But…” A pause. “That brings up some additional issues we need to work around.”

  “Such as?”

  “If the Gulf States are enemy territory—and it seems like they are—then we’re not going to be able to get the pipeline flowing all the way up to Fort Bragg. That would require physical occupation of all the pumping stations along the way, and the ability to route power to them. Now, from what Carl explains to me, wherever they took him, they obviously had power enough to get those local pumps working. Which means that they’ve managed to get some sort of power plant working. It’s possible that power from that plant can be routed to the pipelines that lead to Fort Bragg. But, as I already pointed out, that requires us to own the geography. And that’s a lot of geography. Too much for us to own right now.”

  Staley’s normally mellow demeanor showed its first signs of stress. He ran a brisk hand over his face. “So we’re back to a full scale invasion of the Gulf. Which we don’t have the fuel to accomplish.”

  “You’re right,” Lee answered. “We don’t have the fuel for that. Not yet. But we might be able to do it incrementally.”

  Angela thought that she was tracking with Lee, but wasn’t positive. She closed her eyes. “Okay. Keep going. What are you thinking?”

  “Huachicaleros,” Lee said. “Fuel thieves. That’s what this cartel is, and that’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to take a page from their own playbook and use it against them.”

  ***

  Sam walked.

  The shadows of the woods surrounded him, and even though he was back in the wire, he still found himself looking over his shoulder.

  The gathering at the abandoned house had dispersed.

  Charlie had walked back with him, but she’d already split off towards her house, and now Sam was walking alone in the dark woods, without a light, and he hated it. The buzz of the moonshine took the edge off his fear, but a little voice in his head kept telling him watch your back!

  This wasn’t his first experience with alcohol, but close enough. He’d had a few run-ins with homemade beer that some of the other troops cobbled together from anything that had sugar in it (candies from MREs had been his last unfortunate encounter) and Sam had dutifully taken a drink of it to try and fit in.

  This was, however, his first experience with liquor.

  It still burned in his gut, and it made the world watery and unstable.

  Something else burned in his gut, and those were Charlie’s parting words to him.

  “How do you feel about the direction that we’re going?” she’d asked him just before splitting off for her house.

  He’d frowned, thinking she meant their bearings in the woods. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean the United Eastern States. How do you feel about where Angela is leading us?”

  He had stopped walking and turned to stare at Charlie. The question seemed out-of-the-blue, and he realized that he had no answer for her. He’d never really considered it. He’d just…gone along.

  “I…I don’t know.”

  He recalled the way that Charlie’s eyes had scoured over his face. No longer pleasant and flirtatious. Seeking. Probing. “You’re not worried about how much they don’t tell us?”

  He blinked a few times. The liquor in his stomach making it hard for him to focus on her face. And he really didn’t have anything to say but that he didn’t know, and he’d already said that, so he stayed silent.

  Charlie looked troubled. “You haven’t seen anything weird going on?”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know, Sam,” she said, irritated with his density. “Just weird stuff. Like stuff it seems they don’t want us to know about.”

  Sam didn’t really have an answer to that one either.

  Shit. Was he being dense?

  He wanted to have something poignant and clever for her. Something that he’d seen that made her think he was sharp and observant. But he hadn’t really paid attention.

  He’d done his guard duty. He’d slept and ate. Went through the motions of his daily life. Glad to be surviving. Glad to be living in a Safe Zone.

  He felt suddenly discontent with it all.

  Charlie had simply shrugged and motioned with her head. “Well, anyways. I’m going this way.” Her eyes caught him again, and she offered him a smile, but it had a shadow of disappointment in it. “I’ll see you later.”

  Sam wondered if another kiss was coming.

  It wasn’t.

  She just headed off towards her house, leaving him to make his way home on his own.

  He came out of the woods now. His feet hit concrete. The houses around him glowed yellow through their windows. He felt marginally better.

  But, somehow, the patina of everything suddenly seemed different. Aged. Defunct. Like noticing a stain on your favorite shirt.

  He was heading home.

  Home for him was a house full of strangers.

  Were they really strangers?

  It had never occurred to him before, but that’s how it felt now.

  He was just some Arab guy, living in a house with a white woman who kind of acted like his mother, and a little white girl that kind of acted like his sister.

  As the strangeness of his situation dawned on him for the first time, he wondered if they felt the same way. Did they look at him and wonder who this stranger was that they allowed to live with them? They didn’t fit together, did they?

  One of these things is not like the other.

  Very quickly, everything had become questionable.

  You need to sleep. You need to go right to your room and not talk to anybody, and just sleep until that moonshine gets out of your belly. You’re just thinking weird. That’s all. Everything will be normal again in the morning.

  But now that the curtain had been pulled back, he wasn’t sure he wanted to close it again.

  Now it felt like a lie.

  He arrived back at the house with time to spare. It was only a quarter to ten.

  He realized quickly that his chances of getting to his bedroom unseen were very low.

  The lights were still on in the house.

  A gray Tahoe, which replaced the black one that had been shot to shit, was sitting at the curb. A soldier was in the driver’s seat, watching him approach.

  Shit.

  The man stepped out of the SUV as Sam approached. He nodded his recognition. Technically the man outranked Sam, and technically that meant something. But the rules were much laxer than they used to be.

  “Ryder,” the man greeted him. Not using his rank. Which was something of a common courtesy they all extended to each other: If you weren’t in uniform, then you were treated as a civilian.

  Still, he said, “Sergeant Hauer,” more out of habit than anything else. “Is something going on?”

  Hauer shrugged. “I just drive the car.”

  In other words: mind your own business.

  Sam nodded, then headed for the door.

  “Hey,” Hauer called.

  Sam stopped and looked back at him.

  The man was giving him that eyeball that the old troops gave the new ones. Sam had become familiar with it by now. It said, No, I’m not going to break the unspoken protocols of our common courtesy to each other, but you need to remember that I’m a real soldier, and you’re just a pretend one.

  “Sir?” Sam said, feeling stiff and ungainly under that gaze.

  “Where you comin’ from tonight?”

  Sam swallowed. Realized that his mouth was very
dry. Like the liquor had sucked the moisture out of it. “The community center.”

  A thin smirk. “They got hooch at the community center now?”

  Fuck.

  Was it that obvious?

  Sam blinked. Looked away.

  Sergeant Hauer put one leg back in the SUV. “Better walk straight when you go in there, Ryder. And don’t open your mouth.” Then he sat back in the SUV and closed the door.

  Sam turned clumsily on wooden limbs and went for the door.

  Before he could reach it, it came open.

  Colonel Staley stepped out, and Angela stood there in the door.

  Sam froze where he was, eyes wide, like a burglar caught in the act.

  Colonel Staley and Angela seemed to stare at him for long, interminable moments.

  Are my eyes glassy? Am I swaying on my feet? Do I stink like alcohol?

  He didn’t think he’d had that much to drink. But under the scrutiny of their eyes, he suddenly felt like a staggering drunk.

  The concept of saluting Colonel Staley flitted across his mind. Perhaps if he did it crisply enough, that would fool them…

  Stupid. Just stay still.

  Staley nodded to him. “Sam,” he said, with a certain formality. Then he turned back to Angela. “Night, ma’am.”

  “Goodnight, colonel. Are you sure you don’t want to use the car to get home?”

  Staley headed down the front walk and called over his shoulder, “No, I think a walk will do me good. Thank you.”

  Sam wanted to edge towards the doorway, but Angela was still standing there, and then as soon as she moved out of the way, her body guard, Kurt, appeared in the doorway. He gave Sam a quick evaluation and then ignored him.

  “Anything else you need, ma’am?”

  “No, Kurt. Thank you. Sorry to keep you so late.”

  He shook his head. “Not a problem.”

  Then he too stepped out and walked for the SUV. Sergeant Hauer saw him coming and started the vehicle.

  “You gonna come inside or sleep on the porch?” Angela was holding the door for Sam, watching him with a curious half smile.

  Sam remembered Hauer’s advice to keep his mouth shut, so he just smiled and nodded and slipped through the door like a plague hovered in the air there and he needed to get through it as quickly as possible—and without taking a breath. He headed for his room.