She cackled, slapping at her thigh with a grimy hand. “Mister, this is Kentucky. People been shooting each other for entertainment since the second person got here.”
Conor smiled at her joke, patted her on a thin shoulder, and hurried off.
He stayed off the road, moving across the lawns of homes and businesses. Head on a swivel, he constantly watched for any sign of a sentry post, a guard, or someone in military gear. “Stupid camo,” he muttered. “Wish they were wearing something easier to spot, like prison jumpsuits.”
As sometimes happened when he talked to himself, he was struck with a magnificent idea, but it would have to wait. He had to find them first. He lost sight of the blue sign the lady had pointed out but knew he had to be getting close.
The first sign of anything unusual was the smell of roasting meat. That smell instantly knotted Conor’s stomach, wracking him with an intense craving. He could only imagine the number it was doing on the poor, starving people of this community. It had to be The Bond. Who but an invading army would have the audacity to cook in front of starving people with no concern for having their food stolen by a mob?
The torturous aroma provided some benefit. Conor homed in on it like it was a beacon, following it to the source. The closer he got, the worse it became. He felt like a drunk staggering into the Waffle House at 3 AM only to be further intoxicated by the aroma of greasy cheeseburgers, omelets, and waffles. He was nearly ready to take on the entire force just to steal their breakfast.
He looped around a fast food place, skirted a dumpster, and took cover behind a boxwood hedge. He was beyond the blue sign and had to be near the camp. Besides cooking food he could also smell a campfire. If the camp was that close, there had to be a guard post somewhere. He turned back in the direction he’d come from and could see the road into town snaking around the steep brown mountains. That was where he and Wayne had been when they were shot at last night. Where would the guard have been to see them?
There were some tall Victorian houses on the street. While they were tall enough that you could see the road from an upstairs window, Conor didn’t think there was a guard there. A military guy would never pick a post that allowed him to only see in one direction like that. He’d have wanted something that provided more of a three hundred and sixty degree view, like an old school or a church.
Conor pulled a pair of binoculars from a pocket and scanned the area around him. Then he found it—a Presbyterian church with an old fashioned bell tower. The interior of the open tower was shadowed in the day but Conor focused on it, waiting for one of those shadows to move. When it finally did, he’d found his sentry. He also knew he was damn lucky to have made it this far without taking rounds. Had he walked up the road or sidewalk, the guy would have seen him for sure.
His first thought was to engage the sentry and quietly take him out. He could go to the church and do it with a knife or his suppressed Glock. If he did that, though, the camp would be on high alert tonight and that wasn’t what Conor wanted. He had plans for them. Plans that required he get very close.
Aware that rapid movement drew the eye, Conor carefully plotted a path forward. His concealment was chosen to accommodate very slow movement. He didn’t want to have to run. Until he was beyond this sentry he wanted to be able to move as slowly as possible. Although he hoped like hell there wasn’t another sentry anywhere close, he would have to keep that possibility in mind.
It took him thirty minutes of stealth to move to a point where he was completely obscured from the church tower. By then, for better or worse, the smell of food was gone from the air, though the campfire remained. Conor wondered what these men did to keep themselves occupied between eating and killing innocent folks. He assumed they had to be scavengers, so perhaps that was their day job.
He didn’t know how long The Bond had been in this town but the houses immediately surrounding the car dealership were in a different state than those he’d seen coming through town. There were belongings in the yards and doors left open. Conor couldn’t tell if it was because the residents had fled in a hurry or whether Bond soldiers had ransacked the houses. If that was the case he didn’t want to know what horrors might lay inside those homes.
Conor skirted them and climbed into a treehouse in the backyard of one property. It was sturdy enough to hold him and had a window facing out onto the car dealership. “Poor kid. Got a shitty view.”
Back on his binoculars he found the camp to be different than he’d expected. He’d thought the soldiers might just pull up to the front and sleep in the snazzy glass-wrapped showroom. They were smarter than that. The Bond soldiers were using the service lot around back, with its chain link fencing, as their camp. The garage parking lot was filled with their trucks, which were late sixties and early seventies multi-fuel trucks.
The men were camping in the garage itself. The high roll-up door was raised and Conor could see their gear and at least one truck inside. Outside the garage area was an extended flat awning that ran along the side of the building, beneath which the men had a kitchen set up. A campfire burned on the concrete, blackening the steel awning above it. Some of the showroom furniture had been carried outside and set up around the fire. There were also a few office chairs and some coffee tables. It was a pretty nice setup if you were on that side of the fence.
Conor studied the men and the uniforms they wore. They were from different ethnic backgrounds and their uniforms, which appeared to be the real deal, had been stripped of identifying names or ranks. Most of the men were sitting down but four were standing with cups of coffee in their hands. Those four were all talking in an animated manner. Conor couldn’t tell who was in charge but knew someone had to be. A group of men this size didn’t function this smoothly without someone giving the orders.
This layout wasn’t going to be perfect. His plan would require stealth and a good deal of luck. He also had some shopping to do before it got dark.
39
Conor didn’t want to drive The Bond off and make them someone else’s problem. He wanted to draw them into a well-constructed trap. He was aware he couldn’t lure people after him by instilling fear in them, nor did he do it by angering them. He had to do it by humiliating them, make them so pissed off they became blinded by their rage and did stupid things. Pissing people off was right up Conor’s alley.
To that end, after he’d located The Bond’s camp he’d spent the rest of the day tracking down a sack full of goodies that would help him accomplish his goal. When he’d found everything on his list, he retreated into the woods and caught a little power nap.
When he woke from his nap he stowed his gear and ate an MRE. It wasn’t selected because it was the most palatable option but because it was the heaviest food in his pack and he wanted to be shed of the weight. He readied the gear for his operation and then got moving. His first order of business was with the sentry in the church tower. He wanted to get close before darkness fell because he didn’t know what technology the sentry had at his disposal. He expected the man had night vision gear and was uncertain about thermal.
Approaching the church was easier than anticipated. The sentry was using binoculars to monitor the town in a predictable pattern. He studied the view out one opening for several minutes, then turned clockwise and studied that view for several minutes. His continual rotation made it merely a matter of waiting until he turned away from Conor. Add to that, the church was surrounded by high, dense hedges that gave Conor an approach lane completely shielded from the sentry.
The arched front door was of oak construction, stained dark, and strapped with forged iron hardware. It wasn’t locked but that wasn’t entirely surprising. The Bond sentry probably didn’t expect anyone to come inside unless they intended to relieve him. Conor intended to relieve him alright, although not in the manner the sentry expected.
It took him several minutes of careful searching with judicious use of a red headlamp to find the door that led to the bell tower. It stood open and a
narrow set of winding stairs led upward. The stair treads were wooden and would likely creak as Conor ascended them. He took it slowly, staying as close to the wall as possible. The center section of the step, which got the most traffic, usually made more noise than either end.
The floor of the bell tower was the equivalent of five stories from the ground floor. Because the space allocated for the stairs was so narrow, there were four short landings required to ascend a single floor. That was a lot of careful walking. As a metal fabricator who’d made a set or two of steel steps in his life, Conor couldn’t help but note how much simpler it would have been if they’d used steel.
Because there was no open center dropping top to bottom in this stairwell, Conor couldn’t see until he got to the top that the trapdoor there was closed. It made sense that it would be. The floor of the bell tower was probably only six feet by six feet and leaving that door open in the dark would have been an invitation to step in it. Conor played his red beam around the space and familiarized himself with it. There was a rack of electronic equipment that replaced the old-fashioned bell. Most churches had a loudspeaker in their tower now and used recorded bells.
Conor knew he couldn’t just throw open the trap door and storm the tower. The guy had a gun and would have the jump on him. He could also be standing on the trap door which would prevent Conor from even opening it at all. He studied the homemade ladder leading up to the trap door. It had been replaced at some point recently with a simple structure of two by four framing lumber fastened together with drywall screws.
A devious grin broke Conor’s face as he removed a multitool from his pocket. After removing every single screw from the right side of the ladder, he retreated back a single landing.
“Yo, dude!” he called, then waited for a response. When there was no reaction, he repeated himself. “Yo! Dude! Open up!”
There was the sound of a chair being dragged across the bell tower floor and then the trap door was flipped open. Silence. The sentry must have been waiting for whoever called to him to come up. A light flicked on and shone through the opening, reflecting off the white painted walls.
“Hello?” When there was no response, the voice spoke again. “Hey, don’t be fucking around. You know Thomas takes this sentry shit all serious.”
Conor groaned, making it sound like he was injured. He needed the man to come down the stairs without getting on his radio and alerting the main camp.
“This ain’t funny, man. You hurt?”
Conor groaned again, barely loud enough to be heard. He mumbled something indecipherable.
“Mundo, that better not be your dumb ass down there. If you’re messing with me I’m going to throw you off this roof.”
When there was no response, the man leaned down and played his light through the opening, examining all corners of the room. He saw no one and nothing out of place. Despite the screws Conor removed from the ladder, friction held each wooden step in place until the man put his weight on it. Then the step gave way, as did each below it, and the sentry noisily dropped the twelve feet or so to the floor.
Conor launched himself up the landing, hitting the switch on his headlamp as he went. There was loud cursing and the red light revealed the man writhing in pain at the base of the booby-trapped ladder. He sprang onto the man’s chest and jammed a device against his neck, activating the plunger with his thumb. It was Doc Marty’s creation, a modified auto-injector similar to what a soldier might use to administer a dose of morphine to himself after an injury. Instead of morphine, this one contained a Propofol and Fentanyl combination that produced a rapid anesthetic affect.
He’d once asked the Doc for some type of chloroform-type knockout drop only to find out that the immediate knock-out effect shown in the movies was fictional. There was no real-life equivalent. This injection was pretty darn close but required Conor hold the man down, mouth covered, until the drug took effect. When it did, Conor gave him a quick inspection to make sure none of his limbs were broken in half. Certain that he had no bones jutting through his skin, Conor grabbed him by the collar and pulled him down the steps to the ground floor.
He continued through the church, out the front door, and dumped the comatose man by a brown Dodge Aries. He had a bag of goodies shoved up under the car waiting on him. He removed a roll of paper towels and a spray bottle of window cleaner, then cleaned the dust from the hood of the car. When he was done, he dumped the remaining contents from the bag and got to work.
40
When he reached the car dealership, the only sentries Conor spotted on the inner perimeter were two sullen men standing at the gate leading to the service area of the dealership. Perhaps they were not happy about being late for dinner or missing out on the fireside festivities. The sentry Conor had taken out at the church had a PVS-14, now stored as a spare in Conor’s Go Bag, but neither of these men had any type of night vision or thermal. Perhaps they weren’t as well-equipped as he thought.
He slipped around to the rear of the fenced lot and used the bolt cutters he’d stolen earlier that day to snip a hole in the fence. When he was done, he carefully laid the cutters to the side and slithered through the opening. He pulled his gear in after him, then disappeared into the maze of vehicles.
The men of The Bond were eating dinner, the same cooked meat smell pervading the area and twisting Conor’s stomach. He silently swore vengeance on them for making a fat boy’s discomfort that much worse. Not only was he putting his life in danger to deal with this vermin, but did he really have to be crippled by hunger pangs while he was doing it? It was inhumane. That was okay though. He would have his revenge. He intended to be just as inhumane before this was over with.
The men talked loudly as they ate, telling stories and laughing. Somewhere music was playing. It was rap, which didn’t help Conor’s disposition. He never really cared for recorded music, preferring something live, with voices and instruments. The music and the casual attitude within the fenced compound told Conor that these men were comfortable. They didn’t fear attack. They assumed the population was cowed and their sentries were more than capable of dealing with whatever threat might show up at their door.
Conor was about to show them just how wrong they were.
With the group’s noise helping to cover his steps and the occasional bump of gear into a vehicle, Conor methodically worked his way toward the lead truck. It was the closest to the improvised kitchen and the fire around which the men ate. There were a few lanterns strung up and ambient light coming from the campfire so Conor flipped his night vision out of the way. He needed all the coordination and dexterity he could manage.
When he reached the lead truck, he moved into the gap between it and the truck behind it. He crept as far forward as he dared and removed two devices from the open flap of the cargo pocket on his pants. He’d staged them there earlier, not wanting to have to pull open the Velcro flap on a pouch. There was no stealth where Velcro was concerned.
He pulled the pin on the M84 stun grenade, reached out, and lobbed it into the campfire. No one noticed him but they all flinched when the device detonated in the middle of their fire circle, disorienting them with the noise and blinding them with the brilliant light. Landing beside the fire, it also blew sparks over the men, forcing them to swat at their clothing as the burning embers stung their flesh. Conor followed up with a smoke grenade to mask his movements. Chaos erupted, men toppling back in their chairs and scrambling for weapons that their damaged eyes could not see, cursing and falling over top of each other.
The noise brought the guards from the gate running to the scene. Conor had expected this and was watching for them. They must have thought the cook stove had exploded. They weren’t thinking “attack” and didn’t have their weapons ready. Conor was ready for them. He put a bullet in each man’s face, then dropped his rifle, allowing it to hang from the sling.
He climbed into the nearest truck bed. It put him above the men, looking down onto the scene. If they started fir
ing in the smoke, blinded by the flash-bang, they would only be hitting each other. It was then that he opened up on them with the device he’d put together earlier in the day. Fully expecting the smoke grenade to obscure everyone’s vision, he’d fastened his thermal optic to a full-auto paintball gun and he cut loose with no mercy.
The paintball gun sputtered and burped, pouring the stinging balls out at a rate of around twenty per second. Conor had no trouble spotting the men in his thermal and they paid the price. He aimed for faces and groins, vulnerable spots that had the men squealing, cursing, and crying. When he emptied the gun, he ripped his thermal loose from it and tossed it down.
He bolted for the grill, kicking and shoving, stepping on crawling men who assumed he was one of their brothers. He scooped up two steaks in a gloved hand and disappeared into the night cackling like a madman.
41
The vibe at the camp was kicked back. The Bond found Paintsville to be a very chill town–a very passive town–where they didn’t anticipate running into any trouble at all. There were people living there but they were hiding. To The Bond, those people were like canned goods sitting on the shelf at the grocery store, just waiting for The Bond to put them in a shopping cart.
Their first evening in town they sent out emissaries to make their presence known. They killed a few folks, shot at things that caught their attention, and were back at their base in time for dinner. The rest of the team set up camp at a car dealership and established sentry posts along the road to either side of their base.
They were glad to be settled in a new town. Travel days made everyone anxious. There were frequent stops to remove disabled cars from the road. Every time they did this they imagined it might be a trap with locals hiding in roadside bunkers ready to open fire on them. There was also the fear that some random person with a rifle might open fire on them for the same reason they opened fire on random people–just for the hell of it.
Brutal Business: Book Three in the Mad Mick Series Page 24
