The State

by G. Allen Mercer

  “It’s been 15 minutes,” Leah quietly said to Ian, snapping him from his own mental game prep. No one else knew that she had spoken.

  Ian knew what 15 minutes meant. It was how long they had gone since spotting the enemy, or with a reaction. Fifteen minutes was a benchmark to the readiness of any fighting force; if they couldn’t get it right in that time, then, well, they were open to a well-organized attack.

  It was time to motivate the team.

  Ian looked around one more time, satisfied that the group was as ready as they were going to be. He cleared his throat, and then took command.

  “Alright, we need to know what we are dealing with. Joshua, why don’t you give us a rundown of what happened.”

  Joshua shifted his weight on his legs. He had not expected to be called out. The move bought him an extra second or two before he had to speak.

  “Yes, sir,” he started. “We were in the barn and we heard what sounded like someone stumbling outside of the stable. So, we extinguished the light, and…”

  “Don’t use the light again,” Leah said, her tone motherly, not overtly commanding, but it held the same weight.

  “Got it,” Grace answered for the pair.

  “So,” Joshua continued. “We went out looking for the cause of the noise. Grace was along the tree line at the back of the stables and I was along the fence line, and then I saw a flash of a riflescope on the hill. It reflected the moon, he must have shifted it up in the air or something, but I saw the moonlight reflected in the woods as clear as day.”

  “Roger that,” Ian added. “What else did you see?”

  “When he moved, I saw his silhouette behind some rocks,” Joshua said, surprising himself with the clarity of his observation. “I am familiar with the rocks and know their shape, so I am certain that’s were he was hiding.”

  “Did you see any others?” Bob asked, trying to hide the pain from his demeanor.

  “No, Dad, I didn’t, but when I think back on it, he wasn’t holding the rifle right.”

  “What does that mean?” His father asked. “Like he was injured?” Bob was a Marine sniper, and knew the poses of a sniper better than anyone in the room.

  The room was quiet. All eyes looked at Joshua. Mary stopped patting her leg.

  “Maybe,” Joshua offered. “It was like he was holding his stock shoulder lower. I could see it in the moon light.”

  “I bet he’s been shot in the shoulder,” Bob offered to the group. “There’s no other reason for a soldier to hold their shoulder up like that. Probably has it in a sling.”

  Ian listened, and then nodded. He agreed. “That’s real good, Joshua.”

  “What do you want to do, Cap?” Bob asked from his leather chair.

  Ian was about to answer him, when Daisy stood up, whined and then sat back down. Her posture was that of a statue.

  Ian looked back at Leah, who looked up at him. She was processing just what the dog’s action meant, when a faint noise infiltrated the room from outside.

  “She heard it first,” Leah said, standing. “It sounds like…”

  “A drone,” Mary said, her affect was calm, considering her last two encounters with the SUV size killers. Something had truly changed in her.

  “I agree,” Ian said, nodding. “Alright, we don’t know much, and we don’t have time to get into positions. Our friend on the hill might have called this thing in. Bob,” he said, looking at the Marine. “We should go into your bunker until this thing passes.”

  Bob was moving to stand, with great pain, before he answered. “I agree. Alright family, lets get down there,” he said, still trying to protect his family.

  Ian watched everyone go in, he was the last, with Leah just in front of him. She sensed that he was not moving with purpose.

  “Ian, let’s go.”

  “We need eyes on what ever that is,” he said, his voice was tender and spoken in a whisper.

  “I’ll come with you,” she said, taking a step up on the stairs.

  “No, you should stay with Grace.” He was not commanding, but he asked in a direct tone, nonetheless.

  She stopped, looked up to his face and nodded. “Okay, just this once. There’s no reason we can’t share the risk.” She did not wait for a response and turned around to descend the rest of the stairs into the bunker.

  Ian closed the metal door and sealed it from the outside. While he walked to the front door, he charged his first round into the chamber of the Chinese rifle he had taken off of one of the dead soldiers at the pipeline terminal. Taking a long slow breath, he then cracked the door open slowly.

  The cool morning air spilled in, as did the sound of the drone. It was getting closer. Ian slipped out onto the front porch and put his back against the front wall. The noise was coming from the east, but so was the rising sun. The low rays of the brilliant sun blinded him from pinpointing the source of the sound. He slowly shielded his eyes with the cup of his hand, careful of any sudden moves, and scouted the sky.

  The buzzing grew louder by the second.

  It could have taken me out by now, he thought to himself.

  The noise was right over the house, and then it passed over. As he shifted his position to look in the other direction, he caught the blue blinking on his watch.

  Damn! That’s one of ours!

  Ian pulled the crown of his watch out to the fourth position and turned it counter clockwise, to acknowledge the satellite ping on his watch. Within seconds, the drone changed course. Ian stepped out from the protection of the front porch and looked directly at the drone as it turned. It was low, less than a thousand feet, and was headed right towards him.

  “They can see me now,” he said, knowing that someone in the CIA was looking at him through the camera to verify who he was. He was pretty sure that the facial recognition software would compensate for the beard he was now sporting, after not having shaved for almost a week.

  The drone circled one more time and then released one of the bomb like pods under its wing when it was directly over the farm. The microwave oven sized pod sprang a parachute and dropped into the field next to the house. The drone then waggled its wings up and down, as if saying ‘goodbye’ and turned east to return to wherever it had come from.

  Ian took off for the parachute. The horses wanted nothing to do with the strange thing that had fallen from the sky. They were spooked and nervously sauntered along the backside of the pasture. They were happy to stay as far away from Ian and the ‘thing’ as they could manage.

  Even though he was convinced that the drone was friendly, he still approached the ‘package’ as if it would bite. Standing a foot or two away from the metal object, he listened intently, for what he was unsure. He had been the recipient of a few unmanned drops over his career as a Ranger, and then as a field agent for the CIA, but none had ever given him reason to pause like this one.

  Ian looked back at the house; Leah had emerged from the bunker and was slowly walking towards the split rail fence to see what he was doing. She was armed, and held her rifle at the ready. Every so often she would look towards the stables or the hill where the kids had spotted the intruder. They still hadn’t dealt with the intruder on the ridge. Ian was sure whoever was up there just saw what happened.

  “You okay out there? Over,” she asked through the radio system.

  He held his thumb up just before he bent down to put his hands on the pod. It didn’t bite.

  “So, I’m guessing it was a friendly?” Leah queried, once he got to the fence carrying the carbon-fiber pod.

  “Roger that.” He handed the pod to her while he climbed over the fence.

  “That’s pretty heavy. Do you have any idea what’s inside?”

  “Communications gear, I’m betting,” he said, taking the pod back and turning towards the house.

  “Do you think our friends up the hill saw that?” she asked, gesturing the barrel of her rifle towards the hill behind the stable.

  “I would guarantee it,”
he said, casting a glance at the hill. “While I crack this open, will you take Joshua and Grace and make a sweep of the area.”

  “Grace too, huh?”

  “You said it yourself, she’s as good as anyone else on the team. She has earned that,” he said with affirmation.

  “You sound like a proud papa.”

  “Yup, or a commander that doesn’t need to show favoritism.”

  Leah nodded. “Roger that.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Hill Above the Tiller Farm

  Wu had an excellent view of the compound. He was wedged between two small boulders with a clearing in front of him, giving him line of sight of almost any target of his choosing.

  The enemy drone had dropped its cargo almost ten minutes earlier. He now knew for a fact that this compound housed people of importance. They were leaders in some rebel force with connections to the regular army of the United States.

  Wu knew that he had a new mission, and he needed to do everything in his power to make sure that he captured information and reported back. But, reporting back was the problem. In order to report, he would need to steal a radio. But that would be a task to undertake at night. For now, he needed to rest and collect information.

  With this task in mind, he produced a paper pad and started writing notes about the compound. He had observed the watch rotation of the guards, the times at which they would patrol on foot or on horseback. The number of people and whatever he could learn from the comings and goings of these rebels. He even noted that the wounded dog seemed trained for commands. But these were all observations prior to him nearly giving himself away.

  Right now, he could clearly see the two snipers deployed to the top floor of the red horse building. Wu had never ridden a horse. Horses actually frightened him with their size and crushing hooves. But he knew that the red building was called something other than a ‘horse building.’ But, this word was not something that the State needed him to know, so, Wu accepted that action as fact.

  “But, apparently I do need to know it,” he said, quietly. Almost as quickly, he scolded himself for even contradicting the teachings of the State. Everything that he had become; a man, a soldier, an officer, these were because of the State. This was the simple truth that made life easy, and this is one of the reasons that he was proud to be part of the liberation fighters in this new war.

  “We will make the Americans see that our way is the best,” he said, almost losing himself in his own nationalistic thoughts. And that is when he heard the whining of the horse from below.

  One of the guards had mounted a horse and was patrolling along the foot of the hill that concealed Wu.

  I must have dozed off.

  He reached for his binoculars and quickly found the snipers in the red building.

  “Where are the others?” he whispered to himself and panned the binoculars around.

  He could see the soldier on horseback, the two soldiers in the red building, and there…one along the tree line at the bottom of the hill, and, he panned over to the house. The other one is at the door.

  But where is the commander? Where is the one that received the air dropped package?

  This was a thought that he would have to pack away as the soldier on horseback charged up the hill and towards his position. Wu hastily moved up to the top of the ridge and over the other side. He needed to retreat and let them think that he was no longer watching.

  < >

  Ten minutes later. “This is Tonto, I just worked the ridge, and there is negative sight of the enemy. Over,” Joshua said into his two-way radio. He kind of liked the code name Tonto.

  “Roger, Tonto, Bulls-eye wants you to not stray too far without support. And, so do I. Over,” Bob said into the microphone. His wounds regulating him to the desk job.

  “Bob, I should have gone out there with them,” Ian said, he was sitting at the dining room table, struggling with the pod dropped by the drone. “You and I are the only ones with combat experience.”

  “Ian,” Bob turned to look at him. “Not any more.”

  That comment stopped Ian in his tracks. He looked up at Bob and then walked to the window.

  “Damn, you’re right. Grace, Joshua, Adam, Anna,” his voice trailed off as he stood to look through the window. He could see Mary on guard duty and Anna and Adam were their snipers in the top turret of the stable. “Bob, she was a lawyer last week,” he said, still looking outside, and referring to Mary. “How do you go from posh legal eagle socialite to Rambette in less than a week?”

  Bob chuckled at the term Rambette. He stood with great pain and joined Ian at the window. Standing at the window was not a sound strategic decision on either man’s part, but there was gravity in this moment.

  “You know this is our new reality, don’t you?” Ian said, his voice low and his tone somber.

  “I do,” Bob answered in the same tone and volume. They both could see out over the farm. “I also know that we can’t just sit here.”

  Ian thought about that for a moment. He had been thinking about that very thought for the last few days. He had ideas, and now might be the time to bring life to them. “What are you proposing?”

  Bob scratched at his beard, buying time for him to collect his own thoughts before speaking. “This farm has been in my family for almost 80 years. I know a lot of the people around here, and you obviously know important people in DC,” he cast his thumb towards the unopened pod on the table.

  “Go on.”

  “What I’m saying is that you and I, and our families, make a pretty damn good team. This farm is in a strategic position for communications, defensibility, location to the enemy and our friends back east. I think that we could pull some people together, get a little more help from your drone friends and the we can start to take the fight to those sons-of-bitches!”

  Ian nodded and slowly turned back to the table holding the pod. Bob followed him and took a seat at the table.

  “It’s obvious that our combat forces were caught with their pants down and we are having a hard time punching back,” Bob continued talking. “You hear the reports just like I do. Most of our combined forces are in the Navy, God help us, and what the localized National Guard commanders can get spooled up. We may have helicopters, but there is nobody to fly them. We may have tanks and troops transports, but most of those are at costal staging areas to support overseas operations. It’s going to take weeks, or months to move those to the fight.”

  Ian continue to nod, he was processing everything that Bob was saying and trying to overlay it with what he knew or suspected that he knew about the enemy and the lack of US response. “We’re limping back into the fight,” Ian acknowledged.

  “We’re limping back into the fight,” Bob echoed. “Maybe, we can organize this little part of the world and help America walk into the fight, or…”

  “Screw that! We can help them run,” Ian finished the sentence.

  “Damn right!”

  “Sounds like we’re forming a militia,” Violet said. She had been standing in the doorway, listening to the conversation.

  Ian looked up at her. “Sounds like it.”

  CHAPTER 10

  40 Miles West of Atlanta, Georgia, USA

  Raven worked with the nurses trying to learn on the job as quickly as she could. She knew that it was her father that had put her into service with the medical team. He wanted her safe, she could understand that considering what was going on. Besides, he trusted Tabby and Seth. After all, they were the ones that had originally saved her when the bomb exploded and the truck smashed through the Starbucks.

  Raven stopped at one of the children’s beds. The area holding the children was her most favorite and least favorite place in the medical tent. Most of the children were burned, or missing limbs. There was usually two or three sobbing, and they were all in great pain; both physically and mentally.

  Raven had become a surrogate mother for many of the children, providing a hug or a smile. Most of the kids di
dn’t have parents, and their stories were all similar. Either their parents were missing, or the children had watched them die.

  “How are you today, Joel?” she asked the young boy. He didn’t respond.

  Raven tried a new tactic, one of the two most asked questions in the camp. “Have you seen anyone that you know, today?”

  The question was a tough one, but it had a dual purpose. If a child had seen someone that they knew, it was Raven’s job to try to connect them…and ultimately moved the child out of the medical tent.

  Joel’s eyes rotated to her, but he never made a motion to speak.

  Raven waited a minute and then asked the second most asked question in camp. “Where were you when it happened?” The word, it, had replaced all other descriptive words associated with a nuclear bomb, an invasion, the war, hell on earth.

  Joel parted his lips for a second, but he still didn’t speak. Raven checked her watch, she really didn’t know why she checked her watch…this was her life for the foreseeable future.

  “Well, if you aren’t going to tell me, how about I tell you how I got here?” She had told the story to dozens of children in an attempt to get them to relate to her, and hopefully they would open up with their own voice. Sometimes it worked, most times it didn’t, but she started anyway. “After it happened, a truck flew thru the window and I was pinned…”

  < >

  “That’s got to be his Humvee, it’s got to be him,” Raven said, a small amount of hope crept into her voice.

  The noise they heard was absolutely an engine of some sort.

  “Are you sure that’s your father? Is he a first responder or something?” Tabby asked the girl pinned behind the wreckage of the truck.

  “No, no, no, he’s in the Army. He drives a Humvee all of the time. It’s a diesel and it sounds just like that,” Raven said. She had calmed down since Tabby had started working to free her. “He commands part of the Georgia Guard.” She had said that a time or two, but Tabby was working and it just didn’t register.