by James Cook
“Can’t let you in right now,” the senior man said. His nametag read Shaw. He had red hair and freckles and could not have been more Irish if he tried.
“I need to speak with the officer in charge.”
“He’s busy.”
I took a half step closer and pitched my voice low. “You know who I am?”
“No. And I don’t care.”
“I’m the appointed liaison to the Blackthorns for this mission. Appointed by General Phillip Jacobs, I might add. Personally. So when I tell you I need to speak with the officer in charge, you fucking go get him. Are we clear?”
The sergeant glared, but complied. A minute or so later a big first lieutenant came out and blinked in the sunshine. He was a few inches taller than me and built like a linebacker. Probably played football somewhere before the Outbreak. His gaze settled on me and he stepped closer. His expression was not a happy one.
“What do you want?”
I kept my expression neutral as I reached into a shirt pocket, removed a leather ID case, opened it, and handed it to the lieutenant. He looked at it, paled, and swallowed.
“Sir, this man has a federally authorized recovery claim,” I said. “Gabe, could you show the lieutenant your paperwork?”
Gabe dropped his assault pack, withdrew a slim metal tube, uncapped it, and removed a sheaf of papers. He handed the paperwork to the lieutenant.
“There’s a manifest and identifying information. I’ll personally see to it he doesn’t take anything not on the list.”
The lieutenant sifted through the papers, eyes scanning. I sincerely doubted he had ever seen a recovery claim before. After a while, he handed the papers back. Gabe rolled them up and put them away.
“We’ll need you to get your men out of here, Lieutenant,” I said. “I’ll let you know when they can come back in.”
The lieutenant hesitated. “We’re supposed to inventory all this stuff. Central is waiting for a report.”
“Yes sir, I understand. But they can wait a little longer.” I looked at Sergeant Shaw. “Excuse us.”
Shaw looked at the lieutenant. He flicked a hand. “Go on. Move.”
Shaw moved. Gabe and I proceeded inside the warehouse. Behind us, the lieutenant snapped off a couple of orders and he and the two sentries started the process of clearing the warehouse.
“What the hell was that?” Gabe whispered, eyes alight with amusement.
I gave a small shake of the head. “Later.”
THREE
Heinrich,
Outside Parabellum
Heinrich squatted in the darkness, earthen walls pressing in around him, and fumed with rage.
For two months, Parabellum had been his. He had enjoyed good food, ample booze, a steady supply of young girls, and the respect and admiration of his tribe. His wealth had grown, as had his reputation. Raider chieftains from all corners of the wastelands came to Parabellum to trade in his town, and he always took a cut. And now, in one night, everything he had worked for had been stripped away.
Not everything, he thought. I still have the tribe. Most of it, anyway.
He keyed his radio. “All stations, this is your chief. Report. Over.”
Heinrich listened in the oppressive stillness, fingers pressed to his earpiece. Above him, a receiver took his message and routed it to an above-ground antenna hidden among the thick forest surrounding the settlement. Radio waves propagated from one receiver to another, and responses began pouring in. Most of his men had made it out and were now at the rally points. Some had chosen to stand and fight.
Idiots. Should have run when they had the chance.
Nevertheless, Heinrich was grateful they had stayed behind. Whatever meager resistance they offered would slow the Blackthorns down and increase Heinrich’s chances of escape.
“All right, men,” he said into his radio. “At this point, everyone who’s getting out is out. We lost some people. It happens. Let’s try not to lose any more tonight. Officers and squad leaders, get your men topside and blow the tunnels. Call it in when you’re done.”
Heinrich turned, gave a signal to one of his men, and climbed out of the tunnel. He emerged into the pre-dawn darkness under a thick canopy of trees. It was humid and warm, the smell of rotting vegetation thick in the air. The rest of his men joined him, twenty in all, what remained of his personal retinue. The last man out was Maru, his second in command.
Maru trailed a wire behind him that disappeared into the tunnel opening. He connected its two bare copper ends to a detonator switch, told everyone to stand back, and pressed a button. A distant thump echoed in the darkness, followed by a shuddering of the ground. Seconds later, a great gust of air and dust blew upward from the tunnel, forcing Heinrich and his men to shield their faces. Maru waited a few seconds for the air to clear, then tossed the switch down the hole.
“Let’s move,” Heinrich ordered. “Got a lot of ground to cover and not much time to do it.”
*****
Heinrich had learned about Parabellum’s tunnel network from a traitor.
The traitor had worked for the town’s former ruler, Necrus Khan, and harbored a vendetta against his boss. Heinrich never asked what Khan had done to the traitor, and the traitor had never volunteered the information. But whatever it was, it compelled him to ferret out the full size and scope of the tunnels and where they could all be accessed from. His only request was that Heinrich use the information to kill Necrus Khan. When he had the maps in hand, Heinrich thanked the traitor by plunging a knife into his heart.
No sense leaving loose ends lying around.
Upon seizing the town, Heinrich’s first order of business had been to review Khan’s files and journals. He had found that in addition to the tunnels, Khan had also set up secret caches of weapons and supplies in the event he ever had to evacuate. Heinrich knew this was valuable information, and took steps to make sure it never got out by dividing his men into groups and assigning a tunnel and supply cache to each one. Consequently, the men he was with only knew about the tunnel they had used to escape, and the supply cache they were headed toward. The same applied to the men in other groups. This way, if any of his men were captured, there was only so much information they could give up. The other groups would be safe.
Two miles of frustrating travel through dense, dark woodland brought Heinrich and his party close to their cache. Maru had kept them on track using a compass and a map Heinrich had given him from his bug-out pack. Now that they were close, Heinrich ordered his men to split up into pairs and search for the stack of river stones that marked the entrance to the underground chamber where the supplies were hidden. After several minutes, someone gave three short, sharp whistles.
The group converged on the source of the whistles, whispering to each other in the dim blue light of early dawn. The man who had found the cache was busy brushing leaves and dirt from the hatch. He soon had it open, and Heinrich and his retinue climbed down a short ladder to the dirt floor within.
Other than a pale shaft of light through the opening, the cache was utterly dark. Heinrich felt his way along the wall to his left until he reached a support beam. His right hand went up and found the beam where it crossed the ceiling, followed it, and touched an oil lantern.
“Maru, got your knife on you?”
“Just a second,” the big Maori said. He drew his fighting dagger, unscrewed the bottom, and removed a thin quiver of matches held together with a small rubber band. Heinrich took the matches and used one to light the lantern, then gave the matches back to Maru.
“Okay. We got light,” Heinrich said as he rehung the lantern.
The golden illumination from the lantern dispelled the eerie gloom the men had felt over the past half hour as they had marched away from Parabellum. Heinrich surveyed his surroundings, taking inventory. There was ten days’ worth of food for thirty men, as well as weapons, ammunition, and travel kit for all of them. Heinrich’s party was only twenty strong, but everything in this room woul
d be going with them. What they didn’t use, they could trade. But first, they had to survive the coming day.
“First things first, somebody close that fucking hatch,” Heinrich said. “Don’t want any infected dropping in on us.”
One of his men did so, the creak of rusty hinges loud in the enclosed space. With the hatch closed, it felt as if the room were its own small, sealed world. The sound of wind in branches and the scuttling of small animals in the brush went silent.
“Anybody in here claustrophobic?” Heinrich asked, grinning. His men laughed nervously. “If so, you better get over it. We’re stuck here for a while. Anybody remember how long?”
One of his men raised his hand. Heinrich pointed at him.
“Protocol is twenty four hours, sir.”
“That’s right,” Heinrich said. He kept his tone light, like a parent comforting a child. “The Blackthorns probably won’t look for us here. It’s a big forest out there, and this place is hard to find. They’ll send out patrols, but they won’t have enough men for a thorough search, so they’ll use helicopters. Helicopters have FLIR. Not much use during the day, but great at night. That’s why we won’t move until tomorrow morning.”
“You think the Blackthorns will be gone by then?” a man asked.
“Probably not, but the helicopters will be. They’re too valuable to leave on station for long. They’ll do a sweep and then head back to wherever they came from. We’ll have to be careful, but I’m confident we can slip by any Blackthorns we come across. Any other questions?”
No one spoke.
“All right. Everyone grab a bedroll and let’s move this shit to the back of the room. Stack it high enough and we should all have space to bed down.”
When the supplies were moved and his men were snoring in their bedrolls, Heinrich lay awake long into the morning. His mind played over the hardships he had faced to become leader of the Storm Road Tribe, to grow their ranks, to build enough wealth to take Parabellum and hold it. And now, after starting with nothing but an axe and his will to survive and fighting his ass off to build a small empire, he was back to sleeping in the dirt. Back to running and stealing and fighting. He clenched his fists and ground his teeth in frustration.
The Blackthorns. Always the fucking Blackthorns, dogging my trail.
He thought it had been bad when a Blackthorn had taken two of his fingers. Now, they had taken far more. And as always, he had run from them. That was how it had been from the beginning. Always running, always hiding, fighting only when he had the advantage of overwhelming numbers.
No more.
The time for running was over. The time for retribution was at hand. Tyrel Jennings and his men believed they could strike with impunity. Believed they could hit whoever they wanted without retaliation. They were about to find out differently. It was time for the Storm Road Tribe to go on the offensive.
It was time to go to Colorado Springs.
FOUR
Caleb,
Parabellum
Gabriel managed to recover fifty-eight barrels of incredibly valuable salt. The weapons, ammunition, and other trade taken by the Storm Road Tribe were nowhere to be found.
“Probably traded away a long time ago,” Gabe said as we stood looking at the steel barrels arranged in the town square.
He’d made the statement without preamble, but I knew what he meant. Despite the wealth arrayed in front of him, he had lost nearly a fifth of the net worth he’d earned during his time in Hollow Rock. Losing that kind of trade in a business deal is one thing, but losing it to marauders has a far worse sting.
“Maybe you should have just taken the insurance payout,” I said.
Gabe shook his head. “Price of salt doubled since the attack. FTIC only pays out the value at the time of loss. At least this way I come closer to breaking even.”
“Went through a hell of a lot to get it back.”
“Yep.”
I sat down on one of the barrels and looked eastward. There was a convoy inbound to haul away Gabe’s salt barrels, the Blackthorns, the goods seized from the warehouse—less what the Army troops had pilfered—and the people set to face trial in Colorado Springs.
“What are you going to trade all this for?” I asked.
“Land, horses, and cattle.”
I looked at him skeptically. “You starting a ranch?”
“Yep.”
“Didn’t know you did that kind of work.”
“I don’t. But I know someone who’s willing to do it for a cut of the profits.”
From the east, a distant, low rumble of engines added its voice to the morning chorus of birdsong flitting among the trees. The land around us was green, verdant, and alive with the vibrancy of early summer.
“Sounds downright entrepreneurial,” I said.
Gabe grunted and sat down next to me. The rumble of approaching vehicles grew steadily louder, the day growing hotter and more humid as the sun neared its zenith.
Shortly before the convoy arrived, Tyrel walked over to us, dropped his rucksack, and sat down heavily on the barrel to my right. There was weariness etched in every line of his face.
“So what’s the news?” Gabe asked.
Tyrel took off his headscarf, wrung sweat out of it, and put it back on his head. Between the three of us, we smelled bad enough to knock a buzzard off a pile of shit.
“Town’s under martial law until they can hold an election,” Tyrel said. “Plan is to turn the place into an Army garrison and kill or capture any marauders who come around looking to trade.”
“Gonna be tough to pull off if word gets out,” Gabe said.
“Army’s got this place sealed up tighter than a nun’s ass. No one comes in, no one goes out.”
“Marauders will find out,” I said. “They always do.”
“Maybe,” Tyrel said. “Doesn’t matter much. With all the intel we’ve got, we can track down damn near every major marauder group west of Colorado. Gonna be a busy summer.”
“And profitable,” Gabe said.
Tyrel nodded. “That too.”
The first vehicle in the convoy reached the main gate and stopped. Army troops manning the massive, crane-like mechanism used to open the gate began urging horses tethered to a rotating wheel into motion. The wheel turned a series of gears that slowly, inexorably parted the large wooden doors to the compound. I had to admire the imagination and expertise that had gone into the contraption. Its components were primitive, but taken in aggregate, it was quite a feat of engineering.
Several more troops positioned throughout the streets signaled the various vehicles where to go and park. One of them, a large HEMTT, stopped close to the town square. A civilian contractor leaned out the passenger window and shouted something to a soldier below. I could not hear the soldier’s reply, but the fact he pointed in our direction made the truck’s purpose obvious.
“Looks like my ride’s here,” Gabe said.
“Looks like.” I stood up and walked toward a building at the northeast corner of the square. After making sure no one was in earshot, I removed a satellite phone from my vest and called a number programmed into it. After identifying myself and going through security protocol, General Jacobs’ voice sounded in the earpiece.
“So how’d we make out?”
“You haven’t gotten any reports, sir?” I asked.
“Of course I have. But I want your take on it.”
“I’d say we did pretty well. Got forty-four marauders, couple dozen criminal types from the local populace. Everyone else is playing nice for the moment.”
“What about the other marauders? I thought there were over a hundred of them.”
“Escaped. Turns out Gabriel’s theory about a tunnel network was right.”
The general cursed softly. “No matter. We’ll run them down eventually.”
“Yes sir.”
“Jennings’ report said no casualties. That correct?”
“Blackthorn sprained an ankle. Other than
that, it’s a win for the home team.”
“Very well. Consider your mission complete, Sergeant. Hitch a ride back with the convoy.”
“Yes sir.”
He hung up.
Gabriel and the two civilian contractors had finished loading the salt barrels into the HEMTT and were locking the rear doors when I got back. I asked Gabe if he was finished, and he said he was.
“Follow me,” I said.
A small fleet of Humvees occupied a broad boulevard on the north side of the central plaza. I approached a junior officer standing around trying to look important and showed him my ID.
“I’ll be needing one of these vehicles,” I said.
The officer hesitated. “We only have enough for the men we brought in.”
“There’s plenty of room in the trucks.” I pointed to several deuce-and-a-half transports on the other side of the plaza.
The officer sighed and handed me back my ID. Twenty minutes later, Gabe and I had a Humvee to ourselves and were trundling out of Parabellum with the rest of the convoy, headed north.
“So,” Gabe said as we jostled and bounced over deep ruts and potholes. “What’s the deal with that ID you keep flashing?”
I grinned. “You’ve heard the story of Alexander the Great cutting the Gordian Knot in half, right?”
“Yes.”
I patted my shirt pocket. “Does pretty much the same thing. Only instead of rope, it cuts through red tape and bureaucracy.”
“Damn. Where do I get one?”
“You’d have to ask General Jacobs. Knowing him, there’d be strings attached.”
Gabe’s face darkened. “Forget I asked.”
We drove an hour in silence before Gabriel spoke again. “It’s not the same doing this stuff without Eric.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“You were in the Springs last week, right?”
