The assault team was all in black BDU’s and Lundt reaches into Williams’ lower right cargo pocket, retrieving his wallet, looks inside and asks, “Who would name their kid William Williams? It seems like a bad pun, right?”
Looking to the other surviving man, it is a woman, saying, “I told them this was a bad idea.” She is wearing a thin cotton pullover mask, to conceal her identity, like all the rest, but when she speaks, someone is encouraged to remove it.
“Hey,” says Grubic, “she’s kind of pretty!”
“Not the point,” says Lundt. “What was a bad idea?”
“Look,” she groans a bit, having taken a few shots around the edges – no major perforations – and being disarmed. “They sent us after you, knowing who you are, and who we are.” She struggles to sit up, and Carlos helps her. “Don’t get me wrong, we’re good at what we do, but you guys . . . you are the stuff that these guys dream to be someday. You are trained to the ultimate degree and battle tested. If we want to, we can walk into a drug den and take down twenty, even thirty regular bad guys, but I told them, twelve of us to seven of you; we were outnumbered. Many of these guys were gung-ho, absolutely certain they could take you.”
Carlos moves around to administer a bit of first aid, tearing off a sleeve to clean and apply a bandage to a graze. Carlos is the team’s primary medtech. There is a through and through on her left thigh, a little ragged on the backside, but he will tend that as well as the other nicks and scrapes. So, he tears a patch out of her pants to access the leg wound. He sprays some anesthetic on each end of the wound, trims the ragged parts, packs it with Triple A, stitches it closed and covers with a sticky gauze patch, front and back, two by two. He wraps that with a compressive ace.
“So, what do you want to do?” is asked by Mark.
“I think I want to be left alone as well,” she says, gritting her teeth and growling a bit, as Carlos tightens the ace bandage. “From the very beginning, this has been a clusterfu . . .” she stops, thinking about her staunch, Baptist mama, whom she hasn’t reached in a couple days. “Anyway, what are you gonna do with me?”
“Depends on you,” says Lundt. “Do you have any more tech on you that can be traced?”
She reaches into her shirt pocket, tossing her Company phone on the ground. The agent who is tied to the tree, says, “You can’t be seriously thinking of joining them.” She tosses her personal phone on the ground, removes her dog-tags, tossing them, and then, after being helped to her feet, she reaches way down deep, into her pants, removing something the size of a large marble, which was hidden someplace extremely personal, and she tosses it on the ground as well.
“You’re out of your goddamned mind!” says the agent, writhing against his bonds.
Mark takes a piece of bandage to pick up the marble-like thing, then drops the other devices into the bandage, then all of it into a blood stained hat, and he rests the hat in the agent’s lap, saying, “We only want to be left alone. You go back and fight your wars, but none of us want to be involved anymore; got it?” The agent nods his assent, but doesn’t believe them. “You have to convince them!”
The agent who had fainted is slowly waking. Unnoticed, he reaches for Carlos’ gun, but the new girl is quicker, reaching for Mark’s, left handed, and she hits him just inside the right rotator cuff before he can get a complete grip. She dangles the gun by her thumb and index finger, handing it back to Mark before anyone can decide to shoot her.
“She’s in!” says Lundt.
A couple of the other guys begin tending the medical needs of the other downed operator, er, I mean agent; applying bandages, filling wounds with antibiotics, giving a shot to stabilize against shock, and a sedative in the end. Before he is completely out, like a light – and he will stay out ‘til he wakes at Langley – he is told, by the defecting lady agent, “All we want is to be left alone.” He believes her, and that is what he will report when he awakes. The other agent, tied to a tree, is cut loose, so that he can tend the needs of the other. A small medkit is left behind for just that purpose. “You take good care of him, agent . . . ?”
“The name is Barnes, ma’am, Noble Barnes.”
“Well, if he dies, you remember that he’s a good friend of mine, agent Barnes.” She’s received a passel of stitches, a half a tube of Triple-A, several bandages, and she is vertical now, walking with a little wobble, but still stunning.
“You want your weapons back, ma’am?” asks Carlos.
“I think just the Sig, for now. Could you carry my MP5?” After he tosses her sling over his head, she throws her left arm over his shoulder for some added support. Grubic and Griffin collect the weapons and ammo from the dead, tossing some of the hardware to the others.
Leading the group, with the seven following, Mark says to Lundt, “This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” Lundt smirks in reply.
“Hey, Baby Girl!” shouts Lundt, “What did you guys drive in here?”
“We didn’t drive, sir. We came in an Osprey. It’s sitting in the parking lot with Barnes’ car.”
“New plan!” says Mark.
Two operators jog through the woods to the backside of the plane, moving between cars to stay hidden from view, sliding up the side of the craft, only to appear at the pilot and co-pilot windows. They tap their M4’s on the glass and take a step back, aiming at their heads inside. The Crew Chief and Navigator reach for their weapons, but the pilot raises his hands toward them, in a gesture of ‘no.’ The four of them walk to the side door of the plane, exiting, one at a time, handing their sidearms over to the operators. When all four are standing on the ground, the rest of the operators come from the cover of the woods.
“Did you see my video?” asks Mark.
They all respond with something like a “yes, sir” and a nod.
“Do you understand what it means to be left alone?”
The response is the same.
“You’re not too damn good at leaving people alone, are you?” asks Lundt.
Some heads hang a little.
“You really didn’t leave us much choice. Did you?” asks the Crew Chief.
“The goddamned President is a whackadoodle, Jess, and you know it. We didn’t have to take this mission and no one should have assigned it. Hell, we’re out here tracking a man who’s supposed to be endangering POTUS, but he’s going south, then west. This far west!” she’s kind of shouting at him now. She backhands his left shoulder with her right hand, saying, “Shit, Jess! All he wanted was his gear, and we’re gonna kill him for that?” He looks at her sheepishly, but with a little anger too. Grabbing his face in her left hand, she asks, “What if I want mine?”
She’s quite the little chatterbox when she gets going, and her mouth seems to be connected directly to her brain. There’s not a pause, a stammer, a stutter, or an “um,” as she’s speaking. She’s off Carlos’ shoulder as they walk up. She is wobbling a bit from her wounds, and still, she’s full-on sassy. Now that she’s open for view by everyone, they can see that she is not a big woman, but not small either. She’s got hips! A comedian had once said that there was a difference between a “big ass woman” and a “woman with a big ass.” She is not either of these, she just has real curves, and with every step, she seems to be clearing her path, or opening up her stage. She reminds Carlos of a Mexican version of Mae West, where every movement is an unconscious attention getter. Later, when talking in a more personal setting, Carlos is pierced by her pursed lips, sassy glances, rolling eye gestures, and the shift of her weight, from one foot to the other, whenever she requires a little more focused attention. She gets it too. Her name is Sylvia Rosales.
“Just give us your tech and head west. You should find the others pretty soon,” she says, and they obey. As soon as they are well into the woods, their tech is dropped into the newly broken window of Barnes’ car, but the weapons stay with the team.
They would be deserters in a few days, but their pursuers will soon be too busy with oth
er things to bother following this motley crew. They move quickly, using Mark’s rank and status to get whatever they need. They take the Osprey about twenty miles to the north and set down for about ten minutes, so the transponder can be disabled, and the additional spook tracking equipment removed. Now they can fly invisibly, anywhere they want.
Mark meets them at the drop site and slips his bike up inside. The heavy truck they came in also loads, and they head farther and farther west. Mark shares the coordinates that he received from Mike, so they refuel and head even farther west, doing a fly by, looking at the terrain for future reference. There is a house and a bunker, or root cellar, with about six acres of exposed ground, and slopes up and down in every direction. “I don’t know when that will become the place to be, but I know that Mike will be there in a while. She said the deadline to be in line was in just under seven years from the disappearance, but between now and then . . .”
It is determined that they cannot long manage to keep the bird; fuel and stops being a problem in less than a few days. But they can get to a couple of motorpools and liberate, er, I mean, requisition a few more vehicles. Mark’s insignia still allow him access to anything he wants, just for the asking. The eight men and one woman acquire a total of seven mobile command units, which are really very fancy, but also military-hard, RV’s for commanders in a frontline, or near frontline position. Each of these units has three bunks for support staff, and a queen size bed in the suite, with a very nice kitchen and john for everyone. Each is built on a Freightliner truck frame, with a Danzig drive system; small gas motor driving alternators, powering extensive battery systems (with lots of replacement batteries in a cargo bin), driving six axels of electric motors, and a professional grade cockpit with a ton of extra gadgets. Mark just wants his bike.
It will be a few days of caravanning about before they discover that the camouflage colouring is a peelable wrapping; so they peel them down to their factory colours. There are two brown, three blue, and two green, all with fancy waves and swishes on them. What the Army hadn’t understood about the wrapping is that it was completely unnecessary. There are other secrets to these heavy-duty cuties that Mark can show them as they go.
For starters, the retail versions of these have a king size bed, but for weight reasons, these all carry a queen size, with a lightweight lower and the top four inches are PurplPhoam. The retail units also came with quartz, granite, or marble countertops. These have synthetic soapstone. The milspec units also have three hundred gallon water supplies and super-efficient toilets that use only one quart of water to rinse after urination, and three quarts are blasted through after someone takes a dump. The kitchen is far more utilitarian in these units, and the TV is connected to a command information system that will go offline in a few days, but also a library of twenty thousand movies on hard drives, and half a million books on almost every subject. The heat and cooling systems are top of the line, with warm blowers across the edges of the floors, blowing heated air across the floor at 85, 95, or 110 degrees. Above the cabinets of each room, there are cooling vents which expel air which can be cooled to as low as 50 degrees Fahrenheit. The walls are insulated to an R-factor of 24, which means that it can be 125 degrees outside and 65 degrees on the inside, or -40 outside and 75 or 80 inside. Wonderful in any weather. The air purification systems are amazing as well, and so good that if a skunk fires off a load beneath the coach, you can’t even smell it inside.
Mark shows them what he knows of the tech on the RV, which is very similar to the presidential motorcoaches. The skin, it turns out, could have peeled itself, using the nanite construction to eat away the glues. The surface of the coaches can be triggered to change colour on command. It can be single colour, or a swoosh pattern so common on personal buses, or it can be made into desert, jungle, or woodland camouflage, in dozens of military patterns and colour choices. All control is managed from the pop-up RIO systems, in front of the navigator’s seat, just like in the big ones; except the seat is permanently mounted. Also, the storage space below each of the dining benches is a three-tier weapons rack. On the top level is the pistols – 10 each – below that is MP5’s – 3 per – and on the bottom level is two layers of 9mm ammo for all the above.
Though, apparently, they now no longer look like military vehicles, and that takes some of the heat off, it’s not a worry free world. In the next few weeks, the government will be far too busy to track down a few missing operators in some fancy RV’s. These units are worth about $450,000 each, at retail, though the government got a volume deal and only paid twice that, but some of the insides are custom.
Lundt and Grubic are married men; so on the way to wherever they are going, they stop by and pick up their wives, and Grubic’s kids.
Considering the alternatives, three kids in three bunks is not a bad fit. It is not nearly as spacious as their in their Lincolnshire, Illinois home, but Grubic is with his family every night.
The hardest part was deciding to take the cat along, and after a few days’ travel, the cat got out in a state park, and the caravan decided as a group that, “Little Andy’s cat would come home, given a chance to find his way.” They stayed in the park an extra day, then another night, but the caravan then decided that “Little Andy’s cat has found a new home somewhere, and we should respect that.” So, they moved on.
After about six months of traveling together, the Grubic’s and the Lundt’s split up, each taking a single man and a married or engaged couple with them. The thinking of this is that maybe a smaller group is a smaller, less interesting target. Sylvia and Carlos stayed with Lundt for a while.
Lundt and his entourage are touring the northern border, edging Canada, trying to see if there is a way to make a home, only to discover that it is in their best interests to remain mobile, staying near or within the borders of Nebraska. They have developed a full-fledged oil industry there, not dependent upon any outside agencies, trading north and south, from town to town.
Nebraska had experienced a boom in the late nineties and early new century, bringing hundreds of thousands of jobs to the state, but with all manner of protests from fake Native groups, and all kinds of outside bird loving, tree huggers. None of it was real protest, just whining that it was a collection of evil oil companies bringing the jobs, making the money. They preferred it when the casino’s opened up, creating a couple thousand jobs, but other people have to make money from productivity of some sort to support the casinos, or there is no money with which to gamble. Oops! They didn’t think of that. The economy has since gone to hell, but they still count their operations in dollars, even though no one uses them anymore. It is just the measure by which they keep score. The price of gas is fixed at three dollars a gallon, but what you bring to trade may be valued up or down, depending on how the market is working in favor of what you are trading. Bullets are always up.
Coming out of a reservation one day, having passed through Wyoming, the Grubic party is bushwhacked by a group of make-believe Indians, dressed like movie Indians from the fifties, wearing war paint and feathers, buckskin leather chaps, no shirts, and moccasins, carrying lever action rifles and whooping like they were chasing John Wayne. They ride horses and what seems like electric motorcycles.
Grubic’s wife drives their coach as Andy Sr. goes to the roof hatch, standing on a chain ladder suspended from the bezel. Feet on aluminum chain and his butt resting against the frame, he rises up behind the cover of the roof hatch, with his M4 in hand, and patiently shoots men or horses, whatever he happens to score in the moment. Andy Jr. is below, tossing his dad magazines as needed. Griffin’s girlfriend, Carla, has her daughter – Charlene, age seventeen – driving the coach, as Carla joins Griff in shooting. Carla, positions herself as Grubic does, and her lover, Special Operator Patrick Griffin kneels in the bunk loft above the driver, rising out the hatch in the front. She sure is proud of her soldier. Carla has her dad’s hunting rifle, .45 Long Colt, Marlin, with a barrel of almost four feet, with which she is
endlessly familiar, and Griff has an MP5, set to three round bursts. Together with Grubic, they manage to dispatch about twenty-five or their attackers, reducing their force to less than a fourth of what it had been, dissuading any further aggression. These ersatz “injuns” are scattering across the plains without any wampum.
The Lundt party experiences much the same, somewhere along the way, and in some sense, this is the new normal. It’s like it’s September 11, 1857 all the time, and everywhere. It is not as though it is always the fake Injuns, but often enough. Back in 1857, it was white men, dressed up as Native Americans, attacking other white folk, taking what they owned, and their younger children. The evildoers believed they had to protect their faithful from the outside world to the ultimate degree. That was America’s first act of religious terrorism, the Mountain Meadows Massacre.
Still, whether the attackers are disguised as Natives or not, there is plenty of activity from marauders of all kinds. There are the ex-military, sort of mercenary marauders, most of which were immediately out-classed when they attacked these traveling bands, resulting in high death count of the enemy. There are biker gang marauders – even gay or lesbian biker gang marauders – and usually, they suffer losses and equipment casualties – such as shot up bikes – and they soon give up the fight, anticipating easier prey. There are local thuggeries which attack anyone passing through their territories, but when these friends pass through, they give the thugs a heavy dose of pain, and usually mark the territory with signage like those the US Government had put in southern Arizona, so long ago. “Don’t go here – dangerous people doing dangerous things we don’t have time or energy to fix.” Well, that’s what the signs in Arizona said, back in the day, anyway.
In the days that follow, as they are traveling together, Carlos and Sylvia begin a more and more intense, intimate, and sincere attraction to one another. After about a year of the greater group traveling together, it is decided to separate, but these two decide to remain as one.
The Warriors' Ends- Soldiers of the Apocalypse Page 23
