by Zack Finley
“Boss looks like a crash where TN-297 ends. You can get by alright. Are we going right or left?”
I looked at Allie, and we agreed, “Left,” I radioed. We wanted to stay north of Jamestown and onto TN-52. Only 300 miles to go to Hickman.
We were lucky, Jamestown residents only blocked the major roads into town, and at this hour they no one was monitoring the roadblocks. It just took a few attempts to find a way around Jamestown. TN-52 was narrow and windy out of Jamestown, but it had the main bridges over the East and West forks of the Obey River.
We were blocked at the West Fork bridge by a two-car blockade. It only cost us a 15-minute delay. Razor showed his car mastery. He was in the driver’s seat in a hot minute and had the steering unlocked in seconds. Razor shifted the car into neutral, and we pushed it far enough to get through.
We took advantage of the delay; swapping ninjas and scouts and mounting the used ninjas on the pickups to charge. Allie briefed the new scouts on the proposed route, which used back streets past the Livingston airport and avoided the town itself.
The road to Celina wasn’t as narrow as those before. It even became a four-lane highway a few miles out of town. There were several abandoned big rigs, but room to get by on one shoulder or the other.
There were more signs of life in Celina than we’d seen elsewhere, although that might have just been because we avoided most other towns. We parked the pickups on the side of the road, sending the scouts to check the Cumberland River bridge.
It was only an hour before daylight when they radioed the bridge was blocked, but no one was guarding it. That explained the parked big rigs. I sent Joel to see if any of the semis had any fuel left.
“Boss this one has about a third of a tank,” radioed Joel.
“Scouts, could a big rig clear the blockade?” I radioed.
“Probably, though some of the vehicles might end up in the river,” Razor radioed back.
“Joel, unhook the tractor and give it a try,” I radioed. “The crossing at Gainesboro may be worse.”
“I may need a jump, but give me a few minutes to unhook,” Joel radioed. Allie and Mike ran over to give him a hand. I drove the pickup truck next to the big rig and waited.
Joel returned to the cab, while his helpers unhooked the trailer. I couldn’t help but wonder what was in it. Dreams of a coffee bean bonanza intruded into my thoughts.
The two scouts came back, barely making a sound. They needed to show Joel the only clear path they found through Celina to the bridge.
“Joel, can you tell what this big rig was hauling?” I asked.
“It was going to the Fort Campbell PX,” Joel said, “According to the shipping manifest. Might be worth cleaning out on our way back.”
“You going to need that jump?” I asked.
“We’ll know in about a minute,” Joel said, “I’m waiting on the glow plugs to heat up. I think there is enough juice for one try. The glow plug battery has juice, let’s hope the main one does, too.”
The sound of the diesel cranking over was loud in our ears. As it started to grind down, I unbuckled and opened my door to get the jumper cables. I’d just put a foot on the ground when the engine roared to life. Joel, the engineman, struck again.
“Boss, bring the chains and cable, just in case it is easier to pull the pile apart than push it,” Joel radioed as he put the big rig in gear and pulled out.
Allie climbed back into our pickup and buckled up.
We pulled in behind Joel, lagging by 200 feet.
“Let’s make this a family affair,” I radioed. “We might need the manpower. Park the last two pickups facing back toward town, just in case.”
It was getting a lot closer to dawn than I liked, but I felt the urge to get over the Cumberland River and stay north of Nashville. We’d cross the Cumberland again, but I suspected most of the crossings closer to Nashville would be blocked either by accidents or on purpose.
Since Allie and I had the winch, cables, and chain in our pickup, we parked close to the jumble of vehicles blocking the bridge. The crew on the ninjas dismounted and stood watch looking back toward Celina. It had a pre-crash population similar to Huntsville. The bridge approach was quite elevated, and there were no buildings close enough to represent anything other than a sniper threat.
The road blockage was near the crest of the bridge and probably began as a traffic accident. The bridge was two wide lanes with generous shoulders. We could get the ninjas through but only by carrying them over the mangled vehicles.
Joel left the big rig’s engine running and examined the scrum from several angles. This precipitated a full team meeting. Allie and I stayed low but made our way back to keep watch on the Celina end of the bridge, near where the rest of the pickups were parked. The rest of the team worked to clear the blockage.
“Boss, we’re going to pull a few vehicles out of the pile, then push what’s left to get a wide enough passage,” Joel radioed.
“Roger that, Allie and I will keep watch at the Celina end,” I radioed in response.
I was sure we’d awakened most of Celina with our antics tonight. I just hoped no one came closer to find out what we were doing. I watched the left-hand sector; Allie had the right. Both of us had the thermal sights active.
My side had an old house that was warmer than the surrounding countryside and a few trailers within view. The trailers were cold and silent. Allie could see a church and several occupied residences through a small grove of trees. People might be wondering about the rumbling diesel rig, but they were staying indoors.
The mother of all fingernails being dragged across a chalkboard signaled the next phase of the clearing operations. The hair on the back of my head stood up, and goosebumps paraded up and down my arms.
I expected heads to pop out of every window in the buildings around us. Like me, Allie was kneeling behind the guardrail in cover against a possible potshot.
In my thermal sights, I spotted a person looking through an upstairs window on my side of the bridge. The roof was at the road height, so they were still well below us. Their focus was on the direction the noise came from.
Our work crew wasn’t done making noise. The diesel might have cracked open the car pile, but our guys were using the winch to drag the freed cars to the side, accompanied by more agonizing, screeching sounds.
“I’ve got two Tangoes with binoculars watching the bridge from two different houses,” radioed Allie.
“Stay down and still, go flat if they show a rifle,” I radioed back.
“The natives are restless, how much longer is this going to take?” I radioed.
“Beginning the push now should be only a few more minutes,” radioed Joel.
I could hear the engine on the diesel rig revving up but resisted the urge to look back. My area of responsibility was this way, trust my teammates to know what they were doing.
Sounds from a premier demolition derby combined with the roars of a monster truck show emanated from behind us. The only things missing were screams and shouts from the audience.
Then there was just the regular rumble of a big diesel engine.
“Boss, bring the pickups up to join us. We have a path,” Joel radioed.
“Allie, you go first, no need to be silent. Turn and burn,” I radioed.
“Roger that,” she said, easing backward in a sinuous way, I could never mirror. She was in the cab, had the engine started and the truck in gear while still shutting the door. One of the reasons we liked these little pickups was their turning radii. Her tight turn chirped the tires briefly before racing toward the middle of the bridge to join our teammates.
I began moving when her truck did and was hot on her bumper. I didn’t think someone would fire blindly at our vehicles, but didn’t want to risk it. The scouts were already through the break. They spread out in front of the convoy, with the diesel rig in front preceding the pickups.
We needed to pull off the highway to rest and stash the big rig. It was
still mostly dark when we pulled onto a track about a mile from the river. It wasn’t really a road and didn’t look like anyone had driven over it in years. The tree branches clawed and scraped the big rig. The semi slowed but kept moving until we came to an overgrown clearing. The remnants of an old homestead explained both the track and the open area.
The abundance of broken beer bottles explained why the track was still visible. I imagined it was once a favorite drinking spot for high school boys. A large firepit, unused for a long time completed the picture. Brush and small trees were reclaiming the once cleared field where we parked. Nature was still a few years from completely digesting the farmhouse. Several mid-sized trees protruded through the roof, and blackberry brambles engulfed the front porch.
I was surprised to see Razor jump out of the big rig instead of Joel. Two men went back along the track to disguise the ruts left by our passage. The ninja charging tarps were already out for the two ninjas used last. The other ninjas were still fully charged. A third tarp was set up for charging batteries for the NVGs and radios.
All that effort to travel 80 miles. About 250 more miles to go to the Mississippi River. The diesel rig worked well at removing unmanned blockages. It wasn’t clear if the bridge at Celina was blocked by someone and then people just crashed into it or whether it just happened. A few of the cars caught fire and several had skeletonized remains inside.
Getting past our first roadblock felt good. I really wanted to bring the semi with us, all we needed was a hundred gallons of diesel.
We set a watch schedule, and those not on the first watch pulled out their sleeping bags and used their ponchos for ground cloths. I wanted everyone to get some sleep and reassemble just before dark.
Both rocket stoves were roaring, and the pots of water were starting to boil. We took turns hydrating our freeze-dried food pouches. Someone else stacked a pile of small branches and twigs to keep the rockets hot.
I knew better than to skip the meal. An experienced sergeant during my first deployment drove home one of the tenets of surviving in enemy territory. Eat, and sleep when you can, the enemy may not give you that opportunity later.
That sergeant left the Rangers a few years later on a medical discharge with a metal plate in his head, victim of an IED. I bet wherever he ended up, he was helping his neighbors get through this. Sleep came swiftly.
Allie kicked my foot to wake me for my watch. She waited while I put on my boots, stuffed my bedding into my ruck, put on my plate carrier, and stood up holding my M4.
“Anything happening I should know about?” I asked.
“One of our scouts heard a vehicle driving toward Celina on TN-52 just before noon. It hasn’t come back. No one had a good view of it, but it sounded like a car or pickup. Other than that, it has been quiet. A lot of the nearby residences have people staying in them, based on chimney smoke. One of the scouts spotted a boat storage facility across the highway. Everyone wants to investigate that, but we’ve agreed to wait until nightfall,” Allie said.
“Thanks for the update, get some sleep, I’ll get everyone up in about 2 hours,” I said. Joel came over to join me, he and I were the ones covering this watch. I swapped batteries on the charger for my radio and NVGs, and Joel did the same.
We split the camp, with Joel taking the semicircle away from the road while I took the road side.
The bare trees and terrain screened our camp well from all sides. Even between us and the main highway. The dead leaves littering the woods, should alert us to anyone moving around off the track leading in.
I heard the returning vehicle long before I was in a position to see it. Joel heard it too and announced he would cover the north side of the track. I told him I was moving into the trees to put eyeballs on the vehicle.
An old pickup was moving slowly away from Celina. It had three red plastic gas cans in its bed, which I assumed were full of something. This might explain why the truck was driving so slowly.
An older man with white hair and beard was driving with a young man riding shotgun. Literally, the young man was pointing a shotgun out his window. I froze against the tree I was squatting beside as they passed. I doubted the driver saw me and the man with the shotgun was looking the wrong way.
That answered one of my questions, whether the gas station we passed still had fuel. The two men weren’t super vigilant. While they perceived enough of a threat to be armed, they didn’t have the look of people who expected to be robbed or attacked. I wondered if our opening up the bridge would change that threat level.
After the pickup passed by, Joel and I swapped watch sectors, just to mix things up for the last hour.
The team started waking up as we approached day’s end. More boiling water and some rehydrated Mexican rice with chicken, yum.
Once we were all awake, I pulled out the detailed map to study tonight’s route. I wanted to stay on the northern edge of Tennessee at least until we got to the Clarksville area. Clarksville had two bridges.
To avoid the population centers we needed to loop south around the city for our approach. Between I-24 from Nashville, Clarksville’s pre-crash population and Fort Campbell snuggling it along its northern border, Clarksville might not be a safe choice.
The next bridge over the Cumberland River was Ashland City about 35 miles south of Clarksville. That also put it 35 miles closer to Nashville.
Or, we could squirt through on US-79 bounded on the north by Fort Campbell, population 20,000 and the south by Clarksville population 150,000.
All the choices meant crossing two interstates. First I-65 linking Nashville with Louisville, Kentucky, and then at the edge of Clarksville there was I-24 connecting Nashville with a variety of interstates to the northwest.
While getting across the Cumberland River was our primary objective if we couldn’t find ways across the forks of the Red River we’d never get there.
Continuing on TN-52 looked like a good bet until it ended at TN-49 in Orlinda. From Orlinda we needed to be north of Springfield but still get across the Red River. TN-49 looked like a good choice for part of the distance. After Orlinda the character of the countryside changed. While still rural, there were more cultivated fields and pasture and a lot less unbroken forest. Plenty of more local roads and more population to go with them.
I wasn’t convinced we’d be able to drive any boat we found here all the way through to the Mississippi River. On the other hand, having a suitable boat now would beat trying to find one later. I gave the okay for four scouts to check out the boat storage area once it got dark enough to go.
Allie would be one of the scouts checking out the boats. After all, she’d have to take it down the Mississippi River and come back, twice.
We wanted our investigation of the boat storage to avoid attracting attention, so the four scouts left on foot to check it out. Razor went along as our premier lock picker. They located storage units on both sides of the highway. The occupied home on the road between us and the storage units, complicated matters.
There were three ski boats and a bass boat in the storage facility on our side of the highway, none really suitable for our needs. The crew collected life jackets and an empty gas can for our trip which they left in the ditch on the other side of the road.
Lifting the roll-up doors high enough to fit under was noisy. I could hear it from the road. Every time they opened one, the scouts paused to ensure they hadn’t attracted unwanted attention.
I’d allotted an hour for the operation. We were creeping up on my deadline when they found a trailered 17-foot inflatable dive boat with a 90 HP Mercury engine on it. Its 25-gal gas tank was empty, but there was an extra tank in the storage unit. The boat was rated for 12 people.
Another consideration, my guys had a lot of experience with this style of boat. We knew it could be abused and overloaded, but still do the job.
Joel radioed the boat was stored correctly for the winter and we should take it.
This changed things. Both the boat an
d the semi needed fuel. I announced we would revisit the gas station we passed this morning and fill up. No one disagreed.
One of the pickups left to get the boat, and the rest of us got ready to go.
Two scouts on ninjas cruised by our track, followed by the pickup and boat. We pulled in behind them, retracing our route back toward Celina and the gas station.
As arranged, the ninjas scouted the station before the rest of us moved in. Nothing was spotted on the thermal sights. Now we just had to locate the tanks.
The gas station was on the south side of the highway across from a high school. On the return trip, I spotted some large farming operations along the roads that I hadn’t seen in our mad dash earlier this morning. We needed to fuel up and leave before they sent someone to investigate.
