“Anything come through on the radio while you’ve been housebound?” Bill asked Larry.
The young man took the notebook and slid it into the middle of the table. “More German. They’re making a short broadcast now, once every two hours. They mix up the exact time, but I noticed the transmissions are fitting into that pattern.” The page was divided by vertical lines, with time-stamped dots. No two-hour block had more than one dot in it, nor were any of them empty.
“Might be worth it to see if we can recruit somebody that knows the language to come up and join us for a few days,” Nancy said. “We can handle the extra mouth for a bit.”
“Wouldn’t hurt if they knew their way around a rifle, either,” Bill said.
“Let’s maybe keep that in the back of our minds, think of a few candidates. I don’t know who speaks what, really,” Peter said. “But if we can think of a couple folks that would make a good addition, we can find out if they’ve got the language skills we need when we make our run into town on Wednesday.”
As if to reinforce the need for a pair of ears conversant in German, the shortwave squawked again. Larry grabbed pen and paper and did his best job at a phonetic capture of the transmission. At least the sender kept up his habit of repeating the message multiple times, but it was a long one. By the time the radio went silent again, the group at the table had only managed to piece together a third of the message.
“Gonna throw an odd idea out,” Irene said. “What if we send the radio down on our next trip? Honestly, there are more people available to monitor it than we can give it up here. And whatever the message is, I can’t see that we’d gain any advantage over anything by keeping the info to ourselves up here instead of sharing it out with the town as soon as we hear it.”
“That’s not a bad idea,” Sally said. “We’re stretched thin here, and there’s always work to do. Not having to mind the radio would free up people’s attention and time for other tasks.”
“Or let them rest without distraction when they’ve got rest time,” Peter admitted. “I say we should still think about whether the food we’re starting to gather now can support another mouth or two through the winter, and if a couple extra people to help out are worth the resource use. We’ll discuss it over breakfast on Wednesday.”
With that plan put together, people finished up their meals and went about their work for the rest of the evening. Peter noticed that everybody was looking more fatigued with every passing day since the shootout at the field down by the highway. It wasn’t just a physical tiredness, but a mental one as well.
Peter remembered his father describing it from his deployments. He had used the technical term for it, but what stuck with Peter was the more informal description: Vigilance Burnout. Art had described it as the steady chipping away that happened when you knew something big was coming, but you didn’t know when exactly. It was the result of stewing in a mixture of anxiety, boredom, impatience, dread, and impotence. Peter had once challenged him on that last count. Everything he knew about his father’s service was that he’d been in very skilled and motivated units, as close as the regular Army would get to special ops without actually being Rangers or Special Forces.
“You feel impotent when you know that the smart thing to do is to hunker down and wait for them to come to you, but what you really want to do is just go out and whup some asses. It’s when you’ve got the defensible high ground, but they’ve got the numbers. In your head, you know leaving your base to go look for trouble is suicidal, but your gut is telling you to go and stick it to the other guy before he comes to stick it to you.”
As each day passed without seeing Carter again, Peter could recognize exactly what his father meant by vigilance burnout, and he started to get a visceral understanding of the impotence. Just sitting around, waiting, watching, felt like nothing was getting accomplished. Even going out and constantly tinkering with the defenses felt like nothing but a grand exercise in diminishing returns.
Feeling the itch of crosshairs on him every time he left the house was making him twitchy. Every time he stopped moving on night patrol to just listen to the sounds of the woods surrounding the house, fretting over whether any rustle of leaves was just a raccoon or a human footstep, was killing his appetite, despite the sudden influx of fresh food into the kitchen.
At the heart of it all, Peter felt like he was surrendering control of his fate to Carter. It was now the enemy who was in control of when Peter fought for his life, and on what terms. Carter got to pick the time of the battle; he got to start it when he was ready. Peter and his family and friends could only wait for the first rounds to be fired at them before they fired back.
And yet, to go out looking for Carter and bring the fight to him? Peter didn’t even know where to start something like that. He had no idea where the guy was, what kind of temporary base he might have set up, how many total people he had available. There was absolutely no scenario Peter could think of where seeking out Carter’s forces wasn’t equivalent to seeking out his own immediate and likely unpleasant death.
At three o’clock in the morning, Peter was rousted out of bed for a patrol shift with Sally and Bill. It was one of Peter’s favorite crews to work with, from the standpoint of feeling secure. While it was great to patrol with Larry from a social standpoint, nobody made him feel as safe as when he was out with the two Roths. They were just that solid in their ability to move around without disturbing their environment or missing anything that didn’t seem right.
It was a moonless night with scattered clouds, what Peter often thought of as a thirsty darkness, the kind where there was no direct illumination, nothing to really bring out any details of anything beyond a few feet. They were relying completely on sound to tell what might have been coming in, and their own ability to not make any noise was critical.
Twenty minutes into their patrol, both Bill and Sally both suddenly stopped moving. Peter was barely able to make out a gesture to hold and get low. The property held a strict blackout at night, so there was fortunately nothing to backlight him, but he still slowly lowered himself to a knee to make a smaller target.
Peter held his breath, trying to pick out whatever it was that Bill had heard, or felt was missing from the environment. The crickets kept chirping, the frogs were still croaking and peeping, a light breeze occasionally whispered through the leaves and the tall grass. The tension had his heart beating so hard that the sound of his pulse was distractingly loud.
As the seconds stretched on, Peter felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. If it had been some night critter moving around, Bill would have gotten the patrol moving again. The fact that he hadn’t meant something out there wasn’t right, and the longer they held, stationary and silent, the more convinced Peter was that there was something bad out there in the darkness.
18
Tom Grossman sighed and rolled over. He was exhausted, but his mind was racing on so many things that he was completely unable to sleep. He looked at his watch. It was just after three in the morning.
Deciding there wasn’t anything to be gained by lying in bed staring at the ceiling, he put some clothes on and went outside to take a walk.
It was a quiet and still night, the kind where even the chatter of wildlife seemed absent. It reminded him of the desert in the last few days before the ground war in Iraq started. The silence in the air had seemed to heighten the tension he’d felt, knowing he was just a few days from going into combat.
As Grossman walked down the road, looking into the darkness across the river, he wondered just how close Carter was at that moment, how soon the attack was going to come. His walk took him to one of the bridges over the river. He stopped for a while to chat with the people on guard. They also seemed uneasy, unsettled.
“Wish I had a smoke,” one of them said. “Be a bad idea to light one up, make myself a target and all, but it’d be worth it.”
“I’m glad I never picked up that habit,” Grossman said. “Now, when
we’ve squeezed the very last drop of coffee out of the last bean in town, I’m going to be one hurting unit.”
“Yeah. Itching for a cup of that I can’t see through, too.”
The man was a bundle of restless energy while he talked. Grossman knew the look. He’d seen it many times on his own troops. He needed to get the guy out of his head for a bit. While Bowman was a nice, small town, it wasn’t so small that the mayor could be on a first name basis with everybody. He tried to remember where he might have seen the man before, but in the darkness, he couldn’t make the face clearly enough to give it any context. By the voice and mannerisms, he guessed the guy was in his mid-twenties.
Grossman thought back to a senior officer he’d served under back when he was a freshly minted Second Lieutenant. Shortly after meeting somebody, he’d ask them, “What are you all about?” in a curious, friendly tone.
He figured it was worth a shot.
The man seemed a little confused by the question at first, then said, “Well. One thing I’m still able to do is carve wood. Don’t have as much time for it now as I used to, but still make some time for it. Figure I can do that forever with the tools I got, as long as I take care of ’em.”
“And as long as we don’t burn all the good stuff,” Grossman said.
“That’s why I volunteer for wood cutting duty whenever possible. I get a chance to pull out any really nice pieces.”
“Gotten to pick up any good burls lately?”
“A couple small ones. Got a good piece of maple a couple days ago that I snagged.”
“What are you going to make with it?” Grossman asked. He saw the man’s stance shift, and when he answered, he spoke just a little slower, a little more calmly.
It was working. The man was letting go of some of the tension. Grossman felt himself start to relax as well.
19
Up at the homestead, Peter was standing perfectly still, listening intently into the darkness out beyond the edge of the mowed yard. Bill had signaled for him and Sally to freeze and hadn’t yet given the all-clear to continue their rounds.
If anything was going to happen, Peter realized, it was a perfect time. His father had always held the opinion that the best time to hit a dug-in foe was about fifteen minutes after a shift change. The folks finishing their shift would have mentally switched their brains off and started to really wind down and settle into sleep. The ones coming on could be awake and vigilant, or they could still be waking up and shaking off the cobwebs. Whichever it was, they wouldn’t have had time to truly settle into the rhythm of the environment yet.
While he was considering that, he heard the unmistakable sound of something clinking against the side of a rifle as somebody moved out in the trees. Peter pivoted his torso toward the sound but didn’t raise his rifle. It was too dark for him to know with certainty where exactly Bill and Sally were in relation to the sound he’d heard.
He finally heard a very light scrape of cloth just to his left. Bill hissed, “Sally’s going to the house to wake people up. Let’s pull back to the bunker next to the propane tank.”
“Got it,” Peter said. Knowing where one of his partners was, and where the other was heading, he felt safe finally bringing his rifle into firing position. He divided his attention between listening intently into the tree line and taking quick glances behind and to the side as he toed backward toward the bunker. If they hadn’t spent so much time over the past several weeks walking endless circuits around the property, he and Bill would never have been able to navigate back to the bunker as smoothly as they had under the conditions.
All the while, now that he knew where to put his attention, Peter was picking up more unmistakably human sounds from the woods around the house. They were being careful, but he also assumed that a good number of Carter’s men were city folk without a lifetime of experience exploring, playing, and hunting in woods. They just didn’t have the same kind of intuitive sense of how to move through such spaces without upsetting things.
“Any guess as to numbers?” Peter asked.
“Not a clue,” Bill replied. “Can’t tell if it’s just the one group or if we’ve got more either.”
Peter heard Sally open the back door to the house. She was doing her best to be silent, but with his ears perked up for any sound the way they were, he still detected her. At least she’d made it to the house, so he knew the rest would be awake and ready soon enough. He just wished he knew whether there were men at his exposed back or not. A part of him was convinced that somebody was back there, already lining up a clean shot. He had to fight down that thought, because it was distracting him too much, leaving all of his attention unfocused.
Then he heard a clatter of metal far to his right, around the front of the house. Somebody had tripped one of the alarms, a bundle of tin cans filled with gravel set up to catapult from a tensioned sapling if a tripwire were disturbed.
The noise was just enough to startle one of the intruders Bill and Peter were tracking. Both men homed in on the sound of equipment rattling, and a couple of others shushing whoever it was.
“Three, at least?” Bill asked.
“Yeah. Worth lighting them up?”
“No. I’ve never gotten away with targeting game by sound. We’d just give our position away.”
Peter still put his finger on his trigger, ready to go.
The next thing they heard was one of the men in front of them making a sudden motion, and something flew overhead. It hit the ground behind the bunker. Peter heard a sharp detonation, followed by a bright flash and deep whomp. A pale, yellow light lingered. Not enough by a long shot to illuminate the tree line, but plenty of light to backlight anything around the perimeter of the yard.
“Stay down,” Peter whispered.
“Yep,” Bill said, pressing himself against the wall of the bunker.
To their left, from the back of the yard, another one of the tin-can alarms sounded.
“At least three groups,” Bill said.
“We should be sheltered from those guys,” Peter said. The bunker they were in was shaped like a sharp crescent, so it had low berms around three sides. Unless somebody approached the property from directly behind, they would have protection from any rounds coming in from the back of the yard.
Another one of the firebombs sailed overhead and burst in the middle of the yard. An unfortunate side effect, beyond the backlighting, was that whatever fuel they used crackled just enough to make it really hard to hear people moving around the woods. All Peter and Bill could do was hold tight and wait.
They finally got their chance to act when the flames barely illuminated the metal receiver of an M-16. “See that?” Peter asked.
“Nothing,” Bill said.
“I’ve got a shot.” Peter lined up on the thin glow of yellow firelight on blued steel and squeezed the trigger. The muzzle flash blew out his night vision enough that he had no visual cue as to whether his shot hit home, but he was rewarded with the sound of a grunt and a body falling.
That brought a storm of incoming rounds, full-automatic fire tearing into the front wall of the bunker and crackling overhead while Peter and Bill ducked down.
Two new voices entered the fray, high up and two the left. Peter risked a look over and saw muzzle flashes coming from firing ports in the shutters of the upstairs windows.
“Two friendly at your five,” Nancy called out from an upstairs window. Peter hoped he was interpreting right that his mother was telling him a couple people were coming into the yard through the cellar door.
A third improvised firebomb hit the liquid propane tank, its detonator making a frightening crack as it hit the big metal sausage. Peter prayed that his father had been right that the extra heavy-duty tank he’d bought could resist piercing by a regular bullet, and the homemade firebombs seemed to be pretty low-energy bursts. If the shell were penetrated, though, a jet of gas near an open flame was likely to yield extremely unpredictable results.
Whoever was comin
g out of the cellar must have lost their grip on the door, causing it to bang open. That drew several volleys of fire. Peter started returning fire at muzzle flashes he could see, and it seemed Bill was doing the same.
“They’re still rolling full auto,” Peter said. “Keep covered and keep disciplined, and we should be able to outlast them.”
“You got it,” Bill said. Standard load out for the homestead was 140 rounds for people with an SKS or an AR-15. Six twenty-round magazines carried, one in the well. People with hunting rifles, like Bill, were carrying roughly the same amount, but in ten-round clips.
Peter knew he also had at least two guns inside the house, where there were literally thousands of rounds available.
“Safe for now!” Irene shouted from behind Peter, her indication that she and her buddy had made it to a bunker on the west side of the property.
“One, two, and three confirmed,” Peter called back, letting her know which directions he and Bill had gotten positive confirmation of enemy action from.
“One up!” Irene called back, to let him and Bill know she and her buddy were relocating to a north-side bunker.
There was a quick burst of fire from Irene’s position toward the north, which Peter and Bill backed up by redoubling their attention to the woods to the east. Two people then sprinted from the west side of the yard toward the back. In the confusion, Peter couldn’t count the number of muzzle flashes coming from in front of him. He just picked one and threw three rounds at it.
When it stopped, he picked the next flash to his right. A scream from Irene broke his concentration on trying to listen for any sign that his shots were accomplishing anything.
“Keep pressing; she’s still moving,” Bill said, dropping his clip. Peter knocked out two more rounds and had to reload as well. If it weren’t for the two in the house, Irene wouldn’t have had any suppressing fire for a painfully long time.
Age of Survival Series | Book 3 | Age of Revival Page 12
