Tomorrow's Dawn (Book 4): Gathering Storms

by Wohlrab, Jeff

  Strenke noticed Jensen’s interest and explained, “Your friend Brent has been busy. He managed to track down some paint and take care of that mess.” He pointed to their front and off to the left toward the lake. “He managed to get the cross back up on the point, too.”

  Sure enough, Jensen could just make out the top of the cross peaking above the elevation of the parking lot. “I have to say, between town defense, trying to get the tubs operational, and Jessica, I completely lost track of Brent. I’m not even sure what he’s been up to.”

  The colonel sighed. “To tell you the truth, I’m not certain either. He seems to have collected a small group of locals who spend their time doing community service, like that,” he indicated the fresh paint on the hotel, “or spend their time praying at the churches. I don’t know what to make of it, but the boys have started calling them the crusaders.”

  The two walked straight past the newly erected cross and down the steps of the small amphitheater behind it, ignoring the road which wound its way back down toward the lake. Instead, they cut across the grass toward the large parking lot just east of where Daniel had been working. Like typical military folks, they tended to take the most direct route to get somewhere, even if it meant thousands of Sergeants Major were turning over in their graves because they were walking on the grass.

  In the parking lot, the nine tubs looked squat and menacing compared to the tall MRAPs parked nearby. The purple and green glittery tub looked less menacing than the others. The colonel chuckled as he saw it. “Please tell me that’s one of the non-FMC rigs?”

  Jensen smiled. “Jessica’s? That’s the one which works the best. There’s no way in hell I’d put my girlfriend in anything but the safest vehicle I could.”

  “Do you think the bright colors and glitter might make it stand out a bit?” Strenke asked.

  “It’s a tactical innovation. Enemies will become so distracted that they’ll hesitate before shooting, and the glitter will interfere with missile lock,” Jensen explained.

  The colonel looked at him sharply. “Really?”

  “No, not really, but it would be awesome if it did,” Jensen laughed.

  The colonel shook his head sadly, as if ‘kids these days’ didn’t make sense. It was one of the symptoms of age, which would eventually lead to shouting “get off my lawn” if he survived long enough. “Let’s take one of the other ones, I’ve got something to show you.”

  Jensen patted his pocket to make sure he had the link. The small cylindrical emitter would allow him to enter and use the tub. If the titanium encased link module wasn’t present, the tub wouldn’t even power on. It was a safety measure initiated by the Army with the introduction of the AWESOME. Previous military vehicles didn’t even require a physical key.

  It could be annoying at times. Jensen had already forgotten it once when he walked down from the hotel and had to return to pull it out of his pack. The walk wasn’t far, but it gave him enough time to berate himself for getting sloppy. He never would have forgotten his link module in theater.

  “It seems pretty clear that you expect Jessica to become a driver,” the colonel stated.

  Jensen was suddenly wary. He had assumed his girlfriend would be one of the drivers protected by the titanium shell of the tub. Or perhaps he had simply hoped, since the armored vehicle provided greater protection than almost anything he’d seen so far at Lake Junaluska.

  He would have preferred to have her in the tub with him as a scout, but she didn’t want to be the wilting flower who depended on her man to keep her safe and had made her opinions on the matter very clear. If the colonel disagreed, she might be forced into filling the scout position in his tub anyway, and he didn’t want to have to be the one to tell her.

  “She has shown excellent aptitude so far. She’s picking it up faster than almost any of my previous students back at Fort Benning,” Jensen told him.

  Luckily, Strenke seemed to agree. “She does appear to have a knack for those machines. I’ve already reassigned the driver I had picked out for that tub to the gun trucks.”

  Jensen didn’t allow his relief to show. Instead, he focused on the second part of Strenke’s statement. “Gun trucks? I didn’t see anything like that in the group from Anniston. Hell, I haven’t seen a gun truck since India.”

  The colonel smiled. “That’s where we’re going today. I wanted to show you the gun trucks and talk tactics, and maybe introduce you to the team you’ll be training.” He looked expectantly at Jensen. “So, which one is yours? I can’t tell them apart except for the glittery one.”

  Jensen walked to the tub on the far left of the line facing the lake and popped the hatch open. As the colonel climbed in with difficulty, he couldn’t help but have a flashback to the dog and pony shows he’d had to take part in at the AWESOME Center of Excellence back at Benning.

  Higher ranking officers would come in from various field organizations or TRADOC, the Army Training and Doctrine Command, to see the new school or get a ride in the newest combat vehicle fielded by the Army. A ride in the tub usually capped off weeks of preparation and a long tour which never stuck to schedule.

  Jensen would put the tub through its paces on the training ground while explaining to general officers or highly placed civilians how it was more capable than its predecessors. The preparations were the worst. Anal retentive schoolhouse directors would inspect everything before the tour and go so far as to make him remove documents from his inbox so it didn’t look as though he was behind in his paperwork.

  The entire process was pretty stupid and wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars every year, but the steady flow of visitors continued. If it was the same at other commands and in other services, the dog and pony shows probably cost tens of millions of dollars in travel and lost time annually. At least, they had.

  Once the colonel was settled and strapped in, he pulled the canopy down over them and swung his hatch closed, waiting for Strenke to do the same on his side. Jensen popped a hinged cover up on the center console and twisted a red switch to power up the systems before closing it again. The cover seemed stupid, but more than one of his students had managed to power down their tub during maneuvers because they forgot to close the cover and had bumped the switch.

  Some of the finest feats of engineering in the Army weren’t the weapons, but instead were ways to make the systems dummy proof. If a young soldier could screw something up, they would. Every time. There was a reason so many lieutenant jokes were made.

  Once the system powered on and he could feel cool air moving across his face, Jensen double-checked his status screens. The solar panels were folded away and secured, power levels were good, and the system checks had all come back green. The only error code showing indicated that the .50 caliber machine guns and 40 mm grenade launcher were both out of ammunition, which was how he planned to run the machines during training.

  Friendly fire … isn’t, and Jensen didn’t want to risk the lives of the refugees in the area by having an inexperienced driver accidentally fire off a couple hundred .50 caliber rounds or a high explosive grenade as they were becoming familiar with the combat vehicles. He had already verified that all nine of the machines were stripped of ammunition.

  “So where are we headed?” he asked.

  The colonel responded, “We’re going to head back down the road we came in on, away from the highway.”

  Jensen just nodded as he eased the heavy machine forward and turned back toward the road. He turned left out of the parking lot and started down the road. To his left was the picturesque lake, to his right were homes and businesses looking out over the water.

  “At the intersection up there, we need to turn right,” Strenke told him, pointing at the four-lane road ahead of them. Jensen slowed as he approached the two small columns on either side of the road. He didn’t expect any traffic, but if someone crashed into the heavy tub, it would definitely damage the other vehicle.

  Once he verified there was no danger, he
pulled out into the wide road and headed west. “At the stoplight, you need to turn left,” Strenke intoned.

  The stoplight was continually flashing red in every direction. They had defaulted to the emergency signal when the power was restored to the town and nobody knew how to turn them off. Jensen simply rolled through once he saw there was nobody coming from ahead or to his left. It wasn’t like a cop was going to be monitoring the intersection.

  It was actually kind of freeing to be able to do something without being under surveillance. As much as losing most of the population and getting nuked sucked, there were some good points. Jensen quickly looked at the tops of the lights. There were no cameras, so maybe the local PD didn’t suck as much as some of them did.

  Strenke pointed to a large building on their left. “That’s where we’re going.”

  The building didn’t look like much. It appeared to be a garage of some sort with two large bays. Through the open door, Jensen could see the flash of a welder. His curiosity piqued, he turned to the colonel. “What the heck are they building in there?”

  The older man chuckled, “You’ll see in a minute.”

  Jensen pulled into the parking lot and opened his hatch and the canopy. Instead of turning off the main switch, he pulled up a vehicle schematic on one screen and pushed one of the tiny squares, waiting for the green light to tell him the driver’s side solar panel was deployed and locked.

  He told the colonel, “That will provide enough power to keep the systems running without pulling from the battery packs. That way we won’t have to go through startup again when we get back in.”

  “Why only one side?” Strenke inquired.

  “One set of panels is more than enough to keep the systems on and even provide a trickle for the battery. I deploy the driver’s side because that way I’ll see it when I get in and remember to lock it down. The screens provide a lot of information, and I could miss the indicator if I depend solely on the monitors,” was the nearly instantaneous reply. “I picked that little trick up from a Captain in Pakistan.”

  “I assume it isn’t part of your standard curriculum?” Strenke asked wryly.

  Jensen grinned. “There’s stuff you teach and stuff you do.” He pointed at the deployed solar panel. “That’s not one of the testable items in the classroom.”

  Strenke smile back. “Then I think you’re really going to love this.” He started walking toward the bays. “We’ve got a lot of folks who seem to prefer real world applications to TRADOC bullshit.”

  Jensen stopped short when he saw the scene in front of him. Several of the package trucks had been stripped of their shells and were being fitted with gun platforms. They looked like a heavy-duty version of the technical trucks common throughout many of the war-torn areas of the world.

  Usually, technicals were some sort of automatic weapon mounted in the bed of a light duty pickup truck. These were easily two or three times the size and had improvised armor instead of an open bed. One in particular caught his eye. “Is that a mortar carrier?”

  Strenke turned to see where Jensen was looking and peered toward the rear of the shop. “Yup, that’s a mortar carrier. One of the boys insisted on it; said it was ‘OP’ in one of the video games he used to play.”

  “You’re building a mortar carrier because a gamer wanted one?” Jensen asked incredulously.

  “Just fucking with you. Brent did use a mortar truck in one of his video games, but we’re building this for a little bit of standoff support. Mortar carriers have been in use for over a hundred years, and since we aren’t going to have merl support and are short on artillery, we’re going to go old school,” the colonel said.

  “Even if we had merls, we don’t have rockets, but we do have a shit ton of mortar shells,” Strenke continued. The colonel was using the field nickname for the Multiple Rocket Launcher System, or MRLS, which was an awesome weapon. Even though the Army had moved on to the HIMARS II system years ago, the nickname still stuck.

  Jensen looked around. There were a few other vehicles in the shop in various levels of completion. Each had a machine gun on a swivel mount. “How about one with a GAU?”

  The colonel laughed again. “Now you’re talking! We kicked the idea around, but we don’t have one. We don’t have rounds for on. The recoil would knock over the gun trucks, and the new ones barely carry any rounds. At their rate of fire, you’d be out of ammunition before you even saw where they were hitting.” He used his thumb to indicate someone outside the building. “Amber already shot that shit down.”

  “Amber?” Jensen asked him. He hadn’t heard of her before.

  “Remember the propane RV? That’s Amber.” Strenke responded. “She’s always irritated, and she usually smells like cat piss, so don’t say anything stupid and don’t get too close.” He turned back toward the activity inside the vehicle bays. “But she also came up with most of this.”

  “Noted: don’t get close and try not to say anything stupid,” Jensen responded. “So, we’ll have nine tubs, a mortar truck, and some gun trucks? Is this going to turn into something like a light-armored company?”

  Strenke sighed. “That’s where I need your input. I’m not sure exactly what we want to do with these. All in one armored section or distributed across the three companies?”

  Jensen didn’t even take a second to respond. “Both.”

  The colonel looked at him quizzically. “How so?”

  “Just look at what we’ve got: nine tubs, one mortar carrier, and looks like four gun trucks. They all have different uses. The tubs are made to be scout vehicles, so at least one should be with the mortar carrier to find targets and call in range and bearing.” Jensen pointed at the mortar carrier. “It’s got shit for defense, so it’s going to need at least one gun truck with it in case the enemy gets too close.

  “That leaves eight tubs and three trucks. I’d place two tubs and a gun truck with each company. Now we’re down to two tubs. You can either put them with the mortar truck, or, and this is the idea I like better, put one up at the power plant and one at the dam,” Jensen finished.

  “What about keeping those two here in town instead?” Strenke asked.

  “Nope, doesn’t make sense. The tubs are designed to be effective while mobile. They’re pretty much shit in town because the guns don’t rotate, so the vehicle has to be facing the enemy. The MRAPs with their rotating turrets make a lot more sense; just post a couple up by the areas which need protection the most.” Jensen shrugged. “That’s what I’d do, anyway.”

  “I like it. It makes sense.” He looked at Jensen sternly. “And where would you put yourself?”

  Chapter 29

  Brent rested wearily on one of the stone benches at the small amphitheater below inspiration point. He was starting to think he’d never recover from the near-death experience at his home in Dahlonega. Maybe he had done some sort of irreparable harm to his internal organs or his brain when he chose to stop drinking water in hope of reuniting with his dead wife in the afterlife.

  He smiled grimly, though there was nobody there to see it. It sucked being like this. The pain in his joints from years of construction work had been bad, but this constant tiredness was sucking the life out of him. Being dead would be fine, being fully alive as he had been would be acceptable, but this half-alive thing was starting to wear thin.

  Brinkley promised him he’d come around eventually, but he wasn’t sure he believed it. She looked worried as she said it. Maybe she suspected he’d caused some sort of internal damage as well. It wasn’t like they could do much about it even if he had. There were no organ transplant lists out there anymore and few doctors who might have the expertise if there were.

  He didn’t want new organs though. He wanted a change for the better, or worse, didn’t really matter. Something different. Brent let himself relax in the warm breeze as he looked at the low-lying mountains around the town. The grass was growing tall in places and the trees along the lakeshore were a vibrant green in color
. A single bird was riding the air currents as it drifted lazily in the sky, barely moving its wings.

  It would be quite breathtaking if he wasn’t constantly aware of the pain in his ass from sitting on a stone bench or occasionally swatting at the bugs buzzing around his head. Off in the distance, he could hear the faint sound of a tractor or piece of heavy equipment. It was the only indication that he wasn’t alone in the world at that moment.

  He knew he wasn’t alone. Brent took a lot of solitary walks these days, very slow, solitary walks. Jensen had Jessica, Daniel had Marcy. Even Dave had someone. He spent all of his time with Analiz. Brent couldn’t blame any of them. They were beautiful and vibrant and young, enjoying life as best they could under the circumstances.

  Brent had been, at one time, but he had wasted too much of it with work. He’d lost too much time with Rebecca and Jack while he tried to get his business off the ground, and then keep it in the green. Now they were lost to him. His business, as meaningless as he now knew it was, had disappeared as well.

  He had nothing to live for, but he was still alive. Brent questioned himself for the thousandth time: was his survival truly God’s will or a coincidence? Had he really spoken to Rebecca or was it some sort of hallucination brought on by dehydration? He knew a lot of the effects of alcohol were due to dehydration in the brain; did they include delusions of conversations with the deceased?

  There were no obvious answers. Brent loosened his tie to let the breeze work its way under his collar. He had several suits now thanks to the local men in the small town. This one was charcoal gray with a thin crosshatch pattern in black. The tie he wore was a conservative navy blue over a white shirt.

  Did the man who once owned this suit have the same questions? Did he also pray for answers to a God who never responded? Did these questions mean his faith was weak, or was it something else?