Tomorrow's Dawn (Book 4): Gathering Storms

by Wohlrab, Jeff

  Aside from talking on the radio and watching, the only other thing she had to do was mess around with the bolt action rifle which stayed up in the crow’s nest. It looked like something out of a sci-fi movie with all sorts of moveable parts on the stock and fore-end to allow the shooter to adjust it to their preferences. Sometimes she’d just dial different bits up and down and sight on rocks in the river to see if one variation or another was more comfortable.

  They were there to watch and report. Tensions between Georgia and South Carolina had risen almost to the breaking point after Georgia had demolished several bridges across the river and staged forces near the remaining ones. Governor Howe was convinced Snead was planning to start military action.

  Jasmine knew from previous weeks that several threatening-looking vehicles had arrived at the Georgia Welcome Center and hadn’t left. She couldn’t identify them, but they all appeared to have big wheels or tracks like military vehicles would have. Some of them definitely had big guns.

  Sean had cautioned them all that if they saw one of them pointing toward the tower to get down from the tower immediately. He said that at least one of them was a howitzer. Whether that was a type of gun or a make of truck she had no idea, but she knew it could blow up that tower. At around fifty feet in the air, she wouldn’t survive the fall if it got hit. That danger also helped her to stay awake.

  Off in the distance, Jasmine saw a horse-drawn cart heading toward the bridge on the Georgia side. She was used to seeing horses these days. She grew up in South Carolina and knew horses were a big part of the culture, but it wasn’t until cars stopped being viable that she understood the sheer number of horses in her state. It felt like living in the Wild West with armed cowboys riding around.

  The western part of the state, where she was now, seemed to have a pretty high concentration of stables and horse owners. Aiken was famous for it, but even out here in the Edgefield and North Augusta area there were more horses than she would have expected.

  Through her spotting scope, she kept an eye on the horse and trailer. It wasn’t a typical carriage like some of the ones she’d seen. This horse had a rider in the saddle and a black, wood and metal trailer behind it covered in a tarp. Attached to the hitch was a third tire to keep the front of the trailer from digging into the ground.

  The whole setup seemed dangerous, she mused. The horse could get spooked by an animal, the trailer could roll into the back of the horse and injure it, or who knows what else. She didn’t see any sort of brake control going from the rider to the trailer behind. She started playing her imagination games again. Where could they be going? What was hidden under the tarp on the trailer? How did the rider prevent the trailer from rolling into the horse going down hills?

  She zoomed in on the rider. Was this one of the gypsies she’d been told about? Jasmine didn’t know how to identify one if it was, or what a gypsy would look like, but she’d heard a lot of chatter about them from her crew. Brad called them Irish travelers, Sean and Joe called them gypsies.

  In her mind, gypsies were dark-haired Eastern Europeans from places like Romania. It was hard to reconcile that belief with the term Irish traveler, which she assumed would be red-haired or freckled. The guys back at the house didn’t seem to really know, either. Sean thought they were dark-haired Irish, Brad thought they had red hair, and Joe figured they were Eastern European and someone in the past had mistakenly called them Irish.

  Jasmine sighed with frustration. Unless one of them stopped at the house and identified themselves as a gypsy or Irish traveler, they weren’t likely to find out. It wasn’t like she could hop on her phone and do a web search. For one, nobody had cell reception out here, probably because there was still no power. Secondly, she had dropped her cell phone from the platform the previous week. After bouncing off the metal supports and smashing into the ground, it wouldn’t even power on.

  She wasn’t supposed to be messing with her phone up there, but the games on it were about the only way to pass the time. Not the networked games, of course, because those wouldn’t work, but the single-player ones she had downloaded from the app store. She’d gotten quite good at the golf one, managing to play a round of 18 at 14 under par. The solar panel up there had plenty of juice to keep her phone charged up while she was playing, and keep the radio charged.

  As the rider moved closer on the near side of the bridge, Jasmine noticed a puff of smoke over the tree line on the Georgia side of the river. She scooched over to her left on the thin padding and moved her glass to the right to see if she could figure out what was happening. At the entrance to the rest area, one of the heavy vehicles was slowly rolling out. This time, it was turning toward her.

  Jasmine ignored the rider and kept the telescope focused on the vehicle as she felt around for the radio to call it in. Because of that, she missed it when a man lying prone on the trailer moved the tarp off of himself and his rifle, and sighted it in on her head from only a couple hundred yards away. She didn’t even feel the bullet as it angled through her temple and out through her dark braided hair. The men below didn’t hear the shot over the sound of the generator.

  Another vehicle slowly rolled out of the rest stop toward the bridge and followed the first. Snead’s men were on the move.

  Chapter 32

  After three weeks of instruction, Jensen would have sworn Daquon was prior military if he didn’t know better. The young man from Norfolk, Virginia took to the tubs like he was born for it. During many of the training maneuvers, he was comparable to Kenny or Jack. The others were mostly doing well, but Hank frequently did the wrong thing, and Kirk was frustrated with the ‘antiquated and stupid’ interface in the cockpit.

  According to the young systems engineer, whoever put the programs together must have been drunk, stoned, and stupid to set it up the way they did. No, a drunk, stoned, and stupid TEAM. Kirk said more than once that something so terrible had to be the result of teamwork. “I could program a GUI in five minutes that would be ten times better than this horseshit! That’s what you get contracting out to the lowest bidder at one hundred times the cost.”

  After one particularly trying day, he stared balefully at Jensen and told him, “I think I’m really surprised that these displays are OLED instead of cathode ray tube. They’re only two generations behind instead of ten, like the operating system is.” He smacked the titanium hide of the tub and said, “The equipment is formidable, but the shit underneath is only so-so.”

  Jensen thought back to when he had first learned to drive the AWESOME. It had been a little bit frustrating with all of the menus and submenus, but he caught on pretty quickly. In retrospect, ‘pretty quickly’ had been basic proficiency with the tub within the first six weeks. Aside from Hank, all of the students were far ahead of where he had been at the same time in their training.

  Some of it he could attribute to the streamlined training which focused on the necessities for mobility and combat, some of it he wanted to attribute to his own teaching skill, but it likely came down to simply spending more time each day on training. They typically spent upwards of ten hours each day going through the systems, classroom training, and doing actual maneuvers at the fairgrounds a mile away or the golf course on the other side of the lake.

  During his training, most of the days had been fairly short on content and long on Army bureaucratic nonsense and the sheer amount of wasted time in a learning system structured at the speed of the lowest acceptable performance. It was certainly possible to fail out, but most of the drops were for disciplinary issues or criminal activity. One guy had been pulled out of class handcuffed by the CID for rape and two more were involved in drug trafficking.

  Hank was learning more from Jessica and Lacy than he was from Jensen, which was weird. On the first day, Jensen had pegged him for someone who was probably sexist and wouldn’t listen to a woman. Quite the opposite. He seemed to prefer doing something after he was told to do it by a female. For whatever reason, he didn’t want to listen to dud
es.

  Just that morning, Jensen had tried to instruct him on how to put certain wheels in neutral in case the motors were damaged. If the driver didn’t allow the wheels to roll freely, the damaged motors could heat up and start a fire in addition to limiting mobility. Hank spent thirty minutes arguing about how that didn’t make sense until Lacy explained it using the same words. He had the operation down within minutes. Jensen just shook his head and decided that Hank was going to get paired up with Lacy in one of the companies.

  Jensen still hadn’t determined who was the best fit for point defense at the dam and who was going to the third company. Daquon, Marco, and Jack were all doing well. Daquon was the most vocal of the group, but Jensen would have trusted any of them as his battle buddy. Jack was fantastic at getting into position to fire, probably as a result of his experience in an attack helo.

  On one hand, Jack had military experience and a sound grasp of tactics. On the other hand, he tended to assume he was the one in charge, which seemed to grate on both of the younger men. Jensen still wasn’t sure if it was due to the different ethnicities involved or if they simply disliked his leadership style. Jack was pretty pale, Daquon was equally dark, and Marco was somewhere in the middle as a Hispanic Caucasian.

  The two younger men seemed to work pretty well together, though. In reality, Jensen would have preferred to have Jessica back at the dam and out of danger. His desire to have her with him was stronger, though. It would have made sense to have Jack out in the field somewhere with one of the companies, but the teams seemed to be forming themselves without any intervention on his part.

  It wasn’t that Jessica wasn’t doing well, she was. She was just a little bit reckless for Jensen’s liking. When he mentioned his concerns, she reminded him of his attack on the roadblock in Elberton when he had attacked three turret-mounted machine guns by leaping out of the cockpit of his tub and leaving her to evade. “You can’t have it both ways, stud. Either I’m a driver or I’m not. If I am, then you have to let me do it my way.” Then she smiled coyly at him, “And if I’m not, you’re going to be making great friends with Mr. Spanky and Mr. Stranger.”

  The threat was pretty clear, he either had to treat her like a fellow tub commander during the day or he’d be sleeping alone at night. So he did. He knew deep down that this wasn’t how he should be operating, but he didn’t know how to turn it back. Jensen wondered if the other drivers had an issue with the situation or not, but nobody had said anything to him about it. If she couldn’t hold her own, he was pretty sure there would be dissension in the ranks.

  Another thing he hadn’t counted on was how protective the men and women got about their tubs. Maybe it was his speech at the beginning about guarding the link module with their lives, but Jensen wasn’t about to suggest swapping any of them between the drivers. Even Daquon, who had gotten the short straw and picked the tub without a functioning grenade launcher, was extremely possessive of his ‘baby girl’ as he liked to call it.

  When Lacy mentioned it, he told her, “If I need heavier artillery than the machine guns, I’ll jump out of the tub and mushroom stamp them with my dick.” It took about a tenth of a second before he realized who he was talking to and apologized sheepishly. “I’m sorry. That was completely inappropriate. It’s how we talked on the construction sites.”

  When they weren’t training on the tubs, they spent some time with Colonel Simmons working on dismounted tactics. Using vacant homes and offices, he walked them through clearing a building and setting up defensive fortifications in case their tubs were disabled. “Even those pansy Air Force pilots have to know how to use a gun in case their plane goes down. You sure as hell need to be able to defend yourselves.”

  By the end of the fourth week, Jensen had them out of the training menus and using the real-world operating systems in the tubs. For live fire, they drove out to a place called the Harmon Den Wildlife Management Area. For the most part, they conserved ammunition during those days, but Jensen felt that they needed to see the effects of their weapons and learn to trust the on-board targeting systems. It was also just fun to blow shit up.

  At the end of six weeks, Jensen and Jessica moved out of the inn and over to another hotel just to the west, where Alpha Company was headquartered. Marco and Daquon went to Bravo, Lacy and Hank went to Charlie, Kirk returned to the power plant, Jack made his way to the dam, and Kenny started working with the gun trucks and mortar carrier.

  Daniel and Marcy remained a part of HHC and Dave was a platoon commander in Bravo Company. That night, they sat around the campfire and reminisced about their time together back in Georgia and their friends who were gone while enjoying some of Marcy’s most recent concoction, a dark IPA. Even Jensen had a couple for the first time in years.

  “I’m going to miss you guys so much,” Daniel said to Jensen and Jessica toward the end of his fourth beer.

  “Bro, our new place is literally less than a hundred yards from your office. We can wave to you from our window,” Jensen replied.

  “I know, but it’s the furthest we’ve been apart in over six months,” the big man mourned. “It’s just not the same. Why can’t you still live at the inn with us?”

  Jessica laughed. “Because Jensen is the operations officer with Alpha, so we sort of need to be with our company. Stop being such a big baby.”

  Daniel looked confused. “I didn’t think companies had operations officers. I thought it was just the commanding officer and the executive officer.”

  Jensen was the one to respond. “Colonel Strenke’s idea. He took some liberties with the typical command structure. We’re sort of a militia and sort of a military unit, depending on how all of this shakes out. He’s keeping some military structure so none of us are deserters in case things get back to normal quickly, but also like a civilian militia in case things go the other way.”

  “Ahh, plausible deniability,” Daniel said, nodding wisely. “Always a good choice.”

  Marcy punched him in the arm from the comfort of her folding chair. “That doesn’t even make sense.” She looked down at her beer. “Maybe I made these too strong.”

  Daniel smiled down at her. “No, it’s perfect! Just like you.”

  Marcy rolled her eyes in the dimming light. “Definitely too strong. I’m going to have to ease up on the malt next time.”

  “Hey, Jensen, what can you tell me about my guys?” Dave asked.

  “What do you mean?” he replied.

  “You know, the two tub drivers coming into Bravo tomorrow. They good dudes? Are they dudes? I don’t even know who we’re getting,” Dave explained.

  Realization dawned on Jensen’s face, “Oh! Daquon and Marco—really good. You’ll like them.”

  Dave breathed a huge sigh of relief. “I was afraid you were going to say Hank. I thought I’d have to transfer to Charlie Company, or maybe go AWOL.” He looked around the campfire at his five friends. “I like you all, but if I got stuck with that gasbag, I think I’d have to leave.”

  Jessica giggled. “Again?”

  “Ooooh, harsh. Your words are hurtful,” Dave said with a crestfallen look.

  Analiz grabbed his arm and smiled. “He already found me; what reason could he possibly have to leave again?”

  Daniel held up his now empty glass. “Cheers to that!” He looked at his glass. “Wait, refill first. Then cheers!”

  Marcy put her hand on his and gently pressed it down. “I think you’ve had enough, hon. I think it’s about time we went to bed.”

  Daniel protested, “It’s barely even dark!” Then he took another look at her face and realized what she was saying, “Oh bedtime. Yeah, so tired. Exhausted. Bye guys! I’m still going to miss you!”

  After they were gone, Dave told them, “I think it’s time for us to turn in, too. We’re doing PT early tomorrow. It’s starting to get pretty hot during the day.”

  A huge form dashed back into the light of the fire. Daniel reached down to grab his rifle before hurrying off again wit
hout saying a word.

  Jessica giggled again. “He’s so weird sometimes.”

  “Like I always say,” Jensen replied, “fucking intel.”

  “Hey! I was in intelligence,” Jessica responded.

  “Oh yeah, sorry. Fucking linguists.”

  Chapter 33

  Early the next morning, Jensen made his way up to the third floor of the hotel to the dining area to grab some coffee and breakfast. Daniel had been right; it felt weird being in a different place than his friends, even though they were right down the road. He wasn’t sure if it was the alcohol they’d had last night or the new place, but he’d slept like absolute crap. With any luck, he’d adjust quickly.

  Despite the early hour, he was far from the first person awake, and there was already coffee made and the smell of cooking breakfast coming from the kitchen. Jensen headed straight for the coffee and grabbed an empty cup from the tray. After pouring his coffee, he stared at the steam rising from the top for a moment, debating whether the impending burns or continued existence without caffeine was worse.

  He turned toward an empty table nearby and pulled out a chair, lightly slurping the hot liquid to minimize the damage. Hell, he’d been shot, he could handle some burns from coffee. Once it was gone, he stood up and poured himself another cup, pouring a second one at the same time. By the time he finished his second cup, the third one would probably be cool enough to drink.

  Halfway through the second cup, he noticed a man standing across the table from him holding a steaming cup of his own. “Mind if I join you?”

  Through the fog in his brain, Jensen tried to assess him. Medium build. Blond hair. Blue eyes. The hints of laugh wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. Deciding he wasn’t a threat, he nodded toward the empty chair and replied, “Feel free.”