Dark Coup (15 page)

Just as Sergeant Keeler was making a second call on the radio, there was a deafening explosion that shattered the window above the bed in the cell and rolled the guard’s body onto his back.

…

Mathis was wearing the guard’s blouse and cap, and had taken his sidearm, knife, lighter, and multi-tool.  He had a rudimentary plan but not much more, and needed a few minutes alone to think things out.

He ducked into one of the latrines and took a minute to calm down.  He was out of his cell but still completely surrounded.  He needed to cause a distraction, even better if he could cause some damage to the base at the same time.

After a minute of trying not to breathe too deeply, he got to work.  First, he thanked his lucky stars that he’d stopped in the latrine.  He pulled off three squares of toilet paper and stacked them on his lap.  Then he thumbed five rounds out of the magazine of the .45 he’d gotten off the guard and, using the pliers on the multi-tool, pulled the projectile from the end and dumped the gunpowder onto the toilet paper.  It wasn’t a huge amount, but he was sure it would be enough for what he needed to do.

Finally, he pulled the corners and sides of the square of toilet paper together and twisted the ends to seal it into a tight, compact, tear-drop shaped bundle.  He dropped the casings and bullets into the latrine, opened the door, and headed in what he was pretty sure was the direction of the closest fuel dump.  Or so he had gathered from the guards’ constant chatting. 

It took a couple of minutes to walk there; Mathis was surprised by the size of the base.  On a whim, he grabbed a five-gallon jerry can and headed towards the sound of a running diesel engine.  He was pretty sure it was one of the reverse osmosis units–still running after a year–and would be fairly close to their water source.  The closer he got to the engine, the louder it grew, and he made another decision.  If he was stopped, he’d fight his way out.

There was only one person manning the unit, and he just nodded in Mathis’s direction.  They weren’t really close enough to see each other’s faces, and Mathis nodded back.  Mathis kept walking until he was around a couple of bends from the reverse osmosis unit and its operator, and then stopped.

He’d gotten lucky when he’d picked up the fuel can and grabbed one that was only partially full, but even a couple of gallons got heavy after a while.  He had considered swapping hands but knew that his left hand wouldn’t hold the weight for more than a few seconds with his finger in a splint like it was.

Mathis looked around to make sure nobody could see him and then took a few steps to get closer to the water.  Instead of dumping the diesel directly into the lake, he decided to tip the can on its side and let it spill and run into the lake.  The effect would be the same, and he wouldn’t have to stand there and wait for the can to empty. He wouldn’t run the risk of it splashing all over him, either.  He opened the can, laid it down, and the fuel started gurgling out, running towards the water.

…

Mathis was shaking as he stepped back from the water.  He had just taken a big step from escaped prisoner who’d supposedly aided and abetted the enemy to potential mass murderer and, he snorted, environmental terrorist.  The reverse osmosis units could still provide water for the base and the town but their efficiency was going to be
vastly
diminished and the filters and membranes were going to wear out much quicker.

Fuel leaks and spills were always a concern when the Army moved.  While he was pretty sure the amount of diesel he’d just dumped into the lake wasn’t enough to destroy the ecology of the park, Mathis was positive it would be enough put a kink in their water supply, at least for a little while.

Mathis took a deep breath to calm himself, and got a lungful of diesel fumes, which made him cough. 
“Serves you right,”
he thought.

He started back to the base, empty-handed.

As he approached the water purification unit, he imagined he could hear the engine running faster to work the pump harder but knew it was just in his head.  The water couldn’t be contaminated already; it was just his guilty conscience.  He did look up and see that the operator was looking at him, though, staring at him.  Why?

“Because you walked past here with a jerry can, not five minutes ago,”
he thought,
“and now you’re empty-handed.  Of course he’s curious.  Crap!”

Mathis warred with himself for a second and then walked over to the unit and the operator.

“Didn’t you just have a…” was as far as the operator got.

Mathis pulled the .45 and put two in his chest from less than ten feet away.  The slide locked back on an empty chamber.

“Tough luck, man,” Mathis said as he reached down and grabbed the other man’s gun, extra magazine, and flashlight.  “Wrong place, wrong time.”

The sound of the generator had covered the sound of the handgun going off, but Mathis still looked around to make sure nobody was coming and then dragged the body into the woods.

…

It was a short walk back to the fuel dump and the base proper, and now that he was committed things seemed to go quickly.  There were a number of fifty-five-gallon drums, jerry cans, and a short-bed fuel truck.

“Biggest bang for the buck,”
Mathis thought, and climbed up the back of the truck.

Once on top, he opened the observation hatch and shined the flashlight in to check the fuel level; about half full, and it was diesel.

He set his gunpowder bundle on the edge of the observation hatch, with the twisted point facing out, and then gently lowered the lid to hold it in place.  With his legs hanging over the edge of the truck, he lit the point of toilet paper and then jumped off the truck, planning to make a mad dash as fast and as far away as he could before things blew sky high.

“Maybe I should go back and wreck the reverse osmosis unit,”
he thought as he ran.

…

The toilet-paper fuse burned until it hit the small bundle of gunpowder–about two seconds, and the majority of the powder burned quickly and harmlessly outside of the fuel truck’s tank.  The little bundle collapsed, however, and the observation-port lid fell shut.  A small amount of burning gunpowder fell inside the tank where the diesel fuel vapor to air mixture was well within the explosive range.

Mathis got almost twenty feet away before the fuel truck erupted, spraying diesel fuel for over a hundred-and-fifty feet in almost every direction and puncturing and igniting the surrounding fuel drums and jerry cans.  The area had been picked for a fuel dump because of its relatively sparse vegetation, but nobody had expected an explosion of any kind, much less this magnitude.  The forest had caught fire about seventy feet to the north of the explosion’s center.

There were no buildings or tents right next to the fuel dump, but a half-a-dozen vehicles had been knocked on their sides or completely flipped over, and were now on fire.

The explosion knocked Mathis down and covered him in flaming diesel fuel.  Mathis, screaming and completely engulfed in flames, tried to stand up.  A secondary explosion from ruptured gasoline cans peppered him with shrapnel and knocked him back down.  He wasn’t going to get the chance to sabotage the water filter after all.

On top of everything else, Promised Land had just lost a third of its fuel.

…

“How many more transmissions before you think you can break it,” Sanford asked.

“Possibly none but most likely at least two more Sir,” Sergeant Tuttle said.  “I have a couple of computers working on the recorded transmissions but breaking a real-time transmission is actually easier, sometimes.”

“And how many do we have recorded,” Sanford asked.

“All of them, Sir,” Tuttle said.  “Every single one going all the way back to a couple of days after the power went out and the satellites came back online.”

Just then one of Tuttle’s laptops beeped and he opened it up.  He typed on the first one and all of the ‘activity’ on the screen stopped.  He opened the other two and typed on both of them and the screen activity stopped for a couple of seconds and then the activity started on all three simultaneously.

“And what did I just witness,” Sanford asked, realizing that when he came to this Humvee he spent most of his time asking questions.

“There is a very high probability,” Tuttle said, “that it just identified one of the words used in one of the transmissions.  The one you overheard since you were able to give us a fairly good transcript of the last couple of minutes.  Long story short, it’s a chink in the encryption that I had to tell the system to account for moving forward.”

“I have no idea how any of that works,” Sanford said, “and I understood very little of what you just said but I’m going to trust you on that.”

Tuttle just nodded.  He’d been dealing with Major Sanford long enough to take it as a compliment but not long enough to be able to give him a hard time about it.

Chapter Sixteen

The third dinner shift in the mess hall was just ending and people were finishing their meals.  Joel was having dinner with Maya and Josh for the first time in a week and trying to get a response other than “Okay” out of his daughter, when the explosion rocked the building.

Joel was momentarily stunned, but Josh pushed his sister under the table before the sound of the explosion had faded, and pulled the 9mm he’d taken to carrying.

“
Dad
”, Josh yelled.  “Get
down
!”

Joel shook his head to clear it and squatted next to the table, then looked around to assess the damage.

Wherever the…bomb?  Whatever it was, wherever it had been, it wasn’t close enough to have damaged the mess hall.  They didn’t have any glass in the windows, just wooden shutters to close during the winter.  There wasn’t any debris and nothing had blown in through the open windows or doors.  Joel was pretty sure he could smell smoke now, though.

“Stay here until either I come back,” Joel said, “or someone you know comes to get you.”

Josh and Maya nodded.

Joel reached for his radio which came to life just as he was about to press the send button.

“Joel,” Bill Stewart said, “We need some help.  Grab as many able-bodied adults as you can and meet me at…”

…

Joel had gathered twenty men and half-a-dozen women on the way to meet Stewart.

“It was fuel dump two,” Stewart told the group when they arrived.  “I already have all the chainsaws out cutting a break around the fire to try and keep it contained.  We need help shoveling more than anything since we can’t use water to put it out; all it would do is spread the diesel.”

Fire had always been the biggest concern Joel had about being in the forest.  There wasn’t much he could do to prevent it and their resources were limited when it came to fighting it.  The Guard had a couple of fire trucks that had come with them, but right now they couldn’t use them since the fire was still small enough that there was a real risk of the water simply spreading any unburned fuel.

Stewart started handing out shovels as Sergeant Keeler showed up to lead the volunteers away.

“Where’s my shovel,” Joel asked.

“I need you to coordinate and get additional volunteers,” Stewart said.

“Like
hell
,” Joel yelled.

“Joel,” Stewart yelled right back, “I don’t have time to argue.  Those people are going to be exhausted in less than an hour.  It’s going to be hot, and we don’t have any kind of breathing gear, so they are going to be exposed to fumes, smoke, and hot air.  You are the Mayor, I need you to man up and get people down here to help out, not complain about how unfair it is that you didn’t get to cut down a tree or dig a hole!”

Once he realized Stewart was right, he nodded and took off at a trot back towards the center of the base.

…

The sun stayed up until almost 9:00, which helped the firefighting effort immensely.  They cut an initial firebreak, and felled the trees into the woods surrounding the fire.  Once they completed the first pass, and the ground was cleared, they started a second pass to widen the firebreak to at least twenty feet.  The first wave of volunteers was bone-tired, coated in dirt and ash, and nursing minor burns and lungs that felt lightly toasted.

Once the fire made it as far as the firebreak, they could use water to put it out, since it would no longer be fueled by the diesel.  If nothing else, as long as the weather cooperated they could let the fire burn itself out within the confines of the firebreak.

Back at what remained of the fuel dump, Joel was rotating in new volunteers every thirty minutes.   They started out as close in as they could get, and were shoveling dirt on any flare-ups or fires they could reach.   Some fires would just have to burn themselves out, though.   The remaining diesel in the fuel truck was a loss, and trying to put it out would render it useless.   They had no other way to dispose of the ruined fuel, so they let it burn.

The heavy equipment that Ben had brought down from Ft. Campbell was a life-saver, and the only reason that the firebreak was complete by the time the sun went down.  Once the trees were out of the way, three extra tractors and a front-end loader were able to clear the ground much faster than they could have done it by hand.

…

Allen Halstead stood with his hands behind his back, barely keeping his temper.

“Why,” he asked, “was there only one guard on Lieutenant Mathis?”

Sergeant Pine swallowed.  “I can’t give you a good reason for that, Sir,” he said.

“Can you tell me how he knew so much about our base,” Halstead asked.

“I have a good idea,” Pine said, “but I can’t say for sure just yet.  I’ll know in a couple of…I’ll know for sure within thirty minutes of the end of this meeting, Sir.”

Halstead lowered his eyebrows.  “Things are even worse than we initially realized, Sergeant,” he said.  “We didn’t just lose the fuel dump, we have an environmental problem.  Mathis dumped an unknown quantity of diesel into Maple Creek Lake.”

Pine’s eyes got a little wider.