Foreign Enemies and Traitors (19 page)

“This map doesn’t show any roads smaller than this one we’re on,” stated Carson.  “We might have to go back ten or twelve miles to pick up another road big enough to be on this map.  Or we can try one of these local roads and just use my compass.  Kind of feel our way north.”

“Use the back roads?  Feel our way north?  Are you serious?”

“Why not?”

“Because this is Mississippi!  I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”

“Turn right here, Sergeant, this one looks okay.  The pavement is just as wide as the road we’ve been on.  It looks like it runs about northwest, so that should work for us.”  There were no homes or buildings visible, nothing but dripping trees surrounding their small area of headlamp illumination.

“You sure about this?”

“Come on Sergeant Amory, we’ll be all right.  When we get to State Road 72, we’ll know it.  If this map is right, it’ll be a big road.  Dual lane, like 45 was.  We’ll know it when we reach it.  Then I’ll bail out, and you can backtrack on your own.  You’ll be in Pontapola before daybreak.”

“Look, these back roads don’t run straight like the big ones, they run more like spaghetti.  See?  We’re turning already.  Which way are we going now?”

“Northeast.  That’s still okay.  Just go slow, we’ll be okay.  Thirty-five is fast enough…”

“We’re still turning, so if that was northeast, now we gotta be going east.”

“Okay, we’ll try the next left turn that looks like it’s going north.”

After ten minutes of winding and weaving through more woods, swamps, small farms and smaller properties, their headlights occasionally sweeping across scattered house trailers and homes, they were heading almost south again.  Few of the houses showed even the least glimmer of light within.  Almost all of the dwellings had some crude fence or wall between them and the road.  Homemade palisades protected against unseen night dangers. 

Carson said, “Okay, turn left here, we’ll try this one.”

“Seriously, I don’t like this, I
really
don’t like it!”  They were driving on a narrow one-lane asphalt road, between overhanging pines so thick they formed a solid canopy.  Beyond their headlights was the darkness of the tomb, with only a slight fire glow from the windows of some houses set back among the trees. 

The curving road rolled downhill and ended without warning at a T intersection, and they stopped.  Carson looked at his wrist compass again.  “I guess right takes us more north.  Let’s try it.”

Amory pulled out, ruefully shaking his head.  The road narrowed again, the asphalt badly cracked on both sides, the tree branches sometimes brushing the sides of the truck.  Both of them were peering hard into the darkness beyond their headlights.  “Shit!” the medic yelled and hit the brakes. 

“What the hell is that?” asked Carson.  They stared ahead at a plank of rough two-by-ten lumber lying completely across the road, with dozens of long and short nails protruding upward from it.  The board was tied to trees at both ends with heavy wire.  Driving over the improvised spike strip would cause four flat tires.

“Somebody’s own private night barricade,” said Amory.  “They do that up here nowadays.  That’s one of the reasons why I didn’t want to try these back roads, but you wouldn’t listen, you…”

A single shot rang out, and a muzzle flash flared through the under brush to their left.

Carson yelled, “Back up, back up!” but Amory already had the truck in reverse, skidding backward on the slick road.  The truck lost traction and fishtailed sideways, the rear wheels going over the shoulder into a shallow ditch, stopped hard by an unseen tree behind them.  They had not made it a hundred feet from the defensive barrier of nails. 

“Come on Amory, show me what you can do!”

“I’m trying!”  The truck grabbed traction as he downshifted to low and slowly goosed the accelerator.  They dragged through brush on the other side of the narrow lane, found the pavement again, and were soon sliding through S turns at better than fifty miles an hour.  They were totally lost, completely disoriented, the map useless.  They blew past the last T intersection, and the road curved several more times while dipping and rising.

Carson peered at his dim mini-compass and laughed.  “Well, at least we’re heading north again—for the moment anyway.  Oh, and nice driving, Sergeant Amory.”

“Yeah, anytime.  Be sure and tip your driver when I let your white ass out.”

“Don’t you worry about my white ass.”

“Believe me, I won’t.”

“So, Sergeant Amory, it seems like not everybody in Mississippi got the word about the new gun laws.”

“You noticed that too?”

They both laughed in relief.

Carson said, “Imagine that, shooting visitors coming around tonight.  They might’ve hit old Santa Claus himself.  Good thing they missed.”

“Missed?  No, Colonel, they didn’t miss.  They weren’t shooting at us.”

“How do you figure that, Sergeant Amory?”

“These boys out here?  If they were shooting
at
us, they’d be stretching us out on the road right about now, and going through our pockets.  They wouldn’t have missed, no sir.  I know—I grew up with these Mississippi crackers.  Deer hunting and fast cars are about their two most favorite things in the world.  You think they’d miss if they were aiming right between our headlights?”

“No, I guess not.”

“That was just a neighborly warning back there.  Pure Christian charity.  Next time we might not be so lucky.  Next time, they might not be in such a friendly mood.  Not at all.  Colonel, I do believe we have used up all of our good luck tonight.”

“Well, Sergeant Amory, it is Christmas Eve.  You gotta believe in something.”

****

An hour later Carson sat with his pack against a thick tree,
watching State Road 72 from a few yards inside the woods.  He’d chosen the tree carefully, so that he could lean back against his pack, his butt on a wide root-branch, keeping him above the mud.  The tree’s branches were winter bare above him.  His green poncho covered his up-folded knees, protecting him from the cold drizzle.  Only his face was exposed, peering out of the poncho’s hood.  Beneath the vinyl poncho was a gore-tex camouflage Army rain parka with its own hood, part of the gear that Sergeant Amory had assembled from his list.  Beneath the parka was his field jacket and uniform, and still he was chilled to shivering.

The four-lane road ran east to west in a shallow valley.  During the half hour before two in the morning, not a single vehicle had passed by in either direction.  Carson already missed the warm, dry interior of the truck.  He wondered if he was up to the task of walking the next few miles out of Mississippi, and then more miles into Tennessee.  A lot depended on his knees holding up.  Hiking well into Tennessee before dawn was his goal.  With the addition of the items from the back of the truck, his backpack now weighed at least forty pounds.  It was also much bulkier, with the sleeping bag in its waterproof compression sack strapped beneath it and his foam ground pad rolled up and lashed on top. 

With its wide median strip and generous shoulders, the state highway before him constituted a danger zone almost a hundred yards across, open to long-range surveillance from either direction and from above.  On both sides, the land climbed into woods.  The shoulders and median strip were overgrown with brush up to waist height, which would provide some concealment for his passage. 

The highway was the last major obstacle in his path before Tennessee.  He was determined not to be captured in Mississippi.  He rejected the thought of standing before a military tribunal attempting to explain the deaths of the three Guard officers.  Two weeks in the quarantine camp had already tested his patience, and being thrown into a cell to await hanging was not an option he would choose.  He’d go down shooting, rather than be arrested in Mississippi.  If he could make it to the free states of the Northwest, great.  If not, well, he was sixty-four and he’d already lived an interesting life.  Several lives, in fact.  He’d visited over thirty countries in his time, and he’d seen combat in three of them. 

Directly ahead of him was Tennessee, an American state, but a state at least partially occupied by foreign soldiers.  He’d seen foreign militaries in many countries.  He’d fought with them as allies and fought against them as enemies.  More recently he’d simply watched them strutting down a tropical street while he sipped a beer at a shady outdoor café table.  But this had always been overseas, far from America.  Drunk or sober, Phil Carson had never dreamed, never imagined, that he might live to see the day when armed foreign troops were standing on American soil.

The idea of foreign occupational troops in Tennessee both angered and intrigued him.  Who had decided to invite them into America, President Tambor?  It wouldn’t have surprised him.  Jamal Tambor had always been a one-worlder, a proponent of global solutions to every perceived problem.  Well, whatever the reason, the idea of foreign troops in America stuck in Phil Carson’s throat like a rusty hook.  Sure, the America he’d known as a young man was long gone, after being debased and defiled for decades.  Still, he never imagined that in the end, foreign soldiers would be standing on American soil. 

His arms were inside the poncho, across his chest for warmth.  He shook the water from the plastic covering and shivered, staring into the wet darkness.  Maybe he’d see some more combat in this country he scarcely recognized, these United States of America.  United?  America was anything but united these days.  The Disunited Regions of America was more like it.

At 2:10 a.m. a single humvee passed below him, driving westward at about forty miles an hour.  It was hard-topped, with no visible gun mounts, running with subdued headlights.  Routine patrol, the bare minimum.  Probably making a token patrol run from Corinth in the east to the northwest corner of the state.  Memphis was about sixty miles west.  Directly across from Memphis was where the Mississippi Guard would patrol heavily, not out here in the boonies. 

Carson gave the humvee five minutes to depart, then snapped the straps across his chest and his waist, securing his pack tightly to his body.  He leaned forward to take the full weight on his back, and rose stiffly.  Getting up had always been the hardest part, and it was much harder at age sixty-four.  The straps bit into his shoulders, the poncho snagged on thorns concealed in the overhanging limbs, but after a struggle he was on his legs and away from the dripping branches.  It was forty feet to the asphalt through the unmowed grass and weeds, hunched over to lower his profile.  As a soldier, he might have done it at a low crawl, but not now, not at his age, not with this pack on his back.  He held the Army M-9 Beretta pistol in his right hand out of habit, realizing it provided no more than token security under the circumstances.

He put his head down and hustled across two rain-slick lanes of pavement, then down and up the ditch at the center of the wide median strip, through more high grass and weeds growing into brushy trees.  Then there were two more lanes of wet asphalt and another highway shoulder dipping down and then rising toward the northern tree line.  He was breathing heavily with the effort as he pushed through the vegetation, the clods uneven beneath his feet.  He slipped and fell heavily onto his face when he was almost into the woods.  He crawled the last fifteen feet, the pack trying to flip him over as it slid to the left off his shoulders.  Finally he was under the cover of forest, and he rolled onto his back.  His pack was beneath him, poncho and straps and belt and gear and gravity twisting and pulling him in all directions at once, tying him to the earth like Gulliver as he panted for breath, rainwater dripping from unseen leaves onto his face. 

But at least he was once again in the protective cover of the woods.  No hidden sniper with a night vision scope had been watching this remote stretch of highway.  He still had several hours of darkness ahead of him, and it was only three miles to Tennessee.  He just had to catch his breath, reorganize his pack’s straps and his rain gear, roll back over and force himself to his feet again.  Just get to his feet…after he took off the poncho.  The poncho was a mistake; there were too many loose ends and flaps for sliding easily through the branches and brambles.  He sat Indian style, slung off his pack, and pulled the poncho over his head with difficulty.  Then the pack went back on, over his gore-tex parka.  The dripping poncho was clumsily rolled up and hung over the bottom of the pack’s strap on his left side.  All of this was done by feel, with cold, wet fingers.  In the dark, drippy woods, even trivial tasks like rearranging his gear were ordeals.  During this process, he had lost track of his pistol, and he groped like a blind man in the sodden forest litter until he felt the familiar Beretta.

I’m way too old for this shit
, he told himself as he struggled onto his muddy knees, which unerringly found a sharp stone, and then up onto his legs, grunting and wheezing with exertion.  He remembered a time when he had carried much heavier packs, plus a rifle with a grenade launcher attached, along with a special combat harness loaded with extra ammunition magazines and 40mm grenades, plus mortar rounds, and claymore mines, and LAAWs rockets, and C-4 demo charges…  Where had that young warrior gone?  It was so, so long ago…

They had dropped out of low-hovering Hueys in Cambodia and Laos, with more than seventy pounds of gear and ammo and demo and commo and water and rations strapped onto their bodies.  Now he had a much lighter pack, and only a 9mm pistol for a weapon, and he was winded after the first few hundred yards. 
A man my age should be in a dry, cozy house by a fireplace
, he thought.  Near a crackling fire, with a blanket over his legs, a whisky in one hand and a cigar in the other.  Maybe a dog at his feet, and a woman nearby.

Where is my warm fireplace?
  Nowhere, he thought with bitter regret while pushing wet, thorny branches away from his face.  All of the roads not taken.  The women not married (despite two near misses), the children not raised.  Well, he’d never been one for settling down; he’d known that since he was a young man.  This solitary end game was the price one paid for being an incurable wanderer, an eternal misfit.  The Army had been the only place he had ever truly fitted in, but the Southeast Asia War Games had soured him on the prospect of a military career.  Now at the age of sixty-four, he was homeless and unmissed by anyone, anywhere.  There was not even a stray dog or a cat somewhere to lament his passing.