Foreign Enemies and Traitors (57 page)

Carson asked, “Is it normal for the Kazaks to operate without helicopters?”

“No, they usually have a couple of Chinooks or Blackhawks on big operations like this.  Or even a Little Bird or just an old Huey.  I don’t know why they didn’t today.  The helicopters have American aircrews.  Maybe they don’t want any American eyewitnesses to what was going on—especially at that ravine.  If that’s why, it was sure lucky for me.  I made it from the woods near the junkyard down to the road, and you might say I was pondering my next move.  There was no good cover for the next mile of my trip here to the cave; it was mostly open fields.  But the road turned out to be okay, because Americans were out walking on it: refugees.  They were pulling wagons, pushing carts, taking what they could.  I just stepped out of the trees and took my place among them.  Actually, I helped an old man push his wife in a wheelchair.  I said, ‘Let me help you,’ and I hunched way over and kept my head down and just pushed her along.  I’m not exactly a little guy, and with this vest under my parka I’m basically huge.”  Boone paced around the wooden-floor area of the cave, animatedly waving his arms.

“The Americans around me must have known something was up, my just popping out of the woods like that, but they didn’t say a word.  We passed a squad of Cossacks in a pickup truck.  It was going the other way, and we weren’t hassled.  Of course, if we came to a real checkpoint it would have been all over, because as soon as they searched me…well…it would
not
have been good.”  Boone patted the .45 caliber Glock holstered on the bottom of his vest, and the frag grenades in their own pouches.  “A five-ton truck full of Cossacks passed us that had a loudspeaker; it was playing a tape that was looped over and over.  ‘You must leave the County Radford before night!  You cannot be protected after this day!  You must leave now, and you shall not be harmed!’  Over and over it played.  It must have been a Cossack that made the recording—his accent was terrible, and so was his English.”  Boone pulled a clear plastic water bottle from a box on the cave floor, drained most of it, and then sat down heavily, nearly cracking the fourth folding chair.

“I’ll bet my American traitor would have made a better tape for them,” suggested Jenny, brightening.  “That is, if he was still alive.”  She was sitting across the square card table from Boone.

“You’re probably right.  Good work getting rid of that piece of shit.  So I pushed granny along in her wheelchair for about a mile, and when we got to a nice tree line that I’ve used before, I said goodbye and took off again.  I think the old guy understood what was going on.  He actually said good luck to me, winked and gave me a thumbs-up.  Yeah, he knew what was going on, I could tell.  He could have ratted me out, and made a scene when Cossacks were around, but he didn’t.  Nobody did.  It wasn’t a big column of refugees, just dribs and drabs.  There were maybe a few dozen that I saw, heading south toward Mississippi.  I guess they’re cleaning the leftovers out of the county, after yesterday’s big massacre.  There was a lot of smoke, too, from houses burning.  Oh, and I even passed a lowboy tractor-trailer with a big bulldozer on it.  Cossacks were driving the truck, and an Army truck that was escorting it.  I’m thinking that maybe it was going back to the ravine to bury the evidence.  What else would it be going that way for?  Jenny, that’s how lucky it was that we found you last night, and that I took the pictures today.  Once they bulldoze that ravine, nobody will ever know what happened there, at least not for years and years.  They would have gotten away with it.  But I’ve got the pictures, and the GPS coordinates.

“So after I made it into that tree line I had to low-crawl for a while.  I’d freeze while trucks full of soldiers passed on the road, and then I’d crawl some more.  It wasn’t much of a tree line, not in the wintertime.  Kind of sparse in the cover and concealment department—that’s why I had to low-crawl it.  The only good concealment was down low.”

Carson laughed.  “Low crawling sure beats getting shot.  I’ve got the scars to prove it both ways.  Why, I can remember crawling so low, I was looking
up
at snakes—and they were passing me.  Of course, that was a
long
time ago, in another war, and I’m a lot older now.  Much too old for low-crawling.” 

“Yeah, well I’m getting too old for this shit too, but like you said, low-crawling beats getting shot anyday.  And twice on Sunday, which is today—by the way, God bless you all and hallelujah, amen.  The only thing I really worried about was what I couldn’t see: Predators.  I had almost no overhead cover, and the whole time I was out there on my belly, I was wondering if I was going to get nailed between the shoulder blades by one of those skinny little UAV missiles.”  Boone smiled, his teeth shining white against his dirty red face and his filth-crusted chestnut beard.  “I even thought that if the rocket was a dud, it might pin me right to the ground like a bug.  But I’m alive, and I’m here, so I guess I got lucky again.”

Carson said, “Yeah, unless they just tracked you here on purpose, so they could find your base camp.  For all we know, they’re surrounding this place right now.”

“Well, aren’t you just a ray of sunshine.  Hey, old-timer, let me enjoy my fleeting moment of glory, while my adrenaline burns off.  Sure, that’s a possibility.  It always is.  And we’re going to get started on our new bugout plan ASAP, just in case.  There’s another way out of this cave.  It’s not as easy as the way in, but it works.  We need to get our gear ready.  And let’s square away our ammunition and battery situations.  Doug, make sure all the rechargeables are good to go, and let’s divvy up the new ones that Jenny brought.  We need to be ready, just in case we get visitors at the front door.  That’s the one thing I hate about caves: the thought of getting an unexpected knock on the door from the other team.”  Boone upended and drained the last of the water from the plastic bottle. 

“And even if we’re not compromised, we’re going to be leaving this cave soon anyway.  I’ve given this a lot of thought, and this is what I’ve come up with: Jenny and Zack, you’re going south to Mississippi, with the baby.  A newborn won’t last long if all it gets is that instant milk powder crap.  I’ve got contacts all around Corinth that can take care of you and the baby, and Zack knows his way around down there pretty well too.  I’ve got maps that I can mark with the best routes, for walking across the state line away from checkpoints.

“Too bad we can’t just upload them onto the internet,” suggested Doug.  “A few years ago, it would have been easy.” 

“No, forget the internet, that’s out, that’s over, the government has it all sewn up.  We need to do this another way: person to person.  That’s why we’re going to Fort Campbell.  Zack and Jenny will be our backup, our insurance policy.  They can take the other camera with them.  That way we’ll have two chances of getting the pictures out.  Okay?  Great, now let’s make some chow.  If we’re leaving this cave for good, there’s no point in leaving all of this food behind.  Doug, get our big pot boiling.  We’ll cook up a great big old mess of Zack’s Mississippi rice, enough for a whole platoon.  We’ll throw in some ’taters and beans, canned corn, whatever you guys want.  Even the last can of chicken, the one we’ve been saving.  Let’s do it right.  When we leave this cave, I want us to leave with full bellies…for a change.  And plenty of extra cooked rice for the next couple days.”

****

Phil Carson slid the booklet across the table to Boone.
 “Jenny’s traitor wasn’t much for operational security.  This thing is full of his cheat sheets.  Check it out.”  The pages of the pocket notebook were arranged by topics.  The writing was neatly printed in black ballpoint ink.  On one of the first pages, twenty names were listed, across from their aliases and radio call signs.  Each of the following pages covered a different subject.

                “Bad opsec is right,” Boone replied, flipping through the pages.  “I guess he never thought his notebook might get lost.  Damn, he writes as neat as a girl.  I’ll bet his checkbook was perfect.”

“He wrote down his frequencies, his call signs…even their passwords,” said Carson.

“Passwords?”

“Looks like it.  ‘Challenge and reply,’ it says there.”

“Let’s check the words for tonight—that might be helpful.”  Boone flipped through the pages until he found the passwords.

Both men laughed.  Carrying all of this information in hard copy on one’s person was a cardinal sin for a special ops soldier.

“Let’s see,” said Boone.  “It’s animals, and they change it every week.  This week it’s camel and horse.  ‘Boora and Toolpar.’  That must be in Kazak, so there’s no chance of an American guessing the right password.”  He turned the page.  “And they use a number code for crossing out of the Kazak areas.  That’s all done in English.  I guess English is the only common language between all of the foreign mercenaries.  This week for the password, you add up to number seven.”

“You hear five and you say two, you mean like that?” asked Carson. 

“Right.”

Carson said, “We were doing it like that way back when I was in the Army.”

“Well, they probably had American advisers set up the multinational stuff for them.”

“You mean American traitors.”

“Yeah, American traitors,” agreed Boone.  “Look, it says they use the infrared lights anytime they’re approaching another ‘national area of operations.’  It’s Morse Kilo for the Kazaks.  Morse N for the Nigerians, they’re the next bunch north of us.  It’s all in here.”

Boone turned another page.  “This is a gold mine.  Look at this: phone numbers.  Fort Campbell Building 1405—that must be the traitors’ HQ.  That part of the base was closed when they axed most of the 101st.  What a dipshit this guy was to write all this down!”

“Even so, you’ve got to admit that it’s pretty impressive when a seventeen-year-old girl takes out a full-grown man.  That’s not something that happens every day.”

“You think everything she said is true?” asked Boone.

“Well, she’s wearing his uniform, and she’s got his gun and his notebook.  If it’s not true, it’s the most elaborate plant in history.  Sure, it must be true, how can it not be?  You saw the massacre; she sure didn’t make that up.  It’s just too bad that she wasted him before we could do a little field interrogation.”  Carson smiled.  “Good thing the stupid bastard wrote it all down for us anyway.”

Both men snickered, and Boone handed the notebook back across the table.  Carson opened it up to the page giving the aliases of twenty or so officials.  One name in particular stood out from the rest.  The name right at the top of the list.  An unusual name, one that he remembered from seven years ago in Virginia.

Director Bullard = General Blair.

****

Zack Tutweiler was glad to ride the stationary bike. 
He didn’t consider it a chore at all.  The older men were busy with their own tasks.  The bike’s chain drove an iron flywheel connected by a rubber fan belt to an automotive alternator.  This whirring mechanical generator was wired to an interconnected rat’s nest of car batteries, AC/DC inverters, transformers and small battery chargers, all pulsing and blinking with red and green LED lights.  The heavy flywheel and the resistance provided by the alternator made Zack feel like he was pedaling up a slight grade.  Staring into the darkness of the cave, he was able to travel familiar Mississippi roads in his mind.

Doug Dolan was packing and preparing equipment while occasionally stirring the big cast-iron stewpot.  The pot hung from a tripod constructed from iron rebar.  The bottom of the pot was poised a few inches above a burning chunk of what Boone said was C-4 explosive.  They had run out of the hexamine and trioxane fuel tablets that they had been using, and now they had to use C-4 to heat water and cook.  It looked like a burning marshmallow, only smaller.  Phil Carson had explained that this was safe.  You could burn small pieces of C-4, as long as you didn’t drop anything on it while it was lit.  That iron pot hanging over the C-4 would probably do the trick if it fell!  Zack wondered what a thumb-sized piece of C-4 would do inside the cave if it exploded.  It couldn’t be good.  Boone had also said that there was enough natural ventilation in the cave to keep the fumes from building up.  Well, the three adult men seemed confident, and Zack had no choice but to trust their judgment.  They were all professional soldiers, now or in the past.  The rice was bubbling and filling the cave with steam.  Doug added cans of vegetables and even meat to the pot.  Its aroma made Zack’s mouth water, and he pedaled harder.  Soon they would be sharing a hot “all you can eat” feast.

Phil Carson and Boone Vikersun were whispering over the card table.  Between the two of them, they had many years of experience as guerrilla fighters, and Zack was completely willing to accept their leadership.  Even though Carson was the older of the two, Boone was unquestionably the leader of this little squad.  Boone had announced that Zack would take Jenny south to Mississippi, and that was that.  It only made sense.  He was heartened that they considered saving the infant’s life to be worth some effort and risk.  He was glad that even under these difficult circumstances, they still found the life of a single orphan baby to be worth preserving. 

It was quite a responsibility, to be entrusted with getting Jenny and the infant she called Hope to safety down in Mississippi.  She was back inside the tent with the baby, where she had spent most of her time since they had crawled into the cave.  He wondered if Jenny was sleeping, or doing some motherly task with the baby, or just daydreaming like him.  In some ways Jenny was familiar to Zack, and in other ways she was a mystery.  She had also lost her family, so they had that in common.  She had survived the brutal year since the earthquakes, and so had he, when so many others had not.  They had both adapted to life without central heat or air conditioning, running water, flush toilets, full refrigerators and microwave ovens.  Not to mention no cell phones, television, video games or trips to shopping malls and restaurants.  They had all of that in common.