Patriots Betrayed (13 page)

“I could’ve told you that.” She had the SUV sliding around a curve at an angle. “I guess you’re going to give me a lecture about what happened at the bank.”

He checked the road behind them and searched the sky for a police helicopter or plane. “No time for that. I don’t feel like lecturing, anyway.”

“I’m just so tired of this shit.” Carla had them racing down the road at one hundred and ten, the engine roaring.

“I know. So am I.”

Chapter 7

The Explorer was parked under a stand of large oaks in a game management area. Raylan and Carla sat in the front seat while he finished cleaning and dressing Carla’s wound. “Doesn’t even need stitches, not deep enough for that.” He caught her examining his face. “Has my doctoring your arm resulted in some kind of an aphrodisiac affect?”

She coughed and looked out the windshield. “Uh, no. I was just noticing how you have smoothed over the sharp edges of your personality since the last time we worked together.”

“I’m older now. Old age will do that to a man. Besides, we’re not working together; we’re just trying to help each other survive.”

“Yeah, that’s what I mean by working together. Nothing’s changed except we’re not being paid and now it’s our own government trying to kill us.”

“How can you say we’re not being paid?” Raylan handed her the bank receipt showing he had been successful with the transfer of over one million dollars to his Bahamas account.

She read it. “Well, you bested me on that one. I didn’t get past cutting the throat of the young guy they had posing as the manager. It took all I had to get out of there alive.”

“They must not have been set up long before we got there and hadn’t had time to prepare for me arriving at my bank.”

She made a face. “Just my luck to have my account in a bank that didn’t have many branch locations in that town. They were probably set up at other addresses waiting for you.”

“The banks were so close together they may have thought one team could handle both at the same time. They could observe my bank from the lobby. Did you see anyone standing near the front of the lobby looking out the window when you came in?”

She opened the driver side door. “Nope. I’ve got to stretch my legs.”

He got out, taking the M4 and his backpack with him. “While you’re doing that, I’m going to load mags.”

Carla reached into the SUV and grabbed her submachine gun off the seat. “Yeah, I better load mags too.” She set it on the hood and removed the magazine to stuff rounds in. “We need to be on the move again soon. There’s probably a drone above us, and with the hot engine, their infrared will see us under these trees.”

Raylan got out a chest rig and loaded the pouches, totaling six magazines. “Cops on our trail adds another layer of trouble for us. I don’t want to kill cops.”

Carla looked across the hood at Raylan. “I don’t think I hit any bystanders.”

“Still worrying you?” He froze for a second. “Can’t be certain of that. Bullets travel down streets and through windows and cars. It was a bad situation all around.” He put the chest rig on and then a jacket to partially hide it. “I think all of your shots connected, so unless a bullet went through and traveled on to hit someone, I’d say you managed to avoid collateral casualties. You can turn the radio on and listen for a report, if you want.”

She finished the last magazine. “No. We need to be able to hear trouble coming.”

They both froze when the roar of off-road motorcycles drifted in the wind.

“There’s a trail on the other side of that hill,” Raylan said, “crosses this Jeep trail we’re on. Chances are it’s a couple of young guys out riding.” He motioned towards the hill. “Now, if a good-looking woman was to be by that trail and wave them down, you think they might stop?”

Carla was already removing her disguise, using the side-view mirror. In less than a minute, she lost twenty years. “Do I look sexy enough?” She threw her wig on the seat. “I’m an old woman as far as teen boys are concerned.”

He smiled. “They’ll stop. Trouble is they might not come our way.”

“If they do, I better be at the trail before they get here.” She took off on a run.

Raylan slung his M4 and followed. “You just may scar the poor guys for life. They’ll never again stop to help a damsel in distress.”

She turned and smiled at him for a second as she ran.

Raylan hid behind a large pine tree while Carla stood by the trail, listening to the sound of the trail bikes coming closer.

After a minute, the sound faded, and it seemed they had taken another fork in the trail, but they must have been momentarily behind a hill, because they came around a curve at high speed, racing each other, jockeying for position. Carla waved frantically as if their help meant life or death. They raced on by, slowed, and then turned back, throwing dirt as they spun around.

When they pulled up, Carla said, “Will you help me? My car won’t crank and my cell phone has no signal out here.”

“Where’s your car?” A thin man in his early twenties asked.

The other man kept looking around. “You out here alone?” Before she answered, he said, “If you are that’s crazy. It’s dangerous. I would never let my wife come out here even with me, much less alone.”

“Well,” Carla said, “I do have my friend with me.” She pulled her pistol and aimed it at them casually with her right hand. Her left was clasping the nearest rider’s wrist. “We just need your bikes. We’ll even pay you for them.”

Raylan had moved closer while they were not looking. He leveled the M4 at them. “Be smart and live. Like she said, all we want is your bikes. Chances are the police will find them and you’ll get them back.” He pulled a wad of hundreds out of his pocket. “In the meantime, I’ll give you ten grand each for them.”

The two men looked at him like he was crazy. The motorcycles were worth only six thousand each right off the show room.

Carla pulled on the man’s arm. “Now’s when you get off the bikes, take the money, and walk away.”

The men laid their motorcycles on their side, not bothering to lower the kickstands, and stepped back. The younger man took his helmet off and dropped it. “You two must be running from the law.”

His friend hissed, “Shut up. Don’t ask questions.”

Raylan leveled the M4 at them. “We’ll need your helmets too.”

The older man, in his mid-twenties, dropped his helmet. “Just don’t kill us.”

Raylan let the M4 hang from its sling across his chest, while he quickly counted hundred dollar bills and reached twenty thousand dollars over to the older one. “What would be the point of paying you for the bikes if we were going to kill you? We don’t even really want to rob you, but we have no choice.”

The man took the money and said, “Okay.” He backed off from them. “Can we go now?”

“Yes, but how far do you have to walk to your vehicle?” Rayland asked. “I can give you a canteen of water if you need it.”

The younger man answered, “It’s only three miles. We were on our way back.”

Raylan nodded. “Good you’ll be okay then. One more thing before you go. I want to warn you that we’re being hunted by the CIA. You may have read about us in the papers. They claim we’re traitors and rogue spies. It’s not true. I’m not trying to convince you of that, but I want to warn you not to report this to the police, because the CIA will think we may have told you something. They’ll take you away and torture you. Your family will never hear from you again. Best to take the cash and go buy yourselves new bikes.” His eyes lit up. “You can keep the change.”

They both swallowed. The younger man said, “Uh, we won’t say anything.”

Raylan kept the M4 pointed at the ground. “The police will find your bikes some day in some strange town. Now, when they call to report it, just tell them you had your bikes in the back of your garage or something and didn’t notice they were missing. Someone must have snuck in and stolen them without you noticing it. That way you can get your old bikes back too and no one will know a thing about what happened here or tie you to us.”

They both nodded solemnly.

Raylan motioned with his head. “Now go on.”

They walked away without a word.

Carla laughed. “Taken away and tortured, huh?”

He smiled. “It could happen.”

“You think you can ride with your cut hand?” Carla asked.

“Oh yeah. It’s healing fine.”

They grabbed the helmets and rode back to the SUV.

The motorcycles were dual sport Hondas, which meant they were dirt bikes, but also street legal. While Carla packed her backpack, he used a drain hose ripped off the radiator to siphon gas from the Explorer and filled both tanks.

“I’m guessing these things will give us about one hundred miles on two gallons,” Raylan said. He grabbed items out of the Explorer and loaded them into his pack. “Check that forest map while I’m doing this, will you? We need to come out on the other side of the forest in a rural area. We’ll travel the back roads.”

“Where are we heading, Langley, Maryland, or Washington?”

“South. There’s a Russian mobster I want to pay a visit.”

She opened the glove box. “So you’ve given up on friends getting us out of this?”

“We’re not heading for Langley, so be happy.” He gave her one of those looks that said he had something planned. “I’ve got business in South Carolina, but first I need to dig up a cache and retrieve a few tools we’ll need.”

“Oh?” She looked up from the map. “This forest isn’t very large. It’s only eight miles to the western border. What kind of business?”

“A mess I left a few years ago that I need to clean up.” Raylan looked up at the sky. “We’re in luck. Looks like rain. Heavy overcast moving in from the north.”

She checked the inside of the Explorer to make certain they were not leaving anything behind. “Rain and clouds won’t keep drones grounded.”

“No but it’ll keep cop choppers and planes off us and wash away any tracks these bikes leave. We don’t want them knowing what kind of vehicles we departed with when they find the Explorer.”

“Assuming those two don’t talk to the police,” Carla added.

Three minutes later, they were heading down the trail on the bikes.

~~~

Trey Kraust sat in Ken Linder’s living room, drinking beer and discussing government corruption.

Linder wanted to organize protests across the country right away, call America’s veterans to action. “This will blow over unless we demand investigations,
real
investigations that follow the evidence, even all the way to the White House.”

Trey rested his beer on his knee, not caring about the cold bottle getting his jeans wet. “Hold off on that. It would do more good to crank up the heat after the news media has played out their faux outrage and start to let it fade. Then we spring forward and keep the issue before the people’s eyes and in their minds by protesting on the streets. For now, it’s best to inform the vets and let them do their own thing as far as writing letters to Congressmen and calling radio talk shows. Use the time to plan and get everything in place for the mass protests that will surely be needed later.”

Ken looked over at his wife, who sat six feet away. “You’re in advertising, what do you think?”

Rebecca opened her eyes so wide it wrinkled her forehead and lifted her hands into the air as if she didn’t want any part of the conversation, but her words proved otherwise. “I’m still trying not to throw up. You know, someday, these bastards are going to run out of young Americans willing to die for this country in unnecessary wars they get us involved in for their own hidden agendas.” She bit her lower lip. “Then a real foreign enemy will show up to defend against, but there won’t be anyone willing to fight for a country so full of assholes like those we have in power. When that day comes, it’ll be the sorriest day in American history.”

Trey rubbed his beer on his forehead. “They use the military to kill en masse and the CIA to kill individuals. I feel a strong kinship with those two spooks; they’ve been used just like us veterans.”

Ken had not taken his eyes off his wife.

She sat in her wheelchair and looked back. “What?”

“I think you’re right; that’s what.” Ken’s face showed more years than his chronological age of thirty-five would suggest. He had been taking care of his wife since she came back from Afghanistan more dead than alive. “If we don’t let this one be buried under some fabricated event or a mass shooting in a first grade classroom to distract the public or whitewashed with a show investigation and some hand-picked committee that shits out a report devoid of real facts, the corrupt assholes just may be flushed out of office.”

“We’ll never get them all,” Trey said. “And if we did, there will always be more running for office, financed and controlled by those who stay in the shadows. After the Justice Department tapped hundreds of reporters’ phones and computers, putting the fear of government in their ass, and making it clear the First Amendment means nothing, they’ve backed off from reporting government corruption even more than usual. And after the public was informed about how certain political groups have been intimidated by the IRS for years, threatened with denial of legitimate tax deductions and subjected to audits for no reason, many who would have joined grassroots organizations have been reluctant to stick their necks out.”

Ken’s eyes became slits. “They’ll play hell intimidating combat vets. There’s not enough room in their prisons to lock all of us up for tax evasion. In fact, if they’re going to sic the IRS on us we might as well stop paying taxes.”

Trey set his empty beer down. “No. That would give them a legal excuse to put you away.”

“They don’t need a legal excuse; they have plenty of illegal excuses.”

Rebecca wheeled her chair closer. “As you can tell, Ken is upset about all of this. I think it’s more about what happened to me and the condition I was in when I came home than what the bastards have done to the country.”

Ken held her hand. “It’s both. And yes, I’m pissed.”

~~~

South Carolina, on the shore of Lake Marion.

The killers guarding the perimeter of the lakeshore compound only yards from the white sand that had been trucked in from Florida wore light journalist vests over T-shirts for comfort in the hot summer weather, yet the vests hid their pistols and compact submachine guns they carried under them. Even though South Carolina was known for its heat and humidity in summer, these men couldn’t have possibly acclimated themselves to it over the nine days they had been there preparing for the arrival of underworld VIPs — not when they came from Russia, a land of snow and ice, and this night was one of the hottest on record. They kept nervous watch, as their lives depended on it. One mistake, one second of carelessness… and if potential attackers didn’t kill them, their Russian Mafia employers would.