Pedestals of Ash (24 page)

To the north of the building was a seemingly endless expanse of
wide-open
desert. For as far as he could see, there was nothing but flat, featureless sand. The ridgeline he was atop became very steep less than 1,000 yards north of the center
,
and even if he decided to detour in that direction, he wasn’t sure he could descend those cliff-like walls. He
wanted desperately to bypass that area
and be on his way toward Bliss, but the geography wasn’t cooperating
.
Even if he did head north and found a way to get down from the ridge, he would still have to cross a wide expanse of absolutely open terrain. The people at the complex had fast moving ATVs and most likely night vision – he would be exposed and outgunned with no possible egress.

Bishop had no quarrel with the people below. He wanted to deliver the letters, have a quick chat with the President of the United States
,
and get back home to his wife. That thought made him laugh. “Hi honey, I’m home. How did my day go? Oh, I had a great chat with the President of the United States and took a tour Fort Bliss. I’m tired though, what’s for supper?” Bishop shook his head – his kids would never believe this one.

He needed som
e diversion to draw the sentries’
attention away from that open stretch of desert to the north. That was the right direction an
d the right terrain for trave
ling. If he could keep the lookouts
busy for just
10
minutes, he could scurry across
,
and be out of their visual range
,
and on his way. How to do that was a problem.

After detaching the night vision from his rifle, Bishop refocused the eyepiece and flipped through the notes he had been taking while scouting the complex. There was a trash heap on the very southwest corner of the property
,
and he pondered starting a fire to distract the occupants. There was no way he could even get close to the mound of cardboard boxes, trash bags and other discarded rubbish. He couldn’t think of a
reliable way to remotely
ignite it from a
safe
distance.

Anothe
r train of thought was to simply
approach the complex with a white flag and pass on by. He had seriously been thinking this was the right course of action until he had read the posted signs. The evidence of several human skeletons made Bishop believe the guys at the compound weren’t bluffing.

He spent a few minutes thinking about firing a couple of wild shots at the building and circling around the response team. That course of action was
dead-ended
for several reasons, not the least of which was he couldn’t maneuver quickly in this landscape. He didn’t believe the gentlemen down there were so stupid as to send
all
their
manpower
galloping up the hill to find the shooter
,
and even if they did, Bishop wouldn’t be able to get around them fast enough. Those snipers on the roof weren’t going anywhere
,
and they were lord of everything within 1,000 yards of the complex – maybe more.

It was those snipers that bothered him the most. The ATVs would be easy enough to avoid with any but the worst of luck, but those guys on the rooftop were well placed and well equipped for their job. Bishop had seen them holding a variety of objects up to their eyes and scanning the surrounding countryside. While he had never worked with police snipers, he was sure they were equipped similar
ly
to their military brethren
,
and that translated into night vision, laser range finders, extremely
long-range
rifles and perhaps even infrared sighting systems. While he couldn’t make out the specific weapons, there was a good chance they had at least one or two capable of hitting targets over a mile away.

Bishop looked down at his M4 and shook his head. His favorite weapon seemed small and anemic compared to what he believed the men below could access. The lack of ammo made the situation seem even more dismal. He needed some way to divert those snipers – some method of using their technology against them. Chewing on a piece of jerky and pulling cool water from his drinking tube, Bishop started to form an idea. The concept of using an enemy’s
strength against itself
was an
age-old
art of battle
, and his mind was
running with a plan.

Thirty minutes later, Bishop slowly appr
oached the upwardly sloping embankment leading
to I-10. He had backtracked a little over a mile to the east where the congestio
n of abandoned vehicles bega
n. After verifying that no one was around, he quickly found what he was looking for and trotted to the side of a semi-truck sitting in the
westbound
lane. Clearly, the driv
er had ru
n out of gas and simply walked away from his rig. Both of the fuel caps had been removed
,
and the glass on the driver’s side door had been broken out, probably by someone checking the cabin for food and water.

Bishop pulled his flashlight off of his chest rig and switched to the red filter. He cautiously climbed up the side of the tall vehicle and peered inside
.
Papers and other personal effects littered the cabin floor and seats. The scene reminded Bishop of the old movies where the spy came home to find his apartment had been ransack
ed by someone combing through his personal effects, looking for hidden flash drives storing covert government plans
. The searchers in this case had been looking for food and water, not national secre
ts or hidden safes. Bishop shin
ed his light on the sun visor above the steering wheel and sure enough, there was what he was looking for.

The red glow of the flashlight rev
ea
led a state of the art fuzz
buster, complete with the lettering “Dual Mode – Laser and Radar.” Used by motorist
s
to avoid speeding tickets, Bishop had ridden with a friend who had equipped his sports car with a similar device. Following the little unit
’
s power cord, Bishop verified it was indeed connected to the big rig’s
12-volt
battery. He found the power button and was only a
little disappointed to discover
the truck’s batteries were dead. That might be a problem. A quick scan of the interior rev
ea
led nothing more of interest. Bishop sat in the driver’s seat and pulled the door
shut. A
fter
positioning himself carefully, he
kicked the side mirror hard once and then again
,
until large sections of the coated glass fell to the pavement below. Bishop climbed down with the “borrowed” electronic whiz in his
dump pouch
,
and gathered up the larger pieces of mirror.

He stood on the pavement of the big highway and looked both directions. It dawned on him that there might be a big hole in his plan. He needed
12-volt
power to pull off his scheme, but as he looked up and down the road
,
he saw that every single vehicle had at least one of its doors open. It was obvious that people had driven until they had run out of gas. Before setting out on foot, most had probably locked their cars either out of habit or with the optimistic thought of returning with a can of fuel at some point. As the situation had deteriorated, hungry or thirsty people had probably taken to breaking into the discarded cars looking for food. Maybe some had been vandalized looking for valuables.

Regardless of the motive, open doors and trunk lids meant dome lights, and those lights left on for extended periods of time resulted in drained batteries. He was just about to give up on his plan when he walked past a motorcycle leaning against its kickstand. The bike didn’t have dome lights, but that presented another problem. The bike used a
6-volt
power system, half of the typical automobile. Bishop scanned the road in both directions as far as his optics would allow and didn’t see another bike. He could wire two
6-volt
batteries together and obtain his goal, but there wasn’t a second scooter to plunder. What he did see was a small fishing boat still sitting on its trailer a few hundred yards away. In less than 15 minutes, Bishop was hefting the starting battery out of the bass bo
at and moving off into the cool,
desert night.

As he approached his previous position overlooking the distribution center,
Bishop kept thinking about turning
the enemy’s strength to his advantage
. He needed to convince the force
in the compound
below that they were under attack by a significant threat. The key to his plot was to draw everyone’s attention to the ridge
,
so he could sneak past
them
in the open desert to the north. Since the trip
wires had been set off by chance roaming
deer and other wildlife, Bishop envisioned a low state of alert when the devices were engaged. The flares had cried wolf one too many times for anyone below to get excited. While it would have been simple enough to set some sort of time delay and trip one of the devices, Bishop didn’t think that would be enough. He had to have everyone’s attention pointed away from his route.

Another issue was the reliability of any hastily constructed or complex device. He had enough experience in the field to know that purpose designed and built equipment often failed, let alone something put together with bailing twine and paper clips. He had to implement redundancy in case something went haywire. Bishop solved this problem by using the existing trip wires and their attached flares. While scouting the facility, he had located three of the clever devices and disabled them. He had a lot of respect for whoever had built the nifty
,
little booby traps. Each flare had a
9-volt
battery attached. The leads from the battery were connected to a piece of steel wool. When the wire was pulled, a connection was made with the battery
,
and the steel wool ignited. The burning metal would then ignite the magnesium flare.

Bishop couldn’t improve the dev
ices, so he decided to leave them
just as they were. What he did do was rig the three flares together. After burning for 10 to 15 seconds, the first flare would burn through the trip wire for the next device. In less than a minute, all three of the bright red warning devices should be ca
using concern to the men below. I
t was a simple matter to connect a time delay to the first flare. Bishop removed his roll of duct tape from his pack and tore off a
three-foot
long strip. One of the hundreds of uses for this sort of tape was making a torch. Duct tape burned very slowly and was fairly consistent. Bishop rolled his adhoc fuse into a tigh
t line and left it ready to light,
as the last step before moving off.

The snipers
most likely had laser range finders
,
and Bishop k
new it was critical to keep those guys
occupied. Failure to do so would probably result
in a rather large piece of high-
velocity lead slamming into his body. To avoid this unpleasant outcome, Bishop rigged the truck
’
s radar detector where the beams from the lasers below would pass by the device. The little black case contained
LED-warning
lights to alert the speeding motorist
s
when a police radar or laser unit was nearby. Bishop h
oped it would issue a similar warning regarding the snipers’
equipment. Moving carefully, he strategically placed the broken pieces of mirror where they would catch the flashing white lights from the detector. With any luck, the mirrors would make the blinking lights look like muzzle flashes to the people below. He stood back and wa
l
ked through it in his mind. The flares would cause the snipers to scan the ridge. The m
irrors would reflect the flares’
light and would look unusual to the snipers below. They would scan the area with their range finders, setting off the
detector. The detector’s
white lights would reflect in the mirrors
,
and hopefully look like muzzle flashes to the men below. Bishop rubbed his chin
, concerned the whole plan reminded him of a Rube Goldberg cartoon mousetrap,
but couldn’t come up with anything better.

Worried about his laser contraption, he decided redundancy was in order. His solution was to tape a few of his
precious,
remaining cartridges to each flar
e. Being careful not to trigger the device and
blow off one of his fingers, he slowly wrapped each round so that its primer was
positioned
against the tube of the flare. As the heat from the flare reached the primer, the round should explode
,
causing a lot of noise and not much else.
Hopefully, t
o the people below, it would sound like a gunshot.