Ranger (The Bugging Out Series Book 5) (8 page)

“They’re not planning to land,” Enderson said. “They’re on a reconnaissance flight.”

They...

It was safe to assume that the ‘they’ looking down on us from above were at least related to what had happened to me. In the hollowed out world as it was, there weren’t enough of our kind to make coincidences even possible.

“I’ve got to inform the captain,” Enderson said, then he ended the call.

I nodded with the phone against my cheek and listened for a few minutes more until the sound of the aircraft faded to nothing.

“What do you think they want?” Elaine wondered aloud. “It can’t be the cure for the blight. We already passed that along. It’s no secret.”

“Maybe they don’t know that,” I said.

“You don’t sound convinced of that.”

“I’m not,” I told her.

“Then what? Why spy on us?”

I thought for a moment. A half dozen answers rattled about in my thoughts, but one kept sticking.

“To look for weaknesses,” I said.

Elaine looked to the sky again, nodding.

“Only one reason to do that,” she said.

She was right.

“To prepare for an attack,” I said.

I
hated being apart from her.

“I think we should hold here,” Nick Withers said to me, his voice hushed.

I nodded and stopped behind the splintered trunk of a tree, most of its limbs snapped off and turning to pasty dust on the still barren forest floor. Nick moved a few yards further and lowered to one knee next to a mound of beefy, jagged rocks.

“I’ve got east and north,” I said.

“East and south,” Nick replied.

We were on the eastern perimeter of the town, a half hour past sundown, enough light remaining that we could see a hundred yards or more through the thinning woods beyond our position. Behind us, to the west, was Bandon, and an array of checkpoints to provide a more robust defense than the roving patrols could manage. Patrols like the one I was on.

And Elaine.

She was somewhere to the north, paired with Private Quincy, doing much the same that Nick and I were—staking a forward position for a while and scanning our slice of the pie. Observing. Searching. Hoping to find nothing, but almost certain that something was out there. Some
one
was out there.

A lot of someones.

Elaine and I had worked every patrol together until now, the luck of assignments catching up with us. Or, maybe, it was Schiavo and Lorenzen deciding that a husband and wife should not be placed together on every occasion. The captain and her sergeant were taking very seriously the needs of the town as a whole, with that paramount over personal wishes and aversions of the residents as individuals. Reluctant as I was, I had to yield to whatever they believed was best.

Just a few minutes after Nick and I took up our position, I was as thankful as could be that Elaine was not with me when muzzle flashes blazed in the woods to the east and south, bullets whizzing over our head, rounds chewing into the wasting stand of fir and pine that surrounded us.

“Contact!” I shouted out of habit, though no warning was necessary. “Covering!”

My AR came up, no suppressor on the muzzle, the sight picture I found in the distance just a mix of vague shapes and hellish incoming. I squeezed off three bursts and rolled to the right to a nearby tree, its trunk more stout than the one I’d chosen before. It was then that I saw Nick huddled against the rocky mound he’d been planted himself at, tucked into a ball as rounds splintered off shards of rock.

“Nick!”

He didn’t respond. The twenty-seven year old grease monkey, who was more at ease with a ratchet in hand than the grip of an AK-47, simply shivered, his weapon pulled tight to his chest.

“Nick!” I shouted his name again. “Lay some fire!”

The young man’s eyes came up, finding mine, his body trembling, from a cold that was not external. This shiver that afflicted him came from a wave of utter terror that had drenched him, penetrating to the bone. He was nearly catatonic.

I knelt behind the tree and fired the rest of my mag toward the muzzle flashes, too distant and obscured by the darkening woods to give me any clear sight picture. I dropped the empty and inserted a fresh magazine, chambering the first round and squeezing off a series of single shots before dashing to the rocky covering which shielded Nick. Incoming rounds kicked up dust and dirt a yard or two behind me.

“Nick, can you hear me?”

I hunkered down in the shelter of the sharp boulders and grabbed him by the coat collar.

“Nick!”

Finally, he showed some response, his gaze angling up at me as a flurry of rounds pecked at the far side of the rocks. I looked into his eyes and saw none of what I needed to at that moment. There was no fight in them. Nearly no life at all. Just a blank window to what the sudden eruption of terror had done to the man.

He was helpless.

I leaned left and fired to the east at the extreme north end of the force that was out there, muzzle flashes defining the limit of their line. Or the limit they were allowing me to see. In minutes they could move further north and flank the position we held. There would be no cover from such a move. No tactics to thwart it. We’d be overrun.

“Nick, we’ve gotta move,” I told the young man, shaking him by the collar. “Due west. You hear me? We’ve got to run. Right through the trees.”

He didn’t react at all. I grabbed the AK from him and tossed it aside. I was going to have to drag him clear of the attack we were facing, and all his weapon was now was dead weight that I would have to move with us.

“We’re moving, Nick. Do you understand?”

Again I shook him, with no effect, then I drew my hand back and swung the gloved palm across his face. The impact jolted him, his body shuddering as though some electric shock had run through it. His head swiveled left and right, his gaze finally settling on me. There was life in his eyes again, I could see. At least partially, Nick Withers was back with me.

“We’re gonna move, Nick, okay?”

He looked left and right, cringing instinctively as incoming fire bracketed our position, already dead trees threatening to topple as their wasted trunks were chewed away by the unrelenting streams of bullets.

“Nick?”

Again he fixed on me and nodded.

“Stay down and when I grab you we move west, got it?”

“Got-got-got it.”

The fear-induced stutter at least told me that he was processing what I’d said to him, which meant, hopefully, that I wouldn’t be hauling dead weight through the woods back toward town.

More fire shifted north. The force out there was moving to flank us. And I was beginning to hear voices in the distance. Commands being given. In English. For a moment I was grateful that the Russian force we’d decimated along the Alaskan coast hadn’t reconstituted and followed us home seeking revenge. But I quickly realized that American bullets would make us dead just as quickly as Russian ones, and it was time to make our move before that happened.

A final time I leaned left past the rocks and fired off bursts at the enemy’s northern advance. My AR ran dry and I let it drop to hang from the sling across my chest.

“Now!”

I grabbed Nick and pulled him away from cover, pushing him ahead, his own feet propelling him through the trees as we weaved left and right around the trunks, chunks of decaying wood spraying down from above as incoming rounds struck high.

“Move!”

Thankful that I wasn’t having to drag a catatonic friend away from the danger zone, I urged him on, reloading as I ran nearly alongside. A hundred yards into our retreat, with sporadic fire still whizzing past, I halted briefly, motioning for Nick to keep moving. I brought my AR up from where I stopped next to a knot of young pines that would never reach maturity. By the time I had it aimed in the direction of the enemy, the incoming fire stopped. Just ended. As if a cease fire order had been given.

I held that position, ready to cover any pursuit, not hoping to stop any such advance by the enemy, but to delay it until reinforcements could arrive. There was no doubt in my mind that the firefight had been heard, at least on the eastern end of town. The three checkpoints there, all hardwired into the phone system, would have reported what was happening. Help would come.

As it turned out, none was needed.

Five minutes after I’d halted my retreat the first backup arrived, Sergeant Lorenzen and Private Quincy, with a half dozen armed civilians in tow.

“Where are they?” Lorenzen asked.

I pointed east and drew a sweeping arc to the south.

“Some were moving north when we broke contact,” I said. “I sent Nick Withers toward town. He was—”

“Pretty shaken up,” Lorenzen said.

“We sent two shooters back to town with him,” Quincy said.

“How many are out there, Fletch?”

I looked to the sergeant before answering his question.

“Too many.”

Lorenzen stood with me for a moment as Quincy directed the civilians to form a defensive line. We waited for five minutes, then ten, the sound of more reinforcements arriving behind us rising. Twenty minutes after the last bullet had been fired we were a force of fifty, including Schiavo.

“Enderson has a reaction force in town ready to move if this was just a feint,” the captain said.

Lorenzen thought for a second, then shook his head.

“The truth is, Captain, I don’t know what this is.”

Schiavo walked past her sergeant a few yards, into the no man’s land ahead of our line.

“Fletch,” she said, and I walked forward to join her.

“Yeah?”

“Do you think they were waiting for you, or do you think they were on the move first?”

“I have no idea,” I answered. “It just became a lead throwing contest, and they were the winner.”

Schiavo nodded and surveyed the darkening woods to the east.

“Good.”

“Captain,” I said, not understanding her appraisal of what had just happened. “How is any of this ‘good’?”

“Because we know they’re out there now,” she answered. “And they know we know.”

“W
e’re forming a town defense council,” Mayor Allen announced to those he’d gathered in the conference room at the town hall. “I’m asking everyone here to be part of it.”

The message had come by phone. A simple request early in the morning, when Elaine and I were sitting down to breakfast after a full night’s sleep, which followed a six-hour shift at an eastern checkpoint, together this time. After the engagement I’d been involved in, with Nick Withers at my side, I suspected that Elaine had initiated some contact with either Schiavo or Sergeant Lorenzen, and arranged, through begging or force of logic, that she and I should be paired on any assignment going forward. The latter, a carefully and forcefully presented argument, was the catalyst, I knew. Begging was not in her nature.

I had to say I was pleased. The incident with Nick, where his presence became more hindrance than help, had driven home the already known reality that we were only as strong as our weakest link. Out there, in the dead woods, he’d been the liability that could have gotten us both killed. If that had been the intent.

I didn’t believe for a moment that it was.

“What are we going to defend against?”

The question I posed seemed to take Schiavo, Martin, Mayor Allen, and even Elaine by surprise.

“You were out there, Fletch,” Mayor Allen said.

“I was. And there was a good force in the woods shooting at us.”

The puzzled gazes zeroed in on me, as if I was speaking from a place where amnesia had robbed me of recollections of recent events.

“Do you want to clarify your thoughts on this for us?” Schiavo asked,

I clenched my right hand into a fist atop the table, the contraction forcing an annoying throb to stab at the place where my arm had been violated.

“This is Bandon,” I said, then tapped with my free hand to points around my fist on three sides. “And we’ve had movement reports from here, here, and here and the exchange in the woods. Multiple contacts over the past few days.”

“Indicating testing of our defenses,” Schiavo said.

I nodded. And they waited, not following where I was going. To be honest, I hadn’t even considered the possibility of the conclusion I had come to until Elaine and I were just arriving at the meeting. Outside, Nick Withers stood, pistol on his hip, guarding the entrance to the town hall. Mayor Allen had asked for him to fill that position I knew, not wanting the young man’s failings in the firefight to beat down his morale. As Martin had said, we needed everyone, even those who might not perform at the highest standard. To that end, Nick Withers, mechanic extraordinaire and lackluster soldier, was being given a task through which he could contribute, and feel as though he was contributing to the town’s safety and security.

Looking at him as we entered, as he smiled and nodded and held the door open for Elaine and me, I thought very plainly that he should not be here. That I should not be here. The both of us should have died in the woods.

But we didn’t.

“How many do you think there are out there?” I asked. “Realistically.”

We’d battled our way up the coast of Alaska against a force of Russians that numbered fewer than two dozen. This was a world where armies, however mighty they once had been, were reduced to units only a fraction of their intended size. We were a town of just over 800, with maybe 100 that could be considered battle worthy at some level, with another 75 or 80 who could take up arms in a reserve capacity if things became desperate. But we were stationary, in a fixed position, and reasonably well supplied. Whoever was out there, in and beyond the woods and hills, was mobile. They’d come here, and whatever supply line they had was certainly extended. I knew this, and so did Schiavo.

“Seventy, maybe eighty,” the captain answered.

“We outnumber them,” I said.

“They have some support and better arms,” Schiavo reminded me.

“And air assets,” Elaine added, curious along with the others as to where I was going with this.