Surviving the Dead (Book 7): The Killing Line (21 page)

It was a cylinder of galvanized steel, four inches in diameter, driven into the ground and reinforced from the inside with a stanchion braced at a forty-five degree angle. I pushed on the post. It did not budge, so I tried pulling on it. To my surprise, it moved a centimeter or two in my direction. I smiled in the darkness. The fence was strongly resistant to anything pushing against it, such as a horde of ravening infected, but it was not designed to resist being pulled in the other direction.

Working quickly, I drew my Bowie knife and dug at the dirt around the base of the post. It was still soft from being tilled up earlier and packed in by hand. In just a couple of minutes I had removed enough dirt to destabilize the post if pulled toward me. I moved down the line and did the same with two more posts, staying low and keeping my head on a swivel. When I finished, I backed off and asked Hicks if there was anyone close by. He said there was not. I told him to keep his finger on the trigger, stood up, and hopped into the back of a wagon less than ten feet from the prisoners.

“Anything?” I asked into the radio.

“Nothing,” Hicks said. “No one noticed.”

I let out a slow breath. “Stand by.”

The fabric of the wagon cover made a faint zipping sound as I cut a long vertical slash from the top of the canopy to the bottom. The material fell open, revealing the top of a fence post about chest level to me if I stood on a wooden crate along the wall of the cargo area. I stepped up onto the crate, grabbed the top of the fence, and leapt out and upward as high as I could. My left boot scraped the topmost cable as I cleared it and fell down the opposite side. It was a nine-foot drop, so rather than try to absorb the impact on a pair of knees nearing their forty-second year of service, I did a paratrooper’s tumble and came up in a crouch, ears straining. My suppressed Beretta pistol was in my hand. I did not remember drawing it.

Seconds passed. I heard no one approaching. Behind me, I heard the prisoners speaking to each other in frightened whispers. Someone was weeping, but it was muffled, as if she were holding something over her face.

I keyed the radio. “Eagle, how am I doing?”

“So far, so good.”

“Copy.”

Now was the time for bold action. I slipped out of my ghillie suit, rolled it up, and lashed it to the back of my belt. That done, I went to work on the fence, first detaching the cables from their clips on two of the posts I had loosened and then pushing them over as much as I could. Once the posts were detached, I could plant a foot on one cable, pull up on another, and open it enough for a person to slip through.

It’ll have to do
.

I was about to move to the entrance of the one of the prisoners’ wagons when my earpiece crackled.

“Alpha, you got inbound.”

Shit.
“How many?”

“Just one, but he’s armed.”

“Keep me posted.”

I went to my belly, rolled under the wagon, and lay on my back with the Beretta clutched to my chest. The swish of legs pushing through grass grew steadily louder until a raider with a pistol in his hand came into view. The wagon creaked as he grabbed a handrail and stepped up onto the buckboard.

“Rise and shine,” a rough voice said. “Vacation’s over. Time to start the party.”

I rolled out from under the wagon, stood, and holstered the Beretta. For what I was about to do, the gun was a liability. I could not risk shooting one of the prisoners. So I drew my knife, held it in a concealing grip along the back of my forearm, and stepped up into the wagon.

In situations like this I knew the key to success was acting as if I belonged, as if I owned the place, as if my actions were perfectly planned and logical and I had every reason to be where I was and to do what I was doing. I kept the knife hidden as I pressed my way into the wagon’s narrow cargo hold. Inside, in the dim light from fires farther within the camp, I saw the bulky outline of a man crouched in front of me and the dirty, frightened faces of eight women of varying ages, each one bound hand and foot with ropes tied to iron rings driven into the floor of the wagon.

“Hey Smith, that you?” I said, gambling that out of two-hundred or so men at least one of them was named Smith.

The bulky form barely looked over his shoulder. “No. Smith is on patrol. What’re you doing here?”

I pushed farther into the wagon until I was within arm’s reach of the other man. “Somebody must have gotten their wires crossed. You here to get the girls?”

“Yeah, Carter sent me. How about you go to the other-”

He never got a chance to finish his sentence. I grabbed one of his shoulders, raised the Bowie knife, and plunged it into the base of his skull with all the force I could muster. The raider’s body stiffened and twitched as I pulled him close to me, then I eased him to the floor and placed a finger over my lips. One of the prisoners opened her mouth to scream, but an older woman sitting across from her lunged forward, pressed a hand over her mouth, and hissed at her to shut the fuck up.

When the girl went quiet, the older woman looked at me. “Who are you?”

“I’m with the Army,” I said. “I’m here to get you out of this place. But we have to move quickly.”

“The Army?” another woman said. “Is this a rescue?”

“Yes,” I said impatiently and looked to the older woman. “Can you get them moving?”

She nodded and began hissing orders. I cut loose her bindings and handed her a pocket knife so she could help me do the same for the others. In less than a minute, they were all free.

The women seemed to regard the older woman as a leader and did as she said. I cut a slit in the side of the wagon facing away from the campfires, hopped out, and began helping women to the ground. I told the first one of them to hold the cables open so the others could get outside the fence. She moved to comply. As each prisoner emerged I whispered to them to stay quiet, pointed out which wagon I wanted them to hide behind, and told them to stay there until I came for them.

The older woman came out last. “There are others,” she said.

“I know. Let’s get them.”

I led the way to the next wagon and kept a lookout while the old woman went inside. Hushed voices spoke in the darkness. I keyed the radio again.

“Eagle, Alpha Lead. How we doing?”

“Rider headed in from the north,” he replied. “Might be pertaining to the missing patrol.”

“Copy. Keep us covered. Just about done here.”

“Roger.”

Above me, the point of my pocket knife pierced the wagon’s cover and traveled downward. The older woman leaned out and motioned to me. I moved closer and helped the women from the wagon and told them where to go. There were supposed to be only thirteen of them, but I counted eighteen. Most looked like they had not been used too badly, but a few were in terrible shape. Bruised, bloody, eyes sunken, faces gaunt with fear, the haunted look of people who have given up hope for anything but a swift death. It occurred to me the raiders may have taken prisoners before finding Spike’s caravan. It also occurred to me what probably happened to them during that time.

Not now, Garrett. Focus.

I followed the last of the prisoners to the wagon where the others were hiding. To the old woman I said, “What’s your name?”

“Lynn. Lynn Bristol.”

“Okay, Lynn. Help me get these women into a single-file line.”

She did as I asked. When they were lined up and hunched low in the grass, I took a handful of infrared reflective patches from my vest and put one on the first girl in line, the fourth, eighth, twelfth, and the last.

“What’s this?” one of them asked.

“Reflector,” I said. “So the helicopter can see us from the air.”

“Helicopter? There’s a helicopter coming?”

“Yes,” I said, and moved on. The girl had more questions but Lynn hushed her.

“Stay quiet, girl. Do you want to get us all killed?”

The girl shut her mouth.

Finished with the patches, I pressed the transmit key. “All stations, Alpha Lead. Have eighteen souls. Repeat eighteen souls. We are outbound at this time. Alpha Strike, begin your approach. All other stations, wait for my mark.”

To the prisoners, I said, “Time to go. Follow me, and make sure you keep a hand on the back of the person in front of you. If you get separated I won’t have time to go back for you, so stay close. And for God’s sake, keep your heads down. There’s about to be a very large number of bullets flying around us very, very soon. So stay low. Let’s move.”

The woman at the front of the line grabbed the back of my belt and held on tightly. I pressed through the grass as quickly as I thought the prisoners could keep up. The grass around me was a washed-out shade of white through the filter of my IR goggles. The sky overhead was a yawning ocean of grayish-black. I saw a rider gallop into camp about seventy yards to my right. Bad news. The raiders would soon know about the missing patrol, and not long after, would probably notice the prisoners were gone.

“Come on,” I hissed as loud as I dared. “We have to move faster.”

To their credit, the women redoubled their efforts. As difficult as this was for me, it was undoubtedly twice as hard for them. They did not have the benefit of IR goggles and a radio. For them, the world was only darkness and grass pulling at them and pain in their legs and backs as they tried to run in a low crouch in a direction they could not see. I smelled sweat and heard harsh breathing behind me. The women were afraid, and were right to be.

Static. “Cat’s out of the bag, Alpha Lead,” Hicks said. “Over.”

“Alpha Strike,” I radioed, “tell me something good.”

“Inbound, Alpha Lead. One mike. Over.”

“Do you have us on FLIR?”

“Affirmative.”

“Light up the target area as soon as you’re in range. All other stations, commence attack when you see the tracers.”

Lanning, Clark, Greer, and Duncan acknowledged. Hicks did not because he was too busy moving the horses to the rendezvous, as per the plan. Or at least I hoped he was.

I managed to drag the prisoners maybe forty more yards before the sound of rotors chopped the air above me. The whine and thump of the Chinook passed overhead, banked southward, and a second later, the light from the minigun’s tracers flashed against the sides of my IR goggles’ display. I heard a sound like a great angry insect pounding its wings impossibly fast from the direction of the chopper, and an instant later, Lanning’s voice came over the radio.

“Fire at will.”

The command was unnecessary, but it probably made Lanning feel better to say it. I did not have long to dwell on the subject. Two grenades hit the raider camp with a pair of echoing
whumps
I could feel in the pit of my chest. Then two more came in the space of a few seconds, hitting a different part of the encampment. By the screams and hoarse shouts of panicked command, I guessed the raiders were now in disarray. The thrum of the Chinook passed northward and I heard the minigun let loose with another volley. The sound brought to mind a number of instances over the years when I had seen what miniguns could do.

The minigun on the Chinook was an M134 chambered in 7.62 NATO, the same round fired from most standard military-issue sniper rifles—a cartridge powerful enough to take a man’s head off at well over six-hundred yards. And the M134 could pour them out at 3000 rounds a minute, or 50 rounds per second. Furthermore, because of its Gatling-style cyclical firing system consisting of rotating gun bolts and barrels, the M134 is highly stable and produces virtually zero recoil. The result of this is a relentless hail of lethally dense and frighteningly accurate fire with a hit rate nine times higher than that of most other forms of machine guns. And the results are nothing short of devastating. Miniguns can instantly turn vehicles into shattered, perforated wrecks, reduce human beings to puddles of red paste, and even worse, can quickly and easily transition from one target to another. Combine these capabilities with FLIR, an acronym for forward-looking infrared night-vision technology, and the raiders didn’t stand a chance.

My radio crackled. “All stations, Alpha Strike. Be advised, hostiles are scattering. Some are headed toward your positions.”

I activated the GPS transponder on my radio. “All stations, Alpha Lead. GPS is online. Repeat, GPS is online. Converge on my position. Alpha Strike, see if you can keep these assholes off our backs long enough to reach the extraction site.”

“Roger that, Alpha Lead.”

The Chinook moved ahead of us and began flying a wide, meandering circle, occasionally letting off small bursts of fire. To the raiders it probably looked like the aircrew was chasing down survivors. In reality, they were trying to cover us without giving away our positions.

The next ten minutes were a slog. The Chinook roared overhead, its noise growing and waning as it moved closer and farther away. Lanning and his men radioed to let me know they were on my flanks at twenty meter intervals, SAW gunners inside, grenadiers on the wings. I acknowledged and kept moving. The hand on my belt did not let go, and the labored breathing of the women behind me grew no less desperate. Twice I had to stop when I felt a tug and looked back to see that someone had fallen. The others had them on their feet in seconds and we continued on our way. Finally, the treeline at the edge of the field loomed ahead.

“Eagle, Alpha lead. You got a visual on us?”

“Affirmative,” Hicks said. “Keep your heads down. Might have to shoot over top of you.”

“Copy. What about the assault team?”

“Got them too.”

“Any hostiles close?”

A short pause. “Not close enough to be a concern at the moment. Probably change when the helo touches down.”

“Can you do anything about them?”

“Sure. Hug the dirt for a minute.”

I stopped and ordered the prisoners to get down. For a moment, they just stared. I gestured emphatically and hissed louder than I felt safe doing. 

“Get on the fucking ground!”

This time they obeyed. For a few seconds there was nothing. Then came a muted crack and a sharp cry in the darkness. Two more shots followed the first, but there were no more shouts.

“Let me guess,” I said into the radio. “One center-of-mass and two head shots.”

There was a smile in Hicks’ voice. “You’re in the wrong line of work, amigo. Should have been a detective.”

“We clear?”

“For the moment.”

Good enough
. “Okay,” I said to the prisoners. “On your feet. We’re almost there.”

The women rose, Lynn said something low and terse, and we got moving. I spotted the flash of Hicks’ IR patch and pointed at him to let him know I had his position. He acknowledged by clicking his radio once. I headed to a spot of open ground roughly fifty yards away from him, told the women to lie down flat, and radioed the aircrew.

“Alpha Strike, Alpha Lead. We are go for extraction. Repeat, go for extraction.”

“Copy Alpha Lead. En route, less than one mike.”

“Roger.”

And then I waited with my belly to the earth, the smell of damp vegetable rot in my nose, and thought how I had noticed over the years that the ground smelled differently in different parts of the world. In Iraq it had been dry and acrid, redolent with chemicals in places, and in others, tinged by the faint dust of things dead for millennia. In the Philippines, it had been hot and pungent. In Germany, cool and vaguely sweet smelling. Here in Kansas, the odor reminded me of corn chips, which I found very odd. And it made me want corn chips.

The sound of the Chinook grew louder until it was directly overhead. The pilot lowered it gracefully to the ground, the weight of its dark bulk settling gently onto the landing gear. I looked up and saw the cargo door open and the gunner beckoning at us.

“Time to go,” I shouted above the roar of rotor wash. I stood up and pulled at the woman closest to me. She passed the message down the line, and in a few seconds, everyone was on their feet and running. There was no point in stealth anymore. Between the noise of the chopper and the wind tossing the grass like waves in a hurricane, anyone in shooting distance was going to know exactly where we were. Our best ally now was speed.

I led the way to the chopper holding the hand of the woman I had helped stand. She held the hand of the woman behind her, and so on and so forth. Someone in the chopper turned on a red light that was just barely bright enough to penetrate the gloom. The prisoners saw it and ran for it at a dead sprint. As soon as they were within ten feet of the chopper the light went out.

I took up position on the opposite side of the door from the gunner and urged the women into the cargo bay. Some of them had trouble due to injuries. The gunner helped me lift them bodily and set them inside where the others waited to haul them to a seat. When the last of the women were in, Lanning appeared behind me. I had not noticed him approach because I had been too busy with what I was doing, which I knew was a mistake.

Berate yourself later
.

The gunner tapped me on the arm. “Give me a hand.”

I nodded and grabbed Lanning by the arm. “Cover us for a minute.”

He gave a thumbs up and began barking at his men. I followed the gunner inside.

“Gotta get these crates out of here,” he said as loudly as he could. “Won’t be enough room otherwise.”

I held up a thumb and pushed my way to the back of the chopper. The gunner and I hauled the empty crates to the door and pushed them unceremoniously out onto the field. That done, the gunner motioned to Lanning.

“Let’s go!”

Lanning touched his knuckles to my arm as I climbed out. When I looked at him, he nodded once. I nodded back and then sprinted toward the treeline. Behind me, the Chinook lifted off and carried its payload of damaged humanity off into the safety of the endless night sky. It was headed north. Any raiders in earshot would be looking in that direction, so when I reached Hicks and the horses, we rode west.

“Gotta put some miles behind us,” Hicks said.

I looked back and saw the young soldier had released three of the captured horses and was using the fourth as a pack animal. “At least we’re not on foot.”

“Yep. There is that.”

We spoke no more until dawn.