The Jared Chronicles | Book 4 | The Devil's Bastion, page 19
part #4 of The Jared Chronicles Series
“Well?” Carnegie pushed.
“I don’t know. I mean, we can’t trust anyone who trades sides, period,” Josh replied, his face pinched in thought.
“Exactly,” Carnegie agreed. “After this is over, you can take him somewhere and shoot him. I’d say do it now, but we may have more questions leading up to our final assault.”
For reasons unknown to Josh, the thought of shooting this Barry guy didn’t sit well with him. He’d have to do it while the man was unarmed, which wasn’t the most honorable way to take a life, but Josh had killed Kemper’s murderer in the same manner, and that hadn’t bothered him a bit.
“Yeah, after or right before, I’ll take care of him,” Josh murmured distantly.
“Any word from the boys back at the motor pool? We need more vehicles. This is taking way too long,” Carnegie griped, changing the subject.
Josh shook his head; he hadn’t been back to the base and wasn’t in contact with the men in the rear via radio.
Carnegie dropped into his chair, staring at the tabletop, his reptilian eyes darting about as if searching for something on the table’s surface. “Maybe we should drive back, just the two of us, and shoot the first guy we see standing around doing nothing.” Carnegie’s eyes rose to meet Josh’s. “I bet I’d have five working vehicles by day’s end.”
Josh remained stone faced. His boss’s actions were at some point going to turn the men and women on the both of them. It would only take one person to step up and take on a leadership role to start the ball rolling on a coup. Even Josh realized America as he knew it was gone and not coming back. Somehow, he’d found himself attached to Carnegie in what had seemed like a legitimate mission to rebuild the country when the solar flare had first struck. Now though, Josh felt like he was part of a regional power grab more than anything else. He needed to come to terms with this or move on; those were his choices.
“Well, tell me what this asshole had to say,” Carnegie said, motioning to the other chair.
Josh took a seat and laid out every detail Barry had divulged during his interview turned interrogation. Carnegie was silent throughout the entire briefing, nodding twice and grunting once when Josh outlined the ambush John planned in order to thin Carnegie’s troop numbers. When Josh was finished, Carnegie steepled his hands, thought about what he’d been told, then blew out a long breath.
“John will change that plan, but tell the men on the OPs to stay alert all the same,” Carnegie groused.
Josh dipped his chin in agreement. “Done.”
By noon, Jared’s body was aching from lying in the same position for so long. The sun had warmed his cold body to the point of being slightly overheated, but still, the stiffness lingered in his muscles. Jared rolled carefully over to his stomach, rolling his shoulders and bending his legs to ease the pain he felt in his hips and knees. He pulled himself back to the fence post, withdrew the binoculars, and took a calculated peek in the direction of the OP.
The soldiers were in the same place as before, only now one of the men had a set of binoculars pressed to his eyes, scanning the pastures in Jared’s direction. Jared didn’t know for sure Barry had spilled his guts to Carnegie, but whether Barry had betrayed them or not, the colonel didn’t strike Jared as a welcoming-type fellow. Jared figured Barry might even now be regretting his free agency move.
Jared stared at the two soldiers in the OP for a few moments longer before laying the binoculars in the grass next to the fence post and rolling back on his side. He unzipped and with some effort relieved himself while lying on his side, a thing he’d never done in his life. Finished, Jared wished he could wash his hands, but settled for wiping them on the front of his pant legs. Zipped up, wiped off, and feeling better now that his bladder was empty, Jared rolled onto his back, looking into the blue skies above. There were a few wispy cirrus clouds high above the earth, but other than these heavenly striations, which amounted to little more than white streaks, the sky was blue.
Jared lay on his back, allowing his body to relax, taking his mind off the brutally violent and gruesome task that was fast approaching. A bird soared high overhead as bugs clicked and buzzed all around him. The rest of the world didn’t seem to care that an entire species was at risk of going extinct. Jared guessed species of animal and plant life had been coming and going since the beginning of time, so the troubles humans were experiencing weren’t at all out of the ordinary.
Jared felt he and his fellow man were arrogant if they thought they were above the trends of nature. Nature had been a perpetual struggle for dominance since the beginning of time. Jared wondered if the billionaire using lobbyists to influence politicians in order to strengthen his position was any different from the plant that offered sweet fruit for a bird to eat, yet had a bitter seed so the bird would either spit the seed out as it flew across the land or leave it behind in its feces. This was a way for the plant to spread its seeds across the land, essentially colonizing the land with its offspring.
Bored, Jared reached out, retrieving the binoculars, and searched for Rip. Thirty seconds later he spotted the SEAL, a piece of grass hanging from the side of the SEAL’s mouth. Rip appeared as weary of the wait as Jared himself felt. Moving on, Jared searched for John, but gave up after two minutes of fruitlessly scanning the pastures. Replacing the optics, he lay back again, staring into the vast blueness overhead.
An hour later, Jared drank some water and ate a little dried fruit, real post-solar-flare dried fruit from the Thackers’ fruit trees. The fruit was moister than store-bought dried fruit had been, but there were specks of who knew what on the fruit. Jared could only imagine flies and other insects were the cause of these highly irregular spots, but as the months wore on, he’d come to turn a blind eye to a great many things he previously would have balked at when it came to his diet.
John lay several hundred yards from Jared, wishing he’d done a more detailed brief on how the ambush would be initiated. They had no plausible manner in which to communicate other than yelling or some other equally disqualifying method, so John asked that everyone be up and on target by late afternoon. When they heard his shot, they could commence the festivities. It was a lot to ask mostly untrained and unprofessional fighters, but it was all John had in light of their plans being turned over to their enemy.
A signal would have likely alerted the soldiers, thus reducing John and company’s advantage. John had even toyed with the idea of a get-ready signal sent from the house, but nixed this idea, feeling the first signal would alert the soldiers, which was the last thing he wanted. John felt confident Carnegie didn’t expect an attack, but John doubted the colonel hadn’t issued orders for his troops to be on a high level of alertness either.
After the beating John and the SEALs had given the soldiers a few months before, John was sure every soldier out there would take Carnegie’s warning to heart. John knew this was a double-edged sword in that the soldiers would be more vigilant. John was also banking on panic when the first few soldiers were torn to shreds later today, based on their memories of the past battle and how they had been so soundly outplayed considering they had outnumbered and outgunned John and the SEALs.
It was during this period of confusion and panic John and his friends planned on making good their escape. The period wouldn’t last long with Carnegie and Josh in their leadership positions. Josh would immediately refocus his forces, getting them back in the fight—John was sure of this. John estimated after he fired his last shot, it would take him and the others roughly five minutes to exit stage left. Once they reached the road, they could disappear into the hills on the west side, where the soldiers would have little chance of finding them.
John needed to relax his brain before this engagement. They had all been up most of the night and now all day, bringing their hours of sleep over the last thirty-six hours to near zero. John was mostly worried about Quinten since the older man had never been on an operation like this, making him an unproven piece on John’s game board. John wasn’t sure, but he put Quinten in his early to mid-fifties, and in John’s experience, there were no fifty-year-old men on the battlefield. Men either quit, unable to keep up the pace needed for modern warfighting, or they were killed. The latter was a simple case of mathematics: go into harm’s way enough and you were going to get it sooner or later.
Capitol buildings were filled with graybeards while the battlefield was comprised of fresh-faced young men willing to do the bidding of those graybeards. John, at thirty-six, had begun thinking of alternate employment before the solar flare swept everything away. Now he was thirty-seven, feeling fifty, and without the option of changing professions. John made a mental note to start relying on his brain more than his body in the future. If he could walk half a mile and shoot someone with a long-range rifle rather than run two miles and kill someone with his H&K 416, his body would last a hell of a lot longer.
Squinting up at the mostly blue sky, John was prompted to glance at his watch, 1507 hours and ticking. John wanted the ambush done in the light of day, but wished to have darkness standing close by in support should anything go dreadfully awry. John snorted, thinking, Gone are the days of owning the night. John was perfectly content embracing the night nowadays, but there just wasn’t much mankind owned any longer. Rolling onto his stomach, John pulled his binoculars to his eyes, frowning at the thought of Carnegie and his inability to realize this. If John had anything to do with the colonel’s future, he’d damn sure try like hell to make sure it would be a dim one.
If only the colonel weren’t such a product of the American war machine, things could be different. Carnegie knew only what he’d been raised, trained, and indoctrinated to know and do, which was invade, control through providing what he would sell as a better life, and if that didn’t work, force his will on the people. After all, it was the way America had fought all its recent wars, wasn’t it? Invade, kill anyone who resists, set up, and begin the re-education. It was why men held small seemingly useless towns while schools were built even before politics were sorted out. Americans built the schools and controlled what was taught in them.
John sighed, thinking, Pointing dogs point, and Carnegie was a pointing dog, that was for sure. The soldiers in front of his position were back on the binoculars, telling John Barry had told Carnegie everything. He watched the two men for several minutes before swinging his optics to the left in search of Rip’s targets. Rip’s targets were not difficult to locate in the bright afternoon sunlight. These two soldiers sat swatting at flies, not bothering to use their binoculars. John needed the day’s monotony to dull the soldiers’ senses, tire them out, and make the ambush such a departure from the soldiers’ norm that they would be rendered impotent when John and his friends attacked.
Stephani fidgeted in her position, having had the urge to pee for the past several hours, but when she pulled her binoculars to her eyes, she saw Jared staring her way. Modesty from the old days wasn’t shed easily. Stephani didn’t think Jared was gawking at her, waiting for that time she shed her britches, but still she felt compelled to hold it in. She knew this simply wouldn’t do and that she would have to relieve herself prior to the ambush or run the risk of wetting herself either in all the excitement or during their exfiltration from the area.
Well, she thought, it’s now or never, as she drew the optics to her face again, first in Jared’s direction, then in Quinten’s. Neither man was paying her a bit of attention, so she did what would have previously been the unthinkable. Lying on her side, she relieved the pressure on her bladder, thinking what all the attorneys from her former life would think of her if they could see this spectacle of unwomanly bathroom etiquette. “Fuck ’em,” she murmured under her breath. All those judgmental sons of bitches were dead anyway. She was the one alive, and it was a direct result of her being willing to do things like she was doing right here in the dirt.
Finished, she cleaned up with tissue she never traveled without, before pulling up and fastening her belt, after which she felt a hundred times better, both physically and mentally. Remembering Jared and Quinten, she brought the binoculars back up, but both men were lying on their backs, appearing to stare at the skies above. Stephani reoriented the optics in the direction of her future targets. The soldiers she saw were not the same ones she’d seen less than an hour ago. They must have changed shifts or something, she thought, focusing the optics for a better look at the two new soldiers in front of her.
The soldiers were not men, but two women, one white and the second darker complected. Stephani’s breath caught at the thought of killing two women. She tried shaking the thought away to no avail. The men in her group shot and killed other men, and although Jared always seemed to regret having to take a human life, even he got over it, working through the event in his own way.
Watching the sun drift westward across the vastness of the clear blue afternoon skies brought on a tightening in Stephani’s chest. A tension gripped her body as her brain began a premature processing of events to come. Nothing had happened, yet here she was a ball of nerves, her hands shaking slightly as she held them out for inspection. Stephani flexed her hands into fists, hoping the inert open hand position was the source of the shaking and that when her hands were formed into tightly balled fists, the shaking would vanish. It did not. She tried jiggling her trembling limbs, and still they quivered in the warm afternoon sun. Stephani felt a chill not commensurate with the ambient temperature outside and pulled her coat tighter around her throat.
Feeling vulnerable, Stephani laid a hand on her rifle, immediately feeling its nearly hot surface. The black weapon lay exposed to the sun’s rays and sent a shock of hot relief through Stephani’s hands, straight to her brain. Quickly she grasped the weapon in both hands, drinking in the warmth emanating from its surface. The transfer of heat was therapy at its highest levels, a sort of antidote to her mind’s attempts to drive Stephani into a state of panic before a single shot had been fired.
After ten minutes, Stephani felt better again. Her hands, although still shaking, weren’t rattling her knuckles like they had been ten minutes prior. She lay in the dirt, breathing in through her nose and out through her mouth, a technique she remembered from a yoga class she’d taken before the solar flare.
Off to the west of Stephani, Quinten lay on his side, his hip aching from lying on the hard ground for such a prolonged period of time. He was too old to be crawling around on the ground like some child. He wanted to get up and stretch his legs to the point of nearly doing it. He briefly entertained the idea of crawling out of the area to where he could stand and not be seen, but quickly saw the issues that could arise from such a rash move.
Quinten busied himself with practicing what John had taught him about the rifle he’d brought out for the fight. The weapon was quite simple to operate, and Quinten realized quickly why the military had chosen it for battle. He flicked the safety on and off, pulled the charging handle out of place, but didn’t cycle the bolt to the rear for fear of making too much noise. The dust cover was closed, and without cycling the bolt, it would remain in the closed position. Quinten pulled the rifle to his shoulder and sighted in on the ranch far to his rear, using the rear sight’s larger aperture.
There was no light on the rifle, a bare-bones version of the weapon with only what was needed to send rounds downrange. The weapon was lighter than Quinten’s antediluvian lever-action rifle, held more rounds, and had a better sighting system. Maybe after today, he would ask John for this rifle and put the old lever-action coyote killer out to pasture. The rifle John had given him was also fitted with a sling, which Quinten liked—a lot. His lever-action rifle didn’t have one, which meant the rifle was either in his hand or leaning against something at all times.
Having the weapon hanging off his body, always within easy reach, was a clear advantage even an old-timer like Quinten could appreciate. Tiring of fiddling with the weapon, Quinten groaned softly as he rolled onto his back, thinking about Cody, his son. He wondered how Calvin and the boy were faring with the cattle. He hoped they hadn’t run afoul of any folks out looking for a handout.
Quinten wanted to think the people living in the hills were already self-sufficient, not the type to take advantage of a situation, but he knew better. Calvin was an old man, and if something bad fell upon the two, Quinten felt certain Cody would be on his own. Quinten frowned to himself; he wasn’t prone to worrying about Cody, hadn’t been since his son turned ten years old. Before that, Quinten had schooled Cody in the ways of ranching, making sure the boy was ready when he turned ten to take a rifle and responsibly go out on his own and hunt small game.
After Cody’s tenth birthday, Quinten had taken to a nudging style of parenting, keeping Cody on track, but allowing the boy to make a few mistakes. Cody turned out to be a well-rounded young man, doing well in school, playing both football and running track. At home he was respectful and a hard worker. Cody enjoyed the outdoors more that Quinten himself did, so why now was he worrying about the young man? Quinten surmised maybe it was his own impending clash that had him overthinking things. He tried clearing his head as he inched himself up out of the small ditch he lay in to peer in the direction of the soldiers to his front.
His eyes weren’t what they’d once been, causing Quinten to fumble for his binoculars. Focusing the optics, he found the soldiers. One of the soldiers was doing the same thing Quinten was, staring back in his direction with a pair of binoculars. Quinten slowly lowered himself back out of view, his heart racing at the thought of being discovered.
He knew they were all going to be discovered eventually, but the table would hopefully be tilted at such a steep angle in their favor, it wouldn’t much matter. Calm down, he told himself, laying a hand reassuringly on the rifle. Quinten wanted to take another look, but held back, figuring if he’d been spotted, there would have been shouts, possibly gunshots and more. No, he’d just lie in the dirt, his hips, back, and half a dozen other body parts stiff and aching, waiting for the late afternoon to make its way over the top of him.
