The protocol, p.8
The Protocol, page 8
Indicating the flat-panel monitor mounted vertically to the dash in front of her, Sloane said, “Does this tank have night vision capability?”
Groot thought about correcting her about calling the Oshkosh a tank. Deciding it really didn’t matter, he said, “It can. Thermal, too. The camera’s on the CROWS mast.”
“Then why don’t you ditch the goggles and pick them up with the cameras?”
Keeping his NODs trained forward, he said, “As far as they know, we’re sleeping in here. If you power that thing on, it’s going to emit just enough light to make us visible to them.”
“It’s a tank,” Sloane pressed. “What can they do to us?”
Groot said nothing. When Sloane repeated her question, Chance asking how the group had found them here saved him from having to go through the many ways they could perish in a tank, one of them being blockaded in between two semi-trailers and burned alive.
Groot checked his watch. Two in the morning. Responding to Chance, he said, “We’ve only been here for a couple of hours. They probably heard us passing through town, rallied the troops, and set out to find us. Given all the farmhouses between here and there, I’d bet they’ve been busy checking those.”
“So they cornered their prey,” Sloane declared. “Question is, why did they give chase in the first place?”
“They’re probably just protecting their turf from outsiders,” Groot answered soberly. “It’s what I’d be doing if I lived somewhere rural. Especially considering Romero.”
Peeking between the front seatbacks, Chance said, “What are we going to do?”
Groot said nothing at first. While the Oshkosh had the CROWS Ma Deuce up top, the controls and its targeting and acquisition monitor were in the back seat area. The doors were pinned shut. And there was no way either he or Sloane, who was much thinner and not wearing a bunch of gear, could get back there without him pulling the Oshkosh forward. Then there was the problem of opening two doors and exposing themselves to incoming fire for as long as it would take to hop out and get back inside. Switching seats was out of the question.
“I have an idea,” Groot finally said. He took a penlight from a pocket and handed it back to Chance. “I want you to locate the power button on the screen in front of you. When you find it, press it and hold it down.”
“Done,” said Chance as a soft blue glow lit up the back seat area. “Now what?”
Groot was keeping one eye on the Wolverines as he spoke. So far, so good: They were still deliberating something. Every now and then, one of them would cast a furtive glance at the Oshkosh. He said, “Do you see the joystick in the center?”
“Yep. I’ve been eyeing it the whole time I’ve been back here.”
“Don’t touch it until I tell you to,” Groot stressed. Once he had Chance’s undivided attention, he went on, walking him through the procedure to switch the feed coming in from the camera in the CROWS mount from video to thermal. The blue glow diminishing substantially let Groot know they were making progress. Meanwhile, out in front of the Oshkosh, the Wolverines were making progress, too. They were dispersing, one half of them taking cover behind the pickups, the other forming a phalanx at roughly ten o’clock to the Oshkosh. The ones who had taken cover were, to a man, shouldering their rifles and aiming them at the Oshkosh. The rest were slowly advancing on foot, angling in from the left, clearly taking every precaution to stay out of the line of fire should any of their friends get an itchy trigger finger.
“I saw that gun up there,” Sloane said, gesturing at the roof. “It’s huge.” She paused for a second. “Please tell me you’re not going to kill them. That thing looks like it will shred a person into tiny pieces.”
“I already told you,” Groot said in a low voice. “I am not a killer.” Speaking to Chance, he went on, saying, “You see the crosshairs on the screen?”
“I do,” Chance said. “And Groot … I don’t want to be a killer, neither.”
“You’ve got to trust me, Chance.”
Chance said nothing.
Sloane just continued shifting her gaze between Groot and the people slowly picking their way across the open ground.
Groot said, “What’s in the crosshairs right now?”
“The roof of the big truck on the left.”
“Okay,” said Groot, “this is what we’re going to do. Without touching the red trigger cover, you’re going to grab the joystick.” He paused for a beat, thinking. “Are you left or right-handed?” Groot remembered Sloane was right-handed. In fact, there were compilations of her fights on YouTube that focused solely on fighters being dropped by her famous overhand right.
“A mixture of both,” Chance said. “But I’m mostly right-handed.”
“When you play video games, what hand is dominant?”
“My right.”
“Perfect. Grip the joystick with your right hand.”
“Done. My finger is nowhere near the trigger guard.”
Good job, Groot thought. “Now find the button on the side with your thumb. Pressing it will make the mount go live.”
“That did it. How fast is this thing’s reaction time?”
Groot didn’t know how to accurately answer the question, so he said, “Medium fast. Just don’t jerk it. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.”
“That’s a black op saying, isn’t it?”
Groot shrugged. “Could be. It’s what the last gunner said to me when he was showing me the ropes.”
“So I’m guessing we’re just going to fire a couple of warning shots overhead.”
“Better be all you do,” Sloane interjected. “You kill one of those young people, I walk next opportunity I get. This is still America. The military does not kill civilians.”
Groot nodded in agreement. To Chance, he said, “I want you to position the crosshairs on the front of the truck. It’s a Dodge. Put the point where the lines come together on the ram’s head emblem.”
A soft whirring from the turret motor sounded above them. “Done. It’s dead center.”
“Flip up the red cover, but don’t touch the trigger.”
“Okay. Next?”
A lick of flame belched from one of the long guns. The round hit the windshield head-high to Sloane. Inside the vehicle, behind a couple of inches of ballistic glass, the impact was quieter than one would have thought. The damage to the windshield pane was minimal. Just a shallow divot with a couple of superficial cracks radiating out from it.
“They’re shooting at us,” Sloane bellowed. “Light the fuckers up.”
“What do I do now?” Chance asked, the first hint of panic evident in his tone.
Knowing the round was a small caliber item, Groot said, “You stick to the plan, Chance. Make sure there’s nobody in the crosshairs, then press the trigger. Remember, you hold it for a second, at most.” He leaned toward Sloane and told her to close her eyes to save her night vision.
Without warning, a stream of yellow/orange tracer rounds belched from the heavy machine gun. It looked like a glowing rope was connecting the two vehicles. The sound of the reports was tolerable. The strobe effect lit up everything. It made the people fleeing for cover appear to be moving in slow motion. The damage to the Ram was catastrophic.
“That truck is dead,” Groot reported as he started the engine and hit the headlights. “Now target the other one. Same routine.”
Chance said nothing. The Ma Deuce did the talking. After another ten-round burst, flames were coming from underneath the hoods of both pickups.
Gunfire erupted to their fore, the multiple reports drowned out by the Oshkosh’s noisy diesel.
Groot tromped the pedal. As the armored vehicle lurched forward, emerging from the tight confines, engine growling and causing the people still standing to scatter, Chance was lamenting the fact he had just become a murderer.
“You didn’t kill anyone,” Groot insisted as he hauled the wheel to the right. “You just destroyed a couple of country boys’ pickups.”
“Should have killed a few of them,” Sloane muttered.
“What about the Army not killing civilians?” Groot said, steering the Oshkosh onto the parking lot in front of the feed store.
Incredulous, she said, “They were trying to fucking kill us.” She indicated the multiple bullet pocks in the windshield. “Those weren’t warning shots. And those people weren’t guarding turf. They want this vehicle.” She shivered. “I didn’t see any women when you hit them with the lights. No telling what they would do to me.”
“I think you’d give them what for,” Groot said.
Near simultaneously, Chance said, “I see heat signatures across the road.”
Groot killed the exterior lights. “They left a few behind to guard the entrance,” he said. “Smarter than I thought they were. How many do you see?”
“Five. They’re lying in the ditch. There’s a couple of vehicles over there, too. Looks like full-sized SUVs. Engines are putting off the same glow as the ones in the pickups.”
“Target the vehicles,” Groot ordered. “Same length of bursts as before. You know where to hit them.” As the closed gate loomed ahead, he calculated in his head how many rounds were left for the Ma Deuce. The coward Tolliver always rolled with five hundred linked rounds in the ammo box attached to the CROWS mast. Assuming Chance remained consistent with his bursts, they should be leaving this one-sided skirmish with four hundred and fifty rounds in the box. Acceptable by any measure.
A split second before the Oshkosh’s front grille guard demolished the gate, sending the entire 12x20 panel of chain-link fence, roller wheels and all, flying toward the vehicles parked across the road from it, Chance let loose with the big fifty. The first burst from the Ma Deuce stitched one SUV’s front fender from door to bumper. He was off a bit when he engaged the other SUV. Perhaps due to the impact with the gate, or that the Oshkosh was just beginning to make the right-hand turn onto the feeder road, Chance’s second burst chewed up the SUV’s front right tire, as well as two of the five forms prone in the ditch. Chance was not the only one privy to the outcome of the brief engagement. Groot had seen it all through the NODs. While the blood gushing from the ruptured bodies wasn’t as dramatic as it had appeared to Chance on the monitor, he still saw the bodies contort and the resulting geysers of blood.
The mistake wasn’t lost on Chance. As the gun went silent, it was replaced by the sound of Chance pounding his fists against the back of the driver’s seat.
Groot said nothing. Just got the swerving vehicle under control and pointed it toward the nearby state route.
Oblivious to all that had transpired, Sloane said, “Good shooting, Chance.” She regarded Groot in the dark. “We pushing into Missouri?”
He said, “It’s our only play,” and muscled the Oshkosh onto US-35 south, toward a rendezvous with what appeared to be a series of bonfires way off in the distance.
With the results of his actions playing on a continual loop in his mind, Chance released the joystick and slumped back in his seat.
Chapter 9
Riker woke up knowing exactly where he was: underneath God only knew how many tons of rock, in a prison of both the mind and the body. It was pitch black, the only sound the rhythmic breathing of the five other people sharing the room with him.
He was on the bottom bunk of the first set of bunk beds in a long row of them. Lia had insisted on taking the top, mostly because there was no way they both could share a bed Riker could only occupy alone if he was lying on one side and with his knees drawn up damn near all the way to his chest.
Mercifully, the first night inside the doomsday bunker, Lia had insisted he take the lower bunk. She reasoned should something from his past (pre- or post-Romero) rear up in his resting mind and cause him to wake suddenly and sit up in bed, a regular occurrence since she had known him, it would be better he hit his head on a bunch of exposed bedsprings than the low cement ceiling. Last thing he needed was to aggravate the CTE that, at times, turned him into a different person.
Riker pressed a button on the side of his Garmin wristwatch. 2:45 a.m. Fifteen minutes until I need everyone else to be up and at it.
Yet again, he had beat his alarm to the punch. It had been a long time since he last overslept and nearly as long since he had last slept in on purpose. After listening hard and not hearing anything out of the ordinary, he sat up, grabbed his clothes and prosthetic off the floor, and placed them at the foot of the bed. He affixed his bionic (a name bestowed on his prosthetic leg by his sister), then quickly dressed and slipped the Salomon on his right foot. Next, he dropped to the floor and knocked out his usual set of twenty-five pushups. It was a ritual he performed morning and night, the first twenty-two honoring the average number of men and women who, before Romero, took their lives by their own hand every single day, the follow-on three he always added for the friends he had lost over there.
Kneeling on the floor beside his bunk, he lifted the mattress and retrieved the Mosquito pistol, both magazines for it, and his Randall knife.
Tucking the weapons away, he made his way to the communal area.
After running all the different escape scenarios through his mind a dozen times the night before, every one of which had them having to restrain one or more people adversarial to the plan, it had come to him where he might find something suitable to take the place of the zip ties they did not have.
Removing six of the cushions from the low-slung chairs, he stacked them on the dining table and then went to work dissecting them with the Randall. As he hacked at the fabric, removing the lengths of piping from the cushion edges, all he could think about was the scene in First Blood, when an on-the-run John Rambo was fashioning a tunic from a scrap of automotive upholstery.
When Riker was finished, instead of having produced a makeshift article of clothing, he had arranged on the table in front of him six yard-long lengths of thin rope. They wouldn’t be as quick and easy to apply as a pair of cuffs fashioned from zip ties, but he was certain the rope had more tensile strength than the thin nylon lanyards their key cards hung from.
The clicking of bootheels on cement preceded Steve-O as he entered the communal room.
“Good morning, Lee. Did you sleep well?”
Riker shook his head. “Too much on my mind.” He pointed at the man’s red Stetson brand boots. “You’re going to need to put on your issued shoes. Wear them until we get to where we’re going.”
Steve-O glanced down at his prized boots, the boots Shorty had been so kind to pick up for him in Nashville when he was making his way back across the country after the failed attempt at locating those dear to him. “Do I have to wear those cheap things all the way to Trinity?”
“No,” Riker said. “Just while we’re still here. We don’t need to go announcing to everyone within earshot that we are coming.”
“Good call, Lee.” Steve-O plopped down on a chair and began wrenching the boots from his feet. As he did, he was looking at the mess on the dining table. “I see you found something to tie up the guard with if he does not see things our way.”
“These are for anyone who challenges us,” Riker explained. “We’re only going to hurt or shoot someone as a last resort.”
Shorty entered the room a few steps ahead of Vern. “Oooh,” he said, eyeing the lengths of rope. “Looks like we’re going to be getting kinky. Chips, whips, chains, and dips. Who can name the movie?”
Passing out the lengths of rope, Riker shook his head.
Steve-O shrugged. “Beats the hell out of me.”
Shorty hung his head.
Clapping Shorty playfully on the shoulder, Vern said, “You’ve created a monster.”
Tara strode into the room. In one hand was a piece of metal bed frame she’d taken off the foot of her bunk. In the other, she held a pillowcase bulging with something. “Weird Science,” she said confidently. “Kelly LeBrock played Lisa, the supposed perfect woman Gary and Wyatt conjured up.”
Shorty turned and faced Tara. “That’s all fine and dandy, young lady. But witchcraft isn’t going to get us out of this pickle. You see The Great Escape? Escape from Alcatraz? Papillon? Because those folks in those movies all had luck on their side. We’re going to need some of that.”
Steve-O looked at Riker. “What if they catch us sneaking out?”
Lia said, “They’ll put us in the brig until they are ready to leave.”
“That’s like a jail, isn’t it, Lia?”
“Yes, Steve-O, it is.”
Steve-O shook his head. “Then we better not get caught. Because I’m not jail material.”
“What?” Shorty cracked. “You leave your soap-on-a-rope at home?”
“No matter how the cookie crumbles,” Vern pointed out. “We’re not coming back here. So grab your stuff and let’s get going. I can’t stand another second being incarcerated by the country I fought and bled for.”
“Ditto,” said Riker. He looked at Tara. “Got the pills in there?”
She patted the pillowcase. “And then some.”
Making sure he had everything he came in with, Riker looked the others over. “Everyone know their roles and what to do if anyone tries to stop us?” Heads nodded all around. “Good,” he said, walking his gaze from face to face, “because with everything stacked against us, we’re all going to have to bring our A game.”
“Whatever you say, John Madden. Nice pep talk.” Shorty zipped up his parka and retrieved the black knit cap from one of its pockets. He snugged it on. “If you ask me, I think a prayer is in order.”
They gathered around. Tara and Lia were the last to form up. Lia said, “I’m not really the praying type.”
“Every little bit helps,” Tara said, grabbing her hand. “Just act as if. It ain’t going to kill you.”
When Shorty was finished petitioning his idea of a higher power for help in getting them out of there, Lia opened the door and poked her head into the hall. “Clear,” she called over her shoulder. “We’ve got less than three hours until the sun comes up. Let’s get a move on.”
