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…

Treat all guns as if they are loaded.  The only true safety on a firearm is the one between your ears.  Never pull a gun unless you are prepared to pull the trigger.  Know what is behind your target.  These are by no means the only rules of gun safety, but they are repeated over and over by anyone who knows anything about firearms to novices and old-timers alike.  In the heat of battle, though, they can be forgotten by even the most skilled and combat-hardened veteran.

The members of the National Guard did not forget these or any of the hundreds of other rules of engagement or firearms safety that had been drilled into them over the course of years of military service.  They were also prepared for the encounter and, as such, weren’t surprised into action.  The raiding party had none of the benefits afforded to the guardsmen.  While every round fired by the guard found its target, every round fired by the motley crew they were up against missed completely.

The fact that the shots went wild was due not to the fact that they weren’t aimed well, or that the shooter was a poor marksman, but that they didn’t have anything to aim at and that they weren’t used to being shot at.  A total of nine shots were fired by the raiding party.  Seven of them were enough off the mark to eventually hit trees or drop harmlessly to the ground.  One ricocheted off the exhaust pipe of a semi in the parking lot.  One made its way all the way into camp.

Traveling at just under 1400 mph but with much of its kinetic energy spent and beginning to tumble, the final projectile had dropped nineteen inches from where it had been “aimed”, which was at chest height.  It hit Troy Patterson in the pelvis on the left side, just above the hip socket.  If it had hit much lower and to the right it would have hit his femoral artery.  If it had hit with much more force it would have shattered his pelvis.  As it was, Troy was in for a world of hurt, hours of field surgery, and months of recovery.  And someone had just made themselves an enemy for life out of one Staff Sergeant Rebecca ‘Hammer’ Patterson.

…

When conducting interrogations the questions can sometimes appear completely random and unconnected.  That is, of course, the idea.  The interrogator isn’t actually the prisoner’s friend, and by asking questions in such a way that the prisoner gets confused, backtracks, answers the same questions repeatedly, or is answering questions that seem innocent, the interrogator is able to cause the prisoner to slip up and reveal information. 

When the interrogator is at least minimally trained and the prisoner is a civilian, simply asking what you want to know usually suffices and the mind games are just for the entertainment of the intelligence staff.  Within half an hour a fairly coherent picture had been painted and corroborated by the few people who seemed to know anything about the raiding party.  The bad news was where the raiding party had come from.  The worse news appeared to be who its nominal leadership was, and that he had been holding on to the reins for as long as he had.

“So now we know who Earl acts as the right hand man for, and my, isn’t he a pleasant fellow by the way?”  Mallory said as she walked into the command tent, disgust and contempt warring on her face.  “Unfortunately, Clint doesn’t feel the need to lead from the front.  I’m not happy about the fact that he was also able to determine where we are and convince forty-one men and women that a raid on us was a stellar idea.  He also apparently felt that they were expendable.”

“Before we get into what we’re going to do about Clint, I want to know what went wrong, though.” Mallory said.

“We waited too long to intercept,” Stewart replied.  “We tried to be cute and we let them get too close.  That’s all there is to it.  We had them a klick out and could have stopped them almost that far away.”  Sergeant Patterson was in his platoon and he was dealing with a number of issues, not the least of which was her desire to immediately and single-handedly dispatch the remaining thirty-two members of the raiding party.  Thirty-three if you counted the survivor of the gunfight who was undergoing field surgery to repair a punctured lung and laundry list of other internal damage done when he’d been hit seven times.  Professionalism and training only went so far and Rebecca was
pissed
about her civilian husband.

“Is that all?  Nothing else?” Mallory asked.

“No, First Sergeant, that isn’t all.  The perimeter should have been further out and they should have been detected far earlier.” Halstead replied.  “I can give you reasons but no excuses, and nothing I say is going to make recovery for Troy any easier.”

“No, it won’t, Sergeant.  Give me the reasons though because I need to hear them from you so we can work on getting them resolved.”

“Nobody expected anything like this so quickly.  It’s only been twelve days.  Who else is this organized?  Don’t say it, Kyle, I swear I’ll hit you if you do.”

Kyle looked as innocent as a newborn babe but everyone in the room
knew
he had been about to say “Well duh, apparently Clint is this organized.”

“But who could have
known
he was this organized and ready or willing to pull something like this?  The last time we heard something about him a single guy yelling ‘Hey’ ran off his entire party for crying out loud!  No, he isn’t the only guy out there and yes, there have to be other groups but, well...”  Halstead shook his head.  “Assumptions, pure and simple.  I can’t even blame it on bad intel because we don’t have any intel to blame at this point.  We’ve been making assumptions based on swags that were based on guesses and wishful thinking.”

“Now that your head is out of its rectal cradle, I’m going to
assume
you’ll have a resolution for me by tomorrow morning?”  Mallory made the order sound like a question.

“Absolutely.”  Halstead did an admirable job of not flinching, although the rebuke stung and he knew he deserved it.

“The next order of business then is, in fact, Clint.  You’ve had a couple of hours to think about it;  I’m open to suggestions.  What are we going to do about this?”

Those present included both military personnel and civilians, as had become both the custom and the standard.  Mallory wasn’t interested in setting up a dictatorship backed by the military.  Kyle, though technically junior to everyone else in the room, was the first to respond, “Well, we could always just head over in the middle of the night and kill everybody.”

“Thank you, Sergeant Ramirez.  Your suggestion will be duly noted in the minutes…oh wait, we aren’t taking minutes, so I guess it won’t be,” Mallory smiled.

“It really depends on a number of factors at this point.” Jackson added after it was clear that Ramirez wasn’t actually going to add anything productive at this point.  “First, how many people do they really have after the forty-one they sent?  Second, how heavily armed are those that remain?  Third, is it possible that they are being held against their will or being used as leverage on some of those who participated in the raid today?  Fourth, is it possible to, if not directly remove this Clint person, assist in his removal indirectly?  Those are the things that come to mind immediately.”

“Keep in mind that we aren’t set up for prisoners, Top.” Stewart added.

 “Valid points all.  So, I ask again, what are we going to do?  I’m asking because you are my command team, we make decisions.  This isn’t an autocracy and hasn’t been for a while.  We have a situation that affects the safety and security of everyone here.  We’ve decided, more or less, that the Guard will fill the role of security or ‘Police’ but not with a free reign.”  Mallory looked at those gathered in the tent.

“We have to contact the group, no matter what.  We have to make contact with them and possibly with Clint directly, assuming he will speak with us,” Eric replied.  “We’ve already spoken with him once and it was obvious he was in charge then, even if he didn’t say as much.”

“How do you propose we do that?  Do you have suggestions on how to make contact?”  Mallory asked.

“When we encountered them last time they had CB antennas on every vehicle, so we start there.  Send out a broadcast on channel 19 and listen.  I assume they haven’t told us where home is yet?”  Eric asked.

“Correct, but we haven’t really asked very ‘hard’ yet either.” Jackson answered.

“And we aren’t going to,” Mallory replied with an edge to her voice.

“True, sorry, Top, thinking in military terms and this group is definitely not that.”  Jackson was now also sufficiently reprimanded.

 “I don’t think that this group is going to need all that much persuasion to tell us whatever we want to know,” Mallory continued.  “Frankly, if we let them go to sleep and then wake them up every 45 minutes, after four or six hours they’ll probably beg to tell us anything and everything just to let them sleep for a full eight.  We did find their vehicles, and some of them are rather nice--almost new in fact.  Unfortunately, the gas gauges are all over the place so we can’t use that to give us even a rough estimate of where they might have originated from.”

“So, how long do we give them to give up Clint and do we need to know where he is before we start broadcasting?  I have my ideas but I want to hear yours,” Mallory asked.

“I say we give them until this time tomorrow before we start spreading stories,” Ramirez answered.  Common interrogation techniques included creating a simple story that a prisoner or group of prisoners had ratted out another and simply letting the feeling of betrayal loosen the tongue.   “As for waiting, it’s your call.  We need to have some sort of plan and something to say before we turn on the radio though.”

“Anyone else?” Mallory asked.

“Anything we plan now is going to be, as Sergeant Halstead put it, a swag based on a guess,” Eric said to the quiet tent after five seconds of everyone looking at each other.  “The difference is that we’ll know that going into it this time.  We don’t know anything yet aside from who’s nominally in charge of this group and that one of the guys in the raiding party gave the girls in our group the willies.”  Rachael, Karen, and Sheri all nodded in agreement with the last sentiment.  “Unless we’re going to broadcast for a meeting with Clint, which I don’t know that I can weigh in on the merits of, I don’t know that we can really do anything until we get more information from the thirty-odd people we now have in custody.”

“Always the pragmatic one,” Kyle muttered.  “Not that I have anything better, but I can’t say I like it.”

“That’s about where I was at.  I was hoping I had just talked myself out of being able to do something and I didn’t want to poison the well, so to speak.”  Mallory said.  “Because it’s the only thing we have at the moment, I do want to try to open some sort of dialog with this guy and find out  just what he thought he was going to accomplish this afternoon.  Stewart, I’d like you to take that on.  Eric, I’d like you to work with him as you have an intelligence background.  Not a word about Military Intelligence, Ramirez.”

“What?  All of the sudden I’m the
only
one thinking these things?”  Kyle asked with a wounded expression on his face.

“No,” Mallory replied.  “You’re just the only one with a broken filter.  Anyway, Eric, I can’t order you to, but it would help.”

“Glad to, Top.  When do you want to start trying to make contact?”

“I’d like to begin trying before dark, but only if you two can come up with something coherent.  Although it might be a good idea to let Clint sweat overnight--assuming nobody sent a broadcast that we’ve captured his crew.”

“We’ll get right on it.  Eric, I’ve got a couple of guys to grab that you may have worked with before.  Top, if it’s ok, we’ll get started now.”  Stewart got up at a nod from Mallory and he and Eric left, already discussing how to go about their newly assigned task.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

“My how things can change,” Clint thought to himself as he looked around the small mobile town that had followed him out of Nashville.  In less than a week he’d picked up eighty people and cleaned out an RV lot…literally.  Once he’d left he’d picked up another fifty or so people.  Other than trailers he couldn’t pull, there’d been nothing left on the lot worth taking except the bulk propane tank, and they had left that less than a quarter full once they found someone who knew how to operate it without blowing themselves or the smaller tanks up.  He wasn’t using everything he’d stockpiled just yet but he’d been able to bring it all with him by having everyone who felt comfortable driving a truck with a trailer do so.

When he’d made the decision to pull out of the Nashville area three days ago and head west, he’d made sure to steer clear of the park because he wasn’t sure how many people were holed up inside.  Once they had settled down here on the west side of Beech Lake, just outside of Lexington, he’d figured it was time to go take a peek at the group that was causing such a commotion.  It seemed like every other conversation that they had been picking up on the CBs had been about some group in Natchez Trace.

Now the party he’d sent out to probe the group in the park had been gone for a day without calling back in.  Earl might be a letch and a thug but he was responsible and he should have radioed in by now.  They weren’t supposed to get in over their heads and up until now they hadn’t.  What was keeping them?  What had gone wrong?  I can’t afford to lose that many people!

“Clint.” The walkie-talkie at his waist squawked.

“This is Clint, give me some good news.”

“Sorry boss, no can do,” Cooper replied.  “You need to hear the broadcast we’re picking up over at the cruiser though.”

“On my way.”  Great, now what?

Even with over seventy RV trailers, three full-size class A motor homes, and over eighty trucks and SUVs, it took less than a full minute for Clint to get to the other side of their mobile village.  When he arrived he found almost a dozen people gathered around the former squad car.  “So, the radio has started filtering water?” Clint snapped as he walked up.

A couple of the newer folks gave him sheepish looks and headed away with mumbles of some kind or another.  A few of his original group ignored the implied rebuke and kept listening to the message being broadcast on the police radio.  It sounded like it had just begun and Clint had missed the first few words so it took a few seconds to sink in.