Ranger (The Bugging Out Series Book 5) (12 page)

“You have something to add, Martin?”

The former leader of Bandon turned and faced the mayor. Faced all of us.

“What sort of authority do we have here?” Martin asked.

“I’m not sure I understand,” Mayor Allen said, speaking for all of us, it seemed. “What sort of authority?”

Martin came back to the table, but didn’t take a seat. Instead he stood, looking down at us from a place just to right of his wife.

“I mean, what laws are we functioning under? Normal everyday law? Martial law? We really need to get a grasp on that.”

“Martin, what are you going on about?” Schiavo pressed him.

He took a breath, as if he needed to fuel himself for what he was about to say. To propose.

“Before the blight, if the country was facing what we are now, with an enemy on its borders, certain laws would be suspended. We would be able to take certain actions.”

“Such as?” Mayor Allen asked.

“Warrantless searches,” Martin answered. “Look, I know we don’t function like a normal society. Not yet. There hasn’t been a need for trials and proceedings and legalities. We’ve just made things work. But I don’t think we can do that anymore.”

“Searches for what?” Elaine challenged him.

He looked to me, and I knew. He was still concerned about a mole. A traitor. An infiltrator. In my living room immediately after I’d returned from being taken, Martin had expressed his fear about just such a possibility to me. At that point he wanted to hold his suspicions close. Wanted to keep them from others, particularly his wife.

It appeared to me he wasn’t willing to do that anymore.

“We have a traitor among us,” he said.

He explained his suspicions, relating the accurate knowledge necessary for me to be taken. Knowledge that could only have come from within our community.

“You want to rifle through peoples’ houses in search of a spy based upon that?” Schiavo challenged her husband.

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “Not only that.”

He left his spot next to the table and walked to the door, opening it and waiting.

“Come with me.”

*  *  *

W
e followed Martin to his house. His old house. The one he’d shared with Micah. To the boy’s workstation in particular.

“I like to come here,” Martin said, looking to his wife. “Sometimes I go for walks and I end up here.”

She regarded him with quiet pity.

“I just like to be here. Where he was. The cemetery...that’s not where I knew him. Where I loved him.”

The distance between them that Schiavo had referenced while we talked at the beach, I suspected that this might be one factor influencing why she felt as she did. Unexplained absences. Withholding of reasons for such. There was pain here, in this relationship, and it flowed both ways, swirling in the space between a life gone, and one yet to begin.

“I’ll sit here, and I’ll turn on his computers and his radios, and I’ll just listen and look,” Martin went on. “It makes me feel close to him again.”

Schiavo reached out and put a hand on his arm. He reached up and put his hand on hers.

“I have a wonderful life now, I do,” Martin said. “But I miss my boy.”

No one burst into tears, but there were no dry eyes in the room. After a moment, Martin sniffed away the emotion bubbling from within and gestured to one of the radios.

“Last night, late, I came here,” Martin said. “It was two in the morning. I turned on the radio and I listened. I know how pointless that is, with the Ranger Signal blaring. Except...”

“Except what?” I asked,

“Except at five minutes after two that signal stopped,” Martin told us. “There was clear air for thirty seconds. And in that short window I heard another transmission.”

“What?!” Schiavo reacted.

Martin looked to her and nodded.

“What was in the transmission?” I asked.

Martin stepped close to the workstation and powered up the devices as I briefly had while in quarantine, radios and computers coming to life.

“Micah had it set up so anytime the radios were on, a recording was being made on a hard drive,” he said. “What I heard was saved.”

He reached to a mouse and clicked an icon on a computer screen, activating a sound file.

“Ready?” Martin asked.

“Go ahead,” Mayor Allen said.

Martin clicked
play
and sound rose from the speakers. The familiar at first.

“Ranger... Ranger... Ranger...”

The same repeated again, and again, and then the speakers went quiet, only the hush of a white noise static hissing from them. And then, a few seconds into the silence, a fast and sharp
bee-ee-eep
sounded, followed by more nothingness until my friend’s voice returned.

“Ranger... Ranger... Ranger...”

“What was that?” Elaine asked.

“I don’t know,” Martin said.

“Play it again,” Schiavo said.

Martin repeated the transmission a second time. Then a third. And a fourth.

“It’s just a high pitched beeping sound,” Mayor Allen said. “It sort of stutters a bit.”

“Maybe it’s just an anomaly,” Elaine suggested.

Martin nodded, allowing the possibility.

“Maybe,” he said. “But if it’s not...”

Schiavo thought for a moment, then looked to me.

“Go get Westin for me, Fletch.”

*  *  *

T
en minutes later the garrison’s communications specialist sat at the workstation, the five of us standing behind him as he played the transmission over and over, first through the speaker, and then through headphones.

“It’s local,” he said, slipping the headphones off.

“How local?” Schiavo asked.

“Very,” Westin said. “It’s low power, probably within a mile of where we are right now.”

“That puts it in town,” Martin said.

Mayor Allen looked to Martin and nodded.

“You were right,” the town’s current leader said to his predecessor.

Westin puzzled mildly at the exchange, and at what it might indicate.

“Ed, I need you to keep anything you hear right now confidential,” Schiavo said, addressing the private almost maternally.

“Absolutely, ma’am,” Weston agreed.

“Is there any way to pinpoint the source?” I asked.

Westin thought for a minute, his face twisting as he considered the possibilities.

“If we know when it’s broadcasting, possibly. But the power is so low and the transmission is brief. We’d also have to have multiple direction finding units, and we don’t even have one.”

“Could we build them?” Martin asked.

“Sure, possibly, but there’s something else,” Westin said. “This transmission is recorded.”

“You can tell that?” Elaine asked.

“Yes. It has the same acoustic signature as the Ranger Signal, which we know is a looped recording.”

I was starting to understand his reluctance to embrace the search idea.

“You’re saying this could be transmitted from a remote spot when no one is there,” I said.

“Precisely,” he confirmed.

“Okay,” Schiavo said. “Finding it might be pointless because the transmitter could be low power, small, and highly mobile. So let’s focus on the other big question—what sort of use would our enemy get from a beep?”

Westin smiled, getting into his role as com sleuth.

“That’s just it,” the private said. “It’s not a beep. It’s a series of beeps compressed. Listen.”

Westin dragged the audio file into a simple processing program which Micah had used and slowed the playback down by a factor of sixty. When the transmission was played at this much reduced speed, the singular stuttering beep became a minutes’ worth of long and short tones whose purpose was unmistakable.

“Morse,” Martin said.

With its universally recognized auditory dots and dashes, what we were listening to was some message that had been condensed, much like the burst transmissions we’d been bouncing off a satellite. Here, though, the recorded message was being broadcast locally. From within our very town.

“Can you decode it?” Schiavo asked her com specialist.

Westin nodded and slipped the headphones back on. He faced the computer screen and watched the sound pulses on the display as he listened, no pen or pencil in hand to jot down the words he was deciphering. When he was finished he removed the headphones and looked to those of us standing behind.

“Supply ship not arrived. Resident anxiety growing. Patrols increased in northern sector.”

The private’s recitation of the message hung there for a moment, absolute confirmation that we had a traitor in our midst.

“That patrol increase order went out at the morning briefing to residents yesterday,” Elaine said.

“Anyone at the briefing could have turned on us,” I said. “Or anyone who heard it second hand.”

“Meaning everyone in town,” Mayor Allen said.

Schiavo said nothing at first, looking to her husband, the man who’d seen this development before anyone, then turning to her private.

“Ed, absolute silence on this,” Schiavo said. “I’ll get Sergeant Lorenzen up to speed.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Westin affirmed, then rose from his place at the workstation, took his weapon in hand, and left the room without further prompting.

“What about the searches?” Martin asked once the private was gone.

It wasn’t Schiavo who answered. She looked to Mayor Allen, under whose authority any such decision would have to be made. After a moment, he looked to Martin and shook his head.

“Practicality dictates my answer,” the town’s leader said. “By the time the first search was happening, the whole town would know. Including the traitor.”

“They’d ditch or hide any incriminating devices, transmitters, whatever,” Schiavo told her husband.

To his credit, Martin didn’t protest. But he wasn’t pleased.

“We can’t just do nothing,” he said.

Schiavo looked at him with a thin, almost knowing grin.

“Somehow I think you haven’t been.”

Martin did not react to his wife’s subtle accusation. He simply let that unspoken truth exist between the five of us.

“There is something we do need to do,” Schiavo said. “This is also courtesy of Martin. I want to do an inspection and audit of our supplies. We need to see what we have, and what’s vulnerable.”

“You think this may drag on now?” I asked the captain.

“If they have someone inside, that’s a force multiplier. They may feel that they don’t need to push. That they can peck away at our preparations. Weaken us without destroying us.”

“That’s what they want,” Mayor Allen said. “It’s what they need. A live colony to add to their ledger.”

“The term subjugated comes to mind,” Elaine said.

“Unified,” I corrected her. “Unification is all the rage.”

My wife chuckled. It might have been that, by marriage, she felt obligated to laugh at my attempts at humor. I doubted I was that funny. In any case, I liked hearing her express silly joy. I loved the look of her when she was happy, especially in times that worked against that emotion.

The fact was, I simply loved everything about her.

“Tomorrow we start our survey,” Schiavo said, looking to her husband next. “And you continue with your project.”

Martin smiled and nodded.

“Yes, ma’am.”

W
e returned to our house after stopping in to check on Grace and the children. A pair of neighbors had stepped up and were helping her, cooking and tending to Brandon when Grace needed to sleep. It was impossible to say that she was doing fine. But she was alive, and with us. She was home.

I wished I could say the same for my friend.

“Fletch!”

It was our neighbor, Dave Arndt, calling out from the front yard of his house two down from ours. He jogged the short distance and met us at our front gate, holding a sheet of paper in his hand.

“Dave,” I said. “What’s up?”

“Have you seen this?” he asked, holding the paper out to us.

“What is it?” I asked.

Elaine reached out and took the item. It was a flyer, crudely printed, with a very clear message in the words upon it.

“Residents of Bandon, we are your brothers and sisters in liberty,” Elaine read from the paper. “Join us. Cross your borders unarmed and you will be welcomed.”

“The Unified Government,” I said, reading the final mark upon the page.

“Propaganda,” Dave said, irritated bordering on angry.

“Where did you find this?” I asked.

“A lot were found on the routes between town and the checkpoints,” he explained.

“They’re sneaking inside our perimeter,” Elaine said, crumpling the flyer in her hand and tossing it into the street.

“Were these reported?” I asked.

“Sergeant Lorenzen found one, too,” Dave said.

“I’m going inside,” Elaine said, turning abruptly and leaving me standing with our neighbor.

When the screen door slapped shut, Dave took a step closer to me and spoke in a quieted tone.

“Fletch, some folks are taking this offer seriously.”

“It’s bait,” I told him. “Just one part of their plan to weaken us. They get ten, twenty, thirty people to cross over and we lose people who can stand up and fight.”

“People are tired of fighting,” Dave reminded me. “Everything since the blight hit has been a fight.”

Dave Arndt was a Bandon original. He’d lived here before the world fell apart. A realtor by trade, he now helped repair abandoned houses when he wasn’t standing watch with a Remington 12 gauge in hand and a Smith & Wesson .50 caliber hand cannon holstered on his hip. I knew that he didn’t share the sentiment that some might be considering, but that didn’t lessen the truth behind it. Even in a tight knight community which had overcome so many obstacles, there would be some who would seek a simpler path—even if it was an illusion offered by strangers.

“I just wanted to make sure you knew about this,” Dave said, nodding toward the discarded flyer.

“I appreciate you telling me,” I said.

He looked past me to the house.

“I’m not sure Elaine does,” he said.

I shook his hand and joined Elaine in the house, closing the door and putting my weapons down next to where she had already stowed hers near the closet just off the living room.