Ranger (The Bugging Out Series Book 5) (16 page)

MAD. It had been the cornerstone of deterrence in the nuclear age. Using a weapon of such immense destructive power on a similarly armed enemy would bring an equally devastating retaliatory strike. That such a mentality and strategy survived into this new age did not surprise me. That my friend Neil was somehow involved in such machinations did.

“I believe he intended to go all in with the other side,” Olin explained. “Until he saw that they were no different than our side.”

Their side. Our side. Every side. I’d always been a proud and loyal American, but knowing just what that would entail in a world just inching out of the ravages of the blight was almost impossible to know.

“I think he brought it with him,” Olin said without any prompting from me.

“Here?”

Olin shrugged a ‘why not?’

“Or he cached it somewhere along the way,” Olin theorized. “Maybe in one of those empty supply lockers that are sprouted like daisies all across the country.”

The lockers, filled mainly with food, had been intended for the elite to use in escaping chaos as the blight exploded. But with its rapid spread, the ‘how’ of which was no longer a mystery, the plant killing organism had sent the country spinning out of control. Many of the buried lockers remained untouched, and several had sustained our expedition on its way to and from Cheyenne.

“Or at your Montana place,” Olin said.

“If it was there, it went up in smoke.”

Olin thought for a moment, then shook his head slowly as he eyed me.

“No, he wouldn’t have taken it to you. Or here. He wouldn’t have risked involving you...or infecting you.”

It was my turn to study the man with a look. A long look. As my attention dragged on, Olin began to smile.

“You’re wondering if I’m really here because Neil signaled me, or if I’m now on the hunt for Four Twelve.”

“It’s not a stretch to wonder,” I said.

Olin chuckled and shook his head.

“Mass murder isn’t my game, Fletch.”

“Don’t call me that,” I said. “You haven’t earned that right.”

“Whatever you say,” Olin agreed, then glanced at the reflective window behind me again. “Since the reason I came isn’t actually here, I think I’d like to be on my way.”

I waited for a moment, trying to imagine anything more of use I could get from the man. But to do that I would have to know what to ask. Olin himself was a mystery, and lived in a world of lying truths. Any further discussion with him would likely be circular in nature, and a waste of breath.

Maybe. Or maybe not.

“Tell me one thing, Ty.”

“What’s that, Eric?”

“We seem to be surrounded here, yet you made it through the Unified Government’s lines.”

“Yes, I did.”

“How’d you do that, Ty?”

Olin slid his chair back from the table and stood now, that smug smile back in all its maddening glory.

“Maybe I’m just that good.”

*  *  *

A
fter a quick discussion with Schiavo while Olin remained in the interview room, the man joined us in the outer office and was given his gear and weapons. Lorenzen stood behind the man, his presence impossible to ignore.

“A shadow indoors,” Olin said. “I feel special.”

“I’ll drop you back at the checkpoint,” the sergeant informed our visitor.

Olin nodded and headed for the exit.

“Olin,” I said.

He stopped at the open front door and looked back to Schiavo and me.

“How did you track me?” I asked. “Out there. By the cabin.”

He smiled and slung his lever gun on one shoulder, small bag hanging on the other.

“I didn’t,” he said. “Blind luck. I was walking up that road when I came across signs of travel. It just happened to be you.”

If what he was saying was true it was...

“Incredible,” Olin said. “I know. Almost like it was meant to happen.”

“You’re welcome to stay in town,” Schiavo said.

Olin shook his head politely at the offer.

“No, this isn’t my place,” he said, looking to me. “If he comes back, I’ll be close by. You make sure he knows that.”

“You think he’ll want to see you?” I asked.

“He called out to me,” Olin answered. “He’s already made his choice.”

Then he walked out. Sgt. Lorenzen trailed him to the Humvee which would transport him to the edge of town. From there, I suspected, he would disappear, as simply as he’d appeared.

“What do you think?” I asked the captain.

Schiavo walked to the door and held it open, watching the Humvee drive off.

“I think your friend’s life is catching up with him,” she said. “And we might be the ones who pay for it.”

E
laine took Grace and the children to our house while I searched for what Neil might have hidden in theirs.

After hearing what Olin had revealed, there was the thought that what had been put in me, and what still remained in Grace, Krista, and Brandon, might be some protection against the BA 412 virus. Through love for his family and some loyalty to me it was possible he’d leveraged his Unified Government brethren to have us protected should the weapon be released.

But released by whom?

“Fletch.”

I looked back through the open door to where Martin stood on the porch. Beyond him, Enderson and Quincy stood where the walkway met the sidewalk, keeping any curious neighbors moving. If these minimal procedures could be considered effective against what Olin had described, we were fooling ourselves.

“Yeah?”

“Angela thinks this is necessary,” Martin told me.

“But you don’t,” I said.

“No.”

“Neither do I,” I agreed with him. “Olin was right—he wouldn’t have kept something that dangerous here with his family.”

“And if he didn’t take it with him to the Unified Government...”

What Martin was suggesting was just a small nightmare scenario amongst many.

“It could be anywhere between here and his camp in Virginia,” I said.

His ‘camp’. Rolling acres of farmland. My friend’s refuge, not unlike what I’d manage to maintain north of Whitefish. If the truth of the stories both Neil and Olin had told were to be meshed, it was the place where Neil had killed his CIA controller, and where his father had left the world by his own hand. Once a bucolic getaway, it became a place of death.

“I’m sure Olin’s friends turned that place over and ran it through a sieve,” Martin said. “Which only leaves the whole country as a place where he could have hidden it. If he hid it at all.”

I scanned the living room, giving cursory attention to the myriad of places where one might stash something small. Behind me, Martin entered. My gaze shifted quickly to his closer presence.

“It’s not here, Fletch,” Martin said. “We’re not going to be infected.”

I faced the man and shook my head, though not in disagreement with his pronouncement.

“I just don’t get this, Martin. They put something in me, something in Grace and the kids, presumably to protect us, but from what?”

Once more I looked to the room, and to the hallway, and the adjacent spaces. Out the side windows. Through the front door. I was trying to make all the pieces fit. Every sliver of information from every source.

“Neil leaves, takes his family, has me snatched, sends his family back. Then some old spy buddy of his shows up looking for him because the Ranger Signal is some code word only the two of them know.”

“I’m not sure you’re ever going to understand why it happened,” Martin said.

“But it should,” I said, facing Martin again. “Something that...monumental in our lives should make absolute sense. So why doesn’t it? Why did Neil do it all in this cloak and dagger style that matches a life I knew nothing about.”

“Olin could be half right,” Martin said. “Or half wrong, actually.”

I didn’t follow where he was going with this line of reason. Martin stepped inside now, just a few feet past the threshold. He seemed uncomfortable in the space. Not because of any fear, but, I suspected, for a reason similar to that which affected me. The house, the home, felt tainted. Even with Grace and the children returned, some stain remained on the place. A stain that was the shadow of my friend’s absence.

“What if the Unified Government already has Four Twelve,” Martin suggested. “And they threatened Neil to get back with the program or they’d use it on Bandon. On us.”

Black is white... White is black...

That admonition from my friend as he departed flashed in my thoughts yet again. That world of shifting contrast was a place where what Martin was proposing could easily exist.

But did that make it true? Or even plausible?

“Why would they need him at all, then?” I asked.

“Maybe he’s more important to them, to their plans, than even Olin knew,” Martin said.

“Or that he told us,” I said.

Olin was a creature of deception. Entire portions of his life were based upon people accepting lies he told about himself, or about others. And a lie did not have to be told to have impact. Some truth simply needed to be withheld.

Like some further truth about my friend.

“That’s just another question, Martin.”

“I said you may never understand,” he reminded me.

I nodded. To him. To myself. That the one reality about all this was I might never know the truth, the whole truth, about the man who’d been my best, my closest friend, sickened me. The place I stood right then sickened me. All reminders of the man sickened me.

But some things in the home could not elicit such a feeling of revulsion.

“What are you doing?” Martin asked.

I’d bent and picked something up from the coffee table near the couch. Colorful pencils and markers were scattered about, all having been used to craft what lay within what I held.

Krista’s drawing book.

“I’m surprised she left the house without it,” I said, smiling as I flipped it open and paged through the silly, wonderful drawings. “She’s been pouring herself into this. Everyone who’s stopped in has said this is all she does. Draw.”

“Art can be therapy,” Martin said.

I was glad the child had that. Some way to help her process all that had occurred. We had no such outlet. We had only the reality that we faced, out there, ill-defined and ominous all at once.

“We have to do something, Martin,” I said, placing the book back precisely where it had rested.

“We don’t have many moves to make,” he said. “If any.”

I hated this. Hated the not knowing, and the not doing. I was no military man. No soldier. I’d picked up my fighting ability out of necessity in the new world. Conflict had been thrust upon me, and I’d learned to give as good as I got. So it burned me to just wait. To do what soldiers were taught not to do—be a stationary target.

“We have to wait, Fletch. We have to trust Angela and get everything we can in order for whatever might come.”

“You know what’s strange about all this?” I asked.

“What?”

I gave the space a long look, that sickening feeling rising again.

“Neil would know what to do,” I said.

T
here were more flyovers. Louder. Lower. Crisscrossing the town, from north to south, west to east. Always at night. On one such crossing, with clear skies above, Corporal Enderson was able to snap a grainy image through the night vision binoculars.

Elaine and I stood with the captain and Mayor Allen in the garrison’s office, the image downloaded onto a laptop screen. Its shape was unmistakable, long, slender wings and a bulbous, stubby nose where a cockpit should be.

“Drone,” Schiavo said.

“Observing us,” I said.

Schiavo’s silence indicated that she wasn’t convinced.

“What’s to observe?” she asked. “The number of flights seem excessive for reconnaissance.”

Elaine reached out and put a single finger to the image, directing her attention to something below the wing. In the distorted picture it appeared little more than a black smudge, but that it was there at all is what mattered.

“Missile?” Elaine asked.

The deadly ability of drones armed with Hellfire missiles had been made plain through news reports and declassified footage from past battles in the Middle East and elsewhere. It was possible that we were facing the same threat here.

“It could be waiting for a target of opportunity,” I said.

“Or it could just be a message,” Mayor Allen suggested. “I assume they know we might have the ability to see it.”

“A demonstration of their airpower?” Elaine wondered.

It could be that. Or what I’d thought. Or something else altogether.

“Where is Martin?” Mayor Allen asked, the question interrupting the matter of the moment. “He got the message about this, yes?”

The question was posed to Schiavo. His wife. And the soon to be mother of his child.

“He said he had something to take care of,” she said.

His project. The hunt for the traitor. That was what she wasn’t speaking of with any openness, but which those of us on the Defense Council understood to be taking much of his time. Mayor Allen, too, remembered as soon as Schiavo’s oblique reply was given.

“Of course,” the mayor said.

“So the aircraft don’t have pilots,” Elaine said.

“Not aboard them,” Schiavo said.

“The Unified Government forces are showing an impressive level of sophistication,” Mayor Allen commented.

Schiavo nodded her head as she stared at the photo on the screen. The gesture continuing as some spark seemed to rise in her gaze.

“David and Goliath,” the captain said, smiling now as she looked to us.

“We’re David,” I said, anticipating the reference she was making, even without understanding how it applied to us in any useful way.

“Yes,” she said. “And they’re Goliath.”

She closed the laptop screen.

“And tonight, we’re going to throw some stones.”

*  *  *

E
very checkpoint was at double strength by sundown. Every patrol had three times as many shooters as the night before. Two reserve groups, each twenty strong, waited in the northern and southern parts of town, ready to react in any direction should the need arise. Should there be any reaction to what we were about to do.