Dead Reckoning (41 page)

“Here, you'll need these.” Sean handed me a pair of NVG.

I had used NVG to take night time weather observations back on Kwaj. But these were different. I slipped them onto my head and flipped down the goggles, but nothing happened. Anticipating my trouble, Sean reached over and switched them on. He guided my hand to an adjustment and twisted, showing me how to operate it. Everything came into focus and turned green. The technology was incredible. I could see better with NVG at night than with my own eyes during the day.

We squealed around a corner and into an alley and then onto another main road. We swerved to avoid two mangled vehicles in the road.

That smell appeared again.

“How do you know they don't have lookouts that see us coming?” I asked.

“Too stupid. We've been watching them. Remember? We know their habits.”

We skidded to a stop in front of a building. The sign on the front said Ocean Treasures. Some sort of touristy curio shop. Ransacked.

“Follow me,” Sean said to me. “And be quiet.”

I got out of the vehicle and saw three other Humvees already there with at least a dozen men fully outfitted in army fatigues and all variety of gear.

Sean made a litany of hand signals and then as quietly as church mice, the men scattered in every direction.

Sean motioned me to follow him, and we entered the building and bounded up the stairs.

On the roof, we encountered a man positioned at the edge of the roof, his rifle trained on the marina. I saw the RY as plain as day. A man paced the deck, rifle in hand.

Sean introduced me to VanDyke.

“Sit tight,” Sean said. “I'll be right back.”

“Can you hit him from here?” I whispered to VanDyke.

VanDyke laughed quietly.

“Sir, this is a M82A3, 50 cal, silenced, range 1800 meters. I have 22 years of experience as a sniper. We are at 147 meters. It is not a question of whether I can hit him, but which eye socket I would like the bullet to enter and where I want him to land afterward. A 50 cal to the head will knock him back two to four meters and I want him to land quietly in the bay, behind the boat.”

Sean scrambled up behind us.

“Team one is go,” he said to VanDyke. “You know what to do.”

VanDyke nodded.

It occurred to me that every one of those guys knew what the plan was without even talking about it.

Sean motioned for me to come with him.

We ran several blocks toward the pier. Sean pulled me aside.

“You are only here in case we need to differentiate between victim and perpetrator. Anything else and you will be getting in the way. Every man knows what the other will do, and every angle and every ass is covered. You are a variable that could compromise the mission. Stay on my ass. Understood?”

“Of course.”

Sean reached up to my NVG and hit another switch.

“There is an earpiece,” he said.

I placed it in my ear and suddenly heard lots of radio traffic.

“Update status. A?”

“Can take out. Not ideal.”

“B?”

“Got
em.”

“C?”

“Got em.”

“That's minus three now, looking for seven inside.”

We ran to within one block of the pier. I could now see the RY and the dead man walking on deck. He had no idea how close he was to death. VanDyke had told me, that at 854 meters per second, the bullet would explode in his brain before it even registered the muzzle flash he just saw.

Sean handed me a device shaped like a pen.

“What is this?”

“Laser pointer. If I tell you to light up a hostile, use that. But for Christ's sake, don't light up the wrong person. The person you light up probably dies. There is no room for error.”

Sean spoke into his mic.

“Status. Team one?”

“Go.”

“Team two?”

“Go.”

“Team three?”

“Go.”

“Snipers? “

“Go.”

I peered around the corner, having no idea what to expect next.

“Stay on my ass,” Sean said sternly.

“On my mark, Sean said into his mic. Three, two, one, mark.”

The head of the man on the RY exploded, and he disappeared behind the boat, out of sight. As he did, his finger involuntarily pulled the trigger, and one shot echoed through the night. The man was already dead, but sometimes gravity, momentum, or just bad luck can cause even a dead finger to depress the trigger.

“Damn it!” exclaimed Sean.

“Go, go, go, go!” Sean yelled as he grabbed my jacket and dragged me along toward the pier.

Two more muffled shots rang out as we ran.

The radio spoke: “Minus two. Five left.”

We arrived at the pier simultaneously with several of Sean's men. He motioned to them, and one by one they poured into the building.

We waited.

More shots rang from within the building.

“Perimeter and external zone secured,” a man barked through the radio.

“Snipers?” Sean spoke into his mic.

“All clear. Five down,” came the response from VanDyke.

I could hardly understand how calm these men sounded.

“They're confined to one room,” said another voice. “I've got visual. Four hostiles, armed, holding hostages. Fourteen hostages, seven adults, seven children.”

“That's wrong,” I said. “One extra adult.”

“Are you sure?”

I thought again through the roster.

“Yes.”

“Standby,” Sean said. “One of the hostiles is among the hostages.”

“Come on.”

We scrambled into the building.

We got to the area where they were being held. It was some sort of processing facility for seafood. The room, littered with dozens of gray plastic crates, was entirely concrete and stunk of fish. Cables with hooks and pulleys hung from the metal rafters. Four men with guns crouched behind some of the hostages. Charlie, Brenda, Dean, and Jeff and Brenda's daughter Penny were all being held at gunpoint; the cowards using them as shields. Jill sat in a side group with Joe, Karen, and the rest of the kids, facing away from us. Some guy had his arm around Jill.

“We're leaving out the back door and taking off on the sailboat,” said one of the men.

“You're not going anywhere!” yelled Sean. “You are surrounded. Your only chance to live is to let the hostages go and drop your guns.”

“Which one is the fifth? Sean asked me. “Light him up.”

I peered over the waist high wall in front of me. I held down the button on the laser and shined it on the man’s back. Certain Sean had seen it, I clicked it off.

Sean whispered into his mic: “Did somebody get the mark?”

I watched as one of Sean’s men subtly adjusted his aim. I watched his lips move as he whispered into his mic. “Got him.”

Sean leaned in to me. “Is that it?” he asked. “All the rest are your people?”

“I looked again.”

“Yes.”

Sean stepped out from behind cover into the door way, his handgun extended in front of him.

Four of Sean's men did the same thing.

Fear washed over the faces of the bad guys when they finally saw what they were really up against.

“This is your final chance,” Sean said.

“We will kill these hostages,” one man said.

“Do I look like I'm
fucking around?” yelled Sean. His voice echoed through the room and then came to rest. “Your only chance to live is if they live. Step back and drop your weapons. All of you, or you all die.”

“I will count to three and then you die.”

“One.”

Bang! Five guns went off simultaneously. On cue, each of the villains fell to the floor, and their hostages dropped, unharmed, from their suddenly dead hands.
              My heart jumped as I scanned the room.

Everyone sat stunned, but fine.

“Mission accomplished,” Sean said into his mic. “Stand down.”

The men shouldered their weapons, scrambled to the perpetrators to secure the guns, and began checking the hostages.

I stood up and looked over the group. Charlie and Kelly locked eyes with me. They jumped to their feet and ran into my arms. I collapsed to the floor and held them.

It was finally over.

27

20 YEARS LATER - near WHAT USED TO BE KNOWN as port angeles, WASHINGTON STATE

"In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds." – Henry David Thoreau,
Walden

My grandchildren often ask me to tell them stories of how things were before The Red Plague and the wars—The Great Reset, as we’ve come to call it. Kids find comfort in stories about the past from old people. At least they did when I was a child. As I didn’t have to walk to school shoeless, through waist-deep snow, and uphill both ways, I was better off than the generations that went before me. At least that’s how my grandfather told it. It seems to me that children must find solace in the belief that life perpetually improves.

Some would say it didn’t turn out that way for our children, but I don’t know. Sure, there isn’t any cable television, no professional sports teams or singers to idolize, and no internet. You can’t drive down to a store that sells every imaginable product, and every cold you get these days could
, ultimately, be your death. It takes work to eat—we have to find, grow, or kill our food. We have electricity, but it takes a lot of effort to keep it going. If I fall and break my neck, there is no trauma hospital to go to. We can’t fly all over the world just because we want to.

All those things are true, and if convenience and the ability to occupy your abundant idle time with trash are the tests, then, by all means, our children are worse off than we were before
The Great Reset.

I try to see our cup as half full
, though. There is a benefit to figuring out what you want to know instead of just looking it up on the internet. Children these days can find their way to a fishing hole without GPS. Since there is no television and we have to work for our food, no one is fat anymore. Our kids entertain themselves like we used to: by playing games, reading, or creating. We spend a lot of time outside where we belong. The innocence of childhood exists again.

One of my favorite things is that books are back in style. Children don’t find reading quaint or boring anymore. I maintain that books were the greatest invention of the whole of civilization before
The Great Reset. Books facilitated all other grand inventions. For with books, one can pick up where someone else left off and turn his ideas into an invention that changes the world. Without books, we likely would not have had advances in medicine, engineering, physics, or mathematics. Would Einstein have achieved all that he did if he first had to sit down and invent the calculus? Maybe. After all, he was a genius, but I’m skeptical. No, I believe we would not have had a civilization so advanced without the written word—it is just that simple. Since, unlike the internet, books are still here along with all the knowledge they contain, I am vindicated. One day we can perhaps rebuild what we once had.

Thankfully, we collected a great number of books to keep with us after
The Great Reset. The children marvel at the telling of classics like Tom Sawyer, The Grapes of Wrath, and Moby Dick. Ironically, they envy the likes of Tom Sawyer with all the conveniences of his day and the grand times he had traveling about. They dream of being free like Tom. When I read it as a child, I imagined Tom Sawyer as rather regrettable, better off than, say, Oliver Twist, only because he was in America.

Unfortunately, by the time of
The Great Reset, I was in the minority in my regard for books. Everyone believed the internet would last forever, and so the printed word gradually fell out in favor of electronic means of information storage. What no one seemed to grasp back then was that as we became an electronic society, our entire civilization began to hinge on the availability of a single thing: electricity.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, nobody could imagine life without electricity nor could they grasp the reality that once removed, our newly formed, high-tech civilization would cease to exist, instantly. Thus, the events of that time were almost exclusively recorded by electronic means and are, at this time, lost, perhaps forever. Lifetimes of work, stored in so many bits and bytes on servers in other states or on other continents, up and vanished overnight. Some of the authors and architects of the internet achieved great things in their lives. In the end, it hardly mattered.

Losing so many of our loved ones during The Great Reset was very painful. That billions of people suffered so needlessly is heartbreaking.  But now, every task in our day has meaning. I know and care about everyone here and would trust them with my life. We don’t spend 51 weeks of the year waiting for the one week of vacation so we can go outside. We know where our food came from and what’s in it. Ironically, many people before The Great Reset longed for much of what we have after it.

About the world outside our domain, I don’t know much more than I knew twenty years ago.  In the first few years after
The Great Reset, I heard many stories of the times before, which were utterly false—out of ignorance, embellishment, or malfeasance, I do not know. I heard a story about how we had colonized the moon before The Great Reset, and all its inhabitants were unaffected by the disaster, and that they are almost certainly preparing to come down and rescue us—to bring back technology, medicine, industry, civilization. I wondered if the storyteller was trying to start a new religion. Another storyteller claimed that the whole thing was done to us by our own government. I asked him why such a necessarily sociopathic government would wipe itself out, too. He didn’t answer. All those stories make for great talk at our community fires on Saturday nights, though.

We don’t know how many people are left in the world, but it seems the plague and violence that followed cut a wide swath through humanity twenty years ago. An ambivalent and brutal natural world took over from there and nearly finished the job, far as we can tell. The towns around us are all empty now. We haven’t gone into a major city
for a long time—Seattle is quite a trip without cars and interstates, and what would be the point? We kept in touch with some other groups via the radios until they stopped answering—their chilling tales told us all we needed to know. We haven’t seen another soul in ten years. For all we know now, we are all that’s left.

However, t
here are still faint signs of the old civilization. Nothing puts a charge in the children like seeing a satellite fly over at night. On clear nights, they’ll stay up for hours scanning the sky for any sign of movement. Logically, we know that satellites were built to be autonomous and that they most likely continue on their robotic, solar-powered journey, executing computer code, collecting data, and beaming it down to a world that is decades past being able to receive it. But we suppose it is possible someone still controls them.

In twenty years, our group has grown to the size of a small town. We’ve gotten past living hand-to-mouth, and some sense of order and civilization has returned. At first, it felt almost pointless to bother—to what could we aspire? But then it occurred to us that maybe it was never really so different before
The Great Reset. To what more could we aspire simply by virtue of having cable television, a smart phone, and high speed internet?

The point of life remains the same: it is what you think it is. The meaning of life is intrinsic, what goes on outside is of little consequence. One needs only to look to a child to prove it: a child doesn’t want for purpose. I find meaning in my family, good books, and contemplation. Others find meaning
in spirituality, building great structures, or helping others. Still others find meaning in living in spite of the apparent meaninglessness of it all. Hell, somebody might find their life perfectly meaningful by staring at a rock. None of that is different.

Whatever the case, there is no map to lead the way or instruments to guide us to our purpose, and there never were. We plod along, each of us, sure only of where we’ve been and how long we’ve been at it. Much like our trip across the Pacific, the journey through life could be summed up, then as now, by just two words:

Dead Reckoning.