Digger 1.0 (20 page)

Chuck tore off a small chunk of the plastic
explosive, formed it in his hands, then pressed it to the lock. He
held it in place and then nodded at Delores.

“Take the cellophane wrapper off that roll
of tape and pull me off a three foot piece.”

Delores fumbled with the cellophane, but was
able to use her nails and teeth to remove the wrapping. She noticed
her hands were shaking as she scratched at the roll with her
fingernails to start peeling some of the tape. Once she’d gotten it
started, she measured off what felt like three feet of tape, and
carefully bit it to tear it. She handed one end to Chuck, and he
began to wrap the tape around the C4.

Just at that moment, Ellis surfaced.

He spewed water and sucked in air. His face
was taking on a blue-gray tint. His body temperature was down. He’d
obviously been in the cold water for far too long.

“Ellis!” Delores shouted. “Ellis Kint! Where
were you?” She knelt down and reached for him, as if she could pull
him up right through the grate. As if the power of her will could
make things happen if she just wanted them to bad enough.

Ellis was shivering, his face tight and
stiff.

“I was… I… I wanted… to…
check,
” he paused for a moment and grabbed
the grate, pulling himself up so he didn’t have to try to talk
loud.

“Go ahead,” Chuck said as he worked. “Fill
us in. Take your time, but hurry.”

“I wanted to… check to see if there were any
other tunnels down there. Some… Some… any another escape, maybe.”
He shivered, and his whole body shook.

Chuck was listening, but he never stopped.
He worked the tape through the grate and wrapped it tightly around
the C4.

“That grate is wet and slimy. Don’t want the
bomb slipping off into the water. That wouldn’t be good,” he
said.

“You’re so calm,” Delores said. As she spoke
to Chuck, her hand moved and reached until she found Ellis’s hand
gripping the metal rebar. She rubbed his hand with hers, as if that
might warm him up, even though she knew that it couldn’t. But it
was contact, and perhaps she needed it more than he did.

“I’m not calm,” Chuck said. “Listen, stop
with the hand-holding. Start unwinding some of that wire. I need
you to run it around that corner. Maybe another six feet past the
corner.”

Delores released Ellis’s hand and their eyes
met for just a moment as she reached for the wire.

Chuck finished taping the bomb and took one
end of the wire, tying it to the grate, leaving himself an eighteen
inch end to work with. Delores disappeared from his view, and while
she walked off, Chuck bit off the insulated plastic from the wires,
then attached the detonator. He felt with his right hand and made
sure he had the “clicker” in his pocket. He wanted to make certain
Delores wasn’t going to accidentally blow him up. This was the part
that got amateurs killed. Especially when two people are working on
a device. But once he was sure he still had the clicker, he pushed
the detonator into the exposed C4 and turned back to Ellis, whose
head was down, lips barely hovering above the water.

“You alright, boss?” Chuck asked.

“No.”

“We’re going to get you out,” Chuck
said.

“I know.”

Chuck pointed at Ellis, “When I shout, you
dive down again,” Chuck said. “Go as deep as you can.”

“I… I will,” Ellis said.

“Cover your head,” Chuck said. “Who knows
where this grate might go. Or, parts of it.”

“I…,” Ellis looked up and just nodded.

“Ok, brother,” Chuck said. “Let’s do this.”
He nodded at Ellis then sprinted back to where Delores was waiting
around the corner holding the wire.

Chuck took the wire from her, closed his
eyes and sucked in a deep breath. “We really need this to work,” he
said.

Delores nodded. “It has to work.”

He twisted the wires around the metal poles,
screwed down the clamps, then quickly examined the device to make
sure it looked operational.

“I think we’
re good,
” he said.

“Do it,” Delores replied.

“Fire in the hole!” Ellis yelled. He began
counting aloud backward from ten. As he counted, he gave the small
crank a few quick turns.

“Ten! Nine! Eight!”

“Just…” Delores said. She was frantic, and
tears began to well up in her eyes. Her hands came up, as if to
help hurry.

“We have to give him time to clear,” Chuck
said.

Delores grabbed his hands and her chin
dropped to her chest. “Hold on,” she said.

There was silence for a few seconds, and for
both of them time slowed down. Then her eyes opened again.

“Blow it!”

“Zero,” Chuck said, and flipped the
switch.

~~~

“Ellis!” Delores cried out for what seemed
to her the hundredth time. And she ran. She bolted.

Chuck tried to keep up with her, but she was
gone as soon as the rubble and dust began to settle.

“Careful!” Chuck shouted, but he knew she
wasn’
t listening.

When they got to the small pond, they saw
that the grate was blown back and crumpled. It hung partly in the
water and partly in the air, and it was clear to both of them the
bomb had worked.

But there was no Ellis.

“Ellis!” the two shouted in unison.

Chuck banged on the twisted metal with his
hand, and Delores dropped to the ground so she could peer into the
dark water with her light.

“He’s not down there!” she shrieked. Now she
was crying and sobbing. “He’s not there! I can’t see him!”

“Give him a few seconds,” Chuck said. He
hoped that any moment now Ellis would surface, but he couldn’t see
anything down there either.

Delores stood again, and as she did her hand
came up to her mouth. A mournful gasp as old as time escaped from
her. She took a step backwards. And then another. And another.

“Delores…” Chuck said.

She stared at the water, and her neck
stiffened.

“Delores?” Chuck said again, this time as a
question.

Now she straightened her back and her hands
dropped to her sides and unclenched.

“Del…,” Before he could say her name again,
he knew. She was going in, and there was no stopping her. “Oh,
crap,” was all he could think to say.

She lunged forward and dove before Chuck
could even move to block her path. She was under the water in the
blink of an eye.

Chuck sighed and shook his head.

“I guess I’
m getting wet,
” he muttered. He pulled off his
headlamp before taking a deep breath. He dropped the light and dove
into the cold, black waters of the sub-Texas tunnel.

Shooter was completing his quadrant by
quadrant scan, the third since the violent end of the biker
incursion, and he’d been waiting, on edge and ready, expecting a
second wave, or some other follow up to the attack.

For years the family had talked about, and
planned for, organized assaults, but in their war games the attacks
always seemed to be worse. With this one, he’d not even gotten to
the point of considering blowing the bridge.

Well… He’d considered it, but it never came
close to happening.

Now he scanned downward toward the Solekeep
and saw bodies and bikes everywhere, stretching from Fontana’s
Bridge itself, and littered all the way down the slope past the
buffalo grass and sage and mesquite trees that lined the old road
leading to the bridge. Bodies were in the river, and on the bridge
a dead Hog lay on its side, the chopper’s handlebars twisting off
in strange directions.

He heard a sharp whistle and grabbed the
‘nocs, and looking back up their own valley where he saw Neil and
Rooster walking toward him. He cursed silently.

They should’ve come through the tunnel.
Still could be a sniper out there. In fact, I’m sure there’s one,
because I saved his life.

The tunnel that cut southwestward from just
north of the barn ran directly behind the pillbox and up through a
trap door in the forest behind him. From there, the entrance to the
pillbox was only a hundred feet and most of that would have been
protected from any view by snipers down in the lowlands across the
bridge.

When Neil and Rooster climbed into the
pillbox, Shooter gave them a harsh look.

“You do realize we just survived a
full-scale attack from an organized enemy don’t you?” he said.

Rooster
cackled,
“Of course we do, silly.”

“And you just walked here from Utah directly
across the enemy’s line of sight. Three hundred yards or more as
slow moving targets moving north to south out in the open?”

“The battle’
s over, Shooter,
” Neil said. But his head dropped a
little and his cheeks blushed. He knew they’d messed up.

“Well,”
Rooster said,
“I guess we didn’t think about it like
that. We should have, but we didn’t.”

Shooter nodded and patted Neil on the
shoulder. “Just next time please use the tunnels or go west behind
the farm and barn and come back through the forest. Stay out of
sniper view, ok?”

Neil mumbled, “Ok.”

“Some mistakes…,” Shooter said.

“…
you only get to make once,”
Neil and Rooster answered in abject unison.

They looked down the hill and Rooster
whistled and shook her head.

“That’s a heck of a mess,” she said.

“Yep,”
Neil agreed.

“We’ll have to clean it up?”

“
Eventually,”
said Shooter.
“
But we
’ll wait for Ellis and Delores to get
back. As sad as it is that we had to do that, I don’t real awful
about it. They came here for trouble…”

“And they got it,”
Rooster said.

Shooter watched the dead he’d killed. Then,
“There’ll be gear down there. More weapons, and maybe other…
things.”

“Motorcycles’ll have scrap and trade value,”
Neil offered. “Maybe we can contact those PMPs Ellis met down at
the bridge that day. The ones who said we could leave a message in
Casperville.”

“That’s all a little over our pay grade,
Neil. For now we have another issue to deal with.” While Shooter
talked, his eyes still scanned the battlefield below, watching for
any movement. He knew his counterpart was down there. Watching
them.

“There’s a guy down there I’ve come to
know,” Shooter said. “
And
he
’s someone we need to know better.”

Rooster and Neil looked down across the
bridge.

“A guy?” Rooster asked.

“Yeah.”

“How do you know he’
s a guy?
”

“I
just
—” Shooter shrugged.

She cut him off. “Maybe it’s a girl.”

Shooter
smiled,
“Well, I guess you’re right little sister. It could
be a girl, and that’d be fine by me.”

Neil scowled, “
I don
’t understand what’
s happening.
”

Rooster cackled and pushed Neil hard. So
hard he almost fell down.

“Cut it out, Rooster.”

“Both of you cut it out,” Shooter said.
“There’s a sniper down there. I sort of met him last night. And I
saved his life during the battle. I need to go down and see if he
needs help.”

Neil nodded, and a look of understanding
crossed his face. “I saw that guy! He was the one who took out a
pistol and attacked the whole advancing biker front!”

“That’s him,” Shooter said.

“Stupid bugger,”
Rooster said.

“Would you two just shut up for a minute?”
Shooter snapped.
“I need
to go down there, and Rooster, I need you to go get Marlon and
Patrick to go with me.

“Hey, wait a minute!”
Neil said.

Shooter put his hand on Neil’s shoulder.
“Easy brother. Take it easy. I need you here with my gun. I’m
taking them with me because I need you to stay here on overwatch to
keep us all alive.”

“And I’m worried about Delores and Ellis,”
Rooster said.

“Well,” Shooter said, “one mystery at a
time. When we’re all back and safe we’ll figure out where those two
are. Until then, let’s stick to the plan.”

That’s when the three friends in the pillbox
heard the screams coming from the house. In the blink of an eye
they were up and out of the pillbox, sprinting toward the house.
Only Shooter realized they were once again exposing themselves to
sniper fire from across the bridge. But the screams were angry, and
the hurt and pain in them made the hair on Shooter’s neck
bristle.

Maybe God will let us make this mistake
more than once
, he thought as they ran toward the house.

~~~

The screams were coming from Kay, upstairs,
and before Shooter even reached for the handrail he knew something
was terribly wrong. Somewhere deep inside himself he knew
everything had changed. That life on the farm, if it continued at
all, would never be the same after this day.

~~~

Karl, just ten years old, was cradled in
Kay’s arms, his hair dripping scarlet and matted. Her blood-soaked
arms and hands were wrapped around him as she rocked and wailed in
anguish.

Renny was curled up in a ball against the
far wall, crying and sobbing into his hands.

Karl was dead. That much was clear. Shot
through the head.

Just as Shooter was about to speak,
searching for his voice and the right words, if there ever were
any, Patrick and Marlon burst into the room with guns at the ready.
Surveying the scene, both boys lowered their weapons and sank to
the ground.

Shooter turned back to Kay. “What…”

Kay looked up, taking a minute to gather
herself. Twice she moved her bloodied hand to straighten the dead
boy’s hair, and both times her hand hovered over the matted, bloody
mess and her eyes closed.