Foreign Enemies and Traitors (47 page)

He wiped the blade of his knife on his pants, sheathed it, and began to rotate the slung Kalashnikov rifle from his back, the barrel slowly coming up under his arm to the ready position.  His right hand found the rifle’s pistol grip, in front of which was a wickedly curved thirty-round magazine.  The soldier studied the well-stamped slushy remnants of snow, then turned and looked back upslope, raising an arm toward his two comrades, who were still intently pillaging bodies as a team.

Boone’s pistol was a Glock 21.  It held 14 rounds of .45 caliber ammunition.  The bullets were heavy but slow as pistol bullets went, which had the critical benefit of making them slower than the speed of sound.  It was a stock Glock pistol, except for the threaded barrel.  He had bought the aftermarket barrel years earlier, when they had been perfectly legal to own.  No coincidence, the threads matched those of the military-issue suppressor he had taken with him from Fort Campbell.  His suppressor would reduce the muzzle blast to the sound level of a loud handclap, and the slow subsonic bullets would not make a telltale sonic crack while passing through the air.  The snow would further dampen the sound of a shot, and the ravine walls would reflect any remaining noise skyward.

When the soldier turned upslope and raised his left arm, Boone sat up, twisted sideways, took aim using a two-handed grip and fired.  The pistol’s sights were barely higher than the top of the suppressor, but he had practiced enough to be dead certain of his aim at this close range.  The soldier was wearing body armor over his coat, so Boone aimed higher.  The bullet took him at the base of his skull below his beret, destroying the medulla oblongata and dropping him like a steer in a slaughterhouse. 

Boone immediately took aim at the next soldier.  He was fifty feet up-slope, a much more difficult pistol shot against a moving target.  The two soldiers took no immediate notice of their finger-hacking comrade suddenly falling prone, or of Boone sitting up.  The three Cossacks had been slipping and falling since descending into the ravine and treading among the packed bodies.  They were too intent upon their own looting to wonder about their mate going down again, probably to reach for the promising golden glimmer of a ring or bracelet. 

A head shot was too risky at this range, so instead Boone aimed beneath the body armor for the pelvis area and fired.  The man twisted and dropped to a sitting position, in total shock and amazement.  Boone sprang to his feet and continued to take aimed shots at both men, alternating between their heads and hips.  One of his bullets connected with a skull inside a fur hat and Boone was certain the second man was dead.  The third man had meantime fallen among the bodies and was lost to view.

Boone changed magazines and charged upward, ignoring the fact that he was running over frozen bodies, instinctively weaving and ducking until he saw the third soldier.  The wounded man was lying on his back and groaning loudly, trying to unsling the Kalashnikov rifle from behind him, where it was pinned under his own weight.  Dark blood was soaking his camouflage trousers and staining the snow scarlet beneath him.  He had been shot in the groin area, or perhaps the femoral artery.  He glanced up at Boone and they locked eyes, brown staring up into blue.  The color rapidly drained from the man’s face.  He stopped trying to free his rifle, and slowly raised both hands in submission.  Boone aimed carefully, squeezing the Glock’s trigger slowly, and sent a final bullet into the soldier’s forehead just below his fur hat.  From the minute that he had seen the three soldiers rappel into the ravine to pillage the bodies, there had never been a question in his mind of taking prisoners if it came to this point.  His only momentary regret was that the three had suffered far too little in comparison with what they had done.

There was not a minute to waste, but Boone still forced himself to take a moment to think.  If any other foreign soldiers were watching the drama in the ravine unfold, they would have opened fire.  He quickly scanned both ravine tops, but saw nothing, only the crows returning to the tree branches, waiting their turn.  The three looters were probably operating on their own, out of pure callous greed.  It was not the kind of mission that you invited your entire platoon to attend.  For one thing, more participants meant a smaller share of plunder. 

He could either take off now or spend a minute hiding the fresh bodies.  He decided to take the time, after quickly photographing them in their Kazak uniforms, with their weapons.  He pulled and dragged the last Cossack he had shot into an open slot between two dead Americans, and pulled a bearded man partially over the soldier’s warm body.  Boone scrambled down the ravine and repeated the process with the other two dead enemies.  He left their rifles under their corpses, not bothering to take one.  There were already plenty of captured AKs back in the cave, and hidden in other caches.  He could not conceal a rifle with a non-folding stock during the next part of his escape and evasion.  Being seen with a rifle would pronounce an instant sentence of death upon him from any unseen enemy sniper, or even from a missile-firing drone possibly circling high above.  The easily concealed sound-suppressed Glock pistol was ideal for close work, the only type of combat he could hope to win as one man against the world.

He did remove the matchbox-sized infrared firefly strobes from the body armor shoulder straps of the last two.  They were already switched off, indicating to Boone that the three Cossack looters had been operating on their own, not wishing to be tracked from the sky.  Since he could not be completely certain that the infrared strobes were turned off, he buried them deeply inside a vest pocket.  The tiny strobes’ invisible infrared flashes were so bright on thermal IR that they could be detected even through a shirt pocket.

The snow was already melting.  Soon their helter-skelter footprints among the corpses would be meaningless, and then their message would disappear altogether.  In an hour, the three Cossack bodies would be too cool to be noticed by a helo or a drone equipped with thermal infrared.  It might be hours before the soldiers were missed, and more hours before they were found.  That was all the time Boone needed.  From here, he could make it to the cave in two hours, if he was not impeded.  Without a doubt, there were many more foreign soldiers patrolling in the area.  He could not play it safe and hide nearby, waiting for them to leave.  When the three bodies of their missing comrades were discovered, the Cossacks would go wild seeking revenge.  There would be helicopters, UAVs, and tracking dogs.  He had to move now.

                                        
         15

“The young ones sure need a lot of sleep,”
said Phil Carson.  He wasn’t quite whispering, but he was speaking very quietly.  In the silence of the cave, he didn’t need to raise his voice to be heard.

“Thank God for that,” replied Doug.  “The only time that baby is quiet is when she’s sleeping.”

“I meant Jenny and Zack.”  Jenny and the baby were sleeping in the blue dome tent at the other side of the wooden platform.  Zack was in a green sleeping bag, sprawled on a foam mattress pad next to the tent.  Carson was across the square card table from Doug, sitting on one of the four wooden folding chairs, one for each side.  Both men were nursing mugs of instant coffee.  Doug had his AR-15 carbine disassembled on the table, and he was wiping down the bolt carrier with an oily rag. 

The handheld radio and some of the other electronic devices from Jenny’s pack were also lying on the table, after having been carefully examined.  Both men had changed into dry camouflage BDU fatigues, part of the cave’s stockpile.  They were the old woodland pattern BDUs, curvy splotches of green, brown and black, not the digital gray and brown of the newer ACU pattern.  A single bare light bulb was suspended above them.  Doug had washed his face and hair in a basin and given himself a shave, and his black hair was combed straight back.  Carson looked at his watch.  “It’s almost noon.  How long do you think until Boone gets here?” 

“There’s no telling.  If there are foreign troops around, he might decide he can’t move in the daylight, and then maybe he’ll wait until tonight.”

“You have a lot of faith in him?”

“Oh yeah.  I’d of been dead a few times if it wasn’t for him.  He’ll make it.”

A murmur came from within the blue tent, the start of a baby’s cry, followed by a soft reassurance from Jenny.  When the sounds quieted, Carson whispered, “You know, Doug, that baby can’t live on instant milk powder.  At least I don’t think it can.”

“What if we grind up vitamins and things to add to it?”

“I don’t know.  I just don’t think babies can live on instant milk.  You know what that means?”

Doug whispered back, “Is it going to die?”

“Maybe, but that’s not what I meant.  It means we can’t stay hidden in this cave for a long time.  Not if we want that little orphan baby to survive.”

“Let’s wait until Boone gets here.  We don’t have to decide anything today.”

“What’s the longest you ever stayed in here?” asked Carson.

“You mean without going outside at all?”

“Yeah.”

“More than a week.  We wait for bad weather to go out.  The worse the better, that’s what Boone says.  The worse the better.  He calls it good operating weather.  It keeps the enemy inside.”

Carson lowered his voice in order not to be heard by Jenny, in case she was awake.  “Well, I don’t think that baby can last a week on instant milk.  Not a newborn.  I hope I’m wrong.”

“Let’s just wait until Boone gets here, okay?  He’s the boss.  He decides these things.”

“Fine by me.”  Carson sipped from his cup of weak instant coffee.  He was surprised that a luxury item that could not be found in the state of Mississippi was available in a cave in Tennessee.  The coffee was from an old MRE meal pack—government-issue Meals Ready to Eat.  Carson had seen only one cardboard case of the plastic meal packs.  They’d split a single coffee packet and made two mugs, but at least it was hot.  “So, Doug, you already heard me tell my story, back at Zachary’s house.  What about you?  Where are you from, and how did you wind up here?”  If they were going to spend the next few days or even longer in the cave, they were going to become well acquainted.

“Me?  I’m from Maryland.  The Baltimore suburbs, north of the city.”

Carson had placed his accent as coming from somewhere in the Northeast, maybe Philadelphia.  Maryland was a close guess.  “So how did you wind up fighting a guerrilla war in Tennessee?”

Doug smiled wistfully.  “It’s a long story.  To start with, I was drafted.  I was going to the University of Maryland, majoring in communications, but I had to drop out after my junior year because I couldn’t afford the tuition.  Unfortunately I’m just a Category 7—a healthy heterosexual Christian white male.  That’s the bottom, the baseline.  My tuition was tripled with no warning, so that was that.  They pulled my student loan and I couldn’t get any kind of extension, so I was back at home living with my mom.  That made me draft bait—except they call it National Service now.”

“The draft is back?” asked Carson.  “How’s that work?  Do they still have college deferments?”

“There’s a lottery.  They can get you anytime between eighteen and twenty-five.  College doesn’t get you out of it, but it puts it off, and if you’re lucky they might not call you up at all.”

“How long do you have to serve?”

“It’s supposed to be two years in the military, or three years in the Conservation Corps or the Urban Corps.  The CC’s quota was already filled for the year—at least that’s what they said—and forget the Urban Corps.  That’s all Jamal Tambor fanatics.  We call it the Tambor-Corps.  So it was the Army for me.  To tell you the truth, I would have picked the Navy or the Air Force, but I didn’t get a choice in that either.  I did basic training at Fort Dix.  Then I was assigned to an engineering battalion at Fort Leonard Wood.  So I was already in Missouri when the first earthquake hit.”

“What are you, about twenty-four?”

“Twenty-five.  I thought I’d have my master’s degree by now.  Well, so much for
my
plans—Uncle Sam had some other ideas for my future.”  He went on cleaning his rifle, ramming a small cloth patch on the tip of a metal rod up the inside of the barrel.

“Tell me something, Doug.  You’re obviously a smart guy.  I’ve been out of the country for seven years.  What the hell happened to America?  I always thought Americans would fight to keep their freedom.  What happened?  How could Americans just roll over and give up their rights?”

“Well, we didn’t just ‘give up’
our rights.  It wasn’t like that.  Not at all.  It’s more like they were stolen in broad daylight, at the constitutional convention.”

Carson asked, “How did
that
happen?  I was down in the Caribbean then.  American news wasn’t so big down there.  Panama was going through its own troubles, and I was keeping a low profile.  I didn’t have cable TV, that’s for sure.”

“I’ll tell you what happened—I watched it happen.  When the convention was over, that’s when we knew that the old America was gone.  It was over.  Finished.”

“The convention was in Philadelphia, right?”

Right.  I was in Baltimore when it happened, but it was televised wall-to-wall.  On television, the talking heads called it the con-con, like it was a big joke or something.  Maybe constitutional convention was too hard to spell, or maybe it took them too long to say it.  Too many syllables.  You know—time is money.  I think a lot of the people behind the convention couldn’t even pronounce it, much less spell it, so it just became the con-con.”