Foreign Enemies and Traitors (62 page)

Boone was wearing nothing but a set of dark boxer shorts when Jenny crouched down and followed behind him.  Carson followed behind her, with his pack, the jacket bundle and rifle clutched to his chest.  The candlelight disappeared behind them.  A few yards on, moonlight reflecting off the rippling creek made the cave opening visible from inside.  Carson watched Boone step down into the water, his back against the cave’s mouth.  The creek made an inside turn against a rocky cliff that concealed the cave opening.  The water came up to his hips when he leaned back to the cave exit.  Jenny reached out, grasped Boone’s head, and swung a leg over each of his shoulders.  Boone lurched as he struggled for balance, then he set out across the stream.  Carson followed as soon as his gear was ready.  He fastened his bundled clothing inside the shoulder straps of his pack.  The rifle was also thrust through the straps, the chest strap tying it all together.  His entire kit became one tight mass.

Carson put the heavy bundle down just outside the cave opening, then turned and clambered into the icy water.  It hit his skin like a thousand daggers that were alternately red hot and ice cold.  He had almost no sensation of his feet on the bottom of the creek.  The water was running strongly.  If he cut a foot making this crossing, he wouldn’t be able to hike out, and he’d be finished.  He might not even feel the gash or know it until he was on the other side.  He turned around toward the rocky ledge, dragged his bundle toward him, and strained to hoist it all over his head.  He understood Boone’s rejection of heavy body armor for this exfiltration.  The pack, clothes, load bearing vest and rifle weighed at least fifty pounds, and Carson had to somehow balance it all above him.  He held the pack’s straps and positioned the middle of this bundle on the top of his bare head.  Like a drunken juggler, he struggled to find his balance beneath the unwieldy load.

Just don’t let me drop it, and don’t let me fall in the middle of this creek
, Carson prayed.  There was sufficient moonlight to see by, reflecting off the water and snow.  Ahead of him, Boone was already halfway across, the water rising up his back almost to Jenny’s bottom on his shoulders.  Her feet must be submerged where Boone held her ankles.  Give me the tropical jungles any day, Carson thought.  Behind him, a concave rocky cliff rose at least fifty feet above the water, ancient layers of rock angling upward where it had been undercut by the current.  Ahead of him there was a shallow bank of pebbles, and bare tree branches hanging over the stream.  Patches of snow covered the ground in streaks.  Boone emerged from the water, and once he was standing on the ground, Jenny slid down from his back, then moved into a moon shadow and disappeared from view.  Boone was already returning to the water when Carson reached the middle of the stream

Doug Dolan passed him and was out of the water before Carson.  Zack passed him as he struggled up the bank.  The younger men were faster, but I’m hanging in there, he thought.  The ground was frozen where it was not covered with an inch or two of snow, the air was frosty and revealed their exhalations in the moonlight, but his body was too numb to notice.  My goose bumps have goose bumps, Carson thought, shivering uncontrollably.  He clutched the entire load of pack, bundle and weapon to his heaving chest and followed Doug.  They hustled in their bare feet across an open, easy area along the creek, mostly snow-covered grass, and they quickly came to an abandoned fishing cabin.  It was no bigger than a single large room, but it was relatively dry inside and protected from the chill breeze. 

Doug set a small flashlight onto a windowsill, aiming at the floor, so they could see what they were doing.  The cold drove them to a furious pace of activity, unstrapping their bundles and finding their clothes.  Carson used his hands to rapidly swipe most of the remaining water from his body, then found his socks and use them to dry himself as much as he could, and then dressed in seconds.  His feet appeared not to have suffered a gash or puncture, but perhaps they were too numb to bleed or to hurt.  Once he was dressed, had replaced his equipment vest and strapped his pack back on, he grabbed his rifle and exited the cabin before either Zack or Doug was ready. 

He was already standing guard when Boone walked into view, clutching both his own pack, bundled gear and clothes and rifle as well as Jenny’s smaller pack.  Jenny was in a corner, rewrapping the baby’s blankets and getting herself ready to march.  Again Boone merely nodded as he passed, going into the one-room cabin. 

A few minutes later, they were all assembled in the cramped cabin, everyone dressed and ready to move out.  Carson stood watch in the open doorway, the short M-16 carbine comfortingly familiar in his hands, an acquaintance since 1968.

“Zack, where’s your Winchester?” Boone asked in a whisper.  Carson perked his ears up and looked over from the doorway.

“It…it fell off my bag,” he whispered back.

Boone paused before asking, “Where?”

“In the creek.”

“Why didn’t you get it?”

Zack stuttered, and faltered.

“Never mind.  We can’t backtrack; there’s no time.  You’ve got your bow, Jenny’s got her .45…that’s enough.  You’d probably have to ditch the rifle anyway before you crossed over into Mississippi.  Suck it up, Zack; just try to be more careful.”

During their patrol briefing in the cave, they had decided that Zack should carry his own Winchester instead of one of Boone’s captured Kalashnikovs.  The two youngsters were wearing civilian clothes, in order to pass as refugees if they were trapped at a checkpoint.  They might be able to explain the ordinary civilian lever-action rifle, but to be caught with a captured Kalashnikov would mean an instant death sentence. 

So now he’d have to rely on his compound bow and his hunter’s instincts.  Plus Jenny had her Springfield XD .45 caliber pistol, with its suppressor.  She refused to part with the pistol or the silencer, in spite of Boone’s mentioning that if she was captured with them, they could lead to her execution.  It didn’t matter, she didn’t care.  She would not part with the gun, but agreed to carry it concealed, beneath the oversized green rain slicker that she had found in the cave’s clothing box.  Obviously, she couldn’t pass as a refugee while wearing the Kazak uniform and parka that she had obtained from the dead American traitor.

Boone whispered to Zack and Jenny, too quietly for Carson to hear his words.  The three huddled over a partially unfolded road map held between them, and a pocket compass Boone had provided the teenagers.  Zack’s tiny red LED light illuminated Boone’s finger as it traced their route down into Mississippi.  Finished with their final route brief, Zack shook hands with each of them in the cabin as they all whispered good luck.  Zack had removed the compact bow from where it was tied to his pack, and nocked an arrow.  Jenny followed him out of the cabin, and they headed upstream along the bank.  The creek ran northward here, and the teenagers were hiking the other way, down toward the Mississippi state line.

After a quick look around the tiny cabin for anything dropped or left behind, the three remaining men set out directly into the woods, away from the stream.  The first part of their journey led to the east, toward the Tennessee River just a few miles away.  A hidden Jon-boat with an electric trolling motor would take them across the river to the relative safety of Middle Tennessee.  At least, that was the plan Boone had laid out in his patrol order.

****

Boone walked point. 
Carson followed, and Doug Dolan was rear security.  Boone would have felt better with Carson watching their backs, but Doug was more familiar with night vision goggles.  At any rate, there were only three of them, and with the moonlight filtering through the clouds night vision was a bonus, not a strict necessity.  During their frequent stops, Boone tipped his goggles up, giving himself a wider angle of view in the ambient light.  It was always a tradeoff with night vision: the enhanced brightness came with a restricted field of vision, almost a keyhole view.  Years of practice had taught him how to balance natural and amplified night vision.  He found his path; it took them mostly through woods for the first half mile, past a few isolated farmhouses now abandoned.  The hidden boat was located on another side creek two miles north; he had made this trip enough times to know the way with or without night vision.  The side creek then spilled into the Tennessee River, in a stretch where it was less than a half-mile wide. 

                They moved slowly, but smoothly.  Haste would lead to mistakes, to noise, and possibly to their discovery.  “Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast” went the old saying.  In night patrolling, stealth was everything.  Those who were detected first often died.  Those who did the detecting could hide in order to allow a superior force to pass by, or they could set up an ambush if the tactical situation permitted.  Tonight the risk of discovery was very real.  The foreign enemies had found their hidden automobile, and that meant they would soon find the cave.  Unseen UAVs circling high above could already be preparing to drop missiles upon them, or the distant UAV pilots could be calling the Kazaks to report the location of the insurgents.  It was hard to gauge the cloud cover: was it low enough to keep the drones grounded?  Boone only hoped that the C-4 bomb in the Subaru had killed some of the foreign mercenaries, that it had not been discovered and detonated in a controlled explosion.  That would have been a waste of valuable C-4, and an insult to his expertise as a demo man.

                Little snow was left on the forest floor.  Enough moonlight filtered through the clouds and the mostly bare branches above them to create vivid green daylight in his NVGs.  The wet ground reflected the moonlight like silver filigree.  Even Carson, a few paces behind him with bare eyeballs, had not expressed any difficulty in keeping up.  Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.  Tortoise and hare.  Boone always kept Carson’s lack of night vision in mind, and avoided trip hazards.  When this was impossible, he allowed Carson to catch up to touching distance, and by hand-pointing and a few careful whispers he guided the old man across to easy footing.     This part of Tennessee was a crazy-quilt patchwork of fields and woods, attached at the odd corners and stitched together by hedgerows and tree lines.  When the paramount object was always to stay in the best cover available, the closest route was never a straight line, but an apparently random succession of zigs and zags.  Like capillaries flowing into arteries, a fractal system of streams and creeks spread between the low hills and eventually found the Tennessee River.  You could not walk a straight mile in any direction without crossing at least one ankle-deep stream, flowing subtly downhill to join another and another until they all met the Tennessee, then the Ohio, and finally the Mississippi for the last run to salt water in the Gulf.

                Western Tennessee was certainly not classic guerrilla country in the way that Eastern Tennessee with its mountains was.  This was subtle terrain, shifting and blending, giving barely adequate concealment even to those who understood its hidden folds and textures.  But after tonight, he was done with it.  The Cossacks had won, and for now it was time to leave.  The most important weapon he carried tonight was contained within the memory chip of his digital camera, but that weapon was useless here in Radford County.

                They were about two miles north of the cave, so that meant they were almost four miles from where the Subaru had been hidden.  If the explosion had killed a few more of the Kazaks, they’d be mad as hornets and out for immediate revenge tonight.  Especially if they had found the bodies of their three dead comrades at the massacre site.  Any Americans remaining in the area would be targets for reprisal attacks.  The faint echoes and cracks of small-arms fire reached the three men, possibly from the other side of the cave.  The louder but slower thumping of a .50 caliber machine gun was unmistakable.  The Kazaks might be doing random recon by fire, or they could be gunning down American civilians on the road or in their homes.  It was impossible to know.  Mostly he hoped they were not shooting at Zack and Jenny.  The shots were too far away for that, he hoped.

The lack of any helicopters above them puzzled Boone.  Normally, helos would rapidly arrive over the scene of a rebel-caused explosion, both for medical casevac and to search for the rebels who had planted the explosives.  But there was no faint whine of turbine engines or rotors beating the night sky.

That did not preclude the possibility that a UAV was already high above them, searching in expanding circles around the Subaru for the thermal signatures of humans.  The bare branches above them provided cold comfort; they were no barrier to the heat given off by their bodies.  Boone kept under and between the occasional evergreens as much as he could.  In the pines, they might be missed entirely, or mistaken for deer.  Under the bare branches of deciduous trees in winter, they were naked prey, upright walking bipeds carrying packs and weapons.  He kept to the thickest cover, bushes that still held some leaves, following a stream as it wound gradually downhill.  If they were spotted from above, they would never hear the missile coming.

He consulted the captured military GPS unit, its screen dimmed down to its night vision setting.  They were approaching the narrow waist of an hourglass-shaped section of woods.  According to his memory, this stream threaded its way across the narrow point of the woods.  He remembered often seeing cattle moving through it on their way to lower pasture.  The woods ahead of them thinned out until they provided almost no cover, a danger area for sure.

Ahead Boone saw a flash, and he froze in place and slowly sank down.  He turned around.  Carson was only a step behind, also crouching silently below the level of the bushes that provided their only concealment.  Doug closed up the gap, waiting.  Boone turned back to his front, and watched.  Again he saw the flash, and this time he thought he saw it flicker.  It could be someone with a flashlight, moving in the woods, swinging the light side to side.  He pushed his NVGs up on his head, straining his eyes, but saw only blackness, his night vision ruined by the magnified light of his goggles.  He slid them back down over his eyes, and waited.  After a few seconds, there another series of flashes.  An infrared strobe?