Payload (15 page)

“Guys, we have company,” Bear called back. “Vehicle up ahead.”

“It’s the moving truck,” Dyson observed a moment later as the RV slowed. “The guys next to us. Looks like they broke down.”

“They saved our bacon, punching a hole through that herd before they could close,” JD pointed out. “And we could use a couple extra bodies.”

“If they were FASA we would be zombies or dead right now,” Bear agreed.

“Do what you think is best,” Marv muttered, studying the screen of Doc’s modified tablet.

“She’s dead,” Addison mumbled, straightening up from the girl. “Shock, I guess. I’m getting a Glock.”

“Grab me a couple boxes of 5.56mm, please,” Marv tapped the screen. “I need to refill. If you’re going to stop for the guys, we might as well dump her body.”

“I would call you a cold-hearted bastard if we hadn’t just left two of our own in the dirt,” JD sighed. “You know, after seeing all of this, I think I’m completely over my wife leaving me. Compared to what else I’ve been through lately, it’s hardly anything at all.”

“That’s the spirit,” the Ranger nodded. “Remember, this girl would have been happy to leave you dead or infected.”

“Yard Gnome Action Team, eh?” Chip eyed Moogie in the place of honor next to the fridge. “Well, we’re game until Texas.”

“What now?” Brick rumbled. The powerfully-built Pole looked like he was on the verge of violence at any given moment, but JD got the impression it was just his squat, powerful appearance.

“We find a place to hole up while I take a look at a bar,” Marv didn’t look up from the long thin strips he was cutting from a BDU top that was part of the unclaimed proceeds of the trio’s Jacksonville surplus raid. “The people who hit that camp site were there recently, and may still be. I want to know how they knew we were in that RV park.”

Chip shook his head. “Brick, maybe we should have just stayed on foot.”

“No. Those are bad people. Terrorists. We need to…,” the tough Pole scowled, thinking. “Aid, help…we need to do service. This is very bad. We need to make part.”

“Take part,” Chip sighed. Despite looking like he was always on the verge of assaulting the next person who made eye contact, Brick was insistent that his English be corrected.

“Take, take part,” Brick nodded thoughtfully. “We need to take part in defend America.”

“I dunno, dude,” Chip mumbled. Brick was tough-he had served in the Polish Army, and had earned money to get to America by doing security work in Afghanistan for a Coalition contractor. Chip, on the other hand, was definitely not tough. He was strong, you couldn’t move furniture without building up, but he wasn’t tough. Not the way these guys were tough. They all carried a lot of weapons, and just looked like bad-asses, even JD who was older and more sophisticated than the others.

Chip didn’t care about terrorists and fighting, he just wanted to get back home to his jumbled little apartment, fire up his Xbox, and order in Chinese.

He had a sick feeling that he wasn’t going to get his wish for a long time to come.

Chapter Six

It started to rain as Bear parked Gnomehome behind a long-dead gas station not far from an intersection with a state highway.

Marv tied strips of BDU cloth to his legs, upper arms, and pinned them to his ACU top, the long ends hanging free. “Keep all lights out, and try to get some sleep,” He advised the others as he smeared black Kiwi shoe polish on his face and the white letters on his ball cap.

“I still think you should let me go, too,” Dyson said.

“You’re expert at the sneaking, but how are you at pulling the trigger on an uninfected Human, if it comes down to that? Besides, we’ve only got one night vision device.” Marv checked the batteries on the hand-held CB, then turned the unit off and clipped it to the back of his belt. “This is what I do. Four tours of this crap: sneaking around in the dark looking for trouble. You guys get some rest, leave two on watch until you hear from me. I’m not going to be back before daylight, so patience is key.”

“We’ll be here,” Bear assured him. “But if we don’t hear anything by seven we’re loading up and heading there ourselves.”

“You do that,” Marv grinned. “See you guys at dawn.”

The rain was cool and brisk; the big Ranger paused outside the door to adjust his black ball cap, and then switched on the goggles. They were Yukon brand, Gen One stuff you could buy at Wal Mart, but still pretty solid for the tech level, and the girl had had six extra pairs of batteries in her gear. The head straps were brand-new and held the unit snugly in place once he had them adjusted.

Orienting himself, he took a compass sighting and set off. The bar was two miles cross-country, and he expected it would take him three hours to reach it, moving for stealth rather than speed. Moving through the wet brush, rain pattering down all around him, he felt better than at any time since the chopper crashed. It felt good to be on the move, hunting rather than being hunted, acting rather than reacting. This was what being an Airborne Ranger was all about: moving through the darkness to find, fix, and finish the enemy.

Blood humming in his veins, nerve endings sparking with the rush that only comes from hunting violent men, Marv slipped through the night.

The triple-B was a typical roadside bar: a rambling single-story wood structure painted white sitting at the rear of a large asphalt parking lot. There had been a large sign mounted on tall vertical pipes, but the entire assembly had been cut down and unceremoniously dragged off into the brush. Marv lay behind one silver-painted leg of the sign and studied the scene before him.

How they had found them was partially apparent: squatting in the center of the parking lot, and the reason the sign had been cut down, was a small helicopter, roughly the size of a Bell Jet Ranger. It was tied down for the night, with tarps over the engine.

A cargo truck pulling a fuel trailer was parked nearby-Marv guessed that the bird’s ground crew drove that rig, ready with tools and fuel when the air crew had completed their mission. There were two dark-colored SUVs and a white panel van parked at the main doors of the bar, dim light showed through the barred windows, and somewhere nearby a generator purred softly.

A sentry was posted, sitting in a lawn chair out of the rain, the bright hot dot of a cigarette glowing and ebbing. If it weren’t for the cigarette Marv would have guessed the guard was asleep; he wasn’t using NV gear, and the butt’s ember should ruin his natural night vision.

The size of the operation made this business tricky-if Marv had had his full gear and a fire team he wouldn’t have hesitated, but being by himself made things risky.

Resting the googles on the cold rough metal of the many-times-painted pipe, Marv watched the sentry. It was a young man, he decided, slender, tall, and with an AK-style rifle across his lap. At first he though the object on the man’s vest was a magazine pouch, but when he activated the Yukon’s
IR
infrared illuminator
(which looked like a spotlight when seen through the goggles, but was invisible to Human eyes) he realized it was the control unit for a perimeter security system.

He grinned-odds were it was the military’s PEW: Platoon Early Warning system, a series of units which would detect seismic noise, such as footsteps, or even incautious crawling. A decent system, but it was only as good as the guy who installed it, and the guy who monitored it. Marv was betting he was better than both.

Fading back into the brush, he circled the building, noting points of entry and egress. The generator and the helicopter were the keys to his plan: they chose a place that sat on asphalt to avoid slinging gravel everywhere, and PEWS was useless on asphalt. The generator was in a silencing housing which did a good job-it wasn’t audible at a hundred yards, but the housing did nothing for the vibration.

The generator squatted at the rear left, or southwest, corner of the building, and as Marv expected it was sitting under a tarp at the end of the asphalt so the grounding rod could be driven into the soil without having to punch through asphalt.

Powering up the
IR
infrared illuminator, the Ranger spotted the PEWS box and nodded to himself: too close to the generator, whose grounding rod transmitted vibrations to the soil. The PEWS system was sophisticated, and would filter out a nearby source of constant s
eismic noise so as not to constantly set off the alarm. If the FASA geeks had bothered the read the entire manual, Marv knew, they would know that those same filters being engaged drastically reduced that particular sensor’s effectiveness.

Centering himself on the grounding stake, Marv low-crawled, M-4 cradled in his arms, moving one slip forward, pausing, then another, pausing, then eased a foot sideways, pausing, and then one forward. With the PEWS’ units efficiently reduced by the cut-in filter and the irregular nature of his movement, Marv was confident he was invisible to the device. Employed as an aggressor in training operations with conventional units he had bypassed PEWS systems on several occasions.

Easing up onto the asphalt, he checked his watch: zero five twenty-five. Dawn was at zero seven hundred, give or a few minutes, meaning he had a solid hour of darkness to work with. After scraping off as much mud as he could and getting a count of the content status of the gas cans lined up under the building’s eaves, he eased up to the back door. The anti-burglary iron cage outer door was propped open with a cinderblock, and when he tried the knob on the back door he was surprised to feel it turn.

Switching on the
IR
infrared illuminator, he slipped through the doorway, pistol in hand, and found himself in a clean but disused kitchen taking up the rear third of the building. A double doorway opened into the bar proper, and he could hear snoring from that direction. Silently wishing he had a frag, or even the CS grenades that had been stolen from him, he eased another step into the room.

To his right was a walk-in cooler that was chained shut, and to his far left was an office with the door all but closed. Panning back and forth he noted a wooden kitchen chair flex-cuffed to the stainless steel serving counter with a scattering of tools nearby. The splatter and stains told the story and it wasn’t a happy one: interrogation with extreme prejudice. An object amongst the clutter caught his eye; it looked like the offspring of a stun gun and a cattle prod, a short thick rubber-coated truncheon with two electrodes jutting from the business end. When he depressed the recessed button a vivid blue arc leapt between the posts, dazzling his goggles.

Tucking the device into a thigh pocket, he moved to the other side of the dual counters and found a neat array of canned goods, survival rations, candy bars, and bottled water laid out with military precision Pocketing a Payday bar, he slipped past the double doorway. He almost missed the rows of tactical equipment at the far end of the foodstuffs: hiker radios, Yukon night vision goggles, Streamlight tactical flashlights, and boxes of batteries. He hung three goggles on the back of his MOLLE vest, and stuffed two flashlights and a full box of batteries into his other thigh pocket.

Moving to the office door, he eased it open another inch and peered through. He could see a map on the wall with pins in it, part of a desk covered in papers, and the corner of a cot occupied by a sleeping subject. He desperately wanted to get his hands on that map, but he knew there were more than one person racked out in the bar area, and that the odds of getting the map without waking the person on the cot was nil. He was only going to get one shot at this operation, and he had to make it count.

Retracing his steps, he grabbed a soiled screwdriver from the pile by the chair. Outside he eased the cage-door closed and slid the screwdriver through the latch. Choosing two full gas cans, he carried them to the northwest corner, moving quietly and easing the cans down.

Kneeling, he took a tactical glance around the corner: the sentry was still in his chair, looking more asleep than awake. Checking the surroundings, he ran through his plan one more time before straightening.

Marv came around the corner walking softly but striving to make his gait and bearing as normal as possible. The sentry heard him and sat erect, turning to look as the Ranger closed, not completely alarmed. The young man gave a startled sobbing rattle as Marv jammed the posts on the stun gun into the sentry’s throat and hit the switch. A high-pitched whine escaped his lips as his body convulsed; Marv caught the monitor unit for the PEWS system as it started to fall, then swung the stun gun in a vicious arc that connected with the sentry’s left temple.

Setting the control unit and stun gun on the sidewalk, the Ranger pulled the AK off the incapacitated sentry and slung it over his own arm. Moving briskly, he recovered the gas cans and headed for the helicopter, hearing a voice call from inside the bar but ignoring it.

Opening the left front pilot’s door to the helicopter he set a gas can on the seat and unscrewed the cap. Noticing a binder on the other pilot’s seat, he grabbed it before tipping the gas can over. Bracing the door open with the AK, he trotted to the cargo truck and set the gas can on its hood, unscrewing the cap and then tipping it over. Heading back to the fuel trailer he unscrewed the fill valve and headed towards the sign, pausing mid-way to reverse his cap and flip up his goggles. Striking the first road flare, he heaved it into the helicopter’s open door; the other he threw onto the truck’s hood.