Prepper's Crucible - Volume Six: The End (6 page)

Cory closed his eyes, clearly transported to another
time and lost in thought.

EMP PLUS TEN MONTHS

VARIOUS LOCATIONS

Bill and Cory waited for the airdrop four miles from
the cave. It was around 2:00 AM, and they took turns piling wood on the signal
fire that marked the drop zone. They sat next to the fire and watched the
shadowy movements of the others in their group as they milled around in the
tree line. A line of ATVs sat in one corner of the meadow, waiting to be loaded
with much-needed supplies they would distribute to the militia.

“You think they’ll make it tonight?” Cory asked.

“Don’t see why not.” Bill studied his fingernails
carefully, resumed clipping them, and then cleaned under the nails with the
fold-out
blade on the clippers. He looked bored. It was the
third night they waited for the drop and Cory was starting to wonder if the Air
Force was going to make good on its promise to drop more radios, food, ammo,
and medical supplies to his group of fighters. He found that they were more
than eager to get his messages, through Bill’s radio transmissions, with the
intel
about troop movements and where the Mexican Army
operated, but less than responsive to his requests for supplies.

“This is starting to piss me off,” Cory said. “We’ve
been out here for three nights, and nothing. Get somebody on the radio for me.
I need to tell them to start delivering or stop asking for our help.”

“Not a good idea,” Bill responded, moving to the
next nail.

“Why not?”

“Because you’re going to give them the information
they need anyway, and they know it. So
just
relax and
understand that this is how the military works. They’ll give us what we want,
but they’ll do it when it’s convenient for them.”

“I’m starting to wonder if we’re on the same side,”
Cory complained.

“They’re on their own side, and will get around to
us when it’s easier to get to us. You need to relax.”

“Bill, I like you and appreciate all you have done
for us; but I want you to call them and tell them we’re down to one month’s
worth of rations, three skirmishes from being out of ammo, and we have no more
ability to help them until they help us.
It’s
that
bad. If you need to, tell them we will have to cease operations and stay in the
forest. I
won’t
go to Tucson anymore and help with the
attacks on the rail traffic, and you might as well pack up and head back to
wherever their headquarters are now. We are at the end of the line.
I’m
not bluffing or joking. There is only so much I can ask
of the men and women who are fighting with us, and they only have so much to
give.” Cory stood up, walked to the nearest ATV, and left the drop zone. He
pulled into the area below the cave minutes later, fuming at this latest
setback, and walked up the path to the entrance. He saw Kate monitoring the ham
with her earphones plugged in, and the rest of his group was sleeping in every
corner of the cave. The cavern was much less crowded now, with most of the
supplies they brought from the ranch either eaten or used up in their battles.
He ran his fingers through his hair, sighing once, and then moved to where Kate
sat listening to the radio. He motioned for her to take the headset off when he
got to her line of sight.

“Any good news?” he asked.

“Not really,” she replied, after taking off one side
of her earphones. “They’re still bogged down on the Texas border.”

“In more good news, there was no air drop tonight
either.”

“What the hell is going on with the Air Force?” Kate
responded. “You’ve been out there three nights now.”

“I don’t know, but Bill is calling them tonight and
telling them we’re done if they don’t send us what we need. I told him that
before I left.”

“He’ll sugar coat it.”

“He will, but maybe it will get through to someone.”

“I doubt it.”

“Me too,” Cory sighed and looked around the cave. He
saw Tim and Racheal sleeping in a corner, huddled together like two bears in a
den. He saw the rest of his warriors sleeping quietly in the corners of the
cavern.

“We’ll have to send the hunting parties out again
tomorrow, but they’ve been coming back with less every time we send them out.
Let’s
get whatever is left at the ranch tomorrow, including
the livestock, and move what’s left here. We really can’t afford to lose
anything from the ranch anymore.”

“I’ll take care of it, and we might as well bring
Ben back.
He’s
been staying there for months.
and
so far we’ve been lucky he hasn’t had a visit from the
Mexicans yet.”

“He’ll miss sleeping in a bed and having heat and
power, but yeah, we need to bring him back.” Cory paused for a minute,
then
added, “I’ll see you in the morning. I’m tired.”

“I’ll be asleep in the morning. Justin is taking the
radio shift at first light.”

“Well, if you want to sleep on my bedroll with me,
you can.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Okay, see you later.”

The following night, the Air Force finally delivered
on its promise to resupply the partisans, and the drop was spectacular to the
militia that waited for the supplies. Cory
wasn’t
there. He had left for Tucson to continue the raids on the railroad cars that
delivered the supplies to the Mexican Army. Bill went along, carrying four
bricks of C-4 that they intended to use to blow up a bridge on the railway.

An ordinance and weapons training man fell out of
the sky that night. He landed with an awkward stance, stutter stepping and
almost falling over before he regained his balance, and then limped off the
drop zone before he introduced himself. His name was Jim and he was clearly not
happy to be there; but he
got his act together
, helped
retrieve the SAWs and other automatic weapons from the drop, as well as more of
the encrypted radios and food rations, before he climbed into an ATV and rode
off to the cave.

Cory and Bill sat on a small rise that overlooked
the railway between Nogales and Tucson. They both hated the terrain. “How the
hell are you supposed to fight a guerilla war in a place that’s so damn flat
you can watch your dog run away for a week?” Bill complained.

“You must have a poodle,” Cory replied dryly, and
again glassed the bridge they were about to place the charges on. “But I get
what you’re saying. It makes me jittery to be somewhere where there is no
concealment, much less cover. I’m a lot happier in the mountains, but this is
where the targets are, so let’s just get this done and get the hell back to
Prescott as soon as we can.” After a moment he added, “I haven’t seen anything
move down there for an hour. When it gets to be twilight, I think we should
head down and place the charges.”

“You want to use the contact detonators?”

“Yeah, we need to take the locomotives out. They can
replace the rolling stock all day long, but the locomotives are a finite
resource; so we just place the charges at the northern side of the bridge and
make sure they blast before the engines get to the other side. We can save the
remote detonators for later. How many of those do we have left?”

“Around twenty.”

“How do those things work?”

“Radio waves.
A small servo
closes the contact on the detonator when you activate them from the control.”

“So we could place bombs in buildings and detonate
them from another location?”

“Up to three miles away.”

“We can use that later. We got people working at
their bases all over the state, and if we can find a way to get the explosives
into their headquarters, we could detonate them at the same time we storm the
buildings and take over their headquarters.”

“We don’t have orders to do that.”

“I don’t have to take orders.”

“It would be better if you did.”

 “I decide what our people do, and they will do
whatever is necessary to end this war and get our territory back.”

“They won’t like that.”

“Life’s a bitch and then you die,” Cory replied,
shrugging. He again glassed the area below him, looked over his shoulder, and
said, “
it’s
going to be dark soon. Send the sappers
in.”

“
You going
to stick
around?” Bill asked.

“No, I have to go back to the Babson’s place and
check in with Flagstaff to see if Tim needs any support from Prescott for the
attack they’re doing on the supply trucks. That’s due to start in a few hours
and I want to make sure he’s good to go.”

“You know, we’re going to have to move south of here
to interdict the supply trains to the battle site on the Texas border.”

“We’re moving south next week. Right now,
we’re
still accumulating supplies in Prescott, and that was
all the C-4 we had. Once we get resupplied, we can move farther south and start
going after the supply trains to the Texas front.”

“Okay, I got it from here,” Bill said. He stood,
waved to a group of four men to head down to the railroad tracks, and watched
them as they moved off the rise toward the desert floor.

Cory heard the blast of the explosives as he talked
to Tim on the encrypted radio, and then switched the band to talk to the Army
unit that still sat on the Arizona border, locked in a toe-to-toe battle with
the Mexican Army. He spoke to Kate briefly before signing off. Before he fell
into a troubled sleep, he heard the sound of gunfire in the distance. The
ambush on the Mexican Rapid Response Team that reacted to the attack on the
train was happening, but he was too tired to listen to the battle. He fell
asleep that night with details of operations to come rattling around in his
head, had a dream about his wife and kids, and arose early the following
morning to meet with the head of the resistance in the Tucson area.

Phil Babson was the prototypical Arizona rancher,
wiry and weather-beaten. He was also the leader of the resistance in the Tucson
area, and a ferocious fighter who led his men from the front and was a constant
worry to Cory. His capture would lead to a disaster for the Tucson group, as
Phil knew all the men in
his group and where they lived
.
The two men sat on the porch of the Babson house, where Cory spent the previous
night in the bunkhouse.

“Something big is coming,” Cory said and then fell
silent, apparently lost in thought.

“That’s good to know,” Phil replied. “You gonna tell
me what it is or just let me sit here until it happens?”

“Sometime in the next few weeks we are going to
start aerial bombing with the Air Force. They now have air superiority over the
state and are sending in more forward air controllers with laser designators.”

“What’s our job going to be?”

“Keeping them safe and moving them to target locations.
We need to identify the targets and then move on them, one by one. The priority
will be locomotives, tanks, and trucks – anything that moves
gets
hit first. After that
is
ammo dumps and barracks.”

“That is big. It means our Army is going to make a
final push, or they wouldn’t ask us to do it.”

“It’s bigger than that,” Cory replied. “After we hit
the targets they want us to attack headquarters buildings in all four AOs at
the same time and take our towns back.”

“I’m not sure we have enough men to do that here.
They outnumber us 10 to 1.”

“The Army has intel that says most of the Mexican
Army is going to be moved out of the population centers soon. They have to
reinforce their troops at the border to hold off our Army. When that happens,
we have to move and take our towns back.
We’re
never
going to get a better shot at taking over unless we want to wait for the Army
to come and save us and I don’t want to do that. This is our land and I want to
be the one to take it back.”

“I’m with you. Even if the Mexican find a way to
come back,
they’ll
still have to come against us when
and where we choose. We can fortify positions and make it so tough on them
they’ll give up.”

“Bill is staying here with you. I have to head back
to Prescott. I’m going to stop in Phoenix and talk to the leader there, then
send one of my men to Flagstaff again to organize that effort.” Cory was always
careful
to not use
the names of the leaders in the
different AOs. He was the only one, aside from Bill, who knew them all.

“Have you told Bill yet?”

“He knows everything.
We’ve
known about this push for a while, but I didn’t want to talk about it on the
radio. I know it’s encrypted, but this is too big to take any risk at all.”

“I understand. I’d do the same.”

“As soon as we get the laser designators and the
forward air controllers, that’s the signal to go.
I’ll
make sure each leader has both, and then we attack the following night, take
out as much as we can, then we move on their headquarters and send them back across
the border. The attacks all start at midnight, and we need to move on the
headquarters before light. I’m also going to send down some NVGs so each of
your team leaders can see the enemy.”