Ranger (The Bugging Out Series Book 5) (27 page)

“Some of them are supposed to be on the line,” Schiavo said.

“We may lose our army before our enemy fires another shot,” Mayor Allen said.

“Not everyone will desert,” Elaine said.

“Enough might,” Schiavo said.

Elaine walked unsteadily to the head of the table and stood close to the mayor.

“I will not lay down my arms,” she said. “I will not. And there are a lot of people in this town who feel the same way. They will continue to fight.”

Mayor Allen looked to her, as a grandfather might to a favored grandchild, smiling at her dedication. Her spark. Her idealism.

“I know,” he said, then he looked to Schiavo. “Have the message sent that I’ll meet with General Weatherly to discuss our situation.”

“He’ll only discuss surrender,” Schiavo reminded the town’s leader.

“Then tell him I’ll discuss surrender with him,” I said.

All eyes shifted quickly to me, but it was my wife’s gaze that found mine first. Apart from my late mother, no other person, not even Neil, could read me as she could. From clues in my tone to the sometimes evasive choice of words, Elaine Morales Fletcher could tell, could sense, what motivation, what truth, lay beneath the words I chose to speak. Here, in her eyes, I could see that same understanding.

She knew that I had some plan in mind.

“This is not your responsibility, Fletch,” Mayor Allen told me.

“No, it’s not,” I agreed. “But I’m volunteering. And I’m asking you to let me do this.”

“Why?” Schiavo asked.

“Because Neil wants me to.”

The captain’s stare doubted me, some fire in it. Some anger that I was implying direction from one who’d abandoned us.

“Let him do it,” Elaine said.

Before Schiavo could challenge her, another voice rose.

“Yes,” Martin said. “Let him meet with Weatherly.”

Mayor Allen absorbed the endorsements of my proposal, then turned to his military counterpart.

“Captain...”

He was asking for her opinion. Maybe her blessing. To her credit, Captain Angela Schiavo did not throw down any gauntlet of disapproval. She might be unsure of just what was happening, but I knew that, whatever doubt there was swirling about her thoughts, she trusted me. Even with her life.

Here, though, I was asking to be trusted with everyone’s.

“I’ll have Westin send the message,” Schiavo told me. “I pray you know what you’re doing.”

“Me, too.”

T
he Blackhawk helicopter bearing General Harris Weatherly came in low from the east and settled into a hover over the clearing two miles from town. The dust of dead and disintegrating trees swirled in the woods that bordered the flat, barren meadow as the aircraft descended, its side doors sliding open. Hardly a second after its wheels touched down the military commander of the Unified Government stepped out, two armed troopers at his side.

I stood alone, fifty yards away. To my rear, in the sparse cover the wasting forest could provide, a dozen volunteers from Bandon waited along with Schiavo, providing security for me. As I’d expected, it was not to be needed. General Weatherly left his troopers behind and walked the short distance to meet me.

“You’re Eric Fletcher.”

“I am.”

Weatherly looked past me, his gaze seeming to zero in on a particular spot at the edge of the woods. A spot where I knew Schiavo stood, not behind any tree, eschewing cover for some display of what defiance she could muster.

“Why isn’t she here to receive our terms?”

“Because I am,” I told the man.

In the slight shift of his head I could sense more than irritation. This man was not accustomed to insolence, much less defiance. In my words, and my mere presence in place of Bandon’s ranking military officer, Weatherly saw both.

“Then you it is,” he said. “My troops will enter town from the east on foot at seven tomorrow morning. Your garrison will be there to meet them and will surrender their arms. Another contingent will land on the beach via helicopter transport and will expect to see all civilian arms deposited there. At noon every resident will gather at your town hall to be informed of the town’s new status as a protectorate of the Unified Government.”

He stopped there, the directive I was certain he’d given more than once before to other survivor colonies complete.

“Is all of what I’ve told you clear?”

“Extremely,” I said.

“Good.”

“And we reject your terms,” I told him. “We reject any terms, from anyone, and particularly from a government we did not participate in electing.”

He didn’t smile. I’d almost expected him to. A gesture of amused pity at a defiant streak he knew he could crush. Instead, his gaze and his manner hardened. I watched his posture straighten, as if he was coming to attention in slow motion, making himself taller, more formidable.

Invincible.

But he was none of that.

“My terms are not open to negotiation, modification, or choice. They will be enforced, with your cooperation, or without it.”

He glanced over his shoulder to the helicopter which had brought him, and the troopers who’d accompanied him, as if to remind me, to remind us all, that what we saw was but a small part of the firepower he could bring to bear.

But he was not the only one wielding some unseen power.

“I’d like to show you something,” I said.

“What would you like to show me?” General Weatherly asked with officious impatience.

I wore no arms. No pistol on my hip. No rifle slung across my back. I did not even carry a blade sheathed on my belt. What I did possess I carried in the shirt pocket beneath my coat. Slipping my finger and thumb into that pocket I retrieved a small, clear vial, and held it out in the space between General Weatherly and me.

His gaze fixed on the transparent container and the red-tinted liquid within, and for the briefest instant I sensed that he was about to take a backward step to put distance between us. Between him and what I held.

“You know what this is,” I said.

Weatherly didn’t respond. Not at first. He simply stared at the vial. At its contents. As if he was gazing at the face of the devil himself.

“BA Four Twelve,” I said.

The military man looked up to me again, some controlled rage plain in his stare.

“You know what this can do,” I said. “You know that all it will take is some in a mortar shell to wipe out your army. Or any of your protectorates.”

“He said it didn’t exist,” Weatherly told me, his voice steady and strong. “Your friend said it was a phantom agent. Never even developed.”

I smiled. A very, very real smile, one that I knew Neil Moore would appreciate.

“And you believed him?”

“No.”

“Good on you,” I said. “You were right not to. He’s a spy, and spies lie.”

The tip of Weatherly’s tongue slipped from his mouth and moistened his lips. He was standing his ground. Maintaining control. But it was a struggle. Maybe for the first time since he’d initiated the siege of our small town.

“If you attack us, you kill yourself with the same weapon,” the general said.

“Give us liberty, or give us death,” I said to the general, his gaze coming off the vial I held to meet mine. “Sound familiar?”

He looked past me to Schiavo and the armed party arrayed near her.

“This won’t just give you sniffles and a fever, Weatherly,” I said. “Remember that as you make your choice.”

The choice he made, quickly as it turned out, was the only option this new reality allowed him.

“We would have had to start from scratch with this pissant town anyway.”

I ignored the insult and slipped the vial back into my pocket.

“By noon tomorrow your forces are gone,” I told the general. “We’ll send scouts out, and if we find you still in our area...”

“You won’t,” the man said, though he spoke the assurance with such restrained vitriol that it was hard to detect any hint of surrender in his voice. “Is that all?”

“It is.”

The man wasted no time. He didn’t linger for a long, telling, final look. He simply turned and walked back to his helicopter, its door sliding quickly shut after he climbed aboard. Within a minute it was airborne again, disappearing over the woods to the east.

I stood there, watching the emptiness where our enemy had stood just a moment before. Had it really worked? Was this really over?

“Fletch...”

It was Schiavo. She’d walked out to where I stood, alone, the remainder of the force we’d brought to the clearing hanging back.

“What happened?”

“We won’t have any more trouble from Weatherly,” I said. “For now. Or the Unified Government.”

It was a belief that I stated, not a boast, and I could only hope that it came with no expiration date.

“I don’t understand.”

“They’re leaving,” I told her.

“Leaving? They’re leaving?”

“Yes.”

She studied me for a moment.

“I’m not following, Fletch. We were here to surrender.”

“It didn’t work out that way.”

“And why not?”

I took the vial out again and showed her.

“Because of this.”

I’d made no mention of what I held before her, but the things it could be, things capable of driving an army from the field, were frightening enough just in thought.

“What is that, Fletch?”

“It’s water with a few drops of blood to make it look red,” I explained. “But Weatherly thinks it’s BA Four Twelve.”

“You bluffed him? How...”

There were few I could trust with what Neil had orchestrated. Schiavo was one of those.

“Read,” I said, taking the note from my pocket and handing it to Schiavo. “Neil hid that in Krista’s drawing book.”

She skimmed the admonition about the security of a secret, then the remainder of the note while I quickly explained how Neil had slipped covert messages into the ATV broadcast.

“Christ...”

I took the note back and read what I knew to be troubling her.

“Biological agent called BA Four Twelve exists. Color water light red to mimic it. Unified Government terrified of it. If Weatherly moves on Bandon threaten to use it. Real sample somewhere safe. Hope I can explain someday.”

“He doesn’t know we know,” Schiavo said. “About Four Twelve or him.”

“He has no idea Olin reached us.”

“Somewhere safe,” Schiavo repeated. “How can there possibly be somewhere safe for something like that?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Why didn’t he just do this from here?” Schiavo wondered, confused. “He could have orchestrated this charade from our side. He didn’t need to go over and fake a defection.”

“I think he did,” I said. “Or he thought he had to. It was the only way to know if Weatherly and the Unified Government believed that BA Four Twelve really existed. From the inside. He had to know if a bluff would work.”

“Because using the real thing would be suicide,” Schiavo said, understanding now.

“This was just another mission to him,” I said. “His most important mission. One he had to conceive and carry out on his own.”

Schiavo thought on that, then fixed on the note still in my hand.

“Burn that,” she said. “As far as anyone knows, if the subject comes up, Neil left us a supply of Four Twelve before he left.”

“Agreed.”

I was no longer the sole bearer of the secret. If that should have eased some burden I felt, it didn’t. Because I knew, as Schiavo did, that while we were now secure, now safe, the one who’d made that possible was not.

“He double crossed them,” Schiavo said.

“He did,” I confirmed, knowing what that meant, just as Schiavo did.

“Weatherly knows that, too, now,” she said.

“Yes.”

The result of that was a terrible reality neither of us could deny—my friend’s life wasn’t worth a damn.

T
he alert of another broadcast had come over the open frequency, telling us to expect an ATV transmission at noon two days after General Weatherly pulled his troops from the area near Bandon. Elaine, Schiavo, Martin and I stood with Mayor Allen at Micah’s workstation and watched the transmission resolve from static.

The first face we saw on the screen was Neil’s.

“Dear God,” Schiavo said.

The same sentiment, the same fear, rippled through me as I saw my friend, standing alone, a blue jumpsuit his attire, arms bound behind his back, his face swollen and bruised. Some bastardized version of the American flag was tacked to the dingy wall behind him, red and white stripes the same, but the field of fifty stars had been replaced by one large one. This, I knew, was what the Unified Government had adopted as their banner. As the emblem they would plant in conquered territory. In it I saw a symbol of what both Neil and I had always feared—a centralized government so powerful that the wishes of those across its lands were deemed secondary to maintaining its authority.

The blight had wiped out many things, but not some men’s desire to hold dominion over others.

“Neil Moore has been sentenced to death,” a voice said, its speaker just out of frame. “He has requested to make a statement.”

“Should we get Grace over here,” Elaine asked, any answer to the question bearing terrible consequences.

“And have her see this?” Martin challenged.

No. There was no way we could do that. No way that we would let Grace witness her husband’s murder, even if it was the final chance she’d have to lay eyes upon him before he was gone.

Gone.

They were violating the prime rule of recovery that we’d come to embrace. Every life was precious. Every breathing member of our species, however reviled, had the capacity to contribute, even if not at the moment. It was the reason Sheryl Quincy was still alive. That simple chance, however unlikely, that she possessed some value. Some worth which might—

“Stop!”

I shouted the order, the plea, as I reached down and stabbed a finger onto the transmit button.

All eyes in the room shifted to me, but only until another face we knew stepped into view on the screen.

“What is it?” General Harris Weatherly asked, a mix of impatience and curiosity in his tone.