2020: Emergency Exit Read online

  Danny and Cameron, each had a ten-bullet magazine in their R11 and another clip at their side, ready for a quick switch. They had to make every shot count, and the four men in the jeep would have to go down fast. A Marine sniper is trained to hit their target center mass, middle of the chest, for the quickest kill. The four men in the jeep didn’t afford them that opportunity, with only their heads visible. Those four shots were going to be testy. Danny made another quick scan of the area around them. His two years of training had prepared him for a lot, but he wasn’t sure if he was ready for this. War? In America? No one had even considered this. He guessed for his first fight it was better to be on land he knew, rather than in some other country where the enemy would have the home field advantage. But Danny hadn’t gone through Special Ops training to hurt people. He’d done it to protect people. He’d joined the Marines to challenge himself and to get away from all the personal pain at home. His dad had let him down. He’d let his mom down. He needed to focus on a cause bigger than himself. He wanted to make a difference.

  Lying here trying to decide which oblivious person he was going to kill first—even if they would gladly trade places and take him out—wasn’t something he had ever wanted to do. Another glance at his watch. Ninety-seven minutes. Come on, radio.

  Up on the rock ledge, Cameron continued to watch, waiting for Danny to indicate his first target. At ninety-eight minutes, Danny signaled him to take out the driver and passenger of the second truck first. He then tapped his watch and held up two fingers. Another red dot flashed beside him. Two minutes. When the radio crackled at ninety-nine minutes, the voice was unmistakable, Captain Eddie. “Anything?”

  So these were his men, after all.

  “No sir.” The reply. “Nothing. Is quiet.”

  “Good. Thirty minutes. Yeah?” Eddie again.

  “Yes sir.” The soldier hung up.

  There was a moment of silence. Followed by four quick consecutive kill shots.

  It took a few seconds for the men around the campfire to react to the popping sound of the bullets piercing the windshield glass, and the first one who responded went down a split second later. Danny and Cameron each took out two more before they could find shelter. The last two took off running towards a line of boulders. Cameron got one of the runners. The other made it to the rocks. Cameron kept him pinned down while Danny went for the jeeps. As he opened the driver-side door, the window exploded beside him, spreading shards of glass across the side of his face. Danny dove down and rolled under the jeep. There was someone else out there.

  From his perch, Cameron heard the shot and knew instantly it was a big gun, probably .50 caliber, and not his or Danny’s. He worried how far the sound had carried in the night air and tried to locate the source. It seemed to come from his left and likely from the east side of the road, since the boys had approached from the west. Apparently, the patrol had a scout out there, presumably with a sniper rifle. Danny was a sitting duck, fortunate that first shot had missed.

  Cameron switched his line of vision from the man hiding behind the rocks to the direction of the shot. He found the soldier just as he was raising a flare gun and pierced his heart with a bullet as he pulled the trigger. The flare fired as he fell forward. Fortunately, it never climbed more than thirty feet off the ground, rocketing through the darkness over the jeeps and disappearing into a valley west of the highway. Rolling out from under the jeep and disabling all but one of the radios, Danny swung out wide around the fire. Cameron returned his focus to the remaining soldier, pinning him down with a few close shots, while Danny crawled up behind him. Cameron then descended from his position and ran towards the road. He had seen us coming and needed to cut us off until Danny could complete the task.

  Danny jumped the man from behind and sat on his chest, knife to his throat, interrogating him for a quick minute. When he got all he could, he slit his throat. The soldier provided nothing useful. Danny didn’t believe for a second there were thousands of troops nearby, or that they were already coming this way. The gunshot and the flare could have raised the alarm, but they hadn’t heard a single sound on the radio since. If other patrols had heard or seen the action, someone would have checked in. Danny ran back to the fire and put it out. He collected the soldiers’ weapons, a radio, and two crates of explosives from the jeeps. We loaded those supplies into our trucks and took off south at 3:14 a.m. We didn’t have time to go back for the bikes. If we were lucky, we’d have a fifteen-minute head start before the captain checked in again. We had to fly.

  We were five miles from the south end of Camp Crook Road when Captain Eddie called in. A minute later, after no response, we knew he was rushing west. We heard him give several orders to other troops to follow suit. At that point, we tossed the radio, knowing he’d soon be tracking it. We anticipated he’d go to his downed men at the jeeps first before chasing us south. If we were right, at best, that was going to give us an hour lead.

  We stopped at a small bridge north of Camp Crook Road, and Wes wired it with explosives. He and Cameron ran a trip wire across the middle that would blow up the bridge upon any significant impact. It cost us twelve valuable minutes, but if that slowed them at all, it would be worth it.

  We had no way of knowing while Captain Eddie had ordered all of his men to the site we’d just come from, he had also tracked all of the radios. He had picked up one signal at the end of Camp Creek Road and he, his brother, and the twenty men with them had broken off from the others and were cutting diagonally towards us. They were less than twenty miles behind us when we started driving again, and they were closing fast.

  TWENTY-FOUR: (Eddie) “Too Close For Comfort”

  Captain Eddie ordered the lights off on all their vehicles as they rounded the corner near the base of Camp Crook Road, heading towards the radio signal ahead. It hadn’t moved since he’d first begun tracking it, so either they were lying in wait or they’d pitched it. He figured it was the latter, since no other heat signatures had shown up on their radar yet, not even as close as they were right now. But he also knew he couldn’t ignore the possibility it might be some kind of trap. Acknowledging that option was probably giving the Americans more credit than they deserved, but they’d fooled him before. Several times. Caution was in order here.

  As expected, there was no one with the radio, easily located in the roadside ditch. Trap? Ha! He’d already received the message that none of the twelve soldiers he’d stationed on Highway 323 had survived. His men had found the bodies, each with a single bullet hole. Precise. Professional. Military. The scout had fired off the flare, but the troops to their east hadn’t seen it or heard any gunfire. Then again, eighteen miles was a considerable distance away.

  Looking south down the highway, Eddie had the impulse to jump back in his jeep and race after the Americans. His diagonal route here couldn’t have missed them by much. They couldn’t be that far ahead, and he did have twenty men with him. But the rest of his men were a few miles away and would be here soon. It wouldn’t hurt to wait a few more minutes. At best, the Americans would have a thirty-minute lead, be traveling much slower, and not have the luxury of using their lights. He knew he and his men could make up the distance in a hurry. They’d probably catch them by Belle Fourche.

  He saw headlights approaching and counted. Twelve sets. All his men. Two trucks and ten jeeps. He hopped back into the passenger seat of his jeep. “Let’s go,” he commanded. His driver spun the wheel and whipped the jeep around. They had pulled back onto the road and gone about a hundred yards when there was a huge explosion and brilliant arching fireball behind them. The driver slammed on the brakes, and Eddie instinctively rolled out of the jeep to one knee. He jumped to his feet, gun up, and looked back in shock as flames leapt high into the sky. He took several steps towards the flames, gun ready, until he was certain he wasn’t in any imminent danger.

  A few seconds ago, there had been a bridge behind them, and now there was nothing more than a giant gaping crater. Even worse, al
l his soldiers were stuck on the other side. He grabbed his head with both hands, yanked his hat off in frustration, and then ordered the men with him to go help. They rushed back to the bridge and looked down. The front jeep had been torn to shreds, all three passengers certainly killed. The second jeep was no longer drivable but otherwise intact, all three passengers alive and scaling the walls of the ravine back up the other side. The riverbed was low enough at several points for the vehicles to cross, but they were down three more men now and two more jeeps. Eddie’s company, eighty men strong a couple days ago, had been whittled down even further to fifty-eight.

  It took half an hour to find a manageable crossing point, get all the vehicles across, and start moving south again. Eddie knew they’d lost valuable time, and yet that wasn’t as troubling as a few other revelations. The Americans were starting to get aggressive. How had they snuck up on his twelve armed men and taken them out without being seen or without his men sending out a radio alert? Surely his soldiers had been watching the radar. He’d been calling in on the radio every thirty minutes. It didn’t make sense to him. He knew the purpose of the bridge explosion was to slow him down, but the action had sent another message, too. These weren’t amateurs. It wasn’t lost on Eddie that had he not taken a different route, he’d have been in the first jeep that exploded. His haste and negligence would have resulted in the ultimate waste. He was fortunate he’d sent men to this alternate route, or the Americans would have passed in the night without a trace. Sure, he could have gambled and had all his men on this route, but that could have backfired too. He knew he had to accept this as yet another loss on a frustrating losing streak.

  To keep it from happening again, Eddie had four of his men stay behind with a jeep for investigative purposes. When daylight came, he wanted them to scout the camp where his twelve men had been killed and radio in what they found before catching back up to them. He was curious how many people it had taken to wipe out his men and whether they’d be able to determine how it was executed. At least now he knew where the Americans were, and the trail was smoking hot. He was more convinced than ever he’d catch them any day now, if not tonight.

  From now on he would make a point to send a scout jeep ahead to check every bridge for explosives. He couldn’t afford to underestimate these Americans anymore. These lions knew how to use guns and explosives, and he’d never had to hunt that kind of cat before.

  TWENTY-FIVE: (Ryan) “Nine Lives”

  Nine. The number of lives a cat is credited with. Eight. The number of people we’d left Minnesota with, who were still alive. Seven. Supposedly a lucky number…

  At some point our good luck was bound to expire. The problem was, if we were running out of it, we weren’t even halfway to Hawaii.

  I could tell by the way Danny kept glancing in the rearview mirror he thought the captain and his men might be close. At best, we were going forty-five miles per hour. With lights they could easily go sixty-five to seventy on these roads. In an hour they could gain at least twenty miles on us. I was reminded at this point of a YouTube video where a guy asks his girlfriend how far she can go in an hour if she’s going sixty miles per hour and, for the life of her, she cannot figure it out. I smiled for a second and thought about sharing my thoughts with the others before snapping back to reality. Think of where you are, idiot! Hopefully no one had been watching me. Thank God it was dark. I glanced at Danny. He glared at me. Crap. This wasn’t funny. When you’re expecting at any second to see the headlights of a dozen vehicles packed with men out to kill you, it sobers you up pretty quick.

  I was driving the front truck now with Danny in the passenger seat, his eyes seldom leaving the radar screen. Tara, Hayley, and Emily were in the back. Dad was driving the next truck with Wes, Mom, and Isaac. Behind them was Sam, driving the truck with Kate and Jenna. The last truck had Blake and Nathan in the front seat and Cameron in the back with the box of grenades and our only two “big” (.50 caliber) guns. We had passed the South Dakota border sign a few miles back and were rapidly approaching the Belle Fourche city limits. A few days ago, Belle Fourche had been a bustling city with a population around six thousand, the proud geographic center of the fifty United States. Today it was nothing more than another ghost town in the middle of a country in ruin.

  I don’t know what possessed me to start up another conversation with Tara at that point. The last one went so well. Perhaps it was the realization we were close to where we were planning to drop them off and I might never see her again. Maybe it was to make myself feel better about keeping my distance, to prove to my daughter that I could be an adult. Ha! Or maybe I was a little nervous. Yeah, maybe… Whatever it was, I asked one question and, based on the glare I received from Hayley, it was the wrong one. “Tara, what does your husband do?”

  Hayley mouthed, “What the heck?” at me in the mirror, and I knew the depth of my blunder. Dang it.

  “Uh…” Tara said, flushing and looking away.

  “Daddy’s a soldier,” Emily answered for her mom.

  “Oh,” I said. Genius. I turned my full attention back to the road. Emily started to say something else, but Tara raised a finger to her lips and she stopped. Idiot. I chided myself. I noticed Danny give me another sideways glare too, which told me what he thought of my question. Tara was no doubt worried about her husband, hoping he’d be there when they arrived home, realizing he might not be. “Sorry,” I mumbled.

  “It’s okay,” she whispered back. Flipping moron. I cursed myself again.

  We looped south and west around Belle Fourche. We were a bit unnerved by an abundance of red dots in town and scattered radar movement on the screen. No doubt they were enemy troops. But realizing no one was changing course and coming towards us, we continued south and east, past the South Dakota city of Spearfish. We stopped briefly to fuel up, a half-mile before the Wild West modeled town of Deadwood. We’d gotten used to all the bodies by now and were expecting to see more in Deadwood, but there were none. It sounds weird, but I knew we were all of the same mind on this one: This wasn’t good.

  We pulled off Main Street into a cemetery, the only area in town with tree cover. I wanted to ask if anyone else found irony in the fact there were likely fewer dead people in the cemetery than in the town, but given my recent run of brilliant questions, and the discovery a few seconds later of a large number of the bodies in a giant hole, I decided against it. My sense of humor had a strange habit of peaking at the most stressful of times. Coping mechanism no doubt. That wouldn’t have helped me, or anyone, here. A cleanup crew of some sort had already been here, but were they still here? We couldn’t afford to wait around and find out. It was getting light, and we had to find somewhere to hide within the next hour. Then the truck drove by.

  TWENTY-SIX: (Eddie) “Hiding in Plain Sight”

  About the time the Americans arrived in Deadwood, Captain Eddie and his men were pulling into Spearfish, only twenty minutes back. In Spearfish, they ran into two more companies of men, one from Pakistan and another from North Africa. Not wanting to give away any details of their deviated mission, he forbid any of his men to consume alcohol (lest it cloud their common sense and loosen their tongues) and ordered his soldiers to claim they’d been one of the smaller companies assigned to the northern South Dakota border—and they were just beginning to reverse course now.

  No one seemed to care. None of the companies were expected to report back to central command for another four days, so it didn’t matter who was where. Many of them were drunk. Most were telling victory stories, accounts full of murder, rape and plunder. Eddie hadn’t allowed any of his men to assault the women they’d found or take any valuables. They were only here to kill. As far as he knew, the Americans hadn’t raped wives or taken possessions when they’d attacked Libya. They had just killed his people. Eddie was fine with exact revenge, nothing more. The Pakistani company had only lost three men so far; the other African company had lost five. Eddie and his men shared a similar humiliation over thei
r staggering losses, so they kept theirs to themselves. They had killed many, so they spoke freely of those, but not a single word was spoken of the “lions.”

  Captain Eddie and his brother joined several other officers in a bar where they were all talking strategy. Rapid City had been swept clean and burnt to the ground last night. Many troops that had come from Sioux Falls were still camped there. Eddie knew the Americans wouldn’t be in Rapid City. These two companies had come through Sturgis and Deadwood yesterday. Sturgis had been burnt down, and Deadwood would be destroyed this morning. Today they would be sweeping down through the Black Hills, where they would meet the southern companies of troops in Hot Springs and head back east with them. Eddie knew the area well from studying the Americans’ maps, and he stated they would join them in Deadwood, if that was all right. Then they would head back east, Eddie explained, although he had no intention of doing that. No one objected to his joining them in Deadwood.

  Around 8 a.m., his men back up in Montana radioed. Best as they could tell, the entire attack had been carried out by two men on bicycles. Bicycles? Perhaps their heat signals had mimicked those of deer. Were his men that stupid? It seemed one man had been perched up on a ledge while the other had done the ground level fighting. There were two bullet holes through each windshield from the Americans’ guns, and one of the trucks had a shattered driver-side window from a larger caliber gun. In all, they found twenty-two American shell casings. So they are capable of missing. The attack seemed to be over quick.

  Eddie ordered them to get down here fast and meet him and the rest of the men in Deadwood.

  Around 10 a.m., the other two companies departed Spearfish towards the neighboring towns of Deadwood and Lead with Eddie, Lazzo, and fifty-four of their men accompanying them. When they drove into Deadwood, it was already burning, as was Lead. Drones had been flying over Spearfish and Rapid City all morning, and troops that had reached the Wyoming state line last night had passed back through this area already. Figuring those troops must have set the fires and moved on, the other two companies continued south towards Custer. Eddie told the other officers that he was waiting for some of his men and he’d be heading back across the state when they arrived. He thanked them for allowing him to tag along and wished them luck.