2020: Emergency Exit (8 page)

At sixty-two, with over a decade of service in the Army Corps of Engineers and another seven years as a Navy SEAL, Wes had a rather unique skillset. He wouldn’t exactly have considered himself a doomsday prepper, but he was ready for a fight, and the custom-made bunker under his lodge was built to withstand a direct missile hit and make them invisible from all radar. It was possible to blow open the roof by digging it up and using explosives, but no one outside his family even knew the bunker was there. The entrance was concealed by a lift-gate in the floor of the cabin’s fireplace and could be locked into place from below.

It had taken him and Sam a year just to design the main bunker room and its adjacent tunnel. It then took another seven years to safely excavate and stabilize the living space and quarter-mile passage into Sully’s Hill, behind the lodge. The tunnel ran from the room below his lodge to a large pile of boulders—above them in the woods—one of which could be moved outwards and aside as an exit. A second emergency exit was masterfully built through a revolving wall capsule that led directly into the cove below their cabin, completely hidden from outside view. Inside the bunker, it looked like nothing more than a giant fish tank. The tunnel to the cove had been more difficult to build and was much steeper than the tunnel up Sully’s Hill. With double doors built to a submarine’s codes, the hatch room could be safely filled with water, allowing people in and out without leaking so much as a drop into the bunker. It was Army Corps of Engineers technology used in the most advanced way, a small-scale underground Hoover Dam. Wes never intended the cove exit to be used, but he had a dozen sets of scuba gear on hand for each of his family members. Just in case. The ventilation system he had installed was able to heat and cool the bunker with minimal sound, and it also redistributed trapped heat directly through the water of the lake. It was another example of his engineering genius and something he’d always been quite proud of. No matter the level of technology, no one would ever know there was a chamber under this cabin.
In theory
.

His two boys were in their mid-twenties with families of their own, and this bunker and tunnel had served as quite the entertaining fort for his six grandkids. It had been fun to build, and he’d invested a moderate fortune from his savings into decking it out. Although Wes liked to be prepared, he never figured he’d have to use it for self-preservation in his lifetime and didn’t think he’d have to worry about any form of terrorism in North Dakota. The North Dakota oil supply, one of the world’s largest only a decade ago had been wastefully drilled and drained by the U.S. government. There was little of value up here anymore, other than a few nice ranches and golf courses. Wes couldn’t help but wonder what the devastation outside was about, and who exactly was behind it.
What could they possibly want? And how far reaching was the destruction?

Unable to reach anyone on their contact list—in any state—or find anything on the radio, Wes and his boys sat for hours and discussed their limited options. Before they could come up with any sort of plan they noticed movement on one of their many monitors.
People!

Through the bunker’s high-tech surveillance system, they watched a group of people pull in across the lake and begin hiding their three trucks. They appeared to be hiding, but from what? He watched his screens for signs of pursuit, but saw nothing. Four men did the work covering the trucks, but there were clearly more people in the vehicles. The sun was up now, and they were scrambling to complete the camouflage effort, and doing a dang good job of it.

His initial instinct was to contact them. They had to know something. But the possibility loomed that they could be among the ones responsible for the devastation. They could be fleeing from U.S. troops. Going over there or bringing them here would give away the one advantage he had. Right now, he knew he had to sit, watch, and wait.

He and his sons remained in the bunker, watching the world beyond the walls of their lodge through their remote cameras. The people across the lake remained mostly invisible throughout the day. Several of his exterior cameras had sound capabilities, and they picked up planes flying overhead a couple times throughout the day. He caught a glimpse of one of them and froze the frame to get a closer look. It turned out it wasn’t a plane at all, but some kind of drone. He could make out the word “FOTROS” on the tail. The Internet was down, so he couldn’t look up where the drone was from, but he knew one thing for certain: it wasn’t American.
So did that mean the people across the lake were?

TWELVE: (Ryan) “Off the Mark”

Mark was a jumpy guy. Beefy, hairy, bald, and pretty arrogant, he wasn’t afraid to promote his own toughness and self-importance. After thanking us for saving his life, while insisting he could have handled everything himself, he went on to tell us all he knew about the attacks.
Or didn’t know
. We listened but became less and less comfortable with his presence as the day went on.
The guy was a total a-hole.

His friends called him “Wooly” because of his excessive girth and thick body hair, and he referred to himself in third person as such. He was vulgar, sexist, and racist. His stupid wild generalizations demonstrated his true intellect—or lack of it—making statements like “people from Afpakistan are as bad as all the other Africans.”
Seriously? Infants have more geographical sense.
His ignorant nature was making us nervous. I was certain we couldn’t trust him to look out for anyone other than himself.

He and the three guys he’d been with at Cabela’s had been working on a landscaping project north of Grand Forks, a little south of the Canadian border, during the attacks. A police officer from the border town of Emerson had told them what had happened and strongly suggested they stay out of the cities, but a few days later they desperately needed supplies and sufferance—as Mark put it, clearly meaning “sustenance.” They ignorantly disregarded the officer’s advice and went to see for themselves what was going on. “Wooly ain’t just gonna sit around, you know?” he told us. “Wooly gotta take care of me, doncha know?” They’d worked their way down to Grand Forks through the clutter of crashed cars, first to Walmart and then over to Cabela’s, to stock up. Wooly’s plan all along was to go get the guys who had done this, not run away from them, and his overblown confidence was frightening. “Wooly could’ve taken them on his own, you know? Don’t care how many of those damn A-rabs there were.” The policeman had told him about Hawaii being the only safe zone left for Americans. Wooly was certain that’s where we were headed and seemed intent on going with us. I could tell Danny was never going to let that happen. The jackass was bound to get someone killed, if not all of us.

We stayed hidden throughout the day, and although several planes flew directly overhead multiple times, they didn’t spot Mark flipping them off, and our location wasn’t discovered. Around five o’clock Mark excused himself to go to the bathroom and Danny told him to come right back, while we secretly wished he never did. We couldn’t trust him, but we couldn’t exactly treat him like a prisoner either. When Wooly hadn’t returned in ten minutes, Danny decided to look for him, but he was nowhere to be found. Danny came back for Cameron, and they tracked Mark through the woods towards the nearby town of Fort Totten. They eventually found him walking down the middle of the road talking on a cell phone.
So the communication grid wasn’t shut down. But who was he talking to?

As Danny was about to yell for him, lights appeared in the distance. He pulled Cameron down into the ditch as multiple sets of headlights rapidly approached Mark. Cameron recognized the vehicle outlines and headlight height as being about right for military vehicles, and Mark seemed to be thinking the same thing. He started waving like mad and whooping, assuming they were American. By the time he realized they weren’t, it was too late.

He turned back towards the boys and started running. Cameron and Danny were already well ahead of him, cutting through the woods to the lake. They ran into the frigid water and submerged themselves, watching as Mark thundered through the trees behind them, pursued by a dozen armed men. He was shot once and then again, and he collapsed on the shore. One of the soldiers, a huge, muscular, ebony-toned man, walked up to Mark and flipped him over with his boot. The guy had to be six foot seven at least. Mark seemed to still be alive, but unable to talk. Seemingly dismayed over that fact, the giant man stared into the fog and darkness settling across the water. He then glanced down, pointed his pistol at Mark’s head, and finished him off. He looked across the lake once more and then turned back to his men. Danny and Cameron breathed a collective sigh of relief. Had Mark been able to talk, he would have given them up. A guy like that would have done anything to save his own life, no matter how many it cost in the process.

The large military man addressed the group of men around him in clear, strongly African-accented English. “This man could not have been alone. Others must be close by. Get the dogs. Tonight we hunt.” Danny and Cameron listened as he ordered four of the men to return to Devil’s Lake to get more men and the dogs and ordered the others to hide near the bridge until they returned. He then told the last few men to set up his tracking equipment. One of them handed him a black object, which turned out to be a cell phone. Mark’s. The giant man tapped the screen and held it up to his ear, making a call. A woman’s voice answered on speakerphone, and the big man promptly hung up. Danny and Cameron shared a look saying both “uh oh” and “we don’t have a lot of time.” They were lucky they hadn’t been seen, although it seemed Mark had not been tracked by body heat but by his cell phone. Apparently the big army man they called Captain Eddie assumed the woman on the other end of the phone was close by. Danny figured it would take fifteen to twenty minutes to set up the tracking system and a few more to begin searching the area. They needed to move fast. He and Cameron swam diagonally across a corner of the lake, ran across a narrow spit of land and then dove back into the chilly water. They passed under a bridge and joined the others back at the vehicles a minute later.

Danny and Cameron stepped quickly across the rocks up to the vehicles. I saw them coming and stepped out to meet them. “Is everyone still in the trucks?” Danny asked urgently.

I nodded. “Why?”

We’ve got to get out of here. Now!” Danny said.

“Wait. Where’s Wooly?” I asked.

“Dead,” Cameron replied. Before I could ask how, Cameron answered. “They’re here. And they went to get the search dogs and tracking equipment set up. We don’t have much time.”

Danny added, “I’ll explain everything else later.” It was nearly dark now, and the moon had not yet come up. Danny and Cameron were starting to uncover the vehicles when we saw lights on the bridge.
Crap!
It was too late. We were stuck. We counted eleven vehicles crossing from Devil’s Lake to Fort Totten, and figured others had to be coming down Sully’s Hill Road. Knowing the southern end of that road was already blocked, we realized we were stuck here. We had to cover the vehicles back up, even more if possible, and hope our masking did the trick. Meanwhile, Danny and Cameron were going to have to put on their full-body wetsuits and defend as necessary from the water. I stuck my head into one of the trucks to tell them what was going on when I heard the distinct click of a gun being cocked. I glanced at Danny and Cameron as they spun, but it was already too late to defend themselves.

THIRTEEN: “On The Same Side”

Inside the bunker, Isaac watched the monitors on their surveillance system while his dad and brother napped, adjusting the light and magnification scopes to keep an eye on the people across the water. They’d stayed hidden in the vehicles all day. If they’d gotten out at all it had been on the other side because Isaac hadn’t seen a single one of them on this side. That streak was broken late in the afternoon by a fat hairy man exiting one of the vehicles. Isaac watched as he crept further and further away and eventually took off running, if you could call the jerky wobble that. Isaac woke his dad to tell him what was going on, and Wes decided to venture outside and follow the hairy man. Isaac and Sam stayed behind.

Wes lost the man for a little while, but stealth clearly wasn’t the man’s area of expertise and Wes relocated him a short while later. He was speaking loudly into a phone and Wes could clearly hear the man’s side of the conversation. “Suze, baby, shut up, will ya? I’m trying to tell you. Wooly’s alive, but I had to leave. These Afghan Nazi guys killed Brian and the others. Wooly got away. These other Americans saved my tail, but they’re cowards. It’s a couple of old farts, some cute-ass chicks, and a couple of jocks, but they’re running away. It’s embarrassing. I couldn’t get them to join me, so Wooly’s coming back alone. Ol’ Wooly’s gonna kill ’em all. Wooly’s gonna find more guys like me out there, bring them back, and we’re gonna kill ’em all.”

Afghan Nazis? Wooly? What the heck was this guy referring to? Was it possible to sound any dumber? And where was this person he was talking to on the phone? How did this idiot get reception?
Wes was about to continue the pursuit when he noticed movement and saw two other men following the fat man. Wes was close to one of his hunting blinds and scampered into it. The other two men snuck by less than twenty feet from him, unaware he was there. They each carried military rifles, and he could tell for sure they were Americans now.

Wes waited until they were far enough away to crawl out of his hiding spot and make his retreat to the lodge. He heard approaching vehicles and, moments later, gunfire. No doubt his sons had picked it up too. He rapidly covered his tracks back to Sully Hill, entering the tunnel through the boulder pile. He filled Sam and Isaac in on what he’d seen, and they told him the others across the lake had heard the gunfire too and seemed to be waiting for something.