2020: Emergency Exit (9 page)

Wes tried to rehash the conversation he’d heard. The people across the water seemed innocent enough; they’d even saved that bumbling fool. Hopefully, the two men he’d seen following the fat man had escaped, but if they hadn’t, then the rest of the group across the water were going to die, too. “Any guess on how many people are over there?” he asked his boys.

“When the gunshots rang out, we saw six people get out for a minute or so, and then they all jumped back in,” Isaac replied. “Three of them were armed, one girl and two guys.” Wes began pacing, watching the screens. “And Dad…” Isaac said.

“Yeah?” Wes looked at him.

“We’re not one hundred percent certain, but we’re pretty sure we saw an American flag.” Isaac paused. “We don’t think they’re the enemy.”

“I know,” Wes agreed. “I don’t think so either.”

Wes had been pondering his next move, but now he knew what he had to do. He handed Sam a hunting rifle, grabbed his old-school M40A3 and night vision gear, and they headed out the boulder exit. They carried two-way radios in case Isaac needed to alert them. They hurried around the lake and approached the vehicles against the wind. Isaac’s voice spoke into Wes’s earpiece. “Dad, the other two are back. No sign of the fat man.”

Wes stopped and pulled Sam down to the ground with him. He whispered into the mouthpiece, “Does it look like they were followed?”

 “No, Dad. But it looks like they’re getting ready to leave.” Wes contemplated his next move, and then Isaac spoke again. “Dad, there’s traffic on the bridge coming from Devil’s Lake. I count eleven sets of lights.”

Crap
.
Go back or go forward
. “What do you think, Sam?” Wes asked.

His younger son shrugged. “We’re only a hundred yards from them now. I think we have to save them, Dad.”

Wes sighed. “Okay then. Let’s go.” They crept up on the three men standing outside the vehicles and, after looking around one last time for any more trouble, Wes cocked his gun. “Don’t move a single inch.”

The two muscular young men spun towards him, but didn’t reach for their guns. The other started to reach for his, but Sam raised his own gun. “Don’t,” Sam snapped.

“We’re not here to hurt you,” Wes spoke softly.

“That’s good,” the man without the boots on said. “Because then my sister would have to kill you both.”

Wes wasn’t about to be distracted, until he heard a female voice. “I’d put your guns down if I were you.”

“Appears we’re at an impasse, guys,” the bootless one said, hands still slightly raised. “Who are you and what do you want? In case you haven’t noticed, we’re about to be killed here, so make it quick. They’re setting up their tracking gear as we speak.”

“You guys are Americans?” Wes asked.

“For a few more minutes at least,” the other young man replied with a hint of hostility.

“Hey, we are too. And I think we can help you,” Wes said, lowering his gun and motioning for his son to do the same. He glanced at the girl behind them whose bow was still loaded and raised. “I’m Wes, and this is my son Sam. We live in a cabin right over there, and we saw your friend get gunned down and the troops coming. We have a place you can hide. But you have to trust us.”

The bootless one seemed to be considering his options.

“We don’t really have a better plan, Danny,” an older man said, stepping out of a vehicle and addressing the bootless one.

“Let’s go then,” Danny agreed. “Everyone grab what you can carry and follow those guys. Cameron and I will be right behind you.”

Danny shook Wes’s hand. “Thanks.”

“You got it,” Wes replied. “Hey, just in case, left of the bridge there…” He pointed through the darkness toward his cabin. “I’ve got a hunting blind cut into the hill that goes all the way under the road. We usually park our duck boat in there during the winter. If you need a place to hide between here and the cabin, that’s as good as you’ll get.”

Danny nodded and turned back towards the trucks. “Go guys,” he called over his shoulder.

The group managed to carry most of what they had in the trucks back to the cabin. Danny and Cameron stayed behind and covered the vehicles, imploding scent maskers inside the tarps to deter the dogs. They had to do what they could to keep those vehicles if possible. The two of them were about five minutes behind, almost to the bridge, when the first truck of soldiers pulled up.

FOURTEEN: “Burn It Down”

Through their night vision goggles the boys watched four men jump out on each side of the road, just across the bridge from their position. The truck moved on a couple hundred more yards and dropped off more men. Cameron was about twenty yards ahead of Danny, and he found the camouflaged entry into the hunting blind under the road. He slipped the cover aside and ducked into it. Danny crawled towards Cameron as several of the soldiers began walking across the bridge in his direction. He wasn’t going to make it to the tunnel.

Two jeeps were approaching the bridge from Danny’s left. The soldiers had crossed it by this point and were standing ten not-quite-dark-enough yards from him. Fortunately, they were momentarily distracted by the approaching jeeps and were signaling the first one to stop. As they spoke to the driver, Danny could hear dogs barking in the back of the jeep. He scrambled the last few yards to the blind and Cameron pulled him in. The dogs’ barking got louder, and wilder, as the driver dropped two of them off with the soldiers. Danny and Cameron scrambled through the storage tunnel, under the road, to the exit on the opposite side. As they were about to continue out, a voice a few feet ahead froze them. A soldier stood by the stream beyond the exit, urinating under the bridge. Danny grabbed Cameron’s arm and whispered, “Wait.” But they couldn’t. A large crash came from behind them as at least one man and one dog fell through the netted covering of the lakeside entry of the tunnel, thirty yards away.

Cameron stepped out of the cabin-side exit to deal with the soldier by the stream and nearly walked right into yet another soldier. Equally startled, the other soldier wasn’t as prepared as Cameron, whose knife kept him silent. Knowing that brief distraction had cost him the element of surprise, Cameron spun back towards the soldier by the stream and watched in horror as he raised a whistle to his lips. Danny had emerged from the tunnel, but he was also too far away to stop the man with the whistle. It turned out they didn’t need to.

As Danny was about to lunge for him, the soldier suddenly clutched his throat and dropped to his knees, the whistle falling from his lips. Danny caught his body before he landed in the water. An arrow was sticking out the side of his neck. Danny was pulling it out as a dog exploded out of the blind entrance a few feet behind them. The dog was leaping towards Danny when another arrow whistled past his head and pierced the dog’s skull. It let out a subdued yelp, limply collided with Danny’s leg, and then fell silent. Danny grabbed that arrow too. Several voices were echoing in the tunnel, closing in on them. They had to keep going.

Danny looked up the hill towards the cabin, but he couldn’t see Hayley. He knew she was there somewhere though. He shoved the bodies of the man and dog into the stream, under the bridge. Then he and Cameron continued up the hill towards the cabin.

Two more men emerged from the blind, now fifty yards back, and Danny took both of them down with his suppressed R11. One of the soldiers had been restraining another snarling dog. When the man fell, his dog charged up the hill towards the boys. The dim exterior lights on the cabin went out at that moment, and the door opened twenty yards ahead of them. Hayley stepped out and beckoned them into the cabin. She shut the door just as the dog threw its full weight against it, knocking her to the floor. Momentarily stunned, she watched as Danny shoved the dog back outside with his boot and closed the door. Cameron pulled Hayley up, and she directed them over to the fireplace, where Wes was waiting.

They scrambled down the ladder through the floor of the fireplace. Wes locked the ceiling tiles in place and dropped down with them seconds before the soldiers kicked in the front door. He sealed the bunker hatch moments later. A monitor showed two soldiers searching the main room of the cabin above us. The soldiers didn’t know for certain that we were in here, but the dog did. It had been barking and clawing at the door when these two soldiers arrived, and they figured it had found something in the cabin. But their search turned up nothing.

We figured it wouldn’t be long until the dead soldiers were found, and we were right. Through the surveillance audio equipment we heard whistles, voices, and vehicles being summoned to the bridge below the cabin.

Within minutes it was a zoo outside. Searchlights blanketed the bridge and the once hidden tunnel beneath it. More soldiers were coming up the hill towards the cabin. A crowd of men had gathered around our side of the bridge where the soldiers had fallen. Through the surveillance audio we could hear plenty of shouting and barking, and we could see more and more soldiers combing the area with their lights.

Concerned about the audio and video equipment giving us away, Danny asked Wes about it. “We’re good,” Wes replied. “Every cabin on this lakeside loop has the same external ‘security system.’ Mine is a little more advanced, but they all appear the same. If they look in the office upstairs, they’ll see dummy equipment, and it will only show everything as it appears with the human eye, which now would be mostly dark and distant. Down here I can zoom and span the cameras around and even get a little audio, as you can tell. I have twenty other cameras set up around the lake and woods we use for hunting and observing traps and can access them all from here. Those can be turned on if we need them, and none of them are any bigger than a quarter and well hidden.”

“So there are no lights or visible motion on the outside?” I asked.

“None,” Wes replied with a smile. “It’s state of the art. A military buddy of mine hooked it up. No way anyone suspects a thing. We’re also completely soundproof down here. We could fire off a cannon and no one would hear us.”

That seemed to ease Danny’s mind. He extended his hand to Wes. “Thank you. Again.”

“Sure thing,” Wes replied.

“Seriously,” Danny continued. “That hunting blind under the bridge was a lifesaver. Genius.”

“Yeah,” Wes agreed. “We always liked that one. That was all Sam’s idea.”

Danny thanked Sam. He then turned around and handed the two arrows to his sister. “I assume these are yours?”

Hayley took them and hugged him. “Maybe.”

“Thanks, sis.” He squeezed her. “That was damn close.”

“I didn’t know you could do that with a bow,” Wes said, having watched it all on the monitors downstairs. “Where’d you learn to shoot like that?”

Hayley pointed at me. I laughed. “Right.” I pointed back at her. “No. That’s all her.”

Cameron hugged her. “She’s a star.”

She definitely is
.

Danny’s eyes were again on the monitors, where he focused on one screen in particular—the one with the giant African captain. He was approaching the cabin with a few other men. Danny raised a hand in the air and everyone quieted down, despite the fact Wes claimed the bunker was soundproof enough to conceal a Metallica concert. But Danny wasn’t worried about our sound; he wanted to hear theirs. Anything we could overhear might be useful. We all strained to listen.

Danny pointed out the man the soldiers had referred to as “Captain Eddie,” who was walking a full circle around the cabin. He was eying the cameras and then he entered the front door. Another man entered behind him. “Where’s my brother?” the captain asked him.
Wow, that’s a thick accent
.

“Outside,” the man replied.

“Get him,” Captain Eddie ordered. “And go bring the bodies up here to me.”

“Lazzo,” the man shouted, as he exited the cabin. Lazzo came in a minute later.

“That dog was at this cabin?” Captain Eddie asked him.

“Yes,” Lazzo replied. “But there was no one here. They searched it already.”

Captain Eddie grunted and continued to look around, knocking on walls and occasionally stomping on the floor. As he approached the fireplace, he glanced up at the moose head hanging above it. With cameras in each eye it seemed as if he was staring right at us. Eddie picked a picture up off the mantel and looked it over, then let it drop to the floor. It shattered, and Eddie turned back towards the front door, just as several men carried in the dead soldiers. They set the bodies on the ground, and Eddie examined them. He knelt beside the two men with holes through their throats. “Lazzo, what did this?” he asked, touching the wounds in their necks.

“Bullet?” Lazzo replied.

“What?” Hayley whispered next to me, not completely following his accent.

“He thinks it was a bullet,” I whispered back as Danny hushed us.

“No,” Captain Eddie growled. “No bullet.” He stood up and addressed the other soldiers in the room. “These men were killed by experts. Is not a hunter. Search all the cabins. Then burn them to the ground. Start a fire outside too. Burn this whole place down.”

--------------------

The men hurried off to carry out his orders. Captain Eddie walked back outside and took one more look at the camera above the door. He shook his head and walked away, back towards his high-tech tracking system. He had seen activity around this cabin on his screen when they’d first turned it on. He’d figured it was his men, but maybe it hadn’t been. Still, he’d found nothing in the cabin, and they’d found no signs of life anywhere else. Maybe the dog was just crazy.

Eddie stroked his scruffy chin as he stared at the tracking station monitor. That was unlikely. There were people hiding in this area somewhere. His screen showed red dots moving about in twos and fours. Some of the patrols had an extra dot, if they had a dog, but none of their visible movements suggested anything unusual. If none of these dots on his screen were their targets, then where were the Americans? Was it possible they had some form of defense against his thermal scanner? How? And exactly how many of them were hiding out here?