Last Stand: Patriots (Book 2) (18 page)

T
he Blazer charged along Tunnel Hill Road going fifty over the legal limit. Not that speed limits existed anymore. They were a relic from an age when vehicles clogged the streets. But even relics didn’t always stay dead and John knew eventually they would all make a reappearance.

John made a left onto Route 29 North
, gripping the wheel tight. In the passenger seat next to him was Moss. In the back were Rodriguez and Brandon.

“So you gonna know this jammer when we see it?” John asked Rodriguez.

“I hope so.”

“That doesn’t sound very encouraging,” Moss said with
a growing lack of confidence. “If these guys are Russian, my bet is they’re using something military.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” John agreed. “Once we slip into town, we need to be on the lookout for anything on the nearby roofs that looks out of place. An antenna would be a dead giveaway.”

“Speaking of slipping into town,” Moss said. “How exactly are you planning on us getting in undetected? I know things didn’t go so well for you the last time.”

“I was waiting for you to bring that up again,” John replied,
spearing him with a sharp sideways glance. “Obviously the direct approach isn’t going to work, even with Marshall’s diversionary attack.”

John slowed the Blazer and nosed her down a narrow country road
. They weren’t more than a few feet in before he cut the engine.

“
Brandon, get the camo netting over her, would you?” John turned to the other two. “This is as close as we’re gonna get to a cloaking device.”

“Driving in with camo netting,” Rodriguez said
in disbelief. “That’s your plan?”

John couldn’t help but laugh. “No, this is so that when we return, Betsy’s still here waiting for us.”

“Tell me you’ve got something else up your sleeve,” Moss said.

Brandon
was leaning over the back seat, pulling the camo netting together. “He usually does.”

“
Oneida has a storm drain,” John told them. “It isn’t big, but for our purposes it doesn’t need to be. I spoke to some of the Patriots who once lived in town and they informed me the main pipe releases the excess water into Ponderosa Lake.”

“Oh
, boy,” Moss said. “Something tells me I’m about to get my hair wet.”

John leaned over to study the spiky mohawk running across Moss’ skull. “Thank God you don’t have much there.”

After exiting the truck, John went in back and pulled out a pair of bolt cutters. He handed them to Brandon, who slung his shotgun over his shoulder.

“Bring these,” John said. “I wanna keep your finger away from that trigger for as long as I can.”

Brandon opened his mouth in protest, but held back from saying anything. He was happy to be included. John only hoped it was a decision he wouldn’t live to regret.

•••

They made their way through the forest in silence with nothing but a compass to guide them. Before long, glimpses of civilization began to materialize through the trees. Houses, and a collection of low buildings, but no movement. The town looked deserted.

Directly ahead of them was
Ponderosa Lake, although seeing it now, John realized it looked far more like a reservoir than it did a lake. At the other end, he spotted the pipe they would use to sneak in.

“You see the entrance?” John asked Moss.

Bringing the binoculars to his eyes, Moss scanned back and forth. “Yeah, I see it, but it looks mighty quiet over there.”

“Maybe they all left,”
Brandon offered.

“Nah, they’re there,” Rodriguez said with grim conviction. “
The Chairman’s gonna want an audience when they execute Edward and—” He stopped himself. “Oh, I’m sorry, John.”

John waved him away. “No harm done. That’s one party I’m looking forward to crashing.”

The group stayed low, circling around the edge of the lake until they reached the rainwater runoff.

“Bolt cutters,” John called out to Brandon who handed them over.

A concrete opening the height of a grown man stood before them. Covering it was a metal grate sealed with a padlock. John worked the mouth of the bolt cutters while the others kept an eye out.

“Hold up,” Rodriguez whispered. “We got a patrol, e
ast of our position, over by the edge of the lake.”

All four of them remained still, attempting to
squeeze into the shallow lip of the storm drain runoff pipe. The lock was still in place since removing it would require room for John to maneuver the cutters. In the distance, a group of men from the town were patrolling on horseback, walking their mounts slowly as they watched the surrounding area. Running alongside them were guard dogs.

“Th
ey’re probably part of the same group that nearly finished me,” John told them. “Great to see they have dogs now.”

Moss was nodding. “The kid saved your life back then,”
Moss told John. “Not sure if he ever took credit or not.”

“Did you?” John asked
Brandon, who blushed.

“Darn right he did. Don’t be so humble
, kid. After they heard the shooting, he practically strongarmed that bag-of-bones fella—Gary, I think—to come find us.”

John brushed
Brandon’s hair. “Shoulda let the old man get what he deserved.”

“Nah,”
Brandon said. “You made a choice. Maybe one that wasn’t so good, but you did it for all the right reasons. I was happy to help you unmake it.”

The men on horseback
turned and seemed to stare in their direction. Moss was the most exposed and inched his body further into the concrete opening. Yelping and barking filled the air.

“Think they saw us?” Rodriguez asked.

John peered out and watched as they turned and moved in another direction. “Knowing those guys, if they caught our scent, they’d be on us like flies on—” John’s gaze met Brandon’s as he bit his lip. “Never mind.”

A few seconds later, with the lock
finally cut, the four entered the drainage pipe. Murky water sloshed about their feet. Moss pinched his nostrils while his cheeks bulged out. Finally, he couldn’t hold it any longer and pulled in a big lungful of air through his mouth.

After thirty seconds he let it out and swore as he took in his next breath. “I thought this was a rainwater pipe, not a sewer.”

Up ahead, John saw the source of the foul odor. A dead body lay face up, maggots covering its face and chest. The gases released from the decaying flesh were horrible and John plugged his nose as well and hurried past it.

“My science teacher says that when you smell
stuff you’re actually tasting the molecules in the air,” Brandon offered.

Moss doubled over and dry
-heaved. After a second, he stood and wiped at his mouth. “I wasn’t cut out for this.”

“None of us are,” John said. “But suck it up,
’cause we’re almost there.”

A
trickle of faint light shone in from one of the manholes above them. John scaled the ladder that was recessed into the wall. In one of his back pouches was a tiny piece of broken mirror attached to a pencil by an elastic. When he’d decided to enter via the storm drain, he’d gone hunting for a way to peer through the grates without having to lift them up and expose himself to enemy fire. The solution had come from the side mirror of a broken-down car in camp. John slid it through the narrow opening and scanned the world above. They were on a sidewalk, next to a clothing store. Outside, people were walking around, going about their business. That meant Marshall’s forces hadn’t launched the diversionary assault yet. It also meant they weren’t where they needed to be.

“What’s taking so long?” Moss complained.

“This isn’t our stop,” John told them.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean we need to keep going and stay to our left.”

“Oh, brother.”

Moss was normally a calm customer, but even the best soldiers had their breaking point. For some that trigger was prolonged cold or discomfort. For others it was as simple as depriving them of oxygen for short periods. For Moss, that trigger was smell. He had a sensitive nose, which was enough to generate a laugh or two in camp among the men, but out on a mission, it could spell doom. John needed them all in tip-top shape. Otherwise the entire mission could fall apart.

The next manhole sat
between two abandoned cars. This would provide them with enough cover to exit the storm drain and move to a safe location. Gripping the top ladder rung, John pushed the manhole up and out of the way. After climbing out, he helped Brandon and the others. Moss took a deep lungful as soon as he was clear of the stench they’d just escaped.

“I was losing my mind down there,” he said.

“We could tell,” Rodriguez sniped.

Hunched down beside the front bumper, John scanned the area for threats. Finding none, he motioned to a nearby building. It was a three
-story commercial building with a pharmacy on the ground floor and what looked like apartments above that.

“That roof should give us a nice vantage point to begin searching for the likely source of the Chairman’s radio jammer.”

With a final check, they moved out, single file, scrambling over the hot pavement. The sun was arcing down toward the west, which told John it was at least mid-afternoon. Normally an operation like this would take place at night if the proper optics were available or during the early dawn hours. But the news from Captain Mitchell’s armored battalion had left them little choice. It was now or never. John kept imagining those Bradleys rumbling past their position and out of reach. They would need to hurry.

They double
-timed it toward a recessed doorway, their gear and weapons clanging as they hustled. The team was nearly there when the distinct rattle of AK-47s broke the silence. It sounded as though the gunfire was coming from the north.

“
Marshall’s men must have begun the assault,” John told them.

Moss nodded. “Let’s hope he can keep them busy long enough for us to find that jammer.”

John stood and threw a front kick at the door that led to the apartment complex. He aimed his heavy boot right below the locking mechanism since this was the point of greatest resistance. He’d read an article years ago about how SWAT teams breached drug houses and the tip had always stuck with him.

With a crack of splintering wood, the door swung open.

“Let’s move,” he said, charging inside, his AR at the low ready position, his finger beside the trigger. There were innocent people all over town and telling friend from foe would not be easy.

Three stories later, John could feel his lungs
begging for oxygen. Running up a flight of stairs in shorts and sneakers was one thing. Doing so wearing full tactical gear and an improvised armor vest packed with stainless-steel circular saw blades was something else entirely.

As they ascended, Moss covered the rear, ensuring an enemy didn’t surprise them from
behind.

The top landing led to a metal door with a push
bar. The four made their way onto the roof and were greeted at once by the sound of more distant gunfire. Far from the low-level hit-and-run tactics they’d planned, it sounded as though the battle was heating up.

John turned to Rodriguez. “All right, let’s see what you can find.”

They knew the jammer was somewhere in this quadrant of Oneida, but pinpointing exactly where would require additional ‘fox hunting’.

Fox hunting was a technique often used by amateur radio enthusiasts where radio direction
-finding techniques were used to locate one or more hidden radio transmitters.

Rodriguez attached the attenuator to his setup in order to reduce the power of the incoming jamming signal they were trying to locate. He then removed the quad antenna from his pack and checked the display as he swung it back and forth in a sweeping pattern. A tiny
readout with an LED light would alert him when the antenna was aiming directly at the signal.

A few moments went by as John and the others stayed low, peering over the edge of the building
for possible threats. They could see groups of armed men and some women running east along Main Street toward the sound of gunfire.

“At least they’re brave,” Moss said. “If not a bit stupid.”

“Don’t be so quick to judge,” John said, trying to mollify the scolding tone in his voice. “These people think they’re defending their town from an invading army of raiders. No doubt the Chairman’s worked hard at convincing them that everyone beyond the town limits is out to steal their resources.”

“It’s too bad we can’t convince them they’re wrong,”
Brandon said, almost to himself.

The Chairman’s fake presidential papers would have been the key to doing that, John knew. Otherwise it was one man’s word against another
’s. How could the townspeople be expected to overthrow a leader who was providing food, shelter and something akin to security in the face of baseless accusations? In the townspeople’s minds, the assault on the Constitution and their personal liberties had been initiated and condoned by the president himself.

“I think I got something,” Rodriguez hollered. He was aiming the q
uad antenna toward a patch of trees nestled behind a set of buildings to the south.

“Can you see anything from here
?” John asked. “Any type of comm array poking up through the trees?”

Rodriguez peered through the binoculars. “Negative. Oh, wait. I do see something.”

He handed the glasses to John. The foliage was thick, but a camo-patterned dish was barely visible sticking up over the canopy.

To the north, the sound of gunfire began to spread.

“How do you think they’re doing?” Brandon asked.

“I’m not sure,” John replied. And he wasn’t being vague to protect the truth. From here, there was no way o
f being sure. Only Reese up on Owens Ridge with his Remington 700 trained down on Oneida had any idea what was going on. John wanted nothing more than to call him with the hand-held radio, but he knew that would be impossible until that jammer was knocked out.

Let’s just hope he’s got our backs.

The sound of a woman’s scream snapped John back. Two hundred yards away, someone was being led through the street. John put the binoculars to his eyes and adjusted the focus. The woman’s face was bloody and it didn’t take long for John to recognize who she was.

“What did you see
?” Moss asked.

John answered without looking away. “It’s my wife.”