Out of the Dark (46 page)

“Don’t much like it myself,” he acknowledged. “On the other hand, if Dennis and Sam are right, it’s going to do a lot to knock back their thermal detectors. And I don’t think their optical and low-light equipment is even as good as ours is.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Wilson grumbled. “Yada, yada, yada.” He turned his head and grimaced at his brother-in-law. “Sorry,” he said a bit contritely. “I know you really get into that kind of stuff. And I guess it’s good to know. But I keep thinking about kids whistling in graveyards, know what I mean?”

“Damn straight I do,” Dvorak muttered back. “And you’re right. I sure as hell do
want
to believe that’s the way it is. But it’s not
just
wishful thinking, you know.”

Wilson’s eyes were back on the junction where Hannah Ford Road ran into US-64, but he nodded. Somehow, without their ever intending to do anything of the sort, the two of them had become a kind of clearinghouse for information. No more than thirty or forty people outside their immediate family knew about the cabin (or its exact location, anyway), but those thirty or forty people knew an amazing number of other people who were engaged in things of which the Shongairi no doubt would have disapproved. And the other people
they
knew, knew still other people, who knew still
other
people. Their web of direct and indirect contacts spread throughout the western portions of both Carolinas and well into eastern Tennessee, now, and quite a few people had figured out that if they dropped a word to the Dvoraks and Wilsons about a problem or a question, somehow that
word would eventually reach the person they needed it to reach and answers would come back to them the same way.

At first, Dvorak and Wilson hadn’t even realized that was happening. In fact, if they had realized they might well have tried to stop it, since the whole object of building the cabin had been to provide a bolthole for their family, not to set up some sort of guerrilla resistance organization! By the time they did realize, though, it was really too late to do anything about it. Besides, they’d been careful to keep the more . . . active aspects of the local resistance’s operations as far away from home as possible.

Even without the involvement of their wives and children, that would have made sense from an operational perspective. Dvorak had never served in the military, and while Wilson had been a designated marksman, he’d never done any kind of special operations work. Nonetheless, it seemed obvious to both of them that the very first order of business had to be protecting your own side’s communications nodes. And if that was an added reason to keep
their
kids as far away as possible from anything that might bite them, so much the better!

They’d both ventured considerably farther from home than Rosman as they became more actively involved, and Wilson had damned nearly gotten himself killed on one of those little escapades all the way over near the town of Clemmons, ten miles outside Winston-Salem and a hundred and sixty miles from the cabin. Dvorak was still convinced the raid on a Shongair convoy—which had destroyed fifteen of the limited number of APCs in North Carolina, not to mention two more GEVs—had been worthwhile, but they were lucky as hell they’d gotten Wilson back alive afterward. In fact, three of the eight other men from the upstate with him
had
been killed before the survivors managed to disengage and elude their pursuers. And that time they’d been careful to make sure they were outside the retaliation radius which the Shongairi had established for human towns too close to attacks. But this time, they were both painfully aware that they were barely eleven miles from the cabin. If the Shongairi got really pissed, if they decided to lob in a few KEWs just to teach the locals a lesson. . . .

“Come on,” Wilson muttered now. “It’s only three more frigging miles, Sam.
Come on!
”

Dvorak turned his own head to glance at his brother-in-law, but he didn’t say anything. He understood exactly what Wilson was thinking at that particular moment.

“Front Door” was an Avery County deputy by the name of Paul Scanlon.
Scanlon’s brief, five-word transmission had been confirmation that the refugees they were out here to meet had finally reached his position three miles to the east, where Connestee Road met US-276. At the moment, those refugees were somewhere between them and Scanlon, hopefully headed their way through a network of backcountry roads between US-276 and US-64 without anyone else the wiser. The land between the two highways was primarily farming country, cut by belts of woodland, so it wasn’t like any of the back roads in question were anything like remotely
straight,
but west of Highway 64, the farms ended and the Pisgah National Forest began. The trick was to get the refugees the rest of the way into the national forest without anyone suffering a mischief, and the two of them were only one picket post established to watch the planned route ahead of Mitchell and his charges to be sure the coast was clear.

“Wish I knew why the puppies wanted these guys in the first place,” Dvorak muttered now.

“You think I’ve suddenly figured that out? Or are you just talking to pass the time?” Wilson inquired sardonically, and he chuckled.

“Talking to keep my teeth from chattering, really. And, no,
not
because I’m cold.”

“What I thought.” Wilson snorted. “Don’t think you’re the only one feels that way, either.”

Dvorak turned his head again to give his brother-in-law an affectionate smile, but he really did wish he knew what the Shongairi were up to. The only things he
did
know were that the Shongair base commander had ordered Howell to have his police round up a minimum of four hundred humans and deliver them to his base, and that Howell had declined. Which had been pretty ballsy of him, all things considered, although according to Vardry and Mitchell, the way he’d phrased it was basically that while he himself, of course, was completely willing to do whatever the Shongairi desired, it was likely to have less than desirable repercussions. Without any explanation of why the humans were wanted and at least some assurance of their ultimate safety, after all, it was bound to create uncertainty and anxiety among the humans who had submitted to the Shongairi. The consequences could be that some of those humans would renounce their submission, with the sort of results the Shongairi had seen elsewhere.

Given that guerrillas from outside had recently begun operating inside the state, the Shongair commander had apparently decided it would be just as well not to add any fuel to that particular fire by encouraging local
participation. Instead, he’d informed Governor Howell that his own troops would secure the necessary humans from outside North Carolina. The governor had agreed that that was a much better idea, and suggested that if he knew the route by which the humans in question would be transported to Greensboro, his own police officials would be in a much better position to help provide for the transport convoy’s security once it reached North Carolina.

The Shongair had decided that was a good idea, too, given his own increasing acute shortages of both troops and vehicles, and Howell had clamped down iron security all along the roadways between the South Carolina border and Greensboro. Any Shongair convoy that got into
his
state would by God get to Greensboro
intact
!

Of course, that hadn’t said anything about any citizens of North Carolina—or raiders from outside the state who’d somehow come into contact with any citizens of North Carolina—who might somehow inadvertently find themselves south of the border on the day the transport convoy was due to arrive. Which was how somewhere in the neighborhood of two hundred Shongairi had been killed in a most unfortunate ambush on Interstate 26, three and a half miles southeast of Landrum, South Carolina . . . and three miles
south
of the state line. The guerrillas who’d actually hit the convoy had then headed down I-26 South, towards the ruins of Columbia, obviously fleeing deeper into the area of South Carolina the Shongairi hadn’t occupied. They’d even abandoned a few “broken down” vehicles (with weapons still aboard) along their route to be sure any Shongair pursuers would know which direction they’d gone. But the humans the convoy had been transporting had headed south
west,
down South Carolina 14 to Highway 11, instead, then across to pick up US-276 above Slater and turn north again, towards Brevard by way of Caesar’s Head. Hopefully, the Shongairi would be busy chasing after the guerrillas—once they realized the convoy had been attacked, at any rate—while the liberated prisoners were herded towards relative safety as quickly as possible along those narrow, twisty, tree-covered secondary highways.

As the bird flew, the ambush site was less than thirty-five miles from where Dvorak and Wilson squatted in the rain, but it was over fifty miles by road, and even in clear weather without any Shongair patrols or overflights to worry about, the drive would have taken an hour and a half. Under the conditions which actually obtained, it had taken one hell of a lot longer.

Without reliable, secure long-distance communications, it had been
impossible to know whether or not the Shongairi had managed to keep to their intended schedule. If they
had,
however, then the attack should have occurred over five hours ago, and Mitchell and his little convoy of fugitives had been well overdue. Nobody’s nerves had gotten any less tense as the minutes and the hours had dragged past, either. But so far, at least—

“Backstop, Corner Post,” the radio said suddenly. “Puppies, headed south!”

“Oh,
fuck,
” Wilson whispered with soft, almost prayerful fervency.

“Get on the horn,” Dvorak said tersely, already gathering up his rifle and moving to his left, where the belt of trees in which he and Wilson were positioned made a sharp corner and angled back to the west along the southern edge of a small industrial building’s parking lot. “Tell them we’ve got company. They’d better either get a move on or turn the hell around!”

Wilson nodded and picked up the radio.

“Nanny, Backstop,” he said. “Say time to Backstop.”

“Backstop, Nanny,” Sam Mitchell’s voice replied from the SUV in which he was leading the caravan of two buses, a pair of two-and-a-half-ton flatbed trucks, and half a dozen vans, all of them crammed full of refugees, towards safety. “I make it four minutes. Say again, four mikes.”

Wilson looked at Dvorak, who’d settled into his alternate firing position, facing up Highway 64 instead of across it, and raised his voice.

“What do I tell him, Dave?”

Dvorak thought hard, staring into the north. The rain wasn’t quite as heavy as it had been, and the wind was driving it from the southeast, so at least it was at his back and he wasn’t facing into it. Despite that, visibility was limited, to say the least. There was no sign yet of the Shongair patrol—and it almost had to be one of their routine patrols, he told himself, not someone specifically dispatched to intercept the refugees—“Corner Post” had just reported. Probably out of their satellite base in Old Fort, between Asheville and Hickory. They made fairly frequent sweeps in this direction, and they timed them randomly to keep the humans guessing. So. . . .

Four minutes, Mitchell estimated. That didn’t seem like very long. On the other hand, “Corner Post” (an Asheville city policeman named Grayson) was only seven miles north, on the far side of Brevard, watching the interchange where US-64 peeled off to the east towards Hendersonville and US-276 headed west towards Waynesville. Shongair patrols normally moved at about forty-five miles an hour. In this weather, they’d probably be a little slower . . . call it forty; that’d be about right, judging from other reports on
their operations. So, seven miles at forty miles per hour came to . . . about
five
minutes.

Oh, crap.

“Tell him to fucking floor it,” Dave Dvorak said. “Then get your ass over here. I’m afraid things are going to get . . . busy.”

Senior Squad Commander Laifayr sat in the commander’s seat of the APC with his feet propped on the heater and tried not to shiver in the raw, wet chill.

His vehicle wasn’t
really
an APC, of course. Losses in those—and even more in the GEVs—had been the next best thing to catastrophic. In fact, even though Laifayr wasn’t supposed to be thinking about things that far above his own rank, he had the distinct impression that “catastrophic” might actually be too anemic an adjective. At any rate, the
real
APCs had mostly been assigned to ground bases where the local population was more unruly than in Ground Base Two Alpha’s ZOR. And the handful which
had
been made available to Ground Base Commander Teraik were reserved for critical assignments.

Which, unfortunately, Laifayr’s routine patrol wasn’t.

That was why he was driving along through this miserable rain, watching it blur and splatter on the windshield, in what was basically a standard cargo vehicle to the sides of which Ground Base Two Alpha’s maintenance techs had tacked jury-rigged armor plate. Only, of course, it wasn’t real armor plate, either, just tripled layers of old-fashioned building composite. It was probably tougher than its human equivalent—he understood they used something called “plywood,” a natural cellulose product, for similar building purposes—and three layers of it would stop fire from the Shongairi’s own small arms handily. Laifayr was less confident about how well they would stop
human
small arms fire, however. And he was
positive
it wouldn’t stop those damned shoulder-fired disposable rockets of theirs.