Whiskey Black Book Set: The Complete Tyrant Series (Box Set 1) (43 page)

Hand signals were a universal type of sign language across the branches of the US military and offered silent communication in wartime.

All the scouts lowered their profiles, went on high alert, and waited on the leader to see what was happening. There was a rifle pointing in every direction as they shifted into a staggered column along the roadway. Tensions were high because the front man had seen something and hadn’t communicated to the team what it was yet.

Everybody waited patiently for the signal.

See
,
one
,
enemy
was signaled by the leader.

He had seen the motion of a running pair of feet on the opposite side of the tracks from where they were positioned. The train was blocking the view, but relaying an enemy was erring on the side of caution for the leader.

The team formed up along one of the train cars and proceeded to cautiously clear all of them. Every car door was open and they could clearly see human shackles attached to the walls of the cars. There were steel bars running the length of the cars from front to rear along the walls, both near the ceiling and low near the floor. The shackles were attached to them.
High shackles for hands and low shackles for feet
.

Once the team leader knew there were no immediate threats present, he radioed in to Nathan.

“November One, November One, this is Echo Four Juliet. Over.”

“This is November One. Go with your traffic. Over.”

“November One, we have stumbled upon a block in the highway. A transportation train, similar to the shipping containers on Big Mike. Over.”

“10-4, Echo Four Juliet, secure the perimeter. We’re coming in. Over.”

Nathan stepped out of his vehicle and out to the side of the convoy and gave the hand signal for
rally on me
.

Every member of the combined forces group rallied on him. Nathan, Denny, and Jess stayed tight together as the crew bunched up around him.

“Okay, listen up. The scouts have stumbled upon a roadblock ahead. It’s blocking our route, so we’ll have to figure a way around it. Apparently, it’s not a normal freight train. Evidently, the train was being used for the transport of human beings in shackles. I told them to set up a perimeter and to wait on us. I want us to take a look at this. Your input could be vital. When we get there, stay on guard. We don’t know what could be waiting in the wind. Mount up.”

After Nathan gave his instructions, everybody started walking back to their vehicles.

“What do you think?” Jess asked Nathan.

“I was about to ask you the same thing. Are you going to be okay with seeing it, since you were… you know…?”

“Taken? Yeah, I’ll be fine. You know, not to brag or anything, but I’ve been taken twice! I’ve got my guard up.”

Cade was eavesdropping on the conversation between Jess and Nathan. His suspicions that this was the Gorham group were already high. Now he was confident that he had the people that had destroyed his organization and pulled the carpet out from underneath his little empire.

Denny was also hearing the conversation, but took a mental note that Cade was especially attentive to what they were saying. Denny couldn’t help it, he was a very blunt man and also tactful, but this time he blurted out what he was thinking.

“Hearing everything okay?” he asked Cade.

“Oh, ha-ha, it’s cool. Just being nosey. What happened to Jess?” Cade asked Denny.

“She was taken by a group of bandits a couple months back.”

“That stinks. I guess things ended okay, because here she is.”

“Yeah, she’s a fighter,” Denny said. “Killed a man with a pen.”

Denny was paying close attention to Cade’s replies and interest as he fed him the information. He was suspicious of Cade and, in truth, had always been suspicious of him.

Fortunately for Cade, the one man that could physically identify Cade as
the
Cade Walker from Murphysboro was Pastor Rory Price, who never had a chance to see Cade. He was in the convoy that picked Cade up off of the side of the road, just two months prior. Unfortunately, he was on the opposite side of the convoy, towards the rear, and stayed in the vehicle when the on-the-fly decision to split up was made.

The decision to split was made in October. It was now December and not much had changed with Cade. His way of manipulation was to take as much time as he needed to build trust, cause division, and then take control. Not only was this his modus operandi, but being with a strong group had been his goal all along. The only thing he would change at this point was to be in control. To get there, he would have to take out a number of strong men and women. He had spent the last couple months sizing up everybody in the group, especially Nathan, Denny, and Jess. He was arrogant enough to believe everybody else would just follow along.

There were other strong members in the group, but he had identified the strongest and had made up his mind that he needed to hasten his plan. The group was growing too fast and soon he would lose any window of opportunity.

“Killed a man with a pen? Now you have my curiosity piqued. Please don’t leave me hanging.”

“You’re going to have to talk to her about it. I’m not sharing her business.”

Denny wasn’t a busybody or a gossiper. He certainly wasn’t going to share details of Jess’s abduction with a man he was already suspicious of.

Cade was now suspicious that Denny was onto him, and made up his mind that Denny had to be taken out. Cade’s ambitions, when combined with his narcissism, provided for a dangerous concoction of overreaction that had led to bad outcomes and, most recently, failure. Realizing that his previous mistakes in Murphysboro and Gorham had cost him everything, he had decided to keep a low profile, with snuffing Denny on the backburner.

The entire group had arrived at the train tracks and were staring intently at the train cars. One of the Rangers rallied on Nathan when he pulled up with the others.

“When we first arrived, we saw movement, so stay on guard. We’re not sure who’s here or what level of hostility, if any, we might encounter,” he told Nathan.

Nathan turned around and said, “Stay in groups of no less than two. Spread out and examine this train. You’re looking for any signs of life or intel that may be able to shine a little light on what we’re dealing with here.”

They acknowledged and broke up in pairs of two or three. Everybody was on high alert.

Cade looked at Denny and said, “Can I tag along with you?”

“I don’t care, but I’m going to be with Nathan.”

Cade looked at Jess and asked her, “Hey, you mind if I tag along with you?”

Jess looked at Nathan and saw that he was preoccupied with Denny and whatever they were talking about.

“Sure. No problem.”

Jess double-checked her weapon to make sure that she still had a round in the chamber and rounds in the magazine. After that, she looked at Cade and said, “You ready?”

“Let’s rock ’n roll,” he replied.

The train was huge. They could see where the trains had collided into something, throwing the engine and lead cars off the track. As they looked back down the track towards the rear of the train, they couldn’t see the caboose. It seemed like miles of train. There were also about a dozen tracks at this particular space; room enough for several trains to be parked side by side.

The group was now well spread out and headed in opposite directions to examine the find. Denny was at last alone with Nathan.

“I don’t trust Cade.”

“He’s different, but he’s given me no reason not to trust him.”

“Haven’t you seen the way he’s constantly studying everybody?”

“Yeah, but we’re surviving the apocalypse, man. It’s okay to be paranoid.”

“He somehow seems familiar to me, but I can’t place it. Maybe I’m being
too
paranoid.”

“I’m not sure if
too paranoid
is even possible, these days. Although, I’ll admit, my sixth sense was tingling when we first picked him up. Not meaning to change the topic, but I wonder how Buchanan’s faring?”

Bicentennial Park, Northwest Indiana

Buchanan had amassed a regiment-sized group of veterans, active-duty military, and patriots over the course of the last month. With the UN equipment and radio communications that he had been acquiring, they were able to make contact with large groups and rendezvous at key points. One group in particular had laid siege to most of Kankakee, Illinois, completely ridding it of UN forces through guerilla-type tactics. The urban environment was the battlefield of the times.

When Buchanan found Kankakee and met up with the group, he found that they had an individual they called
the oracle
. The oracle wasn’t a prophet, seer or any such thing, but he had survived and escaped from Goose Island, a FEMA stronghold, where they were shipping Americans and exterminating them, according to the oracle.

The oracle had no tongue. He was a hardened farm boy, once upon a time, but grew into a man that was paranoid of an overreaching government. He was on a list of suspected terrorists, for being associated with patriotism. The list, titled Main Core, was the government’s compilation of tens of thousands of America’s most patriotic citizens. He was high on the list and was working in Chicago at the time of the Flip, making him easily accessible.

The oracle was housed in a special cell, where he was tortured by UN troops and pressed for intel on the whereabouts of other patriots. When he refused to talk, they cut his tongue out and sent him to Goose Island, where he was to meet
the common good
. According to the oracle, the common good is a catchy phrase the UN uses when they are justifying the genocide of a population, or
invasive species
.

The oracle couldn’t speak and didn’t know sign language, but he could read and write. He spent his time educating the group on the topic of Goose Island.

Lieutenant Colonel Buchanan, Captain Riley, Sergeant First Class Reynolds, and Gunnery Sergeant Franks had spent the last two months pushing towards Chicago from southern Illinois. With the find of the oracle, it had been anything but uneventful.

The trek northward had cost them both men and supplies, but they had replenished both along the way. Their trip wasn’t a straight line, but was a strategic zigzag along the way. They had to reroute when they encountered UN movement that was too big to overtake, force on force. Some of these detours turned out to be a good thing, especially the detours where they met other large survival groups. Each group of locals was able to provide intel that led them from military reserve post to military post. At each post, they managed to accrue assets, if not supplies, then people. The combined forces group had grown to a sizeable regiment of about five thousand armed men.

Along the way, Buchanan found himself dodging UN strongholds, only to meet up with other survivors and head back to the stronghold to overwhelm it. By using this tactic, it pushed their arrival to Chicago back, but it gave them the necessary equipment, ammunition, and weapons to help sustain the effort. Not all of the UN soldiers were foreign. Buchanan had accepted the enlistment of at least a hundred US military men that were previously assigned to the UN Missions Agreement. They were in a situation similar to Sergeant First Class Reynolds and his Rangers before they had joined up with Buchanan.

Among the newly acquired members of the group were Major Scott Andrews, an Indiana national guardsman, and Staff Sergeant Anthony Greene, formerly an Army linguist, who was assigned to the UN Missions Agreement. Andrews and Greene knew each other before the Flip, when the National Guard was still under Title 32 of the United States Code.

When the Flip went down, former president Adalyn Baker activated the National Guard under Title 10 of the United States Code, giving her federal authority over them. She called for all linguists to report to the capital building in Washington, DC, now known as “the District.” Upon reporting to the District, the president assigned Greene to his original region, where he would act as a translator for the UN troops from Iran. It wasn’t until Buchanan’s arrival that he found the courage to defect from the totalitarian control that was over him.

Andrews’ story was more similar to Buchanan’s. He defected with a company of soldiers at the first mention of martial law. Andrews started preparing his men for the eventualities of such a disaster long before it happened. Andrews would have his senior enlisted men standing in the BEQs (bachelor enlisted quarters) when the news was running and make snide remarks about the president’s decisions on foreign affairs and domestic abuse of authority. It was his way of grooming them into knowing he was against tyranny and that he would resist it, should it ever come. Eventually it came, and his men knew who to turn to for direction. He tried to get his seniors involved in the resistance, but they wouldn’t have it, choosing instead to report to the District for orders. Andrews left with his men, and his seniors had nobody to command when they returned. Andrews never returned to find out what had happened to them and what orders they had received from the District.

Buchanan not only had a regiment-sized group of fighters, but he had also seized much-needed vehicles from the UN companies that had been posted at random locations. The radios worked well, but the frequencies had to be changed. He assigned Greene to maintain a constant surveillance over a couple different radios that had been confiscated from the invaders, the rest were assigned to squad-sized groups within the combined arms force and given different frequencies. From what Buchanan had discovered, the UN was divided into units of countrymen. One UN unit may be comprised almost entirely of Iranians, and another of Russians. They were almost never exclusive. Many of the units did not speak English, so they had linguists or former US military men assigned to them. In addition to this setup, each unit also had a French, Russian, and Farsi speaking member assigned to it. This allowed loosely educated UN units to communicate with one another and not be so scattered in the orchestration of tactics. It was, however, a weakness that had been exploited a few times by Buchanan. He had learned from Greene that if you hit the UN units hard and fast enough, they lacked the capability to organize a rapid response. The result was chaos for the UN soldiers, who couldn’t relay for assistance quick enough.