Whiskey Black Book Set: The Complete Tyrant Series (Box Set 1) (68 page)
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Authors: L. Douglas Hogan
“Guys, we have a pool of incoming POVs.”
The passenger grabbed his mic and announced to the convoy, “We have incoming.”
Everybody that heard the radio traffic was looking over their shoulders, trying to get a view of what was behind them. Others were confused at the comment and were looking skyward for an incoming air attack.
The gunners mounted their turrets, taking positions behind their heavy guns. They were traveling 50 mph, making a TOW weapon attack improbable. The .50-caliber machine guns were locked and loaded. Each gunner was waiting for a command or for the unidentified convoy to make the first move.
“I need a SITREP, back there,” Banks said on his radio.
“Thirty Victors, zero weapons, maintaining consistent cruise speed.”
That bit of information told Banks that there were thirty vehicles that appeared to be unarmed, not taking an aggressive posture.
“They have a Bravo Hotel Mike Charlie Uniform,” the voice relayed back to Banks, informing him of a UN Mobile Command Unit.
“Pull over and take an offensive position,” Banks commanded on the mic.
The lead vehicle slowed and did a U-turn, which prompted every vehicle to follow into a tactically offensive position. With the heavy guns pointed at the convoy, which had slowed to a near stop, the men and women of the POV convoy slowly stepped out of their vehicles with their hands in the air.
“Don’t shoot,” some of them shouted.
The Marines waited for commands from Banks, who watched them closely as they were stepping out of their vehicles.
“We’re on the same side,” one of them shouted.
“Secure these people,” Banks shouted.
When Nathan, Denny, Jess, and Tori caught wind of what was going on, they stepped out of their HUMMWVs and pointed their rifles at the men and women.
“Don’t shoot,” they shouted once more.
“Get on the ground,” Nathan commanded.
Denny, Banks, Nathan, and other Marines joined in on forcing the people to the ground at gunpoint.
“Who are you? Why are you following us?” Banks questioned.
Nathan studied them closely and recognized their patches and their demeanor.
“It’s cool, Sergeant. They’re with us.”
“Do you know these people?”
“Not
these people
, but I know of them and what they stand for. Frankly, if they’ve survived this long, they might come in handy. They’re members of a three-percenters group.”
“Like a militia group?”
“That’s it.”
“We’re with you guys. We’re on the same team,” a man on the ground said.
“Okay, get up,” Banks said and motioned to the Marines to lower their weapons.
“We’ve been fighting against some blue hats for weeks. Then they just left,” the man said.
“What’s your name?” Nathan asked.
“Troy, what’s yours?”
“I’m Nathan. This is Denny, Tori, Jess, and those guys have name tags.”
“Glad to meet you guys. So are you on mission? We’d like to join.”
“Yes,” Banks answered. “What do you have over there?” he asked, pointing to the mobile command unit.
“We captured it from one of the blue-hat skirmishes.”
“What kind of intel did you manage to secure?” Nathan asked.
“We’ve got some good stuff. It was a good capture. Until recently, the UN traffic was all English. Now it sounds like Persian. I’m guessing they’re starting to see that they can’t communicate without us capturing their radio traffic. Before they went Persian, we overheard information suggesting that US forces were capturing key strategic power grid points.”
Everybody in the group was looking around at each other in awe and dismay.
Troy saw their faces and continued his monologue. “It’s true. This MCU has picked up communications from all over the US. From what we have gathered, the western states are not only without power, but their electronics are down, their cars are down, nothing with an electronic signal works.”
“Would they have nuked the West Coast?” Nathan asked rhetorically, looking at Banks.
“Wait,” Tori said. “Did you say we were nuked?”
“Not necessarily,” Denny interrupted. “A nuclear attack would fry anything electrical, but we don’t have to head straight for the worst-case scenario. They could have seen that we were beating them on every front. Maybe they employed an EMP-style attack?” he suggested.
“I’m voting that they nuked us,” Jess said.
“Why would they nuke us, Jess? They want this land inhabitable. That’s why they’re here. Don’t you remember all the hubbub about the global community and the Agenda 21 initiative?”
“I thought Agenda 21 was hocus-pocus,” Banks said.
“I’m sorry to interrupt, guys, but we’ve been listening to a great deal of communications. There’s no indication that we were nuked. The West Coast, from what we’ve heard, is inhabitable. It’s just like their electronics went out. We were thinking EMP, too,” he said.
Denny nudged Jess as if to say told you so.
Troy continued, “They were driving around inside the area. No signs of a nuclear attack anywhere. Even the FEMA compounds and the UN control points were without power. Oh yeah, and an outbreak of some kind.”
“Outbreak?”
“People are getting sick and they’re starting to quarantine areas around some of the FEMA compounds.”
“And the hits keep coming,” Nathan quipped. “Well, we’re on our way to Chicago. We’re supposed to meet a friend with more firepower. I don’t have a problem with you coming along with us, as long as Banks is cool with it, too. As you can see, we already have several POVs tagging along.”
Banks appreciated the inclusion. He knew Nathan had been running the show for most of their trip from Gorham. “I’m good with it. So, you say they’re speaking Iranian now?”
“Yeah.”
“We should’ve kept the skinny guy,” Banks said.
“You made a deal with me,” Tori said. “How was I supposed to know he’d ever come in handy?”
“Okay, we just need to get another translator.”
Troy grabbed his own face and said, “Man, I don’t know why we didn’t think of this earlier.”
“What?”
“We left a wounded Iranian blue hat back in town.”
The group all looked at each other and smiled big.
“Well,” Nathan said, “go get him.”
Decades before the Flip, the federal government had been buying up American soil, even though Article 1 Section 8 of the US Constitution limited this to ten square miles for the purpose of needful federal things such as forts, dock-yards, and buildings. The amount of land owned by the government was alarming. At any time, these lands could have been posted and controlled by the government, where events unfolded outside of the American eye and away from public knowledge. This image shows all land owned by the federal government (seen in gray), as of 2005. The current federal land mass is even larger:
As of mid-2015, US presidents have issued 18,450 executive orders, bypassing congress, to force their will upon the people, even though this power was not enumerated among the powers listed in the US Constitution under Article 2 Section 2, but on the contrary stated in Article 1 Section 1 that congress had all legislative powers.
For years, the CIA, FBI, NSA, DHS, and other government organizations had been collecting and storing data, belonging to Americans, without probable cause and without warrants, despite the fourth amendment of the Bill of Rights. The amount of data collected daily was so much that the government had to build a multibillion dollar domestic surveillance center to store it. The address is N 11600 W, Saratoga Springs, UT.
These seemingly worriless events had yet to touch the bellies of the American people. The gradual decline of American rights were so incremental that it was not felt as a whole. It would have seemed that America was at peace knowing that the government was taking care of them and presumed the welfare of the people were at the forefront, but the truth is this: The bigger the government gets, the less liberty the people will enjoy. When the government grows so large that is has control over every aspect of individual liberty, then it ceases to be freedom, and becomes privilege, a temporary benefit issued to the people as a license.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. Copyright © 2016 L. Douglas Hogan
No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
All rights reserved.
Opinions
alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral laws are written on the table of eternity.
September, 2031
Belleville, Illinois
Albert Thompson used to have a factory job before the Flip. After just a couple months of martial law, he, like nearly every American, was now struggling to survive. He found himself in a street fight with a couple of thugs from the east side. He had made a routine of plundering for food and whatever else could ease the stresses of survival. Winter was coming, and the urge to fill up the pantry for the winter was overwhelming. His life was now in jeopardy.
One of the men was armed with a pistol and the other with a knife. Albert didn’t know if he would survive the situation, but he knew he wasn’t going to die begging for his life. He carefully sized them up.
The man with the gun was an African American and had a clear commanding presence. He was intense and intimidating, especially with that pistol pointing at Albert. The man with the knife was a Caucasian follower of the man with the gun. That much was clear to Albert, who now stood with his hands in the air.
Albert was afraid, but his courage came to him when his captors commanded him to get on his knees. It wasn’t an issue of ego that kept him from taking a knee. It was more of a sense of self-worth and awareness. He didn’t believe in playing the part of the victim. He felt that if he was going to meet his maker, he would do it with his head held high.
“I told you to get on your knees, honky,” the man commanded.
Albert didn’t argue, he just didn’t respond.
“Put him down, dog,” he commanded his minion.
The man with the knife strolled to the side of Albert and hit him in the back of the head with the butt of the knife.
The impact was painful and dropped Albert to his knees. He almost went unconscious.
“Search him.”
The man with the knife searched Albert, but came up empty-handed.
“He’s clean,” the follower said.
“He can’t be clean. I’ve been watching this boogeyman for days,” he said.
The man with the gun walked up to Albert and kicked him in the ribs.
Albert winced.
“Pick him up,” he commanded.
The man with the knife struggled to lift Albert, but did so because Albert was picking himself up at the same time. Albert, seeing an opportunity, took it immediately. It meant survival of the fittest. He had never killed a man before, but was absolutely certain he was going to die this very day.
The man with the knife failed to put it away as he lifted Albert to his feet. The knife was still within Albert’s arm’s reach when he grabbed the knife out of the white man’s hand and sliced the black man’s throat.
Dropping the pistol, he groped for his neck, but there was no stopping the arterial spray.
Albert threw the knife and grabbed the pistol. The minion was now at Albert’s mercy. He had made up his mind.
If I’m going to kill once, I’m going to kill as much as I have to.
He pulled the trigger and dropped the minion where he was standing; one moment, two kills, and a changed man with a pistol that would change the lives and alter the outcomes of many future events.
Later, Albert would gift this pistol to a damaged young wife of a murdered husband and two murdered daughters. The pistol—handed to her in her moment of weakness—gave her strength and resolve. It became her
go-to
when she was feeling vulnerable. It embodied strength, power, control, and vengeance.
Bubba
was a shiny 1911 .45 caliber Smith & Wesson.
December 15, 2032
Somewhere North of Mount Vernon, Illinois
Jessica Miller was more than a little intimidated by Tori Cunningham. It wasn’t Tori’s past relationship with Nathan Roeh that ate at Jess’s jealousy, or her strong personality; it was more than that. When Jess looked at Tori, she saw a woman who was dangerous. Yes, Tori had been through quite a bit, but it was the apocalypse, who hadn’t?
Tori had lost her husband and one of her daughters in a raging fire set by brigands over a few morsels of food. Her other daughter was cannibalized by an elderly man in the Belleville, Illinois, area in a trade-off for some liquor. Jess was under the assumption that Tori had nothing further to live for. This thought drove Jess’s mind almost constantly. She wanted to feel sympathy for Tori, but Tori had a way of driving wedges into any given situation. She felt that Tori was a liability more so than an asset. She had spent countless hours weighing her pros against her cons. The cons seemed to carry the most weight, at least in Jess’s mind.
Sometimes, when Tori would fall asleep first, she would watch her. Other times she would be awakened by Tori’s dreams. Tori had nightmares on a regular basis, and not just at night. Sometimes, on the road, she would doze off and wake up yelling. Nathan was always there to calm her down and to reassure her that it was just a dream, but not this time. Tori woke up screaming and had a knife in her hand. The men of the group had grown so accustomed to her yells that sometimes they were not awakened at all.
“Put the knife down, Tori,” Jess told her. She could see a deep hollow hole in Tori’s eyes. This was what intimidated her. That was the look that worried Jess. She would get this look in her eyes, and when that happened, you couldn’t talk any sense into her.
“Put the knife down,” Jess said a second time. This time it was louder, hoping to wake the men.
They didn’t stir at all.
Tori had a nine-inch tanto blade in her dominant right hand.
Jess uncovered herself and stood. If she was going to die, it wasn’t going to be lying down.
No sooner than Jess was on her feet, Tori looked back at Nathan and saw that he was still sound asleep.
Jess didn’t hesitate. She had been trained for years in her work as a police officer before the Flip went down. Hesitation was always the number one killer of police officers. Sometimes that trained quick response ended in an unnecessary death, but other times it saved the officer’s life. In that split second that Tori looked over her shoulder at Nathan, Jess had to weigh every possible scenario. The good, the bad, the environment—everything had to be analyzed. These were the things most people never understood about law enforcement. The requirement to make a split-second decision where life and death was in the balance was a heavy burden. After the decision had been made and the action had been carried out, a judge or a jury had all the time they needed to analyze the same information that the officer had to make in less than a second. That was the old way. This was the apocalypse and Jess wasn’t going to be tried.
Jess lunged at Tori and the two of them fell to the floor, but Jess failed to protect herself from Tori’s quick reflexes. She had firm control of the knife. She plunged it deep into Jess’s chest. The double-edged tip made it easy to pierce her sternum.
Jess gasped for air and groped at her chest. She looked into Tori’s eyes one more time, but it wasn’t Tori at all. It was Cade Walker, the man without a soul. The man Tori had killed. That was when Jess realized she was in a dream.
She pulled herself out and opened her eyes.
They were still driving down the road, albeit through the night. It was early morning and the moon had barely sunk below the horizon. The sun was not yet visible, but its warmth was already filling the air, as was the welcomed light it brought with it. There was no way to tell what the exact time was. The moon hadn’t been down for long, and the posse had been taking turns at the wheel, driving in two-hour intervals.
Looking to her left, she saw that Nathan was asleep with his head resting and bumping against the window. To her right was his best friend Denny. She couldn’t be sitting between two better men. She had no reason to be the bearer of bad dreams.
I guess my conscience is beating me up,
she thought.
Leaning forward, towards the driver, she asked, “How far out are we?”
“Shouldn’t be long. I suspect we’ve been on the road five or six hours. We’ll be coming up in Chi Town pretty quick.”
Chi Town
was kind of a nickname that many of the locals used for Chicago.
Chicago had always been Illinois’s largest city and the hub for all the political activity in the state, despite its capital being Springfield. It was the heart of Illinois bureaucracy and the reason for failed policies. Chicago was about Chicago, and if anybody knew anything about Illinois politics, they would know that Chicago politics ran Illinois.
Up ahead in the convoy, Sergeant Banks was growing concerned about the Chicago suburbs. He was noticing that roadside destruction was looking a little worse as they closed in on the windy city. At first it was a few random cars sitting unoccupied in the middle of the street. Then it was entire lines of cars with the doors wide open. He didn’t know if they were pulled from their vehicles or if they had evacuated them.
“Slow down,” he told his driver. “We don’t want to drive into a problem where we can avoid one.”
The whole convoy started to move a little slower. The change in velocity and motor sounds stirred Nathan from his catnap.
He winced in pain as he groped his head.
“’Bout time you woke up,” Jess said.
“I have a headache.”
“No time to start whining now.” She nodded her head toward the scene outside.
Nathan looked out the window as they slowly passed by the abandoned vehicles.
“Where are we?”
“The last sign I saw said Kankakee.”
“Wake up, Denny. None of this looks kosher.”
Jess nudged Denny.
“Hey, sleepyhead. Wake up.”
He was putting off a lot of body heat. He had one of those high metabolisms that made people envious. He could eat anything he wanted and seemingly lose weight. Instead of packing on the pounds when he slept, his body would crank up the metabolic rate. Denny lost weight by sleeping.
No sooner than Denny awoke, the convoy came to a standstill.
Denny responded by grabbing his rifle and placing the buttstock into his shoulder.
“It’s cool,” Nathan reassured him. “We’re probably stopping to collaborate and assess. I’m thinking UN activity was once pretty heavy right here.”
The sun was not yet visible but was offering up a bright luminescence that reminded them of dim streetlights.
Denny looked out the window at several hundred cars, all abandoned, most with their doors wide open. He took notice of several street signs that were hastily put up by the UN, similar to the way temporary road construction signs would be set up. One sign said “UN VEHICLES ONLY,” and another said “TRANSPORTATION RESTRICTED TO FEMA.”
“Well, boss, now we’re in the thick of it,” he remarked.
The entire scene was a wake-up call for everybody in the convoy. One by one they piled out of the collage of vehicles.
Before Troy and his three-percenters joined, there were only a couple of privately owned vehicles in the group. Sergeant Banks had the military vehicles in the front and the POVs in the rear. Uniformity was still important to him, unlike Nathan, who had been out of the Marines for some time. He still had his organizational skills, but didn’t see how it all fit in this new world.
“I remember seeing this stuff in the movies,” Tori recalled as she joined Nathan, Denny, and Jess. “It was an action drama, now it’s a horror story.”
Troy walked up next to them and said, “Do you remember in
The Lord of the Rings
when Frodo and Bilbo had to traverse through Mordor to destroy the one ring?”
Nathan and Denny looked at each other and smirked.
Troy caught the smirk and bantered back at them, “Like you guys never geeked it up.”
“It’s nothing. Don’t worry about it. It’s just that me and Denny thought we were the only two characters from the old world that watched that stuff,” Nathan replied.
“So what’s the plan?” Denny asked.
“Let’s go check in with Banks and see if we can collaborate on a POA.”
“I hope your plan of attack includes settling down somewhere with that Iranian so we can get some intel out of him,” Tori said, with a hint of sarcasm in her voice.
Tori was a bit bloodthirsty and had been since the death of her husband and two daughters. She felt little remorse for anybody she deemed evil. UN soldiers, homeland brigands and bandits, American soldiers that failed to honor their oaths—they were all on her most hated list.
Sergeant Banks arrived on foot. He had walked up just in time to hear Tori’s comment.
“You’re not killing another source of intel until he has been fully and completely vetted by me.”
Tori looked at him with disdain at his tone and squared off with Banks. Her hand was behind her back, and Banks knew she was grabbing for her 1911 pistol.
Nathan jumped between them. “Easy, guys, we’re on the same team,” he interjected.
Tori’s eyes were locked on Banks. She wasn’t intimidated, and he realized that he had failed to assert himself as her alpha.
Banks withdrew himself from the confrontation by sidestepping Tori. “The last prisoner we captured met an untimely death on account of your rampaging around.”
“He had given us everything he could give us, and that rendered him useless by my account,” she defended.
Troy didn’t know what they were talking about but knew there was some kind of rough history. He thought he could lighten the mood by proposing his own idea.
“I’m new here, but if the pretty lady wants blood, I say we give it to her. The Iranian officer is deadweight after we’ve extracted what—”
Nathan and Sergeant Banks interrupted almost simultaneously. “Officer?” both asked.
“Yyyyeah,” Troy responded, carrying out the Y sound to exaggerate his confusion.
The group had found out earlier, from the Iranian soldier Tori had killed, that only the officers carried the alternating radio frequencies. It was the prize they had been waiting for.
“I wish we had known earlier he was an officer. We’ve lost valuable time that could have been used on the comm.”
“What’s the big deal with his rank?”
Nathan started walking back to the three-percenters’ group of vehicles toward the rear of the convoy.
Troy, Denny, Jess, Tori, and Sergeant Banks followed.
Northwest of South Holland, Illinois
Captain Richards’s decision to save fuel put the convoy of HMMWVs in dire straits. Richards considered himself a decent tactician. By traveling the shortest route, he had hoped to preserve their precious resources. Even before his team of soldiers had picked up Pastor Rory Price, they were heading straight through some of the heaviest Chicago suburbs in the area. Their recent run-in with the small UN group of armored personnel carriers yielded up heavy casualties for Richards’s men.
Earlier in Richards’s trip, they had taken down a few small enemy mobile command groups. In the process, their shakedown offered them paperwork that gave them near unprecedented access to everything the UN and FEMA command units were communicating.
Of all the intelligence they had gathered, the most valuable was news of a large coalition of US Marines near the base of the Black Hills National Forest in South Dakota. The original plan was to join up with the resisting forces there and coalesce into a formidable rebellion. That ambition, it seemed, was not going to come to fruition. They had stumbled upon a massive FEMA convoy that was moving in a northward direction on Interstate 294. There was an armored personnel carrier leading the convoy and two soft-top HMMWVs in the rear, most likely carrying ten to fifteen additional personnel per truck. In the middle of the convoy were ten UN-labeled shipping containers. It was these shipping containers that caught the eyes of everybody in the group.
“Pull over up here,” Captain Richards commanded his driver. He was pointing to a small field just off of Route 6, where they had been driving. His intentions were to monitor the convoy without drawing attention to themselves.
“Let’s hope they haven’t seen us,” Rory said.
“I was hoping you could say a little prayer about this, Lieutenant. We can’t sit idle while those people are sent to their deaths.”
Captain Richards had recently field promoted Rory to chaplain. In different times, he would lack the authority to do this, but these times called for compromise and a change of mind-set. Rory was recognized by the men as a lieutenant. Traditional responsibilities called for chaplains to have an assistant who was responsible for the chaplain’s safety. He was to have no combat responsibilities at all, but that was the traditional way. Rory packed a service rifle and was wearing body armor. His skills were limited in the art of combat, but he was a good marksman and could shoot a dime off a field post at fifty yards. He was willing to be whatever the men needed him to be as long as he knew the motives were clean.
Rory bowed his head and said a prayer of safety and security for the men. He prayed for the people in the shipping containers and their safe recovery. When he had concluded, all the men said, “Amen.”
Richards turned the radio up. For the most part, it had been quiet. Anticipation filled the Hummer as they tuned their favored ears toward the radio, patiently waiting for something to be said. When the sounds of the radio came alive, it was in Persian.
Richards slammed his fist on the dash. “Something’s not right. We haven’t heard a single English word on these radios all last night or today.”
After a brief pause and a quick thought, he continued, “We’re going to have to ambush them before they reach their destination, and we have no idea how far out that is. We’ll have to be careful and try to grab a prisoner. We need a translator, and to know where they’re heading would be great.”