The Last Rebel: Survivor (28 page)

Rosen smiled. He could just see him suggesting a family suicide to someone in his family. Maybe his sister Jenna or brother Dave. “Sure, why not? You go first, Morty.”

Rosen drained the last of his coffee and stood up. He was trying to be blasé, act as if it didn’t matter, but it did: when were they going to fight this crazy war?

He took his empty cup, walked over, and dropped it in a trash receptacle and then went outside.

It had been three days since he had met with McAulliffe. Maybe, he thought, he had changed his mind. Maybe he wasn’t going to invade.

No, Rosen thought, that didn’t make any sense at all.

He went outside and then wandered into a sort of park, an area that had benches and, of course, a couple of statues of Christ.

He sat down and looked around. Nothing seemed any different than the previous three days.

He only wished that he would get through to the
Stone
. But so far that had been impossible. To file this story, he was going to have to hand-deliver it to Wagner.

Of course, he had asked McAulliffe for permission to “look over” the military part of the camp and had been politely denied. Of course.

Rosen briefly considered trying to find the section himself and looking at it, but decided against that. If he ever got caught, he could forget being embedded with the Believer army. Indeed, they might throw his ass in prison.

The other reason he decided not to try it was that he felt that he knew he was being shadowed. Not all the time, but some of the time. And who knew what kind of surveillance equipment they had?

It was a risk he’d better not take.

He got up from the bench and was about to go back to the quarters they had assigned him, a little room in the main building, when he noticed something. Three Believers, far down at the end of the path, were walking together and they were carrying something unusual—machine guns of some sort.

A moment later, they were gone.

Rosen thought about it. Maybe, he thought, that was a sign. A sign that the invasion was getting close. He sure hoped so.

TWENTY-SEVEN

Szabo, sitting in the back of his command vehicle, watched the monitor of the portable receiver, the rhythmic blink of the red dot and blue dots on the electronic map of the northwestern section of Wyoming. He was getting closer and closer to the Rebel force. Indeed, he estimated that they were within twenty-five miles. He had an idea, but he wanted to check it with Duyvill and Dill.

He pulled his lead vehicle to a stop, and all of the others stopped behind him. He spoke into his radio, which was connected to all the vehicles in the convoy, but which he could selectively reach. He told Duyvill and Holland to come up to his command vehicle.

A minute later, both men were standing at the side of the vehicle.

“We’re getting close. I had an idea for where to set up our ambush,” he said, “and wanted to run it by you.”

Szabo presented his plan.

“Good idea,” Duyvill said.

“Very good,” Dill said, nodding. “I can’t think of a better way that we can do it.”

“Good,” Szabo said, his eyes twinkling. “And all of our troops have descriptions of Rosen and the bitch, right?”

“Absolutely,” Duyvill said.

“Repeat to them that under no circumstances are they to be terminated. And remember, if we don’t get Rosen, we want to take prisoners until we find out if he told anyone what he knows and if this was spread around.”

The officers nodded, and both said, “Yes, sir.”

When they had left and remounted their vehicles, Szabo gave the command to proceed and the convoy started up again. The way things were going, he would arrive at the road well before the convoy carrying Rosen. Szabo smiled. He felt very pleased with himself. He was, he thought, a great general.

TWENTY-EIGHT

Kindhand’s HumVee, flying the Rebel flag, led the convoy of Rebels as they tooled down the road, which at this point was flanked by lodgepole pines, some of them burned out from one of those spontaneous wildfires that sometimes occur. They had two gun trucks in the lead, two bringing up the rear, which included the HumVee Bev and Jim were in, and an FSB.

Just as the convoy had started, everyone abruptly heard the sound of “Satisfaction,” an old Rolling Stones record that was still popular with the troops in the Vietnam War. Its lyrics expressed perfectly the lament of all soldiers for all time: “I can’t get no satisfaction.”

The convoy, Jim thought, represented a new mindset: when it was only him and Bev they were just hoping they could slide through undetected to Montana. It was amazing, he thought, what a few .50-caliber machine guns and a bunch of battle-hardened veteran troops did to change your point of view!

The Rebels couldn’t know it, but a half hour before Kindhand had met Garrett and his troops, Szabo and his hundred-man Reject force had moved into position down the road about a mile. Szabo, who had climbed a spruce tree, looked down the road with a pair of binocs. He knew the enemy was coming because the UGPS monitor had told him so.

He did not like what he saw. He expected only a few Rebels. Now he saw seven vehicles, three with gun turrets, an FSB, and perhaps twenty-five troops. And he knew from the uniforms who they were: Rebels. This was not good.

Where the hell did they come from?
he thought.
Should I care that much?
He made a quick calculation. He had over a hundred men, all well armed, all experienced. He had heard that the Rebels were very efficient, even great soldiers, but they were simply outgunned.

He picked up his walkie-talkie, which was connected to all the troops, positioned for the ambush at various points.

“Stand ready,” he said. “Here they come. More than we expected.”

Stupidly, as soon as Szabo spoke, a number of the Rejects ran across the road to get in position. Why they had not done this before was anyone’s guess. But there was a problem: they did not get across undetected. The lead Rebel driver saw them. He told Kindhand, and he barked into the radio.

“We got company up ahead,” he said, “flanking us. Put the hammer to the floor and get ready.”

Within less than two minutes, the HumVees were rocking along at seventy miles an hour, and the first fire came from the right side of the woods and from troops who were foolish enough to step out from the cover and the trees and received for their mistake a spray from the lead MK-19, sending them off to, according to what they believed in, a godless universe.

Then the fire coming at them increased, a huge amount of tracer fire, and then abruptly the woods were gone and they were in an open field, a place Szabo had picked because there was no place for them to hide, to get off the trucks and run into the woods. They were now sitting ducks and were being fired on not only from a berm to the left, but from windows of some sort of abandoned building on the right.

Kindhand sent a long, arcing stream of 400-mms from an MK-19 and they disappeared in a flash of impacts and dust, followed by a cacophony of fire from the following vehicles, and then the HumVees were parallel to the building and the Rebels abruptly, under the savagery of the firepower directed their way, turned to retreat at the onslaughts of 400mm fire and tried to hide down behind a culvert while 50mm tracer poured in after them without any letup. One round in five created absolute carnage, and then as the vehicle sped by the building the Rebels poured fire into the windows where muzzle flashes were evident.

But the Rejects were hardly free and clear. The road rose up and then down sharply and there was another berm swarming with Rebels, pouring out fire, including Jim and Bev, she with an Uzi that Kindhand had given her and Jim with an AK-47, operating it with one arm, blasting whoever appeared. And then, fairly close to the woods, rocket trails started to appear, whizzing back and forth across the highway, followed by mortar fire.

Then Kindhand got lucky. About thirty feet out from the woods a Reject popped from behind a berm, ready to send Kindhand heavenward, an RPG set to fire, Kindhand so close he could see the man’s face and eyes—which were leveled at him in hatred. But nothing happened and Kindhand knew that it had misfired, and then fired his own weapon and one third of the man’s head went away to expose a mess of bloody gray matter. It all happened so fast—as all this was happening—that the Reject never even had a chance to express disappointment in the misfire.

A hundred yards from the woods the speeding convoy was the subject of more rocket fire, in fact three rockets, one coming so close that Jim and Bev found out that it was a dull green color. It did not connect but two did, one with a sequoia tree and the other near a tire, and the powerful, concussive blast lifted the HumVee, perhaps loaded at this point with twelve to thirteen thousand pounds, up on two wheels, the tires screaming in protest. But it righted itself and Jim continued his mad dash down the road without missing a frenzied beat.

Then someone in the convoy fired a smoke grenade far ahead and the smoke blew back, obscuring much, but not so much that Rebel gunners, who had spotted positions of the Rejects, couldn’t lay down .50-caliber rounds at a ferocious clip.

Part of Jim watched what he was seeing in awe. For some reason, the Rejects, who had a superior force, were missing the Rebels. When a muzzle flash appeared, .50-caliber fire was directed into it and the light went out, and Jim then realized why the Rebels, as well as he, were being more effective: they aimed, whereas the Rejects, who did not seem to have had much experience in firefights of this kind, sprayed their fire. Jim didn’t know if they were hitting anyone, but it didn’t look like it. And some part of him thanked his brother Ray. “Don’t ever fire randomly,” Ray had said. “Aim. If you have nothing to shoot at, don’t shoot.” And that applied, Jim thought, in hunting or war.

The smoke had thickened, and there seemed to be a corresponding decrease in the amount of fire coming from the Rejects. By the time the Rejects had burst through the smoke, it had ceased completely, and it was clear to Kindhand that the main reason that the firing had diminished was that many of the people manning the guns were dead.

The convoy slowed and drove a few miles until they hit a clearing, then pulled to a stop. Pickets were posted to make sure that they were not being followed, and then the damage was assessed, both to humans and equipment.

It was amazing.

No one had been killed, and not a single person had been seriously wounded.

The HumVees, however, had not been as fortunate.

One seemed near death. The driver started to try to get it going without success. It was gushing oil from holes in the oil tank, there were three bullet holes in the driver’s-side door, two in the passenger door, and from the punctures it looked as if the bullets had Rebel eyes. Every single one of them had penetrated exactly where human flesh was not located.

Jim and Bev had had a very close call. The bed of the HumVee they were in looked like a colander for draining spaghetti, the bullet holes innumerable, and fuel ran freely from the drums inside.

When Kindhand looked at it he said with a straight face to Jim and Bev: “Do you know why those gas drums didn’t explode?”

“No, I don’t,” Jim said.

“Neither do I,” Kindhand said, still with a straight face.

In the bed of one of the HumVees there was an even more bizarre story. Its driver discovered that one of the AT-4 antitank rocket tubes was empty, having gone off, this because the AT-4, which was secured crossways on the roll bar, had apparently been set off when hit by a machine gun bullet. Where the rocket had ended up was anyone’s guess.

The machine gunner now found at least a theoretical examination why he was, as he put it, “knocked on my ass.” There was so much incoming that no one had noticed that a rocket had been fired off one of the trucks!

Few of the vehicles had any windows left. Indeed, in the one the sergeant commanding the FSB was riding in an RPG tail fin had sheared off and was buried in the dashboard, fins out. The rest of the rocket had proceeded through the cab and out the window, taking what was left of it past the nose of the driver and out the partially open window, taking the glass with it.

A driver of one of the gun trucks narrowly escaped death. As it happened, a bullet had hit the glass in the rear door passenger window but instead of going through had caromed off. From its angle, Kindhand concluded that if it had gone through the glass it would have smashed into the driver’s skull at around the base. In general, everything was just riddled. As one of the Rebels commented, and got a good laugh:

“We arrived at that section of road as American cheese and we left as Swiss!”

Ben Raines had been a great one to assign a battle-damage-assessment team to find out what went wrong—or right—when the Rebels battled, and Kindhand and few other Rebels automatically did a BDA.

They didn’t have much time to do it, figuring it was best to get on the road.

There was no way of telling whether there were more Reject forces in the area. Certainly, the defeat—though Kindhand did not know how many casualties they had inflicted—would eat into the gizzard of a guy like Szabo and he would want to come back at them.