Tears of Abraham

CHAPTER FOUR The Enemy Is Us

SOUTHERN ALBERTA, CANADA

The helicopter touched down in a pristine valley surrounded by mountains, and Henry hopped off the bird into the snow in front of a squat log cabin. Smoke coiled from a stone chimney. The other Blackhawk landed behind him as he walked toward the cabin. The flight crews and several team members pulled cammie netting over the birds.

Henry waited on the wide front porch while his teammates sauntered forward. Carlos grinned at him and said, “Guess this is a safe house the colonel had up his sleeve.”

The sky was clear and blue and the temperature was in the teens. Henry stomped his boots on the wooden porch. His face was numb from the ride in the helicopter, but he was not concerned with the cold; he wanted to know what was happening.

Colonel Bragg nodded at the expectant faces of his men as he strode onto the porch and knocked on the door.

A woman opened the door at the first knock. She wore her dark hair in a long braid, and her face was the color of tanned leather. There was the smell of fresh bread wafting in the warm air. Her expression was flat, gazing at the thirty armed soldiers gathered around the front of her cabin. She looked neither surprised nor afraid.

“Hello, Colonel,” she said.

“Hello, May,” replied Colonel Bragg. “Sorry to intrude. But, you know the deal.”

“Yup. I was really hoping you were off somewhere else. Come on in. Not that you need me to tell you that.”

“We won’t all be here long,” said the colonel. “Just need to regroup and figure out what the next move is.”

“Well, come on, boys, don’t just stand there in the cold,” she said, moving away from the door.

Henry followed the colonel into the cabin. A friendly fire blazed in the stone fireplace. The sound system played Mozart. Henry was befuddled.

“Boys, this is my cousin’s wife, May. She’s good people. Try not to track snow inside.”

“Not his wife anymore.”

“Well, no. May God rest his soul.” The colonel led the way down a hallway. He pulled a sconce on the wall, and part of the wall slid back, revealing a stairway.

“I’ll bring you men some coffee and bread. Got some venison stew for supper if you’re going to be staying.”

“That’d be great, May,” said Colonel Bragg.

Henry and the Wolves followed the colonel down a series of metal stairs, and Henry guessed they descended about four stories below ground.

The colonel entered a code onto a keyboard mounted on metal blast doors; the doors opened with a hiss, revealing a cavernous room, three or four thousand square feet, with a row of bunks along one wall. Inert computer screens surrounded what looked like a command center. Metal racks contained assault rifles and ammunition. The colonel walked to the op center and began turning on the computers, which sprang to life. He turned heel, hands behind his back, to face the men. His gray eyes were the color of the ocean before a storm, sober and sad.

“Take a knee,” he said. The men gathered around him like a football team around the coach after practice.

“I know you all have questions; I’ll try to answer them as best I can. I’m gonna ask you to trust me. We don’t have much time, and there’s a lot that needs to be done. Here it is in a nutshell.” His gaze swept the room, locking eyes with each man for a moment.

“This place belonged to a group of guys the Mounties took down about ten years ago. I acquired it quietly, using shell companies. May has been keeping up appearances here, just in case we ever needed a rabbit hole in this neck of the woods. I’ve stashed diamonds, gold, passports, weapons, food, and just about everything we could need to survive a damn apocalypse. I never really thought I’d wind up here.”

“Washington, DC, was attacked this morning. It is unclear whether it was a missile launched by military assets or if it was a bomb detonated by terrorist separatists. San Francisco was subsequently attacked, and I’m pretty sure, based on the eyewitness reports, they did get struck with a missile, maybe something launched from a submarine.”

Henry closed his eyes. Several of the men had families in San Francisco.

“The United States is at war with itself. At installations around the world, there has been fighting. On a lot of bases, there has been no bloodshed. Some base commanders are allowing troops to leave if they choose, trying to maintain order without anyone getting killed. Throughout the separatist states, troops are being given the option to join, disband, or depart, and in most places it’s orderly. But the chain of command is completely broken. Now, every one of us signed an oath to uphold the Constitution, to defend our country against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Frankly I’m not sure what that means right now.”

“Sir,” Carlos said, “shouldn’t we be trying to stop the rebels? I’m confused. Why are things unclear?”

“We could do that,” Colonel Bragg said. He looked tired, depleted. “We have zero assets beyond what you see here and our two birds. We could try to make it to federal territory. We’d run the risk of being shot down.”

Several of the men began to speak at once, but the colonel held up his hand. The men shut up.

“I bleed red, white, and blue, you men know that. I have been a loyal soldier, and I’ve followed orders I disagreed with because that’s what we do. For the last six months, I’ve been making discreet inquiries through some contacts I trust. Men and women I’ve known for decades. I fear our unit has been manipulated and compromised. We have operated outside of the chain of command of even SOCOM.” US Special Operations Command coordinated the joint efforts of the various special ops units the United States deployed around the world. The Navy SEALs, Delta Force, Green Berets, and Marine Raider Regiment all fell under the purview of SOCOM. “We’ve worked with them, but not for them. This much I knew when I signed on; it made sense in terms of operational security and the fact that what we’ve been doing falls into a constitutional gray area.”

“I had a contact within the NSA follow the money trail. The Wolves are funded through a series of offshore shell companies. No real surprise there. But after untangling some of the web, my friend found that most of the money flows from odd places. There is a conglomerate of multinational corporations. Names you know. Defense firms, banks, big pharmaceuticals. The money has been funneled through a private security firm, bounced through various cutouts. These guys have strong ties to the media. People that purchase elections. I haven’t had time to analyze the data, and I don’t know exactly who is involved. It’s a shell game these guys are playing.”

The colonel paused to let this sink in.

Henry’s head was spinning. A conspiracy? So powerful and pervasive that a group could use the Wolves as attack dogs? Why?

“Now I don’t have definitive proof of any of this, and I’m glad of it. My friend in the NSA had a fatal car accident last week. Something stinks, that much I am certain of. I don’t trust anyone. And I’m not going to be a puppet on a string, not anymore, that’s for damn sure.”

“So now what?” Henry asked.

“Right. First of all, the Wolves are no more. If you choose to leave, you are free to do so. If you decide to stay, you are welcome. I intend to hole up here until the shooting stops.”

Henry was shocked. Colonel Bragg was a warrior and a patriot. Henry assumed they’d be headed into the fray, one way or another.

“You boys know I’m from Texas. I swore an oath to my country, but my country has let me down. It let you down, too, whether y’all can see it yet or not. I’m not going to fight my fellow Americans. I’m just not going to do it. I don’t care if the order comes from the president of the United States or from the governor of Texas. I’m done.”

“Um,” Sergeant Major Martinez said, “where exactly are we?”

The colonel chuckled. “Alberta,” he said. “Just north of the US border. Now the first thing we need to do is remove the ICS relays. I don’t know who might be tracking us. We probably don’t matter anymore, but just to be on the safe side, we need to cut those out. Next, those of you who are leaving need to take whatever gear you can carry and get those birds the hell out of this valley. I don’t want to be spotted by a drone or a satellite.”

May came downstairs with a tray of mugs and several metal pitchers of coffee. She put the tray on the floor and went back upstairs without saying a word.

The computer screens displayed continuous images of Washington and San Francisco burning. Reporters pointed and gestured and looked grave. Other screens showed rioting in New York City, Atlanta, LA, and places Henry could not identify.

The Wolves formed a line and Doc Alex, the unit’s medic, performed minor surgery on each man. The ICS relay was about the size of a mosquito, embedded in each man’s neck. The device contained a microchip, power supply, and wireless Internet portal. The relay was not physically attached to the chips embedded in each soldier’s brain, so the operation was simple and mostly painless. Without the relay, the men could still utilize the night vision equipped in their contacts, but would be unable to interface with drones or one another.

The men gathered around to decide who was going where, and how they planned to get there. A third of the men were from the Northeast, another third from the Southeast, and the rest were from the Midwest and West. The flight crews for the Blackhawks were Night Stalkers.

Ultimately, the men compromised. The birds had already expended a considerable amount of fuel and would only be able to travel about three hundred miles. They would stay together and try to refuel at one of several small airports in Canada. From there, some of the men would fly west. The other bird would head south, flying low. They would abandon the aircraft and disband on foot once they reached civilization.

They were loading weapons and food into crates, when a piercing beeping sound erupted from the computer center.

Henry paused and looked over toward Colonel Bragg.

“We’re too late,” he said. The colonel toggled a switch on the console in front of him. “May, get down here,” he said, turning to the busy soldiers.

“We’ve got company. UAVs are circling our position. We may have some infantry on our asses within minutes. That ass-hat commander at Malmstrom couldn’t let it go.”

The computer monitors, some of which had cycled through news broadcasts, and some of which relayed images from security cameras positioned throughout the valley, went fuzzy. They’re jamming us, Henry realized.

Colonel Bragg called Martinez over to the command center and spoke to him for a few seconds in hushed tones. Henry stuffed extra magazines into the webbing in his vest, feeling the rush of adrenaline and heightened awareness that he always did before a firefi

Colonel Bragg talked as he inserted a magazine into an M4 from a rack on the wall. “We’ll exit through the back of the bunker; there’s a tunnel that comes out at the base of a ridge about two hundred meters west of the cabin. Haul ass up that hill and spread out. I’ve got a concealed machine gun emplacement up there with a fifty. There’s good cover and high ground. Get some.”

Sergeant Major Martinez led the way; Henry grabbed his now hundred-pound ruck and followed Martinez down a long concrete corridor lit by naked light bulbs. There was the sound of boots slapping on the floor and gear rustling and breathing. The walls were close and the men jogged in single file. They bunched up while they waited for Martinez to open the final steel door. When it swung open, sunlight—different, brighter and more real than the anemic light cast from the bulbs—streamed into the cement tomb, a portal of white with the men silhouetted against it.

Henry was the sixth man back from the door. No gunfire, that’s good. No explosions. Yet.

The men broke left, then right, in pairs. The feeling in him was reminiscent of how he felt the first time he jumped out of a plane more than ten years ago. Following a line of men into the unknown from a safe, dark place into chaos and wind and light. Watching his brothers ahead move without hesitation, wondering whether he’d have the sack for it when his time came, yet knowing he did and dreading it and loving it at the same time, proving something vital to himself with each step… and then he was in the light and the wind and cold. Pride, fear, and loyalty and… Oh shit, here it comes!

He broke left.

There was a hum in the air, a vibration of wrongness and tension, a crawling thing Henry could feel on his skin as he slogged uphill through snow up to his knees. He followed in the footsteps of the previous team members, noted where the path broke off behind a boulder, fixed his attention on making it to a stand of birch trees twenty meters upslope. He made it to the trees and slid down behind cover, the HK in his hands like an extension of his body. Not five feet to his right, Carlos moved into position, facing away from the cabin covering the approach from upslope.

Henry felt conspicuous. He’d worn what he had available; his fatigues were designed for a nighttime assault, albeit in cold weather. But in his dark gear he presented a target against the blindingly white snow. He burrowed into the snow. He heard the crunching of combat boots and the clicking of gear as the next team ranged past him.

The cabin, with the smoke trailing from the stone chimney and the snow on the rooftop, might have adorned a Christmas card.

One second, the cabin was a warm tranquil refuge, and the next it was a fireball. The inbound missiles struck almost simultaneously, and the cabin was erased in flame and fury and a rolling boom Henry felt in his bones and soul and teeth. A yellow-orange flash, then roiling smoke and pieces of cabin flying through the air and spiraling down. The helicopters exploded next, before Henry took a breath. He flinched with rage and the feeling of being violated.

Before the last pieces of the helicopters rained back to the earth, the crack of small arms fire echoed through the valley.

Henry leaned into the scope and scanned the opposite hillside. Figures clad in white darted between trees.

“Movement,” Henry said, keeping his voice just above a whisper. Controlled.

“Taking contact,” Carlos said. “Who the fuck is shooting?”

“Muzzle flashes. Two o’clock, opposite slope. Not our guys.”

The enemy. But the enemy is us this time. Our own troops, guys I might have passed by on base or shot a game of pool with. Men better trained and equipped than any enemy he’d faced.

In Afghanistan, Henry had learned to put certain things from his mind in the midst of combat. When someone is trying to kill you, you shoot back. On his first deployment he’d found that combat is chaos and death and there is no room for philosophy when the rounds are smacking the dirt. Afterward, yes. But in the moment, you try to survive and you do what you have to do. The first time his team got hit with a Taliban ambush, he’d been riding in an open-top Humvee, one vehicle back from the lead, when an IED rocked the vehicle thirty yards ahead. Henry was riding shotgun, his SAW, or squad assault weapon, pointed out the window.

“Ambush!” shouted the driver.

Another explosion, this one behind them, tore through the air. The narrow street was lined by two-story homes, and from the alleys and windows, small arms fire erupted. An RPG fired from a rooftop narrowly missed the Humvee Henry was exiting. He hunkered down next to the right front tire, firing at the muzzle flashes and shadows. The five-vehicle convoy was pinned down in a kill zone, a carefully orchestrated attack. From the backseat, Corporal Christie was on the radio calling for air support.

Private Birch, a pimple-faced kid from West Virginia, hammered at the rooftops with the .50-caliber machine gun mounted on the Humvee. The lead vehicle was burning, and Henry saw two Rangers dragging wounded men out of the inferno.

Under their current rules of engagement (ROE), the Rangers were only allowed to fire if fired upon and were not permitted to engage civilians. In theory, this made sense, but in practice, the lines were blurry. Henry would discover throughout his experience in Afghanistan that the Taliban and al-Qaeda did not follow any rules.

Henry ran toward the burning Humvee to help his fellow Rangers. Rounds smacked into the yellow-brown wall to his left as he ran. One of the Rangers ahead, Sergeant Pratt, fell as he was dragging another man by his armpits. The .50 kept pounding the enemy positions and the thirty-yard dash was the longest run Henry had ever experienced as time seemed to stretch out and make no sense. He was aware of the smell of propellant and smoke and fuel.

He was about ten yards from the wounded men when a woman in a bright blue robe, face covered with a burka, stepped from the shadows. She was only thirty or forty feet away, and beside her was a child dressed in rags, maybe ten or eleven years old; she held the boy’s wrist.

Later, Henry would try to recall the exact sequence of events, putting them together in his mind like puzzle pieces strewn over a floor jumbled and nonsensical. He was pretty sure he had seen the trigger device in her hand.

He turned, slowing his pace, acting on muscle memory and reflex. The SAW bucked, peppering the woman in blue and knocking her from her feet. Somehow, the boy was unharmed, and he disappeared into the shadows.

Henry made it to the Humvee, and then Cobra attack helicopters swept in, strafing the rooftops and buildings with 20mm cannons and missiles. The cannon fire made a deep, vibrating feeling in Henry’s chest, a terrible and wonderful thing. The enemy fighters ceased the attack, many of them killed, and others melting into the town.

Henry learned the woman he had killed was wearing a vest armed with explosives and ball bearings. He was fairly certain the trigger in her hand made him shoot her. He still dreamed about it, and sometimes there was a gray cord with a red button in her hand and sometimes there wasn’t and in the worst of the nightmares, the kid got knocked off his feet too.

His actions earned him a medal and the respect of his fellow Rangers. If he had not shot that woman, the blast and shrapnel would have wiped out every one of the soldiers from the lead Humvee, along with him. Sometimes the enemy doesn’t look like the enemy.

The soldiers coming down the slope now didn’t look like the enemy, either. But there was no time to debate ethics and morality. They were here to kill Henry and his fellow Wolves, and Henry was going to shoot back.

KEY WEST, FLORIDA

Suzanne Wilkins shivered with the wind, although it was not cold. The bow slapped the water and salt spray splashed her face and rivulets of ocean streamed down her cheeks. Bart eased back on the throttle as he came to the line of boats waiting to enter the channel. Shallow flats stretched off for miles where the water was only inches deep, covering sandbars and turtle grass. The cold came from inside her, not from the wind or the ocean.

Hundreds of pleasure craft streamed into the channel, creating a snaking traffic jam. Cell phone service was down, and they had no means of communication other than the radio. Bart cycled through the channels. On the emergency station, a Coast Guard message informed boaters to clear the waterways. Martial law was in effect. On other channels, captains chattered, voices raw and tight. There were wild stories of boats attacked by military vessels, pirates, and bombs going off in Miami. More fighter jets screamed off the coast, low to the deck.

Suzanne was afraid. Is Taylor all right? Are roving groups of criminals kicking in doors and burning houses? Did the nanny abandon Taylor to go be with her family in Miami? Suzanne’s fear was the primal terror of the mother huddled by a fire in the wilderness, with the rustling of bears and wolves skulking in the night, circling and hungry, heard but not seen. Her fear was worse, perhaps, because she was not with her child. She could not protect her. The trepidation of the abyss, dark and uncertain, pressed against her soul.

“Take the helm,” Bart said. He reached beneath the console, removed a Glock from its hard-shell, foam-lined case. He stuffed the 9mm into the elastic waist of his swim trunks and pulled his Hawaiian shirt over the weapon. He moved up to the bow, scanning back and forth, hands on his hips.

Suzanne stepped behind the center console. The Blue Mistress III chugged along at idle speed. The no-wake zones ahead were there for a reason, and apparently the captains were obeying the posted signs. Suzanne fought the urge to zip around the other boats, but she knew she would only run aground on the flats. The wait was maddening.

They were behind a sixty-foot yacht, and at the stern a group of gray-haired men surrounded by young women were drinking and laughing. “Margaritaville” blared from the speakers for the tenth time. The men seemed oblivious, having a party and unwilling to allow the world to impinge upon their fun.

Behind the Mistress, a sleek red cigarette boat rumbled dangerously close to the stern. A pair of coeds lounged topless on the bow. Behind the cockpit, Suzanne saw a hairy guy with gold chains, beefy and tanned and radiating arrogance and impatience. The clown in a BMW who tailgates and cuts in and out of traffic, speeding ahead only to stop at the next red light, and then gets angry because you pull up ahead of him in the next lane.

Suzanne gestured at the guy to back off. He responded by flipping her off with both hands. She turned back to the wheel in disgust.

Bart’s wife, Mary, lay on the cooler with a towel over her head. Suzanne thought Mary was making whimpering sounds, but she could not be sure. She wished Bart would sit beside the woman and offer some reassurance, put his arm around her. But Bart probably wouldn’t do that because he despised his wife. Everyone knew it, including Mary. So she lay on the cooler with a yellow towel over her face, confronting her fears alone. Suzanne felt sorry for her, but she couldn’t step away from the wheel, and at that point, she had little in her to give, no words of consolation or hope.

Mary and Bart were one of those couples who made no sense. Ten years ago, they had been solid and well matched, but they both changed dramatically. Bart separated from the Rangers with a shrapnel wound in his knee. He and Mary moved down to the Keys to begin a charter business. Mary wanted more than anything to be a mother, but after several painful pregnancies and miscarriages, something vital in her soul had died. She’d given up on living, and put on a tremendous amount of weight. She stayed in bed most of the time, watching reality TV and popping painkillers with the blinds drawn.

Bart, who had been Henry’s best friend and Ranger Buddy going through Ranger School at Fort Benning, went from being a happy-go-lucky young man to becoming a prematurely old young man who carried a seething bitterness in his soul. Bart and Henry were still close friends, but the relationship was strained. Suzanne sympathized with Bart. He’d tried to be a good husband, tried to get Mary help, but he’d fought a losing battle.

Bart’s fierce loyalty and sense of duty prevented him from seeking a divorce, which Suzanne admired without fully understanding. Bart spent his days on the water and his nights at the bar, and the couple existed in parallel. Separate, lonely, passing one another in the halls, eating the occasional meal together in quiet loathing and brittle silence.

Suzanne sensed that Bart was a bit in love with her, a fact she did her best to ignore. She didn’t think he would ever act upon it now, but she’d caught him gazing thoughtfully at her, felt his eyes on her back, seen a kind of longing in his eyes, a sad, wistful expression bereft of real hope. She found Bart to be attractive, but there was no part of her that reciprocated his feelings. She’d made a mistake once, many years ago. He was a friend, and that’s all he could ever be.

Suzanne and Mary were no longer close, although Suzanne did her best to pretend they were still great friends. Mary seemed to have an impenetrable cloud about her, a sucking thing that left Suzanne exhausted after spending an afternoon in her presence. Suzanne was ashamed to admit that she despised Mary sometimes for her weakness. There had been times, particularly when Taylor was a newborn, that Suzanne saw naked envy on Mary’s face, almost hatred. Suzanne never forgot that.

“Bart! Do something about this idiot behind us,” Suzanne shouted.

Bart turned from his perch on the bow, nodded and walked to the stern, gestured with both hands.

“Hey, asshole! Back off!”

The hairy guy flipped Bart off, then pulled out a nickel-plated revolver, something big, a .44 maybe, and waved it around.

“You gonna to shoot me for telling you to back off?” Bart yelled. “Really?” The girls on the bow of the cigarette boat sat up on their elbows, smiling. Bart stood with his hands on his hips.

“Screw you!” said the fur-back from behind the cockpit of the cigarette boat. He pushed the throttle and his boat growled and surged forward to within a couple feet of the Mistress.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Suzanne mumbled.

Bart shook his head and joined her behind the wheel, took a seat on one of the captain’s stools. “I can shoot him if you want,” he said, chuckling.

“No, let me,” Suzanne said. It felt good to laugh. “But I want to use my speargun.”

“Well, if he rams my boat, I wouldn’t rule it out,” Bart said.

Bart tried the radio again, and this time he was able to raise one of his buddies on land, old Bobby Ray, a retired captain and part-time bartender at one of the dives Bart lived in. Bobby agreed to swing by Suzanne’s home to stay with Taylor and Ginnie, the nanny, for as long as it took. Suzanne was relieved.

When Bobby Ray called back an hour later to let her know Taylor was safe and sound, she felt even better. Key West was not burning, Bobby reported, and there were no thugs looting and pillaging, at least not yet. In fact, he said, there was a carnival atmosphere throughout the small town. Civil war parties had sprung up all over, and the bars and restaurants were packed with locals and tourists alike. Duval Street was one giant festival. Gotta love Conchs. But how long will that last? When the water runs out and the power is off and there is no more gasoline, how are people going to get along then? When the freezers are full of rotting meat and bellies full of empty, what then?