Bug Out! Part 6: Motorhome Mayhem in the Rockies (20 page)

“Good,” he replied. “You need these now, or should I put them back in the safe?”

“They can go back in the safe,” Frank said. “Maybe tomorrow we could make the supply run.”

“Sure. I’d do it today, but the electronics store isn’t open on Sundays.”

“I figured,” Frank said.

He walked back to the office, and Frank went over to the PC to check the download. It was almost complete. Then it was over to the kitchen to get that cup of coffee. Jeb and Jerry were in there talking to Kurt.

“Smells good,” Frank said, drawing himself a cup out of the large pot’s spigot.

“Download done yet?” Jerry asked.

“Close,” he replied. “It’ll be about done by the time I walk back over there.”

“Should we make a backup?”

“I don’t know why we should bother,” Frank said. “I just wanted to check out that guy I was talking about.”

“Can you crash the hard drive on that PC from here?” asked Jeb.

Frank thought about it for a minute. “I can wipe and reformat it from here. Not a bad idea, either. We won’t be able to get on again, but any IP trace data will be toast...it would also take away the propaganda value.”

“Let’s do it,” Jerry said.

“Okay,” Frank said, chuckling. “If they’re really watching, this ought to piss them off good.”

The men walked over to the PC. Frank unlocked the screen and saw that the download was complete.

“Perfect,” he said. He was about to exit the console when Jerry spoke up.

“Hey, Frank, let’s take one last look before you crash it.”

“Okay,” he replied. He selected the camera view, and the grid showed up and started to cycle through.

“Oh, crap, look!” Jeb said. “It’s Phil!” The men looked on the screen and saw Philip walking through the front gate with a group of militia men and Islamic fighters following him.

The camera program continued to cycle through, and they could see the enemies walking towards the workshop where the PC and DVR were set up.

“Crash that sucker!” Jerry said. Frank nodded and dumped the camera program, then got to a prompt and typed in the commands to reformat with wipe. He kicked it off.

“Can they stop that?” Jeb asked. “They’ve got to be walking into the workshop right about now.”

“Nope,” Frank said. “Not a damn thing they can do.”

“Good,” he replied. “Wish we would’ve had time to put up a nice message for them.”

“Oh well,” Jerry said. “This is a message in itself.”

Jeb laughed. “So it is.”

“Can we open the video now?” Kurt asked.

“I need to run a scan on it first, just in case,” Frank said. “Better safe than sorry. It’ll take a few minutes…big files.” He started that process running.

“We need to talk about the incident this morning,” Jerry said. “That makes me nervous. I’d have felt better if this was a scout from the militia base back in Arizona or over in New Mexico. This wasn’t a scouting party. They knew who we were.”

“It’s possible that he’s from here but hasn’t been around since the war started, you know,” Frank said.

“How can we find out?” Jeb asked.

“Here’s a thought,” Jerry said. “Maybe we ought to have somebody call the airport and ask for him tomorrow, when we’re in town.”

“I like it,” Frank said. “Let’s do that.”

“Looks like the scan is done,” Jerry said.

“Yeah, let’s see what we have,” Frank said.

“Can you start with the most recent?” Jeb said. “Maybe we can see more of our buddy Phil.”

“Sure, I can go day by day.” Frank opened the folder. It contained a bunch of zip files, one for each day. He clicked on the file with the most recent date. That brought up a list of files by camera number. He clicked on the first file. The men gasped as they looked at the screen.

“Oh, shit,” Jerry said.

The men’s reaction got the attention of Jane and Jasmine, and they hurried over to look.

“Oh no!” Jane said.

The group was huddled around
the front of the PC monitor, shocked looks on their faces. There was an Islamic flag in the middle of the screen, and around it were very high res pictures of Frank, Jane, Jerry, Jasmine, Jeb, Charlie, Hilda, Kurt, Mary, the Sheriff, Jackson, and Earl. The bottom of the screen had the words “Enemies of the People” in ornate text. They all looked like candid shots.

“Son of a bitch, those were taken at my park!” Kurt said. “Look at the building behind Mary.”

“Probably Lieutenant James,” Jeb said. “That son of a bitch.”

“They were from a ways off,” Frank added. “Look at the angles. Remember the topography there. It was flat and open for a long way around the park. These shots would have been easy with a good SLR and telephoto lens, mounted on a tripod.”

“True,” Mary said. “We had a lot of open ground around our park.”

“It could be worse,” Jane said. “The pictures could have been from here.”

“They know where we are,” Jerry said. “Those four militia guys didn’t just stumble on us today. Glad we killed all of them, but I’d be shocked if there aren’t others who knew where they were going.”

“We have to assume that, anyway,” Kurt said.

“Glad you crashed that PC, Frank,” Jackson said.

“They still have the data from the cameras,” Frank said. “I couldn’t erase the contents of the DVR. They could put a new hard drive in that PC and be broadcasting again in no time.”

“I’ll bet this is out on YouTube or other places already, anyway. They left this on Hilda’s system so we’d see it,” Jerry said.

“Yeah, you’re probably right,” Jeb added. “We need to take it to these guys somehow. If we just sit here passively, they’ll eventually get lucky.”

“We’re really in a race against time,” Jerry said. “We need to keep Frank working on the chips. If he can crack that, these guys will be in deep yogurt.”

“Not much I can do until we can get the equipment, and now we know there are folks all over the place who know what we look like,” Frank said

“There weren’t pictures of Gabe or the Deputy,” Jerry said. “We can make a shopping list and send them.”

“Yep, that’s right,” Gabe said.

“I don’t think we’re going to get a massive attack here, either,” Earl said. “There isn’t an easy way to get a lot of people here without attracting a lot of attention, and the army took the enemy out at that base by Eagle, so they don’t have a good staging point.”

“I still want to know if this guy with the airport ID was a local, or if he was part of one of the groups in Arizona or southern Utah,” Jerry said. “If he’s a local, that means there’s sleepers here.”

“The guys we took out today weren’t too bright,” Jeb said, “and by the way, that could have been all of them, too. If it wasn’t, we’ll probably get hit again sooner rather than later.”

“Well, I’m too antsy to sit around here talking,” Gabe said. “Let’s go get the spikes in that moat, and the razor wire in the trees. We can get most of that done before nightfall if we hurry.”

“Agreed,” Jerry said.

“What can we do to help?” Jane asked.

“Come on into the barn,” Gabe said. “I’ll show you girls how to run the grinders. I’ve got two. We need to sharpen spikes.”

Jasmine, Jane, and Hilda looked at each other and smiled. They followed Gabe as he went out the door. The men all got up and headed to the door. Jerry looked over at Frank.

“Frank, why don’t you do some internet searches, like you were talking about? You’re more valuable doing that than you are sticking spikes in the ground.”

“Yeah, I agree,” Jeb said. “Find us those bad guys. Check around Hilda’s park. Maybe you can track where Phil and his merry band of cretins are hiding out.”

“Okay, I’ll do that,” Frank said, going back to the PC. He sat down and started thinking. Phil either has a base nearby Hilda’s park, or we got very lucky and saw him exactly at the right time, after he’d made a significant road trip to get there. No way, he thought. This guy is around Hilda’s area somewhere, at least a good deal of the time.

“You not working with men outside?” Rosie asked, hobbling over.

“No, they asked me to try to find out where Phil and the cretins are holed up.”

“Oh, good. You valuable there more,” she said. “You call airport yet?”

“No, we don’t want to do that yet. Tomorrow. We don’t want to call there from here…Gabe and the Deputy will call from town.”

“Safer,” she said. “I leave you alone. Want coffee?”

“No, thanks, Rosie,” Frank said. She hobbled away and he focused on his job.

“I know that Bryce Canyon and Capitol Reef are nearby,” he said to himself. “Wonder if they have cameras? They’re both National Parks. Let’s see if I can get on their private networks.”

Frank worked on that, and was into the National Parks system in no time.

“Cheeseball security here,” Frank muttered, laughing. He navigated to the administrative tools section, and found the menu for security cameras. It was segregated by state. Frank scrolled down to Utah and clicked on it. Bryce was up towards the top. He opened the folder. There were weekly camera files. He clicked on the camera for the current week. He could get real time and saved. He picked saved. There was a main gate camera, one by the office and restaurant, and another by the entrance of the main camping area. There were several along different parts of the hiking trails too, but all of them had the “off line” icon over them. He clicked on the main gate cam, and brought it up. Deserted, from what he could tell. He started running forwards through the week at high speed, slowing down when he caught a glimpse of a vehicle. The only vehicles he saw were ranger cars. He checked the camera by the office as well. Same thing. Nobody around but rangers, and they didn’t show up very often, in that week anyway. Same with the cam by the entrance to the camping area. No campers to be seen.

“Dead end,” he said to himself. “Let’s check out Capitol Reef.” He backed out of Bryce and went back to the menu page. Capitol Reef was just a little ways down the page from Bryce. He clicked on it. Same basic thing…front gate cam, office area cam, camping area entrance cam, and a lot of trail cams. About half of the trail cams showed offline. He went to the front gate cam first, for the current week. The camera was focused on the gate and a parking lot on the side. There was a ranger car parked in the diagonal spot near the gate kiosk. He did a fast forward. The car stayed there, for the whole week, without moving, day and night.

“Hmmmm, now this is interesting,” Frank said to himself. He got out of that folder and went to the prior week, same cam. The car was still there at the beginning, so he fast forwarded. It sat there for that entire week. Then he went to the prior week and checked. The car was there for that entire week, too. It didn’t move once. Then he checked the week before that. The car was still there, but there was a flash of a dark vehicle. He stopped and backed up. It was a red-neck looking truck. It pulled off out of sight of the camera. Then nothing more for the rest of that week until right at the end. Several trucks came through the gate in a stream, moving quickly. He slowed down the frames to try to get a good look into the car windows. No dice…too much glare. He couldn’t see anything but soft shapes. He counted three SUVs and two pickup trucks.

Mary came in the door with Earl.

“C’mon, we’ll get it cleaned up,” she said. “Hurt?”

“Not too bad,” Earl said.

“What happened?” Frank asked, turning around.

“Oh, nothing much. I just cut myself on that damn razor wire,” he said, sheepishly.

“Let’s go into the kitchen and wash it out,” Mary said. They walked back there. Rosie followed them in.

“Ouch!” Earl cried.

“Don’t be sissy,” Rosie said. Frank cracked up. They came back into the main room, a paper towel wrapped around Earl’s hand.

“Let’s get in the light,” Mary said, leading him over towards the front window. She removed the paper towel.

“Bad?” Earl asked.

“No, you don’t even need stitches,” Mary said. “I’ll close it with a butterfly after we put some dressing on it. But no more hard work for you today. Try to avoid using the hand too much.”

“Alright,” Earl said. He watched as Mary put ointment on the cut and then put on the butterfly bandage. Then she wrapped the hand with gauze and taped it up.

“Go help Frank,” she said to him. “If it starts bleeding again, tell Rosie. She’ll let you know if it’s bad enough for me to take a look.”

“Yes, I do,” Rosie said.

Earl walked over to the PC and sat down next to Frank.

“You okay?” Frank asked.

“Sure, no big deal. Find anything out?”

“Yeah, there’s something going on at Capitol Reef National Park.”

“Interesting. That’s a little ways from Hilda’s park. Maybe about seventy miles or so.”

“There’s a ranger car that’s been at the front gate without moving an inch for about three weeks. I was just going to go to the prior week to see if it arrived then.”

“Anybody else show up?”

“Yeah, first a pickup truck….looked decidedly redneck. Then later in the week, three SUVs and a couple more pickup trucks came in. After I’m done with the front gate cam, I’ll see if I can see anything with the other cams.”

“Could you see into the car windows?”

“Nope, too much glare,” Frank said, as he loaded the next prior week.

“Ah, there we go. No car at the start of this week.” He fast forwarded, until he saw the car arrive, on the last day of that week. “There he is.”

“Look, that guy is carrying a lunch box,” Earl said. “He’s coming to work for the day…ten to one.”

“Yeah, I think you’re right.”

“You know what the phone number for the front office is?”

“I can get it. It’s on another page.”

“Do it, and I’ll call,” Earl said.

“You sure we want to be doing that? What if they can track the cellphone?”

“I doubt they think anybody knows where they are, so they probably aren’t set up to do that. I’ll call up like I’m an RVer looking for a campsite.”

“Alright,” Frank said. He navigated to the front of the admin section, and then went to the page with phone numbers. “There it is….front office.”

Earl dialed his cellphone. It rang a few times, and then it was answered by a woman.