Whiskey Black Book Set: The Complete Tyrant Series (Box Set 1) (69 page)

Suddenly the UN convoy veered off of I-294 and took the off-ramp onto the road where Richards’s convoy was sitting idle.

“Take offensive positions,” Richards shouted on their own radio.

The UN convoy was now headed east on US Route 6 and would meet them within a minute. The HMMWVs backed off the road, and the soldiers found themselves taking cover behind trees and broken-down cars, in ditches, and wherever else they could rapidly deploy. They had their service rifles pointed in the direction of the UN convoy now just seconds away.

San Diego, California

Sergeant Briggs and Specialist Edwards had reached Edwards’s ex’s house the night before. Now they were rummaging through the house and had found her ex-husband’s Faraday locker. It was a large wooden chest. Inside of the chest were three items wrapped in aluminum foil. Edwards tossed one to Briggs to help her unwrap the items.

“Hopefully these are the items we’re looking for,” she said, hoping not to be embarrassed by the previous day’s statement about her ex possibly having communication equipment protected from EMP.

They carefully began peeling away the layers of aluminum foil.

“I count four,” Briggs said.

“I’m almost there. Yeah, four,” she replied.

Beneath the four layers of aluminum foil, they found the items were sealed in plastic wrap. Under the plastic wrap, the items were tightly swaddled in cloth.

“Finally,” Briggs said, revealing a two-way radio.

Looking over to Edwards, he could see that she was unraveling the cloth to reveal a portable crank-powered radio.

“Awesome,” she said. “What’s in the third one?”

Briggs was carefully unwrapping the third item. It was a second two-way radio.

“We’re in business now,” she said.

Briggs turned the radio on, but it was deader than a doornail.

When Edwards heard the click of the radio dial being turned on, she looked at Briggs, but saw a frustrated expression on his face.

“Now what?” she asked.

“What’s the point of securing handhelds from an EMP attack if you have no way to charge them when the power’s down?”

“How am I supposed to know? This was his project not mine.”

“What about the crank radio?”

She began cranking the radio and noticed a power meter on the face of the device. It was rising very slowly. They both realized she was going to be cranking for a while.

After a while of cranking the radio, she switched the power button to the
on
position while they listened for traffic.

“That’s a low-frequency tuner. You should be able to pick up the signals we need,” Briggs said.

Most of the signals they were receiving were being used by men speaking a Middle Eastern language. The whole process was frustrating both of them. Briggs stood up and walked away towards the window of the front room. All of his men were standing out front.

“What are you guys doing out front?” he said before he was even finished opening the door. “
Grab your gear and hang out
in the backyard. You’re going to get yourself killed standing out in the open like that.”

Briggs walked back to Edwards and said, “We just had a firefight with blue hats yesterday. Have they forgotten that?”

Edwards was ignoring Briggs. He saw that she had found an audible station with English chatter and she was listening intently.

“What did I miss?” he asked.

She shushed him.

The radio was alive with communication.

“Eagle’s Nest from Oscar Six Bravo.”

“This is Eagle’s Nest. Over.”

“Eagle’s Nest from Oscar Six Bravo. India, Kilo, Lima, and Whiskey are a go. Over.”

Black Hills Army Depot, South Dakota

“Oscar Six Bravo, I copy,” Commandant John James said into his radio.

He had spent the last several minutes in an undisclosed location, waiting for Colonel Buchanan to contact him. He had sent him out to a predetermined area of operation, where his orders were to wait on the impending attack.

The entire Black Hills Army Depot bunker site was a vast array of underground bunkers. The ordinance depot was built during WWII and was used for the handling and storage of large amounts of munitions. For years it had served as a community of government workers, complete with a school, hospital, etc. It was remote, which was good for hiding, but when the antiquity of the depot was bested by technology, it was time to move on.

Just prior to North Korea’s EMP attack just off the western coast of the US, Executive Commander Abdul Muhaimin had discovered the location of the military forces at the Black Hills Army Depot, using technology supplied to him from the Chinese. The upgraded technology allowed him to ID many of the prominent military personnel that were staged there. The UN leadership, in coordination with FEMA, communicated their intentions to destroy the patriot resistance. John James knew they were coming, but didn’t know where or when. Soon after this radio traffic was conveyed, the invaders switched their tactics, restricting the use of language in communications to Persian and simultaneously rotating out frequencies.

Colonel Buchanan was now strategically placed in and around the vacated town of Provo. It sat on South Dakota Highway 471, which connected to Interstate 71. SD 471 ran west into Provo and then north out of Provo. It was strategic because these were the only two major entry points that a wheeled vehicle could access. The mountainous terrain to the west of the town was not welcoming to anything that could roll. It had long since been a ghost town. It had been abandoned years earlier and forsaken when government-controlled resources made it almost impossible to survive in the remote American wilderness without the use of gasoline for travel. There were remnants of survivors, but they lived, by and large, in the forested areas, where they could escape satellite visuals and live off the land.

The Marine Corps commandant, General John James, gave Colonel Buchanan command over nearly two battalions, totaling just over two thousand defenders of liberty. Under his watchful eye, he had 2
^nd
Battalion, 24
^th
Marines, which consisted of Weapons, Company C (6
^th
Engineers), Company E (4
^th
Recon Battalion), and some hard-core militia that he had traversed the Midwest landscape with. In addition, he was given 3
^rd
Battalion, 25
^th
Marines, which were comprised of the infantry units of India, Kilo, Lima, and Weapons companies. Provo was Buchanan’s assignment. He was to take command in the field and to report any and all factors of the battle back to his commander.

Provo had a few buildings, abandoned factories (which were on the outskirts of town), small amounts of woodland, and was surrounded by hills and some prairie. It was perfect for the Marines. They were highly trained in this type of environment. It mimicked the appearance and training grounds of Camp Pendleton, California. Buchanan felt at home.

He called his team together and gave clear instructions to his commissioned and noncommissioned officers. The goal was to ambush an impending attack from UN and FEMA forces. He made it very clear to each of them that the time and direction of attack was unknown. He assigned positions to each of the colonels and allotted them the necessary firepower to repel and destroy the incoming attackers.

Each of the colonels reported back to their assigned units and briefed them on everything the colonel had commanded.

North of Black Hills Depot was the larger town of Edgemont. It was not a ghost town, as was its old neighboring community of Provo. It was maintained by pro-constitutional ranchers and patriots who refused to abandon their traditional lifestyle of self-sustainment. They lived off the land and had a strict code of conduct. They welcomed the resistance fighters by joining them in their efforts. Lieutenant Colonel Barker was given this key location with the command over 1
^st
battalion 21
^st
Marines. The battalion consisted of Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, and Weapons companies. It controlled Highway 18 from the west and the north.

Southwest of Provo, about eight miles, was the township of Rumford. Like its neighbor Provo, it too was a ghost town. Strategically, the location had oversight of South Dakota Highways 471 and 71 from the north.

Eighteen miles southeast of the depot sat a ghost town called Ardmore. Strategically, it was a position that gave oversight to County Road 5 and State Highway 71 from the south, which channeled in from the southern parts of Nebraska. It needed to be controlled if the attack was coming from the south. Intelligence pointed to a small city named Ogallala, which was still rich with agriculture. FEMA control over every inch of the American agricultural system proved flawed when it came to facing off with heavily armed ranchers and country folk.

Lieutenant Colonel Barnes had 2
^nd
Battalion Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, and Weapons companies embedded at Ardmore.

Lieutenant Colonel Cox was ordered to take 3
^rd
Battalion to an undisclosed location, where it would be a reinforcements unit if called upon. Cox had command of Golf, Hotel, India, and Weapons companies.

Lieutenant Colonel Howard was placed in the town of Hot Springs. It had a community of one thousand people, who held a board meeting to discuss the current conditions and how they could contribute. They volunteered their resources, locations, and people to help effectuate a resistance. Howard had command over thirteen CH-53E Super Stallions. Each one was fitted with two .50-caliber machine guns and chaff and flare dispensers for antiair defense attacks. The pilots could operate in the darkest of conditions, using advanced FLIR (forward-looking infrared) technology. These helicopters were capable of transporting thirteen tons of cargo and equipment.

Twelve miles northwest of the depot, Lieutenant Colonel Wright had thirty M777 Howitzers. The howitzers were previously decommissioned and sitting in storage when General John James had them relocated to the munitions depot. Like the 21
^st
Marine Corps regiment, they had gone from a status of decommissioned to active duty.

General John James, Belt McKanty, Hensworth, and Communications Specialist Sergeant
Rick
Hammel were waiting from their undisclosed location.

Kankakee, Illinois

Troy took the group back to a rusty old state vehicle. The registration plates had been removed, but Jess recognized it for what it was. Years earlier, the state would take bids from manufacturers to supply it with a predetermined amount of vans or cars. This was an older model 2010 van with a caged rear seating area, probably built for inmates or mentally ill patients.

The Iranian officer was seated in the very rear of the van, by himself. The cage was sturdy looking, and there was a man assigned to watch over him. The guard was sitting in the seat directly in front of the Iranian. He was armed with a rifle, but it was obvious that the prisoner did not have access to the guard.

Troy slid the large bulky van door open and stepped up into the van. Nathan and Sergeant Banks stepped in behind him. All three of the men took a seated position in the seat directly in front of the guard’s seat.

“Meet Captain Munsaf,” Troy said.

Munsaf appeared to be in good health, minus the black eye he had most likely incurred as a result of being captured.

“What’s your first name, Munsaf?” Nathan asked.

“He hasn’t said a word since we took him prisoner,” the guard said.

Nathan looked at the guard. He was rough looking, with a full beard, like most men had. No electricity and no razor manufacturing meant unshaven faces.

“I’m Nathan.”

“Yeah, I know. I’m Aaron.”

Nathan peered back at the captive. His name was clearly written above the chest pocket of his uniform coat.

“When we shook him down, he had this.”

Troy handed him an eight-by-ten-inch piece of laminated paper. Written beneath the clear laminate were sets of clearly legible frequencies. Nathan carefully and meticulously looked through the list. He noticed that each frequency rotated out every twelve hours. The problem was that the sequenced list didn’t correspond with a time. They would have to systematically go through the list until they found a broadcast. Therein lay another problem; if there was no communication at the time they flipped to the correct frequency, they would pass it up, thinking it was incorrect.

Troy’s three-percenters group didn’t have the radio equipment that was required to pick up the high-frequency signals. Only recently did the posse have the means to listen in on such transmissions. Taking control of UN vehicles and communications devices enabled them to listen to UN chatter, but unknown to the patriots, Executive Commander Muhaimin had slain the UN’s Russian soldiers and begun using Persian as the primary language. In addition to this complication, the military was using a communications program called “SkyWave” to communicate over long distances. The technology was old-fashioned and operated similar to the traditional
skip propagation
, which was fancy terminology for the way high frequencies could bounce off of the earth’s ionosphere to gain greater distances with technology capable of receiving such signals. Now that the patriot movement was getting their hands on the equipment and the means to decipher signal changes, all they needed was a translator.

“Captain, I know you’re not intimidated by my presence, and I’m sure you can understand me, so let me be clear; I have in my company a—uh, how can I say this?—a very capable interrogator.”

The captain looked into Nathan’s eyes, as if he understood exactly what he was saying, but then looked back downward, toward the rear of the seat to his front.

“We’re not doing this again, Nathan,” Banks said.

“This is not a matter we should discuss in front of our guest,” Nathan replied.

Troy, Banks, and Nathan stepped down out of the van.

“You need to leave the
unethical
affairs to me,” Nathan said, hand quoting at the word
unethical
as he continued, “I’m no longer in uniform and I need to make the hard decisions, because you’re clearly still under contract.”