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  “His is a different technology, a lot more powerful and the antenna is located outside of the bunker,” Grace remarked, drawing off of her parents prepping knowledge.

  Bob Tiller had a set of noise canceling headphones connected to the feed and didn’t hear them approach.

  “Dad,” Joshua touched the man’s shoulder and he jumped.

  “Yes! Yes?”

  “What’s the latest? We’ve been down here for almost 20 hours and we kind of want to know what’s happening up top.”

  Bob Tiller removed the headphones and turned towards the youth. “I’m not going to be mellow dramatic or sugar coat anything.”

  “Good, that helps me,” Grace said, cutting him off.

  “Yes, well, it seems that there are several things happening that we need to prepare for.” Mrs. Tiller joined them in the group, the worried look had returned to her face.

  “My friend Dukes, down near Columbus, GA, has an operative moving towards Birmingham. The operative reports that helicopters and drones are carrying out seek and destroy sorties. The operative also reported that the signature of the helicopter was not one of ours.”

  “What does that mean, Dad, not one of ours? You mean it was a foreign county…for sure?” Joshua asked the question that Grace wanted to.

  “That’s what the operative reported.” Bob could see the doubt on the kid’s faces. “He’s a former Army Captain, so he probably knows what he talking about when it comes to helicopters.”

  “My Dad’s a Captain,” Grace commented, more to herself, than to anyone else.

  “Really?” Bob, asked more out of respect than of question.

  “Yeah, he was ROTC in school and then did like 6 or 8 years active duty before going into the real world.”

  “Your father’s not in Columbus, GA is he?” Bob asked, taking a shot in the dark.

  “No,” Grace said, suddenly caught off guard by the question. “He was flying home from Texas the night the bomb went off.”

  Bob looked at her as if he was trying to puzzle something out. “Would he have connected through Atlanta?” Bob asked.

  Grace thought about that for a second. Her father always flew through Atlanta. It was how they accumulated as many air miles as they did for use when they went on vacation. The extra short hop from Birmingham to Atlanta was a segment builder and added miles for her dad.

  “I think so,” she answered.

  “Interesting,” Bob said, as he swiveled back to the radio and keyed the mike. “Birmingham Bob to Dukes, looking for response. Over.”

  Almost immediately, Dukes answered the call.

  “Bob, this is Dukes. Over.”

  “Hey Dukes, code. Over.” Which meant that they were now speaking some sort of jargon or code that they agreed upon.

  “10-4. Over.”

  “Your operative in the field. Were did he come from?”

  There was a long pause on the short-wave radio.

  “Level of importance? Over,” Dukes stalled.

  “He’s stalling,” Bob Tiller said to the others. “He must know that there’s something special about this operative and he doesn’t want to broadcast to me what that is. He’ll come up with something.”

  Grace felt something in the pit of her stomach. Something that she hadn’t felt since this entire ordeal had started. She felt hope.

  “We’re just fishing here, but we might have a mutual link…one of his assets,” Bob said, going out on a limb. He pulled short of asking for a name on the unsecure channel. “Over.”

  Dukes surprised them by speaking plain code. “First name, Ian, second three letters are Bravo, Uniform, Romeo.”

  Everyone looked back at Grace, who was doing the translation in real time. “He knows my Dad!” she said, her voice rising on the word dad. “Ian Burrows. That’s my Dad, Ian Burrows! It has to be!”

  Mrs. Tiller put her arm around the shoulders of the girl to get her to not cling too tightly to the hope. “His name is Ian Burrows,” she said to Mr. Tiller.

  Bob went out on a limb. “Dukes, Burrows? Over.”

  “Affirmative,” Dukes confirmed.

  < >

  Leah was listening to the broadcast on her own short-wave radio and nearly fell out of her chair as she jumped up to hug Amy.

  “Ian’s alive! Ian’s alive! Ian’s alive!” she yelled as the two women jumped and hugged each other. “And he said we have one of his assets…they have Grace! They have Grace!”

  < >

  “But he missed his scheduled radio check in with me two hours ago,” Dukes reported somberly. “Over.”

  CHAPTER 13

  “What happened to your Scoutmaster?” Ian asked, as he assessed who and what was around him.

  There were five Boy Scouts, all of different rank and age. Each one wore varying versions of the Boy Scout uniform, but each one was a Boy Scout.

  “He died,” the tallest one said.

  “He what?” Mary responded, still out of breath.

  “It doesn’t matter, lets get off this bridge.” Ian stood and started moving one direction. This is not the way I wanted to cross this river. He looked back and noticed that the boys weren’t moving.

  “Come’on guys, we’ve got to go! This flood might get bigger and take out this bridge,” Ian warned.

  Two of the boys started arguing. One of the boys, the smallest, stating crying and the other two just bickered. Mary stood just behind Ian; she wasn’t leaving without him. This was becoming habit…Ian saves her from certain death and then she follows him.

  Ian raised his hand, his fingers forming the Scout symbol for order and silence. The boys responded immediately. Each boy stopped what they were doing and raised their right hands, imitating the sign. The only sound was the roar of the churning water below them.

  “Look, fellas, I am an Eagle Scout, and an adult. I pull rank and now order the troop to follow me to this side of the river,” Ian said, and began to walk.

  Four of the five began to walk after him, but one held back. He was the oldest and the only one with the rank of Life Scout…one below Eagle.

  “Sir!” he said loudly and sharply.

  Ian turned around to look at the only person still standing in the middle of the bridge.

  “Our Scoutmaster’s body is on the other side and up that hill,” he said, the pain in his voice evident.

  Ian looked at Mary. “Take them off the bridge and as far up the hill as you can. We’ll be there in a minute.”

  Mary nodded and swooped her arms around the remaining four boys. “Alright, you heard the bad-ass Eagle Scout, let’s get off the bridge and see how high we can climb.”

  “That’s a cool looking rifle,” Ian heard one the younger boys say to Mary as they hurried off the bridge.

  Ian moved back down the bridge, mindful of the giant debris field that was moving down stream.

  “Sir, our Scout Master is up that hill a little way. He’s…he’s,” the boy cleared his throat. “He’s a good man, and I don’t want to leave him up there. We’ve been out here for three days.”

  “What happened?” Ian asked, as he put a hand on the boy’s shoulder.

  “We all took a day off of school. It was supposed to be fun and edgy, you know! We all thought it was cool to skip school on Friday and go camping. It’s a tradition with our troop. Every year on this weekend, we take off on a Friday morning. Not everyone gets permission to skip school, so it’s usually a small group. We pack light and go deep in the woods.”

  “Okay, so what happened?” Ian kept looking up steam at what was coming down stream. We need to get off this bridge.

  “Mr. McClure just fell over. It was Friday, about 5:30PM. We had hiked for about four hours. We had reached where we wanted to camp, and he just fell over. We could tell it was a heart attack…he had a pace maker and we all knew that. We did CPR, but nothing worked. He was gone.”

  “He had a pacemaker?” Ian confirmed.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And it stoppe
d working.”

  “I think so.”

  “It has taken us this entire time to hike his body back to this point.”

  Ian looked at where he thought the boys had left the body of the man. He then changed his gaze back to the eyes of the boy. He really was more of a young man than a boy. He’s probably just a bit younger than Grace.

  “Do you guys know what’s been going on in America for the last two days?”

  The boy looked at him like he was speaking a foreign language.

  “No sir, other than that big celebrity trial.”

  Ian smirked at that piece of trivia.

  “Son, you are the Platoon Leader,” it was a statement, not a question. “I need you to understand what I am about to tell you, and then help me lead the rest of your troop out of here. Do you understand?”

  The boy, about sixteen years old, nodded that he did understand.

  “Good.” Ian took a deep breath. “America has been attacked,” he waited for a reaction, and there was none other than understanding. “Atlanta was hit by a nuclear bomb and the rest of the country was hit by an EMP. Do you know what an EMP is?”

  The boy nodded. “Yes sir. An EMP is an electro magnetic pulse that renders all electronic devices useless that rely on a microchip for intelligence. Which explains why all of our LED flashlights quit working.”

  Ian nodded. “Very good, now, it would seem that your Scoutmaster might have been struck by the same EMP, and his pacemaker was damaged.”

  “That makes sense, sir,” the boy responded.

  “Do you think it is logical for us to save the rest of the troop and head that way,” Ian pointed to where Mary had taken the other Scouts, “knowing what you know and that it’s probably what your Scoutmaster would have wanted?” Ian said, doing a little psychobabble on the youth.

  “Yes, sir,” the young man responded. “We can come get him after everyone is safe, right?”

  Ian patted the boy on the shoulder. “What’s your name, son?”

  “Adam, sir. Adam Tiller.”

  “Well, Adam, I hope so,” he said. “Now, let’s get off of this damn bridge!”

  “Yes, sir!”

  CHAPTER 14

  Dukes wrote down the notes as fast as the voice was speaking the code. He would have to spend time decoding the transmission later, but he knew that this one would be important. This was a transmission from one of his trusted sources outside of San Diego. He was a brother Marine, having served with Dukes during Desert Storm; and he was one of the few people that Dukes trusted with intel.

  “What was that one about?” June heard the word, ‘over,’ and knew that she could ask the question.

  “I don’t know, but it’s detailed.” His notes filled up an entire piece of paper.

  Over the last few days, a network of short-wave HAM radio hounds had been accumulating and passing information all around the country. This particular message was the first direct communication with anyone from the West Coast. The transmission had originating from southern California and was full of as much fear and confusion as the ones Dukes had been hearing from out of the mid-west or the northeast. It might even be full of as much fear as Dukes had been broadcasting the last few days.

  He started working out the code while sitting at the dinning table. It was a double code, drawing from two different military sources. He had used the same code during Desert Storm and then the military retired it. But, that didn’t mean that the former military people couldn’t use it.

  “Son of a…” Dukes whispered.

  “What is it?” Penny asked. She had been helpful to her father, taking over the manning of the radio when he needed sleep. She knew the same code, thanks to her father, and was looking over his shoulder as he deciphered.

  “Wow!” she said, running the encryption faster in her head than her father could on paper.

  “What does it say? You’re a lot faster.”

  She sat down slowly, reading the entire time. “It says that the shipping docks and neighborhoods around the docks in San Francisco were gassed, and that freighter ships are unloading tanks and troops at the ship yards.”

  “Gassed?”

  “Yeah,” she read further down the page. “Sarin gas.” She looked horrified. “That’s illegal, right?”

  “So is launching a nuclear bomb. Apparently killing an entire city by gas is nothing once you’ve nuked a city!”

  She kept reading. “There are multiple reports that the L.A. ports were also gassed and that the Naval shipyard, base and Marine station at San Diego are under bombardment.”

  “I got this one about 10 minutes ago, he handed her his transposed notes from another source. This guy’s is in San Antonio. It says that the ports in Corpus Christi and Galveston were attacked last night the same way.”

  “What about Mobile and New Orleans?” June asked, after listening to the worried volley of information.

  “I haven’t heard, but, now that you say that…and with those helos flying around,” his voice trailed off without finishing the sentence.

  “What are you thinking?” June pressed.

  He wrote a few things down before facing his wife and daughter. He thought he had it figured out.

  “I think the reason I haven’t heard anything from my friends in Mobile or New Orleans area is that ‘they’ are already there. Those cities have been the bases of operation for the drones, the helicopters and what ever else. I bet, they gassed the place just like they did the ones on the West Coast!”

  “But why would they attack our ports that way? What do they want? Where’s our military?” Penny asked with a true sense of worry.

  Dukes had been asking the same questions. He found it frightening that he had not heard an ‘official’ government broadcast or seen any resistance in the air to the drones or the rogue helicopters. What had happened to the might of the United States military?

  He had heard of a few National Guard commanders with short-waves asking for support from any military personnel along the Mississippi...no particular rally locations were given; it was just a plea for help. These radio broadcasts usually lasted a few seconds. Dukes figured that they didn’t want to give their true positions away by leaving a breadcrumb trail of radio signals…something that he knew he was doing himself.

  The working theory about why there was not an overwhelming show of US military force was that the EMP and the nukes so disrupted travel that the home based troops couldn’t get back to their bases to rally.

  Also, once the power went down and the cities burned, chaos erupted around America. Local police forces were overwhelmed with the response and inability to travel. It seemed that most soldiers were more interested in helping their families than organizing to fight. America had turned into a free for all, with the most prepared and the most heavily armed dominating.

  “Dukes, this is Ian. Over,” the two-way radio crackled with new life.

  Dukes had the two-way on constant scan mode to pick up any messages on any channel. Dukes jumped up from the dinning table. Ian had missed his last check in and Dukes was starting to fear the worst…especially now that he knew that Ian’s daughter was safe with Birmingham Bob.

  “Ian, Dukes. Code word?”

  “States,” he said, sounding tired.

  “How are you? Over.” Dukes asked. Both June and Penny gathered around the radio to listen.

  “We’ve been better,” letting his plural statement speak for he and Mary. “Over.”

  “A lot has happened since we last spoke. I have news, but do you want to report in? Over.”

  “Affirmative. I have first hand of a rocket attack on a dam from enemy birds. My comrade and I escaped, again. We are approximately half way to my target and have picked up five extra toon mates. Over.”

  Dukes looked at Penny and June. He didn’t know exactly what that meant.

  “Can you clarify, over?”

  “Scouts. Troop 280 out of B’ham,” Ian said, using as much code as he could get away
with. He knew that other people were listening to his broadcast, and didn’t know if they were friend or foe. So, he thought it was always in his best interest to assume that everyone was out to use the info from the broadcast to kill an American…so, he spoke in code, and bolstered the credentials a little.

  “Scouts? Over.”

  “Highly trained mountaineers that are S & R certified and well led. Over.” Ian smiled at the boys around the small campfire as the sun came up. They seemed to think this spy stuff was pretty cool. Ian hated the fact that he was eventually going to have to tell most of them that their parents were dead.

  “Breaking in. This is Birmingham Bob. Sorry Dukes. Over.”

  Dukes thought nothing of the intrusion on his call and signaled for Bob to continue. “Bob, this is Dukes. What’s up? Over?”

  “We were listening to your report from Mr. Ian in the field and his band of ‘Scouts.’ Ian, did you say Troop 280? Over.”

  Ian looked up at the boys around the ring of fire. They had grown quiet with the addition of the third voice on the radio. “Bob, this is Ian, that’s affirmative, sir, Troop 280. Over”

  “Is Adam Tiller with the group? Over.” Bob asked. A warble breached his voice.

  Adam stood up across the fire ring from Ian at the sound of his name. The firelight painted him with colors of auburn and yellow light.

  “Affirmative, Bob. Over.” Ian looked across the fire at the youth, and smiled.

  “That’s my Dad,” Adam said.

  Ian held the radio up to the boy to take.

  “Dad,” he said. “Dad, is that you?”

  “Adam? Are you okay, son? Over.”

  Mary wiped a tear from her eye as she listened to the reunion.

  Ian leaned towards her. “At least some good came from this shitty day!”

  She leaned back. “Like we lived again, and oh by the way, saved a bunch of Boy Scouts…not a bad day!”

  Ian smiled and so did Mary as they listened to Adam speak with his father and mother on the radio.