Kinsmen of the Dragons
Copyright© 2013 by Gina Marie Wylie
Chapter 14: Regrouping
When Sam awoke the next day the sun was already well up, even if down in the concrete bunker there was no way to see the light of day. He could hear someone singing in the shower and he glanced over to the couch the admiral had been ensconced on and saw that he was gone.
Sam sat up and stretched. There was a mild ache where the bruise on his leg was, but it wasn’t the angry color of a new bruise, but one well on its way to being absorbed. He stood up and his knees didn’t complain. He did a few deep knee bends, and when his knees still didn’t hurt, he did his old workout routine that he had once started each day with.
He couldn’t do as many pushups as he could when he was twenty, and sit ups still pulled heavily on the muscles of his stomach, but when he was done, he felt a lot better.
The admiral came out of the bathroom wearing a navy uniform with ribbons and all of that stuff that meant it was almost certainly the admiral’s own things. The admiral waved at a pile of clothes on a chair. “Those are for you, Detective. They have your sizes, but I’m afraid your apartment building burned overnight. They say it was almost certainly arson. There were officers on the scene and they got everyone else out safely, but a half dozen units, including yours, were destroyed.
“I might add, my place was ransacked, but not burned. Evidently the doggies don’t know about sea bags. They trashed my bed like they did yours and a few others.”
“And James Fredericks’ apartment?”
The admiral shook his head. “I haven’t heard anything. He was your friend, right? He was one of those killed last night?”
“Yes, sir.” Sam could have killed one of those dog things just then, just with his bare hands.
“Sergeant Godwin popped her head out of the other bedroom a bit earlier and said they would be out by eight thirty. They too have been supplied with fresh clothes, army fatigues.
Sam glanced at his watch. It was a few minutes of eight. “There are toiletries in the bathroom, Detective,” the admiral added.
Sam grabbed the clothes, army fatigues, and went in the bathroom and did his morning routine. The fatigues were heavily starched and he wondered how anyone could bear wearing them. Still, they fit well enough.
He went out and found the admiral was watching the TV.
The admiral nodded at the talking head. “There’s not much new, beyond a great deal of speculation. In a way, this attack was a good thing — it has the media focused on what happened here instead of what happened out in the Pacific. There was a considerable concern about a panic if the word got out that a nuclear attack had been launched on some of our cities. Or if the public learned that the battle included nuclear weapons.
“The Russians are being oddly reluctant to come to grips with things. Yesterday the Chinese destroyed one of the larger monsters — about eleven hundred feet long — with a small nuke. Putin says that if anyone else pops a nuke, he’ll go public.” The admiral shook his head. “As if he could get his own populace to sit still if there was a nuclear threat to their cities!”
A moment later, Sergeant Godwin came out, wearing fatigues, complete with three stripes, followed by Amanda who was wearing fatigues as well.
“I look like a dork,” Amanda said sourly.
“Good morning to you, too, Sunshine,” Sam told her.
She flipped him a bird and he chuckled. “Amanda, yesterday, you asked a very large favor of me and Sergeant Godwin. Now I’m going to ask one of you in return. Do try to be a little more lady-like. Please? Just a little? Try?”
The admiral interrupted. “I talked to Colonel Armstrong a few moments ago. For the time being, I’ll be accompanying you. We’re going to go to breakfast now, and a little after nine, there’ll be a convoy that leaves from here, going to the police headquarters downtown. The colonel is quite delighted that Major Lewis is proving to be a total ass, demanding that Miss Feather be turned over to the police, as she was under arrest.”
“I explained that to him,” Sam said patiently.
“Oh, that you did,” Admiral Sloan told him, grinning broadly. “The major seems unwilling to accept your statement, as the requisite paperwork wasn’t filed.”
Sam saw red.
Admiral Sloan held up his hand like a traffic cop asking him to stop. “Colonel Armstrong has told him that he’ll comply, and that a convoy would be bringing her to the police headquarters as I said. It is the colonel’s fondest wish that the enemy, Dragons, as they are called, will attack the convoy. He is of the opinion that the American combat soldier is going to beat up on anyone foolish enough to attack the convoy.
“To put it mildly everyone in the convoy is going to be locked and loaded and ready for some righteous payback for what happened at the substation last night, and to the Navy earlier in the week.
“A half hour later, another combat patrol will depart, going east, then south and finally west. They will patrol east to the 101, south to the 402, and then west to I-10. Even with downtown, they’ll exit the freeway and make a beeline for the Federal Building, where additional forces have been called in to beef up security. Around eleven, we’ll depart from there for a location they haven’t even told me about.”
Sam contemplated that. The security seemed good enough.
Breakfast was pretty decent, back at the conference table. Things were clearly in progress and Sam had no desire to stick his oar in something he had no clue about. He was encouraged by Admiral Sloan who didn’t say anything either.
They’d been eating for fifteen minutes when the first convoy moved out. They finished eating and went back to the bedrooms to secure their things. When they came back up, it was as different as night and day. One of the others, a lieutenant colonel, came up to Admiral Sloan and reported.
“We didn’t expect much opposition, sir. That hasn’t proved to be the case. Down at Sixteenth and Washington a full-fledged battle is underway. Not just those dogs, but people with mortars, RPGs, light machines guns and a hell of a lot of rifles are opposing the column.
“Colonel Armstrong had your convoy formed and ready to go ... but he sent them as reinforcements to the first group. We’ll have another convoy for you formed up in a few minutes. Please be patient.”
Sam swallowed. Just what kind of opposition would bring a hundred soldiers to a screeching halt? Clearly this was getting out of hand!
It was another quarter hour and they were rolling down McDowell Road again, heading east. As difficult as everything was, was when Amanda had reached out for Sam and hugged him tight, crying a few minutes after they were told that there was heavy fighting in progress.
Every now and then the tears would increase and Amanda would hold Sam tighter. Admiral Sloan looked over her to Sam. “Is she okay?”
Sam met his gaze as they rolled down the road. “She knows when our people die, sir.”
“She’s in their heads,” Sue Ellen elaborated.
The admiral muttered a heart-felt curse.
They had just turned south on the 143 freeway when it happened. It wasn’t as bright as Sam would have expected, but it was bright enough. Maybe twenty miles to the southeast a mushroom cloud was boiling up into the air. Even their driver stopped, his mouth agape.
Sue Ellen recovered first. “Get on the radio! Not nuclear! Repeat, not nuclear!”
Admiral Sloan cleared is throat. “How can you possibly know at this distance? You’d have to sample the cloud.”
“We were looking right at it. If that was a nuclear explosion, we’d be blind. Tell them to check; see if there was a heat pulse! If it’s nuclear there will be a hell of a lot of fires around the explosion. If there aren’t many or none, it’s not nuclear!”
Sam decided that she had to be right ... it hadn’t even been as bright a flashbulb. “Driver, tell the convoy commander, take the most direct route to downtown, avoiding the other fighting, from our current position!”
The driver picked up a radio, and Sam was gratified that the lead vehicle swerved off the freeway a quarter mile ahead on the Priest Road exit.
Mentally Sam winced. That wasn’t going to work — the fighting was ahead of them and they couldn’t avoid it headed the way they were going. “Take the exit for Broadway — we’ll go west on Broadway.”
The driver spoke again and the lead vehicle swerved to the right, leaving a dozen drivers honking wildly, as the other vehicles in the convoy followed suit.
In five minutes they were rolling west along Broadway Road, south of the river, and Sam hoped, south of the fighting a few miles north.
They got to Central Avenue and turned north. The driver picked up the radio and spoke a few words. “Captain St. Cloud says that there was a non-nuclear explosion south of Gilbert.”
Sam kicked himself again. “Dog Boy!”
The driver looked confused, as did everyone else.
A few minutes later they pulled into the basement of the Federal Building. There were guards every few feet, and they were hustled out of the Humvee and into an elevator with a minimum of fuss.
They were put into a conference room, and aside from a half dozen FBI agents, left alone. Amanda still had her head resting on Sam’s shoulder and no one seemed even the least inclined to change that.
After a bit, a guy in body armor came in. “I’m Terry Goldfarb, the Phoenix FBI SAC. It was not, as I’ve heard you’ve reported, a nuclear explosion — the mushroom cloud not withstanding. A Gilbert EOD tech got close with a Geiger counter and a big pair of balls. He says the smell of RDX is overpowering, and his Geiger counter hasn’t twitched.
“A few minutes before the explosion we had a report from Gilbert PD that they’d sent some officers to arrest a suspect in an attempted murder. As near as the Gilbert PD can determine, the suspect’s location is where the explosion occurred. National Command Authority has designated the site as a priority target for investigation.”
Sam had been preternaturally calm for some minutes. “And us?”
“We are in a holding pattern with you for now. Some persons of interest are en route from Gilbert.”
“Suspected good guys or suspected bad guys?” Sam asked roughly.
The FBI special agent in charge smiled thinly. “Good guys, we think.” He nodded at Amanda. “We are hoping the young woman can tell us for sure.”
Amanda looked at him for a second, and then seemed distracted. The distraction lasted for nearly five minutes. “They’ll be here in another ten minutes. Two Gilbert police officers, a Gilbert fire department officer and a man and a woman.” Amanda looked up at Sam. “The last two — they’re like you and Sue Ellen. Like me.”
Sam laughed. “Like you, maybe.”
“No, you don’t know it, but you’re more like me than anyone else here. Except Sue Ellen. She’s like me too.”
Amanda met his eyes. “You think I can’t possibly know. Well, I do.”
Sam saw Admiral Sloan watching in rapt fascination and wondered what he knew. He had never volunteered much, but it was clear he knew a lot about what was going on than he let on.
Still, Sam was curious. “I’m like you? How is that, Amanda? I can’t see how the door is made, you know.”
“You and Sue Ellen both — you see things. Your mind tells you you’re imagining them and you don’t believe your senses. You’re worse about lying to yourself than Sue Ellen — she tells herself that it’s intuition that she knows where booby traps are. Yet you sensed the dog-things at a distance. And you can see me in your head, but you tell yourself it’s a figment of your imagination.”
“You can read my mind?” Sam asked, trying not to sound like it was a big deal.
“Not really. It’s like trying to watch a scrambled cable channel. Sometimes there’s a picture there, but mostly not. Some things are easier to understand than others.” She waved to the door to the room. “I’m going out and getting a drink. The fountain is the left, as I recall from when we came in.”
Of course, it wasn’t as simple as that, as the FBI agents made a procession out of it. He saw Amanda and the entourage head for the fountain, then the door closed behind her.
He told himself he was imagining it when as soon as he couldn’t see her, she retraced her steps and went the other way down the corridor, around a corner and stopped.
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