Chapter 3

Our SUV was safe where it was, so we decided to walk the short distance to Honey Bee. Before leaving the car, I called home and gave them a sort of coded version of what had happened and what our plans were. I pointed out that we were going to be well after dark before getting home just from the time required to make the drive, so they should not worry.

Billy and I followed the road to Honey Bee because there was no other way for us to find it. The town was never very large, and we didn't expect to find that it had grown much in the mean time. Man, were we in for a surprise!

As we got close, we began to hear gunfire spaced out the way one would expect the noise to come from a shooting range. That was our first clue as to what Honey Bee had become. We topped a small rise and gazed upon a sea of tents. The tents were laid out in a symmetrical pattern, so it was easy to get a count. There were 30 tents of the size that the Army used to call "squad tents." In the US Army, each tent that size would have held eight men, so it looked like we were seeing an encampment able to hold at least 240 men, and we figured that the cadre would be housed in the refurbished buildings of the town.

Not only was there a rifle and a pistol range, but there was a drill field and an elaborate obstacle course. To one side, there looked to be a training facility for urban warfare. This wasn't just a place for storing armaments, this was a full scale warfare training facility! This had to be reported to DHS right away, if not sooner.

Of course, I did not know their telephone number nor did I have the number conveniently to hand, so we had to scurry home to report our discovery. Just as we turned to leave, we spotted a squad of armed men headed in our direction. They must have seen us approaching from a hidden observation post. In any case, we had to get the hell out of there or face a fight that we could not win. Dammit, this was the last time we went anywhere without guns—my arrogance just might get us killed!

We set off at a dead run for our SUV. At least, the ISIL troops had no hope of catching up to us. I don't know what they thought when we started to run at just over 40 MPH, but whatever it was, it was enough to make them shoot at us. They were firing their AK-47s on full automatic, and bullets were hitting us. Fortunately, even Billy's skin could resist penetration by these bullets, but they were enough to encourage us to run as fast as we could.

Billy jumped into the driver's seat and turned us around. Meanwhile, I picked up the rifle and fired back at the ISIL people. I doubt that I hit anybody because of the way the SUV was bouncing on the rough road, but I did stop them from chasing us. Nevertheless, they did put a lot of bullets into the SUV's body. We got away before our vehicle was disabled, but we had to be classed as lucky to have managed that.

Billy never slowed down, even after we came to the paved highway. It took us four hours to reach Honey Bee, but it only took us three hours to get home. As soon as we got home, I left it to Billy to tell the women what had happened while I made a bee-line for the telephone directory to look up the DHS reporting number.

Dammit, I was calling after regular business hours, so I wound up talking to a computer. I recognized that this was going to mean that no action would be taken on the ISIL base until tomorrow afternoon at the earliest, and nothing might be done because this could be classified as a crank call or a hoax. Okay, if something was to be done about the ISIL base, it had to be done by us.

Well, there were four of us to fight against something close to 300 ISIL fighters. We did have our built-in body protection to keep us reasonably safe from bullets, but there were still things that could kill us, such as a direct hit by an RPG with the copper cone shaped charge.

Our only thing slowing us down at the moment was what to do with Johnny. We couldn't take him with us, and we couldn't leave him by himself at home, so we had to find a babysitter. By the grace of Lady Luck, Mary knew of a girl who did babysitting and should be available on such short notice. Liz called, and the girl could come over right away if she were picked up. That was easy to arrange: Liz and Mary went to pick up the girl while Billy and I got everything ready.

Johnny had just been fed, so he did not need anything special until his diaper needed changing. He did not sleep as much as the average baby, but he did happen to be asleep at the moment. Liz and Mary returned with Grace Webley, the babysitter, about the time I had the SUV packed. At the time, we had only two vehicles, and the SUV was the larger of the two.

Liz made sure that Grace knew where to find everything that she might need, including bottles of breast milk stored in the refrigerator that only needed warming. She was told that we might be gone all night in answer to an emergency family matter, but we would return as soon as possible. To keep from upsetting Grace, we did not dress in our "ninja suits" until we were on the highway.

Billy was driving, so the other three of us changed clothes and prepared all of the weapons. Once that was done, I swapped the driver's job with Billy so that he could change clothes. By the time we came to the point where our first encounter with ISIL had taken place, we were all ready to go into action. Liz was the only one who had never been on a combat run, but she did have a lot of practice with her pistol and her AK-47. We had decided to go with AK-47s because we figured to pick up more ammunition from our targets as we needed it.

Liz promised to stay glued to me and to take orders religiously, so I just hoped that she was as protected as she needed to be. By this time, she was safe from a bullet from an AK-47, so I was not worried as long as that was the only weapon used against us.

I figured that we had to have some RPGs if we were going to win this battle without too much agony on our side, so our first job was to find the ISIL armory. Logic said that it had to be in one of the wooden or adobe buildings, and I was betting on adobe.

We planned to stay together until circumstances forced us to separate, but I wanted Liz to stick with me and Mary to stick with Billy. That way, each team would have some backup. During our search for the armory, we found five ISIL guards whom we dispatched with our bare hands. Our strength and hard skin made knives unnecessary.

The armory was easy to find because it was the only building with two dedicated guards. They were dispatched silently, and we went in to search for RPGs and launchers. Those were easy to find, and we picked up a total of 16 rockets and two launchers. We installed a fuse in each RPG before we left the armory. I kept one launcher and Mary carried the other. Liz and Billy divided the grenades to carry them. Fortunately, any barely trained child could fire an RPG, so we were ahead of the game there.

Our plan was to move far enough away from the armory and put two RPGs into the building before attacking the troops in the camp. We were about to fire our first RPGs when an alarm siren went off. Somebody must have found one of the guards that we had taken out. Okay, we didn't let that slow us down. Mary and I fired, and moments later the armory building went up like a bodacious fireworks display. At least we were not going to suffer from a lack of light, but that was going to help the enemy more than us—we had night-vision goggles.

It didn't take long for the burning armory to attract a crowd. We fired two more RPGs into the crowd, and there were a lot of dead and wounded, but we didn't know how many. Fortunately for us, only a few of the people in the crowd were armed, and Billy and Liz sprayed them with automatic fire until we attracted too much attention. We ran!