White Wasteland, Jeff Kirkham [ebook reader with highlight function TXT] 📗

outcome would be worthy of scripture; an outcome on the order of Sodom and Gomorrah.

The bloody end of Rex Burnham’s immortal soul was held literally in Chad’s hands. Would it be God’s retribution or his that ended Burnham’s life?

Chad stood up from the cot and went out into the night, his swagger reduced. He continued to spin the IR strobe between two fingers, walking up three rows of tents and then turning left, on a path to the command tent of Rex Burnham.

If the strobe landed face up on the tent, the Homestead men on the mountain would see it and kill Burnham. If it landed face down, they wouldn’t. He would live.

As he passed, Chad could hear someone inside, snoring lightly. Rex Burnham, he presumed.

Chad flicked the IR strobe in a side-handed toss. The device twirled through the air and landed soundlessly on the taut canvas roof. Chad continued on his way without looking back.

Traverse Mountain Peak

Draper, Utah

“There’s the strobe. Light him up.” Jeff Kirkham popped on his ear protection and shielded the side of his NVGs so that the muzzle flash of the machine gun wouldn’t white out his night vision.

There hadn’t been much else to say. They were assassinating a warlord, maybe a prophet, but they couldn’t afford to sit around and have a conversation about it. The strobe could fail or be discovered at any moment. The device could only be seen through night vision goggles—it was an infrared beacon. But Jeff assumed somebody must have night vision in the fundamentalist encampment. The clock was ticking and there was only one right answer to this equation.

“Roger, that. Here goes.” Evan dropped into the turret of the Ferret, cranked the bolt handle of the 1919 Browning and went to work. Night turned to day. Quiet turned to pandemonium.

The muzzle flash reached out three feet to each side of the barrel. Like a two-thousand meter stinger, the tracer rounds lanced impossibly far into the valley, splashing red firelight into the dark void of the encampment. Some tracers hit hard surfaces and winged off in every direction. Many, many others plunged into the ground and vanished. Within less than a second, Evan had walked the arching, red rope onto the IR strobe.

“Bingo,” Jeff yelled. “Hold that beaten zone.” Evan probably couldn’t hear him, but he didn’t need to.

Within twenty seconds, Evan expended the two hundred-round belt of 30-06. If they fired another, they risked melting the barrel. Twenty seconds of well-aimed belt-fed, even at two thousand meters, was enough to kill anything, god or man.

Barkley’s Sand & Gravel Pit

North Frontage Road

Chad hadn’t expected the machine gun fire to begin so quickly. He had only been a dozen paces away from Burnham’s tent when bullets buzzed and ricocheted like angry wasps. He knew the sound of incoming fire and his legs were running before the roar of machine gun reached his ears. The rumble of the gun lagged a full second behind the bullets.

The encampment flew into chaos. Men ran from their tents with rifles, many of them dressed only in the strange underwear of Mormons. Chad slowed his run then blended with the crowd. Most of the men ran toward the command tent.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa! Hold up. That’s machine gun fire!” Chad yelled at the panicked men. “Find cover! Find cover!”

Nobody listened. One young man fell to the ground, smacked in the side of the head by an errant bullet.

“Find cover, you idiots!” Pangs of guilt rolled over him. He ignored the risk and ran toward the dying kid. Chad tried to staunch the hole in his head with his bare hands.

“Come here! Help. Apply direct pressure,” Chad yelled over the distant growl of the machine gun. Suddenly, it ceased.

“Get this man to a medic.” He had no idea if they even had a medic in camp.

The command tent burned. The tracers had either lit the canvas on fire or knocked over the stove. Men darted toward the inferno, trying fruitlessly to enter the burning structure, already collapsed on one side. The roof canted hard, which made Chad think about the strobe.

He found it on the ground a couple yards from where it had slid off the roof. He didn’t even try to make it look like he was rescuing Burnham.

Elder Clawson appeared out of the darkness, panting, wearing just his hunting pants and a Mormon undershirt. “Where’s the Prophet?”

“He’s dead.” Chad pointed toward the burning tent.

“The heck he is!” Clawson raced to the door of the wall tent and ducked inside only to stumble right back out, coughing.

Chad pulled him away from the tent and pounded his back. “He’s dead. It’s not just the fire. Someone hosed his tent with a belt-fed.”

Elder Clawson looked up at Chad, confused. “Who?”

“The enemy, sir.” The look of confusion on the face of his commanding officer persisted. The man coughed again, deep and gravely. Chad narrowed his eyes. How could the man be confused? This was war.

The entire camp had watched two days before as the northern Mormons set up an artillery field and defensive fortifications on the other side of the Jordan River. Nobody should’ve been surprised by the idea of an enemy attack. Chad assumed that Elder Clawson had been part of the negotiations between Burnham and the northern church president. Now, he began to wonder.

“They killed him?” Elder Clawson asked, once his coughing got under control. “They killed the prophet with machine guns?”

“Yeah,” Chad answered plainly. “When you poke the bull, sometimes you get the horns. This is war, sir. This is how it works.”

“We’re the same church. How could it come to this? Who would kill an apostle, a prophet?” Chad had to remind himself that this man, his commanding officer, had been a police officer in better times.

“When you bring guns to a party, arguments get out of hand fast.”

The words were lost on the man. His face was painted in disbelief. Then it hardened, licked by the firelight of the burning tent.

“They