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

is Evan. Go ahead, Wheaton. Just talk. Don’t shout into the radio.”

“Okay, okay. The fundamentalists are coming up the Number Three road. Thirteen trucks and one motorcycle. Do you copy?”

“I copy. Blow ‘em up,” Evan ordered. Then he turned back to the belt-fed.

South Slope

Traverse Mountains, Utah

Ka-whoomp!

Chad watched as his lead truck jumped three feet in the air and tumbled into the draw to the side of the dirt road. It rolled once, twice, three times and picked up speed. He saw a body fly out the windshield. The body hit the patchy snow head first and went limp. The truck finally came to a stop when it hit the bottom of the draw.

Chad had been assigned to seize the top of the Traverse ridges with the “crack troops” he’d been training for two weeks. He’d sincerely done his best, but they had precious little ammunition and even less time.

With at least one Ferret on top of the mountain and with Evan likely leading the counter flank, Chad had little hope of taking the high ground. If the fundamentalist army hadn’t conquered the ridge before the battle, they simply weren’t going to take it. This wasn’t Iwo Jima, and Chad wasn’t working with a division of hardened Marines. This was more like a high school football team trying to take down SEAL Team Six in an uphill assault. Luckily, Chad didn’t much care about winning, but he didn’t want to see his boys get shellacked either. He loved every one of these fresh-faced idiots.

The four boys in the lead truck were probably dead and Chad blamed himself. He should’ve know that a squinty-eyed psycho like Jeff Kirkham would’ve figured out shaped charge IEDs. That dude had spent too long imbedded with the natives over in Afghanistan. He probably fudged together well-pipe artillery and drone-mounted mustard gas too. Chad jerked his head up and searched the sky. He heard nothing but the clicking and pinging of the dead Ford’s engine cooling in the ravine. Half a dozen of his boys tumbled and slid down the embankment to rescue any survivors.

“Set a perimeter, damnit!” Chad shouted. “Wake up!”

Most of his boys had frozen in their vehicles. He shouldn’t have been surprised. First contact with violence fried a man’s circuit breaker.

For whatever reason, the dead prophet hadn’t made the ridge line a strategic priority, and nobody had attempted to convince him otherwise. Elder Clawson had likewise decided that the high ground was too far from the I-15 to be a problem—at least a thousand yards—so he’d crossed it off his list of strategic concerns.

None of the fundamentalists had ever taken machine gun fire in the real world, so their imagination hadn’t extended to bullets traveling a mile and still killing men. They’d blamed the assassination of Prophet Burnham on an unseen assault team that’d infiltrated their camp, even after Chad told them it had been a machine gun. Chad didn’t bother to correct their mistake.

For the assault into Salt Lake Valley, Chad had been ordered to take the Traverse Mountains, which he knew wasn’t going to happen. There was no way Kirkham and Hafer were going to leave it unoccupied. But those orders got Chad and his guys out of the really nasty fight that was going to take place in the middle of the freeway, so he didn’t argue. He would much rather face Evan on a fake flanking maneuver than get ground up in the bottom of a damn canyon, bullets coming from every-which-way. With any luck, he hoped Evan would recognize Chad’s motorcycle and give him a pass.

Given the steaming heap of a truck the bottom of the draw, Chad’s hope dimmed.

“Dismount! Everyone. Get out of the trucks. Get behind the trucks!” Chad yelled again. He rode his motorcycle down the column of Fords, Toyotas and Chevy’s.

“Hide behind the trucks. Get out!”

Chad pulled the radio Jeff gave him out of his pocket and considered calling in. It was an open channel—one of hundreds of ham channels—but an open channel nonetheless. The odds that the channel was being monitored, the likely range of the little Baofeng, were slim.

“Kirkham, this is BadAss One. Do you copy?”

Nothing.

The odds that Jeff would be listening in on Chad’s channel on the cusp of battle weren’t good. Chad stabbed the radio back in his pouch, but left it on, turned all the way up.

After Chad got his men dismounted and behind their vehicles, he took stock of the tactical situation. He didn’t plan on winning this engagement, but he needed to make it look good. At the end of the day, he planned on going back to the fundamentalists a big war hero. He needed to come out on top of this dust up. He planned on making a home with the fundamentalists and he needed a track to glory—not punching a clock as a noncom. He’d always thought “Colonel Wade” had a nice ring to it.

How he would pull that off, Chad wasn’t sure, but this was his moment. This was his parachute scene in Point Break. His fight against Chuck Norris in Way of the Dragon. His gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone.

Elder Clawson had sent them up a steep dirt road with two drop-offs, one on each side. The road ran up a little spine like a dragon’s back, all the way to the top, and there wasn’t a lick of cover. Everything in Utah was so damned steep that there wasn’t anywhere else for the road to go but up, up, up.

Fortunately, they hadn’t taken any rifle fire from above—it’d just been the IED and nothing else. Chad heard a couple bursts from a belt-fed around to the west. He couldn’t see the Ferret along the skyline, but it could appear at any moment. If that happened, it’d be game over for his little football team.

Five men clambered up the steep mountainside from the corpse of the truck. One of them looked hurt pretty bad. They’d left one dead kid