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

in truck, by Chad’s count. The guy who’d flown out the window wasn’t moving, either. The boys who’d gone to help him left the body where it lay. Chad didn’t blame them—the hill was too steep to carry a man.

“Get these trucks backed up and turned around,” Chad ordered. “Hurry up. We need to find another way.” That should’ve been obvious. The bomb that flipped the truck had blown a giant hole in the road and the drop off was too steep on either side to get around the crater.

Getting trucks turned around and pointed downhill on the perilous road took almost ten minutes. Part way through the Chinese Fire Drill, small arms fire plunked into the trucks from the ridge above.

“Let’s go. Go!” Chad shouted and scampered over to his motorcycle. He fired it up and raced out ahead of the string of trucks back the way they’d come.

Chad vaguely remembered from the briefing that he would find a crossroad at the bottom of the rise and he could push east up that road. Maybe Jeff had planted IEDs up every road that climbed the ridge. But if you counted every dragon spine dirt track, there were like ten little roads. Jeff couldn’t have mined them all.

Chad’s mission was to take the ridge and the only way he could think to do that was to keep counter-flanking, deeper and deeper to the east. Eventually, Evan would feel over-extended and pull his men back to the main battleground. Then Chad could get on top and gain the high ground. After that, he had no idea what he’d do. It wasn’t as though he really wanted to win against the Homestead.

Except, Chad always wanted to win.

I-15 Freeway

Point of the Mountain, Utah

The enemy darted toward Jeff up the freeway. Their inexperience made them cautious. Over the last fifteen minutes, the fundamentalist army had advanced two hundred meters. They were still four hundred meters shy of the trap. Jeff overheard a couple negligent discharges on both sides, but the real shooting hadn’t begun.

His adjutant had finally located Frank, the electrician, and had brought back word that all the IEDs and claymores had been wired, but not continuity tested. In Jeff’s experience with electrical systems, that put them in the fifty-fifty category.

Jeff heard a helicopter. He shielded his eyes from the sun breaking over the Wasatch and searched for it. A helicopter over the battlefield would be a massive threat—the ultimate high ground. Jeff had to make sure it was JT and not some ugly surprise.

The helo was an AStar with white body and blue trim. The same as JT’s bird.

A few of the enemy took pot shots at the distant helo, but given that it was almost two thousand feet overhead, they weren’t likely to connect.

The appearance of the helicopter stalled the enemy yet again—now at the three hundred and fifty meter mark. Jeff sighed and closed his eyes, bleeding off stress. A man could only hold this level of readiness for so long and Jeff worried about his men. Eventually, they’d drop their guard, get loose and make a mistake. With a battle strategy this high-tension, they couldn’t afford mistakes.

Jeff found the right frequency and radioed his helicopter. “JT, come in.”

“JT. Go ahead, yo.”

“Can you land that thing over by the prison? You’re freaking them out.”

“Roger. I didn’t want to get shot today, anyway.” JT clicked off. The thumping of the rotors drifted off to the north. The helicopter dropped behind the burned-out prison yard.

A few minutes later the enemy moved again.

“Zach. Radio everyone.” Jeff spoke to his radioman. “All stations: don gas masks.”

The fundamentalists finally moved in behind the minivan Jeff had marked with a pink ribbon. He guessed that at least five hundred men were inside his kill zone. They stood, crouched and lay around the dead vehicles Jeff had pre-positioned. As the interval between cars expanded, the enemy bunched up, reluctant to dash across the big gap and engage Jeff’s men behind their cover of concrete Jersey barriers.

With Evan’s men on the escarpment and the Traverse Mountains, Jeff denied the fundamentalists a clear overview of the freeway. From behind, the subtle increase in the interval between cars on the freeway hadn’t been visible. In any case, one never really knew a battlefield until they walked the battlefield. As the first fundamentalists stacked up behind the last available cover, it was too late for them to describe the problem to command.

Sporadic gunfire rattled around the freeway, almost entirely coming from the fundamentalists. Jeff’s men had been ordered to hold their fire and allow the fundamentalists to move into the trap.

Enemy men choked the freeway, and they spread out onto the shoulders and the frontage road, but the rising escarpment on the east and the sharp drop toward the river on the west contained them.

As the tempo of enemy fire picked up pace, Jeff could see no more advantage in waiting. Either his trap would work, or it wouldn’t.

“Fire mortars,” Jeff ordered. “Then set off the claymores.”

A moment later the mortars sounded.

Whompf, whompf, whompf, whompf, whompf, whompf, whompf…

Zach lifted the cover off a console and pressed thirty model rocket switches, one at a time. The battlefield exploded.

Claymores in the dead cars detonated just as the first of the mortars dropped from the sky.

Instead of ball bearings, churning clouds of yellow smoke erupted from the vehicles and they rolled through the tightly-packed fundamentalist soldiers. Acrid fumes seared their sinuses, from their eyes to the bottom of their lungs. They screeched in terror, and clawed at their faces.

The falling paint cans dropped from the sky and delivered the same payload—searing, toxic dust. It blanketed the battlefield in a yellow, burning fog.

The advance elements of the fundamentalists collapsed in their tracks. Men hacked and coughed—weeping, snot pouring from their nostrils and mouths. They dropped their guns and ran pell-mell. They ran into each other and into the dead cars. A few ran straight toward the Jersey barriers.

“All unit commanders: fire