Unable to reach anyone on their contact list—in any state—or find anything on the radio, Wes and his boys sat for hours and discussed their limited options. Before they could come up with any sort of plan they noticed movement on one of their many monitors. People!
Through the bunker’s high-tech surveillance system, they watched a group of people pull in across the lake and begin hiding their three trucks. They appeared to be hiding, but from what? He watched his screens for signs of pursuit, but saw nothing. Four men did the work covering the trucks, but there were clearly more people in the vehicles. The sun was up now, and they were scrambling to complete the camouflage effort, and doing a dang good job of it.
His initial instinct was to contact them. They had to know something. But the possibility loomed that they could be among the ones responsible for the devastation. They could be fleeing from U.S. troops. Going over there or bringing them here would give away the one advantage he had. Right now, he knew he had to sit, watch, and wait.
He and his sons remained in the bunker, watching the world beyond the walls of their lodge through their remote cameras. The people across the lake remained mostly invisible throughout the day. Several of his exterior cameras had sound capabilities, and they picked up planes flying overhead a couple times throughout the day. He caught a glimpse of one of them and froze the frame to get a closer look. It turned out it wasn’t a plane at all, but some kind of drone. He could make out the word “FOTROS” on the tail. The Internet was down, so he couldn’t look up where the drone was from, but he knew one thing for certain: it wasn’t American. So did that mean the people across the lake were?
TWELVE: (Ryan) “Off the Mark”
Mark was a jumpy guy. Beefy, hairy, bald, and pretty arrogant, he wasn’t afraid to promote his own toughness and self-importance. After thanking us for saving his life, while insisting he could have handled everything himself, he went on to tell us all he knew about the attacks. Or didn’t know. We listened but became less and less comfortable with his presence as the day went on. The guy was a total a-hole.
His friends called him “Wooly” because of his excessive girth and thick body hair, and he referred to himself in third person as such. He was vulgar, sexist, and racist. His stupid wild generalizations demonstrated his true intellect—or lack of it—making statements like “people from Afpakistan are as bad as all the other Africans.” Seriously? Infants have more geographical sense. His ignorant nature was making us nervous. I was certain we couldn’t trust him to look out for anyone other than himself.
He and the three guys he’d been with at Cabela’s had been working on a landscaping project north of Grand Forks, a little south of the Canadian border, during the attacks. A police officer from the border town of Emerson had told them what had happened and strongly suggested they stay out of the cities, but a few days later they desperately needed supplies and sufferance—as Mark put it, clearly meaning “sustenance.” They ignorantly disregarded the officer’s advice and went to see for themselves what was going on. “Wooly ain’t just gonna sit around, you know?” he told us. “Wooly gotta take care of me, doncha know?” They’d worked their way down to Grand Forks through the clutter of crashed cars, first to Walmart and then over to Cabela’s, to stock up. Wooly’s plan all along was to go get the guys who had done this, not run away from them, and his overblown confidence was frightening. “Wooly could’ve taken them on his own, you know? Don’t care how many of those damn A-rabs there were.” The policeman had told him about Hawaii being the only safe zone left for Americans. Wooly was certain that’s where we were headed and seemed intent on going with us. I could tell Danny was never going to let that happen. The jackass was bound to get someone killed, if not all of us.
We stayed hidden throughout the day, and although several planes flew directly overhead multiple times, they didn’t spot Mark flipping them off, and our location wasn’t discovered. Around five o’clock Mark excused himself to go to the bathroom and Danny told him to come right back, while we secretly wished he never did. We couldn’t trust him, but we couldn’t exactly treat him like a prisoner either. When Wooly hadn’t returned in ten minutes, Danny decided to look for him, but he was nowhere to be found. Danny came back for Cameron, and they tracked Mark through the woods towards the nearby town of Fort Totten. They eventually found him walking down the middle of the road talking on a cell phone. So the communication grid wasn’t shut down. But who was he talking to?
As Danny was about to yell for him, lights appeared in the distance. He pulled Cameron down into the ditch as multiple sets of headlights rapidly approached Mark. Cameron recognized the vehicle outlines and headlight height as being about right for military vehicles, and Mark seemed to be thinking the same thing. He started waving like mad and whooping, assuming they were American. By the time he realized they weren’t, it was too late.
He turned back towards the boys and started running. Cameron and Danny were already well ahead of him, cutting through the woods to the lake. They ran into the frigid water and submerged themselves, watching as Mark thundered through the trees behind them, pursued by a dozen armed men. He was shot once and then again, and he collapsed on the shore. One of the soldiers, a huge, muscular, ebony-toned man, walked up to Mark and flipped him over with his boot. The guy had to be six foot seven at least. Mark seemed to still be alive, but unable to talk. Seemingly dismayed over that fact, the giant man stared into the fog and darkness settling across the water. He then glanced down, pointed his pistol at Mark’s head, and finished him off. He looked across the lake once more and then turned back to his men. Danny and Cameron breathed a collective sigh of relief. Had Mark been able to talk, he would have given them up. A guy like that would have done anything to save his own life, no matter how many it cost in the process.
The large military man addressed the group of men around him in clear, strongly African-accented English. “This man could not have been alone. Others must be close by. Get the dogs. Tonight we hunt.” Danny and Cameron listened as he ordered four of the men to return to Devil’s Lake to get more men and the dogs and ordered the others to hide near the bridge until they returned. He then told the last few men to set up his tracking equipment. One of them handed him a black object, which turned out to be a cell phone. Mark’s. The giant man tapped the screen and held it up to his ear, making a call. A woman’s voice answered on speakerphone, and the big man promptly hung up. Danny and Cameron shared a look saying both “uh oh” and “we don’t have a lot of time.” They were lucky they hadn’t been seen, although it seemed Mark had not been tracked by body heat but by his cell phone. Apparently the big army man they called Captain Eddie assumed the woman on the other end of the phone was close by. Danny figured it would take fifteen to twenty minutes to set up the tracking system and a few more to begin searching the area. They needed to move fast. He and Cameron swam diagonally across a corner of the lake, ran across a narrow spit of land and then dove back into the chilly water. They passed under a bridge and joined the others back at the vehicles a minute later.
Danny and Cameron stepped quickly across the rocks up to the vehicles. I saw them coming and stepped out to meet them. “Is everyone still in the trucks?” Danny asked urgently.