He constructed a fourth patrol, with four jeeps and twelve soldiers, and sent them into Montana due west of the men on Camp Crook Road. He and his brother stayed with the men on the most direct southern road, Highway 85. The clock on the dashboard of his armored truck read 8:05. It was pitch black out. His “lions” had to be on the move.
TWENTY-ONE: “And We Were”
We left the caves, lights off, under the cover of darkness. Blake and Nathan, in the lead truck, guided us through the back roads of the national park, along the river, and onto a gravel road running adjacent to the interstate. We reconvened in Montana at the edge of Lamesteer National Wildlife Refuge. So far, so good.
We continued down Highway 7, implementing several detours for safety purposes, to the small town of Ekalaka. Nathan had worked at a camp near here for a couple summers, and he believed we could find food and medical supplies there to replace some of what we’d lost at the bunker. Sure enough, a vacant Camp Needmore provided us with a generator-powered freezer and a well-stocked pantry in the main kitchen. We packed two coolers full of ice and meat and grabbed all the canned goods we could. We also found plenty of other supplies, including four relatively new mountain bikes. As we left, we unplugged the near empty gas-powered generator and took it with us too.
We were well behind where we had hoped to be, but still alive, and hadn’t yet run into signs of any troops. We were about one hundred miles from Belle Fourche, South Dakota, now and therefore within 150 miles of Rapid City. Danny’s goal was to get Tara, Emily, Blake, and Nathan close to the backside of Mount Rushmore, close to Tara’s farm, and then move the rest of us deeper into the Black Hills before daylight. At this point, that was going to be a stretch. We knew we were sacrificing the ideal isolation of our current path to head down a more harrowing passage, into a once heavily populated area. As risky moves go, this was a 10.
Exiting the camp, Danny and I traded places with Blake and Nathan as the lead truck. We were about four miles south of the camp when Wes’s THIRST monitor flashed bright red and beeped loudly. Danny flashed the hazards twice and braked to a sudden halt. The three trucks behind us did the same. He shut off our truck and signaled the others to follow suit. We watched the screen, but nothing appeared. We still weren’t sure of the radar’s scope, but we figured it was somewhere between ten and twenty. The system had proven itself incredibly sensitive and accurate. We’d been able to pick up deer, skunks, rabbits, and low-flying birds as tiny red dots on the screen, but none of those had made the screen flash. This flash had been a big one, and the first time the screen had ever made a sound.
This was something new, and it probably wasn’t good. What made matters worse is the red flash hadn’t been a dot on the screen, but rather more an indicator of nearby radar. Ours had overlapped with someone’s, but we had no idea where the source physically was. Chances were, whatever had pinged us had received the same ping back, and they were watching their screen as intently as we were. But could they see us?
TWENTY-TWO: “What the Truck?”
A little more than ten miles south, where Tie Creek Road met Highway 323, twelve of Captain Eddie’s men had seen a similar red flash on their screen but then nothing else. They ignored it, figuring it was their radar bouncing off the troops to the east, since there were no red dots beyond several dozen likely animals on their screen. Nothing large. Nothing moving fast. Deer were thick out here, and all had about the same size heat signal. This area was so remote there evidently hadn’t been any chemical bombs nearby to kill them. The troops had come across hundreds of deer today alone.
Several of the men had left the jeeps and built a small fire to make some coffee and eat a few rabbits they’d killed earlier. A couple of the others were napping, and the remaining two huddled around the radar and radio, watching for anything suspicious. At one point a solitary red dot got their heart rates up, rapidly approached their position. One of the men raised his rifle, while the other turned a spotlight in its direction. Captured by the light, a curious deer froze in its tracks, and stared the spotlight down. Then it shuffled back off into the night.
Back up the road, we continued to stare at our THIRST monitor. We still hadn’t seen any more flashes, nothing moving our way. We were either just outside the range of someone’s radar, or they’d shut it off to not give away their position. If they’d been approaching, we’d have seen the red dot or dots coming. But since we hadn’t seen any new dots on the screen, we still didn’t know which direction the radar ping had come from. Sitting out on a wide-open road was not the way to find out.
A hundred yards back we had passed a dirt road on the right. We reversed the vehicles back to that road and backed them into a cornfield, fortunately still full of tall stalks. It was possible while we’d been stocking up at the camp someone had caught up to us from behind, but nothing had shown up behind us on the radar, and if someone had been coming down that road they probably would have kept coming. In all likelihood, the ping was from up ahead. We just had no idea how far ahead.
Danny and Cameron unpacked and dressed again in their “ghost suits.” They grabbed their silencer-equipped Remington R11 sniper rifles, their high-powered Nightforce scopes and goggles, their Springfield handguns, and several clips of ammunition. They unloaded two of the mountain bikes and told the rest of us not to move for exactly one hundred minutes, until 3 a.m. on the dot. Then we were to drive straight down the highway for twenty miles at 60 mph. Somewhere between now and there, we’d hopefully meet up with them and move on together. Hopefully. “Good luck boys,” I said. And they were off.
They had been gone twenty minutes when a large red dot appeared to the north on the radar screen in our truck. It was coming fast, and we had no way to warn Danny and Cameron. I shut off the radar system in case the approaching vehicle had one that might detect ours, but in doing so we lost our ability to follow both the looming threat and the boys.
Sam, Blake, Wes and I each grabbed our night-vision goggles and a Remington 700, and crawled to the edge of the field, peeking out of the corn towards the road as the large red dot—which turned out to be a red pickup truck—blew by us. We’d covered the trucks with Mylar tarps designed to block heat from infrared technology, but we didn’t have enough Mylar blankets or time to cover ourselves, so if the red truck had been equipped with any heat-seeking technology, we’d have been easy to spot. The truck’s occupants didn’t seem interested in us though, as they continued to cruise south. We had to decide, right then and there, whether we needed to follow and help out Danny and Cameron. Wes made the executive decision not to. “They’re the experts,” he said. “We have to stay out of their way.”
Five miles south, Cameron picked up a steady hum and whistled sharply at Danny. They pulled their bikes off the road and down into a drainage ditch under the road a minute before the truck raced by. What the hell? They both scrambled up the sandy ditch wall. Cameron trained his scope up the road behind them while Danny followed the truck south through his. “Cameron,” he whispered. “Let’s go.” They hopped on the bikes and pedaled after the truck. They hadn’t gone much more than a mile when they heard the unmistakable sound of squealing tires and gunfire in the distance. There were several quick shots, ten or so, and then total silence. On a night like tonight those sounds could carry a long way, but the truck had only passed them three, maybe four, minutes ago. Somebody was a few miles ahead of them, and whoever it was had intercepted that truck.