To keep it from happening again, Eddie had four of his men stay behind with a jeep for investigative purposes. When daylight came, he wanted them to scout the camp where his twelve men had been killed and radio in what they found before catching back up to them. He was curious how many people it had taken to wipe out his men and whether they’d be able to determine how it was executed. At least now he knew where the Americans were, and the trail was smoking hot. He was more convinced than ever he’d catch them any day now, if not tonight.
From now on he would make a point to send a scout jeep ahead to check every bridge for explosives. He couldn’t afford to underestimate these Americans anymore. These lions knew how to use guns and explosives, and he’d never had to hunt that kind of cat before.
TWENTY-FIVE: (Ryan) “Nine Lives”
Nine. The number of lives a cat is credited with. Eight. The number of people we’d left Minnesota with, who were still alive. Seven. Supposedly a lucky number…
At some point our good luck was bound to expire. The problem was, if we were running out of it, we weren’t even halfway to Hawaii.
I could tell by the way Danny kept glancing in the rearview mirror he thought the captain and his men might be close. At best, we were going forty-five miles per hour. With lights they could easily go sixty-five to seventy on these roads. In an hour they could gain at least twenty miles on us. I was reminded at this point of a YouTube video where a guy asks his girlfriend how far she can go in an hour if she’s going sixty miles per hour and, for the life of her, she cannot figure it out. I smiled for a second and thought about sharing my thoughts with the others before snapping back to reality. Think of where you are, idiot! Hopefully no one had been watching me. Thank God it was dark. I glanced at Danny. He glared at me. Crap. This wasn’t funny. When you’re expecting at any second to see the headlights of a dozen vehicles packed with men out to kill you, it sobers you up pretty quick.
I was driving the front truck now with Danny in the passenger seat, his eyes seldom leaving the radar screen. Tara, Hayley, and Emily were in the back. Dad was driving the next truck with Wes, Mom, and Isaac. Behind them was Sam, driving the truck with Kate and Jenna. The last truck had Blake and Nathan in the front seat and Cameron in the back with the box of grenades and our only two “big” (.50 caliber) guns. We had passed the South Dakota border sign a few miles back and were rapidly approaching the Belle Fourche city limits. A few days ago, Belle Fourche had been a bustling city with a population around six thousand, the proud geographic center of the fifty United States. Today it was nothing more than another ghost town in the middle of a country in ruin.
I don’t know what possessed me to start up another conversation with Tara at that point. The last one went so well. Perhaps it was the realization we were close to where we were planning to drop them off and I might never see her again. Maybe it was to make myself feel better about keeping my distance, to prove to my daughter that I could be an adult. Ha! Or maybe I was a little nervous. Yeah, maybe… Whatever it was, I asked one question and, based on the glare I received from Hayley, it was the wrong one. “Tara, what does your husband do?”
Hayley mouthed, “What the heck?” at me in the mirror, and I knew the depth of my blunder. Dang it.
“Uh…” Tara said, flushing and looking away.
“Daddy’s a soldier,” Emily answered for her mom.
“Oh,” I said. Genius. I turned my full attention back to the road. Emily started to say something else, but Tara raised a finger to her lips and she stopped. Idiot. I chided myself. I noticed Danny give me another sideways glare too, which told me what he thought of my question. Tara was no doubt worried about her husband, hoping he’d be there when they arrived home, realizing he might not be. “Sorry,” I mumbled.
“It’s okay,” she whispered back. Flipping moron. I cursed myself again.
We looped south and west around Belle Fourche. We were a bit unnerved by an abundance of red dots in town and scattered radar movement on the screen. No doubt they were enemy troops. But realizing no one was changing course and coming towards us, we continued south and east, past the South Dakota city of Spearfish. We stopped briefly to fuel up, a half-mile before the Wild West modeled town of Deadwood. We’d gotten used to all the bodies by now and were expecting to see more in Deadwood, but there were none. It sounds weird, but I knew we were all of the same mind on this one: This wasn’t good.
We pulled off Main Street into a cemetery, the only area in town with tree cover. I wanted to ask if anyone else found irony in the fact there were likely fewer dead people in the cemetery than in the town, but given my recent run of brilliant questions, and the discovery a few seconds later of a large number of the bodies in a giant hole, I decided against it. My sense of humor had a strange habit of peaking at the most stressful of times. Coping mechanism no doubt. That wouldn’t have helped me, or anyone, here. A cleanup crew of some sort had already been here, but were they still here? We couldn’t afford to wait around and find out. It was getting light, and we had to find somewhere to hide within the next hour. Then the truck drove by.
TWENTY-SIX: (Eddie) “Hiding in Plain Sight”
About the time the Americans arrived in Deadwood, Captain Eddie and his men were pulling into Spearfish, only twenty minutes back. In Spearfish, they ran into two more companies of men, one from Pakistan and another from North Africa. Not wanting to give away any details of their deviated mission, he forbid any of his men to consume alcohol (lest it cloud their common sense and loosen their tongues) and ordered his soldiers to claim they’d been one of the smaller companies assigned to the northern South Dakota border—and they were just beginning to reverse course now.
No one seemed to care. None of the companies were expected to report back to central command for another four days, so it didn’t matter who was where. Many of them were drunk. Most were telling victory stories, accounts full of murder, rape and plunder. Eddie hadn’t allowed any of his men to assault the women they’d found or take any valuables. They were only here to kill. As far as he knew, the Americans hadn’t raped wives or taken possessions when they’d attacked Libya. They had just killed his people. Eddie was fine with exact revenge, nothing more. The Pakistani company had only lost three men so far; the other African company had lost five. Eddie and his men shared a similar humiliation over their staggering losses, so they kept theirs to themselves. They had killed many, so they spoke freely of those, but not a single word was spoken of the “lions.”
Captain Eddie and his brother joined several other officers in a bar where they were all talking strategy. Rapid City had been swept clean and burnt to the ground last night. Many troops that had come from Sioux Falls were still camped there. Eddie knew the Americans wouldn’t be in Rapid City. These two companies had come through Sturgis and Deadwood yesterday. Sturgis had been burnt down, and Deadwood would be destroyed this morning. Today they would be sweeping down through the Black Hills, where they would meet the southern companies of troops in Hot Springs and head back east with them. Eddie knew the area well from studying the Americans’ maps, and he stated they would join them in Deadwood, if that was all right. Then they would head back east, Eddie explained, although he had no intention of doing that. No one objected to his joining them in Deadwood.