“We already agreed on a strategy to handle him.”
“I didn’t want to tell you this earlier, because I didn’t want to start a panic, and I didn’t want to leave you alone here with the kids. The attack this morning is connected to Milton Mills. I killed Eli Russell’s brother on that bridge.”
“This Russell guy is in charge of the Maine Liberty Militia?”
He nodded. “I killed his brother, and apparently, you killed his nephew in Waterboro. He’s never going to stop, and worse yet, he’s somehow convinced his whole gang of shitheads that we’re some kind of Homeland Security-sponsored, covert operations team. Part of the government’s false-flag operation. He’s using this story to recruit people for his militia.”
Alex’s revelation changed everything. No wonder he had been reluctant to let the kids out of the basement. It had nothing to do with the blood on the walls or the stifling heat. He didn’t think they were safe here.
“So, what do we do? Pack up as much as we can and go back to Durham Road until the military deals with Russell?”
“If we leave the area, I don’t think this place will be here when we get back. We have one option as I see it. We could move everyone to Sanford Airport—temporarily. I’m supposed to secure hangar space for the rest of the battalion tomorrow, and Grady said we could grab extra space.”
Kate stared at him in complete disbelief. Now he was driving around the state for Grady?
“What are you doing in Sanford?”
“Maine is about to be designated as a Regional Recovery Zone and—”
“Yeah, I get all of that. I thought you were putting together reports for Grady. Now you’re making trips to Sanford? When were you planning on telling me?”
“This is the first chance we’ve had to sit down and talk since this morning. I think we can make this work,” he said.
“I can’t see how. The idea of living in a hangar doesn’t sound appealing. Better than dead, but there has to be another solution.”
“Just until Russell is put out of business. The airport will have tight security, and we’ll have a battalion of marines around us. I can billet a squad here to keep an eye on the place, so it’s here when we come back. Part of a forward operating base or something like that.”
“Why don’t you just make this a forward operating base now, and we stay?”
Alex smiled. “I might be able to sell that to Grady. Russell won’t move his militia’s base of operations south. It’s too risky. He’ll head north, but not too far away. Keeping a full squad or platoon of marines here as a quick-reaction force makes sense. If Grady doesn’t agree, we’re back to square one.”
“Then we reinforce the defenses we already have with Staff Sergeant Evans and his men,” said Kate.
“Our fallback plan can’t include the marines. Grady could yank them out of here tomorrow depending on his needs.”
“I don’t think he’d do that to you.”
“He’s running a marine infantry battalion, not a babysitting service. Judging by the scope of operations planned for southern Maine, Grady’s going to need every marine in the inventory to do his job. We can’t count on any organic support at the house. If he doesn’t buy the forward base idea and pulls the marines out of here, the best we can hope for is a thirty-minute response time for reinforcement—if available.”
“That’s too long,” she said.
“I agree. We need to make a decision on this within the next day or so. Space to house civilians at the airport will vanish quickly once the recovery zone is officially designated.”
“Can we defend this place without the marines?” Kate asked.
She didn’t think so, not with three out of their seven riflemen limited to static positions by their injuries and one out of commission. Charlie, Linda and Ryan could take up their same positions on the second floor, but they’d require assistance to switch windows. Ed’s injuries put him in a different category. They could lay him in the basement to watch over the kids, but that might be the extent of his usefulness in a battle. Putting a rifle in Samantha’s hands didn’t help their overall defensive posture. Asking her for more than a few shotgun blasts in the general direction of the enemy was pushing it.
“With a working thirty-caliber machine gun and seven hundred fifty rounds? It depends on what they throw at us. Same as this morning, I’d say no problem, even with half of our crew injured. If they add a few more .308 rifles to the mix and stick to the trees?” he said, shaking his head. “I’m not so optimistic.”
“The machine gun works?”
“As far as I can tell. Evans plans to test fire it a little later. We also need to fix the gates, or at least harden them to SUV-sized vehicles. If they drive up on us too fast, in large enough numbers, who knows?”
“We’d have some warning, at least,” she said.
“Not until we unscrew the sensor situation. The two damaged transceivers correspond to the eastern approach, which means we have a huge gap in our coverage along Gelder Pond Lane and the gate. We should probably do that before dark.”
“If we have the marines here tonight, we can worry about that tomorrow,” Kate said.
Alex looked relieved by her suggestion, but still hesitant to agree. He nodded slowly and forced a smile, which beat the distant and defeated look he had brought to the table several minutes ago.
“At some point, we’ll have to lay this out for the whole group. Let them weigh into the decision. If I were Charlie and Samantha, I’d be thinking real hard about relocating to their house up near Waterville. If they left, the Walkers wouldn’t be too far behind them,” said Alex.
“Then we better have that meeting sooner than later. If the rest of the group decides to leave, we can’t stay, and I don’t want to miss out on Grady’s airport offer. Not with that psychopath running around.”
“I’ll talk to Grady tomorrow and see what he thinks about establishing a forward base in Limerick. If he goes for it, we don’t have to impose a rushed decision on anyone.”
Kate leaned back in her seat, glancing inside the house. “I’d still like to know where everyone stands.”
Chapter 48
EVENT +86:18
Porter, Maine
Eli Russell sat in a wobbly rocking chair on the wide front porch, admiring the vast vegetable garden past the dirt driveway. He didn’t know the first thing about growing vegetables, but he could worry about that next year. Right now, all he had to do was figure out how to harvest everything and store it for the winter. Too bad the farmer hadn’t been friendlier. Maybe they could have worked something out, where he let them live in exchange for running the farm. No big deal. He’d find another farmer or two to take the deal, no matter how far and wide he had to travel. There was no way he could let this bounty go to waste. They’d need every scrap of it to survive the winter, unless they could put a stop to the Homeland invasion within the next few months.
He still wasn’t sure what to make of the Gelder Pond situation. The tactical vehicles arrived after he ordered a general retreat, so technically, the hostile team inside the house stopped the attack without help. He saw at least two sandbag emplacements on the first floor and had to assume they had created reinforced firing positions at the windows. The gray siding around each window had been riddled with .223-caliber bullet holes. Anyone shooting from one of those windows should have been killed immediately. Instead, he lost twenty-nine men, not including the men lost two days earlier in Milton Mills.