War buds under attack a.., p.1
War Buds: Under Attack (A Post-Apocalyptic EMP Thriller), page 1
WAR BUDS
Under Attack
Jack Hunt
Contents
Synopsis
Also by Jack Hunt
Prologue – High Value Target
One – No Respect
Two - Funeral
Three – The Gift
Four - Rules of The Road
Five – Darkness Falls
Six – Blackout
Seven – Family First
Eight – Neighborhood Watch
Nine – Enemies and Allies
Ten - Desperation
Eleven – Hideaway
Twelve – Von’s
Thirteen – Fortify
Fourteen – Boot Camp
Fifteen – Emergency
Sixteen – Atomic Jim’s
Seventeen – Under Attack
Eighteen – Fallout
Nineteen – Neighborhood Watch
Twenty – Morning After
Twenty One – Death’s Door
Twenty Two – Catch a Mouse
Twenty Three – Malcolm
Twenty Four – Rising Storm
Twenty Five – Black Rain
A Plea
Newsletter
About the Author
Copyright © 2017 by Jack Hunt
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
WAR BUDS: Under Attack is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
For my Family
Synopsis
A terrifying blackout. A nation under attack. The beginning of survival.
In 1987, five friends had high hopes of joining the military. It never happened. Thirty years later, after their grizzled army coach dies, they reunite for a weekend excursion to fulfill his last wishes. But when the nation comes under attack and the country is thrown into darkness and chaos, they must band together and fight to survive.
You don’t meet people by accident. There’s always a reason. A lesson or a blessing.
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Also by Jack Hunt
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The Agora Virus series
Phobia
Anxiety
Strain
Camp Zero series
State of Panic
State of Shock
State of Decay
Renegades series
The Renegades
The Renegades Book 2: Aftermath
The Renegades Book 3: Fortress
The Renegades Book 4: Colony
The Renegades Book 5: United
Armada series
Defiant
Mavericks series
Mavericks: Hunters Moon
Time Agents series
Killing Time
Prologue – High Value Target
1987, Eastern Sierra Mountains, California
Thirty Years Ago
Long before the country came under attack, our war began with him. Mack Sheldon was a beast of a man. Aptly nicknamed “The Machine,” his six-foot muscular frame towered over us like one of the huge pines that surrounded the small town of Mammoth Lakes. A former Green Beret with more medals to his name than anyone could hope to achieve in a lifetime of service, he embodied everything we wanted to be — courageous, selfless and dangerous. A larger-than-life individual whose crazy feats in the army preceded him, he was the epitome of the all-American hero. The last of a dying breed, and if I failed to mention him, our account of what took place would be sorely incomplete.
Among his many attributes, Mack had eyes like an eagle. There was very little that you could get past him, and yet that evening in the Eastern Sierra Mountains, that was exactly what we were attempting to do.
He would be our high-value target.
Our job was to locate, secure and extract him.
A seemingly easy task for anyone trained in military tactics, however, that certainly wasn’t our group. At fifteen years of age, we were still wet behind the ears, sporting braces on our teeth and having wet dreams about high school cheerleaders.
Still it didn’t prevent us from thinking we could achieve the impossible. In our minds, we were unstoppable at that age. The world was our oyster, we could do anything and no amount of persuasion would tell us any different.
That night it was to be our first mission, the first of many we would experience over the course of three years — years we hoped would mold and shape our future, a future in the United States military.
And though at the time enlistment was nothing more than a dream, if anyone could get us ready it was Mack Sheldon. After many years of service, he had settled into his new life as a mechanic, though rumor had it he was still contracted out by the military and would deploy overseas to protect high-profile individuals. He’d be gone for months at a time and return with insane stories that would make the eyes of folks down at the local bar widen in horror. Others said he was just full of it, and that he was really visiting his sister in Texas.
When he wasn’t reeling off some whopper of a tale, he offered to help anyone who wanted to join the military. More specifically, to assist them in passing the rigorous training regime required to become one of the nation’s elite. Really, I think he just enjoyed chewing kids out and running them ragged so they would stay out of trouble.
Now at the age of fifteen, my friend and I finally summoned the courage to approach him and ask if he would train us to become Green Berets. I know. Crazy. Truthfully, we really didn’t care about being a special operative, we just wanted to get a head start and increase our chances of getting into the military. Hell, at that time we didn’t have a clue about what was involved, everything we learned came from watching films. In fact the whole thing had just been a dare. A mad idea concocted from the mind of Chase, my best friend. After watching the movie Platoon, he just couldn’t shake the image of Charlie Sheen with a M16A1 in his hand. Perhaps like many others who joined the military, he figured life inside was going to be a non-stop thrill ride of blowing shit up and acting all badass. Mack soon dispelled that nonsense.
In all honesty, now as I look back, I’m not sure any of us really knew what we were getting ourselves into, or the impact Mack would have on us thirty years later. My mother would say that everything was in hindsight, that our steps were guided by something bigger than ourselves. I’m not too sure about that. It sounded like bull crap that was spoon-fed to us at church on a Sunday morning. Not that I’m against those of faith, but I’ve seen a lot of shit in my time that caused me to doubt that we were anything but alone in this world.
However, there is one thing I’m certain about, those years with Mack were some of the best years of my life. A moment in time that would forever remain seared in my mind.
Smeared in camouflage paint, our eight-man recon team lay prone in the dirt with our face masks up. In the darkness, all that might have been seen was a series of blinking eyes peering out from beyond a cluster of trees. We were kitted out in secondhand army fatigues that we’d picked up from some military surplus store in town. Of course the damn things didn’t fit, so I had my mother unearth her ancient sewing machine to work its magic.
What a disaster that was.
Mine must have got mixed up with Kai’s who was a short ass. My pants were riding up the crack of my ass and every few minutes I had to yank them down to avoid one hell of a wedgie.
There were sixteen of us out that evening in the mountainous region that surrounded our town. An opposing squad of eight was meant to protect the HVT, while ours was supposed to slip in, fuck ’em up, plant demolition charges and then breeze out of there with the prisoner like true medal-of-honor warriors.
Yeah… we hadn’t got that far because one thing after another had gone wrong.
“This damn thing is jammed. What a piece of crap,” Todd said slamming the palm of his hand against the side of his weapon. Obviously because of our age, Mack couldn’t give us real loaded weapons or even ones that fired blanks, so instead he had worked out an arrangement with a buddy to supply him with a whole arsenal of paintball guns. Now back in ’87 they weren’t as slick as the ones sold today, and there certainly wasn’t much to choose from. It was slim pickings; most of the products on the market were modified Sheridans and Nelspots. Still, they did the job and I thought they were pretty damn cool. Todd didn’t but then he was a hard guy to please.
“Keep your voice down,” I said in a hushed voice.
Mack had hooked us up with several Tippmann SMG-60’s. It was pitched as the world’s first select-fire paint pellet gun that could fire, semi or fully automatic, 600 rounds per minute. Not that it could hold that many. It was magazine-fed and relied on preloading from the side with bright orange stripper clips that held five .62-caliber paintballs. It would hold a maximum of 60 balls, had a range of 100 feet and could handle up to 450 shots per cylinder. Yep, that sucker was one hell of a weapon in its time. There was only one problem, well two, to be exact. These beauties usually cost thre e hundred bucks a pop, and there was no way in hell Mack was going to shell out that kind of green for a bunch of pissants that could barely put their pants on the right way around. However, fortunately for him and unfortunately for us, he’d managed to get some for less than thirty bucks because that winning batch he nabbed had a couple of issues, one being the damn things tended to jam and the other was that some of the CO2 cylinders on the back were leaking due to damaged O-rings.
Todd got up off the ground and started banging the unit on the side of a tree.
“Get down, you idiot, you’ll give away our location,” I barked.
Marlin grabbed a hold of his jacket and yanked him back.
“Ah who cares, it’s not like we stand a chance of getting through their defenses with these pieces of crap.” He tossed it and pulled his bag off his back. He fished around inside for a second and that’s when I caught sight of a Glock 18.
My eyes widened, I reached over and grabbed him by the collar. “Where the hell did you get that from?”
“My old man’s gun cabinet.”
“Is it loaded?”
“Of course it is.”
“Put that thing away before you kill someone, you moron,” Chase Garcia barked.
“But we can use it to our advantage. They aren’t going to expect someone to fire a real round at them. One shot of this and they’ll get the fuck out of dodge.” He pointed the barrel at our heads. I reacted by slamming it to one side only to have it go off. We froze. For a few seconds there was silence as we remained still, hoping that none of us had been shot. After no cries or groans could be heard, Chase lunged forward and started laying into him.
“You dumbass.” He dived on top of Todd and start wailing on him. It took three of us to haul him off. Chase wasn’t a small guy and even back then he looked as if he was eating for two when he sat down in cafeterias.
“Get off me, you idiot,” Todd said while trying to protect his face from Chase’s meaty paws. Chase cracked him on the chin and cut his lip open.
At the best of times the two of them had issues with one another but it didn’t help that a gun had killed Chase’s old man a few years earlier in an argument outside a bar. He hadn’t been the same since. Finally Chase managed to wrestle the gun from him, then he pulled the magazine out and tossed it as far as he could.
“Oh for fuck’s sake, Chase, now how am I going to find that? My old man is going to go apeshit on me.”
“Good,” he said dropping the rest of the gun on him, then running a hand over his buzzed blond hair. “I hope he gives you twenty licks of his belt.” Marlin and Kai roared with laughter as we watched him walk off to find it. Todd switched on a small flashlight and began sweeping the forest floor while grumbling to himself. Todd Fontane was a complete jackass. A stringy-looking fellow, with less meat on him than a chicken, he dressed in a raggedy old green jacket, like the kind worn by Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver. His dark hair was even buzzed at the sides like he was trying to imitate him or his father, we couldn’t figure out which one. His old man, Chuck Fontane, was an even bigger lunatic. He was in the habit of getting drunk and giving Todd’s mother a shiner. The one time Todd tried to intervene he paid for it dearly. He took a belt to his behind and made sure the buckle struck him multiple times. The kid couldn’t sit down for days. He never showed up at school all that week and though we kind of figured what had happened, we never brought it up.
“You guys done jerking each other off?” A barrel-chested kid by the name of Kurt Donahue piped up. Of course, among a group of army wannabes there would always be one dickhead who took everything super serious. It was like they had something to prove. Donahue was “the guy” who would be last to get laid because he was too busy spit polishing his boots and spending every waking hour sniffing the asses of the powers that be. Of course he wouldn’t see it that way. He was the kind of freak that would come up with lines like… “if you don’t think tactical, you’ll get yourself killed” or “I would never do that because I know every fucking rule under the sun and my daddy was a four-star general.” As if we gave a shit. Back then it was just fun, we didn’t anticipate to find ourselves smack bang in the shit storm of the century, many moons later.
Marlin gave Kurt the bird, and we all moved out under the cover of darkness. Our first objective was to carry two inflatable boats down to the river and launch in an area across from Banbush Road. From there we would paddle the boats up the river to a bunch of log cabins near Mammoth Mountain. Upon getting close to the location, two swimmer scouts would enter the river and swim near to the primary insertion point and make sure it was all clear. If it was, they would give a red lens signal to the boats, we’d pick up the swimmers and then tie off the boats and haul ass to the secondary insertion point. Now it all made sense when Mack was reeling it off earlier that afternoon, but telling and doing were two different things and our group was full of all types of retards who could fuck it up.
“You sure you know where the hell we are?” Kurt muttered to our buddy Kai. Of course the biggest asshole in our group had been given the position of patrol leader while I’d been made assistant leader. Chase was meant to be a point man while Marlin was the radio guy and good old Todd had volunteered to be the demolition guy along with several others.
We stopped for a second while Kai peered through his Coke bottle glasses at a map. He was down on his knees shining a light over it when Kurt came up and gave him a kick in the ass. “Did you hear me, chink?”
“Yeah, I hear real good and you still as dumb as fuck,” Kai said pulling at his own eyes and mocking his own Chinese heritage.
“You cheeky asshole.” Kurt went to kick him again but Kai spun around and took out his other leg. Kurt landed on his ass and the rest of us cracked up laughing. Kurt got up scowling, brushed himself off and trudged away threatening to make him pay later. It didn’t faze Kai one bit.
Kai Tukami was a small guy but shit on me if he couldn’t take down someone twice his size. His family ran a martial arts school in town. It was the only one that offered lessons from a real Chinese Kung Fu master. From the moment he could stand, his father had him doing spinning round houses, and within a matter of eight years Kai had so many gold medals plastered around his bedroom it would put others three times his age to shame. Whether his father’s discipline was a good thing was still to be determined, but we couldn’t help think he went a little overboard at times.
Anyway, not only was Kai an expert at the way of the fist but he was the only guy who could find humor in some of the lame ass racial remarks made to him by ignorant losers in the town.
Of course his life wasn’t too bad. I don’t think there was a year that went by that we hadn’t seen him with one girl or another hanging off his arms. He was a complete chick magnet and definitely the one who raised the bar of what we thought was possible.
“We’re on track. It’s north of here.”
“Right on, let’s go.”
As we got closer to the river, the babble of rushing water filled the air. Sweat trickled down my back as we lugged one of the boats down to the water and everyone hopped in and started paddling. Minutes later, only the sound of tree frogs could be heard as we eased our way upstream through pristine waters. Mosquitoes buzzed around our heads and Todd kept slapping his neck and cursing.
Marlin was one of two swimmer scouts that launched over the side and swam ahead to make sure the coast was clear. He was always the strongest swimmer. Seconds turned into minutes and then a red glowing eye flicked on and off in the distance. We paddled in the rest of the way and picked them up and eased down the banks until we reached the insertion point and tied the boats off.
From there it was another two-mile jog through a mosquito-infested forest until the log cabins came into sight. At this point our team of eight was meant to split up. Two guys were to plant the demolition charges while the rest of us moved on to the cabins. Of course it wasn’t actual C-4, just simple road flares.
Donahue peered into the darkness.
Mack wasn’t loaded with cash so there was only one person on each team that had night vision optics. The rest of us would just have to wing it. Of course Donahue had the optics and was leading the way.
