Emily added multiple shotgun rounds to his attack, putting both men to the ground in less than ten seconds. They never even got a chance to fire in return, which made Ted extremely proud.
His ears rang louder than he ever remembered.
“We’ve got to clean this up!” he cried out.
They both hopped out of the truck. He immediately looked back to Lamar, which was about two miles away. A few vehicles moved on the road, with at least one heading for the roadblock. Unless they were Americans in disguise, like them, they had to assume bad guys were approaching. The last thing he wanted to do was get into an endless firefight with arriving vehicles.
“Grab what you can. We’re taking a Humvee.”
“Are you sure?” she asked, already reaching into the cargo bay to grab some gear.
“We’ll blend in better if we take the same vehicles they use. This truck has been a workhorse for us—” He tapped the door of the silver SUV. “—but she’s been on the Fort Collins news by now. They’ll recognize it from the roadblock on the other side of town. I can’t help but think the guy’s change of orders came in because of us.”
They scrambled to get what they could in about sixty seconds. Once they had all the guns, most of the ammo, and some of the food, he reached down and grabbed a radio from the dead man. The Humvee didn’t require a key, so he set its ignition switch to ‘run,’ waited for the ‘wait’ light to turn off, then cranked it over to ‘start.’
The rumble of the engine was annoyingly loud compared to the truck he was giving up.
Emily got in a few seconds later. “Wow, this thing is loud!”
“It is what it is,” he said, channeling his time in the military. “Here we go.” He turned the truck around and got away from the blockade and the dead men.
It didn’t take long before the radio chirped, but it wasn’t about them. Two men talked back and forth about picking wives, or some nonsense. He didn’t care, as long as they avoided mentioning runaway couples. As he looked back, Ted was certain the vehicle behind them must have reached the grisly scene.
Minutes down the road, Emily squirmed like she needed to hit the head.
“What’s on your mind, partner?” he asked over the road noise.
She got closer to him, which was a requirement in the wide cabin of the military truck. “I know you’re the expert at this stuff, but why are we going so slow?”
He gave a fatalistic chuckle. “When I ditched our ride, I didn’t really appreciate what I was getting us into. This thing was made to go up hills and through mud bogs. It wasn’t designed for the highway. I’ve got the pedal all the way to the floor.”
The brisk wind blew at them from directly ahead. The speedometer only went up to sixty miles-per-hour, and it hovered around that number.
“Oh, crap,” she said dryly.
They passed several cars and trucks heading back to Lamar, including a convoy of six or seven empty tractor-trailers. After each one passed, he leaned to check his mirror to confirm they weren’t turning around.
For many miles they drove on the knife’s edge of waiting to be pulled over, waiting to hear a call to arms in the radio, and the frustration of feeling like they were going slow enough to pick up a hitchhiker on the fly. Eventually, an hour into the drive, they saw a lone mountain rise on the western horizon. Its bare peak was a distinctive contrast to what he thought of as the snow-capped Rocky Mountains.
“We’re almost there, Em. Look. NORAD’s very close to Pike’s Peak. We can use the mountain as our guide.”
“Great,” she said with relief.
He still looked over his shoulder, positive someone had put the pieces together about what happened at the roadblock. Surely an enemy smart enough to invade America would have the capability to figure out it was the same perpetrators who’d been in Fort Collins and had killed the bikers on the dusty streets of Nowheresville.
Emily jumped in her seat. “Oh my God!”
“What is it?” he replied, holding the wheel steady as he checked for threats.
She looked at him like she’d seen the Grim Reaper. “Do you think this truck has one of those tracking devices on it?”
It came down on him like a piano falling from the sky. “How did I overlook that?”
Pike’s Peak suddenly seemed a lot farther away.
Pike’s Peak, CO
“This brings back memories,” Kyla shouted to Meechum as they huddled next to each other on a long 3-person bench bolted to the outside of the tiniest helicopter she’d ever seen. There was one soldier on the other side of Meechum, sitting with his rifle ready for action. Three other soldiers were on the opposite side of the craft. It was nothing like their prior ride in the sky, where she and Meechum had the entire interior compartment of a much larger helicopter all to themselves.
It was also far less comfortable. Even Meechum had to twist her body between Kyla’s direction and the rider near the front to keep from cramping up. During one such contortion, Meechum winced in pain.
Kyla became concerned. “Is it your wound?”
The woman composed herself. “I’m fine!”
“But—”
“I’m fine!” she repeated before changing the subject. “These MH-6s are pretty cool, but I don’t think I’d want to be on them all the time. I preferred the bigger Sikorsky Seahawk.”
The man overheard her shouting. “Trust me, we would, too. The colonel brought these two Little Birds so we’d have a low profile on enemy radar.”
Meechum turned and spoke to the guy, but when she reoriented on Kyla, it must have been obvious she didn’t hear what was said. “I told him thanks again for the lift. It sucks we were
