Page 38 of Following Their Heart

“Wait here.” He leaves the bags with me, just inside, and pulls the ATV between two bushes. Loose branches someone must have stacked there earlier become camouflage, and in a few minutes, the vehicle is completely invisible.

Then we’re putting on helmets with flashlights and beginning the winding journey to a hole in the ground. And there’s no telling when we might come out.

Jud

The sun is sinkingtoward the horizon way too fast for my liking. My thumb presses the talk button on my radio. “How’s it lookin’, summit? We got it online?”

There’s a second of static. Then I hear Scrap’s voice over the comm. “Got it!” I can hear his excitement and I picture him doing a fist-pump. “We’ve got second SAM online. MotherFucker!I’m the boss!”

“Knew you’d get it. Nice work.”

“Jesus-H-Christ,it took long enough.” This comes from Rev, who talks into his own radio.

“Hey,” Scrap says. “You can’t rush perfection.”

“Don’t I know it,” Rev says. He’s grinning from ear to ear. So am I.

Rev, Brawn, and I have been busting our asses all day to get the second missile truck set up. Now that Scrap’s got it online, we have two trucks in position, ready to fire four missiles at whoever dares to fly anywhere near our mountain. Having all six trucks positioned around the mountain would have been my preference, but the timetable didn’t allow for it.

Oh-fucking-well. You do what you can, and you make it work.

We’re nowhere near as prepared as we planned to be, but we’re not going to let that stop us from kicking ass. This Raptor fucker is coming for Cora, and he’s coming quick. Rev predicted we’d have more than a week to prepare, but it’s only been a few days. Which means Raptor must have left his base in New Orleans immediately after we caught the pelican.

“Must’ve changed his plans when he knew we had his spy,” Rev said earlier, while we widened the road to get the huge missile truck up here.

“If they left in a hurry, maybe that means they’re as underprepped as we are,” Brawn put in.

It turns out he was right about that. Updates from the pelican are keeping us in the know. According to Shep, after feeding and resting last night at a large body of water, Bernard banked east, and wouldn’t you know it, he spotted Raptor’s convoy almost immediately. The bird caught up to them as they rolled into Casper, Wyoming off I-25.

How did I know it was Casper he was circling? Easy. He communicated to Shep there was a dead, yellow lake nearby where he could smell the bones of many birds. There’s only one spot like that I can think of, and it’s the dry, mineral-caked bed of Soda Lake, which we drove through on our way up here. While searching the area, we learned a petroleum company made the lake as a reservoir for their refinery byproducts—basically to be their 600-acre toilet. Needless to say, the manmade lake screwed up the environment, and eventually, they rerouted the water to let it dry up and become a hazardous waste site. The research led us to the company’s refinery, where we were able to find a shitload of fuel just sitting there for us in tankers. So, yeah. Casper has turned out to be one useful place for us, and we’ve returned several times to scavenge that fuel and secure the refinery so no one can launch it into operation without us knowing about it.

Casper is about four hundred miles out, too far to launch an attack by chopper. But after a fueling stop, the convoy continued on to Billings, a scant hundred-fifty miles away. The trip from Casper was smooth sailing for the convoy, thanks to our work clearing the roads in our territory, which meant they pulled into Billings in the early afternoon. Ever since, they’ve been setting up base.

Bernard is being cautious and keeping to the highest air currents he can handle to remain out of human sight range—apparently, he’s afraid Raptor will spot him and take control again. From so high up, the info he can gather is limited, but I’ll take what I can get.

Bernard’s sharp eyes have picked up four vehicles, each with two men riding in the cabs. He’s spotted an additional three men who got out to help refuel in Casper. That makes eleven. Two of the transports are flatbeds with military-grade choppers onboard. The other two are tractor trailers with cargo containers that could be holding anything from ammo to a small army.

I’m betting that when Raptor changed his plans and launched this operation in a hurry, it meant downsizing. I’d be surprised if he brought his full army of thirty men, especially with just two choppers. But downsizing the air raid means they’re going to come in fast and hot.

They’ll be looking for Cora, and they’ll know we won’t give her up without a fight. If I were Raptor and I knew my enemy had a woman, I’d stop at nothing to get my hands on her. I’d mow down everything in my path to get to her. But at the same time, I wouldn’t risk hurting her. An operation like this requires precision and lots of recon. For Raptor, that means birds, since they’re his spy of choice.

He'll send in birds to try and spot Cora, and he’ll use heat-seeking tech to count living bodies. He’ll know from his earlier recon that there are seven of us men with big heat signatures and a single woman with a smaller signature. When he only spots six signatures—because Cora and Grim are safe underground and out of reach for their tech—he’ll throw everything he has at us in hopes we’ll surrender her. Or he’ll realize we’ve tucked Cora away, and he’ll try to mow us all down so he can set up base here and search for the hiding spot.

But we’re not about to let some asshole come onto our turf and take us out. We’ve got the homefield advantage, and we’ve got Bernard, plus Scrap’s radar to let us know the second Raptor’s choppers take to the air. We’re ready for this. We’re going to defend what’s ours.

I use my balled-up T-shirt to wipe sweat from the back of my neck. The shadows are growing and clouds are rolling in as I press the talk button on my radio. “South face to base. Come in base.”

“I am here.” Shep’s staticky voice comes back. “Go ahead.”

“Where are we at? Any more men spotted?” Raptor’s convoy took over a section of taxiway at the Billings-Logan airport and have been loading gear into their two choppers.

“No more. Still just eleven. If there are more men, they have not come out of the trucks. One of the choppers is powered up. They will launch soon.”

“Copy that, base. Are you all ready?”

“Ja.We are suited up. All weapons are hot.” Thanks to our scavenges on military bases, we have body armor and firepower galore. It’s going to be tough for Raptor to hurt us, even with the advantage of coming in from above.

“Copy. Is Doc in position?” Our resident Army sniper will be perched on the roof of the treehouse, ready to take out anyone dumb enough to stick his head out the open door of a chopper. He’s also got a shitload of RPG rockets and a pair of shiny new launchers. Between the SAMs and Doc’s RPGs, we’ve got a good chance of taking down those choppers.

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