Dan and the Bottle Ch. 09

The entire team worked with chilling efficiency; one group split into four teams, going back to retrieve the sniper rifles from outside the holes in the fence, while another went to the comm shack to set explosive charges inside and gather up any written materials they found.

Others went to the motor pool, to procure a dozen of the big trucks, moving all but one to the warehouse.

Another team loaded these up with rifles, rocket propelled grenade launchers, case upon case of ammunition, RPG loads, field rations, hand grenades, and other deadly toys, before charges were set to destroy the rest.

Yet another team set blocks of plastic explosive inside the tank turrets and inside the engine compartments, in the breeches of the howitzers, on the gas tanks of the remaining trucks, humvees, and helicopters, and the last few they had on the fuel storage tanks for the base. In just under an hour and a half, the trucks were rolling, and Jim waited until they were two hundred yards down the road before pressing the button.

The fireworks were, indeed, spectacular. The initial explosions destroyed much of the base, but the secondary blasts, from the ammunition and fuel, looked like the devil's own nightmare.

Jim and Tom Dorn watched them in the rearview mirrors of the humvee they were driving away from the base in, then looked at each other and grinned. It had been a productive night.

Once back at the Cave, the women they had freed were immediately taken to the hospital wing, the munitions and field rations were unloaded and transferred to their own storage facilities, and the intelligence they had gathered was turned over to the computer geeks for translation and interpretation.

They soon learned that there were four other bases around the state, and roughly two hundred, nationwide. It looked like they had their work cut out for them. They would have to do some major recruiting and training, and that quickly.

Jim looked over the reports, gleaned from the material taken from the communications shed at the former Chinese base, and from the offices of the base commander and his lieutenant, and felt his stomach sink. They were all over the country, and the base he and his people had just destroyed was actually one of the smaller ones.

On the bright side, there were also reports from all over the country that told of armed resistance groups, many of which the Chinese had trouble finding. This was something he could work with.

They had gotten away easy with this first assault; he knew that wouldn't last either. Sooner or later, there were going to be some folks coming home in body bags... and he dreaded that day.

Still, three days later, when a team of scouts came back from that base with dozens of digital images of the destruction, he was quick to post some of the more vivid photographs on various bulletin boards around the complex; it was good for morale, especially for the former villagers, and requests from them to join the training schedules doubled.

Jim, however, insisted that they continue with their schooling first. He wanted to be sure they could read the training manuals they'd put together, over the years; what's more, they would need at least another six months of decent meals and physical conditioning to be able to keep up with the training regimen.

Phil Huett, leader of one of the scouting teams, was chomping at the bit to go and check out the enemy base to the north of them, which was nearly two hundred miles away, but Jim overruled him for the time being.

The days were getting colder, and this time of year in Wyoming was no time to be taking on a two hundred mile trek to scout an enemy base. If they got caught in a snowstorm, they could easily freeze to death, even with the specialized cold weather camping gear that great grandpa Dan had stocked in one of the warehouses... or they could simply become snowbound, which would be bad enough.

Besides, he reasoned, waiting until late spring would give them plenty of time to train up the two dozen villagers who were even now preparing to undergo basic training. Having people who knew the outdoor terrain along would greatly increase their chances of success. And of course, he'd already heard of two other villages nearby, that had also been treated abominably by the Chinese.