It was real. The thing he’d yearned for, longed for, all these lonely years.
Liam didn’t know how long they sat there, wrapped in each other, enraptured. He’d never felt so warm. So cherished. So completely loved.
All along, this was where he’d belonged: in Hannah’s arms.
34
Liam
Day One Hundred and Eleven
The next morning, Liam’s assault teams headed to St. Joe.
From Luther’s intel, they knew the General had four units scattered at different locations in the field. The soldiers guarded fuel storage, ammunition dumps, and vehicle staging areas.
They would strike first—hitting soft targets rather than infantry.
Liam took point, his eyes up and out, scanning for threats. Bishop followed, with Reynoso covering their six as rear security. Hayes and Perez led the secondary teams in other parts of the city, while the bulk of their fighting force remained in Fall Creek.
They’ d come prepared. Liam wore his plate carrier body armor beneath his chest rig. Several fragmentation grenades and a few flashbangs nestled in the pouches at his belt.
He had his M4 and the .308 slung across his back for sniper work, along with the Glock and Gerber. Reynoso and Bishop carried the same. Their faces were painted with charcoal, gear taped to reduce noise.
Trash skittered across the road. Two raccoons perched on the lid of a dumpster. Stray dogs lurked in shattered doorways, staring at them with bold aggression.
Liam’s pulse thudded in his ears. Anxiety rippled through him, every sense on full alert. His heart rate kicked at every sound. Enemies lay in wait everywhere.
Other than the shanty tent cities crowding the beachfront, St. Joe was a ghost town. It felt like a corpse—a dead thing crawling with maggots and rats.
St. Joseph, or St. Joe as everyone local called it, had once been a thriving beachfront city with a population of ten thousand before the Collapse. Established in the 1820s, the buildings were historic, constructed of vintage brick and steel.
The businesses and shops had been raided months ago. Most people had migrated to the outskirts, where there were trees for firewood, yards for planting gardens, and farms with crops and livestock.
As they crept through the barren city, they moved from cover point to cover point. Reynoso held a handmade tape measure-and-PVC pipe antenna, searching for the enemy’s location.
The antennae looked like the skeleton of a kid’s homemade kite-building project for the Science Fair, but it worked. Every time they got to a covered point, he took a compass bearing.
From what they’d ascertained, the General’s troops weren’t bothering with EMCON—radio silence. Liam would use that against them.
Military radio traffic data was encrypted. Plus, it automatically switched frequencies at mind-numbing speeds. Luckily, they didn’t need the data itself; they just needed a compass bearing to follow.
Jamal and Dave had put their heads together to build homemade directional antennas made from a tape measure with steel tape, PVC pipe, stainless hose clamps, electrical tape, 50 Ohm coaxial cable, and a receiver with an S-meter to locate directional signals.
Dave already had some directional finder equipment. It was a hobby many ham radio aficionados enjoyed. As Dave proudly informed him, the popular sport was known as Amateur Radio Direction Finding, or ARDF.
Like ham radio, the gear was primitive, and most of it had survived the EMP.
They’d hunted the source of the transmission via triangulation. With the homemade antenna, Reynoso took multiple compass bearings at separate locations along the lines of the transmissions—where the lines crossed on the map pinpointed the location of the unit.
Perez’s team had a similar antenna. They’d tracked down the ammo dump several blocks away on Port Street, and were awaiting the signal.
Three blocks from their target, Liam bladed his body and crept around the corner of a boutique coffee shop, weapon up and scanning as Bishop came out behind him, searching to the left.
Twice, they glimpsed movement on rooftops—overwatch—and took great care to avoid detection. They kept to the shadows, alleys, and doorways.
Like invisible wraiths, they moved past boutique shops, tourist traps, and hotels. A vacation home rental office with a placard in the unshattered window advertised beachfront homes for five hundred bucks a night.
In dripping blue paint, someone had sprayed “Free housing,” followed by expletives, across the glass. Inside the building, it smelled rancid. Like death.
Block by block, they closed in on their target.
The General’s command and control center—the Boulevard Inn—was too well defended to attack. The building was six stories of beige stucco, steel, and glass.