Chapter 7

Carl Partley looked back at the pall of smoke rising over what used to be Baltimore and frowned. He knew that life in Baltimore wasn't worth living anymore for any decent people that might still be alive in the city. The mobs ruled the city entirely now and any decent citizen was either dead, about to die or had become a slave to one of the mob leaders. Instead of medals, the mob leaders gave pretty female captives to their followers for anything that the leader thought was worthy of recognition. What had been neighborhoods had become small countries that were guarded by semi-organized mobs that usually had a very short life expectancy. The mobs would fight with a viciousness that had been rarely seen by modern man. Carl shook his head and put the Army Humvee into gear and began to move down the country road.

Carl Partley was, until a few weeks ago, a member of one of the CIA's armies that some newspapers had mentioned in their articles about Iraq. The editors of the papers that mentioned the CIA's army were always visited the next day for a "confidential talk". Each time the editor was "convinced" to keep his mouth shut about the shadow army. The editors were always given a juicy exclusive to compensate them for their silence. Only one editor had refused to stop writing about the shadow army; just before he disappeared.

The CIA had covertly started an army for their own purposes. The CIA, being the organization that it was, needed men who had a different moral approach to war and, let's just say, knew what the interests of the United States were. The shadow army was recruited from the ranks of Delta, Navy Seals, Israeli Commandoes, Green Berets and several spec op forces of other countries. It was not hard recruiting as the type of person that joined "The Crew", as they called themselves, they loved the excellent money and they were killers that the governments dared not release on society.

A very compromising set of pictures and other documents, that each of the Senate Intelligence Committee was presented with, ensured that The Crew was well funded and kept secret. America would be up in arms if they knew that there were pedophiles, adulterers, sadists, thieves, child rapists and drunks in Congress. Congress had equipped the CIA with the tools to destroy Congress or at least to manipulate them to the will of the CIA.

The Crew had sufficient training for warfare, but a much higher level of training was required for these men and women. They had to fight a war that no one knew was going on and slip away without be detected; in fact The Crew often completed a mission and the targets never knew that they had been defeated until their own people executed them in a coup or a rebellion. Rarely did a country know that The Crew was at work in their country.

The Crew was often the cause of political fortunes being changed, lives being destroyed, families becoming missing, prominent politicians dying of a sudden illness and nations being overturned. Congress didn't want to know about the methods that The Crew used. It was better if no one outside of The Crew knew how missions were accomplished. The American public would never believe that civilized people could commit the acts that The Crew performed on every mission.

The training had been hard and there had even been killings included in the training. Captured prisoners had been hunted and killed as part of training exercises. Certain known criminals in the United States were targeted to be terminated in such a way that it would seem like a death from natural causes. Each time, the name and picture of the target was given to the trainee with only the purpose of the mission; termination with extreme prejudice. The address or even the general location of the target wasn't given to the trainee. It was up to the trainee to find the target and destroy it in two weeks. The trainee never knew the crimes that the target had committed or even if a crime had been committed. The instructors often hinted that this was just an innocent civilian that the CIA wanted to be terminated; the trainee was being tested to see if he or she would perform any mission given to them without question. This training came with a high price; all graduates of the training lost most of their emotions and any sense of caring for their fellow man. The only things that mattered were The Crew, the members of The Crew, the mission and the interests of the United States.

Carl's first mission was to slit the throats of the wife and children of a South American politician that had backed out of an agreement. The mission was completed 25 hours after he had received it. Pictures were taken of the wife and children and then the bodies were taken out to sea and disposed of. Carl made sure that the crime scene yielded no clues as to what happened to the family of the politician; it would later be blamed on the Marxist rebels. The politician was kidnapped and the pictures were shown to him. He was told that if he didn't fulfill his part of the bargain every member of his family, starting with the politician's mother and father, would meet the same fate. Carl promised him that it would take a very long time for them to die and that the man would have to watch his parents die slowly and very painfully.

Carl never found out if the politician agreed to honor his agreement. If further action was required another operative would take care of it. It would be years before Carl would ever be asked to go back to that country and then only after the politician had died; either naturally or by other means.

During his training he had overhead two instructors talking about how they had engineered the disappearance of two US Congressmen and how they had even made the plane disappear long ago. Their mission had been sanctioned by the CIA. After his training had finished Carl researched the incident and could only find one plane crash that fit the scenario; the crash of the plane carrying Congressmen Hale Boggs and Nick Begich and two others in Alaska. Neither the plane nor the bodies were ever found.

Carl had joined the CIA thinking that he was joining a small group of warriors that would perform missions that were too hot for regular forces. Though he had never seen any figures on the troop strength, he surmised from the different conversations that he had overheard, that the size of the CIA's army was in the thousands. In the CIA, any information that you didn't need to know was off-limits to you.

Carl had been in Africa when the oil was cut off to the USA. He completed the mission about three months after the Coalition forces had been overrun and sent to Iran. By the time that he had come back to his home in southern Maryland the mobs had begun to move into the suburbs. He went to his parent's house and found the bloated, decaying bodies of his parents, his two sisters and two women that he had never seen before. Carl's father had been hung from a tree in the back yard. All of the women were nude and they had apparently been gang-raped before being killed. From the wounds on the bodies he surmised that they had been tortured for hours before they were put out of their misery. He buried all of them in the back yard. Whatever emotions or feelings for his fellow man that Carl had left, he had buried with the bodies of his family and the two unknown women.

After looking around the house for anything that he could use to enable him to survive the chaos that America had become, he set fire to the house and watched until the fire went out. He then made his way to the National Guard post that was only three miles from his home. He would need some of the specialized equipment that the military had if he was to have any chance to survive.

At the National Guard installation he found the members of the guard patrolling the fence with rifles. Carl flashed his CIA identification and was ushered into the obviously frightened Second Lieutenant that had been left in charge.

Carl handed his CIA identification to the young man, "I'm on a mission for the CIA. I need access to weapons and a Humvee. If you need authorization call Langley."

The officer handed the ID back to him, "Hell, take whatever you want and hurry. It's getting harder each day to keep this shit secure. We have firefights here every day. I keep losing my men. I won't have any people left in a few more days. I don't blame them. I want to go home myself. I've been trying to call my wife for ten days now but the phones are dead. I don't know if anyone is trying to repair the lines or not. We haven't had any electricity in two weeks. We're going to run out of food shortly and then I'm going to destroy all of the gear here except for what each man can take with him."

Carl saw the fear in the young man's eyes, "How long have you been in the service?"

Tears started to slowly fall down his cheeks, "I just graduated from college in June. I'm supposed to go to camp this summer. I've only had my ROTC training. I don't know what to do about any of this shit and the men know it. I haven't had a decent night's sleep in weeks. I know that they'll slit my throat and go home to their families. How is it out there? I haven't seen a car go by in days. I keep smelling smoke and hearing gunfire."

Carl looked at the young man and began to tell him what he had seen in the towns that he had passed through and what he had found at his parent's house. He could see the terror and concern for his family grow in the young Second Lieutenant's eyes.

"Lieutenant, if I were you I would have every man get what he needs to protect himself and his family and get out of here. Once the mobs decide that they want this military hardware they will come and get it; over your dead body if they have to. After you have all that you want to take with you, destroy the rest so that it can't be used against any good people that are left out there. Now, can you get me outfitted so that I can complete my mission?"

The officer got up from his desk and took Carl to the Armory. The Armory was stocked pretty well as the unit had been scheduled to go to Iraq before all of this shit happened. Carl hurried to get what he wanted before the officer began to realize that the CIA did not have the authority to take military weapons, especially on US soil. Carl suggested to the young man that he go have a talk with his men and offer them the chance to take what weapons they would need to protect their families. After the officer left Carl pulled a Humvee up to the Armory and began to load the gear into it. When the Humvee had everything that Carl could possibly fit in it he got in the driver's seat and started the engine. He turned and looked at the gear. The weapons included several automatic weapons, handguns, rocket propelled grenades, cases of plastic explosives and enough ammunition to keep his arsenal supplied for a long time. He also packed as many MRE's (meals-ready-to-eat) as he could into the Humvee.

Carl had picked this particular Humvee for two reasons; it was the only one that was armored with the retrofit armor that had been supplied during the Iraq war and the fact that it had a full tank of fuel and the two jerry cans on the back were full. The armor would protect him if any of the mobs tried to shoot at him with small arms and that was highly probable with the way things were going in America. Carl knew that the Humvee was never meant to be armored; the Jeeps in WWII were never armored. The Humvee and the Jeep were just utility vehicles that sometimes got into a war zone. It was just after the Senators, most of who had never been in the military, started yelling about "our fine American boys dying in the Humvee death traps" that the Pentagon started putting armor on the vehicles. Since the armor weighed almost two thousand pounds, this served to slow down the vehicle and made it an easier target. Congress reined in the funding of the appropriation that would allow the Pentagon to purchase the armor and the Pentagon let it slide after making a show of the armor that they had outfitted some of the Humvee's with.

When Carl started to pull away from the Armory he saw the National Guardsmen running to the line of military vehicles. The vehicles began to line up in front of the Armory and several of the men ran inside; only to come out several minutes later with automatic guns and ammunition. Carl watched as one of the older men, apparently with some military experience, formed a force of five of his most senior men and took one of the larger vehicles and began to arm it. The arms that the men were putting into the truck would do serious damage to anyone that tried to get in their way.

As he pulled out of the main gate he didn't see any traffic on the roads. A short way from the National Guard post he passed a couple of vehicles that had been burned. One of the vehicles had a body hanging out the door with the seat belt holding the body in place. Carl looked at the three automatic weapons and the RPG lying on the seat beside him. The RPG had an infrared and a night vision sight on it and Carl knew how to use them. The only problem was that if a bullet hit the Humvee in the right place they would never find enough of him to bury.

Carl made his way to the Interstate and soon found the highway blocked by buses. The mobs had blocked the Interstate in an attempt to trap anyone trying to escape the violence of the cities and towns. Apparently they had been a bit successful as there were several cars stopped on the highway close to the buses. Carl heard screams coming from one of the buses. He pulled off of the Interstate and decided to get out of town on the back roads for a while. He would try to use the Interstate after Fredrick, Maryland.

Carl had taken vacations in the mountains of West Virginia with his parents and knew of a remote area that he felt he could be secure and ride out the violence that was strangling America. If the cabin had been destroyed he knew of several abandoned coal mines where he could hide the Humvee and himself. He had to stay alive.

Chapter 8