Grace Under Fire Page 14

  “I need padding,” he’d insisted while she laughed to the point of tears.

  “Everyone has their weakness,” Barb chuckled. “Your vulnerability is your delicate posterior.”

  Conor huffed in mock offense. “You try riding seventy miles without padding and let me know how you like it.”

  “No thank you.”

  Conor studied himself in his bedroom mirror. “Shame I’m riding at night. I feel like more people should have the privilege of taking all this in.”

  “The countryside will never be the same,” Barb said. “I expect the trees will wilt as you pass and the crops will fail. Squirrels will intentionally jump to their deaths when they can’t wipe the image from their tiny black eyes.”

  “You’ll miss me when I’m gone,” he said playfully. “You’ll wish you’d been nicer when you’re stuck home alone by yourself watching chick flicks and eating cookie dough.”

  “If I miss you I’ll talk to a rock. The outcome is similar.”

  “Did you finish packing my food? I’d hate for you to get so distracted coming up with witticisms that you forget the one thing I asked you to do.”

  “It’s packed. You’ll miss no meals.”

  “Did you split it between the trailer and the backpack?”

  “Yep. How long is your ride?”

  “No way of knowing. This is all an experiment.”

  “There are safer ways to conduct experiments.”

  “It’s not just an experiment. I told you I was checking on a girl for a friend.”

  “You are checking on a girl you don’t know for a friend you barely know.”

  “It’s how I am. I’m too old to change.”

  “Too stubborn to change is what you are,” she said. “Just don’t get personally involved. If you get there and the situation is not salvageable, turn around and come on home.”

  He grunted, refusing to commit himself to any particular course of action. “I love you.”

  She sighed. “You always say that when you want me to change the subject.”

  Conor widened his eyes as if she’d finally received a revelation. “Now that you understand that, please change it.”

  “You have a tendency to go overboard when things get personal.”

  Conor feigned offense. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  She waved her arms, encompassing their surroundings. “This shop in the backwoods? Our crazy life?” she said. “It’s all because you went overboard.”

  “That was indeed personal,” Conor said, serious now. “I did way less than I should have done. And just for the record, I think our life and this shop are delightful. I’d have it no other way.”

  *

  As the sun dropped beneath the farthest ridge and darkness settled over the mountains, Conor set out on his journey. The early miles would be in familiar territory, through the nearby town he visited on a regular basis. Beyond that, the route would be less familiar.

  He would follow a four-lane highway for about twenty miles, then take another twenty mile route across three steep mountains. He hoped that the motor would assist him on those climbs but he hadn’t had a chance to experiment with it under those conditions. He did carry extra batteries and he had a solar charger for them in the trailer. The trailer was a bicycle-drawn child carrier that he’d picked up at a yard sale. He couldn’t help himself. He was always picking up used bikes and bike accessories for projects.

  Conor had loved bicycles his entire life. He came from an era when a kid’s life centered around his bicycle. It was entertainment, transportation, and freedom all rolled into one. His family didn’t have cable television in those days so he was outside all the time. To have been forced to spend the entire afternoon inside would have been torture. In fact, it was a common punishment for children. Commit a bad enough infraction and you may have to stay inside all evening. He still remembered how miserable that had been. He didn’t understand how children did it now, how they enjoyed being trapped inside.

  He loved the pensive nature of bicycling. There was something about the rhythm of riding a bike that freed the mind to travel in different directions than the body. Even riding at night in the green glow of the night vision was relaxing in a vaguely alien way. He thought about what Barb had said as he was preparing to leave. He did have a tendency to personalize things. He assumed it was an inherited trait, one that had come from his father.

  His father had been a preoccupied and distant man. He’d been in prison in 1980, when Conor was just fifteen. He’d been an IRA bomber and the British came looking for him during a crackdown. One of his bombs had taken out a military barracks and there was a lot of anger directed toward him.

  Conor’s mother had been concerned about potential repercussions. She chose to move to the United States with her son and hope that they could disappear in the vast country. They settled in North Carolina where the terrain was similar enough to Ireland to keep the homesickness at bay. No one ever came after them and they lived a relatively normal life. Conor played football, graduated high school, and went on to graduate from the local community college as a machinist.

  He used his skill both in his day job at a local manufacturing company and at night to supplement his income. He did welding for anyone that needed metal tacked together, some gunsmithing for folks who needed his more precision skills, fabricated parts for people who broke things for which parts were no longer available. All the while, his skills grew.

  Despite his mother’s concerns that he may have inherited some of his father’s proclivities for living on the wrong side of the law, Conor kept himself occupied with his work and stayed out of trouble. Part of that was due to a girl who’d come into his life.

  When he was at the community college he started dating a girl in the cosmetology program. Despite all the jokes that Conor had to listen to about the Irish, he found that women swooned over his accent. Khrystiana had been different. Conor could tell some of the women he met were only interested in the novelty of dating someone from a different country, who spoke with a different accent. While Khrystiana may have initially been attracted to him for those reasons, their connection was deeper. When he was twenty-two he bought a house and took her to look at it.

  "I know it's not much, but if you marry me I'll do my best to make it a good home for you," he promised.

  Khrystiana broke down in tears and accepted his proposal. They’d barely been married a year when their daughter Barbara was born. Conor's mother lived just long enough to meet her granddaughter. Before the baby was a year old she died of lung cancer. Conor had tried to contact his father to make him aware of both events but could not reach him.

  He assumed his father was merely an insensitive bastard, but later learned he had already died in prison by that time. The guards, perhaps loyal to mates in the regiment, sought to make his punishment worse by beating him on a regular basis, one such beating rupturing his spleen. By the time anyone figured it out, it was too late and he died in a prison ambulance.

  When Barb was three years old, Khrystiana picked her up from daycare one day. They were driving home, singing a song from Barb's favorite show, The Wiggles, when a drunk driver crossed the median and hit them head on. Conor's wife was killed instantly. Barb was almost killed but survived after weeks in the hospital.

  In the manner of such things, the drunk driver walked away with no injuries. He was sentenced to twelve years in prison but was out in three due to good behavior and overcrowding. Conor found no justice in that. There were things he knew from childhood, bits of his father's craft that no one knew he was aware of. His father, a true believer, assumed there would be a day when Conor would fight for Ireland in his father's name. When his mother was not around, the father taught his young son the trade of the bomb maker.

  When the man was released from prison, Conor kept an eye on him. He watched as the man found a place to live and eventually a job. One night while the man was working the night shift at a furniture
factory, Conor stole the headrest from the driver’s seat of his pickup truck. The man was not supposed to be driving but the judge gave him special permission so he could work and pay off the debts incurred by his imprisonment. Conor wired the headrest full of explosives with a proximity trigger and replaced it in the vehicle.

  While the man drove home that night, he drove under a low railroad bridge he passed every night. This time, an RFID chip fastened to the underside of the bridge signaled the proximity trigger and detonated the headrest. When the truck rolled to a stop, the interior looked as if it had been spray painted with blood. As for the driver, everything from the ribs up had been vaporized by a shaped charge.

  Although all eyes were on Conor as the likely bomber, there was no evidence linking him to the crime. His dad’s history as a bomber was not even linked to him because his mother had adopted her maiden name when she and Conor immigrated to the United States. Whether it was the sophistication of the bombing or the grisly nature of the murder, word of the crime made its way through law enforcement circles and inevitably reached the ears of folks who were interested in people with Conor’s skill set.

  He got a visit at home one night, two men who made no threats and exerted no coercion. They stated that they assumed him to be the bomber responsible for killing the man who killed his wife. They neither wanted a confession nor an acknowledgement of any kind. They wanted to recruit him for a special apprenticeship program for machinists. If it worked out, they would set him up with his own shop.

  He knew what they were asking. He also understood that sometimes opportunity only knocks once in your life and you should be ready to open the door to it. Perhaps there was even a little of his father in him after all, and he found himself intrigued by what the opportunity might offer. He took the night to think about it and called them to accept the next day.

  *

  From Jewell Ridge, Conor cycled through Richlands, Virginia, across Kents Ridge, and down the four-lane Route 19. At Elk Garden he took Route 80 across Hayter's Gap, following it all the way to the interstate at Meadowview, Virginia. This was the first point where he anticipated potential trouble. Because of the interstate, there were roadside convenience stores and truck stops. These were the kind of places that people were becoming stranded when the fuel supply dried up. These were the places that people were setting up encampments. He expected there might be clusters of dangerous, desperate people.

  Near the interstate Conor stopped in the middle of a deserted section of road. He turned on the handheld GPS unit that was mounted to the handlebars of his bicycle. After he powered it up, it took several moments in the wooded valley for the unit to acquire satellites and pinpoint his location. Once everything aligned, he familiarized himself with his location and planned his next step. The GPS led him to the take Route 11, an old US Highway that paralleled the interstate.

  At a particular point along Route 11, all that stood between him and the interstate was an enormous farm. There were no dwellings, only hundreds of acres of fields on both sides of the interstate. Conor chose that as his point to cross. It was a good choice. He saw nothing but cows.

  Once on the other side of the interstate, his plan was to take a small secondary road that would lead him to Damascus, Virginia. He didn't make it far on that road before his night vision revealed a line of cars barricading it in the distance, and shadowy figures manned a roadblock. He quietly came to a stop and considered his options.

  He had expected this type of roadblock. He'd heard chatter that communities along the interstate had been forced to do this to stop the hordes of trapped travelers from overrunning their communities. Conor was fairly certain that the men at the roadblock could not see him in the dark. They did not have his technological advantage.

  He assumed that with his natural charm, given enough time, he could talk his way through the barricade. Should that fail, there was a strong possibility he could take the men by force. It was barely a couple hours until dawn and sentries at this time of night were often exhausted and less vigilant. All of those options presented complications, potential delays that he was not prepared for.

  Instead, he chose to backtrack, consulting his GPS to find an alternative route. He found one and was beyond the barricade in a matter of thirty minutes without so much as an encounter. Sometimes avoidance was the best strategy. It saved time, ammo, and resulted in fewer holes in the hide.

  As he neared Damascus, Conor's anxiety level increased slightly. Not only was it a proper town, but Kevin had warned him on the satellite phone that there was some sort of mob scene there. Those were the worst types of encounters for the low-key solo traveler. It was impossible to predict the reaction of the crowd. Typically, you couldn't outgun them or talk your way through them. There were too many variables.

  It was likely that a group this size had sentries on duty. He fully expected to run into them. His biggest advantage was that most of the mob would be asleep at this time of night. That would reduce the number of people with whom he had to interact. If he had an encounter, his best option was to keep the situation quiet and resolve it with immediacy.

  When he realized that The Creeper Trail ran dead center through the middle of town, Conor decided the best cover was to hide in plain sight. Rather than skulk about the streets and back alleys he opted to get on The Creeper Trail and follow it through town like he didn’t have a care in the world. When this approach got him halfway through town with no significant encounters, he was pretty pleased with himself. He wondered if this most dreaded part of his journey would be a piece of cake after all. Then he spotted the sentries blocking the old railroad bridge near the town park. He shouldn’t have counted his chickens so soon.

  Conor paused on the trail. He considered his situation for a moment, then turned his bike around and backtracked until he was out of view of the sentries. He stopped and stashed all his visible tactical gear in the trailer that he pulled behind him. He took off his night vision and replaced it with a battery-operated headlamp like most of the backpackers wore.

  Once everything was stowed in the trailer he covered the load with a backpacking tarp and pedaled back toward the sentries, looking a little less like an alien clown space marine this time. When Conor arrived at the roadblock, he simply looked like a bicycle tourist, of which the town saw thousands each summer. He approached the roadblock as if it were routine and expected under the current circumstances. He rode until the armed men raised their weapons and asked him to stop. Conor was completely casual, as if the men were fellow travelers stopping to exchange stories of the trail ahead.

  "Hold up," one of the sentries said. He wore a bandana tied around his head.

  Conor allowed his bike to coast to a stop. He threw a hand up in greeting. "Easy boys. What’s with the firepower?"

  Since Conor had not immigrated to the United States until his late teens he had retained his Irish accent and he turned it on now to full effect. He found that most Americans loved that particular accent. It disarmed and charmed them.

  "Where do you think you’re going?" the other sentry asked. He was wearing a long-sleeved paisley shirt that seemed inappropriate for hiking but Conor wasn’t one to judge. The shirt was grubby and even across the distance Conor could tell that it smelled like a mildewed towel.

  Conor shrugged and stretched his back as if it were sore from hours in the saddle, which it in fact was. “I'm riding across the United States. I'm taking in your fine country from sea to shining sea."

  "I guess you missed that the shit hit the fan?" Bandana Man asked.

  "No, I noticed. It’s hard to miss, in fact. There's not much I can do about it. I can't get back to Ireland right now so I might as well finish my trip."

  "Haven't you found circumstances to be a little dangerous for travel?" Paisley asked.

  Conor nodded. "Indeed. That's why I'm riding at night."

  "What about food? You’ve been able to get enough?" Bandana Man asked.

  Conor laughed. “Apparent
ly you two didn't grow up in Northern Ireland. This trip has, of the last week, reminded me a lot of my childhood. Riding about on a bicycle with too little to eat and the threat of violence everywhere you go."

  Conor could tell that he was disarming them. He detected the easing of fingers on triggers. Barrels had drooped away from him. It was exactly what he wanted. He had them.

  "That was all before my time," Paisley said.

  Conor chuckled. "There was food but most people were too poor to buy it. There wasn't a lot of work so no one had money. Then there was the troubles, as we called them. Bombings every day, police violence, danger everywhere."

  Bandana Man looked at his partner. "It does sound like today, doesn’t it?"

  Paisley nodded.

  "Is there some reason I can't continue on?" Conor asked.

  "We had some trouble with the town," Paisley said. "The roadblock is for our own safety.”

  “Ah, more troubles,” Conor said. “Always troubles.”

  Paisley looked apologetic. "We'll have to check with the men in charge to see if we can let you through. I'm sorry but it will take a little time. We’ll have to go wake someone up."

  “I hate to hear that,” Conor said. “I do indeed. I’ve been trying to make as much distance as I can each night and hole up during the day.”

  Conor had been talking with his hands the entire time so the two men were not concerned when his right hand moved briefly out of their sight, as if it were merely reaching to scratch an insect bite. When it came back around, there was a pistol in his hand. He placed a quick round in the forehead of Paisley, then shot Bandana Man right through his bandana before either man could wipe the surprise from his face. Both men dropped and kicked spastically. A .22 caliber headshot made pudding of the brain but it sometimes took the body a little while to realize there was no one in charge.