Home Invasion - J. A. Johnstone [117]
And no one would ever know what had happened on this lonely stretch of West Texas highway.
From several blocks away, Bud focused the lenses of the binoculars on the trucks parked in front of the police station. He grunted as if he had seen what he was looking for and said in low tones, “Check out the one on the left. See that little dish antenna on top?”
He passed the binoculars to Ford, who studied the trucks for a moment and said, “Yeah, I see it. You think that’s where the EMP is coming from?”
“I don’t know if it’s a regular series of EMPs or a continuous jamming signal of some sort, but yeah, that’s why nobody’s phones or computers will work. I’d bet on it, anyway.”
“You are.”
“Are what?”
“Betting on it,” Fargo said as he lowered the glasses. “Betting a lot of lives, in fact.”
Bud swallowed hard. “All right.”
“What’s the best way to disable a gizmo like that, anyway?”
“Well … the sure-fire method would be to blow up the truck.”
“Short of that?”
“It’s bound to have an on-off switch,” Bud said. “Worst comes to worst, I could kill the power to it.”
“And everybody’s phones would start working again?”
“Probably not all of them. Some of them are probably damaged and would need to be repaired. But as many cell phones as there are bound to be around here, some of them should work, yeah.”
The two men were crouched inside a big Dumpster at the side of the grocery store. A few minutes earlier, the two men had taken cover in the Dumpster to avoid being seen by one of the Rey del Sol patrols, and they had stayed there since it had proven to be a viable, if somewhat smelly, observation post for their needs.
Since they had found out what they needed to know, they climbed out and trotted around the back of the grocery store, carrying their rifles. The rest of the group had split up, since nearly thirty people couldn’t move around a town the size of Home without being spotted. General Garaldo had been tied up securely and left at the high school with Cochrum and the blond reporter, who had refused to join the fight. Jimmy and Eloise had stayed there as well to keep an eye on them.
Parker and Alex were waiting in a beauty shop called the Hairateria, which sat a block off Main, facing a side street. Alex and Delgado had deployed everybody else in specific places around town, contingent on the small groups being able to reach those locations without running into any of the patrols. Since they had no way of communicating with each other, they had established a signal that would mean everyone should converge on the police station and be ready to fight. That signal was three evenly spaced shots, followed five seconds later by two more. The invaders would be able to hear those shots, too, and might figure out that they were intended as a signal, but there was nothing that could be done about that.
Parker had broken the lock on the beauty shop’s back door, but the damage wasn’t noticeable. Ford and Bud slipped inside the darkened interior. Parker and Alex lowered the rifles they had trained on the door when it swung open.
“Bud’s pinpointed the truck we’re after,” Ford said. “It’s parked in front of the police station, just like we thought it would be. But if we can fight our way to it, Bud says he can disable whatever’s jamming communications.”
Bud nodded. “Yeah, shouldn’t be too big a problem. Other than staying alive, that is.”
“Yeah, that’s all,” Parker said dryly. He turned to Alex. “We’re going to need a distraction, like the one we came up with when we sprang you from Garaldo and his men.”
“Why are you looking at me?” she asked. “That sounds more like a job for you two spooks.”
Ford shook his head. “No, we’ll be leading the attack on the trucks. You know this town better than the rest of us. Surely there’s something here that’ll get their attention. I don’t think we’ll be lucky enough to find another tanker truck to blow up.”
Alex frowned in thought. After a moment, she said, “There’s a warehouse full of hay on the edge of town. If somebody set fire to it, it would make quite