Lionhearts (Denver Burning Book 5) Read online

  Lionhearts

  Part Five of the Denver Burning series

  by Algor X. Dennison

  Kindle Edition

  Copyright 2016 Algor X. Dennison

  This is Part Five of the Denver Burning series, in which the Leonhardt family struggles to rescue their daughter from the disaster that tore apart Denver in Part One, Get Out of Denver and Part Two, Take Back Denver, the origins of which were further explored in Part Three, Deep Thaw and Part Four, Assault on Cheyenne Mountain.

  If you haven’t yet, you can sign up here to be notified when new books are released from Algor X. Dennison, and get an exclusive free ebook in this series, Denver Overrun, following two police officers during the initial fall of Denver.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1: Strays

  Chapter 2: Over the Precipice

  Chapter 3: In the Dark

  Chapter 4: A City Torn Apart

  Chapter 5: A New Kind of World

  Chapter 6: The Long Journey

  Chapter 7: Searching for Safety

  Chapter 8: Moving Out

  Chapter 9: Pushed Together

  Chapter 10: Hometown Woes

  Chapter 11: Across Open Country

  Chapter 12: On the Rez, and Off Again

  Chapter 13: Break

  Chapter 14: Night Fall

  Chapter 15: New Allies

  Chapter 16: Militia Rising

  Chapter 17: Into the City

  Chapter 18: Eye of the Storm

  Chapter 19: Alliances and Enemies

  Chapter 20: Refuge and Runaway

  Chapter 21: To Defend the Innocent

  Chapter 22: Making the Run

  Chapter 23: Wild City

  Chapter 24: Hunting for Tara

  Chapter 25: A Very Dangerous Situation

  Chapter 26: Out of the Lion’s Jaws

  Chapter 27: Into the Lion’s Den

  Chapter 28: Into the Canal

  Chapter 29: Out of Patience

  Chapter 30: Out of Town

  Chapter 31: Heading North

  Chapter 1: Strays

  Walt Leonhardt eyed his two errant steers angrily through the rain-spattered windshield of his Chevy truck. They had again broken through the gap between sections of fence that he’d mended a thousand times, eager to get at the field of greens just beyond. The hassle of rounding them up was one thing, but the larger problem was that unbeknownst to the mindless cattle, this particular field was full of pigweed, milkweed, and some arrowgrass. They might already have poisoned themselves beyond recovery.

  Slamming the door of his truck, the wiry old rancher grabbed a rope from the toolbox in the truck bed and stormed over to the fence. The two steers jumped at the sound of the door slamming and sauntered off toward a stand of Russian olive trees. Overhead, dark gray clouds hastened the onset of night, and a low rumble of thunder rolled in the distance over the Montana hills.

  “Hi! Get back here,” Walt shouted. His words had no effect, so he put on his leather gloves and climbed through the strands of barbed wire. He strode toward the trees, swearing under his breath that he wouldn’t stop at mending the break in the fence this time, but would triple-reinforce this section with fencing that no animal could ever get through again.

  Then he stopped in his tracks. A feeling hit him like a bolt of invisible lightning, and he knew better than to ignore it.

  The thunder rumbled again, but it was no weather phenomenon that had made him pause. It was something in his mind, and something he felt deep in his chest as well. He closed his eyes for a moment to concentrate.

  The situation he was in had triggered a feeling in his subconscious. There was something going on here he needed to recognize. He’d felt such a prompting before on a few occasions, and each time it had turned out that he was on the cusp of a crucial moment in his life. So this time, he stilled his mind and listened, looking around at the scene for clues as to what was hovering just outside his awareness.

  This was about his children, he realized. He was experiencing a physical metaphor in his role going after the stray cattle which mirrored his role as a father. His thoughts quickly ran over his six kids, mostly grown and gone now, and touched on the ones he was most concerned about.

  Tara.

  Maybe some of the others as well, to some extent, but Tara was the most direct parallel to the strays. She was putting herself at risk and he was reacting badly. Just like with the stray cattle.

  It wasn’t a drug problem, like the one his nephew in Oregon was struggling with. Tara was a good clean girl, as far as Walt knew. It was just that she was vulnerable. She had made a habit of putting herself in dangerous situations ever since she’d left college and moved to Denver, and she was too naïve to realize that the consequences of her decisions would soon catch up with her. She considered herself on solid ground, no doubt, but that made the risk all the greater.

  Walt fingered his short mustache and beard as he stood, thinking it through. Tara knew that her parents didn’t approve of her recent financial choices or the kind of men she had been dating. As far as Walt knew she was living entirely on credit cards and enjoying a fast-paced urban lifestyle that he strongly doubted she’d be able to sustain for another year. Especially given some alarming developments in politics, the economy, and national security.

  He’d had more than one heated conversation with his daughter, trying to make her understand how foolish she was being. That was how he had knocked sense into his men during his time as a sergeant in Vietnam, and it was how he’d steered his sons clear of some stupid teenage behavior during their adolescent years. But in Tara’s case, the tactic had no effect except to lose her trust.

  He had reacted with anger to the stray cattle, and it only drove them further away. He was now receiving a warning, he realized, to treat his daughter more gently, to draw her lovingly back into the fold before a great storm broke over them all. It was perfect, almost too obvious an allegory to miss. And whether it was God or his own intuition that had brought it to mind, he was grateful. Being religiously inclined, Walt decided it had to be spiritual.

  As Walt went about collecting the two errant cattle with more patience and a humbler attitude, he resolved to speak with each of his children that very night. If recent headlines were any guide at all, times were getting very ugly, and it was his duty as patriarch of the Leonhardt clan to corral the herd as best he could against whatever was coming. But he needed to do so gently and with love, not heavy-handed or judgmentally.

  That evening, after a chicken dinner and a few more chores, Walt and his wife Sarah sat at the kitchen table and put the phone on speaker so they could both hear their children. Their eighteen-year-old Liam and fifteen-year-old Amy still lived with them, so that was two down. Liam was out with friends at the moment. Amy and her cousin Jess, who was visiting for the summer from Portland, were up in their room.

  “Let’s just go from oldest to youngest,” Walt suggested. He didn’t say it to Sarah, but he wanted to save Tara for last to give him more time to figure out what to say to her. He scrolled through the saved numbers until he found the one for Karen, their oldest daughter. She and her husband were firmly established in Salt Lake City with their four kids and had visited the ranch for Christmas the previous year.

  “Hi, Dad,” she answered over the sound of her two-year-old’s gurgles, whom she was apparently cradling in her arms as she held the phone against her shoulder. “How are you and Mom?”

  After some small talk about how her kids were doing in school, and a pause to let the little one say hi to grandma, Walt got down to business. “Listen, Karen, I’m calling everyone in the family tonight because I’ve had some thoug
hts and feelings recently that have me worried about the direction things are headed nationally. I don’t want to alarm you, I just want to see where we all stand as far as money, emergency preparedness, stuff like that. How are you and Jim set for food storage and the like?”

  Karen agreed that current events had grown vastly more troubling in the last few years. It wasn’t that there hadn’t been social discord in America before then; Walt and Sarah had lived through plenty of that in the Vietnam years. But politicians and populace alike seemed to have abandoned all desire for compromise in recent years. They shamelessly enflamed tensions between different demographic groups and catered to the extremists, always seeking to polarize and divide everyone into “for” or “against”.

  And apparently these days if you were “for” anything that the other guy was “against”, it meant you were deadly enemies and could have nothing in common. Several members of Walt and Sarah’s local church congregation had left in an angry huff when things were said over the pulpit that didn’t fit their views, and Karen mentioned that her oldest son was being actively persecuted by a schoolteacher who took issue with some of the comments he’d made in class.

  “We’re not afraid, though,” Karen declared. “We have a good home here, good neighbors, and the politicians and activists can rage away. We’re not going anywhere and we’re not giving up.”

  Satisfied that she and her husband were in a stable place and in no need of help, Walt let Sarah wind down the call with a promise to come for a visit in the Spring or Summer when the roads south out of Montana were clear.

  They called Joel next, their oldest son who was heavily involved in the local leadership of his small California town. He expressed similar concerns to Karen, and took a similar stance.

  “I’m good, Dad. You don’t need to worry about Beth and I. We’re determined to lead the fight for our values around here, in our humble way. We may not be able to influence the rest of the world, but one vote at a time, we’ll do our part.”

  Walt encouraged his son not to make too many enemies as he campaign for local issues, and then let him get back to his evening activities.

  Then Walt dialed Michael’s number. Michael was a college student in Idaho Falls, just beginning his final year of study. He was the most agriculturally inclined of their children, and Walt privately assumed Michael would take over the ranch someday.

  Their conversation was brief; Michael was within a few hours’ drive of home, and was an athletic and rugged young man with plenty of experience in the outdoors, practical skills, and the rough and tumble of life. Walt and Sarah made sure that Michael had the necessities taken care of and a plan for getting home if anything went seriously wrong. Then they let him go so he could “get back to studying”, which Walt assumed was code for whatever irresponsible activity he and his roommates had cooked up that night. He wasn’t really worried, though; Michael had never been a real trouble-maker, just a fun-loving and energetic young man.

  That brought them to Tara.

  Sarah twisted at the end of her graying braid, and the corners of her sweet hazel eyes creased with concern. “Tara’s been working late most nights, so I don’t know if she’ll answer,” she told Walt. Their younger daughter worked at a national marketing firm’s Denver office, and so far claimed to love her job and the variety of worldly executives and creatives she got to work with. “After that she’ll probably be out with friends, though, so now’s as good a time as any.”

  Walt waited a minute before dialing, and Sarah watched him in silence. She knew Walt and Tara didn’t see eye to eye on things, and wanted him to be able to get his mind in order.

  Tara lived in a city apartment with a couple of ditzy roommates, Walt knew, and was not remotely prepared for any kind of emergency or hard times. After college she had gone to “the big city”, as Walt called it, and hadn’t looked back. Walt got the sense that she was desperately searching for wealth, praise, and excitement, three things he didn’t care much for. And, he had to admit, it hurt to hear her speak of their rural lifestyle as if they were hillbillies that hadn’t been out of the mountains in decades. She seemed to think that the only things in life worth thinking about were to be found amid crowds of other people.

  With a heavy sigh, he dialed her number. No doubt she’d answer it on a brand-new phone she couldn’t afford, and talk like she was on top of the world even though she had to be harboring deep anxiety just below the surface. But she would never admit that to her family.

  The phone went straight to voicemail.

  “Maybe we should get online,” Sarah suggested. “Amy says she responds better on social media.”

  “Forget it,” Walt grumbled. “We’ll talk to her tomorrow. I’m going to bed.”

  Chapter 2: Over the Precipice

  Lieutenant Jeff Turley thanked the controller in the tower very kindly, pivoted until his F-22’s nose was pointed at the destination marked on his test mission profile, and engaged his afterburners. The aircraft soared away from Holloman Air Force Base and climbed high enough that he could see a good portion of New Mexico. The sky was a crisp blue, just transitioning from the sun-drenched end of summer into the early autumn cooling. A beautiful day for another test flight.

  He puttered in the cockpit as his Raptor took him toward the deployment point at Mach 2.1. The machine was in excellent condition and had just passed a thorough yearly deep check with flying colors. This was good exercise for it, although it wasn’t the plane he was testing that day, but rather its cargo.

  Turley gazed out at the ground passing below. He was approaching some more populated areas east of the base, but he was far too high now for civilians on the ground to take notice of his passing.

  He wondered briefly about the nature of the new electronic countermeasure system he was to deploy on this flight. It was classified at a higher level than most of what he had tested in the past. Some new toy from the Department of Defense that the Chinese didn’t know about yet, so it was being kept under wraps even from the pilot himself.

  It was big, whatever the thing was; larger than any armament he’d tested before. A long rectangular box, painted flat gray with no discernible markings. The early prototypes were always bulkier than the finished product, though, and it would no doubt be slimmed down before ever seeing deployment in combat. The mission profile said the device wouldn’t have any kinetic effects. He was just supposed to push the button and then fly home again. That was all he knew.

  Part of the allure of this gig was getting to play with powerful new tools before anyone else. But regardless of the fact he couldn’t brag about it at the bar later, it was frustrating not to be briefed on what he was carrying at all. How was he to provide effective feedback if he didn’t know the parameters of the test, or even the purpose of the device he was carrying? He resolved to enjoy the flight for what it was worth. Let the eggheads monitor the test however they wished.

  Minutes later he approached the target point, somewhere over Kansas, and slowed the aircraft to a gentle cruising speed as directed in his flight instructions. He communicated with the tower again, confirming his actions and notifying them that he was about to deploy. They gave him final clearance and he reached for the trigger.

  It was a simple, smooth mission, one test flight among hundreds. Textbook operation.

  But the lieutenant’s finger hesitated slightly as it came into contact with the button on his flight stick. The control somehow felt cold, even though his hand was gloved. It was icy, and his hand almost retracted involuntarily.

  He hadn’t experienced a gut feeling like this since his time over the skies of Afghanistan, when he had been about to hit a ground target with a thousand-pound bomb and hesitated on a hunch. Something in the ground controller’s voice, a hint of uncertainty. Seconds later the JTAC frantically radioed up that the coordinates were wrong and he needed to abort the strike. His hunch had saved lives that day.

  But this wasn’t combat, and he wasn’t carrying a bomb. How
bad could the repercussion be? It was just some ECM gadget.

  His eyes flickered over the display and he noted that all systems were performing optimally. It was a routine test job going smoothly—he could hardly tell the tower that he didn’t want to deploy because of a funny feeling in his finger.

  He pushed the erratic sensation away and pulled the trigger, leaning on years of following orders and getting the job done to overcome his personal misgivings.

  He felt a sudden chill in his chest as well as his finger, and the back of his neck tingled. Was the sensation caused by some problem with his cockpit systems, or was that an effect from the mystery device he had just deployed?

  The answer came swiftly. All his electronics went dark, the plane’s engines cut out, and its nose began to pitch sharply downward.

  It was eerie. There were none of the flashing lights or alarm tones that accompanied other in-flight emergencies. The entire aircraft was a silent, dead hulk, and he was trapped inside it. Efforts to restart the engines and breathe life back into the machine provided not a single flicker of hope. The radio silently ignored his increasingly frantic Maydays.

  It was total electrical failure, and no emergency measure had any effect. The F-22 did not glide well like a smaller aircraft would have, and its fly-by-wire systems meant that Turley had zero control over the plane now. Soon he was tumbling and rolling toward the ground at near terminal velocity. As the adrenaline threatened to choke off his brain’s oxygen supply with hyperventilation, he made the decision to eject.

  Unfortunately, the sensors and computer circuitry responsible for ensuring a safe egress from the cockpit were as fried as the rest of the plane. The charges ignited successfully to burst the canopy off and rocket Turley’s seat out into the wind, but he spun wildly out of control and when the chutes eventually deployed, he was unconscious with multiple broken limbs.