Adrian's War Read online

  He had chosen the hospital cabin because defiling it would be exceptionally insulting. The fact that he could sneak in, dig a hole, set a trap and get back out past the sentries was bad enough. That he would sneak in and out, and set a punji pit right in their camp, was extremely bad. But to do it where wounded men were being cared for spoke of a mind that was unhinged, beyond moral redemption, insane or pure evil—maybe both. This one brazen act would create a terror in their minds that would haunt them at night as they tried, and failed, to sleep. Adrian knew in a calculated way exactly what he was accomplishing. Up until now they had felt relatively safe in camp. Even that small measure of comfort would be gone in the morning.

  He returned to his lean-to vantage point before dawn and waited. Smoke appeared out of the chimneys at day break as fires were built to warm the cabins, but no one came outside for another half hour. Then the men started coming out and heading for the outhouses. Breakfast was cooking. Adrian could smell roasting meat from where he was. It disgusted him that some of it was human flesh, but he realized that he hadn’t eaten all day. He pulled the par fleche to him and dug in. The bear pemmican was delicious.

  As he chewed he watched a man carrying a bucket of water to the hospital cabin reach for the door and step right into the punji pit. His scream jarred the camp into action as men ran to the cabins to grab rifles. The sentries stood and moved to take cover, aiming their rifles out at the line of trees around the camp. Pandemonium broke loose for several minutes before anyone discovered that the man had been injured by a trap. Adrian could read fury on the men’s faces, even at that distance. Their sharp movements spoke eloquently of their rage.

  Wolfgang armed twenty men with long sticks, and then had them sweep the camp from end to end and side to side, poking at the ground looking for more traps. None were found. This became a morning ritual every day. The long sticks were stacked against the outsides of the cabins and every morning the men would take them up and check the entire camp for traps before anyone else came out. Adrian loved it. With one small trap he had permanently changed their behavior, complicating their lives with even more fear.

  Wolfgang had a bad evening followed by a bad morning. The previous evening he had four men come in with poisoned wounds. Two from Adrian’s arrows and two from booby traps. Even the trails themselves could no longer be trusted. Then came the injury by a trap in his own camp. He was furious and would have happily killed Adrian a thousand times, yet for the life of him he couldn’t figure out how to find him.

  Chapter 13

  ADRIAN WATCHED THE CAMP FOR the rest of the day. After dark he left his vantage point and returned to the trails. He rebuilt the punji pits that had been stepped in. It only took a few minutes to freshen them up, and these men might be stupid enough to step in the same trap twice, so why not? He then moved over to the third trail and put traps alongside it. Eventually he was hoping to force the men to use this trail, or the road, whenever they left camp. It would take a while, but they would eventually notice that there were no traps on this trail or the road. They might notice that there were traps off each side of them. They would wonder why he was leaving them safe lanes of travel, and probably conclude that it was for his own use. They would be extra slow and careful but they would still use them, or else walk into the woods where there were no trails. Given what he had seen so far of them, he didn’t think they would take to the woods without a trail. To help make sure they didn’t venture into the woods, he placed traps in in the most likely paths they would use if they decided to avoid the trails.

  Adrian had no way of trapping the road. It was an all-weather road made of gravel compacted into an iron-like surface from years of truck traffic. There were potholes, but men on foot would avoid them naturally, so punji pits weren’t an option. They would simply walk down the center of the road avoiding any kind of swipe traps. He placed traps parallel to the road, lots of them. If they wandered off the road, he wanted them to return right back to it. He had a reason for that. If he could increase the traffic on the road by decreasing it on the other trails, he would be more effective at hit and run ambushes along the road. More traffic meant more opportunities.

  While Adrian was attacking out in the woods, it probably had not occurred to Wolfgang that he was also spending time to watching the camp. Now that he had attacked the camp itself, if Wolfgang had any sense, he would know that Adrian was watching the camp from the wood line. Once he came to that conclusion, the only rational reaction would be to search the wood line for tracks, and to establish a roving patrol that circled the camp just inside the wood line in hopes of finding him. It was only a matter of time before his lean-to vantage point was discovered.

  With that in mind, Adrian began setting traps around his vantage point. He used every natural opening in the brush, every game trail, every feature a man was likely to follow or investigate. He placed so many traps that it was difficult for him to get in and out, and he knew where they all were. They might find this spot, but they would pay a price in the process. Because of the bowl shape of the camp, Adrian had virtually endless choices around the camp from which to watch. He set up dummy camps in the less desirable spots, and then heavily booby-trapped them.

  He had the men so scared of the forest that he could move around during the day with near impunity. He placed traps in the woods completely around the camp. The roving patrols would be bound within a certain distance of the camp; in that band of area there were natural places where a man could walk, and places where the terrain or thickets made walking impossible. The terrain and the vegetation created bottlenecks, narrow places that were the only passages from one area to another. Adrian took advantage of all of these places. Within a week he had placed so many traps that he was having difficulty remembering where they were. He found it easier to avoid the areas completely, and leaving himself safe lanes to travel away from the booby traps.

  It took Wolfgang four days to figure out what Adrian had been waiting for. He sent out two roving patrols of two men each. They were apparently ordered to move around the perimeter of the camp, inside the wood line, in opposite directions, crossing each other’s path twice each full circle. It was a clever method of patrolling. Two men were sufficient in each patrol. These men were literally only meant to give warning to the camp by shooting at Adrian. Wolfgang would not expect them to actually get Adrian, although he could hope. Upon hearing shots fired another group would immediately follow the sounds of gunfire to the source and then chase and kill Adrian. The plan was easy for Adrian to figure out; a group of ten armed men were always in the picnic building ready to go. They were obviously a strike team waiting for a signal. This gave Adrian an idea.

  The first day of the perimeter patrol was a disaster for Wolfgang. All four of the men were stabbed with poison stakes in one way or another. The traps were deadly effective in the brush. Adrian’s plan to set the traps where the men would be forced to walk worked perfectly. Adrian watched from one of his many vantage points. He could not cover his tracks around the perimeter, so instead he made so many tracks that they couldn’t be untangled. The patrols’ tracks would soon cover so much territory that even an expert tracker would be confused.

  The next day four new men moved out into perimeter patrol. Moving slowly, they carried big sticks which they flailed at the ground and brush in front of them as they went. Eventually they cleared a path that they could walk, but they were also forced to stay on it, making them easy to avoid. For all intents and purposes the patrol was useless once they stayed strictly on the same path all the time. Each night Adrian would place a few new traps on their path to force them to repeat the stick exercise each morning. It only took one near miss for them to realize that he was operating on their trail after they had retreated to their cabins. They continued the patrol—it would be an admission of failure to stop—but they knew it was an exercise in futility. That knowledge increased the effectiveness of Adrian’s operation. He had them acting like trained monkeys, and they knew
it, but they couldn’t stop themselves. He was reminded of how in the grid days, terrorists had radically and permanently changed Americans’ behavior at airports, with just one attack. It was amazing how their fear of him, and their reluctance to go into the woods without a trail, was working to shape their behavior patterns.

  Adrian had the men trapped in the camp, except for the hunting parties. If they left and returned by the untouched trail or road, he left them alone. He wanted them to have food; he did not want them to have to raid the village. He didn’t want them hunting humans, but they had been doing it before he arrived, and surely the people in their area knew it and took defensive actions. Wolfgang would want to raid the village, and would sooner or later, but Adrian wasn’t going to force the issue. When they did go on a raid, they would use the road, and he would harass and ambush them mercilessly. He believed that he could mortally wound as many as twenty to thirty men if they took to the road in a large number.

  It had been nearly two weeks since Adrian had first penetrated the camp’s security. It was time to do it again, and ratchet up their fear another notch. They still put sentries out each night, armed men that took up positions around the camp. Adrian observed that they habitually used the same positions every night, and changed guards at the same time every night. This was another example of poor security. They were acting in predictable patterns that anyone could take advantage of. And Adrian certainly would. He waited for dark.

  He had made a war club, a smooth river rock shaped like a small loaf of bread. Using a harder stone he rubbed an indentation around the center of the rock all the way around it. Splitting a piece of green hardwood he placed the groove into the split, then laced it together with wraps of rawhide. He dried the rawhide and the green handle next to his fire each time he built one. Within a few days the club was phenomenally strong and extremely deadly. The head was like a two-pound hammer. The handle was two-and-a-half feet long and big enough around that it fit Adrian’s hand perfectly. He had cut the handle to a length that balanced the club’s swing. It would crush a skull with a flick of his wrist. It would bust a head into shattered pieces with a half-swing. A full swing would leave mush where a head had once been. And it was totally silent.

  At four in the morning, Adrian’s favorite time for attack, he moved stealthily into the camp. He had chosen a route that none of the sentries could see. He could have walked in carrying a lantern and they wouldn’t have had any idea if they stayed where they were. It was pure stupidity on their part, but each man wanted to have as many walls around him as possible. They were scared to be out in the open, where they should have been after dark.

  He rose up behind the first of the guards like the grim reaper he had become, and with a half-swing crushed the man’s head in so thoroughly that the man’s body fell straight down without twitching. The sound of his crumpling body was too quiet to alert the other guards. Adrian knew exactly where each one was. He moved quietly and calmly to the next guard. This one was asleep, breathing in that deep, relaxed way that only the truly asleep do. Adrian decided to leave him alive, for now. Instead of killing him, he placed one of his arrows across his lap, so that he would know how close he had come to dying in his sleep. His tale would bring more terror than his body; there would be enough bodies.

  Adrian left the sleeping man to dream his dreams. He put his hand against the cabin wall to orient himself as he walked to the next guard. This one was awake, but yawning. Adrian moved forward swiftly, drawing his club up over his shoulder while the man was in mid-yawn, a particularly vulnerable moment. Before he had a chance to finish the yawn, the stone came down through the top of his head, smashing through the skull and the brain, stopping only when it reached the shoulders. Adrian grabbed the dead man’s body to help ease it to the ground; no need for noise.

  Adrian move from guard to guard, abruptly ending their lives with a flick of his wrist, a flashing blur of stone, until he had killed all but the one. Five bodies would be found in the morning. One live guard with an arrow to show and a story to tell to all the others. Adrian thought, “This is Stone Age war at its finest.” The gruesomeness of the smashed heads would be a gory testament to how strong their adversary was.

  Adrian boldly walked away from the camp. There was no one to see him. It would be the last night that any of Wolfgang’s men would go outside after dark. From now on they would lock themselves in their cabins as soon as the sun went down, in fear of the monster that preyed upon them in the dark, and in the woods, and roamed through their camp at will. As bad a shape as he was leaving them in, he had another idea for tomorrow that would make things even worse.

  Chapter 14

  WHEN THE MEN CAME OUT to get their sticks to sweep the camp for punji pits the next morning they found the five dead guards, and the one live one. The arrow was handed from hand to hand as each man looked at the bodies lying in a row, their heads smashed into gory shreds. There was a somberness among them. Where they had gestured wildly the morning of the punji pit, they looked defeated today. There was no anger evident, no sharp gestures, no frantic running around. Just men with slumped shoulders standing in small groups, talking. Adrian’s strike had taken a lot out of them, the cumulative compounding of terror on top of terror was reaching an apex. Pretty soon these men would fall into a deep dark depression relieved only by moments of terror.

  The two roving patrols were sent out as usual, plus two more. They took up sticks and began searching their tried and true lanes for fresh traps. They would find two. Adrian hadn’t had time last night to put out more. Two was enough to keep them anxious. Four patrols were too many for Adrian’s newest idea. He would wait and see if they dropped back to two. He thought they might at lunchtime. The extra patrols were a gesture by Wolfgang, a useless gesture that wasn’t worth pursuing. Adrian settled in to watch, and to avoid the roving patrols, which was easy since they stayed on their cleared path religiously.

  At lunchtime all four patrols came in to eat with the rest of the men. Then, only two patrols were sent back out. The rest of the men were busy fortifying the cabins. They were building shutters for the windows and wooden bars that could be dropped into place inside the doors to lock them. Now that he had demonstrated a free run of the camp they were worried that he would begin coming into the cabins as well. Adrian had no intention of doing that. In order to keep these men at maximum terror, they needed to believe they had one small, safe place they could go. If he took that safe place away from them then there would be little else to take from them and they would be more likely to abandon the camp. He wanted them to have their safe place, and to fear its loss with every breath they took. It was more effective to leave them some small hope, false as it may be, than to take away all shreds of it.

  Adrian knew he could set fire to the cabins any night he wanted. But he liked this camp. It made his war easy. If he burned the cabins, they would have to move, and the next place might not be as good. When he saw that only two patrols were back on duty, he decided to execute his next plan. The strike team was poised and ready to go. Twelve armed men would rush to the sounds of gunfire, hoping to find and shoot Adrian. Each man would be dreaming of being the one who killed Adrian, ending the war. That man would be a hero.

  They had not practiced their tactics at all. Adrian knew they would be stumbling all over each other when they ran toward the gunfire. They would not have discipline. They would all be running on hair-trigger adrenalin surges. They would be afraid of getting a poison arrow or stake in them and dying the slow death in the grim cabin. They would shoot at anything that moved. That was what Adrian was counting on.

  He had prepared his lean-to vantage point with dozens of booby traps in hopes that the patrols would discover it, move in, and set off the traps, injuring more of them. They hadn’t found it. It was time to show it to them. Taking a pistol that he had picked up after one of the wounded men left it in the forest; he walked into a position that placed the lean-to camp between him and the strike force. Th
en he waited for the roving patrol to be as close to that spot as they were going get. When they were, he fired the pistol in their direction, shooting all the bullets in the clip. He yelled at the same time, “There he is! I see him! Red shirt! Red shirt!” One of the men on patrol was wearing a red shirt.

  The twelve men sprinted directly towards the gunfire, stringing out as the faster men gained on the slower ones. The patrol whirled and headed towards the gunfire also, reaching the spot just moments before the first members of the strike team arrived. Adrian had faded back into the woods and chosen a place where he could watch without being seen. As the men all started to converge on the same place, two of the men in the strike team began shooting at the man in the red shirt. The man in the red shirt began shooting back. Within seconds there was chaos as men shot at each other and returned fire. Several were wounded in the fracas, but none killed outright. Then men began stumbling into Adrian’s traps. Fourteen men filled with adrenalin and a small area filled with traps is a bad combination. Adrian couldn’t tell how many were punctured, but from the yells and reactions it appeared that several had been.

  The man in the red shirt had been shot twice; it didn’t look like he would live to get back to camp. At least three other men had been badly wounded by the errant rifle fire from the confused and excited men. It was a disaster for Wolfgang. His men, thoroughly demoralized, terrorized, and panicky, had been easily duped into attacking each other when their mission had been to kill Adrian. They began to return to camp, heads bowed, shoulders slumped, defeated in every way possible. Adrian slipped up closer and let fly three arrows, hitting two of the men and barely missing a third. He turned and disappeared back into the woods, laughing.

  Some of the men, enraged beyond sanity by their situation, heard his laughter, turned, and charged back into the forest after him. They stumbled onto yet more booby-traps, another one of them getting a poison puncture wound before they gave up again and went back to camp.