Not On My Watch by Jeff Bailey

    The stars fascinated Cassie. They were like an image from a dream but displayed in real life. Dusk was falling over the grassy foothills of Central Oklahoma north of Fort Sill. Lance Corporal Cassandra Sing USMC could still see a small crescent of the sun on the western horizon, but the panorama of stars was already coming out. The night sky mesmerized Cassie. She didn’t see stars like this in Southern California where she grew up, too much light pollution. She never tired of looking at the stars.

Cassie dragged her gaze back down to the burn line on the ground. The ground to Cassie’s right was blackened ash. Everything to her left was lush, tan prairie grass. The grass fire had been out for almost an hour. Cassie was a Marine Aviation firefighter on temporary duty at the Fort Sill Nuclear weapons depot. She was taking classes on how to fight an aviation fire where a nuclear weapon might be aboard the aircraft.

Today, however, the base fire marshal had offered to cancel afternoon classes and to allow the class the opportunity to go out to the field and fight a real fire. That had been six hours ago. Cassie was walking the fire line, picking up discarded tools and searching for flare-ups and/or hot spots. She enjoyed the release of getting outside for the afternoon and digging up tufts of grass to form a firebreak. She glanced back over her shoulder and could see the rest of her class and the regular fire crew spread out over the length of the burn line.

As Cassie looked back around, she saw the instant that the lights at Fort Sill’s back entrance (sometimes called the secondary entrance or North entrance) flickered on. The time must be close to 8:45 p.m.; official sunset for the middle of June in Oklahoma. Fort Sill’s back entrance was perhaps three quarters of a mile away from where Cassie stood and far enough away from Fort sill proper that none of the fort’s buildings were visible. The brilliant dome of light cast by the gates lights were a startling contrast to the growing darkness of the surrounding countryside. She could easily make out the distinctive silhouette of a canvas covered, two and a half ton, Army M-34 class, cargo truck (a deuce and a half) approaching the guard’s shack in the exit lane. Odd, the truck stopped a good twenty feet short of the traffic barrier. As Cassie watched, an Army M.P. stepped out of the guard shack and started to approach the truck. A second guard stepped a couple of paces out of the guard shake to provide cover for the guard checking the truck. The driver of the truck opened his door and stepped down.

Cassie looked back up to the display of stars. It seemed to her that there were a million more….

Wait, Cassie thought, regulations prohibit drivers from exiting a vehicle in the lane of traffic at a base entrance. Vehicles were supposed to pull into the inspection parking area off to the side before the driver dismounted the vehicle. As Cassie watched, there were several flashes of light near the truck driver as though someone was taking pictures. Cassie’s Adrenalin shot up when the M.P. closest to the truck stiffened and fell over backwards without bending at the waist. The other guard turned to run back to the guard shack before he too fell to the ground. It didn’t seem real. The scene was so quiet. There were no gun reports echoing the scene, but Cassie knew that the driver of the truck had just shot the M.P.’s.

Cassie looked back up the burn line to the other firefighters. The wind was in her face and the other firefighters were all too far away to hear her if she called. She didn’t carry her cell phone on fire calls. She had lost or destroyed too many phones that way. Cassie’s fire radio hung on the collar of her fire jacket and her jacket hung on the back of the fire truck at the far end of the fire line. She hung it here when the site control sergeant declared the fire under control.

Cassie looked back to the scene at the gate. She could see that a passenger had also gotten out of the truck. One of them must have pushed the gate release button because the traffic barrier was in the up position. Cassie knew that she had few options. She wasn’t going to let these men get away with murdering the two guards, not on her watch, not when she was standing her post ‘on the wall.’

Cassie watched the two men return to their truck. She knew that when the truck left the gate, the driver would have to turn right, away from Cassie and follow the access road along Deer Creek Canyon (really, just a narrow dry wash) for maybe a half mile. Then he would have to cross the Deer Creek Canyon Bridge. The access road made a 180 degree turn at the bridge. Then, the truck would have to come back down the other side of the canyon to within a half mile of Cassie’s position. After the truck passed Cassie, the stop sign at the intersection of HWY-49 was only two hundred feet further on.

The truck lurched forward a few feet and stopped the way a truck would if the driver lacked inexperience. Cassie tensed. She knew she had to act – now. The men were leaving. Cassie felt her sudden anger as she thought No! Not on my watch. She knew that she had only one viable option. When the truck lurched a second time, every muscle in Cassie’s body exploded into dead run.

The story, I’m a Marine, is based, in part, on my experiences as a nuclear weapons electronics technician for the U.S. Army and, in part, on the career of y granddaughter, a Lance Corporal aviation fire fighter and paramedic in the Marine Corp , at the time of the writing. I see her in every line of the story.            

My name is Jeff Bailey. I write action/thrillers with a nuclear theme because I worked in nuclear related industries, from nuclear weapons to nuclear research, for fifty years. In The Defect, I tell the story of a terrorist attack on a nuclear power plant and why the government covered it up. I based the story on true events. Deer Hawk Publications has scheduled to release of Not On My Watch. Not On My Watch is about a female, aviation firefighter in the U.S. Marines who witnesses the murder of two M.P.s. She decides that it is her duty to stop them. The screenplay version of Not On My Watch is available on request. Keep in mind that I write nuclear thrillers. The Chilcoat Project is about the theft of nuclear weapons secrets from a national laboratory. True events form the core of the storyline of The Chilcoat Project. The Radioactive Boy Scout is the inspiration for my current project, Wine Country, a case of industrial sabotage. The screenplay version is in development. I have five more thrillers story-boarded for future development.