Renewal 9 - Delay Tactics by Jf Perkins Page B

had done her job too well. She was standing in the woods overlooking the Duck River by the old green bridge east of Shelbyville. She figured that after the mess she had made of their convoy on the other side of town, a smart man would have circled out by Beech Grove to leave Bedford County by a less direct route. Thanks to the spotters and runners she had deployed along the highways, she knew that Gary Tucker Jr. was not a smart man. She said a little prayer of thanks that she wasn’t tangling with the Grand Dragon himself. Any man who could control two counties would make for a tougher challenge.
    Her second concern, now that she knew Tucker was bringing his convoy this way, was that they might not make it before nightfall. Tam’s tactical mind knew that the darkness would make her trap even more deadly to the Dragon army, but her selfish and angry side just wanted to watch the show. After enough glances at the sun to make her family as nervous as she was, Tam finally heard the distant sound of engines growing slowly in the distance.
     There was one final junction where Tucker could choose to take the back roads north. She had backup plans in place to hit the Dragon army either way, but she would only see the trap sprung if the enemy took Highway 41A towards Tullahoma. She tried to imagine how Tucker thought that taking a turn through Tullahoma was the best idea, and she concluded that he wanted to end up on the side of Manchester where the wealthy families were clustered. Possibly he was just trying to avoid passing too close to Teeny Town, where the engines of the convoy would surely be heard. Either way, she saw the yellow flag waving from a high spot in the distance and pumped her fist in excitement. The Dragon army was coming.
    The horses were being watched back in the woods. Three hundred of Tam’s family and friends were crowed in as close to the river as they could get without being spotted from the highway. The bridge was sabotaged, of course. Tam’s old Uncle Chet, who had spent his entire life as a metalworker, had supervised the effort to cut through steel in strategic places on the rusty framework of the bridge -  in ways that she hoped would cause the bridge to collapse under the load of all those trucks. She had given some thought to the value of the bridge before she made the call to destroy it. The truth was, according to Chet, that the bridge was on its last legs, no matter what they did. He figured if it didn’t collapse today, it wouldn’t be too long before it could collapse when someone friendly was using it. That made the decision easy.
    Not long after the flag signal from her rider, she saw the first of the trucks appear by the old gravel plant. They were grinding up the road at a stately twelve miles per hour, using both lanes in a double line of trucks. She made a downward motion with her arm to remind her people to stay out of sight, and to quell the excited buzz that was beginning to build behind her. Her people were well trained and dropped into silence. The convoy pulled within a hundred feet of the bridge. Tam watched for any sign of slowing. If it had been her, she knew she would stop and inspect every bridge they crossed, but to her relief, the convoy maintained its speed right onto the bridge.
    She watched the lead truck through her binoculars and saw that Tucker was talking rapidly about something. She noticed that he was in a truck that was decidedly less impressive than the one he had been occupying earlier. She wondered how he had survived the barriers. In less than a minute, Tucker’s vehicle was safely across, and Tam looked at Chet. He spit tobacco juice on the ground and shrugged back at her.
    “It didn’t collapse,” Tam said.
    “Give it time,” was Chet’s reply.
    “The sooner the better.”
    “It’ll happen,” Chet  said with another emphatic spit.
    The trucks kept passing, and Tam was beginning to panic. She had a third trap planned but if she didn’t thin the