The cache had everything a person on the run could need. Papa O’Neal had spent plenty of time opening up Viet Cong tunnels and he knew what the best ones stocked. He had simply updated the list to the times.

The first thing she donned was her body armor. The Class IIIA armor was custom made — nobody made body armor for thirteen-year-old girls — but she carried it without thought; she had spent so much time already in her life in body armor it was like a second skin. The armor was studded with pouches for ammunition and grenades, and they were all filled.

The base of the armor had latch points for more equipment and she had a holstered Colt .44 magnum on one side and a combat knife on the other. The .44 was a revolver — she just didn’t have the wrists for a Desert Eagle yet — but she was nearly as quick with a speed-loader as most people were with a magazine. She also had two quart canteens — they would supplement the camelbak built into the back of the armor — and a buttpack with an absolute minimal of survival materials.

In the pouches she had her basic load, 180 rounds of 7.62, five fragmentation grenades, five white phosphorus grenades and two smoke. She probably wouldn’t have an opportunity to use the smoke, but if she needed it she would need it bad. With the armor, pistol, ammunition pouches and grenades she was already looking at over forty-five pounds. Which was half her body-weight.

Around her neck she had a set of night-vision goggles. They were lightweight and had binocular zoom capability, both optical and electronic. As such they had it all over standard helmet monoculars. But, with the weapons sights she wasn’t sure she should carry them. And the helmet she had just put on seemed like an unnecessary extravagance. Papa O’Neal was always adamant about it when they were going in hot against Posleen, but if she was on the move she wasn’t sure she could afford the extra weight.

She thought about Papa O’Neal and a lump rose in her throat. He had always seemed… invincible, immortal. He had fought in just about every brush-fire war that existed for nearly two decades then came back to the farm when his father died. With her mother dead and Dad off with the ACS, he had been all she had and for him it seemed like a chance to make up for never being there when her father grew up.