Serve & Protect

by L. J. Breedlove

  Mark sighed. “We took fire,” he said simply. “I don’t know what the fuck is going on. This was not planned. And those are real bullets. Cleve said he’d go for help. I take it he made it since you’re here?”

  Mac shook his head. “No, we were attacked, too,” Mac said. “We made it back to camp, and Rand sent us out. We found Cleve. He didn’t make it.”

  Mark swallowed hard. He looked as if he wanted to cry, but he choked it back and nodded. “So, we have four customers with us. Two have bullet wounds. We turned off the trail too early, got into this ravine. No biggie, it just meant a harder hike to the target, right? And then they started shooting at us. We retreated back this far, but we’re trapped. Any real movement, and they fire off a shot. Like they did at you.”

  Angie opened up the pack, handed out water and sandwiches. She made Mac take a sandwich. Handed him more Mountain Dew. He drank about a third of a can, offered her a sip. “Sugar and caffeine,” he said. “Good for what ails you.”

  “Extreme fatigue?” she said with an attempt at a smile. “It might at that.”

  Mark looked in the pack, found the med kit, and pulled it out. He seemed to know what he was doing with it, and Mac turned to consider their location. He looked at the tree that had taken the shot, and backtracked to where the shooter had to be.

  We’re fish in a barrel. So, this fishy has to evolve and seek higher ground. Getting a bit punch drunk when you make bad jokes to yourself, he thought with amusement.

  The problem was the shooter was across the ravine. That was a long shot. Well, he didn’t really want to hit the target anyway.

  “One shooter? Or more?” he asked.

  “There were more,” one of the men said. Mark was tying a bandage around his arm. “First was this mass of shots coming from multiple directions. We didn’t know which way to go. But since then there’s been just the one, I think. He’s perched up there. If we look like we’re moving out, he fires. Occasionally he fires just because he’s bored.”

  “So, either he’s got a bunch of ammo with him, or he doesn’t care if he runs out,” Mac said. He thought about that. “How long ‘til dark?”

  Mark glanced at his watch. “Dusk in about an hour. Dark not long after that.”

  “OK, so here’s the deal,” Mac said. “That’s one of Norton’s deputy reserves out there. We can’t shoot back. If we kill law enforcement, they’ve every right to return fire and wipe us out. To be honest, now that they’ve killed someone, they’re going to have to kill us all anyway. They may not have figured that out yet.”

  The men nodded. They were too tired to argue, he thought. The adrenaline was long gone. “So, Mark? Norton has got to have a camp, somewhere. A base of operations. Where?”

  Mark rocked back on his haunches and considered that. He’d put a tourniquet on the man with the leg wound. “Probably where we usually camp. You know we were told to move our base farther back? Ken said he was told to do it because there were hikers complaining to the rangers about all the gunfire. Made sense, Ken doesn’t like all the weapons fire either. But the trips pay well. Anyway, so we set up a new site. But Norton isn’t skilled enough to set up a camp out of nothing. He’d use the site he knows. And there’s porta-potty and a generator still there, I think.”

  He thought about it and nodded to himself. Mac showed him the map. “Where?”

  Mark looked at it. “This is our camp,” Mark said. “These are the three routes we planned out. We’re the middle one, you all were on the southern one. Ken took the northern one. The other campsite is just south of the southern route.” He pointed at a spot on the map.

  Mac studied it. “So, if we’d stayed on the main trail this morning we would have hit the old camp.”

  Mark nodded.

  “How far from here?” Mac asked.

  “Depends. If you backtrack this trail and turn south here,” he said, pointing at a spot on the map, “you’ll hit the trail you took this morning, and you can follow it right into the camp. Probably take you an hour-and-a-half, maybe two hours. But it requires some overland hiking, breaking trail. If you go all the way back to camp and then set back out again? You’re looking at maybe three hours, but you won’t get lost either.”

  Mac looked at the map. “And if I go through here?” he said, drawing pretty much a straight line from where they were to the old campsite.

  “Probably an hour,” Mark said, but he shook his head. “You’d have to break trail the whole way and navigate solely by compass.”

  “I was recon,” Mac said briefly. “The compass isn’t the problem; it’s the terrain. And I’m a whole lot more familiar with the terrain now than I was 24 hours ago.”

  Angie grinned at him. He couldn’t help smiling back.

  “So, tell me if I went straight through, how steep? Are there ravines I’d need to go around? What’s it like?”

  “Not bad, really,” Mark said slowly, tracing the route with his finger, as if that helped him visualize the countryside. “No real inclines. This is the only ravine to speak of. But it’s dense undergrowth, man, and you can’t get any perspective, you know what I mean?”

  Mac did. It would be like navigating through a green sandstorm. He wouldn’t be able to see farther than a few feet in front of him. Well, he’d made it through real sandstorms, this wouldn’t be worse.

  The only way to solve this thing was to reach Norton. Get him to call his men back. Or they would be under attack all night. Helpless to fight back. That was the part he hated. He didn’t like being a sitting duck in someone’s shooting range.

  He looked at the spot the shooter was coming from. Looked at the tree the man had shot. Well, the least he could do was scare the bastard out of there, he thought. He slung his rifle across his back, leaped up and dove behind the tree. Another shot rang out.

  Got you bastard, he thought. He jumped as high as he could, grabbed a branch and pulled himself up and onto the branch. He scrambled up the tree a bit farther, as far as the branches looked sturdy enough to hold his weight.

  The shooter fired again. Mac ignored him. He was either a bad shot, or he didn’t really want to hit him. Probably a bad shot, but Mac wasn’t going to take chances. He propped his Remington along a branch. He sunk into the moment. All the time in the world, he thought.

  He hadn’t been the sniper on his team. But he was a decent shooter. Just not as good as Danny had been. He winced. Danny was dead. And he had died here in the States for a man’s ambition and lust for power. He let it go. Let everything go. And then he saw a flash off the shooter’s gun as he shifted slightly. He smiled grimly, eased the tension on the trigger and fired.

  He fired again. Don’t hit the bastard, he chanted to himself. Just panic him and get him out of there. He took a third shot. Damn, that was a bit close, he thought. Oops.

  And then there was the sound of a man crashing through the undergrowth. Mac took another shot in the direction of the noise for good measure.

  And then he slid down the tree. “OK,” he said. He found the bullets in the pack, reloaded. “Hope to God there’s just the one. Let’s get you guys out of here.”

  “Why didn’t we try that?” one of the men demanded.

  Mark snorted. “Because I’m not good enough of a shot to come close,” he said. “And you couldn’t climb the tree to start with. Just because he made it look easy? It wasn’t.”

  The man mumbled something, but the other three men ignored him.

  Mark had made a makeshift crutch for the guy with the leg wound. With some assistance they’d get back, he thought. Mark seemed to be sensible enough.

  He looked at Angie. She smiled. “You’re going to leave me behind, aren’t you,” she said wistfully.

  He considered it. No doubt he could make better time without her, although she’d been a real trooper. But his heart about stopped when he thought of all the things that could happen to her if he wasn’t around.

  “Your call, babe,” he said finally.

  Her e
yes widened and she grinned. “Really? Then I’m going,” she said. “I want to be there when you take that bastard Norton down.”

  “Yeah, still haven’t gotten that part figured out,” he admitted. “Kinda winging it here. What do you think? The straight-as-the-crow-flies route or the backtrack-to-the-trail route?”

  She looked up at the sun, and glanced at her watch. “We’ve got about two hours of daylight,” she said. “And then it’s going to get dark, really dark and really fast. Remember last night? So, it’s not about distance, it’s about speed.”

  Mac nodded. “Mark, take the pack with you,” he ordered. “Tell Rand and Ken where we went. OK? Rand and Ken.” These guys would also know, but nothing he could do about that.

  Mark nodded, with a quick glance at his team. He didn’t trust anyone either. Good.

  “You’re going to find Cleve,” Mac continued. “Make a mental note of where he is, because someone will have to come after him later. No way to pack him out now.”

  Mark nodded again. “Which way are you going?” he asked.

  “Speed,” Mac said. “We’re going straight there.” And he hoped to God he could trust Mark’s intel. And that Mark wouldn’t set them up or call Norton and sell them out. Or any of the myriad of ways things could go wrong when he couldn’t trust his allies and he couldn’t shoot his enemies.

  Chapter 22

  They were moving rapidly, as fast as the undergrowth would let them. Angie was navigating; Mac was on guard. He thought she was getting really good at this. She followed an animal trail for a ways that allowed them to make a bit better time, and seemed to know when it was time to strike off of it again. Mac trusted her to get them there. His job was to get them there in one piece. He was looking, searching for sign of Norton’s men, and didn’t see any. Didn’t know quite what that meant. Surely Norton would have a perimeter guard around his base camp? Surely?

  Of course, there was no guarantee that they were actually headed to Norton’s base, he thought grimly, although he thought Mark’s reasoning was sound. In fact, that was probably why Sensei had moved Ken Bryson deeper in. He knew how to set up a camp and had the staff and equipment to do it. Norton got to use the old camp as his base.

  But what was Sensei’s end game here? A war game? Maybe. But Janet’s observations kept coming back to him. Norton challenging Sensei? Or, Sensei seeing that day coming was using this to take out Norton — or at least set him back. Was Sensei using him as his weapon to do that? He rather thought he might be. And he wasn’t anyone’s weapon, not anymore.

  Angie stopped. It was getting dark. She studied the map while she still could. “OK,” she said softly. “I think we’re about 10 minutes from the site. But I don’t hear anything, Mac. Wouldn’t we? Seems like we’d hear them talking or fixing dinner. Something. Did I do something wrong in getting us here?”

  “I don’t think so,” Mac replied, keeping his own voice barely audible. He wondered at Angie’s prior job. She knew not to whisper, just to talk softly. She knew about things like sheriff vs police chiefs. He’d assumed she’d worked in photography or on a newspaper. But now, he wondered. He’d ask when they were safely out of this mess.

  “Let’s go find out,” he said with a grin. He took a look at the map then the compass, and he took the lead in the direction Angie had been heading.

  Mac could smell the camp before he saw it. A mix of latrine chemicals, gasoline from vehicles, mankind smells. It wasn’t a bad thing, really, and barely noticeable. But after spending most of the day deep in the woods, he noticed it. He slowed to a crawl and motioned Angie to stop. She nodded and looked grateful for the reprieve. She was done in, he thought, and for good reason. He didn’t have much energy left himself.

  Actually, he didn’t have any energy left, either, he acknowledged. He just had been trained to keep pushing on regardless. See the hill, take the hill, and the next hill, and the next. So, he crept closer until he could see the camp.

  Well the good news was that this was their base camp. There were SUVs parked there, and some tents were set up. The perplexing news was that he didn’t see anybody. Had they left their camp undefended? Surely not. But then, his folks had only left Rand behind. Of course, they hadn’t been expecting an attack. Well, maybe these guys weren’t either. Mac grinned at that thought. But he still watched.

  Angie crawled up beside him. She looked out at the camp and frowned. “Empty?” she asked.

  He grinned again, this time with a bit more amusement in it. “Time for mischief and mayhem?”

  She laughed. “What do you have in mind?”

  He considered that. “I want to take a vehicle,” he said. “Hopefully someone left keys in one of the rigs. I want water, and I want a radio, either a hand unit, or if God is good, a base unit. I was hoping to find Norton, but I’ll settle.”

  “OK,” she said. “I want a sandwich. And the porta-potty. And caffeine. So those are my objectives while you do you.”

  He laughed again. “Fix me a sandwich while you’re at it. And the caffeine too. But I go in first.”

  She grinned at him. “Have at it,” she said. She pulled the Ruger from her sweatshirt pocket. “Fire once at anyone who comes near me. Fire in the air to make sure you heard. Throw the gun at my attacker. Run. Wasn’t that what you said?”

  “You’ve got it,” he said. And then stepped into the clearing.

  Angie watched him. It was like watching a shadow move, she thought, unconsciously echoing what others had thought before her and bestowed him with Shadow as a nickname. She was fascinated by him, she realized. Oh, she liked him, was attracted to him, and rather thought that might go somewhere. But more than that, she was intrigued by him as a puzzle, a complex one. Or maybe as a story? She knew what her camera was telling her: he was a dangerous man. He had told her as much. A man with no tells? She knew there were those at the Examiner who were afraid of him, and others who truly considered him a sociopath. Janet’s leashed killer, one reporter had said after too many drinks one night. Watching him out here, she wasn’t sure they were wrong. But she also saw the side of him that had taken great personal risks to rescue men he didn’t even like very much. The protective side that he showed her. And the listener.

  The listener was a surprise, really. She hadn’t expected him to be that kind of reporter. Most of his stuff was facts. Although she’d gone back and read the Howard Parker pieces, and listened to those interview tapes online — which had been an inspired editorial decision in her opinion. And again, there was the listener. She suspected these stories would be full of the people he was talking to, and she looked forward to reading them.

  It was also interesting to see him in the context of other dangerous men. She wasn’t the least bit fooled: Rand, Ken Bryson, Craig Anderson? They were also dangerous men. And they respected Mac. Accepted his leadership even. The only ones who challenged him were the wannabes.

  She realized she’d lost sight of him, and wasn’t sure if that was because he had moved around the tents, or because he had just gone very still. She pulled her mind away from her thoughts to focus on the here and now. To see. To hear. To use all of her senses to stay safe.

  She saw movement rather than Mac. He raised a hand and motioned her in. She scrambled over the last bit of salal and entered the clearing.

  “No one’s here,” Mac said, with a shake of his head. “Not even someone to start supper. Weird?”

  She considered that. “Depends on how many men he brought out here,” she said. “If there were fewer than a dozen? He’d need them all to take our teams out.”

  He considered that and nodded. “That would actually be good news,” he admitted. “I’d been thinking more like 20 men. There’s 70 deputy reserves.”

  She winced. “Food,” she announced, and she went to look.

  Mac watched her go with a half-smile. He went to find an SUV with keys. And sure enough, they’d left the keys under the front seat — not because they were stupid, but because it was the smar
t thing to do. If things went to shit for them, they didn’t want to get back here and find out that the men they were forced to leave behind were the ones with keys in their pockets. But still he grinned. This was going to be fun.

  He loaded up the water. It would accomplish two things — give them water back at their own camp, and deprive these bastards at the same time. He felt like he was in some grand game of capture the flag. He found both a handheld and the base radio. Loaded those up.

  Angie handed him a sandwich. He ate it hungrily. She’d also found some Pepsi.

  “No Mountain Dew,” she said, laughter in her voice.

  He grinned. “Be kind of creepy if they did.”

  “You going to slash tires and such like they did ours?”

  He shook his head. “Nope,” he said. “I’m taking all the keys.” And depending on how this all turned out? He could give them back, or he could make them replace the fobs. And that was expensive. He grinned at the thought.

  “I found something,” she said slowly. “You need to take a look at it, I think.”

  He followed her back into the area they had their supplies and ammo.

  “Is that what I think it is?” she asked, pointing at small stack of what looked like bricks — except for the C-4 clearly stamped on the sides.

  “Shit,” Mac said. He looked around, looking for blasting caps or detonators. He tossed the whole area, without finding them. “Fuck, is someone carrying them?” he muttered.

  “Mac?” Angie asked worried.

  “Yeah, it’s C-4,” he said tersely. “Stable enough like that. It’s the damn detonators I can’t see. And that’s enough C-4 to blow up both camps and a whole lot of dead bodies.”

  “Hard to explain that away!”

  How would he do it? He thought about it. “All these weapons?” he said. “I’d say something happened, and the weapons caches exploded. And since Norton has every intention on being the first responder to the explosions? He probably could get away with it. Although that’s a hell of a lot of C-4 to get that done. You could bring down the whole mountain.”