Serve & Protect

by L. J. Breedlove

  “I know Rand,” Norton said disgustedly.

  Tim looked at the sheriff he’d admired so much just hours ago, and then back at Mac. “I hear you,” he said. Craig watched the exchange with narrowed eyes, but didn’t say anything. Mac nodded.

  “OK, then,” Mac said to Craig. “You get these guys out of here, and I’ll come have another Mountain Dew at your shop one of these days.”

  “It will be there for you,” Craig said. “They’ve been there since I moved in 10 years ago. Probably be there when I move out if you don’t come drink them.”

  Mac laughed.

  Chapter 26

  Mac sorted through his pack with practiced speed and thoroughness. What did he need? Really need? Warmth. Rifle. Ammo. He hesitated. His reporter’s notebook. He could hear Janet’s voice asking him when he set out after Howard Parker: Are you a reporter or a Marine on this one? Still a good question, he conceded. For the next few hours, he was a Marine. But he had a life he wanted to come home to — as a reporter who might have found a girl to love. He wasn’t always going to be a Marine on a mission.

  Just for the next few hours as he got this sorted out.

  He snorted. And then he became the wolf — that was how Stan Warren described him, a wolf who had realized that the sheep had it pretty damn good with their regular meals and warm safe barn. He didn’t don sheep’s clothing to harm the sheep but to join them for a bit. But this was the price you paid for joining the sheep for three squares and a warm place to sleep: you started liking some of them. He liked Rand. Kevin here, even Tim and Craig. Ken? He respected the hell out of that old wolf.

  And, of course, there was Angie. He thought briefly of her. Her smile, her abilities as a news photographer, the amazing way she’d kept pace with him yesterday. Was there any other way to make it down this mountain to her than this?

  Well, he could probably abandon these people, slide out and make it down. It would be a damn cold hike, and it would be tough, but he could. But he wouldn’t be a person worth much if he did it. He would be someone else.

  Because in all the things he’d done, both in the military and out, he’d never abandoned those entrusted into his care.

  He’d never betrayed that trust and wouldn’t do so now.

  These men were trusting him to get them out of this mess. And he would, or die along with them, because that was who he was.

  And at the end of the day? He liked who he was.

  So, he stuffed ammo into his pockets. Put his pistol in one. His knife was strapped to his leg above his boot. He drank a Mountain Dew, toasting Craig with it and making him laugh.

  He gave Kevin his larger pack and told him to empty his small backpack — his son’s pack.

  Kevin looked puzzled. “What are you going to do?”

  “Watch,” he said. He pulled out the fluorescent strip and re-attached it to the small pack.

  Kevin looked puzzled still, but he obediently filled the bigger pack with the few things he thought they’d need. Some food, warm layers, some first aid items. He went through the belongings of everyone there with a thoroughness that made Mac grin.

  The kid had sand, he thought. He might recommend him to Ken.

  Kevin shouldered the pack, picked up his own rifle, and nodded at Mac. Mac looked at the weapon. “Are you as bad a shot as he implied?” Mac asked.

  “I’m not a bad shot at all,” he said. “I’ve been hunting deer and game in these mountains since I was a kid. I’m just not going to shoot at a human being.”

  “Good enough,” Mac said. “And if it’s him or you? Or him or me?”

  “I’ll shoot to scare him off,” Kevin said without hesitating, an indication he’d been thinking about it. He took a deep breath, let it out and then nodded. “And if that doesn’t work? Yeah, I’ll shoot to kill.”

  Mac just nodded. He hoped Kevin wasn’t tested. Hoped if he was, that second shot was quick enough to save Mac’s life or his own. But the important part was the decision. The strategy. Now Kevin knew what he would do.

  And so did Mac.

  “OK, so here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to make a run for it the way we came,” Mac said. “And I’m going to hang this backpack on a tree limb for our shooter to get in some target practice. You are going to ground and become a black hump like these guys have been. Stay down. I’ll come for you.”

  Kevin frowned, thought it through and nodded.

  “Let’s go,” Mac said. He nodded at Craig, who nodded back.

  And the two of them moved out at an easy lope, that allowed them to pick up their feet out of the snow that had accumulated. Mac thought there was probably six inches now. It would make it easy for him to track someone.

  Unfortunately, it made him easy to be tracked. And if the shooter was smart enough to stay put? There’d be no tracks. Well, they could play what if games, or he could go find out. So, in a kind of a staggering lope, they pushed out of the copse of trees they’d been hiding in and made for another copse ahead. Mac had the backpack flung over his shoulder feeling much like he was wearing a bullseye on his back. A bulletproof one, he reminded himself. Maybe he should approach Janet about replacing reporter bags with school backpacks.

  She’d probably make him wear a Spiderman one.

  He barely heard the shot until it smashed into the tree ahead of him. Craig was right, he had a suppressor. Mac ran toward that tree, hung the backpack about where a man might crouch to look back and kept on moving. He caught up with Kevin. “Wait here,” he said, pushing him further out of sight behind a tree a bit further on. “Don’t shoot me by mistake.”

  Kevin grinned.

  Mac did his centering routine, and then he studied the tree the bullet had hit, figured the trajectory of where it must have come from. He headed uphill from his present location, angling around where he thought the shooter was. Or had been. He wanted to be uphill from the bastard for a change, he thought.

  It was slow going. He moved from tree to tree, hiding behind clusters of shrubs as they appeared before him in the falling snow. He wished he had on goggles. Should have looked for some among the packs. But if Kevin had found some he would have snagged them, so apparently snow hadn’t been on anyone’s forecast. He kept heading uphill.

  The temptation was always to turn too fast, to think you’d gone far enough up the triangle when you hadn’t. Hunting men took patience, not something he’d gone into the Marine Corps with, but something he’d learned in the mountains of Afghanistan. Now there were some patient hunters. To outwait an ISIS group was hard. Hard for an American who needed advertising to interrupt his television show so he could get munchies rather than wait for the end of the show. Hard for Americans who broke time down into minutes and seconds.

  So, he pushed himself further up the hill, pretending that the shooter was a wily old Taliban militant. An ISIS insurgent bedded in for the night. And then he hit a rock escarpment and knew he was as far uphill as he was going. He headed to his left, west, he thought, but only because he like most people in the Northwest tended to associate uphill with north. And here it might be true, he thought. Although it could also be a west facing slope. Didn’t matter, as long as he plotted the turns in his head and didn’t forget how to get back to Kevin. Because getting lost out here was as much a death sentence today as a bullet.

  He found a protected spot along the escarpment and stopped. Then used his scope to survey his location thankful the snow was letting up a bit improving visibility. He spotted the SUV and realized he was “west” of it as planned, good, he thought. He looked for the shooter. Looked for anything that didn’t look like trees and shrubs or snow. He was patient. He had all the time he needed. Look. Look, he thought. What do you see?

  He was starting to shake with cold when he spotted him. Mac smiled grimly. The shooter had himself a perch in a tree, up out of the snow. Smart. But it meant he also had been maintaining his balance on a limb for a while now. It wasn’t going to take much to make him fall out of the t
ree whether dead or just wounded.

  Bad news, though because it meant Mac wasn’t going to get a second shot at him if he only winged him on the first shot. He shrugged mentally. Winged and running was as good as dead. Maybe not as satisfying, but he wasn’t going to pack out a dead man. And there wasn’t room in the SUV either.

  So, Mac took position, going down the mental preparation checklist for a long shot. He rested his rifle on a bare tree branch and slowed his breathing and heart rate, then slowly squeezed the trigger.

  You could certainly hear his shot, Mac thought with a snort, as the sound echoed in the small canyon. He saw the shooter fall out of the tree and headed that way, too eager, too impatient, and the shooter popped up firing his rifle, and Mac felt the bullet hit his leg.

  “Damn it,” he muttered as he went down hard against several boulders. He shook off the pain to his ribs and head, sighted his own rifle and shot back at the man. The man turned and ran, headed west, holding his arm. So, Mac had hit him, good, he thought. Mac fired again, keeping the man running, running away from the SUV. A short time later, he could hear Craig and the guys getting it back on the road, moving out. Mac didn’t even try to rejoin them. He wouldn’t make it to them before they left, so he might as well take his time.

  He pulled out his knife, cut a branch and pulled himself up with it. He looped his rifle over his shoulder, and slowly started down the hill toward Kevin, who damn well better be waiting for him, or he was going to make it out of the mountains alive just so he could hunt him down and kill him.

  Kevin had not only waited, but come after him, Mac found when he staggered and fell for the second time.

  “You’re hurt?” Kevin said, as he replaced the stick with his own shoulder and levered Mac up onto his feet.

  “He got me,” Mac admitted. “Took a bullet to my calf, and yes, it hurts like a motherfucker.”

  “Let me look at it,” Kevin said.

  Mac shook his head. “Wrap it tight,” he said. “We’ve got to keep moving. How far are we from where you guys camped?”

  Kevin looked around, taking his bearings. “So that’s what you were planning,” he said. “I couldn’t figure it out. No way you wanted to hike out.”

  “Not if there’s an SUV sitting not far from here,” Mac agreed. “Although if I blew it up when I set off the C-4? I’m going to cry.”

  Kevin snorted. “Good news? We’re maybe 20 minutes away. Bad news? With that leg? It’s going to be a long 20 minutes.”

  Mac snorted. “Wrap the son of a bitch tight then,” he said. “It’s getting colder.”

  “Nightfall,” Kevin agreed. “But even if we just have to sit it out, we’re better off there than anywhere else right now.” He wrapped Mac’s leg, tying the bandage tight. And the two of them started hobbling toward where Kevin said the sheriff’s camp was located.

  Mac was fading in and out of coherency by the time they reached the camp. He kept moving forward, but half the time he thought he was in a sand storm. Felt the same. Strange how the sting of wind-driven snow felt like wind-driven sand, he thought fuzzily. Kevin didn’t argue with him, just kept him moving on. Not even when Mac called him Danny a couple of times.

  They limped into the camp, and Mac didn’t even care that they were sitting ducks if anyone was waiting for them. No one appeared. No one shot at them. Kevin put him in the SUV which had escaped him blowing up the enemy arsenal. Always check to make sure you don’t need anything before you blow the fucker, he heard an old sergeant lecture him. “I hear ya,” he muttered. He heard another boom go off. The other arsenal? He wondered. Were there still others up here?

  Could be, he thought in a moment when he actually remembered who he was and where he was. “Not doing well, kid,” he said.

  Kevin snorted. “Anyone else would be unconscious and dying about two miles back,” he said. “Drink this. Yes, it’s coffee, but it’s hot. It’s laced with sugar. And God damn it, drink!”

  Mac obeyed. Didn’t taste as bad as he remembered coffee tasting. Still smelled like shit. He’d drank worse things. Afghani tea for one. Kevin handed him a sandwich and when Mac protested he wasn’t hungry and they should leave, Kevin just ordered him to eat it.

  “Yes, Lieutenant,” Mac muttered. Damn snot-nosed lieutenants always thought they knew more than they really did.

  He was inside the SUV now. The heater was running, and it felt glorious. Danny was eating a sandwich too. Mac wondered where the Lieutenant had gone. He wasn’t tracking very well if he’d lost track of his lieutenant. Never lose one of those guys, the next one they sent you would be even dumber than the one you lost.

  He wondered who the guy was, not Danny, like he thought. Danny would be talking, nothing stopped that man from talking. Not even a sand storm and his mouth full. “Danny? We should go?”

  The man in the driver’s seat — not Danny, Danny was dead, a voice in the back of his head said — nodded and started slowly down the mountain.

  Well if he wasn’t Danny, who was he? Mac demanded of the voice. The voice couldn’t remember either. Mac snorted, silently satisfied to have gotten the better of the argument. But he couldn’t argue that Danny was alive. Even if he didn’t know where he was and who was driving, he remembered mourning his friend’s death. Holding him as he died.

  “He didn’t want to die alone,” he explained, to the not-Danny who was driving. “Said no one should die by themselves.”

  “I’m not letting you die either,” the young man said. He kept his eyes focused on the road and the snow. They were going very slowly. Mac approved.

  “That’s good,” Mac said. “I don’t want to die. I haven’t made love to Angie yet.”

  The not-Danny grinned. “You hold onto that thought,” he said. “And let me drive.”

  Mac nodded, and he held onto that thought as he lost consciousness.

  Chapter 27

  Mac had spent the first week after he blew up “half of the North Cascades” in a hospital with an officer standing outside his room. FBI Agent Stan Warren wouldn’t tell him whether the guard was for his protection — or whether he was under arrest.

  “Makes no difference until you heal up,” Warren said when he stopped in on day two to check on him. He listened to Mac fume about wanting out of there. “You’ve got a concussion and two broken ribs, Mac, not to mention the bullet wound in your leg. Remember that thing?” he said. “Just lay low for a bit, OK?”

  Mac grumbled until Janet showed up and shoved his laptop into his hands. “Write,” she ordered. “I need the stories. You need something to do. And the nurses will thank me for this. So, write.”

  He did. He wrote the profile of Pete Norton, Skinhead to Sheriff, and knew that was going to be the headline, even if it made his eyes cross to type it. Norton was in FBI custody. He was telling everything he knew about Sensei, about the whole militia Sensei was building.

  Unfortunately, he didn’t know who Sensei was. Rand dropped by that afternoon to tell him about what Norton had to say.

  Mac was deep into his second story about the rise of white supremacists among the white middle class when he showed up. He set aside his computer to catch up on the investigation.

  “On the record?” Mac said.

  “Hell no,” Rand said. He was out and about on administrative leave pending a review. Janet hadn’t done that to him — he didn’t think. The holy trinity might have, he conceded, and Janet just hadn’t told him.

  “But we don’t know who the damn head of it all is,” Rand said disgustedly.

  Mac grunted.

  When Angie showed up, he was more enthusiastic. She had lost 10 pounds, she told him, as if that was a good thing. He disagreed, but he didn’t say so. He’d learned a few things along the way about women and weight. He listened to her chatter on about all the gossip, and how her photos came out. She pulled up a server access on his laptop and showed him, sitting on the edge of his bed.

  She smelled good. And her fuchsia hair streak was back. He want
ed to kiss her, but then he saw the pictures she was pulling up, and he was temporarily diverted.

  “Jesus, Angie,” he said, letting them cycle through on his computer. “You’re amazing.”

  She grinned. She sat there next to him, pointing out the photos she thought were best. Photos of the clients, of Craig Anderson and him carrying out the stretcher, of Cleve left behind, of Rand setting up camp and drinking coffee. Of the weapons. Of the two camps. Hundreds of photos, Mac thought. If he just wrote the cutlines, they’d have all the story they needed. She’d win awards for this. Maybe even the Pulitzer. And wouldn’t that shove a stick up Steve Whitaker’s ass?

  When visiting hours were ending, she kissed him. “Get better,” she ordered. “I have plans. Plans they won’t let me do in here.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said smiling.

  He looked through the photos again, and then he wrote the chronological story about what had happened the previous weekend. He was still writing when Rodriguez came by at 10 p.m.

  “You stirred things up a bit,” Rodriguez observed, sitting in the chair next to his bed.

  Mac laughed. “So, I hear,” he said. “Get me out of here?”

  “Out of my hands,” Rodriguez said with a shrug. “Up to your doctors.”

  “And Stan Warren?”

  “Probably,” Rodriguez agreed. “You came close to buying your six feet of earth this time, Mac.”

  Mac nodded. “I wasn’t sure I was going to make it home,” he agreed. “Worse, I was afraid I wasn’t going to get Angie out of there.”