by Peter Nealen
The far side of the hill was as empty as the draw, and while I might have been able to find some microterrain to conceal my approach, even in the sage and bunchgrass that provided all the ground cover there was to see, it was doubtful that my adversaries could. I figured I could be fairly confident that whatever military training was seeping into the world of the Latino gangbanger, through the likes of MS-13 and Los Zetas, open-ground infiltration was not one of the skills being taught.
I paused behind another outcrop, taking a second to plan my next move. I needed to get back to The Ranch. First priority had to be getting to a secure location, and that was the only truly secure location for Praetorians in the world.
I needed my truck; it would be a long haul on foot. I carefully moved back around the hill to my previous vantage point, stopping and waiting to watch and listen. I didn’t want to run to the truck only to go barreling into the last two gangsters’ fire. They had some ground to cover before they could do anything with their pistols, presuming they hadn’t gone back to get more firepower out of the car, but since I was by myself, I had to err on the side of caution.
But as I scanned the draw, I saw nothing but the two corpses lying where they’d fallen. Somebody out at the nearby farm had to have heard the shots, but unlike a lot of urban areas, the sound of gunshots out in the open wasn’t a terribly significant thing out there. I could have been somebody out plinking or shooting coyotes.
In a way, that was just what I’d done.
There was still no sign of their buddies. I waited for a few minutes, my eyes skimming over the slopes opposite and craning my head out just enough to see below me. Nothing. The draw was just as empty as before. They must have scrammed as soon as they saw the first two catch it.
I held my position a little while longer, then started back down toward the truck. They may have run, but I wasn’t putting money on them making their retreat permanent. Not only was I already a target that they’d been paid for, unless I missed my guess, but I’d just smoked two of their homies. They’d want revenge, if nothing else.
I half-ran, half-slid down the slope, coming to a halt against the cab of my truck in a small cloud of dust. I hadn’t shut the door, so I tossed my rifle in on the seat and followed it without bothering to strip off my chest rig. I pulled the door shut with a bang as I jammed the key in the ignition, stomped on the clutch and brake, and twisted.
That old, faithful truck started with a roar, and in moments I was moving again, bouncing and swaying toward the far end of the draw, watching the mirrors for any sign of my attackers.
My rear view stayed empty even as I rounded the hill to the west, passing an abandoned farmer’s shed. I spotted the dirt road through the fields and made for it as fast as I dared. It was a bumpy ride, and I about knocked my head against the ceiling of the cab a couple of times.
Once I got on the road, it got easier. I turned north through the fields, and headed up to the top of Polecat Bench. I’d have to be careful on my route back, and make sure I wasn’t dragging anyone along with me.
It did occur to me, as I planned my route, that evasive driving might be pointless. If they could find me in Powell, they had to know where The Ranch was.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. While I had been assured that steps had been taken to discipline the members of the Network (or the Cicero Group, as the more dramatic members liked to call it) who had leaked our information to the bad guys while we were in Mexico in the hopes of using us as bait, I still didn’t know just how much had been leaked in the first place, or even if the leak had been entirely plugged. We knew where a lot of the bodies were buried, and we had demonstrated a willingness to violently stomp all over cunning plans hatched in back rooms and restaurants, far from where the bleeding and the dying was happening. There were definitely people we had worked for who considered us a liability.
That said, we had plenty of enemies outside the Network, as well. We’d spent the last several years leaving a growing swathe of dead jihadists, rogue operators, and narcos behind us. For the most part, until Mexico, we’d kept our profile low, at least outside of certain circles. But sooner or later, the butcher’s bill comes due, no matter how righteous the killings.
I was afraid of what I was going to find as I drove north.
The Ranch sat on about two thousand acres, backed up on the Beartooth Mountains. It had once been a genuine cattle ranch, up until a combination of the economic downturn, the ever-increasing costs of ranching, and the younger generation’s lack of enthusiasm for raising cows forced the aging owner to sell. He hadn’t been running cattle for some time before he sold the land. Some of us felt a little bad about buying his land and not actually ranching on it, as he evidently had hoped that somebody would take up the torch when he was gone, since his kids wouldn’t.
But we’d turned it into our base of operations and training center. While we might have been sneaky and underhanded when it came to getting the job done overseas, for this place we’d crossed our t’s and dotted our i’s. All the requisite paperwork was filled out for a tactical training facility, not unlike Blackwater’s old one at Moyock. In the interests of increasing our security and being neighborly, we had even actively cultivated a close relationship with the local sheriff, having the department out to train and shoot with us regularly.
The entry gate was closed and appeared abandoned as I pulled up. I knew better. I’d helped put the concealed, hardened guard posts in myself, so I knew where to look. Even then, I couldn’t see anyone, which was kind of the whole point.
I was already on the phone. “I’m here,” I said, holding the phone with two fingers in my wheel hand.
“Roger,” the voice came from the speaker. “I see you. You sure you’re clean?”
“As a whistle,” I replied. I had been very careful and very watchful on the way back. That was actually putting it mildly. I had been on edge, poised to go into aggressive evasive driving, while ready to draw my .45 and dump the mag into any vehicle I saw that looked remotely suspicious. None of us who had deployed as Praetorian Security (I’m sorry, Solutions) shooters ever quite turned it off, anymore. But even so, this had been a nastier shock than I’d expected.
One of the younger guys stepped out onto the road. He was wearing plates and carrying an AR-10 slung in front of him. He peered at me until I waved, then unbarred and swung the gate open. I rolled through, pausing just inside with my window down.
After he secured the gate, he walked up to my window. “Sorry, Mr. Stone,” he said. “I didn’t recognize you at first.”
“Don’t apologize,” I told him. “You did what you were supposed to.” I glanced at the glorified pillboxes set in the brush beside the road. From inside, I could see the men with rifles watching through the firing slits. “Has there been any activity out this way? Any probes, or anything suspicious?”
The kid shook his head. Holy hell, he barely looked old enough to shave, much less be a vet who had done his four years in the mil and gotten out. Or was I just getting that damned old? “We haven’t seen anything but you guys who were out coming back in in a hell of a hurry,” he said. “What’s going on? All I’ve heard is that something’s happened and we had to go to stand-to.”
“You know about as much as I do at the moment,” I told him. “Somebody tried to jump me out in town, and it sounds like I wasn’t the only one. I’ll make sure the word gets passed down once we know more. Just keep your eyes peeled.”
“Roger that,” he said. I waved vaguely at him and put the truck back in gear, heading up the gravel road toward the main house.
Larry and Nick were on the porch as I pulled up, both kitted up and armed. Larry was a bald giant of a man with a dark beard that showed streaks of gray these days. He’d trimmed it down from his “scary murder hobo” beard to a goatee, but that didn’t make the six-foot-five mountain of a man any less intimidating. He looked like a monster, which, conveniently enough, was his callsign. Of course, his love of B-grade monster
movies and action-horror novels had gotten him the callsign, but most people outside the team wouldn’t realize that.
Nick was not a small man, but next to Larry, he looked like he was. Almost half a head shorter, he was still heavily built, though his brown hair and beard were also starting to show a little gray. His eyes were set in a semi-permanent squint that still saw a lot more than it seemed.
Nick blew out a relieved breath as I pulled up and piled out. “Have we got everybody?” I asked, even as I dragged my rifle out of the cab with me.
Larry shook his head, his mouth tightening to a thin line inside his goatee. “Hal’s on the way back, but we’ve had no contact with Jim or Little Bob,” he said. “They’re the only ones still out.”
I fought back the sinking, hollow feeling in my gut. Jim had been my assistant team lead for years now. Little Bob had been with us since we’d first gone into Kurdistan. Both were solid professionals and good friends. If they were out of contact, it could only be because things had gone very, very bad.
“How many of us actually got hit?” I asked as I mounted the steps to the porch.
“Hal’s running as far behind as he is because he had to lose a couple of bad guys who started shooting at him,” Nick told me. “Apparently, there was a sheriff’s deputy only a half mile away, and he got involved. Jack had a narrow scrape, and a couple of the newer guys got a bad feeling down in Cody and came running back up here. Not sure about anyone else.”
“I left two corpses and a couple of scared gangbangers on the west slope of Polecat Bench,” I said, as I headed inside, looking for Tom Heinrich. If anyone was going to have a more complete picture of what was happening, it would be him. The retired Colonel and I didn’t see eye to eye all the time, but he’d been hired to run training and turned into a pretty good mastermind at turning the company into the de facto private special operations command that it was.
Tom was in the command center in what had been the master bedroom. Nobody lived in the main ranch house anymore. It had been entirely converted into a headquarters building, though one that could be used for meetings with clients and outsiders as well. Most of us had our own cabins scattered across the northernmost corner of the two thousand acres of the ranch, away from the ranges.
Tom was standing in the middle of a room covered in maps and whiteboards. We had a few laptops up, too, but most of us had become rather minimalist when it came to having monitors everywhere. Whiteboards and paper maps are simple, cheap, and don’t require power and working internet connections.
Tom looked up as I walked in, my rifle still in my off hand and chest rig over my jacket. He was smoking, which was rare indoors, but given the day I’d had already, I imagined that Tom no longer gave a shit about filling the room with smoke. The crow’s feet around his icy blue eyes looked deeper than normal, and his already gray hair seemed to be going whiter by the day.
“Jeff, good,” he said. “Glad you made it back in one piece. What’s the score?”
“Two dead gomers, two in the wind,” I replied. “How many incidents so far?”
He pointed to the map of Wyoming spread on the north wall with the hand holding his cigarette. There were several red pins in it. “You make six, including James and Robert. I’m counting them both as ‘incidents’ until we get some contact and/or confirmation otherwise.”
I studied the spread, which covered nearly a hundred miles. “All within the last couple of hours?” I asked.
He nodded, taking another drag. “Tighter than that,” he said, checking his watch. “The first incident was…seventy-four minutes ago.”
I shook my head. “Well, if there was any doubt that this was coordinated…”
“There is certainly none now,” Tom finished for me. “The only question is which one of our admittedly myriad enemies has finally caught up with us?”
“After Mexico, I’d be willing to say that it won’t be just one,” I said. “Let any one of them get wind of us, and all kinds of assholes will be dropping their feuds just long enough to put us in the ground. It’s the way of the world.” I stepped closer to the map. There were little notes attached to the red pins with callsigns, indicating who had been involved. The only two that were missing were “Kemosabe” and “Sasquatch.” “Do we have last known positions for Jim and Little Bob?”
He shook his head. “Not precise enough,” he replied. “They were both heading into town this morning, but we haven’t exactly been doing five-point contingency plans while Stateside.” He frowned. “That’s probably my mistake, but I imagine that it wouldn’t have gone over well.”
I grimaced. No, it wouldn’t have. I would have chafed at it, myself. Stateside had become much less stable in the last few years since the beginnings of the Greater Depression, but it was still Stateside, and most of us, if unconsciously, associated it with safety. We still went everywhere armed, but I don’t think any of us had really anticipated a situation that would have required downrange levels of security and contingency planning to present itself, particularly not in rural Wyoming.
“I’m going to get reset, grab some more ammo, and go find ‘em,” I said. “Powell’s not that big; we shouldn’t have too much trouble.” Especially if they’ve run into something they can’t handle, I didn’t say.
No sooner were the words out of my mouth, then a sudden roar of gunfire sounded from the direction of the gate.
Chapter 2
I hadn’t put my rifle down. Tom grabbed his M1A from where it had been leaning in the corner as we both turned and ran out of the ops room.
Larry and Nick were already in Nick’s big diesel, and Tom and I hauled ourselves into the bed. It wasn’t quite the leap that it might have been a few years before, but we got ourselves situated and braced in a few seconds, before I banged on the roof of the cab with my off hand. Nick threw the truck in gear and we roared down the long driveway toward the gate.
It was more of a road than a driveway; the gate was almost a mile from the ranch house. Tom and I held on for dear life as the pickup raced over the unfinished gravel track, leaving a cloud of dust behind us. I could hear the shooting even over the roar of the engine and the buffeting wind of our passage. Those boys at the gate were getting some.
It took only a bruising couple of minutes to get there, but by the time we skidded to a halt in a cloud of dust and bailed out, rifles in hand, it was all over but the screaming.
Three bullet-riddled cars sat at angles across the entrance, one only a few feet from the barred gate, which, while it looked like any other ranch gate at first glance, was actually reinforced enough to withstand the impact of a Level 7 armored vehicle without moving. Several bodies lay motionless in the dust below opened doors, and at least one bloodied head was lying on the dashboard below a shattered windshield.
I had a sudden flashback to the ambush in Arizona, just before we’d crossed into Mexico and into the shadowy world of El Duque. The remains of the MS-13 ambush had looked very similar, especially after I’d shot three gangbangers over the hood of our Expedition with a shotgun. I’d stared at the same mélange of blood and broken glass then, too.
I shook it off as I stepped toward the gate. The kid who’d let me in only a few minutes before was coming out of the pillbox on the south side of the gate, his rifle in his shoulder. There were moans coming from somewhere in the wreckage of the attacking vehicles; somebody back there was still alive.
The kid hesitated as he looked at us, as if unsure what to do next. After all, he was new, and here were four of the company’s plank-owners, three of whom had been in the middle of some of the nastiest ops we’d ever run. He looked slightly intimidated.
It was a strange feeling, realizing that I was now one of the old hardasses that the younger guys looked up to. It didn’t seem like all that long ago I had still been trying to make my own mark.
That was not the time or the place for such ruminations, though. I just made brief eye contact with the kid, then nodded toward the gate. “Don�
��t just stand there, son,” I said. “Let’s go see what we’ve got. We don’t own the objective until we’ve gone through it.”
The kid started a little, then stepped forward, unbarred the gate, and pulled it open before falling in behind us. I led, with Larry and Nick on my flanks and Tom following a step behind, on Larry’s flank. The kid fell in behind Nick.
“Let’s try to secure at least one alive,” Tom said. “Raoul should be able to get something out of him.”
“We don’t always kill everybody, Tom,” Larry said, a note of unaccustomed asperity in his voice. For all his intimidating size and great skill with a gun, Larry is ordinarily one of the nicest guys I’d ever met in this business. But Tom’s comment had just pissed him off.
I held my peace. That was another conversation for another time.
Keeping at least a yard away from the first car, I stepped carefully around the open door, my rifle up and trained on the cab, my eyes scanning the wreckage over the sights. I had the rifle canted to use the offset irons; while I could—and had—used the scope at close ranges, I much preferred iron sights at that range.
The car had been hammered. If I’d been counting bullet holes, I would have had to give up pretty quickly. Those boys at the gate hadn’t fucked around. The gangbanger lying half in the car, half on the ground had been turned to hamburger. If my brain hadn’t gone cold and calm, as it usually does in a combat situation, I might have sneered at the Hi Point lying in the dirt under the nearly shredded car door.
The guy in the passenger seat hadn’t even made it as far as the driver. He was slumped against the dash, blood and brains leaking out of what was left of his skull.
