by Peter Nealen
Bryan dropped flat on the floor; I didn’t know if he’d been hit or if he had just sensed the gunfire coming and hit the deck as soon as the door didn’t open all the way. I lifted my subgun and ripped an answering burst through the wall, dumping the magazine as Jack and Eric came up behind me.
There wasn’t time to think, plan, or even to see if Bryan was all right. If we didn’t get in there and kill that son of a bitch, we were all going to die in the hallway. Hesitation was going to be fatal. So, I moved.
I took one step over Bryan’s prone form, reloading as I went, and aimed a kick as high up the door as I could get, hoping to smash the hinges off the doorjamb and lever the door over whatever obstacle was inside. It was not the first time I’d encountered a barricaded door on a raid.
Naturally, it didn’t work. The jamb cracked a little, but my boot rebounded from the door as the painful shock of the impact traveled up my leg. Eric had shouldered past behind me and was putting another burst through the wall just to give whoever was inside something to think about besides turning me to hamburger.
I could stand there and try to kick that door all day, and only buy the asshole inside more time. So, I changed tactics. I stepped back against the wall over the stairs and bull-rushed the door.
I hit it low enough and hard enough that the barricade slid on the carpet. It was still heavy enough that it stopped me and the door a good two feet inside, but that was enough.
I was low, almost lying on the floor, my submachine gun aimed in the opening to the darkened room, somewhat lightened now by all the bullet holes in the walls. I heard the ping of a spoon flying free as Jack tossed one of our few flashbangs in over my head, and closed my eyes. This was gonna hurt.
A fraction of a second later, the bang went off with a deafening blast of noise, painting an actinic flash on my retinas even through my eyelids. Smoke filled the room, and I was pretty sure that something was on fire. Meanwhile, Jack jumped over me, knocking the door a few inches further open as he went.
I had to stay down for a few more seconds, because Eric was already heading in after Jack, and if I stood up, I was going to trip Eric up. As soon as he was clear, I scrambled to my feet and shoved the door the rest of the way open, even as suppressed gunfire tore through the room.
Something was burning. The flashbang had somehow landed on the bed and set the covers on fire. The rest of the lights were off, and Jack’s and Eric’s flashlights stabbed brilliant white beams through the drifting smoke, making the blood splashes against the drywall look particularly bright.
There had been three men in the room; two sicarios and El Presidente. All three were now rapidly cooling piles of meat and bone. The sicarios had gone down fighting; one had a pistol clenched in his hand, while the other had an AK.
El Presidente had not died well. He was still in his underwear, huddled on the floor on the far side of the smoldering bed, unarmed. If he’d been smart enough to stay down, he might have lived a few moments longer. But he apparently had peeked over the top of the mattress just as Jack and Eric were doing for his bodyguards, and had taken a round right in the T-box. One eye was slightly bulged out from overpressure, just below a gently smoking hole right over his eyebrow. A sizeable chunk of the back of his skull was gone.
“Clear,” Jack said, his voice only slightly louder than normal, probably because of the ringing in the ears we were all experiencing thanks to the opposition’s unsuppressed gunfire. His face was blank as he looked at the corpses crumpled on the far side of the room. For all his sarcastic belligerence, which had earned him the callsign “Anarchy,” most of the time Jack did his damnedest to affect a demeanor of bored cynicism. That extended to combat, as well. The guy never got visibly excited.
Of course, few of us did, anymore. We were all too old, too jaded, and too combat hardened.
I didn’t say anything but, satisfied that I wasn’t going to get burned down as soon as I turned my back, I went back to the door to check on Bryan, hoping and praying that we hadn’t lost him, too.
But he was already levering himself painfully off the floor. He was alive, but I put out a hand to stop him before he moved too much. “You’re bleeding,” I told him.
“I know,” he said with a wince. “I got burned on my right trap as I went down. It hurts like a motherfucker, but I’m all right.”
I ran my hands over him anyway, checking for bleeds or holes that he might not have noticed. Aside from his shoulder, he came up clean.
“I love you, too, Jeff,” he said as I worked.
“Fuck you, Bryan,” I said. I finished, got to my feet, and held out my hand to heave him up. “Let’s get out of here before the hordes show up.”
Fortunately, there was no sign of any response mustering as we cleared out of the bullet-riddled house of corpses. Yet. The shooting off to the west had died down; whatever had been going down between MS-13 and the cops appeared to be mostly over. But it also appeared to mean that the Mara hadn’t had a chance to re-orient themselves to the hit going on deeper in the East Side. We scattered to the winds, jogging away singly or in pairs, bombshelling into the fading night even as the first pale light started to grow in the east.
We didn’t link up again in Pueblo itself. As soon as I got back to the truck, I sent a mass text to the whole team giving an RV point way out by the Pueblo Reservoir. Our target deck was clear, at least for the moment. I was reasonably certain that we’d eliminated the major players who had ordered the hit. It should give our enemies pause while we got to work on a more strategic plan.
I knew on some level, even as we drove west, that what I had in mind wasn’t going to work. There was no way to kill everybody who wanted us dead, not least when so many of them were powerful and violent men south of the border. I hoped that we’d sent a message not to fuck with us on our home ground; we’d lost Jim and almost lost Little Bob, but we’d reaped a lot of souls in recompense. But it wouldn’t stop the cartels, or the other assholes who had it out for us.
I didn’t have any answers, not then, other than continuing to build the target deck and taking down enough big boys that they got the message to never fuck with us ever again.
I wasn’t going to have time to complete the plan, never mind put it into action.
Chapter 8
We had just passed Franktown, north of Colorado Springs, when my phone buzzed. I cursed, since the phone was in my pocket and I was driving. Risking a little bit of swerving, I dug the phone out of my pocket and passed it to Jack.
“Fuck,” he said flatly. “Tom just sent us ‘Extremis.’”
“Motherfuck,” I said. “Details?”
“Hold on.” He squinted at the phone.
“I keep telling you, you need glasses, dude.”
“The fuck I do,” he replied. “Let me read.”
I kept driving, though I was checking my mirrors a little more often. Intellectually, I knew we were clean, and there was no way in hell the bad guys could have picked us up once we got clear of the Springs. Too many miles and too many other vehicles on the road. But “Extremis” meant that The Ranch was under attack, and that meant we were all under threat.
“Holy shit,” Jack said, still focused on the phone’s screen. “It’s like Waco all over again.”
I risked a glance over at him. “The Feds?” That a Federal raid was only about midway down our list of nightmare scenarios said something about some of the enemies we’d made over the years. Nothing good, but something.
He shook his head, frowning, his lips tight behind his sandy beard. “He says that they look like it, but there are no markings on any of the gear or vehicles—no ‘FBI,’ ‘BATFE,’ or anything like that. Just blank black.” He tapped the screen and turned the phone to squint at something. “Sure looks like a lot of ‘em, though. A couple of infantry companies worth, at least, with MATVs and a couple other armored vehicles I don’t recognize right off.”
He read on. “Tom says that they’re secure; they’ve taken a couple of
casualties.” He shook his head. “A couple of the new guys, out by the gate, it looks like. They’re dug in, but they can’t get out, and he doesn’t recommend trying to get in without a lot of firepower and backup.” Which were things that we did not have at the moment.
“That’s about all he’s got,” Jack finished, looking up from the phone. “Or at least, it’s all he was willing to put in a text message.”
“Send an All Call,” I said. “We need to link up once we get back into Wyoming.” I started racking my brain for a good spot.
“I’ll call it just south of Tie Siding,” Jack said after a moment of squinting at the map. “It’s ‘middle of nowhere’ enough.”
I just nodded and tried to concentrate on driving. There were a lot of miles to go before the rendezvous. A lot of miles to try not to think of how bad things could be getting back at the only home we had left.
It was almost dark when we pulled off the side of the 287 and joined the other two vehicles that had beaten us to the RV point. Larry and Ben were waiting next to the old, beat-up Pathfinder, no weapons in sight but eyes out and alert. The Bronco parked ahead of it was dark, but I could see Nick’s silhouette in the driver’s seat.
I parked and got out. There was nothing to see around us but sagebrush and bunchgrass. This was cattle country; miles and miles of rolling plains and dry washes. We had plenty of long lines of sight and open fields of fire.
It didn’t mitigate the feeling of being a hunted, cornered animal. We were still free and at large, but our home base was surrounded, and I was only too aware of how many people wanted us dead, or at the very least, buried in a deep, dark hole where no one would ever find us and we’d never cause trouble for anybody ever again. We’d been making political enemies since we’d shot our way out of Kismayo in Somalia, rustling the jimmies of a lot of people who’d never heard a shot fired in anger, but presumed to dictate the use of firepower by those they’d sent into an untenable situation with inadequate support and top cover. Since then, it had only gotten worse. We’d uncovered rogue operations, discovered links between American companies and Mexican cartels, embarrassed our own employers by killing a lot of people who’d had it coming but hadn’t been on their target deck, and done a lot of very bad things to very bad people, setting some carefully laid plans back years.
And when it all came to a head, here we were, alone, low on ammo, cut off from the only safe place we knew of, and pretty sure that we had nowhere to turn. We’d fought, bled, killed heaps of people, and buried friends, all in the hopes that we were doing the right thing in the end, and this was where it had led us.
Anyone who says that he can have peace just by killing all his enemies is a damned liar. Kill one, and two more will pop up in his place.
Alone as we were, there still wasn’t really any conversation. I think we were all thinking that we were going to be talking over the same things over and over again, anyway. And with our paranoia at a peak, we were just watching the plains and the sky, staying quiet lest some unseen enemy hear us.
Even so, it wasn’t a long wait. Derek and Bryan pulled up in their battered old Ford and shut off their headlights. The sun was right on the western horizon. It was going to be full dark in a matter of minutes. Which didn’t mean anything if there was an eye in the sky watching us. Any drones our enemies in high places might be using were guaranteed to have IR and thermal capability. But there weren’t a lot of other places to hide at the moment, and time was a-wasting.
Doors slammed loudly in the empty quiet of the open country, and we gathered down the slope from the highway. I stuck my hands in my pockets and looked around at the team. Bleary eyes met mine. We all looked a little ragged. We were all tired as shit, feeling the last week of driving, snooping, prepping, fighting, and more driving.
“I take it everybody’s up to speed on what’s going on?” I asked. “At least as much as Tom sent?” There were nods all around.
“How the hell are we going to get through that cordon with eight dudes?” Ben asked. “Especially eight dudes who are guaranteed to be on their ‘Most Wanted’ list?”
“The same way we’ve gotten through just about every other cordon,” I said grimly. “We smash through it.”
“With what?” Ben looked around at the rest. He seemed to be getting annoyed that he was the only one voicing doubts. Nobody else looked at him, but stayed silent, either looking outboard, toward the highway, or down at the ground, thinking. “We’re kind of low on ammo after the last few days, and we weren’t exactly rolling heavy enough before to be in any position to take on what looks a hell of a lot like a Federal task force.”
“Well, Tom’s pretty sure they’re not really Feds,” Bryan pointed out. “No identification as such. They might not be as well-equipped.”
“They’ll be just as well equipped as we would be, taking on a hard target like The Ranch,” Larry replied. “And I doubt those are fake MATVs, or whatever those other things are.”
“They won’t be,” I said. “Whoever these guys are, they are going to be as well-funded and well-equipped as their sponsors can make them, and if they came after us this quick, you can bet that there’s a lot of money and influence behind those sponsors. Our list of enemies isn’t exactly a short one, I’ll remind you.”
“We need to stay well away from The Ranch until we’ve had a chance to refit and resupply,” Eric said. “The Pat O’Hara Mountain cache should have everything we need, it’s on the way, and it’s far enough away from The Ranch that nobody else should know about it, presuming that they haven’t compromised everything.”
“That’s a pretty fucking big presumption,” Jack said, his arms folded across his chest. “They moved fast enough after the MS-13 hit that I suspect they had all this ready to go weeks ago, maybe even months. In that case, they will have done their homework.” He spat. “We might not have any bolt-holes they don’t know about.”
“That’s paranoid as shit,” Nick said.
Jack shrugged. “Times we live in,” he said.
“Not saying you’re wrong,” Nick said. “I’m actually kinda impressed.”
Jack gave a sardonic little bow.
“If we start thinking that they’re always five steps ahead of us, we’re just going to paralyze ourselves,” Larry said, getting the discussion back on track. “I say we shoot for the Pat O’Hara cache, and make sure we recon it thoroughly before we move in on it. As we know all too well, there’s no such thing as really undetectable surveillance. If they’re watching it, we should be able to spot them.”
“Larry’s right,” I said. “We know the ground better than they do, and I guaran-fucking-tee these assholes haven’t done as much field work as we have. That said, if we get cocky, we’re dead, and so is everybody back at The Ranch. Careful and methodical, and don’t drop tradecraft for a second. I know we all do this already, but it’s cash only from here on out. No plastic, burner phones only. We’ll split up again as soon as we start rolling, and ditch the vehicles not less than ten miles from the cache.” I turned to look at Derek. “How confident are you that we weren’t tagged on the way out of Pueblo?”
He grimaced in thought, then shrugged. “Eighty percent, maybe? We were pretty careful; we didn’t have any tails on the way through Colorado Springs or Denver, and unless tech has advanced farther than even I know—and trust me, it hasn’t—we should have seen or heard some sign of a drone following us if they had an eye in the sky on us. No, I think we’re clean.”
I nodded. “Even so, be ready to ditch the vehicles and E&E as soon as it looks like we might have picked something up. It’ll fuck our timetable, but better late than rolled up or dead.” The nods I got were of the, yeah, we know, teach your grandpa to suck eggs variety.
“Do we have any theories about who’s behind this?” Eric asked after a moment, just before I was about to break the meeting and hit the road again.
“The list is a pretty long one,” Nick said. “Take your pick.”
“There isn’t enough information to say, yet,” I said. “But trust me, once we get this sorted, we’re going to find out.” My tone promised that there was going to be retribution for this. It might not have been the “civilized” way to deal with such problems, but if anyone Stateside knew just how uncivilized our times were, it was the eight men gathered on the side of that highway in the deepening twilight. We’d been an instrument of policy, several times, though a deniable instrument, employed through multiple layers of shady organizations and contacts, but useful or not, when it all came down to the wire, we were expendable, which meant we were outlaws. We could count on no support but each other.
“All right,” I said, after a brief pause, “We’ll RV at the Pat O’Hara cache, no later than EENT tomorrow.” End of Evening Nautical Twilight was when the last light of the sunset disappeared in the west. In northern Wyoming, at that time of year, it would be around eight thirty at night. “We’ll depart here at staggered intervals; I want us spread out no less than five miles between vehicles. In the event that there is an eye in the sky, I don’t want a convoy showing up. Find someplace to hole up and grab some shut-eye tonight or in the morning, but be at that cache by the time it’s dark tomorrow night. Questions?”
A few guys shook their heads. No one asked a question. “Let’s go, then,” I said. “We’re wasting darkness.”
Jack was driving and I was dozing as we went up Wind River Canyon in the early morning. The road was still in shadow; the sun hadn’t risen over the bluffs to the east yet.
I was yanked out of my fitful slumber by a phone buzzing. We’d stopped for a few hours to sleep in Boysen State Park, but we’d gotten moving early, knowing that once we got to the foot of Pat O’Hara Mountain, we were going to have some slogging to do to get to the cache. I wanted to get to the foothills by mid-afternoon at the latest.
A moment’s bleary rummaging produced my main phone, but it wasn’t the one ringing. “What the hell?” I muttered, and started digging in my go bag some more.
