by Peter Nealen
I wasn’t sure why not, but then I heard the distant growl of helo rotors. That was certainly a familiar enough sound, and given the fact that all our helos, to the best of my knowledge, were currently either still in Kurdistan, where Alek was running the bulk of the company’s overseas operations, or out at sea aboard the Frontier Rose, the freighter that we’d liberated from Somali pirates and turned into a maritime operations platform, it probably didn’t mean anything good. I kept the camera up, scanning for any sign of the bird.
In a moment I had it, a dark dot moving low over the flats. I didn’t get too fixated on it, but kept scanning, looking for a follow aircraft. There wasn’t one within my line of sight; it appeared to be alone. A glance down at the TF showed that they were expecting the helo; two of them were laying out an LZ, as far from the gate as they could get, in the middle of Dave Harrick’s hay field. Old Man Harrick was gonna be pissed, but I expected they’d already threatened him with all sorts of imaginary charges and a long stay in a black site if he didn’t keep his mouth shut. They probably wouldn’t have threatened his life directly; that might not have maintained the cover that this was some kind of legit Federal operation.
We watched and waited as the helo came closer, flying low and fast before flaring just above the LZ. It was a Bell JetRanger, not unlike a couple of our helicopters, only painted black. Just like the armored vehicles on the ground, there were no other markings except for a white tail number, which I suspected was a decal that could easily be replaced.
The bird settled in a cloud of dust and hay clippings. No shots were aimed at it from the gate; Tom must have instructed the boys to be a little circumspect in their shooting. I didn’t know how they’d convinced the TF to back off when they’d first approached; what little contact we’d had with Tom since the “Extremis” signal had been necessarily terse and of a strictly operational manner, with only absolutely necessary information being passed, and that as coded as possible. We were kind of stuck using a commercial satellite uplink for all our comms, and if these assholes were as well-connected as they appeared to be, we had to assume that they were tapping into every data stream they could find, including commercial sat-comm. Our encryption was top of the line, largely thanks to Derek, but we still had to be careful. It was entirely possible that we were being overly paranoid, and Derek insisted that we were, but under the circumstances, few of us were willing to chance it.
At any rate, there wasn’t any attempt made to shoot the helo down, though I could see a lot of rifles pointed toward the gate as the bird got closer. They were nervous, and they weren’t taking chances.
I kept snapping pictures as a figure got out of the helo and ran, hunched over below the still-turning rotors, toward one of the unidentified armored vehicles. It took a second to make out, since the figure was kitted out just like the rest, but after a moment I saw that it was a woman, her long blond hair tied up in a ponytail that stuck out from the back of her olive-green ball cap.
“Who the hell is this?” Nick asked, his eyes still pressed to his binos.
“I think this is somebody working for a higher echelon,” I replied, still snapping photos. We’d have more pictures than we knew what to do with, but the more information, the better. We could sift through it later. Somewhere in the ocean of imagery, we might find a vital clue to what the fuck was going on.
A barrel-chested man in kit, with a bald head and a beard down to his mag pouches, got out of the armored vehicle and shook the blond chick’s hand before ushering her into the undoubtedly cramped compartment inside the vehicle.
The TF’s security was still on alert, watching the gate from behind rifles and machine guns. To their credit, the boys at the gate didn’t do anything, but were presumably watching and recording as much as we were.
After about a half an hour, the blond came out of the vehicle and ran back to the helo, which quickly spun up again and rose into the sky, banking hard and staying low and fast as it flew back down the valley. I spared only a couple of shots for the bird, as I turned my attention back to Big Beard.
Old boy was yelling, though he was far enough away that we couldn’t hear what he was saying. He was getting responses, though, as several individuals came running to his vehicle. I counted one per MATV or eight-wheeler, suggesting he was calling in team leaders.
“I don’t think we’ve got a hell of a lot of time,” Nick whispered. “That looks like something’s getting ready to kick off.”
“I think you’re right,” I muttered, as I slowly and carefully put the camera down and pulled out the tablet and the satellite puck we were using for comms. The boys might be skeet shooting drones every chance they got, but I knew I’d heard at least one up there, and still wasn’t going to take chances on being detected by moving carelessly.
I hastily laid out the situation in as brief a message as possible, and squirted it up through the satellite before shutting off the puck and stowing it and the tablet in my pack again and focusing back on the TF. We couldn’t move until dark, and even then, we were going to have to move with extreme care.
I just hoped that the TF didn’t decide it was go time before then.
By the time the sun went down, it was pretty damned obvious that go time was fast approaching. I’ve been on enough teams getting ready for an assault to know what it looks like. As it got dark, they were donning helmets and NVGs and sitting in their vehicles, even if they were keeping the doors and hatches open, the up-gunners focused on the gate.
And we were still stuck in our OP, watching, afraid to move lest we give our position away.
“We could get Big Beard from here,” I muttered. “It’s only about six hundred yards. Easy shot with a 7.62.”
“I don’t know,” Nick replied. “Can we get back under cover before they light up the whole fucking hillside? And would it slow ‘em down, or just make ‘em step up the timetable?”
“It would at least give them something to think about,” I pointed out. “You and I would probably try to assault through, but can you think of anyone trained up in the last decade who’d do the same? They’re trying really hard to mimic some kind of Federal law enforcement task force, whoever they are, and I haven’t heard of Federal LE taking fire and counterattacking with overwhelming force in the last few years.”
“These guys might be trying to mimic Federal LE,” Nick answered, “but we’re pretty sure they’re not. Which means, when push comes to shove, we can’t count on them to react the same way.”
Which was a good point. As much as I was itching to do something, anything, to put the hurt on these fuckheads and drive them off, there were no guarantees that taking a shot wasn’t going to have disastrous consequences.
But then, there are never any guarantees that violence isn’t going to have disastrous consequences. The nature of violence is that it’s violent, which means it’s unpredictable. You can only be certain of so much. After that, you’ve got to make a decision.
We had a rough plan already worked out, that had taken shape throughout the day, through brief messages sent during carefully planned comm windows. It involved a series of strikes at the two staging areas, mainly focused on sowing as much confusion as possible, followed by getting the rest of the Praetorian personnel out and into the mountains. We’d ID’ed the two overwatch positions that had been set up watching The Ranch, which had prevented an earlier breakout—Tom hadn’t been sure they could get clear before the overwatch had the TF coming down around their ears.
The siege had been a delicate balance of power for the last couple of days. Our guys had demonstrated that they had enough firepower to put some serious hurt on any attacker, which had led the TF to fall back and reconsider its position. But those overwatch positions had to be feeding the staging areas enough information, coupled with however many drones that they could get in the air, to let them know by now just how narrow the margin was. We were heavily armed, sure, but even we didn’t have the kind of clout to stop a coordinated assault,
with air and armor assets, cold.
Tom hadn’t moved for the same reason you don’t turn your back on a pissed-off dog. As long as he had a gun pointed at the TF’s face, that delicate equilibrium stayed in place. As soon as he pulled back, they were going to be coming in, and then things were going to get ugly.
Of course, now he had us on the outside, so the dynamic was going to change a bit, especially given some of the toys that had been in the back of that panel truck. The problem was, the plan required time, time that I was no longer sure we had.
I decided to take a chance. It sure looked like they were saddling up to move down there, and they weren’t going to just drive away. If that had been the plan, they would have done it as soon as Blondie left on that helo.
I pulled out my tac radio and turned it on. After giving it a moment to boot up, I keyed the mic. “North Gate, this is Hillbilly,” I sent.
“Hillbilly, Geek,” Eddie replied a moment later. Eddie had been Mike’s assistant team lead until Mike had caught a round outside of Veracruz. Since then, Eddie had been my counterpart, taking over Mike’s team and trying to rebuild it after losing Mike and Chad.
I hadn’t known that Eddie was out on the North Gate, but it wasn’t worth commenting on, especially since he’d treat any question about it as a waste of time. Eddie was one of the most dispassionate killers in the company. He’d once told me that he got mistaken for a borderline sociopath a lot.
“It looks like our visitors are getting ready to introduce themselves again,” I said. “Are you guys set, if they do?”
“Ready and, well, not quite eager, but at least ready,” he replied. “We have eyes on.”
“Roger,” I replied. “I’m going to try to throw them off a little. Send to the rest that go time just got moved up; I don’t think these guys are going to give us much more breathing space. Hopefully we can disrupt them before they move. The main effort’s going to have to go as soon as the shooting starts. Just be ready to repel if they decide to counterattack, and cover our retreat, if need be.”
“Roger,” he replied calmly. “We’ve got a few party favors waiting for them down here, too. Standing by.” Eddie and I knew each other well enough by then that there weren’t a lot of questions. Just rolling with the punches.
Stowing the radio, I looped one arm through my pack strap and pulled my rifle forward. It had been lying close to my hand all day, just in case, but now I got behind it properly, carefully moving the pack forward to act as a rest. Then I got behind the gun, turned on the lighted reticle, and looked for Big Beard.
He was right where I expected him to be, standing behind his vehicle, holding a phone to his ear, either getting last minute instructions, or running last minute coordination. He and his boys had made the mistake of focusing all their security on the gate; they hadn’t taken shooters in the hills into consideration. He wasn’t even trying to stay behind cover from anywhere but the gate.
Gauging wind is always difficult after dark, and we hadn’t brought a Kestrel with us to measure it precisely. But I could feel a faint breeze, enough to at least make a decent guess for a six-hundred-yard shot. Of course, since it was downhill, I had to adjust my hold ever so little, aiming slightly below where I wanted to hit him. Making sure I was squared up behind the gun, I let out a breath and squeezed the trigger.
Suppressed or not, the shot cracked loudly across the empty slopes of the mountainside. The suppressor contained the muzzle blast, but didn’t quiet the supersonic shockwave of the bullet breaking the sound barrier as it flew toward its target. It was an unmistakable sound, especially in the quiet of rural Wyoming in the evening.
Big Beard was kitted up and armed, wearing a plate carrier and carrying a SCAR slung across his chest. But plates only work if you’re standing head-on with the shooter, and he’d been facing the gate. The bullet went into his side, a couple inches behind his front plate. If I had my angles right, based on where the reticle had been when the trigger broke, it had just blown right through both lungs and the top of his heart.
He dropped like a rock.
Now, I’d been hoping to sow confusion and chaos. But there was no reaction, aside from the tiny glints of NVGs searching the hills for where the shot had come from.
I realized that, with everybody mounted up and ready to go, no one actually had eyes on their boss. I’d just decapitated this part of the TF, and none of them even knew it yet.
Under different circumstances, that would have been a feat to be proud of. At the time, however, it was just an annoyance. I’d lopped off one of the Hydra’s heads, but its heart was still beating, and it was still about to come after us with the other eight.
“Holy shit,” Nick whispered. He’d noticed the same thing.
I didn’t say anything. I just did the only thing that I could do that made sense. I shifted targets.
The eight-wheelers had their hatches in the rear, and they were all facing the gate, presenting their armored flanks to me, so I didn’t really have a shot there. But the MATVs had doors like ordinary trucks, and most of them were open. One smart guy had closed his door when the first shot echoed across the hillside, but the others hadn’t quite caught on yet.
I put a second bullet into the vague outline of a man in kit and helmet, who still had one leg hanging out of his door. His scream sounded faintly and he slumped, though he was trying to close the door. I put another bullet through the opening before he could get it closed, and the door swung all the way open again.
By the time I’d shifted to the next truck, its occupants had wised up and closed their doors. A MATV is impenetrable to most bullets, so I shifted higher. The gunners in the turrets were hunkered down and swinging their heavy guns toward the hillside, but I had a good enough angle that they couldn’t quite get low enough. I knocked one down into the cab, then shifted to the next. By the time I steadied the reticle on the turret, he’d already ducked inside.
“This might be a good time to make ourselves scarce,” Nick said. The eight-wheelers were swinging their turrets around. “If they’ve got CROWS on those things, they’ll have thermals.”
Whatever those eight-wheelers were, even if the turrets were manned, I suspected they’d still have thermals. Nick was right. It was time to get the fuck out of Dodge.
We didn’t need to go far; we were right at the crest of the finger, and we just had to clamber a few feet backward and down to get a good chunk of dirt and rock between us and anybody trying to shoot us. Still, haste was called for, so I dragged my pack to me, threw off the poncho, which Nick swept up under one arm, and we skedaddled down the slope, even as one of the gunners down below opened up on the hillside. A few shots snapped by overhead as we dropped below the crest, but for the most part, they didn’t seem to have zeroed in on us before we disappeared.
There was a louder, heavier boom from down below. I knew what that noise was, even without being able to see the shot.
Logan Try, in addition to being a sour, anti-social son of a bitch, was something of an evil genius. He’d managed to build four reasonable facsimiles of a Lahti L-39 20mm anti-tank rifle. He’d been something of a ballistics nerd for a long time, always fiddling with various wildcat cartridges, and had started fabricating his own rounds for the 20mms. I didn’t know where he’d gotten the sheer amount of tungsten needed for the penetrators, and I didn’t ask. I suspected that I didn’t want to know. With Logan, hijacking and/or murder was not entirely outside the realm of possibility.
We’d been careful to keep the capability that the 20mm rifles provided under wraps. Even Brett didn’t know we had those, and we’d run him through his paces with some pretty cool toys. I hoped that meant that the Task Force down there was shitting its collective pants as soon as the first round punched into one of those MATVs.
As soon as we were behind cover, Nick and I took a brief second to properly get our gear set to move, then we stepped off. We were going to have to pick our way carefully to make sure we kept some terrain between
us and those armored vehicles down there; I didn’t want to catch a round from somebody who decided to keep an eye on the hillside while his buddies confronted the 20mm blasting at them from deep inside a pillbox.
We didn’t have any time to waste moving slowly, though. Opening fire had, hopefully, forestalled the assault, but we had to move fast. They were going to recover and come after us sooner or later. Leading out, I started dog-trotting up the draw.
We actually got to the ranch house itself just ahead of Eddie and the boys at the gate. They were coming at a trot, rifles in their hands, looking almost as smoked as I felt at that point. Training aside, climbing a fucking mountain at speed while trying to keep cover between you and an enemy down in the valley is a bitch.
“They fell back after we disabled two of the MATVs,” Eddie said between breaths. “I think you threw ‘em for a loop with that sniper fire, Jeff.”
Tom stepped out onto the porch, dressed in woodlands, with a chest rig on, pack on his back, and his rifle in his hands. A cigarette was dangling from the corner of his mouth. “It slowed ‘em down, but it didn’t stop ‘em,” he said. “They hit the East Gate hard, and broke through. Miguel and those boys took the secondary exits from their positions and are E&Eing as we speak. We need to do the same.”
A deep, earth-rumbling boom sounded from the north. “That would be the demo charges on the bunkers detonating,” Eddie said. “Did Miguel get the east bunkers wired?”
A similar rumble a second later answered his question. “There’s nothing left here that can’t be replaced,” Tom said. “All the drives are wiped and we’ve been hiding most of the sensitive stuff for the last few days anyway. Let’s go.”
“Lead out,” I told him, pointing up into the Beartooth mountains. I specifically pointed to the left of the big pyramidal peak that loomed behind The Ranch. That was where Larry and the rest of the team except for Jack and Ben, who were out on the southern flank to provide some more harassing fire, were waiting to cover our exfil.
