by Peter Nealen
“You’ve barely slept and barely eaten more than a few bites at a time in the last week,” she replied. “I’ve noticed. Some of the others have, too. You know better than that. You’re not eighteen anymore. Food and rest are as important as recon and ammo. But you’re trying to have a hand in everything, going out on the longest patrols and then staying up and trying to put together the reports and plan afterward, even when you’re utterly exhausted.” She sat up and put a hand on my arm. “You’re going to kill yourself if you keep this up.” Her voice got quieter. “Personally, I’d rather you didn’t do that. I’m sure the rest of your team would agree.”
“She’s right, you know,” Larry said, looming suddenly beside the tree to my other side. I squinted up at him against the sunlight filtering down through the needles.
“You too?” I asked, mock-indignantly. “I’m getting ganged up on here.”
Larry’s presence seemed to ease a bit of the tension under the tree, though Mia still didn’t move away. “Bitching and moaning about common sense really isn’t your style, Jeff,” Larry replied. “Listen to the lady.”
“All right, I’ll try to slow down and spread the weight around when I can,” I said. “Is there any word on the newcomers?”
“Eric and Jack went out early this morning, and saw a couple of them starting to probe the woods,” he replied. “They didn’t get far before they headed back in; Eric thinks they were looking for spoor that hadn’t been contaminated by the lead-footed morons that tried the first time.”
“We’ve still got a little bit of time, then,” I said.
“I’d say at least until nightfall,” Tom put in, coming over to join us. “But we do need to move tonight. The newcomers aside, if we wait much longer, we might never be able to get Robert back.”
I nodded. Mia and Larry mother-henning me about overreaching myself aside, we really were short on time. “Did Eddie have anything new about the Cody site?” I asked.
Tom shook his head. I noticed he wasn’t smoking, and realized he must have run out a day or two before, since none of the rest of us smoked. His head had to be pounding. “No,” he said. “Our best guess is that the target is still that trailer near the center of the site,” he said.
“Is everybody back in?”
“Aside from the new guys out on the LP/OPs, yes,” Tom replied. We had Listening Post/Observation Posts on several of the nearby peaks, with commanding views of the most likely approaches to our rocky aerie.
I looked at my watch. “We’ve got at least ten hours before we need to step off,” I said. “Should be plenty of time for final target studies and mission prep.”
“Not before you eat,” Mia insisted. Tom nodded, fixing me with those pale eyes of his, raising one gray eyebrow.
“Everybody’s a mother hen all of a sudden,” I grumbled, as I stuffed my blanket back in my ruck. “Fine, I’ll eat. Then can we get to the job?”
Chapter 13
I couldn’t quite believe that we’d gotten this far.
It was 0300, and I was crouched not ten yards from the outermost barn on The Ranch, watching the obviously bored and sleepy night patrol checking the barns and the treeline through my hybrid NVGs. We had used PVS-14s with small thermal attachments for years, but Logan had found an outlet recently for the purpose-designed PSQ-20s, which had thermals built-in. They were clearer and crisper than the 14s, casting the world in grayscale instead of the shades of green we’d always been used to.
Jack and Nick were behind me, similarly kitted out, cammied up, and armed. Larry, Eric, and Bryan were higher up the mountain with long guns, ready to provide some support by fire.
At least we didn’t have to worry about Gray Man and his manhunters. We’d gotten the signal from the LP/OPs that they’d pushed into the mountains only a couple of hours before, fortunately along a different route than we had taken for the approach; they’d headed west on the north side of the ridge, while we were pushing east on the south side. So, we just had to deal with the original task force clowns.
I could hear them bullshitting as two of them walked around the corner of the barn.
“Only a matter of time now,” one of them was saying. “Once Baumgartner catches them, we can burn this place down and get out of here.”
Baumgartner? That name sounded damned familiar. But it couldn’t be the same guy, could it? I hoped not, because if it was, it was really fucking bad news.
“It ain’t that bad,” the other said. “Scenery’s nice.”
“Maybe,” was the reply. “Fucking Gage won’t let us drink, and there’s no pussy around here.”
“Sure there is,” the younger-sounding guy said, a joking note in his voice. “I’m sure some of the ladies at that strip club outside the truck stop down the mountain would be happy to go across the street with you, for the right price.”
“I just threw up in my mouth a little,” the first one said. “I like my hookers with all their teeth. And preferably not-pregnant.”
“I’ve never had a toothless blowjob. At least you wouldn’t have to worry about the chick using her teeth.” They were moving away, down the barn wall. “Besides, it’s not like we’ve been in there; you don’t know that they’re all toothless and pregnant.”
“We’re in the middle of fucking nowhere,” was the growled reply. “You know it’s all meth queens and trailer trash in there.”
“Pussy’s pussy, man.” The voices were fading as they headed back to the house.
While I was rather disgusted at their lack of professionalism, as they had obviously been too focused on their conversation and their blue balls to pay too much attention to the perimeter, at the same time, it was something of a relief. Though it was merely a confirmation of what we’d observed from afar, it made it clear that, while they were at least going through the motions of security—which was more than we’d seen a lot of the jihadis we’d waxed do—they were complacent as all hell. They figured that we were on the run, soon to be brought to ground by Baumgartner—holy shit, I hoped that wasn’t who I thought it was—and they had the local law buffaloed. They were on guard out of force of habit and a certain ingrained professionalism, but that was it. They didn’t figure we’d come out of the dark and hit them.
That was, of course, assuming that we hadn’t been spotted by one of the drones that they still had up, that we’d heard on the way down. I was pretty sure we hadn’t, though. We’d have been met by a watchful perimeter if that had been the case. If it was me, at my most sadistic, I might have let us get deep inside before cutting us off and gunning us down. But I was not getting a “subtle trap” vibe from these assholes. They were, after all, the same tards who had tried to storm a mountain compound full of proven hardasses who were known to be armed to the teeth using urban assault vehicles.
Once they were out of sight, heading back to the house, I knew that we had anywhere from thirty to forty-five minutes to work with. Considering that forty-five minutes was a long damned time to spend on a target site, we had plenty of time. We just had to do this carefully and stealthily. The advantage of surprise notwithstanding, we were still wildly outnumbered. If Little Bob was in there, and if we were going to get his incapacitated ass out, we were going to have to do it really sneaky-like.
A glance back confirmed that Jack and Nick were with me, Jack trailing a little behind. Jack was smaller than either of us, and while plenty competent, he was a bit of a city boy. Nick and I were country boys and backwoods hunters, and had been quietly woods-running for a lot longer than Jack had. We could move quicker and quieter, with ingrained habits that he’d had to learn on the fly.
Silently, weapons up and ready, the lighted reticles set to their lowest settings so that we could see them through our NVGs, we padded forward. Unlike the guard force, that had kept close to the barn, we stayed farther out. We were in the open, but the ground wasn’t entirely flat; there were plenty of hummocks and folds in the ground to use as cover if we needed to drop flat. We also weren’t
going to silhouette ourselves against the lighter corrugated aluminum of the barn wall. Our camouflage blended into the grass and the ground and the brush a lot better than the buildings.
The lights were out in the house, though we saw the faint flicker of a flashlight beam through the back windows as the night patrol made their way to whatever they were using as a ready room. More than likely, they’d just moved into our own team rooms, which rankled. Even as we crossed the back forty, closing quickly but quietly on the back porch, the light went out.
In minutes, we reached the back porch. There had been no sound beyond the wind in the trees, the usual nocturnal sounds of the woods, and the faint buzz of a distant drone. Somebody had to still be up, watching the drone feed. Hell, I was kind of surprised to see the whole place dark, given that the manhunters were out. Unless this Baumgartner didn’t want the pseudo-SWAT guys looking over his shoulder for some reason.
I didn’t step onto the porch itself until I absolutely had to; I knew the old planks creaked. When I did have to mount the porch, I was careful to glide between planks and roll my feet as much as possible, trying to spread my weight out and put most of it on the supports underneath.
I kept my SOCOM-16 trained on the door while Jack reached past me to open it. We might have been trying to keep this hit soft for as long as we could, but that never means not being prepared to start shooting motherfuckers in the face at the drop of a hat.
The door swung open soundlessly, and I stepped inside, scanning the back hallway quickly, my NVGs just over my rifle’s sights. At those ranges, I really could have just point-shot anyone I needed to, without even using the sights, but old habits die hard.
The hall was clear. I moved forward, while Nick and Jack followed, quietly closing the door behind us. If, by some chance, another patrol went out, randomly out of order, we didn’t want them to suspect we were on-site.
Since we had been pretty sure that Little Bob was not being kept in one of the barns, or the various other houses out on The Ranch, we’d thought out how to narrow down which room he was probably being held in. The central briefing room, at the front of the house, was probably the best bet for a man with six extra holes in him. If they were holding him, they were going to be keeping him alive, and that meant a cot and medical supplies. The briefing room, that had been the living room before we’d taken the house over, was the largest room in the house, and therefore the most likely to work.
Fortunately, it was a fairly straight shot from the back door to the briefing room. Carefully, keeping away from the walls, we paced toward the front of the house.
The briefing room was a jumble of equipment cases and boxes of MREs, with our easels being used for tac maps and imagery. One of our folding tables was covered in comm gear and Toughbooks, one of which was open and casting a pale glow over the rest of the room.
There was no sign of a gurney or a wounded man. There were, however, two men in the room, one sitting at the laptop, the other lying on the couch against the north wall.
We’d been quiet, and the hallway and the room were both dark, except for the glow of the laptop. But something made the guy at the computer turn and look toward us as Jack and I stepped into the room.
“What?” he asked, sounding bored. “Are we about to get overrun by a strike force of racoons?” He thought we were the perimeter patrol.
When neither of us replied, with either a flippant remark or obscenity, he frowned, squinting at us in the dark. We were going to be made in the next couple of seconds. So I moved.
There was an equipment case between him and me. I almost went over it, but adjusted at the last moment to dodge around it, lest vaulting it make more noise than we could afford. Of course, if I didn’t get this shithead shut down quick, we were going to have more noise than we knew what to do with, and then we were fucked.
Even as I started to charge him, covering the ten feet between us in a couple of long steps, he realized that something was wrong, and grabbed for the pistol that wasn’t quite where he thought it was on the table. He opened his mouth to yell as he turned his head to find the gun, his fingers desperately scrabbling at the plastic tabletop, and then I hit him.
A collapsible polymer buttstock is not the ideal tool for buttstroking an opponent into insensibility, but with the weight of that rifle behind it, I gave it the old college try, anyway. He probably could have ducked it if he’d had his eyes on me, but since he’d turned to try to find his pistol, I caught him at the base of the skull with a good, solid thud. His brain sloshed hard against the front of his skull, and he went out like a light.
Holy shit, I thought. I could not have imagined that actually working so well.
My astonished triumph was short-lived. In trying to get around me to get at the same guy, Jack had stubbed his toe on an equipment case, and kicked it a good couple of inches. While he bore the pain silently, the impact of his boot on the plastic was almost deafeningly loud in the quiet room. The sleeping man grunted and jerked his head up.
Fucking dammit! I whirled toward him, bringing my rifle around, afraid that I was going to be too late; he was going to see me, kitted up and camouflaged, looking nothing like one of his guys and standing over the slumped form of his fellow watchstander. He was going to yell, and bring the entire fucking task force down around our ears.
But Nick took a chance, vaulted over two of the equipment cases, and came crashing down on the groggy sleeper with all two hundred seventy-five pounds of man, rifle, and ammo. There was a grunt of pain, and the couch rocked back on two feet to hit the wall with a painfully loud thump.
There followed a series of grunts and meaty thuds as they struggled, a struggle that I ended abruptly with the touch of my suppressor to the guy’s forehead.
It took him a second to realize what the circle of hard, cold metal against his skin was, but when it sank in, he froze.
“Make any more noise than a whisper and your head turns into a canoe,” I hissed. “Understood?”
He made a tiny movement that was just barely a nod. If there had been more light I might have seen him going cross-eyed as he stared at the rifle muzzle pressed to his skull.
“Where’s Bob Sampson?” I demanded. But if he knew, I didn’t get an answer.
“What the fuck are you idiots doing in here?” a voice asked sleepily from the doorway.
Oh, fuck. I didn’t dare turn away from the guy on the couch, especially since Nick had gotten off of him as soon as he’d stopped fighting. I had to rely on Nick and Jack to deal with this; unfortunately, there was only one way this could end.
“What the fuck?!” the voice suddenly had a lot more alarm in it. Whoever it was had heard the commotion and come to bitch out the watchstanders for horsing around in the CP, only to find one of them slumped unconscious at the desk and the other prone on the couch with a gun to his head, not to mention the three unfamiliar figures in field gear and rifles at the ready standing in the middle of what was supposed to be a secure house.
I heard what sounded like two loud claps, almost like a heavy book being smacked against a solid table, followed by the unmistakable sound of a body hitting the floor. There was an extra thunk in there that sounded a lot like a pistol falling to the hardwood floorboards, as well.
Suddenly, we could hear the sound of people moving elsewhere in the house, and I caught the reflected illumination of a light being turned on down the hall. FUUUUUCK!
Slinging my rifle out of the way, I grabbed the guy on the couch and dragged him to his feet. “You’re coming with us!” I snarled quietly, shoving him toward the front door. It wasn’t the ideal escape route; they had more security stationed toward the front than they’d had toward the back, but getting through the house to head out the west side was going to be suicide now that we’d awakened the hornet’s nest.
There were more loud claps as Jack fired a few more shots down the hallway to discourage pursuit. Meanwhile, Nick, having apparently read my mind, yanked the front door open and rolled
through behind his rifle. Driving our unplanned prisoner ahead of me, I followed him, with Jack only a pace behind, stopping at the doorway to cover back the way we’d come one more time before ducking out the door quickly, trying to clear the front windows before somebody could start shooting through them.
Nick was moving, heading for the trees where the ground dipped down to the south. It would provide us some cover as well as the concealment of the darkness under the trees. I had adjusted my hold on my captive, letting go of his t-shirt and twisting his arm up between his shoulder blades. I was driving him ahead of me at a trot, my other hand on my rifle’s firing controls. If he got too froggy, I was in a good position to shove him on his face and put a bullet in the back of his head, and he knew it. He didn’t resist.
A round snapped by overhead, and Jack stopped, dropped to a knee, and fired three more shots in reply before getting up and running after us. We were almost to the dip, where we could drop down and be out of the line of fire. It was dark enough in the patch of woods down there that by the time they caught up, we’d be long gone and out of sight.
We hit the slope just shy of a run, and went skidding and slipping over it. I barely maintained control in the dark, and damned near wrenched my prisoner’s arm out of its socket. I heard him gasp as he bounced off the trunk of a spruce, but he left it at that.
He was going to have a miserable night, regardless. It was getting on toward fall, and it got cold at altitude. And while he had his trousers on, fortunately for him, he was otherwise dressed in a t-shirt and socks and that was it.
Once we were well inside the trees, Nick banged a hard right and started heading uphill. There was a small stretch of open ground we’d have to cross before we got back into the treeline on the south flank of the mountain, but it was pretty well covered by the terrain.
