Lex Talionis

by Peter Nealen

  Yep, he was scared. Good.

  I moved quickly away from the trailer, while trying not to look like I was sneaking. That’s one of the keys to successful infiltration; look like you belong there. I kept waiting for Williamson to pull his nuts out of his throat and yell; while I hadn’t been lying about having my team in the grass on the perimeter, ready to cover my exfil, he could still make getting clear plenty sticky with little more than a shout.

  But as I walked between tents and trailers, keeping to the shadows and avoiding the knots of hard-talking tough guys who were still discussing the explosion that Tim’s team had set off close enough to the TF camp to keep those assholes focused on perimeter security for a while, there was no call, no shots fired, not even any movement from the direction of Williamson’s trailer. By the time I reached the perimeter and started to fade into the darkness, I was reasonably confident that Williamson had been the only one to know I’d been there.

  It occurred to me that I might well have been the first person to ever seriously threaten Van’s life. That kind of confrontation could have some unexpected effects. I suspected, given his silence, that Van was presently sitting on the floor of his trailer, shaking too hard to move.

  So much the better. Sometimes a good, heavy dose of pants-shitting fear is what it takes to knock some common sense into some people’s heads. On the other hand, of course, he might go the other direction, and double down to cover up the fact that he’d pissed himself when I’d threatened him. I’d known a few of those types, too, and it was entirely possible that there were plenty of them in that camp, the kind who will go over the top and completely fuck shit up just to compensate for the fact that they’re scared.

  We’d roll with the punches if that happened, but it would make matters that much harder. I hoped, as I carefully signaled to Larry, who was down in the grass behind his FAL, that I was clear. He didn’t return the signal, but he didn’t shoot me, either, so I could safely assume he’d gotten it.

  I got to him and dropped into the tall grass next to him. He had my chest rig and my SOCOM 16 with him, and I quickly donned the rig and took up the rifle, getting into a decent shooting position a few feet away from him.

  I’d given Van six hours, but if they decided to do anything but pack up and go home sooner than that, we were in a position to make that a very, very bad idea.

  The truth was, I really didn’t want to start shooting these guys. As dumb and dangerous as most of them were, they were genuinely sincere, and if they hadn’t been a bunch of tards living in a fantasy world, I might have tended to sympathize with their outlook a little more. As it was, if I could scare them off and get them out of the way, I’d be happy.

  We waited, watched, and listened. At first, I thought maybe Williamson had fainted, but after about half an hour, I could hear raised voices near the center of camp. I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but it sounded like things were getting pretty heated. It didn’t sound like there was a great deal of agreement about how to proceed.

  I started to get a sinking feeling in my gut. Dammit, they were going to make this hard. Granted, I should have probably expected it; it wasn’t like these guys were strategic geniuses. They wanted their blaze of glory, and they were just as likely as any other mob to turn on anyone who opposed them as “one of the bad guys.” I could just see some of them starting to think that they had to “secure” the area against the Task Force and us.

  Larry inched closer so I could hear him. “Are we going to need to go to Plan B?” he whispered.

  “Maybe,” I replied.

  “Jack and Derek are already in position if we do,” was all he said, then went back to watching the militia camp over the sights of his FAL.

  After another hour, we started to see things happening. There were disparate clumps of individuals divided through the camp, and while I couldn’t be sure, I was getting the distinct impression of a decided split within the group. Pretty soon, some of those clumps started packing up their tents and hitching up their trailers.

  Others weren’t so inclined to skedaddle, and I started to think we were going to have to go to Plan B, at the very least. Plan B consisted of disabling their vehicles, in a rather loud and pyrotechnic manner. Plan C was going to get messier.

  But as the night got older, and more and more would-be “freedom fighters” decided that this wasn’t the hill to die on, the thinning ranks looked around and started to wonder about their chances of success as their numbers dwindled. More started grudgingly packing up and driving away into the night.

  There were still thirty minutes left on the clock before the deadline I’d given Williamson when the last of the militia showed us their taillights. Larry and I got up off the ground, looking around carefully for any more stragglers, and then headed for our own RV point.

  One crisis had been averted, at least for the moment. We could concentrate on the more immediate threat.

  Chapter 16

  Two days after giving Van the scare of his life, we were ready to move.

  With the IED blast coming so soon after the militia’s glorified drive-by, the Task Force had apparently decided that they weren’t satisfied with their security at the Cody site, and moved the entire operation up to The Ranch. Which suited us just fine. Sure, our home might get a little busted up prying them out of there, but at least we only had one target to focus on instead of two.

  Of course, we were still badly outnumbered and outgunned, but since when was that anything new?

  We started to move down out of the hills, traveling in pairs, slowly and carefully encircling The Ranch, setting up to start whittling down their exterior security.

  Naturally, the enemy always gets a vote, too.

  “Got ‘em,” Jack whispered. “Three hundred meters. Right where they’re supposed to be.”

  I peered over his shoulder. We were in the low ground, which wasn’t necessarily the most ideal place to be from a tactical perspective, but there was cover down there, the only cover where we could get eyes on the choke point that we’d picked out for the ambush. Looking up the hill, I could see the two eight-wheelers he’d spotted trundling down the dirt road from the north gate.

  “Somebody still hasn’t learned their lesson,” I said. “They’re right on time.”

  “If they were so stupid and arrogant that they thought their drones were a good substitute for alert sentries,” Jack pointed out, “then they’re too stupid and arrogant to learn the lesson of varying their routine.”

  We lay there and waited. We hadn’t gotten our ghillie suits out when we’d broken contact and fled The Ranch, but camouflage is something you do, not something you wear, so we’d adapted. We had grass and brush tied to arms and legs and stuffed in bungie cords around our torsos. Unless you were really looking, we’d be almost invisible until you were right on top of us.

  My team was the one in the ambush position; Tim and the new guys were set up on overwatch, surveilling The Ranch itself, and Eddie had his own, similar op going on off to the south.

  The two armored vehicles, their black paint gone gray with dust, continued down the road, slowly. They weren’t MRAPs or MATVs, but they still had high centers of gravity, in spite of the independent suspensions for each wheel, and they had to negotiate the steep terrain carefully to avoid falling over. The CROWS turrets weren’t scanning, but appeared locked forward on the lead vehicle and aft on the rear vehicle.

  Jack’s point notwithstanding, I was surprised. As arrogantly complacent as these fuckheads had been, I would have thought that the IED blast would have put them on their toes. But here they were, doing an exterior security patrol like they were just going through the motions.

  For some reason it put my hackles up. They were playing right into my hands, and it bothered me. If anything in a combat situation seems too good to be true, it probably is.

  I squinted at the lead vehicle as it got closer and closer to the dry creek bed where we were waiting. They were buttoned up; nobody w
as sticking his head out of a hatch, but still, they should have been scanning with that CROWS. I started to get a really, really bad feeling.

  That feeling only got more intense when both vehicles stopped about a hundred fifty yards from the creek bed and sat there.

  Now, an armored vehicle on a security patrol halting momentarily wasn’t unheard of. Security halts are a regular part of patrolling, and especially on that terrain, it only made sense to stop and get a steadier look at the surroundings. But that CROWS stayed in place, locked forward, and nobody got out of either vehicle.

  They just sat there.

  Something was very, very wrong. I started to get that nasty, hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach. It was something like how I imagined a trapped animal must feel.

  We didn’t dare move. If we’d suspected that they’d pinged to our ambush, we could possibly have simply let them roll through without triggering the big ANFO IEDs we’d buried under the only real viable crossing across the creek bed. But without RPGs or even Logan’s mutant 20mms, what the hell were we going to do if they stopped short?

  The only saving grace was their weird complacency that meant they weren’t scanning with the thermals in the CROWS. It was by no means certain that they’d spot us; we were well buried in the brush. But they weren’t even trying, and that creeped me out more than anything else.

  A fly buzzed in my ear. It was a relatively cool day, but I was sweating my ass off, lying in the dirt and rocks, feeling every bit of vegetation I’d used to cammie up that had worked its way inside my shirt and my belt chafing. And I didn’t dare move a muscle.

  The moment of frozen uncertainty was suddenly broken by a gunshot.

  It rang out from behind us, northwest and up the creek bed. It was quickly followed by an intense fusillade of more fire.

  The eight-wheelers still didn’t move, and the CROWS turrets still didn’t shift a millimeter. That was when it dawned on me. They were right on time because somebody was expecting the ambush, and wanted us in place at the right time so they could have us in a fixed position.

  Find, Fix, and Finish are the three bywords of hunting High Value Targets. We’d just been Found and Fixed.

  I rolled over, pulling my rifle with me, and turned toward the sound of gunfire. If those CROWS weren’t engaging by then, they probably weren’t going to; they would run too much of a risk of hitting their own guys, especially if they were trying to get close enough to take any of us alive.

  At first all I could see was brush. Bullets were starting to snap overhead, a few of them clipping off branches and showering us with splinters and bits of shredded plant matter. A lot of them were the higher-pitched noise of 5.56, but there were the deeper, throatier booms of 7.62 rounds going the other direction. Eric, Larry, and Ben were on the six, and at least one of them was shooting back.

  There were other, different-sounding shots mixed in there as well, but I didn’t have time to think about trying to identify them. We had to counterattack or we were going to be fucked.

  Not knowing exactly where the enemy was, and not wearing plates, I didn’t get up and charge forward. That was a good way to get shot. I crawled forward as quickly as I could, looking for an opening to engage. Jack, Bryan, Derek, and Nick had also turned and came with me, all of us staying low, at least until we could get a target.

  The gunfire was only intensifying. As I crawled forward, as nasty as the hornet’s nest worth of rounds going over my head was, I started to realize that the opposition was throwing lead in two different directions, and some of those different-sounding reports were coming from off to the north, outside of the creek bed.

  Whoever was up there wasn’t shooting at us, though, at least at the moment, so I put them most of the way out of my mind, especially as I saw a muzzle flash in the brush ahead and dropped flat, the bullet going past my head so close that the crack of its passage was actually painful.

  I squeezed off three fast shots in return, mainly just to keep his head down while I got down and tried to spot him. He was as well-camouflaged as we were, and I suddenly suspected that I knew where Baumgartner was. These had to be his hunters.

  He recovered from my suppressive return fire quickly, snapping off another shot at me that was also too damned close for comfort, but I shot at the muzzle blast just as the bullet burned past my ear, and I saw him jerk and slump. I put two more shots into the lump, just to be sure.

  A renewed storm of gunfire ripped through the air overhead, only to be answered by more of our own, and more from the unknowns uphill to the north. I couldn’t see much; the brush down there was thick, and these guys were good at concealment. So, I was picking likely spots and putting pairs of shots into them, shooting low so as to hopefully not simply blast over their heads. If I kicked some grit in their faces or ricocheted a bullet the same way, so much the better.

  Volume of fire wasn’t going to do the trick with this bunch, though. A gravelly voice rose above the gunfire, shouting, “Assault through!”

  Ah, fuck.

  A roaring storm of automatic fire came ripping through the brush overhead, crackling through the air, shredding vegetation, and thudding into slender tree trunks. I pressed myself flat against the dirt as more rounds came uncomfortably close, though none nearly so close as the earlier, aimed shots.

  In spite of the nearness of the flying metal death right overhead, I forced myself to look up and get behind my rifle, just in time to see a shaggy form like a sasquatch made of grass rear up from the creek bed barely fifty yards away, carbine in his shoulder, dumping his mag in our direction as he charged forward.

  With so many bullets snapping and thumping overhead, the natural reaction was to get as low and as flat as possible, to curl into a tiny ball and cringe away from the bullets. Training doesn’t take that impulse away; in some circumstances, it can be useful. But sometimes it needs to be overridden. Especially when there’s two hundred-odd pounds of gunman coming at you from close-quarters, about to pick you out of the greenery any second and dip his muzzle to stitch you with bullets from skull to groin.

  So, while every nerve screamed at me to stay down, I picked my head up, lifted my muzzle, and put two rounds just over his heart at twenty yards.

  He kept moving forward, but he was dead by the time his face hit the ground. Relieved of the pressure of his fire, I was able to shift right and engage the next guy, at the same time Larry blasted him with a failure drill, two to the chest and the last one snapping his head back with a faint red spray as his momentum kept him falling forward.

  Just like that, the gunfire fell silent. I almost got up to count the bodies.

  Fortunately, I remembered at that moment that the hunters weren’t the only ones to worry about. I still didn’t know who was up to the north, and those two armored vehicles were still waiting in the wings.

  If any of us had stood up, we’d have been fucked. Because right then, one of those CROWS turrets opened fire.

  A hail of 7.62 rounds tore through the creek bed, smacking off rocks, thudding into trees, kicking up little fountains of grit where they hit the dirt. We had no place to go, and nothing we could hit back with. We’d been banking on the IEDs to take them out, and they were too far away.

  We were fucked.

  I almost didn’t hear it. The firestorm roaring down around our ears was too loud. But there was the faint suggestion of another sound, a deeper, heavier sound, and then suddenly the machine gun fire lifted.

  Three more shots rang out. They were definitely something heavier than 7.62; they sounded vaguely like a big-bore magnum round.

  The last shot’s report echoed down the valley, and then the only sound was my own harsh breathing, the pounding of blood in my ears, and the rumble of engines receding to the south.

  And Derek’s tooth-gritted groans of pain.

  Still not trusting that we were in the clear, I started crawling toward the sound. Along the way, I came across Ben.

  He was clearly dead. He’d taken three
rounds to the head and upper torso, and was lying face down in a pool of his own blood. I could see his brain.

  It wasn’t the time to mourn, or even try to retrieve his body. I kept going, heading for Derek.

  The rest of the team was forming a perimeter, guns out. I got to Derek and found him tightening a tourniquet around his own leg.

  A glance told me that his femur was shattered. He’d taken a bullet in the thigh, presumably one of the machine gun rounds from the armored vehicles, given the angles involved. His pantleg was soaked in blood, and his leg was lying at a weird angle. He’d gotten the tourniquet on quick, but I wasn’t feeling particularly good about his femoral, just looking at what I could see of the wound. He needed surgery, and quick.

  A footstep crunched nearby and I froze. Looking over, I saw Eric getting on his rifle’s sights, but a voice rang out from the trees.

  “Friendlies!” Old Man Harrick called out. “Coming in!”

  Rifle muzzles lowered, and the crusty old rancher stepped through the brush. He was dressed in his hunting cammies, which actually blended into the vegetation better than most of the “tactical” camouflage patterns I’d seen. He had a chest rig on and an AR-10 in his hands.

  Dave Harrick was a Vietnam vet, and looked it. His hair had gone white years ago, but it was still plenty thick, as was his mustache. Tall and barrel-chested, he was burned brown by the sun, and his eyes were flint-hard flecks of steely gray within a mass of squint lines. He looked hard as woodpecker lips, and having gotten to know the man over the last few years, he was harder than he looked. It would have been tough to make it as a rancher otherwise.

  “We’re clear for the moment, but we need to move,” he said. “They’ll be back once they start to figure out what the hell just happened.”

  “What the hell did just happen?” Eric asked as he got to his feet.