Lex Talionis

by Peter Nealen

  “CROWS ain’t worth much if you shoot out the cameras,” Harrick replied. “Dennis likes to play with that Omen of his.”

  I knew the rifle he was talking about. Dennis Harrick had been proud as a peacock of his .458 Magnum AR, and I knew the younger Harrick well enough to know that he probably could pick off a CROWS sensor with it.

  “Derek’s Urgent Surgical,” I told him. “We’ve got to move him quick but careful.”

  Harrick jerked his chin toward the north. “I’ve got a truck on the far side of the hill. We can load him up and they’ll get him into town. We’ll head back to the house on horseback.”

  I didn’t argue with him. Arguing with Dave Harrick was rarely a good idea under the best of circumstances. Having heard a few stories about his actions in Laos and Cambodia, I was pretty sure it was a worse idea under these circumstances. If he said we were clear, we were clear. I also agreed with his assessment of the need for haste.

  Standing up, I did a quick scan of the area. Ben and Derek were our only casualties. However, there were only three other bodies on the ground. When they were turned over, though, none of them was Baumgartner. If he’d been there, the man had disappeared like a ghost as soon as things had started to turn.

  Which meant he was still out there, somewhere. We needed to move quick. If there was anyone I expected to be fast on the turnaround, it was Baumgartner.

  Larry supported Derek, who was looking more than a little pale, and started hauling him up out of the creek bed, following Harrick. I slung my rifle and picked up Ben’s body. I was his team leader. I’d carry him out.

  There were half a dozen men on horseback at the treeline, all in various camouflage patterns and carrying a hodge-podge of rifles, ranging from ARs to M1As to even a couple of lever actions. I didn’t see Dennis, but imagined he was still on overwatch somewhere.

  Frank Wagner kicked his horse forward as we came out of the trees and approached Larry and Derek. “I can get him to the truck quicker,” he offered. “It might hurt more, but it’ll take less time.”

  “Sorry, buddy,” Larry said. “This is gonna suck, but we need to get you medevaced.” Derek just nodded, his teeth gritted. Larry squatted down, got his big mitts under Derek’s armpits, and hoisted him. Frank grabbed him by the back of his chest rig and got him over the saddle in front of him before kicking the horse into a quick walk. Derek couldn’t hold back the groan of pain as he bounced against the saddle, but kept it under a scream.

  Another horseman I didn’t recognize sidled his mount up beside me. “I’ll take him,” he offered, but I shook my head.

  “He’s my guy,” I said. He just nodded and jerked a thumb toward the horse he was leading behind him.

  It took some doing to get Ben’s body up on the horse in front of me, but we did it. Most of the rest were scanning the hills around us, hands never straying far from rifles. I recognized a few of them, others were strangers. But they were quiet and alert, and had just pulled our asses out of an ambush that should have killed us all.

  Once we were all mounted, Harrick nodded curtly, swung into his own saddle, and led out.

  To my complete lack of surprise, we headed north, quickly heading up into rough country, back into the Beartooths, though a part that we hadn’t gotten into. We were still on Harrick’s ranch, which was at least twice the size of ours, but we were getting up into some rough, wild parts of it, where the cattle didn’t go.

  Nobody said much of anything. We knew we were being watched; there was the buzz of a drone overhead, and we had quite a bit of open ground to cover. They were going to know where we were going, but aside from Baumgartner’s hunters, the Task Force had not shown a great deal of ability when it came to mountain warfare, and unless I missed my guess, we were going high again.

  We were. After a few miles, we turned west and went over the ridge, into a high, forested valley. In another half an hour we were under the trees and heading uphill again. I hadn’t even known that Old Man Harrick ever came up this far.

  I looked around at the men who’d pulled our asses out of the crack we’d gotten into. Most of them were older; I recognized two other local ranchers. Tom O’Reilly I knew had been in Desert Storm. I didn’t know if Orrin Ketchum had been in the military.

  A couple of others I recognized as more recent vets. Brad Lewis was a former Army grunt who had tried out for Praetorian and failed the indoc. TJ Taylor had been a Marine, and in and out of trouble with the law ever since he’d gotten out and returned home to Wyoming. I mainly knew him through Brett’s bitching about him. But, troublemaker or not, right at the moment he was sitting his horse easily, his rifle held ready and his eyes alert as he scanned the woods and the surrounding mountains.

  After another hour, we rode into the wide bowl of a high valley. A low, stone house had been built against the side of the mountain, and I got the distinct impression that it actually went back into the hillside. It looked relatively innocuous to the untrained eye, but a brief examination belied the idea that it was just a little mountain cabin. That place was a fortress. I could get some idea of how thick the walls were by studying the deep recesses of the narrow windows.

  Old Man Harrick rode up to the stone-fenced corral beside the cabin and swung down out of the saddle. He opened the gate and led the horse in, and the rest of us followed. It was only then that I saw that the corral actually extended back into a deep stable under a massive shelf of rock.

  A lot of planning had gone into this place. Of course, I shouldn’t have been surprised, knowing what I knew about the old man. He had been one of those who had come back from Vietnam, found no place for themselves in society, thoroughly disliked where society had been going, and had headed for the hills.

  TJ dismounted and moved forward to help me get Ben’s body off the saddle, but Eric shouldered him out of the way. Ben was one of ours, and we were going to see to him ourselves.

  Larry was at Eric’s side quickly, and we eased our teammate’s corpse to the ground before I swung down from the saddle myself. As my boots hit the stony floor of the corral, Dave Harrick loomed out of the shadow of the rocky shelf and jerked a thumb back inside the stable.

  “There’s a root cellar back there where we can keep him until we’ve got time to bury him,” he said. I nodded my thanks, and we lifted Ben and carried him back into the shadows.

  The root cellar was a narrow cave blasted into the rock and shored up with heavy timbers. There were a lot of supplies stacked on shelves against the walls, and it was chilly enough that we could probably leave Ben’s body there for most of a day. A proper funeral was probably going to be some time in the future, if ever.

  He wouldn’t be the first Praetorian to go without a proper funeral. We never had been able to go back to Djibouti to dig up Colton’s remains.

  We laid Ben down on the floor, composed his limbs, and closed his eyes. We took his mags; the ammo would need to be distributed later.

  Harrick, O’Reilly, and Ketchum were waiting inside the cabin when we left Ben and went in the open door in the back. As I’d suspected, most of the “cabin” had been blasted out of the mountainside. There had been a ton of work put into this little hideaway, and from the main room I couldn’t see how far back it went. A solid-looking door set in a frame of heavy shoring timbers led back into the mountainside.

  The main room itself was Spartan but comfortable, most of the furniture being rough, rustic pieces likely built from local timber. The floor was stone. There was no stove, only a deep, stone fireplace with several iron hooks and a spit, that could easily have been hauled up on a pack horse. The lights were either battery-powered or propane lanterns.

  The rest of the team and the three ranchers were standing across the main room from each other. Ketchum looked nervous, O’Reilly was composed, and Harrick was as stone-faced as ever. My guys just looked tired and wary.

  “We owe you a thank you, Mr. Harrick,” I said. “We’d have been finished if you gents hadn’t showed up.” Harrick i
nclined his head silently in response. “But you shouldn’t have gotten involved,” I continued. “Now you guys are going to be targets, too.”

  “Bullshit,” Harrick replied bluntly. “We live here, too. Who else was going to step in?”

  “We’ve got a genuine quarrel with these guys,” I said. “I already sent Van Williamson and his little ‘Constitutional Defense Force’ packing over this.”

  “And we don’t?” Harrick snapped. “These little bastards have driven their armored vehicles around with abandon, scared and scattered our cows with their damned drones, and landed a helicopter in my damned hay field without bothering to ask. They’ve got Brett all but a prisoner in his own home, and they’ve been interfering with the local law every chance they get. I think we’ve got plenty of quarrel with ‘em.”

  He squinted at me. “And I’ll thank you not to lump the rest of us in with that limp-wristed little poser, Williamson.”

  “The lower profile we can keep this, the better for everybody,” I protested. “We can handle this.”

  His gaze hardened still further. “Bullshit,” he said again. “If you could handle it, you wouldn’t be hiding out in the Beartooths while those jackasses are squatting in your house. As for keeping a low profile, I know more than one reason as to why you sent Williamson packing, and I agree. A few of us have been some of the same places you have, and we don’t want that shit here, either.” He looked like he wanted to spit, but there was no place to do it but the floor. “But there’s only so far you can let yourself be backed up against the wall, and I’m pretty sure you know that as well as I do.”

  When I raised an eyebrow at how thorough his apparent understanding of the situation was, he grinned humorlessly.

  “And if you’re surprised that I know so much about what’s going on, the day something happens in this county and I don’t know about it, that’s when you need to start worrying. That’ll be the day I start to die.”

  I couldn’t argue with him. Running off a poser ideologue with guns like Van Williamson was one thing. Dave Harrick had seen the elephant, quite possibly in a worse way than I had. Most of the stories I’d heard were second- or third-hand; he rarely talked about it. But I’d heard enough to know that he knew the cost of what he was embarking on.

  “Hell, if we do this the way I’d like to,” he continued, “they’ll never know we were involved. They’ll blame you for all of it. We’re all hunters, after all, and a deer’s a lot harder to sneak up on than a man.” The faint echo of a smile under that snowy mustache faded. “Face it, Jeff, this is our fight. It became our fight when they attacked our neighbors and locked up our sheriff. We can do what we can to keep it from escalating, though from what I’m hearing it may be too late for that. But we’ve got no other recourse but to fight, now, and you’re in no position to do it alone.”

  I looked to my left and right. Larry shrugged. Eric was nodding. Jack was stony-faced. Nick gave me a look that told me he thought that I was an idiot if I didn’t take Harrick up on his offer. Bryan echoed Larry and shrugged. It was in my court.

  Technically, I probably should have taken it up with Eddie, Tom, and Tim. But I was the man on the spot, and, frankly, Old Man Harrick was right. Turning down and running off a bunch of loose cannons who didn’t know or care the consequences of their actions was one thing. These guys were different.

  Grimly, I nodded my surrender and held out my hand. Harrick shook it, his rock-hard palm and crushing grip promising that I’d made the right decision.

  I still wasn’t entirely sure, but the decision was made. Whether I liked it or not, the Beartooth Mountain War was about to enter another phase.

  Chapter 17

  Our first move wasn’t against the Task Force itself, not as such. While Tim’s team, accompanied by Dennis and a few other local sharpshooters, stayed on overwatch above The Ranch, taking the occasional pot-shot when the opportunity presented itself and keeping an increasingly nervous and wary eye out for Baumgartner, the rest of us piled into several of the ranchers’ trucks and headed south, for Cody.

  Even professionals get complacent, if things stay quiet long enough. Baumgartner might be a different matter; the guy was, at least by reputation, barely human, and he worried me. But these guys weren’t Baumgartner, and nothing had happened near Cody since the IED blast and the exodus of Van Williamson’s Threepers.

  So, I wasn’t too worried about getting made as we closed in on the two Expeditions that were still stationed outside Brett’s house. Cody was quiet and they had no reason to expect us, especially not when their buddies up north at The Ranch were taking fire every so often. They figured we were still running in the hills, soon to be hunted down by Baumgartner.

  It helped that Jason O’Reilly, his brother Doug, who was barely eighteen and looked like a fresh-faced kid to me, and their girlfriends, Katie and Sami, were doing the initial approach. I’d been against letting them do it to begin with, especially given how young Doug and Sami were, but Tom O’Reilly had stood firm, saying that he’d trained them himself, all four of them knew how to use guns, and they had to see their first action eventually. I still wasn’t convinced, but I was sitting in the truck behind them, along with Larry, Bryan, and Nick, ready to bring my rifle over the dash and ventilate the shit out of the clowns in the Expedition at the drop of a hat if things went south.

  Hell, I was worried enough about the kids that I was ready to drop the hat myself.

  They were walking down the sidewalk, the boys with their arms around the girls, laughing and carrying on like a handful of kids just coming from a party. It was late on a Saturday night, so it was entirely plausible.

  As they came abreast of the first Expedition, Jason and Katie stopped and started making out. Doug and Sami laughed and kept going, up until they came alongside the second vehicle.

  I was impressed. We’d drilled them continuously for hours, rehearsing every step of the approach and the first contact, most of us uncomfortable enough with letting them participate at all that we’d been nearly impossible to please the entire time. I was uncomfortably aware of how close they were in age and experience to Van Williamson, though I told myself that the ranchers were right. They could at least be trusted to do what they were told.

  At the exact same time, Jason and Katie drew their pistols and held them to the window of the front Expedition, even as Doug and Sami did the same. I thought I saw a bit of a tremor in Sami’s grip on her M&P; actually pointing a gun at another human being for the first time can be tough.

  At that same instant, Larry reached down and flipped on the truck’s high beams, while the rest of us piled out, rifles in hand.

  The kids backed up as we moved in on the two vehicles, keeping their weapons pointed until we stepped in front of them to take over. Their part was done; we’d just needed them to get close enough without raising suspicions to immobilize the guards for the precious few moments it would take us to move in.

  Neither of the Expeditions were armored; they were regular soft-skinned vehicles. So when I reached for the door handle and found it locked, the guy behind the wheel staring at the muzzle of my SOCOM 16 through the window, I just gave him a brief look that suggested he was an idiot, smashed the window with said rifle muzzle, and told him, “Open the door.”

  Looking a little sheepish, keeping his hands in view, he did so. I stepped back, keeping my rifle trained on him, while Larry dragged him out, put him on his face on the ground, and dropped a knee into his back. I heard his breath go out with a groan; having Larry’s two hundred seventy-five pounds, plus another fifty of gear and weapons, land on your back couldn’t feel good. I could hear the grunts as Nick and Bryan did the same on the other side of the vehicle, dragging the passenger out and searching him before zip-tying his hands.

  Ahead, Eddie, George, Eric, and Jack were doing the same thing with the other Expedition. I heard some scuffling and Jack snarled, shortly followed by a meaty thud, after which things went quiet again. “Anarchy” was
living up to his reputation for belligerence again.

  With the Task Force overwatch out of the picture, Larry, Eddie, and I headed for the front door. Old Man Harrick had told me that Brett was effectively a prisoner, but at the same time, I didn’t want to chance that he was still armed. Busting in his front door in that case, whether we were there to break him out or not, would be a good way to get shot.

  “Brett!” I called out. “It’s Jeff Stone! We’re coming in!”

  The door swung open. Brett was standing there, fully dressed but unarmed. “I can look out the window, Jeff,” he said calmly. “Which I did as soon as I heard breaking glass.” He looked down at the prostrate, bound bodies of his guard detail. “Took you guys long enough. I was expecting something to happen shortly after that bomb went off.”

  “We’ve been busy,” I said. “Have they got the rest of your boys and girls locked down, or just you?”

  “I think they’ve got a detachment at the office,” he said, “but I was essentially the hostage for the department’s good behavior. I think they sent most of the rest home, after insisting they leave their weapons at the office.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Somehow I doubt that had quite the effect they were expecting.”

  He chuckled humorlessly. “Oh, yeah. Miguel’s got enough guns and ammo squirreled away in his garage to arm the entire department five times over. But they’ve been laying low because I told them to.”

  I nodded. It made sense. Regardless of how well-armed pretty much everybody up there was, one did not take on a group that was as well-equipped as the Task Force lightly. Guys with MP7s in thin-skinned vehicles was one thing. MATVs and those armored eight-wheelers were something else.

  “So, what’s the plan?” Brett asked, accepting the subgun that Eddie handed him.

  “We do the same thing to the TF goons at the office that we did here, and get your people back in charge,” I said. “Then we deal with the rest of them.”