by Peter Nealen
There were more nods all around. Harrick’s platoon of militia would link up with the rest of the Praetorians who were still in the mountains, the RV point having been sent by code during one of the extremely brief sat phone conversations I’d had with Tom. We still couldn’t be entirely certain that somebody wasn’t listening in. The bulk of the armed country boys and ranchers were staying in Cody, helping Brett prepare for a possible counterattack there. My team and Eddie’s were going to be the main effort, going in to clear The Ranch.
With the last of the questions out of the way, we mounted up in the motley collection of ranch trucks and offroad 4x4s and headed north.
As important as speed, surprise, and violence of action are to any combat action, they are always preceded by slow, painstaking, methodical preparation. Or, in this case, slow, painful, careful movement.
The south OP was our first target, and we had to get close enough without being spotted to take it and clear it before the rest of the TF back at the main Ranch buildings knew anything was up.
That was always a tall order, even when the targets were booger-eaters in mud huts. When they were well-trained, well-equipped, and using state-of-the-art comms, it got next to impossible.
Which only meant that we had to find their weakness and exploit it. And the primary weakness of any technological force is that it tends to think that its technology makes it invincible.
Now, we’d deliberately sited that OP to minimize the amount of dead space where someone could sneak up on it. That presented its own set of problems; we were effectively trying to penetrate our own security. So, when you can’t use cover and concealment to their full advantage, you’ve got to rely on misdirection and deceit.
That was why Eddie had feinted an attack at the North Gate, pulling a glorified drive-by before retreating across the creek and toward Old Man Harrick’s hay field. Then, about fifteen minutes later, he’d brought the gate under fire with long-range rifles. It wasn’t enough to do much damage, but it was enough to make them, hopefully, think that any attack was coming from the north, and that it would only consist of the usual harassing fire that Tim had been dealing out for the last couple of days.
Meanwhile, Jack, Bryan, and I were creeping on our bellies through the grass and brush, heads to the ground, skull-dragging our way inch by inch toward the OP. It was going to take us a couple of hours to cross the five hundred meters from where we’d crawled around the shoulder of the mountain to the OP. But impatience was going to get us killed.
It had already been one hell of a grueling movement. We’d driven up to the Harrick Ranch, then taken horses up over the mountain until we were at our final rally point, just behind the pyramidal peak that rose above the back of The Ranch itself. There we’d dismounted, cammied up, and started down.
We’d only covered a little over a mile since leaving the horses behind, but it had been a brutal mile, the first klick being downhill over rocky ground, trying to stay in the trees, though we could still catch glimpses of the OP in the distance. It was a truism that if you can see the enemy, the enemy can see you, provided he’s looking. I was sincerely hoping that they weren’t looking that far.
The last half a klick made the downhill hike seem like a nature walk. We had gotten down onto more open ground, where the trees and bushes were lower and farther apart, and we had to move slowly and carefully, crawling on hands and knees much of the time, which was murder on knees already battered by years of soldiering.
Across the last five hundred yards, we had to get down on our bellies and inch along, careful to watch the OP—which was well camouflaged, rather like a sandbagged, fortified deer blind—without looking directly at it. While it might seem like woo to some people, the fact is that a man can often sense a stalker watching him. So, we were careful not to stare directly at a target if we could avoid it.
Right at the moment, I was lying flat behind a low scrub spruce, sweating my ass off, feeling every single minute I’d been awake for the last forty-eight hours, along with every bruise and contusion where I’d dragged my body across the rocks and brush. Keeping my scope’s objective lens shadowed inside the tree, I scanned the OP.
There was no movement. The OP looked completely undisturbed. I had the captured radio still stuffed in my belt, and had been intermittently turning it on, the volume turned up just enough that I could hear it when pressed to my ear, but either they weren’t talking, or they’d smartened up and changed crypto. There was no traffic.
So far, there had been at least three times where if we’d been made, I might have expected some kind of reaction. Hell, from where we were lying, we could actually see the corner of the main ranch house; if we’d been spotted, we should have been able to see the QRF coming after us. But everything was still and quiet; even Eddie had given up shooting at the North Gate. Too much, and they might start to suspect that there was something more than harassing fire afoot.
I suddenly wondered if we were too late. What if the Task Force had mobilized and headed for Cody while we’d been working our way around to come at them sideways? What if we’d passed them going south as we’d come back north?
If that was the case, then Brett, his deputies, and the militia would have to do their damnedest to hold their own until we could regroup and go support them. Second-guessing the plan at this point was counterproductive and stood a good chance of getting us all killed. I had to presume that that OP was occupied, and that if we didn’t approach it with every bit of care we could, we’d get shot full of holes and the alarm would be raised.
So, I stifled my impatience, buried my doubts and worries as deep as they would go, slung my rifle back over my shoulder and partway under my borrowed ghillie, positioning it so that the muzzle was up out of the dirt, and recommenced my crawl.
The closer we got, the more careful we had to be. Inch by inch, we crept through the grass, trying not to breathe too deeply, trying not to make the grass move too much ahead of us. We were keeping as many low bushes and junipers between us and the OP as possible, but that hillside was just open.
I hadn’t thought of it before, but I suddenly imagined putting my hand out and hearing the telltale buzz of a rattler. We didn’t see too many of them that high, but they were around. That would be a bad day.
But I didn’t put my hand on a rattlesnake, and we got closer and closer without any sign that we’d been detected.
Finally, we were lying flat on the ground, guns up, facing the rear of the OP, which was, at least from a distance, just another grassy mound with a couple of bushes around it. Only when you got up close could you see the firing slits and the slot of an entrance on the north side.
The hillside remained quiet and still; I saw no movement, and no sound reached my ears but the wind in the grass. If there was anyone in there, they were keeping really quiet.
Just as vividly as I’d previously pictured the nonexistent rattler, I had the sudden thought that there could well be a shooter in there right at that moment, hunkered back at the corner, with his SCAR 16 pointed at the entrance, waiting. This could get really dicey, really quick.
The three of us came abreast in a short skirmish line, then carefully and quietly rose from the grass, first coming to a knee, then to a forward-leaning crouch as we rushed the OP behind our rifles.
I slowed at the entrance, carefully pieing off the opening, hoping to nail anyone inside before making entry. But the “fatal funnel” was empty, the interior dark.
Here goes nothing, I thought, and plunged inside.
There wasn’t a lot of room inside the OP to hide, but that also meant that there wasn’t a lot of room to maneuver once I made entry. If there was somebody crouched in the corner, I was about to get shot, get in a hand-to-hand scuffle, or both.
There was nobody in the corner that I turned to cover. Nor was I shot in the back or knocked over by somebody trying to fight Jack behind me.
The OP was empty. Either they’d cleared out, or they hadn’t occupied it at all.<
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While it was conceivably possible, I found the idea that they’d left their entire southern flank open unlikely. Which meant they’d cleared out. Which, in turn, meant that we had to move. Things were moving without us.
Looking at my two teammates, I got nods. I had to risk it. I pulled my cell out of my rig and sent a short message.
“Move on the house. Now.”
In an ideal world, that message would have been immediately followed by the other team and a half roaring overhead in Little Birds, swooping in on the ranch house in a hail of gunfire, with Ride of the Valkyries blaring on loudspeakers.
While I was sure somebody had Ride of the Valkyries on an MP3 player somewhere, we were notably lacking in Little Birds, or air assets of any kind.
The three of us still had about a klick to go, over terrain that was anything but flat, so “Now” was going to be a bit negotiable. Especially when we were the vanguard; the rest of the assault force was a terrain feature to the south, waiting for us to clear the OP.
We still had some forest to move through, which would provide some concealment, but speed was now our primary concern. Fortunately, while Jack, Bryan, and I had crept our way to our objective on foot and belly, the rest of the assault force was a little better equipped to make tracks.
In moments, the snarl of engines started to become audible, and then a rag-tag collection of four-wheelers, RZRs, and dirtbikes came over the hill.
Two of the RZRs pulled up next to the OP, and we piled on, careful to keep our muzzles pointed at the dirt. Then it was off to the races.
In a few short moments, we had rolled down the slope and into the trees. Fortunately, the woods were mostly high country pine, the trees spaced out so that we could fit an ATV between them easily in most places. We still had to slow down, as there was no riding in a straight line through those woods, and while we’d pulled a lot of the fallen stuff out for construction and firewood over the last few years, there are always logs and fallen trees on a forest floor, and they make going hard for wheeled vehicles, even offroaders.
I was gripped by a formless sense of urgency. I couldn’t escape the feeling that we had to hurry, that if we didn’t get close fast, they were going to be ready and waiting for us, poised to mow us down as we came out of the trees. In truth, we could only go as fast as the terrain and good tactics allowed. It just didn’t feel fast enough.
In fact, there were still no indicators that they even had the faintest idea we were on The Ranch at all. The militia in their support by fire position should have opened fire if they thought we’d been made; it would have been less than ideal, but it would have given us advance warning and hopefully disrupted any defenses the Task Force had in place.
Since the only sound was the growl of our own engines under the trees, I had to assume that either they’d cleared out, or they hadn’t shown the militia enough preparations to make them think we were about to roll into an ambush.
Of course, that was assuming that the militia could necessarily recognize such an ambush.
Sometimes being able to run through multiple contingencies in one’s head, even while maintaining alertness and situational awareness, is more a curse than a blessing.
Fortunately, I didn’t have long to woolgather over every way this could go wrong. Even weaving through the trees, we got to the assault position in short order, fortunately without running into any traps or security.
I was still thinking that there was no way they could have missed the noise the engines had been making as we got into a skirmish line and advanced toward the treeline and the house.
I dropped to a knee behind one of the last pines, and the rest did the same, spread out along the treeline and facing the barns and the back of the house.
The reason we’d gotten so close without, apparently, being detected became obvious after a moment. While the terrain and the trees had masked some of the noise, I could now hear the rumble of diesel engines out in front of the house. It sounded like all the remaining vehicles had been fired up.
I couldn’t quite believe our luck. Unless I missed my guess, they were gearing up to head south, responding to our successful attacks in and around Cody.
They would never be more vulnerable, especially if they thought we were still in Cody.
That didn’t mean we rushed in. I scanned the back yard and spotted a figure at one of the back windows of the house, watching the trees. He hadn’t seen us yet, but they’d learned from the night we’d grabbed Gage. They were watching the back.
I made eye contact with Eddie, who was crouched a few meters away, and slowly and carefully signaled to him that I saw one sentry. He nodded ever so slightly and signaled that the part of the house he could see was clear. Then he motioned an interrogative.
I nodded. Time to kick this pig.
He pulled the radio from his rig and murmured a single word into it. A few seconds later, a storm of gunfire started from up the mountain, peppering the northwest corner of the house with bullets.
At the same time, I smoothly brought my rifle to my shoulder and centered the scope on the back window.
The guy on rear security had suddenly leaned closer to the window, trying to look up the mountain to spot where the fire was coming from. He just made my job easier. I let out my breath, took up the slack on the trigger, and squeezed.
The heavy rifle surged back into my shoulder and the suppressor spat, the report of the shot drowned out by the roar of fire from above. The window glass spiderwebbed around the single, neat hole that formed right below the man’s eye. He suddenly dropped out of sight.
It was about a fifty-yard sprint to the back wall of the house. It felt like a lot longer to my tired, battered carcass, and I was sure the rest were hurting just about as bad. The biggest danger right then was that we’d do something stupid out of sheer exhaustion.
Of course, the packs full of explosives and incendiaries we were hauling didn’t make matters any easier.
While Eddie and his team set security on the windows and corners, the rest of us unslung the packs and stacked them strategically around the back door, under the windows, and where they’d do the most damage to the structure, particularly the incendiaries. A couple more packs got set around the corners, even as return fire from the front and the north side started to respond to the shooting from the mountain. It seemed like most of them were out front, loading the vehicles.
Once the charges were set and primed, we turned and beat feet back toward the treeline. As we neared the barn closest to the house, though, a shot snapped past my head from behind.
I spun, dropping to my belly, bringing my rifle up, even as three more shots cracked by overhead, right where my head and torso had been a second before.
I hit hard, mags digging into my ribs, but better to have a little wind knocked out of you than to get shot. I returned fire as soon as I got my sights somewhere in the vicinity of the window, though Eddie had started shooting before I’d dropped. The window shattered the rest of the way, and the shooting stopped.
Picking myself up off the ground, trying not to groan with the effort, I turned and ran for the barn, where Eric and Bryan had already set up, covering the back of the house. It felt like a lot farther to run when my back was to the house than it had running toward it.
I hit a small hillock just beyond the barn and threw myself down behind it, covering the house while I bellowed at Eric and Bryan, “Turn and go!” They spun and ran past me, even as I spotted another head in the window, trying to see without exposing much more than an eye and a rifle barrel. I cranked four fast shots through the window, and the eye vanished.
In two more bounds, we were back in the trees. A storm of shots rained down on the back of the house from up the mountain, where the secondary support by fire position had been waiting for us to fall back. That should keep them bottled up in the house for a bit.
I got on my own radio. “Rancher Four, this is Hillbilly,” I called. “Have you got the front covered,
as well?”
“Not all of it,” was the reply. “They can get into one of those vehicles without us being able to hit them.”
Not ideal, but I said, “It’ll have to do. All right. Cease fire.”
“Roger.” A moment later, an eerie quiet settled over The Ranch, seeming deafeningly silent after all the gunfire.
I didn’t want to give them time to figure out what had just happened. I stuffed the radio back in its pouch and pulled out a burner phone.
We still had a landline in the house, though it was almost never used. That was the number I had set in speed dial.
It rang a few times before a voice answered. “Who the hell is this?”
“I think you know who it is, asshole,” I told him. “I’m calling to give you the same offer I made Potter. Bring all of your people out, unarmed, with your hands on your heads, or I blow the house up.” I didn’t let him answer right away, but plunged on. “If you’ve got any doubts that I’d happily burn down my own house to get you fuckers out of it, carefully take a look out the back windows. But don’t try coming out the door. I’ve got enough boom-boom stacked back there to turn anybody who tries into pink mist, while bringing the whole roof down on the lot of you.”
He probably put his hand over the handset, but I could still hear him yell at somebody in the back to check out the windows and look toward the door. I waited, then heard him start cursing. “How do I know you’re not bluffing?” he demanded.
These guys were starting to sound like a broken record. “Potter asked the same question,” I told him. “His vehicles are now smoking scrap metal. Like I told him, though, by all means, try me. I won’t object to turning all of you into grease spots.”
