by Jim Riley
I was lying in three-foot-deep snow. The top six inches were pure powder, but under that it was crusty from having been exposed to the sun for ten days without any inclement weather. The storm that had dropped the six inches had pushed through rather fast, and as usual, cold, clear temperatures had been right behind it. I didn’t have a thermometer handy, although I had one in my daypack, but I guessed the temperature was hovering right around ten degrees above zero. Not so cold that it instantly froze exposed skin, but cold enough that it hurt for a while, then started freezing it if you weren’t careful.
I was dressed in snow camouflage, as was the rest of my team. We were spread out over a fifty-foot-square area with everyone having found some kind of cover. I scanned the tree line with my small pair of binoculars and wished I had a larger pair with soft rubber eyepieces. The compact Nikons were great for carrying, but for extended periods of glassing they really started to give me a headache. I had been looking through them nonstop for about fifteen minutes. That may not seem like a long time, but when you’re lying in the snow in below-freezing temperatures with them to your face, it’s a long time. I heard JB asking JW if he could see anything. JB is what we called Jeff Brown. He was talking to Jeff White, or JW. They are both on the Logan County Sheriff’s Department SWAT team and are both named Jeff. I’m sure you can see the problem. I told them to maintain radio discipline, which was a nice way of saying shut the fuck up. Next time I’d just say shut the fuck up.
I was fairly sure the White Supremacist who had shot one of our other guys, Troy Zimmerman, was gone, but I wasn’t positive. I still hadn’t figured out where he had shot from but I had a couple of ideas. I was basing my hunches solely on what I could see was good cover. I glassed the ridge line for the fourth time when I saw it. A small hole dug in the snow below a log. It was no larger than a tennis ball, but once I saw it I wondered how I had missed it all the times before. I watched it intently for the next five minutes. I couldn’t see into the hole, or over the log, but if he were still there I hoped to catch some movement. I was hoping Danny Baker was going to call me soon to tell me he had gotten into a hide further up the slope. I watched the hole for another ten minutes before Danny called.
“Leader, this Sierra One. I’m in a hide seventy-five yards to the southwest at about your four o’clock. I’ve got eyes on you and the opposing hillside. Nothing to report yet.”
It was a comfort having him there. “Roger my four o’clock at seventy-five yards. I’ve got a sniper hole below a log at sixty feet and to my one o’clock.”
“Fuck, it’s cold. I wish you guys would hurry up.” It was Troy, who had been shot and was lying face up in the snow out in the open.
“Shut up. Quit whining and die already.” It was Travis Meach. Travis can be hard sometimes.
“I got the hole. I can see over the log, too, and can see where he dug it out. He’s gone.”
“Roger that, he’s gone. See anything else?”
“I’ve got footprints going through a draw, then disappearing over the crest of a low ridge. I don’t see any others but I’ll keep looking.”
I figured from the get-go that he was trying to suck us in with hit-and-run tactics to get us moving after him. If I knew him, he’d have another ambush like this one set up not too far down the trail. I decided I was going to call Danny in and let him work ahead of us from now on. I should have done that earlier and maybe Troy wouldn’t have gotten hit.
The sun went behind one of the few clouds in the sky and it got a few degrees colder almost instantly. I decided that we had to move. I called Brett Haston on the radio and told him to take Benny and Travis with him, circle along the tree line, and cut the ridge a little further down. I cautioned him not to get out of sight of Danny’s cover, though. When he got to approximately straight across from us, we’d come across under his cover. Then we’d call Danny forward and move out. Brett asked about Troy, and I said I’d take care of him.
The sun was beginning to drift in and out from behind the clouds that were now moving into the area. The temperature had stabilized but a wind was picking up. That, combined with the moisture coming off the next front that was pushing through, had taken what was a beautiful morning and turned it into a downright miserable day. We had laid in the snow and waited for Brett and his team to work their way around for half an hour before he called me on the radio.
“We are almost straight across from you. We found the place he was holed up and shot Troy from. Judging by the tracks, he’s long gone from here.”
“Roger that, but be careful; he may have backtracked.”
I called the rest of the team up and told them we’d cross the small opening in the trees at five-yard intervals. Brett would be covering us from that side and Danny from above. We didn’t think the guy was still in the area but to keep on their toes. I told them I’d bring up the rear.
“What about him?” It was JB asking about Troy.
I walked over to him and kicked him in the boot. “Get up. You come with the team, but you’re dead so you can’t do anything. Got that?”
“I got it. As long as I don’t have to lay here in the snow anymore, I don’t give a crap what I do,” Troy said as he got up and brushed the snow from his Gore-Tex. There was a nice red circle of paint on his white camo, right over where his heart was. It wasn’t very big because the paintball he’d been shot with was practically frozen solid when it hit him. Fortunately for him, it had hit him in the chest where he had on plenty of padding, and he hadn’t hardly felt it. If he’d been hit in the thigh or arm it would have hurt like hell, and if he’d been hit on any exposed skin, he’d have probably thought he’d really been shot. If Sarge had wanted to hit him in any one of those spots, he could have. Sarge didn’t miss, even with paintballs.
I’d decided to have this unannounced SWAT training call-out to sharpen our skills in the woods. We practiced all the time indoors, but considering most of Logan County was forest and mountains, it was only reasonable we train out here on occasion. I had planned to do it before winter was gone for the same reasons. At least half of the year there was snow on the ground. Logic dictated we train in the worst conditions. Train hard and fight easy.
I hadn’t heard any bitching about it and knew I wouldn’t. It’s a SWAT thing. They may not like it, but they’d never admit it to anyone. It would seem weak. Except for Troy, who’d been complaining ever since he’d gotten the good news from Sarge’s paintball gun. I figured he was much more embarrassed about being killed than he was uncomfortable with the cold. Oh well, no room for second place. Now he could bring up the rear and carry the gear.
When I first started thinking about doing the training, it was out of frustration over not solving the Gittleson murder case. It was bugging me, and to divert my attention and get out some of my aggression, I decided it was time for a surprise training. One of the hard things to do as a team leader and training coordinator is come up with surprise call-outs. Since I know about it and help prepare it, it’s not really a surprise for me, if you know what I mean. And considering I’m the one leading the team, it makes it hard to pretend that I don’t know what’s coming. I got around all of those problems by simply calling Sarge. He didn’t ski, but when I told him I needed him to set up an ambush and be the bad guy for my team to hunt down, you’d have thought he’d won an all-expense-paid trip to the Caribbean. I knew the team and I would be in for a tough time of it. Sarge was Delta Force, after all. He hadn’t let me down.
The first ambush had been lightweight. In fact, I thought maybe it was a trick to push us off course at first. He’d left obvious tracks in the snow to a large rock. The tracks disappeared onto the rock and the most obvious place to go was a small overhang, which allowed for a nice sniper position. I could see it well in advance of getting close enough for him to get a shot, so we were able to avoid it. Looking back, I guess he was just testing us to see how good we were. Apparently now we knew after the latest ambush, not good enough.
I’d
given Sarge a topo of the area we were going to be allowed to use, which was about one hundred acres of wooded and rock-sided mountains. Some of it was straight up and down, and some of it was just uncomfortably steep. A little of it was meadows and easy walking. So far Sarge had avoided all of the easy stuff. Naturally. I told him the scenario was a White Supremacist had shot it out with cops and taken to the mountains. That was Sarge. The paintball guns were loaners from a group of kids one of the team members knew. The kids belonged to a group that did paintball wars during the summer months. Some of these guns were worth a few hundred dollars and those kids took the whole thing pretty serious. I was beginning to feel like they could have probably kicked our asses, too.
We moved out with my new plan of having Danny scout in front of us. I was pretty stealthy in the woods and so were a couple of other guys. Unfortunately, most of the guys had never really spent much time in the woods hunting or anything like that. Being quiet to them was not knocking trees over. I knew that Danny moving alone would be able to be pretty quiet, and he was really good at scouting.
Danny had moved out quite a bit ahead of us. We were following his tracks, and I kept a man twenty yards in front as point. My intentions were to not lose another man, but if we did I wanted him to be enough in front that the team would get some notice. Danny called me on the radio.
“I’ve got him.”
“Where are you?” I stopped the team.
“Follow my tracks until you come to the steep rock face. You’ll see where I climbed the face, but you just keep going around it. When you get to the north side, it descends into a small valley. On the facing slope is an old log homestead, or what’s left of it. He’s in there. If you get into that valley, about fifty yards west you can walk up it and come in from the bottom. He shouldn’t be able to see you. If you want to come in from the top, you’ll have to get higher up, way up the valley, and walk the ridge back down.”
“Have you seen him?”
“Yeah. I put eyes on him a few times. He just seems to be waiting patiently for you.”
That didn’t seem like Sarge. That was a little too casual for him to get seen multiple times. Maybe he was just trying to keep it doable for us.
“Okay, we’re moving out.”
We followed Danny’s directions. I was impressed when I saw the rock face he had climbed. I used to rock climb some, and I’m not sure I’d have tried it in the winter, with all my gear, and no rope. I’d have to chew his ass out for taking such a chance. But I was definitely impressed.
Danny had described the terrain, cabin, and ingress to the target perfectly. When we got there, it matched the picture he had been able to paint in my mind. I led the team down the valley. We could see the rock bed that the cabin was built on but couldn’t see any of the logs of the cabin yet. Good. That meant Sarge couldn’t see us either. We were directly below it by about twenty-five feet when I stopped the team.
“Leader to Sierra, can you see him?”
“No, I haven’t seen him move for about ten minutes.”
That worried me. It wasn’t like Sarge to let himself be seen, but it was like him to disappear.
“There’s no way he got out the other side, though, without me seeing him. Assuming there’s even a back door to the cabin.” Danny sounded very sure of himself.
Sarge disappearing made me nervous, but I trusted Danny’s judgement.
I split the team up, sending half with Brett up one side and I took the side with the door. There was an old, now frameless and empty, window opening on Brett’s side, and they could port that opening when we went in. I still wasn’t too comfortable not knowing where Sarge was and really wanted to hit it from two directions.
The cabin had to be at least one hundred years old. Most of the logs were still in good shape, but the whole structure was leaning a little. There was no roof left anymore, and judging by the shape and size of it, there was probably only one room in the whole place, at most two. The plan was for my team to throw a practice flashbang, which only made about one third of the noise of a real one, through the door and then enter. At the same time, Brett and his team would port the window by sticking their guns through the opening. It was the closest thing we could come up with to a multiple point entry, without coming in from the top.
We snuck into position and Brett let me know his team was ready. They hadn’t been able to see any movement. Danny reported that he had not seen anything either. I also felt a lot more confident with Danny’s assurance of Sarge’s whereabouts once we got to the cabin. It was built into the side of the hill, and there was no way Sarge went out the back unless he tunneled. Of course, this was Sarge so I wasn’t completely counting that notion out yet.
The bang went off, and my team went in with me third man back. It wasn’t what we’d expected. The cabin was only one large room, but there were a couple of short walls jutting out. It would have given someone a place to hide, but the snow didn’t look disturbed. The snow in the middle of the area had been packed down by being repeatedly walked on. It appeared almost intentionally so. There were piles of snow in the corners, but the most unexpected thing was a cellar door on the back side of the cabin. There were footprints leading to it and it was closed. Brett moved his team into the cabin and we all covered the cellar door, with the exception of JB and JW who I had covering the main door and window and looked out. We still didn’t know for absolute certain where Sarge was, even though now we thought we had a good idea.
It took us about a minute and a half to organize ourselves and decide on a plan of action. It was assumed that Sarge was either right at the stairwell preparing to do battle when the door opened, or there would be a room down in the cellar to clear. Maybe with more surprises.
Given the size of the cabin, and the size of the door we’d be going in, I had spread the men out a little in case Sarge did come out firing. No use giving him an easy target to get all of us. I was still feeling uneasy about the idea that Sarge had let us trap him into a small hole, but I gave the signal to go ahead. Brett reached and grabbed the old log-slabbed door. It began to lift and I noticed some snow move to the right of the door. It wasn’t much, only what was being displaced by the fishing line secretly attached to it. I yelled it as I dove out the door over the top of JB, but it was a second too late.
“Booby trap!”
The hidden flashbang under the packed snow went off, throwing snow way into the air and creating a snowstorm inside the log structure. I could also hear paintball guns going off. I ran around to the other side of the cabin just in time to see Sarge through the window, bolting out the door on the opposite side. All of my team were riddled with red paint marks and cussing up a storm. Nice ambush.
I knew that he would assume there was a sniper watching the entry. Hell, he probably already knew exactly where Danny was. I also knew that he’d use the distraction of what went down to make a break. His closest cover was straight out the door and a forty-foot dash to a bunch of rocks. He could snake his way through those until he reached the off-side of the hill and he’d be out of Danny’s sight. I also knew that he would not quit until he got Danny. I looked back over the valley to the hill Danny was on, then looked all around. It took me about three minutes to figure out what I was going to do. I quietly told the team there were dead and to make the best of it. Then I told Danny something he didn’t like; stay where he was and make sure he kept moving his scope around enough to pick up the afternoon sun. I wanted to make sure Sarge picked up the glint off of it.
I’d been in place for over two hours. My insulated boots had completely lost the battle to the cold by then and my feet were numb. I was seriously considering getting out and moving just to get some circulation going, when I heard it. I couldn’t describe it and I’m not sure it could have even been considered a noise. Just something that hadn’t been there before. A moment later I heard it again. It was Sarge moving on the snow, but it was quiet. Oh, so quiet. Just not quiet enough.
When I had scope
d out the terrain, I considered two things. One, Sarge would go after Danny. He wouldn’t be satisfied until we were all dead. Two, he would not take the most direct route there. He’d go out of his way to come in from the direction Danny wasn’t expecting. If Sarge would have had a rifle there would have been other scenarios to consider, but since his paintball gun was only good for about thirty yards or so, it drastically cut down on his options.
I was hanging thirty feet up from a rock chock firmly anchored in a small crack in a granite boulder overhang. My climbing harness was slightly padded but it had long ago cut the circulation to my legs. Maybe that’s why my feet were numb. The noise continued coming ever so slowly. There was no way Sarge would know I was there since I had climbed into position from below. In doing so I had eliminated any possibility of chewing Danny out for taking risks. The climb I had made had been worse than the one he had done at the rock face. Sarge was going to have to walk past the rock I was hanging behind. I could hear him coming. The adrenaline was moving through me a like a train. I had forgotten all about my feet and the aching in my legs. I was so attuned to the noise of Sarge moving in the snow I could feel it. Suddenly, there he was. I only had a short window of opportunity to get him because there was a tree just a few feet up the path he could make it to. I raised my paintball gun.
“Gotcha.”
I have never seen a man his age move as fast as Sarge did. For that matter, I have never seen anyone react that fast. Considering he had no idea I was there, his reaction time was less than half what a normal person’s would have been if they were standing there looking at me when I spoke. He spun and dropped at the same time. The paintballs probably crossed paths in mid-air, and we both took one. His was in the upper shoulder, but mine was in the chest. Shit. I’d gotten greedy. Killing him hadn’t been enough. I had to rub his nose in it beforehand. It had cost me my life and an incomplete mission, since my shot probably would not have killed him. You’d think I would have known better.
