by DL Barbur
The inside of the cafe smelled like fried meat and fresh coffee, and my stomach started growling right away. I saw three familiar faces in a booth near the back, where the front door could be easily observed, and the back exit was readily accessible.
Dale Williams stood up as we approached, and shook my hand. I knew the old rancher was on the downhill side of seventy, but you’d never know it by looking at him. He was lean, with forearms like sinewy cables poking out of the sleeves of his rolled up work shirt. His sons were carbon copies. Robert was more muscular. Daniel was taller. But as soon as you walked in the room there was no mistaking that they were father and sons.
“Good to see you, Dent,” Dale said. “You all sure are a long way from Portland.”
Dale was about three hundred miles from his own ranch outside of Redmond, but Lehigh Valley had much more in common with Redmond than it did with Portland. As the waitress approached, her eyes slid over the Williams clan, in their jeans, work shirts, boots and ball caps, without a second glance, but she looked the rest of us over pretty hard, particularly Casey, who was wearing a black leather jacket and a Fugazi t-shirt. At least her hair was something resembling a natural human color.
After we ordered, I filled Dale in on recent events, using very broad terms and without naming names. The odds were we weren’t going to be overheard, but you never knew.
“So we need to get to a place where we can see the property in question, and we need some kind of secure base to operate out of,” I said.
Dale started to answer, then paused while our food was delivered, then waited for the waitress to leave.
“I looked at those maps you sent me, and I’ve got a few ideas for observation posts,” he said. “I may have an idea for an operating base as well.”
Casey poked her sandwich like she expected it to spring off her plate and take off across the floor. The vegetarian offerings were few and far between out here.
“That would be helpful. We couldn’t find anything out here for rent or really even for sale on the Internet.”
“It doesn’t really work that way out here,” Dale said. “I’ve got a fellow in mind that would have plenty of room on his ranch. His politics are a little on the extreme side, and I doubt he has an internet connection. Hell, he probably won’t even answer the phone, so I might have to drive out and go see him.”
“We need a secure place with room for seven people, good electrical power, and if possible a place to stash the helicopter,” Casey said.
Dale nodded. “The place I have in mind will do, I think. We’ll get on it tonight. In the meantime, we took the liberty of researching a route to some possible overlooks.”
Robert pulled out a topographical map. We spent the rest of lunch pouring over the map in between bites. Most of the land out here belonged to the Bureau Of Land Management and was leased by various ranchers to run their cattle. The rangeland was crisscrossed with roads in various states of repair. The Williams clan had been busy and had plotted a route that would get us to a ridge overlooking Freedom Ranch. Dale was nicely presenting it to us as if he was asking our opinion, but the truth was, the rest of us had a vague idea at best of the lay of the land. Dale had spent a couple of years in Vietnam as a sniper, and Daniel and Robert had both done tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, so establishing an observation post was second nature to both of them.
Their plan was solid. I wanted to get a lay of the land myself, but we would need to come up with a plan later on how we were going to keep the place manned.
I picked up the check for Dale and his boys on my government credit card and we all stepped outside in the hot sunlight. I felt my nose hairs kind of crisp when I breathed in. As everyone was climbing into vehicles, I drew Dale aside.
“I appreciate the help, Dale.”
“Least I can do.” He stuck a stick of gum in his mouth and started chewing. He’d been trying to quit smoking of late.
“How’s Mandy?”
Mandy was my old partner. She’d once been a promising young detective, now thanks to being beaten and nearly killed, she struggled with the aftereffects of a traumatic brain injury and rarely left the house. Dale was her father.
He looked off in the distance.
“I’m not sure what’s worse, watching her think she was going to get better, or watching her realize she isn’t. We take it day by day.”
I’d visited Mandy pretty frequently in the months right after she’d been hurt, then sort of tapered off. Part of it was Marshall’s people had decided to try to kill me, but part of it was it just hurt too bad to watch her struggle.
“We’re going to try to take Marshall alive,” I said. I didn’t know how many people Dale had killed in his life, and I would never be rude enough to ask, but I was pretty sure the number would be staggering. The vast majority of them hadn’t had a hand in almost killing his daughter. I was pretty sure he could smoke Marshall and his heart rate wouldn’t even go up, but I needed him to be ok with the idea of capturing him instead.
He knew what I was thinking.
“I’m on board, and so are my boys. We rather relish the idea of Marshall having a big, burly amorous roommate, in fact, but the second it looks like he might get away, our plans are going to change.”
“Fair enough,” I said, and we both headed to our vehicles.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the waitress through the tinted windows of the cafe. She jerked her hand down and hid it behind her leg as I turned my head. I was pretty sure I’d seen a cell phone in her hand.
Interesting. She’d either been making a phone call while she watched us, or had been snapping a photo.
I gave her a frank stare and she turned on her heel and walked deeper in the cafe. I was tempted to go badge her, but I wanted to get up on the ridge over the ranch. I put her in my mind as something to deal with later.
Dale took the lead in his truck, followed by Daniel pulling the big trailer, while we brought up the rear. We soon left Highway 95 and started working our way up a network of range roads. I had a handheld GPS and was glad as I was soon disoriented. I did make a mental note that we needed some different vehicles. Everybody out here either drove a truck or a big SUV. The Charger wasn’t very low profile even back in Portland, but out here we might as well have been driving a marked car with a light bar and everything.
We pulled off into a primitive campsite, basically a flat spot with room for parking with a fire ring and little else. The Williams busied themselves with unhooking the trailer, and we helped Casey unload some equipment from the trunk of the Charger. She was going to remain here and get the beginnings of a command post set up.
The trailer was designed to accommodate people up front, like a standard camp trailer, and also haul horses in the rear. As much as part of me fancied the idea of roaming the range on a stallion, I was somewhat relieved to see a pair of four-wheeler ATV’s in the back instead.
“We’ve just got the two,” Robert said. “We did bring extra helmets though.”
I strapped my rifle and backpack to the rack on the back of Dale’s ATV, and Alex did the same with hers on the back of Robert’s. Dale had a worn old Remington 700 strapped to his rack, while Robert had a more modern, .308 semi-auto very much like mine and Alex’s. People driving around on four wheels with rifles strapped to them wouldn’t necessarily attract that much attention out here.
I hopped on behind Dale and hung on. The ride wasn’t that bad. He was a skilled and conservative driver, but the dust was ever present and insidious. Robert took the lead, following a route on the GPS strapped to his handlebar. Dale stayed well behind and off to the side, but we still were enveloped in a cloud of brown more often than not. I could feel it getting in my mouth, nose, and ears. I made a mental note to clean my guns well.
The road got worse the farther we went, and we gained elevation as we headed for a big rock escarpment. The landscape out here was both foreign and beautiful. It was hard to judge distances accurately. What I thought was a
tree several miles away turned out to be a sage bush only a couple hundred yard off, then the exact opposite happened. There was no sign of human beings as far as I could see other than the narrow set of wheel ruts we were following.
Finally, the road petered out. We stashed the ATVs under some camo nets, shouldered our packs and rifles and started climbing. It was a brutal slog. The midday sun bore down on us and I found myself gasping for breath pretty quick. It didn’t help that we were almost a mile above sea level. This part of Oregon was on a high desert plateau. I saw a rattlesnake slither off under a rock and added that to my list of things to worry about.
I was tempted to ask and stop for a rest and a drink of water, but two things kept me going. First, I could see the top, so it wouldn’t be much longer, and second, Dale was more than twenty-five years older than me and was charging up the hill like a mountain goat, despite the full pack, rifle, and pistol he wore.
The view from the top was incredible. There was also a breeze, which I enjoyed for a few minutes as I huffed and puffed. Dale and Robert didn’t seem to mind a little break. I hate to admit it but I was a little pleased to see that Alex was more than a little out of breath as well
After a break, we found a spot to string a camo net between two rocks and all crawled under it. It was like lying on a griddle that was still warm from frying eggs. We set up a pair of spotting scopes and a high tech digital camera. Casey had shown me how to set it up. I anchored its little tripod to the ground and waited for the “link established” LED to light up, then keyed my radio.
“Casey, are you getting the camera feed?” I asked over the radio.
The camera swiveled back and forth on the tripod.
“Got it,” she said.
The radio reception was excellent, courtesy of the fact that there was nothing between us but miles of air.
Exactly how to manage surveillance of Freedeom Ranch had occupied my thoughts for most of the drive out here. It had been a couple of decades, but during my military time, I’d spent plenty of time in hide sights just like this one, surveilling airstrips used by drug cartels in Central America, and warlord compounds in Somalia. Ordinarily, you’d keep an observation post like this manned continuously, and swap out crews every couple of days.
We were a little short-handed for that. We’d need at least two people up here at all times, one watching while the other rested. Three would be preferable. The third person would be responsible for the security of the site. When one person was looking through a high powered spotting scope, and the other was trying to catch some sleep, you could find out a bad guy had a gun screwed in your ear before you even knew it. I wasn’t sure how much hardball the opposition was going to play, but better safe than sorry.
Dale and his boys were more than up to the task, and I could fake it, even after all this time, but that was about it. Dalton would have been a natural, of course, except for the inconvenient fact that he still needed a cane to get around. Nobody else had the kind of experience we needed for a gig like this, hence the choice to set up cameras. I was much more comfortable with Casey and Henry sitting in front of a monitor drinking Jolt! Cola than I was with the idea of them huddled under a camo net up here on the ridge.
Dale clicked his tongue. “Looks like somebody had some trouble getting their airplane stopped on that runway,” he said in an almost whisper. The target location was miles away, but stealth was as much a mindset as anything else, and noise discipline was a part of that.
He scooted to the side so I could take his place in front of the spotting scope. I was pleased that I automatically remembered old habits. I checked the position of the sun, to ensure it wouldn’t reflect off the wide lens of the scope. It had an anti-reflective coating, but it wasn’t fool proof. Our ridge ran roughly north to south, and we were to the east of the ranch. Right now the sun was off to my left, in the south, and there was no danger of it reflecting off our optics. We’d have to be careful in the evenings though.
I adjusted the focus for my eye. I was looking through a mile of shimmering, hot air at the surface of the runway. The heat mirage made the tarmac look almost like it was a liquid, undulating back and forth, but I could still make out the streaks of rubber on the runway. Down near the end, there were deep gouges in tarmac.
“Huh,” I said, wishing Jack was here. We’d have to try to get some pictures to show him.
I panned the scope around carefully. It was a big lens but it was still like looking through a soda straw. At this magnification, even small adjustments shifted the field of view by dozens of yards. There was a small single engine prop plane parked on the apron in front of the hangar. The hangar doors were shut. It looked like an awfully big hangar for a ranch.
“I wonder how big that opening it?” I wondered aloud.
“I already mil’d it,” Dale said. “Sixty feet, give or take.”
The spotting scope reticle was etched with evenly spaced dots, called “mil-dots.” Assuming you knew the range, which we did courtesy of a laser range-finder, you could count the dots and use them to figure out the size of an object. I could count the dots and laboriously do the math with a pencil, paper and preferably a calculator, but Dale could do it without even thinking about it.
“Wide enough,” I said. The jet we were looking for had a fifty-five foot wingspan.
“Tall enough too,” Dale said, as usual, one step ahead of me. “I find it suggestive that little prop job is parked out in the open instead of in the hangar.”
He had a point. Planes were expensive, and there was no reason to have one sitting out, exposed to the elements unless there was no room inside. I panned around the rest of the ranch. There were several sizable outbuildings, garages, shops, that sort of thing. There were a couple bunkhouses, then the main house itself, which was a monster. I saw a half-dozen pickups parked here and there.
“Two guys coming out of the bunkhouse,” Alex said. She was lying on her belly looking through binoculars like this was the sort of thing she did all the time.
I panned the scope around just in time to see the bunkhouse door slam shut. Several seconds later the sound carried to us, a reminder of how vast the distances were here. Two men walked across the gravel parking lot in front of the bunkhouse. Through the shimmering air, I could see they were wearing tactical pants, polo shirts, and handguns strapped to their thighs. They each carried a rifle. They got in one of the pickups and drove off on an access road deeper into the ranch.
“That sure looks like a patrol to me,” Robert said, from beside me where he was looking through his own scope.
I had to agree. Interesting. Those guys hadn’t been dressed like cowboys. They looked like the private military contractors the government paid to do stuff overseas.
We gave it a few more minutes, but nothing else happened. Out over the valley, a vulture drifted lazily around, soaring from thermal to thermal without having to flap its wings.
“Let’s get the rest of the gear set up,” I said.
We unloaded the backpacks. We set up a second camera. It would be good to have two independent views of the ranch, plus if one of the damn things broke we wouldn’t be completely blind. We also set up a couple of antennas and some gear that Casey could use to spy on radio and cell phone communications in and around the ranch. As she confirmed with Casey via radio that it was all working, I took a swallow of flat, plastic tasting water out of my canteen.
The climb down was quicker, but harder on my knees. As I held on to Dale’s four-wheeler on the ride back, I had little to do but ruminate. The ranch was a tough nut to crack. If we tried to raid the place, they would see us coming from a long way off. The two armed men we saw were no doubt only the tip of the iceberg. Hell, this was Eastern Oregon, every ranch out here was liable to have a good sized armory, even the ones that didn’t have a plane full of a hundred million dollars.
We stopped back at the trailer and I spit dirt as I took off my helmet. Casey stepped out looking the exact opposite of a federal
cop wearing cut-off shorts, a tank top, and a big straw hat. I hoped she had some sunscreen somewhere.
From inside I heard the muted sound of radio chatter.
“Is it all working?” I asked.
She nodded. “It sounds like they have two trucks out patrolling. They check in every fifteen minutes.”
“That sounds a little extreme to make sure nobody wanders off with their cows,” I said.
“Now what?” she asked.
Dale untied a damp bandanna from his face where he’d put it to block the dust, and I wondered why I hadn’t thought of that.
“I thought I’d wander up the road a ways, and see if we can’t talk to my friend about setting up your headquarters on his land. Robert and Daniel can stay here and help Casey with surveillance.”
Unspoken in that was they’d also keep her from being abducted and murdered if Marshall’s people figured out we were here. I nodded my thanks.
I looked at my phone and saw I had zero signal.
“We’ll head back to town, and get a couple of rooms at that motel we saw,” I said. “Even if your friend comes through, it will be good to have a space in town we can use.”
The air conditioning was blessedly cool in the car on the way back to town. Alex didn’t seem to be in much of a mood to talk, so I was content just to recline my seat back and shut my eyes. I didn’t sleep, exactly, just let my brain slip into neutral for a little while. It had been a long day.
At some point I must have fallen asleep, because I jerked awake, realizing that Alex was pulling the car over to the side of the road. Up head I saw Lehigh Junction, a smattering of a dozen or so buildings sitting in the middle of all the brown.
“What’s going on?” I said. My tongue felt thick and furry. I needed to drink more water. I realized I could see flashing red and blue lights in my side view mirror.
“We’re getting pulled over,” Alex said. “Looks like we’re about to meet local law enforcement.”
