Oath to Defend

by Scott Matthews

  “Not on ranches in Montana, they don’t. You’re lucky if you can find the time to eat, you’re so busy from sunrise to sunset. But I never got paid to take care of a polo pony that costs as much as a luxury car. But it doesn’t sound right, does it?”

  “So how are we going to find out what these guys are up to?” Drake asked.

  “We don’t have a lot of options,” Casey told him. “If they leave the ranch, we could snatch one and see what he’ll tell us. If they stay put, we might try to get Ricardo in there and see if he could learn something. Or we could just keep watching them and see if there’s a pattern to their activities that gives us a clue.”

  “I don’t think we have that much time, Mike. If this O’Neil guy is involved, he’s returning the Escalades he rented this weekend. The polo match is the day after tomorrow. They may all leave before we’ve learned much,” Drake said. “Have you rigged that drone you brought to eavesdrop on these guys at the ranch?”

  Casey nodded. “The Draganflyer X8 now has a wireless video camera with audio function. I’ll add the small radiation detection device my purchasing agent is sending if it gets here in time. It’ll work with a smart phone that receives and analyzes data related to any radiation it detects. We’ll see what the drone is seeing and at the same time tell whether it’s hot or not.”

  “You’re kidding,” Liz said. “I’m not even sure we have that capability.”

  “I’m sure you do,” Casey said. “It just costs a lot more and you’re supposed to get a judge to approve its use before you deploy it. But we don’t have to jump through that hoop.”

  Drake made his decision. “Let’s do it,” he said. “First thing tomorrow, let’s get eyes and ears on the ranch. Liz and I agree that Vazquez isn’t telling us everything. We’ll just have to come up with something that will make him want to talk to us.”

  Liz frowned at him. “I’m not sure I like the sound of that,” she said.

  “Don’t worry. If you think it crosses the line, you can help Larry keep looking for O’Neil. With your FBI background and his LAPD experience, the two of you should be able to come up with some ideas for finding our guy. You can also check with local law enforcement and see what they’ve learned about the guy I killed.”

  That made Casey look up from the steaks. “Whoa! The guy you killed? When, today?”

  “I didn’t really kill him,” Drake said. “I was just there when he took an unfortunate fall and broke his neck and I’m just curious if my name has come up in the investigation. Liz, why don’t you get started on that salad while I put the potatoes in the oven and Mike gets our steaks ready to grill? If we’re going to get an early start tomorrow, we need to get these men fed.”

  While Liz was opening cabinets and looking for a salad bowl, Casey nodded to Drake to grab a beer and go out on the deck with him. The other men followed. Drake took the cover off the grill and walked further down the deck so Liz couldn’t see him. Then he turned to Casey and his men.

  “Here’s what went down today. I went to see if Vazquez was in his room at the Pronghorn. A man was waiting for the elevator on the second floor. When I walked past him and stopped at Marco’s door, he tried to knife me from behind. We fought, he lost. I should have been more alert. He looked like one of the guys at the ranch. If I’m asked to give a statement, after what we just went through last month in Portland, they’ll keep me tied up for longer that we can afford. So…if the policia show up looking for me, I’m not here and you haven’t seen me all day. I don’t think Liz will interfere, but I can’t be sure. She’s a pretty straight-shooter.”

  “Why don’t we just go to Wyler Ranch and talk with these yahoos?” Billy Montgomery asked. “I think we can handle whatever they throw at us if things get out of hand.”

  “Because,” said Drake, “if they have the nuke Liz is looking for, we don’t want to scare them off. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be pussy footing around tonight. Look, I don’t know what I got you into here, but we all need to be careful. They’ve tried to get me out of the way twice and they’ll try again if they get a chance. But tonight, let’s ‘raise up our glasses against evil forces,’ as Toby Keith would advise, and prepare for tomorrow. I have a feeling things are going to get interesting real soon.”

  38

  Casey grilled the steaks perfectly to each person’s preference, and the baked potatoes with toppings could have been a meal in itself. Liz’s Caesar salad was a masterpiece of simplicity with hearts of romaine, garlic-toasted croutons, olive oil, egg, lemon juice and Worcestershire sauce and a sprinkle of grated parmesan cheese.

  Casey took a big bite of the salad and raised his bottle of beer in a toast. “Liz,” he said, “that’s the best Caesar salad I’ve ever had. You can cook with me anytime.” The others raised their bottles in agreement.

  Liz returned the salute by raising her glass of wine. “Knowing how you enjoy your food, Mike, I’m flattered. My steak was perfect. Thank you as well.”

  Bottles of cold beer were again raised in agreement.

  The six members of Team Drake relaxed comfortably around the dining table in Senator Hazelton’s great room. Outside, the setting summer sun turned the tall grass on the other side of the river into a rich shade of gold. The slow moving water of the Little Deschutes River shimmered in the waning light. Soon the solar-powered lights that bordered the path down to a fire pit by the river’s edge came on.

  “The evening is too nice to waste sitting inside,” Drake said. “Leave the dishes and let’s enjoy the sunset.”

  As the men headed out to the deck, Liz walked to the bar near the fireplace to refill her glass of wine.

  What an unusual group of men, she thought. They were all warriors, but they weren’t like the men she had competed with when she was with the FBI. These men were respectful of each other and certainly respectful toward her. She had seen none of the one-upmanship she was used to. The team members were all comfortable with themselves, and each other.

  Especially Casey and Drake, they were like brothers, she thought, and not just brothers in arms, but best friends. Pity the fool who harmed either one of them. That person would pay a heavy price for his mistake.

  She looked out toward the deck. Drake was talking to the team. He was good looking, she had to give him that, but looks weren’t what she found herself attracted to. What appealed to her was his quiet strength and his confidence. The other men acknowledged these qualities in the way they deferred to his leadership, even though each of them was capable of leading if called upon. It wasn’t something Drake had to work on or consciously assert. He was just a natural leader, who happened to be very lethal when he needed to be.

  She knew how dangerous he could be from the events a month ago in Portland, when he had dealt with the terrorists who had tried to kill her boss. And she knew it from the record of his military service Secretary Rallings allowed her to see before offering Drake a role as a consultant of sorts, a position as an off-the-books privateer to assist in dealing with issues of national security. As an attorney, Drake could look into matters defense contractors and corporations didn’t want the world, or their shareholders, to see when they suspected they were being probed or threatened.

  Yes, she told herself, the Secretary had made the right choice when he’d reached out to Drake. She just hoped she had made the right choice, too, when she’d told him about the nuclear device they were searching for. She had to be back in Washington on Monday and was running out of time to prove Drake’s hunch was correct that the nuke was in Oregon.

  She suddenly realized she’d been watching Drake for longer than she intended. Her second glass of the wonderful Oregon pinot that Drake had insisted she try was half gone. She refilled her glass and walked out to the deck to join the men.

  Drake was talking about the huge steelhead trout he’d caught while fly fishing right here in the river last summer. She couldn’t help but ask if she’d interrupted another ‘fish story’.

  Drake stopped talking,
stared out over the river for a second. The last thing she heard was his shout, “Down!” as her glass of wine exploded in her hand.

  “Rifle, twelve o’clock, across the river. Get inside!” He crawled toward Liz. Her face and neck were covered in blood.

  “Liz, can you hear me?” He searched for a pulse on her neck. She was unconscious, but he saw that her chest was rising slowly with each breath. Her pulse was weak but steady.

  “Mike! Help me get her inside. She’s been hit, but with the red wine all over her, I can’t tell where. Or if it’s wine or blood”

  When they had pulled her across the six feet to the door, which was partly protected by the heavy log railing that ran the length of the deck, Drake let Gonzalez take over. His secondary training as a medic on his Green Beret A-team had trained him to treat gunshot wounds.

  “I saw a flash off a scope directly across the river,” he told Casey in a hurried whisper as he headed inside. “Fifty yards deep in the tall grass. Go upstairs and see if you can spot the shooter. As soon as we know how Liz is, we’ll go look for him. Larry, Billy, bring the weapons down from upstairs. We might need them.”

  Drake ran to the kitchen and grabbed two clean hand towels from the pantry and ran hot water over one of them before taking them to Ricardo. He saw that Liz had regained consciousness and was responding quietly to Ricardo’s questions.

  “I think she hit her head when you pushed her down,” Gonzalez told him. “She has cuts on her neck and face from the glass, and I suspect more cuts on her arm and chest. I’ll know more when I clean off the wine and blood.”

  “Okay. I’ll go see if Mike’s spotted the shooter.” As Drake ran up the stairs, he intercepted Montgomery and Green coming down with their weapons. Montgomery was carrying a HK416 carbine and wearing a holstered Colt .45. Green also had a Colt .45 and was carrying a Remington tactical shotgun.

  “Cover the front and rear,” Drake said. “I’ll see if Mike sees anything across the river.”

  He found his friend standing to the left of the window he had opened in his upstairs room. He was looking east across the river through the scope of his Remington M24A2 sniper rifle.

  “I don’t see him,” Casey muttered. “He could be in the tall grass, but there’s nothing he could be hiding behind. If he’s good, he could have taken the shot from the far side of the meadow.”

  “The reflection from his scope was in the middle of field, not behind it. Why just one shot?”

  “Maybe he thought his target was down. Liz’s wine glass exploding probably looked like a head shot from where he was standing.”

  “I’ll ask Billy to go search the area. There’s a dirt road from the highway that runs along the river right to that meadow. If that’s the way he got in there, maybe Billy can cut him off.”

  “If he isn’t long gone by now,” Casey said and lowered his rifle. “Snipers don’t wait around for their escape route to be blocked.”

  “Why do you think it was a sniper?”

  “From where you say you saw the reflection from his scope. It’s four hundred and forty yards from here. Most hunters won’t take a shot from a quarter of a mile away. Besides, hunters don’t shoot toward houses. Killers do. Buddy, I suspect you were the target.”

  Drake had to chuckle. “If I was, they’ve missed me three times today. It must have rattled them when their guy didn’t make it back from Pronghorn. You know, I think it’s time for us to rattle them a little more, whoever they are.”

  39

  David Barak stood on the deck of the hangar house at Sunriver, looking south toward where he now knew the meddlesome American attorney had just been shot. He swirled his favorite Glenmorangie scotch in his tumbler and listened as his shooter recounted the kill.

  “It was an easy shot,” Jameel said, “straight across the river from the meadow. They were out on the deck of the log house drinking beer. His head exploded, blood everywhere. But you were right, the other men have been in the army. They took cover as soon as he went down. I couldn’t get another shot off. By the time they realized what had happened, I was half way back to the ATV I rode in on.”

  Barak gave a satisfied nod. “You did well, Jameel. Return to your men in Boise and wait for me there. As soon as I finish here, I’ll join you and we’ll move everyone to our new base in Canada.”

  One more day, Barak told himself as his sniper left the deck, a couple of minor adjustments to his plan, and this phase of the mission would be completed. He had to smile. It would be a hundred times more deadly than the attack on the Twin Towers. His strike in America would be the standard that all others would envy and, hopefully, copy. The underbelly of America was its infrastructure; bridges and highways, power grids and, of course, dams.

  That was the genius of his plan. Well-placed demolition devices to unleash the most destructive power on the planet, nature itself. A hundred foot wall of water would rush downstream and inundate everything in its path for a hundred miles. That was an awesome weapon that he couldn’t wait to use. As he had been taught, a warrior uses the weapons at hand. In America, water and the reservoirs that collected it for hydroelectric power and irrigation were everywhere, just waiting to be used against the people who built them.

  But he was growing more and more concerned about his celebrity polo player. He had been visited twice by the attorney, and even though the attorney was now dead, the woman who accompanied him was not. Perhaps worse, the men who were there when he was shot had the training to cause him trouble. If they came for Marco Vazquez, who knew what he would tell them? It was very worrying.

  Barak found the number for Saleem, his Hezbollah commander, on his cell phone and waited for him to answer as he walked inside to refill his tumbler with Scotch.

  When Saleem answered, he said without greeting him, “I think it would be wise for you to take our Argentine to the ranch to be with his horses until the polo match Saturday. Keep him away from people. Take his phone. I don’t want him talking to anyone. Tell him it’s in the best interest of his family that he concentrates on playing well and be focused on why he’s here.”

  “That may be a problem,” Saleem said. “There’s a charity fundraiser and dinner tomorrow night. He’s supposed to attend.”

  “Well, he’ll have to miss it. Call from the ranch and tell them he has the flu or something. If they want him to play on Saturday, he’ll need to rest. Tell them whatever you want. Just get him there and keep him quiet until Saturday. All I need him to do is arrive at the polo field with his ponies and the trailer they came in. He will have served his purpose.”

  “Will you be at the ranch tomorrow?”

  “Yes. I want to talk with the men when they return from their last practice ride. I’ll be there by sunset for the Maghrib prayers. Bring Vazquez to the ranch first thing tomorrow and keep an eye on him. I don’t want the attorney’s friends talking with him before Saturday.”

  “Is there anything you need from me after I’m finished at the polo match?” Saleem asked.

  “No my friend. You and your men have served us well and I look forward to working with you for many years to come. Leave as planned and return to San Diego. Just avoid crossing the mountains unless your car can float.”

  Saleem laughed. “Don’t worry, Barak. As much as I would like to witness your success in person, I’ll wait to watch the carnage on the news. Inshallah.” He disconnected.

  Barak took his tumbler of Scotch and went looking for his pilot. He found O’Neil playing pool in the rec room downstairs.

  “Tim,” he said in a jovial voice, “I’m feeling good tonight. Let’s celebrate. Drive over to that restaurant at the marina and get us two orders to go of their grilled baby back ribs, some ceviche with the Mexican prawns, a couple salads, and some fried ice cream. I’ll be busy tomorrow night and we’re leaving Saturday, so we’ll make this our farewell dinner.”

  “Would you like me to arrange for female companionship as well?”

  Barak shook his head. “I don�
�t need the distraction. But go ahead if you do. As long as you have my plane ready to go on Saturday, I don’t care what you do between now and then. As long as you’re discreet and don’t attract unwanted attention,” he added.

  As O’Neil left, Barak walked out to the hangar and opened the exterior luggage compartment of his Beechcraft Hawker and removed two padlocked, twenty-four-inch, black nylon duffel bags. Each bag held five pounds of Semtex.

  He carried these bags to the closet in the master bedroom and set them next to the smaller black nylon range bag that held his Glock 21 and HK MP5K submachine gun. It never hurt, he told himself, to have too much fire power. He knew that from experience and because most of the world’s law enforcement agencies were looking for him. The guns in the range bag were only backup, of course, if he found that he needed more than the Glock 30 he always carried in a horsehide holster on his right hip.

  The Semtex was also a backup of sorts. Sooner or later, he knew they would discover where he had been staying. Before they did, he planned to level the hangar house and destroy any trace of evidence that would link him to the most lethal terrorist act in history.

  40

  When he walked into his bedroom, Drake found Gonzalez using saline to irrigate the wounds on Liz’s face. She was on the bed, trying to lie as still as possible. He was impressed that she didn’t flinch when the medic dabbed at the skin around the cuts on the right side of her face.

  “She was lucky,” Gonzalez said without looking up. “She was holding her glass of wine at her side, level with her shoulder, not her face, when it exploded. Most of the small glass shards hit her upper arm. Only a few shards hit her neck and right cheek. If you hadn’t pulled her sideways, there would have been lots more of these shards to remove.”

  Liz spoke up. “I guess that means I should be happy you knocked me down and gave me a concussion,” she said. “All I remember is how good that wine tasted and that I was glad I was the only one drinking it.”