by Scott McEwen
“We could assault the house,” Duke said. “We’ve got the manpower.”
“We’ll wait to see. If Shannon’s in there ready for us, it could be a disaster. We don’t know how many more men he has inside with him.”
“Listen, you want to end this duck hunt before morning, or you wanna fuck around out here all night in the goddamn rain?”
“You need to stop with the blasphemy.”
Duke chortled. “I’m talkin’ about the Jew God.”
“It’s as Abad told you before . . . blasphemy is blasphemy.”
“You want to kill this prick or not?”
Akram narrowed his eyes, wishing it was time to put the American to death. “I’m listening.”
“You need to send in that kid with the bomb vest. Even if the blast doesn’t get Shannon, it’s gonna fuck up whatever defense they’ve organized in there and set the house on fire. Then we shoot whoever comes running out.”
“Tahir!” Akram called in the darkness, his face illuminated briefly by a flash of lightning. “Come here.” It was a brilliant idea to send a bomber into the house. But Akram was irked with himself for not having thought of it on his own.
Tahir appeared with a pair of night vision goggles on his face, an AK-47 hanging from his shoulder. “Yes, teacher.”
“Your moment has arrived.” Akram put his hands on the youth’s shoulders and squeezed. “I need you to go into the house and detonate the bomb. You will arrive in heaven instantly, bathed in the affections of Allah.”
Tahir shivered, and then felt the warmth of his urine running down the inside of his leg into his boot. “Yes, teacher.” His voice felt raw, and he suddenly realized that he did not want to die. But there was no turning back.
Akram unzipped Tahir’s jacket and readied the dead-man switch, putting it into the youth’s fist. “It is very easy,” he promised. “All you have to do is let go of the handle, and Allah will take care of the rest.”
“Will there be pain?”
“None,” Akram promised. “And your name will live forever.”
Weak in the knees, Tahir leaned back against the stall door where a horse stood eating from a bucket of oats. “Should I sneak across or run?”
“Be stealthy,” Akram said. “Work your way to the red truck, and from there you can run full speed to the back of the house. If you cannot force the door, break in through a window. Whatever you do, you must stay alive long enough to get inside, where the pressure wave will do the most damage. If you see our target, get as close as you can before releasing the detonator.”
“I will not fail,” Tahir said numbly, feeling utterly empty inside his skin.
Akram broke open a hay bale and spread it on the ground, getting to his knees and beckoning the youth to do the same beside him. “Now let us pray. This straw will serve as our musallah and protect us from the dung of these animals.”
A few feet away, Duke sat watching them in infrared as they knelt in the hay, bowing their foreheads to the ground. He felt nothing but contempt for them.
It’s too bad I don’t have all my money yet, he thought, because I’d waste every one of you crazy fuckers and be on my way.
53
MONTANA
Glen Ferguson came to in the rain, facedown in a patch of brambles beneath the weight of his brother Roger’s body, the sharp tip of a dead juniper branch jagging deep into the flesh below his left eye. He had never been so cold in his life, and for nearly a minute he was completely unable to move. At first he thought one of the bullets had nicked his spine and left him paralyzed, but then he realized he could still move his fingers and toes. He became conscious of the dead weight pressing down on his back, and drew his arms up beside him, pushing against the earth to roll himself over. The branch tore a chunk of flesh from his face as it pulled free, but he was cold enough that he hardly felt it.
He lay there a moment, feeling the icy rain beating on his face, and then groped inquiringly at Roger’s body. “Oh, no!” he gasped, suddenly lucid and struggling to sit up. He was aware that he’d been shot multiple times, and he was becoming cognizant of the damage to his skeleton and musculature.
He felt Roger’s carotid artery, but there was too much rain pelting down, his fingers too cold to detect a pulse. His thumb slipped into the exit wound at the back of the skull, and he jerked his hands back in horror, wiping them on his soaking Carhartt jacket.
The bastards had killed his little brother. At first he couldn’t believe it and simply sat there dumbly in the driving thunderstorm with Roger lying across his lap. Finally it dawned on him that the killers were still out there somewhere, trying to kill his father and older brother. He checked his watch, seeing that an hour had passed since he and Roger had decided to head down to the house.
He hefted Roger’s bulk aside, trying not to look at him, fearful of seeing his brother’s death mask. When he tried to stand, he grew so dizzy that he nearly pitched over into the brambles, so he sat back down, probing about in the dark for his AR-15. It didn’t seem to be anywhere around, so he began crawling back toward the trail. Lightning flashed, revealing the tent fifty feet away, and he crawled over to it, pulling himself in out of the rain.
Glen stripped his soaked cotton clothing, which was rapidly driving him into the advanced stages of hypothermia, feeling his body temperature rise as soon as he was naked. He checked himself over in the inky blackness to locate three exit wounds in his upper chest. The holes were small, about as big around as a pencil, and the bleeding was not profuse. He could feel the bone of both clavicles creaking as he moved his shoulders, and the fingers of his left hand didn’t respond with as much dexterity as they should have, but he could still use both arms and hands, and that was all that mattered.
His Gore-Tex boots had kept his socks dry, so he pulled the boots back on over them, and rolled up his three-layered ECW (extreme cold weather) sleeping bag. Then Glen took the scoped Mauser from beneath Roger’s bag and loaded in the five-round stripper clip by feel. He tucked the remaining four rounds into his brother’s CamelBak rucksack and rolled the ruck up inside the sleeping bag. Slipping from the tent a few moments later, he found that he still couldn’t stand.
He set off crawling toward the ridge naked and dragging the Mauser with his right arm and the sleeping bag with his left. The rain drove down on his back, and muddy droplets spattered his eyes, but he was only vaguely aware of the cold, which he knew must have slowed his bleeding so far. When he got to the ridge, he pulled himself into Kashkin’s sniper nest and unrolled the sleeping bag, zipping himself up inside its waterproof Gore-Tex shell.
The increase in body temperature would increase the bleeding, but he was dying of hypothermia even faster. Glen aimed the Mauser down the hill at the ranch and peered through the scope to see no signs of life. Three separate lightning flashes revealed nothing. He grew alarmed and unzipped the bag with the intention of crawling downhill to the ranch, but the instant the icy wind and rain hit his exposed flesh, his body was wracked with an intense pain ten times worse than any fever chill he had ever experienced. He jerked the zipper back up and decided to stay put.
Groping around inside the sleeping bag, he took a folding knife from the CamelBak and cut two armholes in the bag so he could operate the rifle without exposing his shoulders to the cold. Then he took Roger’s wool watch cap from the ruck and pulled that onto his head. After eating a Snickers bar and sucking down a quart of water, he felt a great deal better and settled in behind the rifle. There were no broken windows on the back side of the house (except for Marie’s boarded-up bedroom window), and that told him the fight down there was probably yet to begin.
“You’ve still got overwatch, Dad.”
Lighting flashed, and he saw a figure dart from the stable, running for cover behind a steel water trough.
Glen quickly worked the bolt and pulled the stock into his shoulder. “
Lord God,” he whispered beneath the rolling thunder. “I beseech you in the name of all that’s holy . . . send me another flash of lightning and let me blow this motherfucker’s head off.”
54
MONTANA
Hal stood back from the upstairs window beside Marie, both of them studying the stable with every flash of lightning. They caught glimpses of men with AK-47s moving about inside, but for the most part, the enemy was keeping out of sight, so they had no idea how many they were up against.
Marie had taken Gil’s Browning from the gun safe and lain it across the guest bed for Hal to use. “Are we waiting for them to make the first move or what?”
“Right now we have the advantage,” he said. “Every minute closer to daylight works in our favor. If they move to surround the house, we’ve got trouble because we won’t be able to see them.”
“What do you think is going on with your brothers?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “We underestimated the enemy, and I got a bad feeling the boys might have been taken by surprise up there.”
“God, I hope you’re wrong. Your father will never forgive—Look!” She pointed out the window. “Somebody just ran from the barn and ducked down beside the water trough.”
Hal wrapped a poncho liner around his upper body and head to reduce his heat signature, stealing a peak around the window frame. Lightning flashed, and he saw a perfect snapshot of Tahir crouching beside the corrugated water trough. “I didn’t see a weapon. Did you?”
“No, but he was clutching something in both hands. Like he was really afraid of dropping it.”
“A grenade, maybe?”
“I don’t know.”
Hal went to the top of the stairs. “Dad, be ready for a grenade!”
“He’s running toward the house!” Marie shouted.
• • •
AKRAM LAY ON his belly in the loft with the stock of the TAC-50 pulled into his shoulder, watching through the nightscope as Tahir jumped up from the water trough and took off in a headlong dash for the house, not bothering to maneuver from cover to cover as he’d been told. He cursed the youth for his stupidity and cowardice, for it was now obvious the boy’s heart was not in the mission; that he was merely going through the motions to get it over with as quickly as possible.
There was a flash of lighting, and a rifle shot rang out. The boy fell in the mud and lay there gripping his leg with his free hand, his mouth open in a scream of pain that was carried off on the wind.
Akram got to his knees, cupping his hands around his mouth and shouting, “Get up and run!”
Though Tahir could not hear him, he managed to get his feet beneath him and to gallop off toward the house again, still gripping his wounded leg as he approached the deck on the back of the house.
The entire ranch was lit up by a brief moment of daylight. Another shot rang out, and the boy exploded in a blinding flash.
The shock wave blew out the windows on that side, peeling back the two-by-sixes on the deck and blasting the house with a hailstorm of debris, but the structure remained intact, and nothing caught fire.
Enraged, Akram began to back away from the loft door, but Duke arrived and dropped down next to him, training his M40 sniper rifle up the slope.
“Shannon’s not in the house. He’s up there on the ridge. Keep your eyes peeled for muzzle flashes, because we probably won’t live to see more than one.”
Akram got back down behind the TAC-50, believing he could almost feel the omniscient eyeball of the Navy SEAL sniper watching him through the scope of his own rifle from up on high, leering down on them like Black Death. He struggled to dominate his flinching reflex—as if one could flinch away from an incoming round—and swept the bulky rifle in twitchy movements from point to point along the crest as he searched for their target.
“You’d better relax,” Duke cautioned, able to feel Akram’s herky-jerky movement through the straw. “You’ll never spot him that way. Keep your sweep smooth. He probably displaced after shooting that dumb-fuck kid on the chance we saw his muzzle flash. So we got a minute or two before he’s resettled. Just keep calm, and we’ll get him.”
Akram resented the American’s composure, but he knew Duke was the better shooter, so he shoved the .50 cal in his direction. “We’d better trade.”
Duke grinned. “Hell, you speak my language better every day.” They swapped, and he put his eye to the expensive night scope. “Watch what a man of talent can do with this fine piece of artillery—and keep your finger off the trigger over there. You’re my spotter now. If you shoot and miss, that’ll be our ass, so just help me find the squid fucker and let me blow his ass in half.”
They studied the rocks above for the next four minutes.
“I’ve got something!” Akram said. “A rifle.”
“Where?”
It took another minute for Akram to help Duke locate the target.
“Ah, there he is,” Duke said. “And do you know what, my camel-jockeying friend?”
By now Akram was past taking Duke’s invectives personally. “What?”
“The reason we’re still alive is that he can’t fucking see us. He’s got no night vision up there. He’s blind as a fucking bat without the lightning.”
“So kill him already!”
The Duke chuckled. “Patience, Kimosabe. This ain’t a shot you want me to rush. If I miss, and he sees the flash, he’ll fire this way on pure reflex—and who the fuck knows which one of us he’ll hit, eh?”
Akram reached nonchalantly down his leg to unsnap his pistol, planning to kill the Duke the second Shannon was dead.
“And before you get the wise of idea of putting a bullet through my head,” Duke said, taking his eye from the scope, their faces faintly visible in the glow of distant lightning, “we’ll need to walk up there to be sure he’s dead. You don’t wanna kill your best marksman until you know that goose up there is cooked, do you?”
Akram smiled. “The thought never crossed my mind.”
Duke put his eye back to the scope. “Don’t piss down my back and tell me it’s rainin’.”
He placed the reticle on the nose of the face he was looking at. He couldn’t make out the features because the shooter had a wool watch stander’s cap pulled down tight to his eyebrows, and the rest of the face was obscured by the scope.
“It’s too bad this can’t be a fair fight,” he muttered. “I almost feel bad about it.” He squeezed the trigger, and the rifle kicked against his shoulder. It wasn’t the mule kick he was expecting, however, because the hydraulic piston in the rifle’s stock had greatly absorbed the recoil.
When he recovered the sight picture a second later, the shooter’s rifle was still sticking out from the rocks—but the head behind the scope had disappeared.
“Bull’s-eye!”
“Did you get him?” Akram was unable to see for himself because the optics on Duke’s M40 weren’t as good as those on the .50 cal. “I can still see the rifle.”
“I wasn’t aiming at his fucking rifle, jerkweed.” Duke got to his knees, swinging the TAC-50 around to point it at Akram. “Now, here’s how we’re gonna play this, Zatoichi. We’re goin’ up there to check the body . . . just me and you. If he’s dead, we’re walking down the backside of the ridge to the trucks and leaving all those dumb fucks downstairs behind. You’re gonna transfer the rest of my cash as soon as we get back to the hotel, and if you don’t like that idea, I can just blow you the fuck away right now.”
Akram backed away from the M40 and got up on his knees. “I’m guessing I leave my guns here?”
“You guess correctly, Buster Brown. So drop the pistol, and let’s move it out.”
55
MONTANA
Buck carried Janet upstairs and laid her on her bed. She’d been hit in the forehead by a chunk of two-by-six in the explosion and was only
half conscious. Marie sat beside her in the dark, holding an icepack against the contusion.
Oso shadowed Marie everywhere she went, able to smell the adrenaline in the air and knowing something was wrong.
“What happened out there?” she said to Buck. “Could you see?”
He grunted in frustration. “The guy running at the house was a suicide bomber.”
Hal was listening from across the hall in the guest room, where he kept an eye on the stable, Gil’s Winchester .300 in hand. “Why didn’t he get closer before blowing himself up?”
Buck crawled across the hall to take up firing position beside him. “Because I think one of your brothers shot him. I’m pretty sure I heard a rifle shot.”
Then they heard the booming report of the TAC-50 in the direction of the stable, and both men ducked down.
“Anybody hit?” Buck said.
“We’re fine over here,” Marie answered.
“They’re not shooting at the house,” Hal said. “They’re shooting up at the ridge.”
“That means they’re shooting at your brothers!” Buck stole a quick peek out the window.
For the first time, Hal was beginning to think his brothers might still be alive. “If they’re still on overwatch, that’s gonna make the bastards think twice about sticking their heads out of the stable.”
Buck took the Winchester .300 and crawled down the hall into Marie’s bedroom, where the wind and rain were blowing in through the shattered windows. He used the powerful scope to seek out Kashkin’s sniper nest that Marie had shown him during the day. When the lighting flashed again, he saw clearly the fore stock and muzzle of the Mauser protruding from the rocks.
“It’s them!” he called. “I can see the Mauser.”
“Who’s behind it?” Hal called back.
“I can only see the rifle.”
Marie left her mother’s side and slipped into the guestroom. “Hal, you have to go for help before they decide to surround the house. They won’t let this rain discourage them for long.”
