The Echelon Vendetta

by David Stone

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  ing on the windblown tarmac at the end of the runway when the jet rocked to a stop fifty feet away and the side door popped open. Two men came down the folding gangway, both of them short, muscular, one darkly Hispanic, with a shaved head, the other a pale, pink-looking man with bright-red cheeks and a bit of a beer belly, both men wearing leather jackets, cowboy jeans, and dusty combat boots, both men carrying long military-issue rifle cases.

  They saw Dalton waiting by the tower, his hair flying in the crosswind, his cowboy range jacket pulled in tight, and Fremont next to him, looking pinched and wary, his red down vest buttoned up tight and his arms crossed against his chest. They came across to meet them, the Hispanic man grinning broadly.

  “Micah Dalton, as I live and breathe,” he said, his lively black eyes bright with good humor, his lean face creasing up as he smiled.

  “Delroy,” said Dalton, genuinely pleased to see him, and grinned as he shook the man’s hands. “Always a pleasure,” and, with a little less warmth, as he turned to Nicky Baum, whose closed unwelcoming face had changed into a hard, suspicious, cold-eyed glare as he got closer to Willard Fremont, “And you, Nicky. How’s the wife and kids?”

  “Last time I saw them they were fine, Micah. Who’s this?”

  Dalton did the honors. Fremont was ready to be judged and excluded by these new arrivals, who, by the hard flat look of them, were not that long out of Army Special Forces. He was also somewhat reluctant to give up Dalton’s exclusive attention. He tried his best to be civil, but it wasn’t until they were all safely stuffed into the Crown Vic and rolling west along a bumpy two-lane goat track passing itself off as Wyoming State Highway 14 that he relaxed enough to comply with Dalton’s request to fill the men in on what had happened back at Pete Kearney’s place on the far side of the Bighorns.

  Fremont told it straight, sparing no details.

  When he was finished, both men sat in the back and stared

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  blankly at Fremont for a full thirty seconds. Finally, Nicky Baum, a beefy pink-skinned man with pale-brown eyes and, of the two men, the one with the most pronounced air of latent aggression, sighed theatrically, and said, “Micah, this old fart actually reliable?”

  Fremont, who had been preparing himself for precisely this, turned around and faced the road, his thin, sharp face hardening into a remote, cold glare. Dalton shook his head and sighed.

  “Nicky, Willard here has seen more operational time than both of you put together. He’s been working this part of the country for twenty years, and before that he was NSA in Guam, working under Jack Stallworth. While you were still hoping to make third-string safety for the Nittany Lions, Willard was out here in the wild keeping your pimply teenage butt safe from America’s enemies. You can either find your manners, Nicky, and speak to my friend with respect, or you can go right back to Kansas.”

  Baum’s pink face had brightened into a full-blown apple red during Dalton’s short, sharp rebuke, delivered in a flat and businesslike tone that lacked for nothing in force and conviction. When it was over, the atmosphere in the car was taut and electric.

  “Nicky . . . ?” said Dalton, clearly waiting.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Fremont,” said Baum, in a strangled tone. “I didn’t know your background. I sincerely apologize.”

  “So do I,” said Delroy Suarez.

  “You didn’t insult him,” said Baum. “I did.”

  “I was apologizing for my choice of partners,” said Suarez, smiling at Baum. “Excuse Nicky, Mr. Fremont. He’s a tad insecure meeting new people on account of his mother was a lowly ungulate and he’s afraid people will hold it against him. I keep telling him that these sorts of bestial couplings happen all the time in Pennsylvania—”

  “Shut up, Del,” said Baum. “Micah, this guy Mr. Fremont has been telling us about, this the same guy we’re going to see right now?”

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  “Yes.” “And he was one of . . . he was company too?” “Yes. He was a member of Willard’s Echelon unit.” “And this is true, about him wrapping this Kearney guy up in a

  fresh deer hide and leaving him to get eaten alive by maggots?” “That isn’t the kind of thing a healthy mind makes up.” “Where would a guy even get an idea like that?” “Plains Indian trick. The Comanches did it all the time.” “This Gibson guy’s a Comanche?” “No. But he’s studying real hard to become one.” “The guy’s fucking insane,” said Suarez. “What’s his story?” Dalton laid out what they knew—or hoped they knew—about

  Pershing Gibson’s struggle with the IRS, about his slow descent into madness, about Al Runciman’s death, last Friday evening’s attack on Crucio Churriga in Butte, and the earlier attempts on Fremont’s life up in northern Idaho. The two men listened intently, exchanging only a few sidelong glances, until Dalton got around to the death of Porter Naumann and his family.

  “I knew Porter Naumann by reputation,” said Baum. “It’s hard

  to believe that anyone, even an ex-Marine Recon, could get to him.” “Well it happened,” said Dalton. “So why is this guy killing guys from his own unit?” “We haven’t a freaking clue,” said Dalton. “Mr. Fremont—” Suarez began. “Call me Willard.” “Did your unit have any contact with Porter Naumann?” “Not as far as I know.” “Then why’d this guy go all the way to Italy to kill him?” “That’s why you’re here,” said Dalton. “We’re going to take him

  alive and then we’ll ask him. How’s that sound?” “Can’t we just call in an air strike?” said Nicky Baum, only half

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  joking; their assessment of the target’s threat level and operational

  skills had been cranking up with every new detail.

  “No. But we’ll keep it in mind. Show them the map, Willard.”

  Fremont pulled a well-thumbed terrain map from the glove compartment and spread it out on the backrest. Both men leaned forward to look at it.

  “This here’s the road were on, Highway 14. And here, about thirteen miles west, there’s this little town called Emblem. We turn off there and go south until we cross the Greybull River.”

  He traced the route with a tobacco-stained index finger, drawing a line that led out into a huge flat high-desert plain bisected by the meandering course of the Greybull, bounded in the north by a chain of peaks known as Elk Butte and in the south by Sheets Mountain, a solitary volcanic peak that rose five thousand feet off the valley floor. He tapped a point in the middle of a wide flat nowhere about halfway between these two mountains.

  “This here’s where Moot’s got his spread. Nearest town is Meeteetse, six miles to the west, and then there’s Worland way off to the southeast. Land around there is hardscrabble, small rocks and sagebrush, and the wind is always blowing in from somewhere, so it gets in your eyes, your gear. Nasty fighting ground. There’s every kind of crawling biting stinging thing you can imagine—”

  “I can imagine a whole lot,” said Suarez, who had a deep fear of scorpions. “Any scorpions at all?”

  “A few. The little brown ones, mainly. But they only come out after dark. Just don’t kick over a rock without a stick. Also rattlers, sidewinders mainly, and a few copperheads. Now, this—”

  He pulled out a drawing he had made, from memory, of the layout of Moot’s ranch, the outbuildings, the type of fence, and everything he could recall of the main house.

  “This here’s the basic layout. The main house here, its all on the

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  one floor, but Moot dug a storm cellar under the summer kitchen at the back, which could be a hidey-hole for him, so when we go in, bear that in mind. Two front rooms, dining room and living room, and a third, which is his bedroom. Whole building’s about thirty-foot square—”

  “What’s it made of ?” asked Baum.

  “Cinder block mainly, but he poured gravel in a latex compound into the chambers, so they will stop most
long-distance rounds short of a fifty or a big magnum, and the roof’s flat adobe on plate iron, so’s he can catch the rainwater and run it off into a cistern by the rear of the house. Two small windows in each room and he fixed up some two-inch-thick solid-steel shutters—complete with fire slits in a cross shape so he can elevate as well as traverse—to bolt down over all the windows. Place is a right little fort, gentlemen.”

  “How about the perimeter alarms?”

  “Moot keeps dogs, four of them. Better than any electronic system you can devise. They live in this outbuilding here, far side from the privy, two mongrels, a half-blind mastiff he keeps chained up, but his main dog is a wolf-shepherd cross name of Irene, and she is a serious piece of work. Weighs a hundred pounds, scary-smart, can’t be tricked, won’t take strange meat, can hear a flea fart in a sandstorm, smell a man a mile off, and she can run like the very wind itself. I saw her run down a hare in a fifteen-minute chase. She never gave up until she had her teeth in his guts. She likes to kill, once she’s coursing, and if she gets you on your back she will have your throat out before you can say how do you do.”

  Dalton, listening, privately noted that Willard Fremont’s response to the new arrivals was to slide back into his cowboy hillbilly persona, if only out of defensive habit.

  “Other than these dogs, Moot had some trip wires laid out at a hundred yards off, all around the area, but these plains get a lot of antelope and the occasional rogue elk, so the trip wires got ignored,

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  as they tended to go off a lot. Mainly this is a low, flat, heavily fortified bunker surrounded by three hundred yards of high-plains desert with very little brush and no man-size trees, and the fellow who lives there is a serious killing hand.”

  There was a silence while Baum and Suarez studied the terrain map and Fremont’s detailed sketch. Then Baum, with a tentative look at Suarez and something of the air of a conjurer, reached into his kit bag and pulled out a sheaf of photographs, which he handed across to Fremont with a slightly sheepish air.

  “I know this is operationally risky. I tried to make the request look routine. But I got a friend at NRO to e-mail me the most recent overfly shots of this area from the Condor Nine bird—”

  “Condor Nine,” said Dalton. “How’d you do that?”

  “She’s kind of a personal friend,” he said, blushing.

  Since everybody in the car except Fremont knew that Baum was married, the detail was lightly passed over in a diplomatic silence.

  “Anyway, these were taken yesterday at 1633 hours 19 seconds. Here’s the infrared readout from a quadrant that includes this place here.”

  He tapped a glossy blue-tinted photo taken from fifty miles up and then magnified a thousand times. It showed a flat, pebbly terrain dotted with a few scrub bushes and a cleared area around a low flat bunkerlike building and two smaller outbuildings. A tiny meandering driveway led up to the main building. Long shadows were trailing eastward from the shrubs and buildings. Beside the main building was a pickup truck with a dim red oval on the hood. Another brighter red oval showed inside the main house, and a series of smaller red blobs in the larger of the two outbuildings.

  “These are infrared readings from the sector. As you can see, it looks like the truck had been used a little while before, because the engine is still cooling off. Inside the house I figure that’s one man, or at least one man-shaped heat source. And I guess these

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  other red returns are his dogs, penned up in the outbuilding. These other shots...”

  He fanned out three more, in varying degrees of magnification, showing the house in straight black-and-white high-resolution shots.

  “These give us a look at the immediate area, maybe a range field of five hundred yards. You can see a fork of the river here—”

  “The Greybull,” said Fremont.

  “Yes, the Greybull, running here in a diagonal across the top right sector. You can see by the shadows that the river has carved out a series of arroyos and one of them runs to within a hundred yards of the house. Since it’s in shadow, where the house is still lit up from the west there, I figure it’s deep enough to let us come in pretty close before we make our run.”

  “Nice work,” said Dalton, grateful for any tactical data that would help him frame an assault plan that wouldn’t get them killed. Or, even worse, unthinkably worse, taken alive.

  “Thanks,” said Baum. “What’ve we got in the way of arms?”

  “Remington 308 bolt action with a Leupold and match-grade rounds with armor-piercing jackets. Colt Python with all the rounds. A 1911 Colt .45, ported and stabilized, and fifty rounds. And you?”

  “I’ve got a scoped Barrett 50 and a big box of match-grade rounds. Del has an M249. We’ve both got Beretta nine-mils. And we brought along some shape charges and a couple of stun grenades.”

  “You brought a Barrett?” asked Dalton.

  Baum shrugged, gave him a sideways smile.

  “I took a look at a map when we were back in Kansas. This is a flat and empty land, just like Mr. Fremont says. I figured we’d need a guy to stand off and punch a lot of heavy-caliber bullet holes in stuff.”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” said Fremont, looking out at the broad flat plain and thinking about the way the changing light was lying.

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  THEY GOT WITHIN A quarter mile of Moot’s place by a little after two, bumping along a shallow depression that ran by the course of the Greybull River, and left the car at the last bend, covering it with fresh-cut brush and coarse river sand to hide the gleam of metal.

  They held a brief counsel of war: Wait until twilight, until the shadows come out strong and a hard western light would lie right in Moot’s eyes. Nicky Baum, with the Barrett, would provide long-range covering fire, taking an OP on a little crest of rising land about two hundred yards to the west of Moot’s place, with a clear sight line to Moot’s front door, in the west so the setting sun wouldn’t blind him if he had to make a long, difficult shot in a tearing hurry.

  Usually the long-range sniper would have a spotter, partly to tell him where his rounds were going, but also to cover his back, since the attention of a sniper was of necessity often a thousand yards away. But there was only one target, not multiples, so they decided against it. Which left Del Suarez, with the Remington bolt-action, free to work his way around to the rear of the house to take up a blocking post about fifty yards out, in a small stand of pine they had seen through the binoculars.

  Fremont, with the SAW, would check out the smaller outbuilding and the privy, making sure no ambush was waiting for them, and then hold down the southern sector for Dalton’s final approach, taking a stand near a lone creosote shrub a hundred feet from Moot’s side wall.

  A hundred feet, because that was the outside limit of the SAW’s effective combat range, and not too close to the solitary creosote bush, of course, because bitter experience has taught the infantry soldier that any bush or rock that looks like good cover to you will also look like good cover to your enemy, and will either be booby-

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  trapped or so well sighted-in with aiming sticks that the defender could drill out the location with full-auto rounds even in the pitch-blind dark.

  Dalton would be the entry man, with the Python and the .45. He would clear the other outbuilding and then, carrying the shaped charges, make the final dash across the front yard. Suarez and Baum, as the snipers, would use whatever suppressing fire was necessary to cover Dalton’s final approach to the house, then Fremont would come up on the run—again, covered by the snipers—when Dalton was ready to go through the door.

  They all had com sets, wound packs with morphine in case things went bad, and canteens filled to the brim so they wouldn’t make noise. They calculated three hours for Suarez and Baum to get into position—easily that long, since the idea was to get into place without being seen. Once there, they’d check in on
the com sets.

  They all shook hands, wished one another luck; Baum and Suarez moved out with hardly a rustle of gravel, disappearing into the low brush in a few seconds, leaving Fremont and Dalton to wait the long wait in the stony arroyo near the Greybull River.

  While they waited, watching the light change slowly on the land, Fremont and Dalton talked quietly of various things, places they had seen, men and women they had known, talked of Guam and the Horn and Stallworth’s obsessive love of orchids, about this never-ending war, a few wry reflections on how things were better when it was just the Russians they had to worry about. The quiet talk flowed easily on, both men thinking of the coming action and wondering whether their theoretical tactics would withstand a bench test out in the mortal world.

  As it usually happens to men facing a fight, the talk ran to other memories of combat, either declared or covert, that they had experienced, which, naturally enough, brought them around eventually

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  to the here and the now, and Fremont asked Dalton if he thought that Baum’s Barrett 50 was the right weapon for suppressing fire.

  “Great question. My platoon sergeant when we were in the Horn had a list he called ‘The Rules of Combat.’ The first rule was that the single most dangerous thing in a combat zone was an officer with a map. Today, that would be me. Number two was ‘No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy,’ which is about to be proved again. And number three, to answer your specific question, was that suppressing fire only works when it’s used on abandoned positions.”

  “That has been my experience,” said Fremont, laughing. He was a man whose natural state was reasonably sunny, and he looked around the valley with real appreciation of the present beauty it was offering.

  He looked up as a flight of birds passed over, a thousand feet up, black chevrons against the fading light—they might be swifts or swallows—and in the west an orange fireball sun was sinking through a gray storm squall high over the Beartooth, while a delicate pink afterglow was slipping away into the east, chased by a violet dusk.