Peter Nealen's Blog, page 35

Lex Talionis Chapter 4

“Damn, these guys ain’t even trying to blend in, are they?” Jack muttered.

“No, they aren’t,” I replied from the back of the van, where I was already snapping pictures.  We’d done a few recon passes just by driving through the neighborhood, with the passenger looking like he was texting while he took pictures with his phone, but the bigger Nikon provided better quality, and the van meant that we could get better pictures in general.  Trying to be discreet with the phone usually meant that the angles were poor.  Sitting in the back seat of the panel van, I had a lot more freedom of movement.

Right at the moment, my viewfinder was filled with a relatively fit young man with a pencil mustache and immaculately gelled hair, wearing shiny pants, an equally shiny black shirt open nearly to his sternum, and a short, white jacket.  A thick gold chain around his neck and mirrored aviator sunglasses completed the image.  I couldn’t see from our vantage point, but I was sure there was a pistol in his waistband.  The handful of other young men around him weren’t as fancily dressed, though they were still wearing that sort of northern Mexican, garish, semi-formal attire that, to someone looking closely, screamed “sicario.”  These guys weren’t the baggy-clothed local hoods, any more than the other groups we’d picked out over the last few days.

We’d been in Pueblo for a week.  It had been a week of long days, longer nights, and not much sleep.

We’d had very little to go on, initially.  I knew a few guys who had done some work down around Pueblo in the past, and they’d offered a little bit of general atmospheric information, the most useful being the fact that the gangs were mostly centered on the East Side.  They hadn’t been kidding; it hadn’t taken long to see that the East Side was essentially a no-go zone for anyone who wanted to avoid trouble.  Even the local cops steered clear.

As we had cautiously ventured into the East Side, generally either driving through in the beater vehicles we’d bought with cash up in Wyoming, or shuffling through on foot, disguised as one of the numerous derelicts haunting the town’s street corners, we’d started to build a picture.  It was, necessarily, incomplete.  There’s only so much you can put together by observation over a week.  Really getting down into the nitty-gritty of an area’s human terrain takes months.  We didn’t figure we had months.

Every city has gangs.  They’re part of the wildlife of any urban area, regardless of ethnic makeup.  Even the Middle East has gangs, though with the way that part of the world has been going for the last few decades, it’s often hard to pick them out from the Islamist insurgents—often because they’re the same people.

Different cities, of course, depending on local culture and law enforcement, have differing levels of gang problems.  Pueblo had a bad one.  There were dozens of local gangs, apparently into all sorts of narco trafficking, extortion, car theft, or just plain young, belligerent assholes being violent for the sake of being violent.

But the landscape had changed recently.  The out-of-towners, who, even those less flashy than White Jacket out there, stood out if you were paying attention, were only part of the equation.

It was becoming harder, at least in the States, to pick out who was Mara Salvatrucha.  The leadership network of MS-13 had, in recent years, started to urge downplaying the extensive tattooing and distinctive clothing—usually with the number “13” plastered all over it—in favor of a lower profile.  It was a matter of practicality and an expanding capability.  Mara Salvatrucha wasn’t just a gang.  It was an international criminal empire, though more of a cellular, corporate one than a hierarchical one.  There was still plenty of room for violence and intimidation, but they were finding that the violence was, if anything, more effective when the victims couldn’t see it coming from a mile away.

There were still indicators, though.  And if we were reading them right, MS-13 was taking over Pueblo.  Big time.

They were everywhere, and we had observed numerous examples of local gangs taking their orders and offering a cut of their take to the MS-13 guys.  It was subtle enough to probably be invisible to anyone who wasn’t looking—and a lot of the locals didn’t want to look—but after a while you could pick out the tax collectors and enforcers making their rounds.  Sometimes there was some posturing, but it was usually violently quashed by the MS-13 enforcers.  There had been five shootings and six stabbings that we knew of within a half-mile radius of where Jack and I were presently parked, just in the last few days.

But if MS-13 was enforcing its rule in Pueblo, even they appeared to defer to the outsiders.  We didn’t know exactly which cartels were represented, though I had a feeling that White Jacket was tied in with Guzman-Loera.  He had that northern Mexico hilljack flashiness about him.  The Sinaloans had been poor Mexican rednecks until they had gotten filthy rich off a combination of narcotics, extortion, and bloody violence, and it still showed.

White Jacket and his entourage piled into a shiny, gold-chased Hummer and the equally garish Escalade parked beside it.  They pulled out of the driveway and headed down the street.  Jack didn’t turn around, but asked, “Do you want to follow ‘em?”

I scanned the house that they’d come out of.  A one-story, orange stucco job with an open porch and a relatively large yard, it looked no different from any of a dozen residential homes.  But there were faces in the windows, and though they were too far away and it was too dark inside to tell, I was sure that there were guns there, too.

“Nah,” I answered.  “I think we’ve got our target house.  This wasn’t just a meet; this is their safehouse.  We’ll want to confirm that White Jacket and his buddies are on-site when we hit it, but if not, we can move on to another target.  It’s not like we’ve got a shortage.”

Jack snorted.  “True enough.”  Jack was relatively new to the team; he’d joined up just before Mexico.  The sandy-haired former Ranger and SF Weapons Sergeant didn’t talk all that much, and when he did, he tended to be rather acerbic.  He was plenty competent, if a bit of a belligerent son of a bitch.

“I’m calling everybody in,” I said.  “Time to get this show on the road.”  Putting the camera down, I pulled out my phone, a burner pre-paid job, and banged out a quick mass-text.  Salt Creek House.  2300.  Everyone.

Jack just sat there behind the wheel, leaning back so that he wasn’t that visible, shaded by the sun visor in the windshield.  We wouldn’t move for a while; if we drove away too close to White Jacket, it might raise suspicions.  We didn’t want our targets to be suspicious.  We wanted them fat and happy, ready for the slaughter.

I took a few more snapshots, then pulled out my notebook and got back to planning.  The book was already crammed with notes, sketches, and checklists.  I kept my eyes roving outside the van’s heavily tinted windows, but my focus was on what was to come.

Some of that was a self-defense mechanism.  I’d had far too much time to think on the drive south, and had found my mind going down some very, very dark paths.  Burying myself in the preparations, planning, and reconnaissance had helped keep me focused and somewhat even-keeled.

It would have been a little worrying, if I’d let myself think about it.  What the hell was I going to do when I didn’t have a mission to focus on and an enemy to hate?

I just told myself that the way the world was going, that eventuality wasn’t likely to happen anytime soon, and shoved it to the back of my mind.  Again, probably not the healthiest coping mechanism, but after decades as a gunslinger, I didn’t really have much else.

 

The Salt Creek safe house wasn’t much to look at, which was why we’d picked it.  None of us were staying there on a long-term basis; most of us had been sleeping in cars or in a trailer just outside of town for the last week.  Bryan and Derek had each spent a couple nights sleeping in the open, as part of their bum disguises.

The white walls were as dingy as anything I’d seen in the Middle East, and the roof was sagging.  It looked like the front porch was about to fall off the face of the house.  The front yard was nothing but bare dirt with a bent, mangled cyclone fence around it.

Most of us had parked several blocks away, and worked our way in on foot.  Jack and I had actually come in the back way, past piles of junk and beater cars, to jump the fence and enter through the back door, which was barely hanging on its hinges anymore.

Some of our safe houses in the Middle East and even Mexico had been turned into op centers, with maps, laptops, and tracking boards arranged in a central room.  We weren’t playing this one that way.  We wanted to be able to break contact and get the hell out of Dodge at a moment’s notice, without leaving anything behind.  A large part of that was because none of us really wanted to cross swords with American law enforcement, and regardless of how evil the scumbags we were planning to put in the ground were, the cops were going to have to try to look into it.

So instead, we had a couple of tablets, notebooks, and reams of photos printed out at the local Kinkos.  All of it would be packed up and go with us when we left the safe house.

It was a dirty, grungy-looking bunch of peckerwoods that was gathered in the living room in the sickly light of a fluorescent Coleman lantern at midnight, and I’m including Ben, the sole black guy on the team, in that definition.  We called him “Carleton” for being “the whitest black man,” which never ceased to get a rise out of him, but when the dude dressed more cowboy than any of the rest of us and listened to bluegrass all the time, it was going to happen.

“All right,” I said, getting things going, “we’ve got four major targets.  Any MS-13 that gets taken out in the process is an added bonus.”  We had our target packages laid out on the floor in four vague groups.  I pointed to the first one.  “Here’s number one; Fat Boy.  We don’t know for sure who this guy is, but Raoul’s fairly confident that a couple of his buddies are former Los Zetas shooters.  They’ve networked with several of the local gangs, and recon has identified several possible spotter groups loitering around his safe house.  At least one of those is going to need to get taken out before we make the main assault.  Preferably, we’ll nail two of them; hitting one a couple minutes before the other should hopefully provide enough of a distraction to have everybody looking the wrong way when the real hit goes down.”

I pulled out the tablet with our overhead imagery on it, and got it centered on the target neighborhood.  I pointed to the known spotter locations.  “These kids are usually hanging out on these corners, and stay until about midnight.  Groups of five or so.  They do the usual gangbanger stuff, too, including intimidation, the occasional robbery, and drug dealing, but they’re definitely staying there as lookouts.  This one on the north is probably going to be the easiest to hit first, so, Bryan, you’ve got that one.  You’ve got the special present?”

Bryan nodded, lifting the ratty backpack packed with explosives and nails.  “Right here,” he said.  “And I’ve got the detonator, just to make sure none of you fuckers get any ideas.”  It wasn’t much of a joke, but it got dark chuckles anyway.  We were in that kind of mood.

“Just make sure you look pathetic enough that they can’t resist robbing you,” Ben said, “though that shouldn’t be too hard for you.”  Bryan flipped him off.

The banter was a good sign.  The rest of the team wasn’t any better balanced after what had happened than I was, and the drive south had been a quiet one, overshadowed by a quiet, murderous anger.  The fact that we could still fuck with each other meant that we hadn’t gone all the way over the edge.  Once things got quiet and the “dead face” started to be seen, then it would be time to worry.

And yes, there’s a difference between “dead face” and “game face.”  I’d been around long enough to recognize it, though I probably wasn’t so well qualified as to judge properly which one I was wearing.

“All right, knock it off,” I said.  It might have been a good sign, but we needed to get this brief done and scatter before too many people noticed that there was a light on in this house.  “Coordination is going to suck, since we can’t be on comms all the time.  A vagrant on a cell phone…well, it’s not impossible these days, but it’s still a possible compromise that we can’t really risk.  So, Bryan, you’ll stay out of sight until we’ve confirmed that the target is there.  I’ll contact you by cell, then you can move on your targets.”  He nodded, his game face back on.

“Derek is going to be Drive-by Bum.  He’ll be with the main strike force until it’s time to move.  Again, as far as coordination goes, once I’ve given Bryan the go-ahead, Derek will close on his target group.  Going hot is on Bryan.  Once he gets ‘mugged,’ he’ll run away and clack off the backpack.  We’ll be close enough to hear it.  The boom is your go signal, Derek.”  The hatchet-faced, dark-haired, former SF guy nodded.  Derek was our resident computer geek, but he wasn’t your ordinary pencil-necked, soft-as-baby-shit image of a geek.  The guy was just as much of a killer as any of the rest of us; he wouldn’t have been on a team if he wasn’t.  That didn’t stop him from being the team’s resident oddball, but for once he didn’t decide to add one of his quips in the middle of the brief.

I traced the road up to the house we’d fingered as Fat Boy’s safe house.  “Once we’ve got our hole, we roll up and execute.  The plan is still to make it look like a drive-by, though we won’t be fucking around; no 9mms on this job.”  More nods.  We already had the two M60E4s loaded in the van.  “At the risk of making it look more professional, Larry, Eric, and Jack will be flankers.  As soon as we pull up, you guys are going to bail out and sprint your asses off to the back of the house to make sure we get any squirters.

“Nobody gets out of that fucking house alive,” I stressed.  I didn’t need to reiterate it, either.  There was a deadly glint in every eye that was looking back at me.

These assholes had fucked with the wrong guys.

“After the initial fires, we’ll have no more than five minutes to sweep the house and clean up anybody still breathing,” I went on.  “There won’t be any SSE; at this point I don’t give a shit about additional intel, and we don’t want to get caught in Blackhawk Down in Pueblo at one in the morning.  We’ll sweep the house, make sure the job’s done, and get the fuck out.  Questions?”  Nobody raised a hand.  We had, after all, been hashing out the vague outline of this plan all the way south from The Ranch.  We’d just needed the specifics to fill in the blanks.

“While the East Side is apparently a no-go zone for the cops, we don’t want to take chances on crossing them.  I don’t want any dead cops on our hands.  So, Derek’s going to set up a rash of 911 calls to draw just about every cop in the city off to the west.”

“Already done,” Derek put in.  “It’s just waiting for me to send the command.  And there might be a couple other nasty little surprises built in.”  He grinned evilly, though when I raised an eyebrow at him—the “extra surprises” had not been in the plan—he spread his hands innocently.  “Nothing too destructive,” he said, “but they need to stay tied up for a while.  I’ve got a couple contingencies worked up for it.  Their comms are going to be fucked for a while, and I’ve got several bots that should have them chasing ‘assault in progress’ for a couple of hours.”

“At least until they figure out that they’re chasing ghosts, while there’s audible gunfire and explosions coming from the East Side,” Eric pointed out, rubbing his shaved head.

“But there’s always gunfire coming from the East Side,” Derek pointed out.  As if to punctuate his statement, we heard three pistol shots in the distance.  “The cops are already wary about investigating any of it.  If they do come in after us, they’ll be inclined to come in force, and that’s going to take time to organize.  All I’ve got to buy us is a few minutes.”

“Fine,” I said.  “It sounds like a good idea.  We’ll roll with it.”  I’d learned a while ago to let Derek do his magic when it came to computers.  I wasn’t a Luddite, but I wasn’t any kind of code geek, either.  Derek knew that sorcery and I didn’t.  I deferred to his expertise.  “Make sure you take one of Logan’s party favors,” I added, “just in case you’ve got to drop it and run.”

“Already planning on it,” he replied.  Logan Try was our aging, thoroughly cantankerous gear guy.  He hadn’t deployed since East Africa, but had instead ensconced himself in the machine shop behind the barn.  He’d sent a duffel bag full of scratch-built 9mm bullet-hose submachine guns with us.  They were of considerably higher quality than most of the homemade firearms that cropped up on gun blogs every once in a while, and more durable than the polymer 3D printed jobs.  They were also completely without serial numbers, and completely untraceable if we had to dump them.

“All right,” I said, checking my watch.  “I’ve got 2320.  Let’s aim for Time on Target of 0100.  Final go time is situation dependent.”  I looked around the dim room.  “Last chance.  Did I forget anything?”

A few guys shook their heads.  We gathered up what we’d brought and slipped out in ones and twos, careful to leave the house looking as dilapidated and abandoned as it had been when we’d arrived.

 

Even with the back seats all stripped out, the van was crowded.  None of us were especially small guys, and we’d brought a lot of firepower.  And since the flanker team was poised to go out the back doors as soon as we stopped, they weren’t exactly sitting comfortably, but crouched in the back, weapons held ready, holding on to the walls as best they could as the van swayed down the street.  Ben was braced across from the sliding door, one of the 60s across his knees.  Nick was driving, and I was in the right seat.  I’d considered using one of Logan’s toys, but had stuck with my SOCOM 16.  Derek had one of the cheap little bullet hoses because he was getting to bad-breath distance, and might have to break off in a hurry.  I had wheels, and was probably going to be shooting through walls and windows.  I wanted a rifle.

We were waiting in the shadows, under a burned-out streetlight, a few blocks from the target house.  We could actually see Derek’s targets, a group of four vatos lounging under another streetlight on the corner a couple blocks ahead.  Derek was already out and shuffling toward them.  I’d just gotten off the phone with Bryan, and we were going hot.

At least, we were supposed to be.  Derek had needed to slow his roll, stumbling and sitting down in the gutter for a moment, because the expected boom hadn’t come yet.

Then we heard a series of four loud pops to the north.  Nick and I looked at each other.  That wasn’t good.

Book Review: Iron Chamber of Memory

As you may have determined from my review of Somewhither, I have been impressed by the work of John C. Wright.  Somewhither was an awesome roller coaster ride with as much depth as it had spectacle.

Iron Chamber of Memory is different.  It is a much slower burn.  Don’t get me wrong, there is action, adventure, and derring-do.  There is also romance, though in more than one sense.  I’ll get to that in a bit.

Slower burn or no, unlike Somewhither, I read Iron Chamber of Memory in a day.  Thanksgiving Day, to be precise.  It’s taken me this long to write the review because how to review such a book was a bit of a conundrum.

The story starts out with Hal Landfall, a poor graduate student working on a paper on Arthurian legend, looking for his missing friend Manfred on the island of Sark.  (Sark is a real place, a small island in the English Channel, just east of Guernsey.)  Manfred has recently become the hereditary lord of Sark, and Hal is seeking him in the middle of the night, at a bizarrely labyrinthine mansion where the Lords of Sark reside, presently unoccupied.  (Unlike the island, the mansion, I regret to say, is fictional.)  There he falls in with Laurel, Manfred’s fiancee, who is also looking for her husband-to-be.  They find a way inside the mansion and begin to explore, before stumbling on a strange, rose-lit chamber.  As soon as they step through the door, they realize that everything they know about their lives outside is a lie.  Only in that chamber do they know the truth.

So, it starts out as something of a supernatural whodunit, with a side of sorcery-tainted love triangle.  But that’s just where it starts.  It goes oh, so much deeper, and darker, as Hal tries to sort out real memories from false, and slowly comes to understand the deeper spiritual and metaphysical reality that his surface life is plastered over.

When I first saw the blurb for the book, my first thought was that it sounded right up the Jed Horn alley.  I wasn’t wrong.  I wasn’t entirely right, either.  It’s deeper.  Far deeper.  If I can manage to get a fraction of the depth of John’s stories into the Jed Horn series, I figure I’ll be doing all right.

Do yourselves a favor and pick up Iron Chamber of Memory.  I tell you this while taking the definite risk that it will make my own stories pale in comparison.  Go read it, anyway.

Lex Talionis Chapter 3

The wrecked, bullet-riddled cars had been dragged away from the gate by the time we got back.  With the uproar in town, the sheriff’s department hadn’t showed up yet, either, though I was sure they were on their way.  It was going to take them a while, though.

I pulled the truck up in front of the porch and got out.  Tom was waiting in the doorway.

“Where’s shithead?” I asked.  The fury was burning pretty hot by then; I’d been feeding the flames most of the way back from town.  It might not have been the healthiest way of coping, but as long as it kept me from breaking down, I was going to stick with it.  I had so damned much bottled up grief and fucked-up shit in my head by then that I didn’t dare open that floodgate.  That way lay madness and fatal alcohol poisoning.

Tom jerked a thumb toward the back.  “In the barn.”  I just nodded tightly and started around the side of the house.  “Jeff,” he called.  I stopped and turned back to look at him.  “Try to leave him mostly intact,” he said.  “We’re probably going to be making local law enforcement plenty uncomfortable in the near future as it is.  Let’s not make matters any more tense than we have to.”

I just nodded, keeping my teeth together.  Tom and I had clashed in the past over similar admonishments.  He’d done a good job running things back at home, but those of us out on the pointy end tended to bristle at “suggestions” about how we should run ops.  I had to remind myself that Tom was right here with us on the chopping block, and that he hadn’t hesitated to grab his own rifle and join us at the gate.

The barn was about a hundred yards behind the house.  There were actually three barns, two hay barns and a horse barn.  The hay barns had been converted into team rooms and temporary barracks.  We’d considered keeping the horse barn as it was; there had been some talk about keeping a few mules and horses for training, in the event that we found ourselves in a situation like the SF guys in Afghanistan back in the early ‘00s.  The idea had been scrapped once we’d found out how much it would have cost in time and money to keep the animals.

So, the barn had been turned into a gym.  Given that it was big enough that even we couldn’t fill the entire thing with weights and racks, about a quarter of it had been turned into storage and the other quarter into a dojo, with pads on the floor and walls and heavy bags hanging from the rafters.

I headed for the storage area, where a sort of cubicle of lockers had been built.  Inside that little cubicle, hidden from the rest of the barn, the captured gangbanger was sitting, zip-tied to a chair with a burlap sandbag over his head.  Two shop lights were standing in the corners, aimed at him.

His wounds had been hastily bandaged.  He wasn’t at any risk of bleeding out, not yet.  It also didn’t look like anyone had been in there since he’d been strapped to the chair.  Tom had left him to stew and think about what was coming.

Tom had a vicious streak of his own.

I walked up to him and yanked the sandbag off his head.  “Nap time’s over, fucker,” I snarled.

He winced at the sudden brightness and squinted up at me.  “Hey, what the fuck man?” he said, feebly jerking his hands against the zip ties.  “You can’t do this.  I got rights!”

I laughed without humor.  It was an awful sound, even to my own ears.  “Rights.  Sure.  Keep telling yourself that, asshole,” I said.  I took a step in front of him, momentarily blocking the work light that had been shining in his eyes.  I must have been little more than a looming silhouette, but this kid still didn’t understand just what kind of trouble he was in.   He didn’t get it, not yet.  “It’s only going to make this last longer.”

“Man, fuck you, puto,” he said, trying to spit at me.  He’d lost a good deal of blood, though, and he was dehydrated.  He managed to almost reach me with a pathetic spray.  I kept my face carefully impassive.  “You can’t do shit to me.”

I let him eyeball me for a moment, letting him start to bow up, get some of his confidence up.  As long as he could stare me down without my reacting, the more he’d start to think he really was as tough as he wanted to be, the bullet wounds in his body notwithstanding.

Then I hit him.

It was a good punch, a hard right hook that took him right in the cheekbone and popped his head around so hard he might have gotten whiplash from it.  I followed it up with a vicious left and then another right, then hooked an uppercut to his chin that snapped his head back hard enough that the chair tipped over and he landed heavily on his back on the dirt floor.

I stepped over him, grabbed him by the hair, and hauled him upright again.  Holding him up with my right, I punched him three times in the groin, my teeth gritted with the sheer, killing fury that was driving my fist into his body.  Right at that moment, I didn’t give a fuck about information.  I wanted to punish this son of a bitch, and I was relishing doing it with my bare hands.

I let go of his hair and stepped back.  He doubled over and retched violently, puking what little was left in his guts on his shoes.  When he had nothing left, and was just dry heaving, I grabbed him by the hair again, twisted his head back, and pulled my folder out of my pocket.  Snapping it open with a flick of my wrist, I held the point less than an inch from his eyeball.

“Rights?” I gritted.  “You’d have rights if the cops had you.  You’d have rights if the Feds had you.  But I’m not a cop, and I’m sure as hell not a Fed.  I’m a fucking mercenary.  And considering you fucks just murdered and mutilated a very good friend of mine, I’m off the clock.  So, I don’t even have an employer to make the rules about what I do to you.  Think that over very, very carefully before one more word comes out of your fucking sewer.”

There was real fear in his eyes, though one was swelling shut where I’d hit him.  He wasn’t looking at me, but going cross-eyed looking at the point of the knife that was poised to put one of his eyes out.  He didn’t say anything.

“I didn’t say you could take forever at it, cockbag,” I told him.  “Either you start talking, or I start cutting pieces off you, starting with your eye.”

I hadn’t meant to, but the knife blade must have moved fractionally closer to his cornea as I spoke, because he squeezed his eyes shut, as if his eyelids could block the razor-sharp steel.

“I don’t know anything, man!” he all but screamed.

“Bullshit,” I replied relentlessly.  “Say goodbye to your fucking eyeball.”

I am not by nature a sadistic individual.  But right at that moment, it didn’t matter.  Nothing did, only the hate roaring in my ears and turning my vision red, and the vision of Jim’s butchered corpse.

The sudden acrid stink of piss filled the small space, competing with the stench of his vomit, even as he tried to squirm away from the threat of my knife.  Between the zip ties and my iron grip in his hair, though, he couldn’t move.  The point touched his eyelid.

“Stop, stop!” he screamed.  “Madre de Dios, stop!”  He squeezed his eyelids tighter shut.  Tears of terror leaked out.  “I’ll tell you anything, man, anything!  Just don’t cut me!”

I eased back the knife ever so slightly, but tightened my grip on his hair.  “Well, then,” I said, “start talking.”

“What do you want to know?” he sobbed.

“Everything,” I rasped.  “Who sent you?  Where are they?  What was the job?”

“I don’t know who they are, man.”  I tightened my grip fractionally as a warning, and he tried to shake his head frantically.  “I swear, man, I don’t know!  They were Mexicans, that’s all I can tell you!”  He paused a moment.  “They were important; they must have been, if they could even get a meet with us, much less hire us.  They might have been narcos, I don’t know.”

“How many?  Did they have bodyguards?”

“Six, maybe?  I don’t know.”  He shrieked as I jerked his head back again.  “Six!  There were six of them, six of the important pendejos.”

“How much security did they have?” I asked.

“I didn’t count ‘em,” he said.  Tears were still leaking from the corners of his eyes.  He was terrified, and the pain of the blows I’d given him had to really be setting in by then.  “But yeah, yeah, there were guards!”  I barely had to move even a little to elicit a response from him.  Any shift in my stance or my grip was a threat.

“Give me a ballpark figure,” I pressed.

“I don’t know…thirty, forty?”  He sobbed.  “Please, man, I don’t know!”

“What did they tell you?”

“I just got what Miguel told us; I wasn’t in the meeting itself,” he said.  He looked up at me through streaming eyes and saw me tilt my own head warningly.  “They said that you guys had killed a bunch of their friends down in Mexico, and that we needed to send a message for them, you know?  A message that it’s a bad idea to fuck with them.  They didn’t have to tell us anything else, except where to find you.”

I could believe that.  Mara Salvatrucha had a well-earned reputation for brutality going back years.  They used guns, but they also had a taste for using machetes.  They would have taken any suggestions as an insult, and anyone dealing with MS-13 would be wise not to insult them.

Of course, we’d killed quite a few of theirs in Arizona, Mexico, and Central America, too, though it was anyone’s guess if this cell had heard about it.  MS-13 wasn’t exactly a hierarchical organization with a well-established intel apparatus.  They were more of a franchise.

They must have gotten paid a lot to venture this far north, though.  I’d heard of some narco activity in Billings, but for the most part, the Mountain States weren’t a hotbed for cartels.  Maybe because the local “habit” of choice was homemade meth, and there just wasn’t a large Hispanic population for the Mexican and Central American gangsters to blend in with.

Which led me to my next, and most important, question.  “Where?”

He hesitated for the briefest moment before he sobbed, “They’re in Pueblo.”  He had to have pretty well despaired by then.  He had to know that if we let him go, he was a dead man.  He probably figured that he was a dead man, anyway.

And I was tempted.  Between Jim lying in the parking lot, naked and dismembered, and Little Bob all shot up in the hospital, I wanted to ram my knife to the hilt in his eye socket and wrench it around until he stopped squirming.

But then, as I looked down at him, his trousers soaked in urine, blood, and puke, tears mingling with the blood and bruises on his face, one eye swelling shut, and something changed.  I didn’t feel sorry for him, not quite.  He was still a scumbag and a murderer, who had been party to the sadistic murder of one of my best friends.  But at the same time, he was a sniveling, terrified kid, zip-tied to a chair and utterly helpless.

And I’d damned near murdered him myself out of rage.  I almost felt sick.  I took a step back, folded my knife, stuffed it in my pocket, then turned on my heel and left him there, his chin on his chest.

I stepped out of the barn and looked at the sky, taking a deep, shuddering breath.  I liked to think that I’d only ever killed people who were trying to kill me, though that wasn’t actually true.  That Qods Force Colonel in Kurdistan suddenly nagged at me.  I’d shot him in the back of the head after Haas had been done with him, and buried him in a shallow grave.

Now, having come so close to killing another captive in cold blood, I suddenly realized how much time and energy I’d spent since either trying to justify that killing or just to forget it.

“Well, is he still alive?” Tom asked, forcing me to compose myself and shelve my reverie for another time.  He was smoking what had to be his tenth cigarette of the day, at least.

“He’s still alive,” I replied tiredly.  “I didn’t even carve anything off him.  So, you can get off my ass about it.”

He didn’t say anything, but just nodded and took a deep drag on the cancer stick.  I got the sudden impression that he was giving me a moment.  “Did he talk?”

“Yeah.”  I turned back toward the house.  “It sounds like some of the cartels didn’t like our interference down south.  They sent some reps north to hire these assholes to deal with us.  Shithead back there tells me that they met in Pueblo.”

“It’s certainly enough of a shithole for a bunch of cartel types to blend in there,” Tom mused as we walked back toward the house.  “Are you sure he was telling the truth, or telling you what he thought you wanted to hear?”

The truth was that information extracted under duress is always somewhat suspect.  I was fairly sure the kid had spilled his guts; he wasn’t trained, he wasn’t nearly as hard as he thought he was, and I’d sufficiently terrified him that unless he was a damned good actor, he hadn’t had the time or the mental acuity to just make stuff up, especially after I’d rattled his brains with those punches.  But confirmation of the truth of anything extracted during any interrogation took time, time that we really didn’t have.

“He was convincing enough,” I said, after a moment’s consideration.  “That’s no steely-eyed operative in there.  That’s a kid who thought he was a lot tougher than he is.  I’m sure he didn’t tell me everything, but he wasn’t ready to get the hell beat out of him when he started bowing up.  I think I shocked him hard enough that he wasn’t holding anything back.  Might have forgotten a few things, but not deliberately holding it back.”

“Hmm.”  He glanced sideways at me, and while I didn’t meet his eyes, I could still see the wheels turning.  I was calm now, at least outwardly, but Tom had seen me walk back there brimming with fury.  I was waiting for him to say something about whether or not I was justifying my own rage-induced violence as some kind of calculated interrogation technique, which it wasn’t.  But he didn’t.  Maybe he bought my façade.  Maybe he knew that he didn’t have to say anything.

“Pueblo, then,” he said, dropping the burnt-out cigarette to the dirt and grinding it out with his boot.  “Nothing more specific than that?”

“No, I didn’t get the impression that he was much more than outer cordon security for the meet that set up the hit,” I answered.  “We still need to see if we can get some descriptions, but I don’t think he knows much.  He just knows they were Mexicans, and they had security.”

“We’ll get Raoul on him, but we aren’t going to have much time.  We’re going to have to turn this guy over to the sheriff’s department once they get here.”

I nodded, grimacing.  “And they’re not too far behind us, either.”  I was momentarily tempted to say fuck it, and hide the kid from Brett until we’d wrung him dry.  But that would ultimately mean we’d have to dispose of him later, and after what I’d just almost done, I wasn’t ready to do that again.  And if Brett found out we were withholding a prisoner from him, and interrogating him, there’d be hell to pay.

“I hope you didn’t mark him up too much,” Tom murmured quietly.  Anyone else, I would have figured they were being a bit squeamish, but with Tom, I knew that he was thinking about long-term consequences for the company.  He was a ruthless, cold-hearted motherfucker when it came to looking after the company’s interests, and if bad guys got hurt, as long as it didn’t adversely affect the company, he generally didn’t give a shit.  But this was a dicey situation, to put it mildly.

“He’s hurting,” I admitted, “aside from the holes we already shot in him.  And I’m sure he’ll tell Brett and the rest that I beat him up.  I’ll fess up to it.  Call it heat of the moment.”

“I’d rather you weren’t around,” Tom answered.  “Brett can’t make things awkward about hauling you in for assault and battery if you’re not here.”

“Brett’s already nervous about what we’re going to do,” I told him.  “If I don’t own up to shitstain’s bruises, it’s going to further damage what little relationship we’ve got left with him.  He’s already afraid we’re going to go behind his back and start killing people.”  Which was precisely what we were going to do; this was out of Brett’s league.  “Besides, I wouldn’t worry too much about Brett trying to throw me in jail.  You haven’t seen Jim’s remains, yet.  I have, and so has Brett.  I think he’d be more suspicious if I hadn’t worked the kid over.”

“I hope you’re right,” Tom said, as we stepped up onto the porch.  “I don’t want to have to bail you out and then have you break bail to go narco hunting two states away.”

Even as he was speaking, two sheriff’s department cars pulled up to the gate, one of them stopping next to the shot-up cars, the other easing through the gate to approach the house.

“Well, I guess we’re about to find out, aren’t we?” I said.

 

I was true to my word, and took Brett to see the captured gangbanger myself.  The kid was conscious when we walked into the barn, though one eye had swollen shut.  He looked like he’d been through the meat grinder.

As I had rather expected, when he saw the badge, he first froze, then immediately started babbling.  “That guy tortured me!” he yelled thickly.

“Shut the hell up,” Brett cut him off before he could really get going.  “I saw what you and your buddies did in town.  You’re in a lot more trouble for that than he will be for hitting you a couple times.”  He stepped forward, pulling his handcuffs off his belt.  “You got something to cut these zip ties?” he asked me.

Without a word, I stepped forward and pulled my knife out.  The gangbanger flinched a little as I did, and Brett’s eyes flickered.  He noticed.  But he didn’t say anything as I cut the captive free.

If the kid had had any ideas of making a run for it, they were quickly dashed, as Brett had ahold of one of his arms as soon as I cut it free, and slapped the handcuffs on quickly, reciting the kid’s Miranda rights in a dead, robotic tone that suggested that his heart really wasn’t in it.

He hauled the gangbanger out of the barn to the car, and stuffed him in the back seat.  The kid seemed to have decided that omerta was the better part of valor under the circumstances, though I had no doubt that as soon as he got in front of a lawyer, he’d be telling a hugely embellished version of the beating I’d given him.  It wouldn’t be entirely inaccurate, though it also probably wouldn’t get him off, though it might get me in trouble.  I was a private citizen, after all, so he couldn’t claim police brutality.

With the prisoner safely in the car, Brett turned and looked me in the eye.  “You should have told me you had a live one when we were in town,” he said.

I just shrugged.  I couldn’t think of anything in particular to say that would reassure him that I hadn’t been holding a prisoner illegally for the sake of interrogating him using violence and the threat of worse violence.  In large part, because if I tried to say that, it would be a bald-faced lie.

He sighed.  “Given everything else, I think I can arrange for no charges to be pressed, even if this little turd makes a big deal out of it.  I’m sure Tom knows some good lawyers, too, in case it does become a problem.  It should be an open and shut case of self-defense, and anything that might or might not have happened after can be fairly easily put down to severe emotional distress.  I can’t say I wouldn’t have worked him over even worse, after seeing what they did to Jim.”

“You probably shouldn’t be saying stuff like that,” I pointed out.  “Prejudicial, or some such.”

He laughed hollowly.  “I won’t tell anybody if you don’t,” he said.  He looked down at the dirt for a moment.  “I probably should tell you not to leave town for a while, in case we need you to come in, but I’d probably be wasting my breath, wouldn’t I?”

I nodded.  “We’ve got some work to do.  And the less you know about it, the better.”

He sighed again, shaking his head, as he looked back at the car and the gangbanger in the back.  “Just promise me one thing,” he said.  “If whatever it is is likely to lead to more stacks of bodies in my county, you’ll let me know.”

“I’ll do the best I can,” I told him.  “Although—and I never said this—if we play our cards right, this should be taken care of far away from your jurisdiction.”

He gave me a bit of a rueful look.  “I’ll believe that when I see it,” he said, as he went to get back in the car.  “After all, this happened here.  I’m not convinced this little dustup is all over.”

I couldn’t disagree with him, either.

 

The deputies stayed on-site for hours, carefully documenting everything, even the skid marks from where we’d moved the shattered car away from the gate so that we could get out.  Every piece of brass, every bloodstain, every impression of a body, every piece of bloodied, shattered glass was carefully photographed.  Each of the gunfighters on the gate was interviewed, though their statements were as bare-bones as possible, and the self-defense aspect of shooting the wounded gangsters who had tried to point weapons at us was always stressed.  After the spectacle of Jim’s mutilated body, I didn’t think any of the deputies were terribly interested in finding reasons to go after any of us.  It was still a delicate balancing act.

No sooner were the sheriff’s department vehicles out of sight down the road than my remaining team and I were packing to head to Colorado.  If they thought we’d hurt them in Mexico, they hadn’t seen anything yet.

Lex Talionis Chapter 2

I hadn’t put my rifle down.  Tom grabbed his M1A that had been leaning in the corner as we both turned and ran out of the ops room.

Larry and Nick were already in Nick’s big diesel, and Tom and I hauled ourselves into the bed.  It wasn’t quite the leap that it might have been a few years before, but we got ourselves situated and braced in a few seconds, before I banged on the roof of the cab with my off hand.  Nick threw the truck in gear and we roared down the long driveway toward the gate.

It was more a road than a driveway; the gate was almost a mile from the ranch house.  Tom and I held on for dear life as the pickup raced over the unfinished gravel track, leaving a cloud of dust behind us.  I could hear the shooting even over the roar of the engine and the buffeting wind of our passage.  Those boys at the gate were getting some.

It took only a couple of minutes to get there, but by the time we skidded to a halt in a cloud of dust and bailed out, rifles in hand, it was all over but the screaming.

Three bullet-riddled cars sat at angles across the entrance, one only a few feet from the barred gate, which, while it looked like any other ranch gate at first glance, was actually reinforced enough to withstand the impact of a Level 7 armored vehicle without moving.  Several bodies lay unmoving in the dust below opened doors, and at least one bloodied head was lying on the dashboard below a shattered windshield.

I had a sudden flashback to the ambush in Arizona, just before we’d crossed into Mexico and into the shadowy world of El Duque.  The remains of the MS-13 ambush had looked very similar, especially after I’d shot three gangbangers over the hood of our Expedition with a shotgun.  I’d stared at the same mélange of blood and broken glass then, too.

I shook it off as I stepped toward the gate.  The kid who’d let me in only a few minutes before was coming out of the pillbox on the south side of the gate, his rifle in his shoulder.  There were moans coming from somewhere in the wreckage of the attacking vehicles; somebody back there was still alive.

The kid hesitated as he looked at us, as if unsure what to do next.  After all, he was new, and here were four of the company’s plank-owners, three of whom had been in the middle of some of the nastiest ops we’d ever run.  He looked slightly intimidated.

It was a strange feeling, realizing that I was now one of the old hardasses that the younger guys looked up to.  It didn’t seem like all that long ago I was still trying to make my own mark.

That was not the time or the place for such ruminations, though.  I just made brief eye contact with the kid, then nodded toward the gate.  “Don’t just stand there, son,” I said.  “Let’s go see what we’ve got.  We don’t own the objective until we’ve gone through it.”

The kid started a little, then stepped forward, unbarred the gate, and pulled it open before falling in behind us.  I led, with Larry and Nick on my flanks and Tom following a step behind, on Larry’s flank.  The kid fell in behind Nick.

“Let’s try to secure at least one alive,” Tom said.  “Raoul should be able to get something out of him.”

“We don’t always kill everybody, Tom,” Larry said, a note of unaccustomed asperity in his voice.  For all his intimidating size and great skill with a gun, Larry is ordinarily one of the nicest guys I’d ever met in this business.  But Tom’s comment had just pissed him off.

I held my peace.  That was another conversation for another time.

Keeping at least a yard away from the first car, I stepped carefully around the open door, my rifle up and trained on the cab, my eyes scanning the wreckage over the sights.  I had the rifle canted to use the offset irons; while I could—and had—used the scope at close ranges, I much preferred iron sights at that range.

The car had been hammered.  If I’d been counting bullet holes, I would have had to give up pretty quickly.  Those boys at the gate hadn’t fucked around.  The gangbanger lying half in the car, half on the ground had been turned to hamburger.  If my brain hadn’t gone cold and calm, as it usually does in a combat situation, I might have sneered at the Hi Point lying in the dirt under the nearly shredded car door.

The guy in the passenger seat hadn’t even made it as far as the driver.  He was slumped against the dash, blood and brains leaking out of what was left of his skull.

A quick glance at the back seat confirmed that neither of the two back there were going anywhere.  Both had managed to bail out, but had been cut down barely a step away from the car, and were lying in the road, their blood soaking into the dust.

Nick and Larry had fanned out as we passed through the gate, and were closing in on the other two vehicles.  One of them was smoking, sitting on two flat tires, just as bullet-riddled as the first.  I circled around the first car and closed in on the Ford sedan, Nick on my right.

The driver and the first guy in the back were obviously dead.  The driver had a gaping hole in his neck, and the guy in back was lying in the road, staring up at the sky, a fly alighting on his motionless eyeball.  I started to ease to my right, intending to circle around behind the car.  I didn’t want to get in between the vehicles until I knew that everyone in them was dead or secured.

There was some groaning and cussing in Spanish coming from the far side of the car.  I circled around, keeping my muzzle trained on the car, my eyes flicking back and forth between it and the far vehicle.  Larry, Tom, and the kid had stayed with us, rather than split up and cut off each other’s fields of fire.

There had only been three guys in the car.  The passenger door was open, and a youngish-looking man with long hair and a sallow face, wearing baggy shorts and a soccer jersey with a telltale “13” on the back, was trying to crawl away, toward the ditch on the far side of the road.  He looked like he’d been gut-shot.

As I came around the car, he turned and glared at me, sheer hate in his eyes.  It was the look of a wounded animal, not a man.  He rolled over and tried to point his cheap 9mm machine pistol at me.

Maybe I should have tried to warn him not to.  I didn’t.  Instead, I just smoothly lifted my rifle, put the front sight post on his forehead, and squeezed the trigger.  The rifle bucked smoothly, flame spat from the muzzle, and his head jerked backward with a spray of blood and bone fragments before flopping messily to the dirt.

His death hadn’t silenced the moaning.  So, there was at least one still alive.  Fortunately, Tom hadn’t said anything about me smoking the crawler.  He might have occasionally let his background as an officer get the better of him, but he wasn’t a second-guesser when it came to battlefield decisions.  I was pretty sure he’d seen the gun, too.  That had been a cut-and-dried shoot.

Together, we advanced on the last car.  Steam was coming from the radiator, and the engine was still running, though it was starting to sound pretty fucked up, grinding and rattling.  There had to be quite a few bullets interfering with its functionality.  It must still have been in gear, too, because it was nosed into the ditch, with the rear wheels still spinning.  I suspected the driver was dead, his foot still wedged on the accelerator.

My suspicions were confirmed a couple steps later.  Most of the driver’s brains were splashed across the headrest and the door column.  It looked like he’d taken a tight burst to the face.  There wasn’t a great deal left of the top of his skull.

The passenger and one in the back were similarly fucked.  The moaning was coming from the far side of the car.

I moved around the back again; it put me across from the northern pillbox, but I wasn’t climbing down into that ditch in front of a still-revving car.  We could worry about shutting the engine off once we were sure there weren’t any more gangbangers lurking around with guns.

The last thug was lying in the ditch, where he’d apparently crawled after the car got lit up.  His white t-shirt was mostly red; it looked like he’d taken a couple of bullets, though they weren’t immediately fatal hits.  As Larry, Nick, and I came around the trunk of the car, rifles up and trained on him, he shoved his Beretta weakly away from him and raised his shaking hands.  He must have heard the gunshot a few moments before, and realized what it meant.

Nick stepped forward, unslinging his rifle and handing it off to the kid.  “I’ve got him,” he said.  I moved up with him, keeping my rifle trained on the scared gangster’s face.

Nick didn’t waste time, but jumped down, stepping on the gangster’s extended hand before kicking the Beretta a good four feet away.  Then he reached down, grabbed the young man by the wrist, twisted it so that he had to either roll over or risk having his arm broken, and propelled him, screaming in pain, up out of the ditch and facedown onto the road.

He wasn’t gentle, but thoroughly, and rather invasively, searched our captive, turning up a knife, a couple spare mags, and two cell phones.  The gangster, a skinny, beak-nosed kid, was screaming and crying in pain, in between cussing us out and demanding that we had to take him to a doctor.

He wasn’t getting any sympathy from us.  You come to our house and try to shoot up the place, you get what’s coming to you.

Nick was just about finished when Tom’s phone rang.  He lowered his rifle and stepped back to answer it, while the rest of us watched Nick and the wounded gangbanger.  I couldn’t hear much of the following conversation, but Tom’s normally grim voice got even more grave than usual, and I felt that sickening feeling in my guts again, even as I was careful not to show anything in my expression.

He hung up and put his phone back in his pocket.  “Jeff,” he called.  His tone wasn’t encouraging.

I lowered my rifle and stepped over to him, Larry moving up to take my place covering the captive gunman.

Tom’s face was drawn, and he was searching in his pocket for a cigarette.  He was a habitual chain smoker, but I could tell that this was something more.  “That was Sheriff Eaton,” he said, his voice slightly hollow.  “He didn’t want to say much over the phone; he’s aware of our…difficulties today, and I think he’s figured out some of the implications.  But he did confirm that Robert is in the hospital, in critical condition.  And, he wants one of us to come into town to identify a body.”

That faint feeling of nausea became a heavy, leaden ball of dread in my stomach.  “I’ll go.”  I already knew what I was going to find, but it was my team, and I had to handle this myself.

Tom opened his mouth, then shut it tightly.  I looked him in the eye.  “What?”

He shook his head.  “Nothing,” he said ruefully.  “I was about to turn into a mother hen, and caught myself.”

I just nodded and headed for my truck.  Tom had been about to voice his concern that nobody go out alone, which was just common sense at that point.  He’d thought better of it because he knew that, as pissed as we all were, we were still professionals, and didn’t need the reminder.

Most of the rest of the team had pulled up to the gate by the time I got back to my truck.  “Bryan,” I called out to the tall, dark-haired, lanky man who had just gotten out of his Tacoma, his OBR in his hands and murder in his eyes.  I pointed to my truck.  “Get in.  We’ve got to go meet Brett Eaton.”

Something must have been in my voice, because Bryan’s expression changed as he searched my face.  “Oh, fuck,” he muttered, but he got in the cab without another word.  I shoved my SOCOM-16 next to my leg, slammed the door, and put the truck in gear, easing it through the narrow gap between two of the wrecked cars.

“Is it Jim or Little Bob?” he asked as we got on the road.

“Pretty sure it’s Jim,” I replied grimly, my eyes on the road and my knuckles white around the steering wheel.  “Little Bob’s in the hospital.”

“Fuck,” was all he said.

I’ve seen a lot of dead bodies over the years.  I’ve made quite a few of ‘em.  And I’ve seen more than a few teammates and brothers-in-arms go down.  Even been a pallbearer at a few of their funerals.

But looking down at Jim Morgan’s mutilated corpse, I thought it was probably one of the worst things I’ve ever seen.

The local cops had circled the scene with yellow police tape.  Both county sheriff and Powell PD cars were parked on the street, lights still flashing.  The corpse had been dropped in a parking lot, apparently before the lumberyard had opened.

Jim had been shot four times, before he’d been decapitated and his hands cut off.  His body had been stripped naked, and his head and hands had been placed in his lap.  His genitals had been cut off and stuffed in his mouth.

A copy of the same wetwork ad that we’d turned into death cards in Mexico had been stapled to his chest.

A couple of the cops standing nearby looked a little green.  They hadn’t seen this kind of violence before.  I pegged the couple of hard-eyed mothers who seemed relatively unfazed by the carnage in front of them as vets.  There might not have been much violence in Powell in a long time, but there was plenty in the world outside, and a lot of infantrymen found their way into law enforcement after getting out.

I was flanked by Sheriff Eaton and Chief Mays.  Ordinarily, this should have been entirely a Powell PD show, but I got the distinct impression that the crime was so horrific that Mays had called in everybody he could to deal with it.

A vaguely disturbing thought occurred to me.  As horrified, grieved, and monumentally, volcanically pissed as I was, this gruesome horror that was threatening to make a few of the cops lose their lunches—those who hadn’t already—was actually rather mild compared to some of the shit I’d witnessed over the last few years.

“When did he come into town, do you know?”  Sheriff Brett Eaton was trying to stay strictly professional, though I knew he was just as affected as the cops and deputies.  He’d spent a lot of hours on our ranges, and had become a friend more than a client.  It had been, initially, a purely pragmatic move on our part.  If you want to survive in the environments we routinely worked in overseas, you have to either go as completely unnoticed as possible, or make friends of the locals.  Since a six-hundred-acre ranch with a shoot house and 1000-yard ranges wasn’t exactly going to go unnoticed, we’d gone for making friends.

Working with the local sheriff’s department wasn’t like working with, say, Hussein Ali’s al Khazraji militia.  While enough of a bond had been built in Basra that pretty much the entirety of the crusty old commander’s extended family had insisted on joining up with the company, they were still Arabs, and we weren’t.  The sheriff and his deputies were a lot closer to us than the Arabs ever would be, regardless of how much blood we had shed together with Hussein Ali and his boys.  What had begun as a strategic move to secure our position in northern Wyoming had turned into a genuine friendship and partnership.

“I don’t know for sure when he left,” I replied, “but Jim was always an early riser, especially Stateside.  When was the body found?”

“When the manager showed up for work, about seven-thirty,” he answered.  “Sorry it took so long to get in touch with you.”

I shook my head, still staring down at my friend and assistant team lead’s corpse.  “We’ve been a little busy,” I said.  That got a look from him, and a frown.

“Are we going to find more bodies cropping up?” he asked.

“Not of ours,” I replied grimly.  “A few of theirs.  About a dozen out by the ranch gate.”

“Son of a…”  He ran a hand over his face.  “What the hell is going on?”

“Trust me, you don’t want the whole story,” I told him.  “But this is definitely coordinated, and I’m fairly certain that it’s connected to some of our past operations.”

“Terrorism?” he asked, a faint hush entering his voice.  That had become the magic word over the last couple of decades, the invocation of ultimate evil that presaged awful things to come, even though it had, ultimately, become routine in the brave new world since the ‘70s.

I grimaced.  “It’s a bit more complicated than that,” I told him.  “You’ll find most of the bodies are Hispanic.  Given the predominance of the number thirteen on their clothes, I’m pretty sure I know who they are.  I’m just not sure yet who sent them.”

Eaton gave me a hard look.  He was getting older and going to fat, and his hard look wasn’t nearly as intimidating to me as he might have liked.  “I might not want to hear the whole story,” he said, when I appeared completely unfazed by his glare, “but I think I need to.  If we’re looking at a shooting war in northern Wyoming, my people and I need to know what we’re in for.”

I looked him in the eye for a moment, then let out a breath and nodded.  He had a fair point.  I could hope that this attack was the only one coming, at least for the moment, but as has been said by many, “Hope is not a plan.”  That death card stapled to Jim’s chest was a clear enough message that these shitheads hadn’t planned and executed this operation by themselves, or in a vacuum.  We might have a little breathing room while whoever had sent them reset and adjusted their plans and tactics, but this was far from over, and Brett and his people were going to have to deal with the consequences just as much as we were.

“Let’s get Jim’s body taken care of, then I’ll tell you what you need to know on the way to the hospital,” I said.  He stared at me for a second, his eyes narrowed.  I knew he’d picked up on the phrase “need to know,” even though I hadn’t meant it precisely that way.  But he kept his thoughts to himself, and just nodded his assent.

Bryan and I lifted Jim’s body into the body bag and then onto the gurney for the trip to the morgue.  He was our guy, and Brett and Mays had enough respect for us to allow us that courtesy, though a couple of the paramedics looked like they wanted to object.

I tossed Bryan the keys to my truck.  “I’ll ride with Brett,” I told him.  He just caught the keys and nodded.  There wasn’t much to say.

Brett got into his car, and I slid into the back seat.  Brett might have made a crack about riding in the back seat of a sheriff’s car, but refrained.  Even as grim as the day already was, I was sure that Bryan wouldn’t have, and would probably have something cooked up in his twisted mind by the time we got back to The Ranch.  He’d have time to perfect it by then.

As Brett hit the lights and put the car in gear, I started in on the story.  I was as brief as possible, leaving out a lot of the gory details that he didn’t need to know, but I outlined the initial op in Kurdistan, which had led us to Basra in search of the Qods Force command cell.  I told him how we’d found out about the Project, a rogue group of American special operations contractors who had embarked on aiding Salafist jihadis in Iraq to act as a counter to the Iranians, and how that had led us into contact with the Network, or the Cicero Group.  I told him what our contact with the Network, Renton, had told me about the backroom factionalism and manipulation of national and international politics to personal and group ends that had nothing whatsoever to do with patriotism or ideology, and everything to do with money, power, and influence.

That contact had led to our operations in Mexico and Central America, where the hunt for an elusive HVT known only as El Duque had led us further down the rabbit hole into the tangled web that was the true face of the new international order.  He listened carefully as I briefly ran down the blurred lines between politics, espionage, terrorism, and organized crime, and some of the backstabbing we’d endured as we had hunted for a ghost in Latin America, leaving a bloody swathe of corpses and upset political and financial apple carts behind us.

“So,” he said, after mulling over my words for a few minutes, “you’re telling me that you guys have pissed off a lot of powerful and unscrupulous people here in the States, a lot of Islamic terrorists, just about every cartel south of the border, and the Chinese on top of it?  Is that about right?”

“Pretty fair assessment, yeah,” I replied.

“Holy shit.”

“No kidding.”

He didn’t say anything more until we got to the hospital, apparently digesting the horror story I’d just told him.  When we got there, he parked right in front of the Emergency Room and got out.  He looked at me over the cab.

“What are you going to do?” he asked quietly.  “If this is only the first move?”

I looked him in the eye.  “We’re going to do what we’ve been doing for years now, Brett,” I told him.  “We’re going to find them and we’re going to fucking bury them.”

He looked down for a moment, his lips pursed.  When he looked up again, I could see the conflict in his eyes.  “You know, given the oath I swore, and given what I suspect you’re actually saying, I should try to stop you.  I’m an officer of the law.  I can’t just stand aside and let you guys run around like vigilantes with machine guns.”

I smiled coldly.  “I didn’t say we were going to be vigilantes, Brett,” I pointed out.  “I only said we were going to bury them.  I never mentioned how.”

He searched my face for a moment, reading what I wasn’t saying.  I was giving him an out, a way to say that he hadn’t know what was coming.  Finally, tight-lipped, he just nodded fractionally and jerked his head toward the ER doors.  “We’ll have to discuss this in greater detail later.”

“No,” I answered as I walked past him.  “We won’t.”

A flicker of irritation crossed his face, but he composed himself.  I hoped he was reminding himself that I was trying to keep him out of trouble.  Brett was a friend, and one I would regret losing.

The Powell Hospital ER wasn’t big, and it was easy to pick out Little Bob’s room by the pair of uniformed Powell cops sitting outside.  They both looked up as Brett and I walked past the nurse’s station.  Technically, I was supposed to have left my gun in the car, but since Brett was with me, and still armed, I wasn’t worried about it.  There was no way in hell I was going anywhere in the near future without being within arm’s reach of a weapon.

Little Bob was unconscious under the sheets, with both IV and oxygen lines going into him, along with all kinds of monitors and electrodes.  They’d cleaned him up, but there was a bandage alongside his head, and his chest was partially exposed, to reveal the bandages over at least three wounds.

“He was shot four times and stabbed at least once,” Brett explained as I went to the bedside.  “He gave as good as he got; we found his pistol with the slide locked back, and enough bloodstains on the ground to suggest that he got at least three of them.”

I looked down at him.  Bob Sampson had joined the team just before Kurdistan, and had gotten the nickname “Little Bob” because the team had two Bobs, with Bob Fagin having been one of the original Praetorians, and because unlike Bob Fagin, Little Bob was a giant of a man.  Bob Fagin had been dead for years, but Little Bob was still Little Bob.  He tended to surprise people when he talked, since his voice was soft and high; he wasn’t feminine, but he could have been a schoolteacher, just to hear him talk.  It had made his callsign of “Sasquatch,” given his size and hairiness, that much funnier.

I shook my head.  “Dammit, Little Bob,” I muttered.  “Still getting your ass shot off.  I thought you’d learned to duck since Iraq.”  Little Bob had caught a round in the side during our final confrontation with the survivors of the Project.

I turned to Brett, and nodded toward the two cops outside.  “I’m sure he’s in good hands here, though I’d suggest getting some more firepower out front.  These assholes aren’t fucking around, and if they make another try for him, they’ll bring the hate.”

He nodded, his expression hooded.  “We’ll have two deputies out in the parking lot twenty-four hours a day,” he promised, “with patrol rifles and shotguns.”  He squinted at me for a second.  “I’m tempted to ask you guys for some backup, knowing what kind of hardware you’ve got on that ranch, but somehow I suspect you’re going to be busy.”

“Ask me no questions, Brett, and I’ll tell you no lies,” I told him.  “Trust me, it’s better this way.”

He sighed.  “Dammit, Jeff, my job’s to enforce the law.  And you’re not exactly setting my mind at ease that I’m going to be doing that properly if I leave you guys be.”

I looked back at Little Bob for a second.  “I’ll make you a deal, Brett,” I said.  “If the FBI and half a dozen organized crime and terrorism task forces descend on this place in the next twenty-four hours, and go after the bad guys instead of trying to lock us up for shooting a bunch of poor, oppressed brown guys with automatic weapons, then we’ll hold our peace and let the justice system do its thing.  If not, then we’ll handle things the best way we know how.”

He looked pained at that.  The truth was, I think he knew that no such thing was going to happen.  The Mountain States had been left nearly autonomous for several years now, especially as several of the major cities had descended into near-anarchy following the dollar’s collapse and the subsequent disintegration of the welfare system.  Even assuming that none of the string-pullers Stateside were involved, Federal law enforcement just didn’t have the manpower to deal with everything on its plate.

I could feel the rift opening as Brett composed himself.  He was caught between a rock and a hard place.  We were friends, and one of us had been murdered, another at death’s door.  But his duty was to the law, not to his friends.  Conversely, he didn’t have nearly the manpower or the firepower to keep us from doing much of anything, and he knew it.  It had to stick in his craw.

Unfortunately, as much as we really wanted to maintain the relationship we had built with local law enforcement, we knew enough about the reality of the situation to know that going through the system was no longer an option.  The war had just come home, and we were going to have to fight it or lie down and die.

I clapped him on the shoulder as I left the room.  “Thanks for keeping an eye on Little Bob, Brett,” I said.  “I promise we’ll do what we can to keep as much of the trouble away from here.”  He just nodded stiffly, probably thinking that it was a little too late for that.

I felt my shoulders start to slump as I stepped out into the parking lot, where Bryan was waiting with my truck.  Dammit.  I had hoped that Brett would be on our side, and losing that support hurt on a personal level, not just because of the strategic pragmatism involved in befriending the department.

That thought was all that the horror needed to start getting past my otherwise ironclad self-control that had kept me from being overwhelmed by what had happened.  I was shaking a little, my eyes stinging, as I climbed behind the wheel.  For a second, I just sat there, my hands on the wheel, staring at nothing.  Bryan glanced at me once, then looked out the window, giving me some space, at least for a moment.

Jim was dead.  That cantankerous old bastard had become a fixture of life since before I’d taken over the team from Alek, several years before.  He’d been an older, retired Special Forces NCO, who had joined up ostensibly because there weren’t any other jobs for a guy who’d been in the gun club for twenty-two years, though I’d gotten to know him well enough to know that most of the claim was bluster.  Jim could have done just about anything he put his mind to.  He could even have been in Brett’s place, easily.  He’d wanted to stay in the game, and he’d been damned good at it.  He’d been a stolid, quiet professional, who had a way of tempering my own hot-headed violent streak without ever saying very much.

And now he was gone, murdered in the night by a bunch of vicious little fuckstains for standing against some very, very bad people.  I felt the familiar spark of rage start to glitter through the roaring blackness of grief and despair, and fed it.  It was the only way I knew how to cope, to keep my head above water.

My phone buzzed in my pocket, yanking me out of my reverie.  I hauled it out and stared at the screen for a moment before the number registered.

I almost didn’t answer it.  But I finally hit the “Accept” button and lifted it to my ear.

“Yeah.”

“Oh, thank God,” Mia said.  “Are you all right?”

Mia had been the intel specialist that Renton had found for us in Mexico.  She was a pro.  She was also very pretty, knew it, and used it to her advantage at all times.  We’d shared a weekend at a high-end hotel in Veracruz on surveillance.  She’d done a good job of convincing everyone around that we were an item, which had made it a little awkward for me and the rest of the team.  I will admit, she made me a little nervous.  I was never entirely sure what her angle was.

“I am,” I replied after clearing my throat.  “Though not everybody else is.”  I paused a second.  “Wait a minute.  How do you know what happened?”

“I don’t,” she replied.  “Or, I didn’t until you just confirmed it.  I just avoided getting snatched by three gangbangers in a van.  I put two and two together.”

“We got hit this morning,” I confirmed, somewhat back on solid ground.  Hearing her voice and the note of stark relief in it when I’d answered the phone had thrown me a little.  “Most of us are secure, but Jim’s dead and Little Bob’s critical.”

“Oh, dammit,” she said.  She paused for a moment.  “I’m on my way to you.  I’ve got some territory to cover, so it’s probably going to be a day or two, but I think we’ve got a better chance staying close.”  I couldn’t object.  “I’ll see you soon.  And Jeff?  Stay safe?  Please?”

“I will,” I replied, somewhat by rote.  I had no intention of “safe” having much to do with our actions over the next days or weeks.  “I might not be here by the time you get in, but Tom will know to expect you.”

She didn’t reply right away.  I could almost see the look on her face as she once again put two and two together.  “Make sure you let him know where you’re going,” she said finally.  “I’ll see you soon.”  She hung up.

I looked down at the phone and sighed.  I was pretty sure that meant she intended to link up as soon as possible, and even lend a hand.  Trouble was, I still didn’t know if she was being sincere, or still running whatever agenda the Network had laid out for her.  We were all pretty sure she’d been put with us in Mexico as a watchdog, and we still couldn’t be sure that that role wasn’t continuing.

I started the truck up and put it in gear.  There was a gangbanger back at the ranch who had some questions to answer.

Lex Talionis Chapter 1

You know, a normal person, upon stepping out of a grocery store in a small town in Wyoming and seeing a dark red Crown Vic full of four young men, all Hispanic, all exuding the vato belligerence, two with shaved heads and goatees, watching them intently, might or might not immediately identify them as a threat.  If they did, in this day and age, they might dismiss their initial concern as prejudice, and nobody wants to be prejudiced.  So, they would try to ignore the mean-mugging and go about their business.  To all outward appearances, that was what I did.

But I am by no means a normal person anymore.  Haven’t been for a lot of years.  Most “normal” people would probably call me “paranoid” if they could see inside my head.  I would probably correct them, pointing out that I am, in fact, “professionally paranoid.”  It’s kept me alive in some very, very unpleasant places.

I wasn’t looking at them as I walked across the street toward my beat-up old pickup, but was keeping them within my peripheral vision, watching them without focusing on anything in particular.  I learned a long time ago that if you keep your eyes unfocused, you can actually see a lot more around you.  Details get fuzzy, but any movement will be instantly visible, and you can keep track of your quarry spacially all the time.  Also, it keeps people from getting that hackle-raising sense of being watched, since you’re not staring at them.

Let these fuckers think I was oblivious.

I made a show of looking both ways before crossing the street, even though there is usually very little traffic in Powell, and crossed to the truck.  My .45 was on my hip under my jacket, but I had a lot more firepower in the cab.  Part of me was hoping not to have to use it in town; Powell had a very low crime rate, and committing the first killing in decades was not going to help us stay low-profile.  We might have a good relationship with the county sheriff, but word of a shooting was going to get around.

I got in and started the truck up, making sure my SOCOM 16 was next to my leg and easily accessible.  To my complete lack of surprise, the car followed me as I pulled away from the curb and headed west, out of town.  They weren’t terribly good at this; they were following too close, and trying to pull this off in a small town was never a good plan in the first place.  Outsiders were noticed, especially Hispanics in a place where most people were pretty white.

I was driving through town partially on autopilot, already thinking ahead, trying to remember good ambush sites.  There was no way I was going all the way back to The Ranch with these clowns in tow, and if they were who I thought they were, shaking them was going to require some applied violence.  Outnumbered four to one, I wanted a terrain advantage.

Unfortunately, Powell sits on pretty flat ground.  Surrounded by fields, there aren’t a lot of good ambush sites close to town.  I’d have to head north, up toward Polecat Bench.  There were hills and ravines up there where I could set up, though I needed to open up that time-distance gap so that I could park the truck and move off to find a shooting position.

I was studiously avoiding thinking about the wider implications of a car full of possible sicarios in our backyard.  There would be time for that later, provided I got out of this with my head still attached to my shoulders.  I needed all my mental energy to concentrate on the fight at hand.

I wove through the outer neighborhoods, moving just over the speed limit.  I’d made sure a long time ago that I knew Powell, Ralston, and Cody like the back of my hand, just in case.  I don’t think at the time any of us had figured that we would actually be E&Eing through ranchland Wyoming, but here I was, and the worst-case scenario appeared to be coming true.

I dropped south and turned onto Highway 14, heading southwest toward Ralston.  The Crown Vic was still following; I’d been moving quickly, but there was too little traffic to be able to lose them, particularly in the middle of the morning.  Most everybody was working the fields or the range at that time of day.  That was okay, though; I hadn’t expected to shake them off in town.

I ran through the gears as I accelerated down the highway, the Crown Vic keeping pace behind me.  They hadn’t started shooting, which was good, but I didn’t want to give them a straight line of sight longer than I absolutely had to.  They were bound to get impatient sooner or later.

I’d thought about going through Ralston and hitting the 294 north; there were several turnoffs into the foothills of Polecat Bench up there.  But with them following so close, I realized that I didn’t want to stay on one road that long.  So, as soon as a turnoff presented itself, heading out into the fields to the north, I suddenly stomped on the clutch and the brake and twisted the wheel, turning off the highway with a squeal of tires and onto the side road.  Working the clutch and accelerator faster than I think I ever have before or since, I ran back through the transfer case, roaring past two farmhouses before taking another left.

The Crown Vic had almost spun out when I made the turn off the highway.  They’d swerved hard to avoid slamming into my tailgate, then back to follow me through the turn, and almost flipped over.  I was briefly disappointed that it hadn’t happened; that would have solved my problem, and possibly left one or more to work over for information.

I kept taking turns, avoiding staying on a straight line for very long.  They had to be getting pissed by now, but still hadn’t opened fire.  Sooner or later, I was going to have to stay on the straight and narrow a little longer, and see if I couldn’t open up that gap a little farther.

Hitting the next major road, I banged a hard left and raced over the creek, heading up into the hills.  I was pushing the truck as hard as I dared; I didn’t want to flip on a curve or lose control on a bump, but I knew the road and I knew the old Dodge’s capabilities well enough.  I kept my speed right at the edge of what both the truck and I could handle, roaring uphill into the foothills.

I glanced in the mirror behind me.  The Crown Vic was falling back a little.  I grinned tightly.  Tough guys they might think themselves, but my vato buddies back there were flatlanders.  They weren’t comfortable driving at high speed in the hills.  I was opening that gap.

My next turn was a risky one.  The first violent turn off of Highway 14 had been onto a paved road; this one was onto dirt and gravel.  And I waited until the very last moment to stomp on the clutch and wrench the wheel over.

I damned near broke the rear end loose as I hit the gravel road.  The truck definitely fishtailed a little, and it took a good hundred yards before I was confident that I was fully in control again.  Then I was bouncing and roaring up the road and over a ditch, leaving a cloud of dust between me and my pursuers.  They could easily see where I had gone, but they wouldn’t be able to spot me well enough to hit me for the time being, and if they were driving like flatlanders on the paved road, this gravel track was going to give them fits.

I had to slow as the track headed into the next draw, but I was relying on that dust cloud to provide some concealment.  I bounced back over the dry wash and turned off the dirt road onto a barely defined vehicle track going up the side of the finger.

After trundling another three hundred yards, just around the curve of the draw, I found my spot.  I threw the truck in neutral, set the brake, and killed the engine.  I didn’t have much time.

My chest rig was on the floor under my seat.  A yank brought it out as I kicked the door open, then I swapped hands, grabbed my rifle, and bailed out of the cab.  I had to move fast, before the dust settled.

I ran uphill, my boots slipping slightly on the bunchgrass as I went.  There was a rocky outcrop at the top of the hill I was aiming for, hoping to get there before the gangbangers could get around the curve of the draw and spot me.  I hoped they’d get focused on the truck and not notice me, even though the slope was open ground covered in sagebrush and bunchgrass.

My heart was pounding by the time I got to the top and flung myself behind the boulders.  I leaned my rifle against the rocks, lifting one eye over the edge to watch the draw as I shouldered into my chest rig.  I only had four mags in it, plus one in the gun, but a hundred rounds of 7.62 would be more than enough for this situation.

As soon as the fast-tech was snapped around my waist, I grabbed the rifle, bringing it to my shoulder and pointing past the side of the boulder, my eye finding the scope as I scanned for targets.  The dust was settling around the parked truck.  There was no sign of my pursuers, yet.

The draw stayed still and silent.  Even what little traffic there was out on the highway was all but inaudible.  The only sound was the whisper of the wind in the grass and the faint creak of my boot as I shifted my position ever so slightly.

I was suddenly struck by the impression that, if not for the old Dodge sitting down there on the slope below me, and the modernity of my rifle and chest rig, this wasn’t all that different from what some frontiersman might have experienced out there a hundred fifty years before.

Time dragged on, or at least, it seemed to.  The draw stayed empty.  I was starting to think that the bad guys had given up.  Or maybe they’d buried the grill of that low-slung car in the ditch only a few dozen yards from the road.

Then movement caught my eye.  A voice echoed down the draw.  Rendered unintelligible by distance, it had the unmistakable tone of a curse.

I eased out just enough to get the dark figure in my scope.  It was one of the bald ones, wearing a black jacket buttoned at the collar and baggy jeans.  He was struggling up the draw, a pistol in his hand.  He didn’t look like he was dressed for walking in the badlands.  And he really didn’t look happy about being out there, either.

I placed the stadia line on his upper chest, and rested my finger on the trigger.

Then I hesitated.  I knew what this was; these men were there to kill me, or, failing that, to kidnap me for torture and later murder.  I didn’t know for certain who they were, but we’d killed enough MS-13 thugs in Arizona and Mexico that I had little doubt that these guys were here in some connection to the mountain range of corpses we’d left behind us in Mexico and Central America.

But we were Stateside.  I’d willingly ignored and blatantly violated a lot of laws downrange, particularly in Latin America.  I’d killed a lot of people.  But for some reason, being here, in the US, the fact that if I dropped the hammer on this guy, who couldn’t touch me with that dinky little 9mm he was carrying, it would be a homicide, gave me pause.

I knew, in that pause, that these dogfuckers wouldn’t hesitate.  Giving them a chance would be suicide.  My finger tightened on the trigger.

The rifle boomed loudly, the report echoing and rolling down the draw.  The bald guy staggered, then fell on his face.

I quickly transitioned to the next guy, a baby-faced little fat dude with longish hair and a white t-shirt.  He was momentarily frozen with shock; they must have been expecting to catch me unawares and helpless.  They must not be familiar with the Mountain States.  While not everyone was armed up there, a lot of people were, and not just with little subcompacts for CCW.  Truck guns were pretty ubiquitous, especially with the hard times that had marked the last few years.

His hesitation didn’t last long, though.  These guys hadn’t come up here to pop their violence cherry; they’d traded shots with other gangbangers before.  He dove for the dirt, holding his pistol up uselessly, searching for a target.

I eased off a little of the tension on the trigger and adjusted.  It wasn’t an easy shot at two hundred, but I was in a good position with good glass.  I let out most of the air in my lungs, paused, let the reticle settle as best it could, and squeezed.  The trigger broke just as the stadia line crossed the bridge of his nose.

Another rolling boom echoed down the draw, and he jerked as the bullet passed through his face and cored out his heart.

Satisfied that he wasn’t getting up again, I kept scanning, looking for the other two.  There was no sign of the car; I assumed they’d gotten stuck and continued on foot.  It was probably a pretty safe assumption.  That was not terrain for a Crown Vic.

But after five minutes, they hadn’t appeared.  I came off the scope and eased away from the boulder, careful not to skyline myself.  I scanned the slope behind me, then started working my way around to the western side of the hill.  I should have been able to see them if they were trying to come around to my flank, but I was in combat paranoid mode at that point, and wasn’t going to leave anything to chance.  Besides, it’s never a good idea to stay in one place for long, especially when you’ve just smoked two of the bad guys from that position.  Mobility is security for a sniper, and for all intents and purposes, that was my role at that moment.  I was alone, and couldn’t rely on anyone else to watch my back.

The far side of the hill was as empty as the draw, and while I might have been able to find microterrain to conceal my approach, even in the sage and bunchgrass that provided all the ground cover there was to see, I figured I could be fairly confident that whatever military training was seeping into the world of the Latino gangbanger, through the likes of MS-13 and Los Zetas, open-ground infiltration was not one of the skills being taught.

I paused behind another outcrop, taking a second to plan out my next move.  I needed to get back to The Ranch.  First priority had to be getting to a secure location, and that was the only truly secure location for Praetorians in the world.

I needed my truck; it would be a long haul on foot.  I carefully moved back around the hill to my previous vantage point, stopping and waiting to watch and listen.  I didn’t want to run to the truck only to go barreling into the last two gangsters’ fire.  They had some ground to cover before they could do anything with their pistols, presuming they hadn’t gone back to get more firepower out of the car, but since I was by myself, I had to err on the side of caution.

But as I scanned the draw, I saw nothing but the two corpses lying where they’d fallen.  Somebody out at the nearby farm had to have heard the shots, but unlike a lot of urban areas, the sound of gunshots out in the open wasn’t a terribly significant thing out there.  I could have been somebody out plinking or shooting coyotes.

In a way, that was just what I’d done.

There was still no sign of their buddies.  I waited for a few minutes, my eyes skimming over the slopes opposite and craning my head out just enough to see below me.  Nothing.  The draw was just as empty as before.  They must have scrammed as soon as they saw the first two catch it.

I held my position a little longer, then started back down toward the truck.  They may have run, but I wasn’t putting money on them making their retreat permanent.  Not only was I already a target, that, unless I missed my guess, they’d been paid for, but I’d just smoked two of their homies.  They’d want revenge, if nothing else.

I half-ran, half-slid down the slope, coming to a halt against the cab of my truck with a small cloud of dust.  I hadn’t shut the door, so I tossed my rifle in on the seat and followed it without bothering to strip off my chest rig.  I pulled the door shut with a bang as I jammed the key in the ignition, stomped on the clutch and brake, and twisted.

The old, faithful truck started with a roar, and in moments I was moving again, bouncing and swaying toward the far end of the draw, watching the mirrors for any sign of my attackers.

My rear view stayed empty even as I rounded the hill to the west, passing an abandoned farmer’s shed.  I spotted the dirt road through the fields and made for it as fast as I dared.  I still about knocked my head against the ceiling of the cab a couple of times.

Once I got on the road, it got easier.  I turned north, through the fields, and headed up to the top of Polecat Bench.  I’d have to be careful on my route back, and make sure I wasn’t dragging anyone along with me.

It did occur to me, as I planned my route, that evasive driving might be pointless.  If they could find me in Powell, they had to know where The Ranch was.

I shouldn’t have been surprised.  While I had been assured that steps had been taken to discipline the members of the Network (or the Cicero Group, as the more dramatic members liked to call it) who had leaked our information to the bad guys while we were in Mexico in the hopes of using us as bait, I still didn’t know just how much had been leaked in the first place, or even if the leak had been entirely plugged.  We knew where a lot of the bodies were buried, and we had demonstrated a willingness to violently stomp all over the cunning plans hatched in back rooms and restaurants, far from where the bleeding and the dying was happening.  There were definitely those we supposedly worked for who considered us a liability.

That said, we had plenty of enemies outside the Network, as well.  We’d spent the last several years leaving a growing swathe of dead jihadists, rogue operators, and narcos behind us.  For the most part, until Mexico, we’d kept our profile low, at least outside of certain circles.  But sooner or later, the butcher’s bill comes due, no matter how righteous the killings.

I was afraid of what I was going to find as I drove north.

 

The Ranch sat on about six hundred acres, backed up on the Beartooth Mountains.  It had once been a genuine cattle ranch, up until a combination of the economic downturn, the ever-increasing costs of ranching, and the younger generation’s lack of enthusiasm for raising cows forced the aging owner to sell.  He hadn’t been running cattle for some time before he sold the land.  Some of us felt a little bad about buying his land and not actually ranching on it, as he evidently had hoped that somebody would take up the torch when he was gone, since his kids wouldn’t.

But we’d turned it into our base of operations and training center.  While we might have been sneaky and underhanded when it came to getting the job done overseas, for this place we crossed our t’s and dotted our i’s.  All the requisite paperwork was filled out for a tactical training facility, not unlike Blackwater’s old one at Moyock.  In the interests of increasing our security and being neighborly, we had even actively cultivated a close relationship with the local sheriff, having the department out to train and shoot with us regularly.

The entry gate was closed and appeared abandoned as I pulled up.  I knew better.  I’d helped put the concealed, hardened guard posts in myself, so I knew where to look.  Even then, I couldn’t see anyone, which was kind of the whole point.

I was already on the phone.  “I’m here,” I said, holding the phone with two fingers in my wheel hand.

“Roger,” the voice came from the speaker.  “I see you.  You sure you’re clean?”

“As a whistle,” I replied.  I had been very careful and very watchful on the way back.  That was actually putting it mildly.  I had been on edge, poised to go into aggressive evasive driving, while ready to draw my .45 and dump the mag into any vehicle I saw that looked remotely suspicious.  None of us who had deployed as Praetorian Security (I’m sorry, Solutions) shooters ever quite turned it off, anymore.  But even so, this had been a nastier shock than I’d expected.

One of the younger guys stepped out onto the road.  He was wearing plates and carrying an AR-10 slung in front of him.  He peered at me until I waved, then unbarred and swung the gate open.  I rolled through, pausing just inside with my window down.

After he secured the gate, he walked up to my window.  “Sorry, Mr. Stone,” he said.  “I didn’t recognize you at first.”

“Don’t apologize,” I told him.  “You did what you were supposed to.”  I glanced at the glorified pillboxes set in the brush beside the road.  From inside, I could see the men with rifles watching through the firing slits.  “Has there been any activity out this way?  Any probes, or anything suspicious?”

The kid shook his head.  Holy hell, he barely looked old enough to shave, much less be a vet who had done his four years in the mil and gotten out.  Or was I just getting that damned old?   “We haven’t seen anything but you guys who were out coming back in in a hell of a hurry,” he said.  “What’s going on?  All I’ve heard is that something’s happened and we had to go to stand-to.”

“You know about as much as I do at the moment,” I told him.  “Somebody tried to jump me out in town, and it sounds like I wasn’t the only one.  I’ll make sure the word gets passed down once we know more.  Just keep your eyes peeled.”

“Roger that,” he said.  I waved vaguely at him and put the truck back in gear, heading up the gravel road toward the main house.

Larry and Nick were on the porch as I pulled up, both kitted up and armed.  Larry was a bald giant of a man with a dark beard that showed streaks of gray these days.  He’d trimmed it down from his “scary murder hobo” beard to a goatee, but that didn’t make the six-foot-five mountain of a man any less intimidating.  He looked like a monster, which, conveniently enough, was his callsign.  Of course, his love of B-grade monster movies and action-horror novels had gotten him the callsign, but most people outside the team wouldn’t realize that.

Nick was not a small man, but next to Larry, he looked like he was.  Almost half a head shorter, he was still heavily built, though his brown hair and beard were also starting to show a little gray.  His eyes were set in a semi-permanent squint that still saw a lot more than it seemed.

Nick blew out a relieved breath as I pulled up and piled out.  “Have we got everybody?” I asked, even as I dragged my rifle out of the cab with me.

Larry shook his head, his mouth tightening to a thin line inside his goatee.  “Hal’s on the way back, but we’ve had no contact with Jim or Little Bob,” he said.  “They’re the only ones still out.”

I fought back the sinking, hollow feeling in my gut.  Jim had been my assistant team lead for years now.  Little Bob had been with us since we’d first gone into Kurdistan.  Both were solid professionals and good friends.  If they were out of contact, it could only be because things had gone very, very bad.

“How many of us actually got hit?” I asked as I mounted the steps to the porch.

“Hal’s running as far behind as he is because he had to lose a couple of bad guys who started shooting at him,” Nick told me.  “Apparently, there was a sheriff’s deputy only a half mile away, and he got involved.  Jack had a narrow scrape, and a couple of the newer guys got a bad feeling down in Cody and came running back up here.  Not sure about anyone else.”

“I left two corpses and a couple of scared gangbangers on the west slope of Polecat Bench,” I said, as I headed inside.  If anyone was going to have a more complete picture of what was happening, it would be Tom.  The retired Colonel and I didn’t see eye to eye all the time, but he’d been hired to run training and turned into a pretty good mastermind at turning the company into the de facto private special operations command that it was.

Tom was in the command center in what had been the master bedroom.  Nobody lived in the main ranch house anymore.  It had become entirely a headquarters building, though one that could be used for meetings with clients and outsiders as well.  Most of us had our own cabins scattered out on the two thousand acres of the ranch, away from the ranges.

Tom was standing in the middle of a room covered in maps and whiteboards.  We had a few laptops up, too, but most of us had become rather minimalist when it came to having monitors everywhere.  Whiteboards and paper maps are simple, cheap, and don’t require power and working internet connections.

Tom looked up as I walked in, my rifle still in my off hand and chest rig over my jacket.  He was smoking, which was rare indoors, but given the day I’d had already, I imagined that Tom no longer gave a shit about filling the room with smoke.  The crow’s feet around his icy blue eyes looked deeper than normal, and his already gray hair seemed to be going whiter by the day.

“Jeff, good,” he said.  “Glad you made it back in one piece.  What’s the score?”

“Two dead gomers, two in the wind,” I replied.  “How many incidents so far?”

He pointed to the map of Wyoming spread on the north wall with the hand holding his cigarette.  There were several red pins in it.  “You make six, including James and Robert.  I’m counting them both as ‘incidents’ until we get some contact and/or confirmation otherwise.”

I studied the spread, which covered nearly a hundred miles.  “All within the last couple of hours?” I asked.

He nodded, taking another drag.  “Tighter than that,” he said, checking his watch.  “The first incident was…seventy-four minutes ago.”

I shook my head.  “Well, if there was any doubt that this was coordinated…”

“There is certainly none now,” Tom finished for me.  “The only question is which one of our admittedly myriad enemies has finally caught up with us?”

“After Mexico, I’d be willing to say that it won’t be just one,” I said.  “Let any one of them get wind of us, and all kinds of assholes will be dropping their feuds for just long enough to put us in the ground.  It’s the way of the world.”  I stepped closer to the map.  There were little notes attached to the red pins with callsigns, indicating who had been involved.  The only two that were missing were “Kemosabe” and “Sasquatch.”  “Do we have last known positions for Jim and Little Bob?”

He shook his head.  “Not precise enough,” he replied.  “They were both heading into town this morning, but we haven’t exactly been doing five-point contingency plans while Stateside.”  He frowned.  “That’s probably my mistake, but I imagine that it wouldn’t have gone over well.”

I grimaced.  No, it wouldn’t have.  I would have chafed at it, myself.  Stateside had become much less stable in the last few years since the beginnings of the Greater Depression, but it was still Stateside, and most of us, if unconsciously, associated it with safety.  We still went armed everywhere, but I don’t think any of us really anticipated a situation that would have required downrange levels of security and contingency planning to present itself, particularly not in rural Wyoming.

“I’m going to get reset, grab some more ammo, and go find ‘em,” I said.  “Powell’s not that big; we shouldn’t have too much trouble.”  Especially if they’ve run into something they can’t handle, I didn’t say.

No sooner were the words out of my mouth, then a sudden roar of gunfire sounded from the direction of the gate.

“The Canyon of the Lost” is Out!

The Canyon of the Lost is out today!  Check it out for a short adventure with Jed Horn and Dan Weatherby, about a year after Nightmares and some time before A Silver Cross and a Winchester.

Bit of a Progress Report

Well, it took a couple weeks longer than I had hoped, but the outline for Lex Talionis, Praetorians Number 5, is done.  Finally.  This one has been a bear to get started, for a couple of reasons.  One, shifting gears from two entirely different genres, in which I was immersed for the entirety of the summer and fall, between the novel that I otherwise can’t talk about yet, and The Canyon of the Lost, has been…difficult.  Add in the grim(mer) nature of this final installment in the American Praetorians series, and you start to get the picture.

I can say this much: the storm clouds have been gathering for the last three books, and now the thunder’s rumbling and it’s starting to rain.  This is going to be a rough ride.

The Pre-Order is Up!

The Canyon of the Lost, the new novelette in the Jed Horn series, is now available for pre-order on Kindle (Kindle only, for now.  It might get folded into a later edition of one of the paperbacks.).

If you’re hoping for the further adventures of Jed, Eryn, and Frank Tall Bear, and more of the aftermath of the Walker’s rampage, I’m afraid that’s not here.  This story takes place between Nightmares and A Silver Cross and a Winchester, when Jed is still learning the ropes from Dan Weatherby.  From the book description:

All too often, it starts with a missing kid.

It has been a year since Jed Horn and Dan Weatherby confronted Professor Ashton and destroyed his homunculus. They’ve been busy in the meantime, roving the Intermountain West, fighting monsters and and the demonic, protecting people as best they can from the powers of the Otherworld and the Abyss.

They are between jobs in Washington State when they catch wind of a missing kid in the mountains. There is enough weird about the situation that it sounds like their kind of work, so they volunteer to help out.

As the hunt for the missing child progresses, it turns into a deadly game of cat and mouse, as they are led deeper and deeper into a dark place in the mountains where our reality begins to give way to the Otherworld. It will be a fight to get out themselves, much less to bring the child out. But that’s why they do what they do…

The Canyon of the Lost

I’ve talked about it a little on Facebook, but I’ve recently finished the Jed Horn novelette The Canyon of the Lost, which should be out soon on Kindle.  The art is still being worked on, which is why there’s no pre-order yet, but it’s almost there.  Here’s a peek:

Quick Update

Been pretty busy lately.  Got the first (and second) draft of an Heroic Fantasy story done that I’m trying to sell to an actual publisher, but while I wait on Reader Force Alpha, I’ve embarked on a couple more projects.

The big one is, of course, Lex Talionis, American Praetorians Number Five.  I’m still outlining, as this one is going to be a bear and a half.  But it’s getting there.

In the meantime, I’ve started in on a Jed Horn short story/novella (probably going to end up about the same length as Rock, Meet Hard Place).  It’ll be going up on Kindle exclusive once it’s done.  (Though it might get included in a later edition of one of the existing novels for those who want to have a paper copy.)

Now back to the word mines.