Rachel’s mind raced. She could not immediately decide whether to hug her husband or strangle him. She couldn’t figure out how a man who had just seen a friend shot and who had murdered a half dozen men could maintain such control of his emotions. He barely looked upset by the events. Then she realized worryingly, she couldn’t read his emotions at all. Before she could form her thoughts, Mark poked his head out the back door.
“John, we stripped him down to his boxers and zip-tied him to a chair in the shop,” Mark reported. Those were the orders John had left everyone with right after he hollered to Kevin and Vicky to tend Andy’s wound.
“And you’re sure he can’t wiggle his way free?” John asked.
“Not a chance. Kevin was so enthusiastic with the zip ties, I’d be surprised if he can feel his fingers and toes,” Mark replied without hesitation.
“Post a guard, with a sidearm, with strict instructions not to talk to or even look at that asshole. Let him sit there for an hour and sweat before I go in there and ask him a few questions,” John said. His voice did not waver, but his tone indicated he had far more than questions in mind. Mark’s stomach turned as his mind contemplated what John planned.
John stood to go in and check on Andy. “How’re you feeling, peckerhead?”
Andy glanced up at him, grimacing. “Alcohol ain’t for pouring into open wounds, it’s for drinking. I’m sure that’s why this hurts so bad.”
“Quit your bellyaching. If your wound gets infected, you’re a dead man. You’re lucky that agent rushed the shot,” John said good-naturedly. “I do wish I’d caught him with my first shot; you wouldn’t even have had a scratch,” he said seriously.
Andy grabbed John’s arm hard. “Don’t you sit there and feel sorry for me. We won; that’s all that matters. I’m alive. You got the bastard before he shot me again and killed Kevin. Don’t fall on your sword, ’cause you can’t save everyone.”
John nodded his head, patted his friend’s shoulder, and turned to leave. “Vicky,” he started.
“I’ve got him, John,” she replied sincerely.
He nodded his head and went to the TOC to find Mark and Kevin.
“What’s the radio chatter saying?” John asked.
Kevin looked up from his terminal. “Lot of chatter about their missing team, even their lead guy, Shorts, is demanding they check in. I’m not sure if they’re that shorthanded he’s answering radio calls, or that frantic they aren’t answering.”
“Any indication if they know this cell is here? Was this a random hit, planned? Did they act on a tip? We need to figure out really fast if we’ve been made.” John voiced the same worry everyone at the compound was feeling.
“Haven’t heard anything, and honestly, John, the way these guys operate, if they knew this cell was here, they would’ve sent every agent they had. Or called in the damned Air Force to stick a bomb through our roof. They’re not that incompetent,” Kevin reasoned.
John couldn’t argue with his rationale, but he worried about what conclusions they would draw now that eight armed agents had failed to return from their raid. The natural conclusion was that whatever resistance they had encountered was substantial and merited an overwhelming response by all agency assets that could be brought to bear.
“Alright, let me know if anything changes,” John said, turning towards the shop.
Mark looked up. “What are you going to do?”
John’s eyes darkened. “I’m going to start with a bucket of water and a towel; then I’m going to go ask some questions. And I had better get some answers that make sense. Or I’m going to get a blowtorch and some pliers, then ask those same questions again.”
Mark struggled to hold John’s smoldering gaze. “You’re going to torture him?”
John just glared at Mark. “No, I’m going to make him a glass of warm tea and wrap him in a blanket. Maybe rub his shoulders. Hell, I might just strip down and spoon with the bastard before I politely ask him what’s on my mind.”
“John, you can’t seriously—” Mark started before he realized he was looking down the barrel of a handgun and listening to the sound of a hammer being thumbed back.
“You going to stop me, Mark? Or do you want a piece of what that agent has coming to him? You just say the word, ’cause it makes no difference if he sees Jesus today by himself or has some company.” John’s diatribe wasn’t angry, it was cold. His eyes were not clouded in emotion, they were like the eyes of a snake staring at prey. Mark felt his heart skip a beat, and he finally realized who and what John had become. All the men’s lives he had taken, all of the blood, all of the violence. John had turned from a friend into a pure predator, and he was trying to figure out if Mark was his equal or his prey.
The room stood silent. No one even breathed. Mark could feel sweat dribble down the back of his neck. “John, I am not your enemy.” That sounded lame even to Mark, but it was all the command of the English language he could manage at that moment. The fear he felt was incredible.
“John,” Rachel’s voice called gently.
John’s face softened, but the gun did not waver. His finger might have eased its pressure on the face of the trigger, but it did not move.
“John, this isn’t the way. These people aren’t your enemy. Your enemy isn’t in that shop either. He’s waiting at that detention camp. He is whoever sent them all to hunt us.” Rachel’s voice soothed.
“Then why do I feel like I have to fight a war out there, then come back here and fight another war? Why should I listen to the pissing and moaning of these people? They aren’t wolves. Wolves do not care for the opinion of sheep,” John spat.
“You are not a wolf, dear. You’re a sheepdog. Sheepdogs do not tear the throat out of sheep, because that is not who they are. You are not a wolf.” Her voice was patient, but firm.
John’s shoulders dropped ever so slightly.
“Love, you’ve been fighting so long you’re forgetting why you started in the first place. You killed the first man to protect your family, not for the sake of killing. You’ve killed dozens, maybe hundreds, but you aren’t a killer. You are not a wolf.”
Seconds dragged by, feeling like hours to everyone present. Then a click was heard through the room and everyone flinched. John had hit the decocker on his sidearm. He holstered the gun and lowered himself to the floor, taking a knee. Everyone held their breath as Rachel walked forward to put her hand on the back of her husband’s neck.
John felt the stinging of the first tear slip past his eyelid. His emotions rushed out: shame, fear, remorse, guilt, anxiety, depression. He had almost lost control of himself. He had actually drawn a gun on Mark, a man who had saved him and his family. Even he couldn’t put into words everything that ran through his mind right then.
The tears came, and everyone in the room sat or stood silently and watched John’s shoulders heave. Mark had come within fractions of an inch of dying, and all he could think of was the stress this man must have been under to cause such a drastic change in his personality. An hour ago, he had been good-natured, lighthearted. He had been eating breakfast with his wife and daughter, content with his life for that moment. Then he had changed once again into a vicious fighter and was finding it so difficult to change back, he had very nearly killed another man who had not threatened him. Mark wondered not for the first time if his luck would run out, and this man would be the death of him or someone else.
Rachel looked up to Mark, her eyes saying what her words could not. She knew her husband was hurting, but she felt the remorse that he felt for his actions. “Give me a few minutes with him, please.”
Mark could only nod his head, and she gathered him to his feet and led him out of the room. Mark caught himself thinking for just a moment how childlike John’s mannerisms were at that moment. How scared and incredibly sad he looked, how his wife drew her arm around his broad shoulders to comfort him, and how he clung to her. It was like watching a man come apart at the seams and hold onto someone else for
their very life.
“Holy shit,” Kevin said in a whisper. “Mark, he’s even more on the edge than I thought.”
“Kevin, he’s more on the edge than I think any of us thought,” Mark agreed.
“What do we do?” Kevin asked, looking to Mark.
What do we do? Mark thought. Like I know what the fuck to do. Mark ushered everyone else back to work while he wondered how to deal with one of his men pointing a loaded handgun at him. He of all people knew time was running out, and one of the most important pieces of their plan was on the verge of a mental breakdown.
Shattered
Andy charged down the hallway, only wincing in those moments he pulled on the bandage around his side. He was heading for John and Rachel’s room after he had heard someone say John had almost shot Mark, and he felt incredible urgency to reach his friend. He lifted his hand to knock, stopped for just a moment to soften what was sure to be a heavy fist against a door, and gently rapped his knuckles on the door. A few seconds passed, and he was greeted with the face of a very worried Rachel.
“What the hell happened? Someone said John almost shot Mark,” Andy said in a loud whisper.
Rachel motioned him in and shut the door, for him to come face-to-face with his friend sitting on the edge of the bed, looking down at the floor, completely unresponsive. He stepped forward to grab his friend, but Rachel’s grip on his arm was savage and insistent.
“Andy, I think he’s had a psychotic break. He won’t talk. He doesn’t answer to his name. He’s gone,” Rachel said, a thin shade of panic on the edge of her words.
“What happened?” Andy repeated.
Rachel looked from the worried face of a good friend to the blank face of her husband, and she wondered the same thing. John was not sitting on the bed, in a room with his wife and close friend. John was in his own mind, reliving weeks of violence in gruesome detail…
John was sitting in the improvised blind he and Andy had constructed earlier from a bush they’d hacked the center out of and layered with additional branches and foliage. It provided them fair concealment from every angle but directly behind them and allowed one man to crawl forward into a makeshift firing point, while the other stayed behind them to defend their unprotected back. John would normally be firing his .308 Winchester bolt action off its mounted bipod, but the position he was in precluded that. Instead, he rested his rifle in the crotch of two branches and peered through his 12X riflescope at his target. He watched a man tell some joke to the other man in the guard tower and meander around aimlessly; then the man jerked as if someone had struck him in the chest with a sledgehammer as John’s 168-grain Sierra MatchKing struck him high in the chest. John had been lining up his shot, increasing the pressure on the trigger between breaths, and hadn’t even realized the rifle was about to fire until the rifle jerked and bellowed.
John and Andy had collected intelligence on a group of these agents for a few days. Unlike many of their counterparts, these had rented a local house just off the compound and preferred the relative luxury. The tricky part about dealing with these four was the house’s proximity to noncombatants, and John desperately wanted to prevent collateral damage. He also understood they would only have one bite at this particular apple, so eliminating all four…targets was a requirement. A bomb of sufficient scale to ensure all four deaths would, by design, be large enough to severely damage neighboring homes. Too small, and the men’s dispersion throughout the house would allow survivors. John opted for multiple bombs, command detonated via a throwaway cell phone.
Eight small bombs were attached around the doorframe, little more than pipe bombs and ball bearings wrapped in duct tape, hooked up to a common detonator. Two more were placed in a cabinet in the kitchen, a cabinet in the only bathroom, and one in each of the beds of the house. That evening, when the last man had walked through the doorway, Andy and John rapidly dialed each of the predetermined numbers and listened to the irregular banging noises emanating from the home as the devices detonated around the house. Andy saw one man, bloody from head to toe and looking like the world’s biggest shotgun had hit him, stumble screaming out the front door before John silenced him with his rifle.
Hitting supply trucks was ridiculously easy, since they ran on a constant schedule and on the same route. John wondered if the supply convoys that had run to his post in Iraq were this dim-witted, or if they had actually given the insurgents some sort of challenge. Once Mark had figured out the weekly schedule and rough timing and related that to John, John picked a section of rock and shelled road off the main highway leading to the detention camp and, under cover of darkness, had buried an IED directly in the path of the truck. Cribbing from history, a pressure cooker filled with black powder, buried only a few inches below the surface, would suffice to stop the truck in its tracks.
The next day, when the truck came along and ran atop the device, it was remote detonated by a waiting John and Andy. The device, true to John’s predictions, was insufficient to disable or destroy the truck, but was more than sufficient to shock the driver and grind the truck to a halt. He was immediately confronted by two men with rifles standing in front of his truck. “Park it and get lost,” came the order, with the rifle providing the “or else.” He did as instructed while Andy shot the lock off the back of the truck and hurled a Molotov cocktail in, immolating the contents.
One agent, apparently enjoying an evening off, was followed to a local movie theater. John picked the seat directly behind the agent and patiently waited for the few other attendees to become absorbed in the movie while he put on a pair of nitrile gloves. John thanked his lucky stars this was an unpopular movie and there were fewer potential witnesses as he drew a knife from his pocket, leaned forward, and quickly ran it across the right side of the agent’s neck, severing his jugular. The man jerked and reached for his neck, only for John to repeat the motion on the other side, then drop the knife and walk briskly towards the emergency exit.
Andy sat outside with the engine running in the closest parking spot he could manage. When he saw John, he shifted into drive and quickly pulled up to the curb as John shed his gloves and jumped inside. The two were leaving the parking lot within seconds, disappearing into the night.
One afternoon John and Andy went back to John’s home to survey the damage and see if John could recover any of his cached gear and preps. The men shoved the door, left knocked off its hinges, out of the way and entered to find a house torn apart. Whether by the agents’ hands or vandals afterwards, there was little left of John and Rachel’s once happy home. John was able to recover some additional ammo caches he had buried in the backyard, and several weeks’ worth of Mountain House freeze-dried food stored in the attic away from prying eyes. John tried to salvage what pictures and keepsakes he could for his wife, but much had been damaged or was missing. John’s anger at the reminder of this intrusion flared, and he quickly hatched a plan.
He and Andy cleared the house, sealed up all of the broken windows, propped the door back up in its frame and taped it shut, cracked the gas lines for several large appliances, and attached a homemade incendiary device to the front door. They then walked out the back door and called in an anonymous tip…on John’s own home. For added effect, John racked off a full thirty-round magazine in the backyard, guaranteeing lots of calls from panicked neighbors.
When two teams of agents arrived, anxious to discover the source of the gunfire and make an arrest, and reached the front door, the result was immediate. All eight men were engulfed in the hellish inferno. The two who were far enough away to escape their immediate death were shot by John from the tree line. Damage to neighboring houses was unavoidable, but John felt abandoned by these people who hadn’t lifted a finger to help his family and cared little.
John and Andy had identified one man, a “field supervisor,” and made note that though he drew a vehicle from the camp’s motor pool, it was always the same one. His job, as best John could tell, was to drive around and find shady s
pots to recline his seat and take a nap. It was during one of these moments of slumber that John low-crawled to his vehicle and quietly attached a device to the bottom of his SUV directly under the driver’s seat. The magnets ensured it would not be dislodged; two pounds of ANFO and miscellaneous screws and bolts provided the punch.
John worried the device would not penetrate the floor (he had experience overseas with armored Humvees and knew about the armor they wore on their undersides, though he couldn’t be sure this SUV was so equipped) and came to a solution. They followed this supervisor to his next stop, waited till he exited his vehicle and had both feet firmly on the ground less than a foot from their homemade claymore, and detonated it. He survived the immediate blast but would almost certainly lose the use of both legs for life if he managed not to bleed to death.
After the Minutemen had lost their man inside (they told him now would be a good time to resign, for his own safety) they began tracking and vectoring Andy and John towards agents on confiscation missions via drones stationed around the camp. John and Andy preferred to set up complex ambushes for the agents, with good cover and predesignated lanes of fire, when possible, but occasionally time did not allow. On days like today, they resorted to that favorite tactic of terrorists everywhere and set up a simple ambush.
With the drone feeding them heading and location information, John and Andy did not have to tail the vehicle. They simply set themselves on an intercept course, pulled over, and popped their hood. John’s CZ was sitting on top of the Jeep’s engine, Andy’s AR-15 sitting in the hatch. When the agents pulled up to the stop sign and stopped, both men jumped into action. Twenty-one rounds of 9 mm Parabellum were fired through the front windshield of the SUV at the two agents there, while Andy emptied a full thirty-round magazine of 5.56 at a glancing angle through the vehicle to get to the agents in the back seat. Neither saw movement as they reloaded.
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