Byron Fitts, on the other hand, had been a reclusive figure in the community, and barely mixed with his neighbors after the death of his wife. I’d never seen the man in life, but still, after hearing from Maddy about the way the deputies had tortured him for his stash of gold coins made me wish I could have killed them all over again.
Maddy had been nearly hysterical when she had described how Wally had first been tortured, and how he’d been shot in both arms and both legs before a bullet to the head ended his misery. A similar treatment for his poor father had followed after he disclosed the location of his coin collection. Maddy said both men were dumped like so much trash in Byron’s front yard. Thinking about that casual, and practiced, brutality still made my blood boil. Bailey and his crew had died far too easily. I wouldn’t be as quick or merciful the next time.
With father and son both murdered by Landshire’s renegade deputies, the farmhouse and surrounding acreage sat empty. Even with the place looted and no farm animals in place, the property still represented a concern for residents along this stretch of the county road. The property now became a potential weak point if squatters moved in and took up residence. The sixty acres of the Fitts property sat between that owned by Wade Husband’s family and the Lovett horse ranch.
“We do need to find out what the county wants to do with that property,” I started, then paused. “I know Byron only had the one son, but anybody know if Wally had any kids? I know he was married at one time, but the divorce was some years back.”
“What are you thinking?” Nancy asked, finally drawn into the conversation. Like Sally, Nancy was still trying to find her footing in this group of near-strangers, but she seemed to be having a better time of it.
“I need to find out if Byron had a will, and if so, who were his beneficiaries.”
“You worried we might not get along with the new neighbors?” Mike asked,
“I’m worried the property might attract squatters,” I replied simply, then gave Nikki a bit of a mock glare for her earlier suggestion.
“You afraid we might get some undesirables moving into the neighborhood?” Nikki asked sharply, completely ignoring my look.
“How much would that property go for?” Mike asked, catching my drift.
“Depends. Are we talking about on the old market, or what the county could expect to get for it given the circumstances?”
“You thinking about adding another parcel to your homestead? Even though it is between the Wade’s place and the Lovett’s?” Nancy queried curiously.
“Our homestead,” I replied softly, then with a louder voice, I continued, my gaze moving to encompass the two women not related to us by blood or marriage. “If you are in this meeting, that means you are one of us. My God, ladies, the kids already call you Aunt Sally and Aunt Nancy.”
“Duly noted,” Nancy replied with a touch of heat in her voice. “But do we have the resources and personnel to manage such a deal?”
“We’ll have to put that in the maybe pile for now…”
I stopped speaking as the door opened suddenly, and I wasn’t the only one who grabbed for a holstered pistol before realizing it was Beatrice.
“We got movement on the logging road behind the house,” she explained breathlessly. “They just hit the sensors, triggering the trail cameras. Looks like multiple trucks.”
I saw Tammy coming in behind her grandmother, and she joined in immediately. “They just stopped at the that little pullout where we have the second set of cameras. Right behind Mister Wade and Miss Dorothy’s house.”
We only had four cameras covering the logging road, something that I resolved to remedy as soon as this emergency was handled, but that was a problem for the future. Mike and I knew from early on that the route was a possible weak point, but rigging the solar to operate the cameras as well as boosting and networking the feeds called for a significant upgrade in power production. I began to think about possible solutions but Pat’s voice cut through my woolgathering.
“Gear up heavy,” Pat said, his typically laconic voice now diamond-sharp as he cut through the first syllables of chatter. “I want Team One in full rattle in thirty seconds and rallied up out the back door. Team Two, same deal, but you have perimeter. One minute, and I want you in your assigned positions.”
“What…” Beatrice started to speak, but Pat overrode her question.
“Let’s go, people!” he barked, and we jumped into motion. “And Beatrice,” Pat continued, conversationally this time, “get on the radio. Use the emergency frequency and warn Wade. Let him know we are coming across the fields from our side.”
We’d drilled on scenarios before, but this was different. This was the real deal, and once again I felt my petty concerns recede into the background as I mentally and physically prepared myself for another mortal confrontation.
Somebody was probably going to die shortly, and I needed to make sure it wasn’t any of my people.
CHAPTER FOUR
We ditched the ATVs just short of our fence-line, using the two battery powered buggies because even though they might be slower, they also made less noise. They weren’t silent, though, and we would be crossing the barbed wire fence, so Mike and I parked them behind a small stand of pines and the four of us moved out to crawl under the wire.
Team One consisted of Pat, Mike, Sally and me, pretending I knew what I was doing. We’d worked a bit on moving together tactically ever since Pat had made it home, and in the last few weeks, the three of us worked with Sally shaking off the cobwebs while I continued learning on the go. Pat handled our training for the most part, using patrols through the fields and pastures interspaced with trips into the woods behind our property to teach some rudimentary woodcraft. None of us were exactly Natty Bumppo, not even Pat. He admitted most of his training had more of a desert flavor, but he’d spent some time running around in the woods outside Ft. Bragg and his skills far outstripped the rest of us.
Mainly we worked on moving as a unit, usually maintaining a loose diamond formation. Pat trained us on spotting traps, recognizing common hand signals, which Mike sheepishly confessed he’d forgotten over the intervening years, and avoiding sweeping our teammates with our muzzles. We also did a bit of live-fire training, which only superficially resembled the three-gun competitions I’d participated in over the years. I still did pretty good on that part, though Pat continually dinged me for not making better use of cover while I fired. Even though I’d been in more than a few two-way shooting engagements, I still had a ways to go re-training myself. Nobody expects to the targets to shoot back on the range, after all.
Those thoughts swirled in my head as I wriggled my way under the barbed wire and then held up the bottom strand for Mike to follow, bringing up the rear. Pat and Sally took a knee and maintained overwatch while I helped my brother up. Even burdened with the heavy load of magazines, body armor and his AR, Mike was noticeably slimmer than when this whole mess had started. He tended to take more after our mother’s side of the gene pool, and that stout German peasant stock made weight gain a genetic certainty as one aged, but the Apocalyptic exercise and diet regime seemed to agree with him. Neither of us had the build for long distance runners, but I could tell Mike was moving better and his knees and back weren’t bothering him as much.
“You guys ready for this?” Pat asked, risking a glance back, but he didn’t wait for an answer as he rose to his feet and took off at a ground-eating trot.
Given the short window we had to act, our team would trade speed for stealth, while still doing our best to maintain noise discipline. The four of us needed to cover another five hundred yards to get into position before these trespassers hit the hastily dug in line made up of Wade’s defenders. Once the group of twelve would-be home invaders left the road like they did five minutes before, we no longer had a way to track them. We only had so many trail cameras set up on this stretch of dirt road, and none to spare for covering inside the trees. They served as little better than a tripwir
e, but we appreciated the advanced warning, and Wade no doubt felt the same.
Because the lack of real time intel on the opposing force, our plan involved getting on site as rapidly as possible and hunkering down at the most likely avenue of approach, the path of least resistance. We would need to let the raiders pass before unleashing our ambush. Fortunately, the old dirt track that snaked back to the logging road behind Wade’s property was both fairly obvious and also impassible for any vehicle short of a rock crawler.
The condition of the path was no accident, as Wade had made it a point even before all the recent troubles to block the route. No landmines, unfortunately, but his construction work meant part of his job on home remodels involved hauling away old appliances that no longer worked or the owners decided to do away with. Anything that still worked eventually ended up in one of the local second-hand stores, but that still left him with an overabundance of non-functional appliances.
Since the materials were not only free, but they also represented materials he was being paid to dispose of, Wade had taken advantage of the situation. To no one’s surprise, the paper company that owned the land forming our common back border did very little to maintain or patrol their property. Not only were the roads rough and rutted, but they also offered a plentitude of places where local teens liked to go for a bit of illicit fun.
Wade had tried calling the sheriff’s department whenever the bonfires were lit, but deputies never showed up. He’d also tried filing complaints with the paper company, but they’d also went unanswered. After having his back fence cut for the fourth or fifth time in as many years and bonfires lit in his pasture where drunken parties woke his family, Wade came up with a different strategy. If he couldn’t close the logging road or protect the fence from midnight vandalism, he resolved to at least prevent the little bastards from driving up to his property line for their mischief.
Starting where the narrow dirt track veered off from the main logging road, Wade did a bit of illegal dumping that included old washing machines, gutted air conditioning units, and jagged pieces of scattered sheet metal that threatened to flatten the tires of any vehicle that dared challenge the trail. This extended about fifty yards into the woods, and no one was willing to haul the debris out of the way to simply drive down the lane. As a result, the local kids tended to park right at the mouth of the lane and limit their parties to that area. I knew about the location, which was the reason I’d mounted one of the cameras with a view to cover the little clearing.
Thus, we calculated the invaders would be afoot, and or little troupe followed the winding path to where it petered out as Wade’s back fence line. How they knew to come here was still a mystery at the moment. The existence of the old logging roads wasn’t a secret, but I did wonder how they knew that taking this cluttered, overgrown path might lead anywhere. The video from the cameras wasn’t anything close to high definition, but none of us recognized the occupants of the three trucks as they scrambled out of the beds and filtered into the woods. All we could tell was they looked scruffy, hungry, and heavily armed.
Despite our best efforts, walking through the deepening dusk while navigating around the trunks of pine saplings, and trying to avoid the thick mud trying to suck our boots off, slowed us more than any of us would have liked. Time seemed to fly by as we worked hard to quietly trek through the underbrush, but when I next checked my watch, I saw only ten minutes had passed since we’d left the buggies.
As Pat led us deeper into the woods, I realized I needed to get myself into better condition. I was generally fit from the farm work and not carrying a spare tire or a beer gut, but knew I needed more. I needed to get stronger, and more flexible. As I felt my thighs begin to burn with the exertion, I realized my calves threatened to cramp up from the constant flexing as we climbed through the nasty gumbo of this water saturated groundcover. I could hear the others panting into their throat microphones as our hurried scramble continued.
“Drink,” Pat growled in my ear, and I realized he was transmitting to all of us. Stopping to lean into a nearby tree, I quickly fumbled my canteen free and forced myself to take slow, deliberate sips. As I stood there, I realized part of my problem was the adrenaline rolling through my system, forcing my body to strain beyond what was necessary. I needed to think like a distance runner, not a sprinter.
In the past, my fights had mostly been either sudden, quick clashes of violence, or engagements where I had time to ride out the chemical wave before the action started. Hurrying through these woods, spurred on by the dual needs for speed and silence, I realized the flow of naturally occurring stimulants were messing with my rhythm. Slow and steady, I began to mentally repeat the mantra to myself as Pat called for our advance once again. By the time I saw the brightening sunlight heralding the edge of the woods approaching, I felt once more in control of myself. My legs still ached and I felt the beginnings of a headache in the back of my skull, but I was breathing easier and my hands remained steady.
“Spread out here,” Pat ordered, the low murmur of his voice sounding amplified in my earbud. “Find cover and make it five-yard intervals in a line here. Cover your zones and pick your targets. We’ll let them pass me first. Wait for my call.”
These were all things we’d practiced before, but acting together, and not blowing the advantage of our position, would make this our first real test as a team. I was hunkered down behind a small pile of blowdown tree limbs, using the six-inch thick main limb as a rest for my carbine as I waited for the attackers to arrive. With the row of metal fence posts fifty yards to our left and the mouth of the narrow trail about an equal distance to our right, I marveled at how easily Pat had led us to this location. We stayed back about five yards back in the ragged line of trees, which might impede our shooting a bit, but kept us concealed and offered some cover from return fire as well.
I adjusted the earbuds, still not fully acclimated to the new addition to our equipment. Five clear plastic packages, each one containing the earbuds, throat mikes, battery packs and belt-attachments appeared out of Pat’s gear bags one day. We hadn’t the opportunity to train with them until after the assault at Landshire’s estate, but they’d gotten a work-out after that. In addition to functioning as short-range communications gear, the ear plugs also worked as noise-cancelling headsets, blocking out high decibel sounds while allowing one to hear normally.
Pat hadn’t explained how they came to be in his possession, and I didn’t recognize the brand, but I noticed a slip of paper in the packing with the instruction manual that simply read, AUSTIN PD SWAT. Since Pat had worked as an EMT in that city, I figured they were either the product of some horse-trading on his part, or a bit of midnight requisitioning, as Mike put it. Apparently, both methods of acquisition were common for Special Forces troops. They were, as Mike explained once, “sneaky little shits” after all.
However he got them, Pat integrated the devices into our training and I became comfortable with using them, but the foam rubber bits still rubbed my ears raw if I wore them too long. Small price to pay, I reasoned, as we had secure, quiet comms for jobs like this.
The sound of rustling and cursing at fifty yards brought my attention back to the matters at hand as a trio of muddy and grubby-looking men in hunter camouflage pants and jackets came stumbling out of the mouth of the narrow trail and emerged into the small clearing. I knew this was where Wade routinely crossed over and trespassed on the paper company’s land, not merely to obstruct the overgrown path with junk but also to cut back the trees and bushes in this area to provide clear sightlines. Despite that traffic, the nearly constant rains and piles of windblown debris concealed any signs of recent passage by Wade or any of his crew.
As the first three men ambled out of the brush, I saw other shadowy shapes coming up behind them and pushing through until I did a head count and confirmed we had the full twelve man complement present. I could hear talking although none were close enough to overhear, but their intention became obvious as two o
f the camo-clad men unslung their packs and dug out heavy wire cutters. Maybe this wasn’t their first rodeo, I mused as the mass of men moved diagonally across the clearing, passing my position and approaching the fence line. The raiders moved with a renewed vigor as they approached the boundary marker for the Husband’s property, and I hoped our warning had given Wade and his family time enough to take up their defensive positions and get Dorothy, Susanne, Margie and all their kids into the shelter. Knowing Ethan’s wife Margie, though, she was probably hunkered down in a fighting position with her man.
“Stay in your zones,” Pat muttered into his throat mike, and I could hear the tension in his voice. He probably worried about blue-on-blue, but he had set up our ambush so that we would be firing across and not towards our neighbors, provided they were where they were supposed to be. As our most experienced shooter, he anchored the extreme right side of the line so he would be the one in the most likely position to overshoot into our allies, while Mike held down the left end of the line and would be shooting almost straight across, but might have to deal with what Pat called ‘squirters’ once the shooting started. Squirters were those who might flee toward the fence line in panic, or in the alternative, rush our own positions either again in panic, or as an intentional counterattack to break the ambush.
Sally and I held down shooting positions between those two, and our job would be relatively easy. Just service the targets in front of us and leave the rest to Mike and Pat. As the seconds ticked down, I tried to clear my mind and focus on the shapes in front of my sights, planning out my shots…
“Go,” Pat whispered, and with no warning, the four of us opened fire.
As part of our training, Pat had worked with us to identify weapons and prioritize the biggest threats first. At this range, slightly over fifty yards, shotguns might present a danger, but targets carrying rifles with high capacity magazines trumped that threat. In some scenarios, you might want to take out the potential snipers first, but at this range and against these numbers, scoped hunting rifles came in dead last on the threat meter, because by the time the shooters got their weapons shouldered and sighted, they should already be dead.
Tertiary Effects Series | Book 3 | Bite of Frost Page 4