Lex Talionis

by Peter Nealen

  “And I take it that you are hoping that we’ll take a hand in dealing with these factions.” I didn’t phrase it as a question.

  “More than likely,” he said. “It would probably be in your best interest, given the unhealthy interest both factions have taken in you, though I’m sure you’ve already thought of that.” He sighed again. Damn, but that man looked tired. My sympathy was, of course, limited by the fact that he hadn’t just spent the last week and a half running and gunning and sneaking through the woods and mountains like a hunted animal. “I don’t have anything set in stone yet. The Cicero Group’s not even all on the same page as to what’s happening. I came out here to make sure you were still alive and to try to get you to stop killing people where their corpses can be used as propaganda footballs.”

  “We’ll take it under advisement,” I replied dryly, getting a little angry again, “right after they stop trying to kill us. For the time being, my primary concern is breaking these paramilitary clowns who just drove us out of our home, and finding Little Bob. Come talk to me again when you’ve got something useful.”

  The air had gone tense again. We’d been burned trusting Renton’s Cicero Group before. It was the reason we were in this fix in the first place.

  Somewhat to my surprise, Mia’s reaction to my hostility was to step up next to me, facing Renton. I saw his eyes move to her for a moment, then back to me. There was a flicker of surprise, and then he was the dispassionate professional spook again.

  “I’m not your enemy, Jeff,” he said. “We really are on the same side. And to prove it, I’ll send you any intel I get on the task force or where Little Bob might be. In return, I only ask that you be a little more circumspect. This isn’t Iraq, or even Mexico. Stacks of bodies attract attention.”

  As much as I hated to admit it, he had a point. “We’ll see,” I said. “There are a lot of woods and empty spaces to hide the bodies out here.”

  He studied me for a moment, as if unsure whether I was joking, or if he had reason to be worried. To tell the truth, I wasn’t entirely sure myself at that point.

  Chapter 12

  Even with The Broker’s support, the task force was going to be a tough nut to crack. They had some serious money backing them, and that meant some serious numbers and hardware. The armored vehicles alone presented a problem that we weren’t all that well equipped to deal with, especially since Logan’s hundred-pound 20mms had been left behind, being too heavy and unwieldy to lug through the mountains.

  Fortunately for us, we had kind of gotten used to facing off with enemies who had a lot more men and materiel than we did. It was how we’d made our money in dangerous places, usually alone, outnumbered, outgunned, and under-supported.

  So, we kept our heads down in the hills, moved camp every couple of days, and ran recon. A lot of recon.

  “Complacent, trespassing bastards,” I muttered.

  “You say that as if it’s a new observation,” Bryan whispered from beside me. He was right; this was the fifth time in the last week that we’d gotten eyes on The Ranch, which was now occupied territory. Our front yard was now filled with armored vehicles, and what grass had been growing there had been churned to dust by the big eight-wheelers.

  “I know, but it’s just that they’re so fucking lazy about it,” I answered. This was, again, the fifth OP we’d put on The Ranch, and they hadn’t come close to catching us yet. They had sentries on the porch, but no patrols out. There were drones still buzzing overhead, but we had gotten very good at hiding from them. They made enough noise that we could usually tell where they were, and careful camouflage kept us hidden. Believe it or not, a good blanket not only keeps you warm during a fall night in the mountains, but it also acts as a surprisingly good thermal barrier to hide you from thermal cameras.

  We were taking our time, carefully cataloging their personnel and equipment, recording their patterns of life, and looking for weak points in their security for a couple of reasons.

  For one, given how outnumbered we were, and how little support we could really count on, either from The Broker or Renton, we wouldn’t have a second chance if things went pear-shaped because we got caught with our britches down. We had, hopefully, learned our lesson from Pueblo, and were approaching this new threat in a more coldly pragmatic and careful way.

  The other reason was to encourage the kind of complacency that Bryan and I were observing right at that moment. They had security in place, but it was lazy. I was reasonably certain that there were no eyes on the mountain where Bryan and I were perched. As I had noted before, there were no patrols out looking for us. They were relying almost exclusively on their drones. And drones have drawbacks that men on the ground don’t. They can only look where the operator tells them to look, and staring at a video feed for hours not only gets tedious, it also denies the drone operator a lot of other environmental cues that a man on foot or on horseback—or even in a vehicle—can pick up.

  Granted, they weren’t necessarily just sitting there. They had tried to push up into the hills after us, the day after they’d taken The Ranch. They hadn’t made it far; they were in no way prepared for extended ground operations in mountainous terrain. We hadn’t even needed to ambush them. One of their “operators” had fallen down a draw and broken his leg. It had taken them the rest of the day to get the casualty out. They hadn’t tried since. I’d be willing to bet that they’d expected to steamroll over us and be done, taking us down quickly with a fast “shock and awe” raid. It hadn’t worked out that way, and they didn’t seem to quite know what to do about it.

  Derek was, somehow, still doing his voodoo, using a laptop he’d gotten from The Broker before carefully scouring just about every line of code to make sure that our “benefactor” wasn’t snooping—which I was sure he still was, anyway—and a satcom puck. He told me that, even though he couldn’t necessarily read it, he could see a lot of comm traffic going between The Ranch, the other TF headquarters that we’d pinpointed near Cody, and a third location, which he still couldn’t quite nail down. My guess was that they were asking for mountain gear and more backup.

  The other reason we were taking our time was because of that second HQ. We still hadn’t gotten eyes on Little Bob, and Derek hadn’t cracked deeply enough into their comms to be able to find any mention of him. They had some decent encryption on everything, he told me; not completely unbreakable, but it was going to take time, time we probably didn’t have. They were running advanced enough setups that the usual hacking tricks—tricks that had worked even on official government agencies—weren’t necessarily going to work. But until we knew where Little Bob was, we would be risking his life if we hit the wrong place and he wasn’t there. Better to hit both simultaneously, but to do that, we were going to have to have everything carefully plotted out ahead of time.

  I was thinking about all of that while I peered through the spotting scope at The Ranch below me. There was some security around the barns, but the vast majority was around the main house. They didn’t appear to be using any of the outbuildings. Just the house. That would make matters a little simpler.

  I was mostly only confirming stuff that we’d already observed and recorded. The armored vehicles were sitting shut down and unmanned, the turrets still. It was still conceivably possible that they were keeping gunners in the vehicles, but the turrets weren’t oriented outboard, like they should have been if they were using the vehicles to hold security. The dismounts were the only visible sentries.

  There were two or three roving around the back of the house and the outbuildings at any one time, all wearing body armor and carrying SCAR 16s. They were roving in what might have initially appeared to be random patterns, but after a while we’d determined that they went out about every half hour to forty-five minutes. They varied the timing, but only by about the same five to fifteen minutes.

  Not good enough, cockbags.

  “Heads up,” Bryan whispered.

  I didn’t need him to point out what
he’d seen. We had a good line of sight on the main road leading up to the house, and there was a trio of pickups trundling up the road in a cloud of dust. Whoever it was, they were making good time, and were obviously in good with either the task force or its masters. We knew they had security on both gates, and besides, the half-dozen shooters on the porch were still relaxed as the vehicles approached. These guys were expected.

  They pulled up in front of the house, and the figure that we’d tentatively ID’ed as the task force’s field commander stepped out. Even with the quality of the spotting scope, I couldn’t make out a lot of detail, so while I could ID him from his build and coloring, I couldn’t make out his face. But he seemed slightly nervous. That was interesting.

  The doors of all three trucks opened almost simultaneously, and I counted ten men getting out. Most of them started pulling packs and gun cases out of the beds, but one strode up to the porch to greet the field commander.

  There was something familiar about him, though I couldn’t make out enough to say why. Something about the way he carried himself struck a memory, somewhere in the back of my mind.

  I wasn’t alone, either. “Who the hell is that?” Bryan muttered.

  “He looks familiar to you, too?” I asked, my eye still glued to the scope.

  “Yeah,” he answered slowly. “I’m not sure from where, but there’s something about him that’s ringing a bell.”

  That had me racking my brain, wondering who it might be, that both Bryan and I thought we recognized him, even from a distance. We’d both kicked around the Marine Recon and Special Operations communities for a while before our contractor days, but we’d seen a lot more since getting out and going private sector.

  I suddenly thought of Cyrus. He had been one of Mike’s guys, who had been seconded to my team in Iraq after the battle for Basra. I’d lost Bob Fagin, Paul, and Juan during that shit-show, and had gotten Marcus and Cyrus from Mike to balance out our teams for follow-on operations. Cyrus and I had never really gotten along, though he’d been competent enough, up until the point where he’d objected to taking the contract with the Cicero Group to take down The Project, a rogue special operation that was training and supporting some of the worst jihadis in Iraq as a proxy weapon against the Iranians. He’d quit angrily and flown home from Baghdad. None of us had heard from him since, but our adversaries had to know that he’d been one of us, and that we hadn’t parted on the most amicable of terms.

  The guy below us wasn’t Cyrus, though. Cyrus was a short, skinny guy. This dude was tall and, while not enormous like Larry or Little Bob, he was still considerably burlier than Cyrus. He was also gray-haired, if I was seeing him right.

  Who the hell did both of us know who fit that description? I couldn’t place anyone off the top of my head, but I had a nagging suspicion that when I did figure it out, it wasn’t going to be good news.

  The mystery man was talking to the field commander, and just from watching their body language, I could tell that there was a new sheriff in town. The gray-haired guy was now rather obviously in charge, whether the guys already on the ground liked it or not.

  “I can’t tell for sure, but you want to lay bets that those packs are mountain rucks and these guys are the backcountry manhunters?” Bryan murmured.

  “No bet,” I replied. I grimaced, though Bryan couldn’t see it, since we were side by side in our tiny hide, under the same camouflage blanket, peering through carefully selected loopholes in the rocks. “That tears it. We’re going to have to move soon, before these assholes put us on our back foot and we can’t.”

  I was worried that the hunters were going to step off right away. If that happened, it could throw everything into a cocked hat; we’d have to break out the comms and risk a transmission, telling Tom that he needed to move the camp and push farther back into the mountains. We’d lose our staging area for both raids, necessitating longer approach marches and stretching the timeline farther than I was afraid it could stand. Coordinating near-simultaneous hits without comms got more difficult the longer the approach was, not to mention the added risk of something going wrong, such as compromise or injury.

  But the hunters took their packs inside, while Gray Man and the field commander stayed on the porch talking for a while before following them in. We couldn’t really move until nightfall, anyway. Well, we could, especially as long as we were careful to keep under cover from the sporadic drone coverage, but the risk of compromise was still higher than if we crept away under cover of darkness. Technology alters things a lot, but never entirely eliminates certain advantages and disadvantages.

  So, we waited and watched, poised to send the warning that would throw all our plans back to square one, and quite possibly kill any chance we had to retrieve Little Bob. I was already revising the strike plan for The Ranch as I watched; ten more shooters could complicate things, and just from what I could see, these guys were competent. They’d present a challenge.

  The anticipated formation of shooters heading into the hills didn’t come, though. More than likely, Gray Man wanted to get as complete a picture of the situation first-hand as he could before going into the planning phase. Ops generally don’t get started on terribly short time-schedules, particularly one as extensive as a manhunt through the entire Beartooth Mountains. Hell, we’d been watching and planning for days now, ourselves, and we had a hell of a lot smaller target area to focus on.

  When night finally fell, we stayed in place for just long enough to be reasonably certain that they weren’t heading out right away. It was certainly possible that they’d wait until the wee hours of the morning, say around 0300, to step off. But even if they did, we could be reasonably certain that we had a little bit of breathing room. Hopefully enough to launch our own strikes. Hell, the more I thought about it, if they did step off at 0300, it would work out better for us. They wouldn’t be on-site when we hit The Ranch.

  Straining our ears and our eyes for drones, we carefully packed up and sanitized the OP, even though the task force had shown no sign of being inclined to climb up there and look for us, and started over the mountain toward camp.

  That was one hell of a tough slog. We were already running on short sleep, and had been for weeks. Furthermore, it had been a forced march from hell over some really nasty terrain just to get into that OP the previous night. A day lying on rocks, mostly glued to the glass, hadn’t been particularly restful.

  By the time we got back to camp, Tom nixed any further movement that night. It was already damned near 0400, and we were falling down from fatigue, muscles shaking and with that curiously empty feeling that is the warning sign that you’ve used up all the gas in the tank. We were in no shape to mount a raid.

  Tom listened to our report, then said he’d strengthen our exterior security, but we were staying in place for the moment. We had enough guns that unless they bird-dogged us for a larger force, which would have the same difficulties getting up into the mountains and the woods after us that the Task Force had already run into, they’d find us a pretty tough nut to crack, especially given the harsh, extremely defensible terrain we’d set up in. We were hard to find, and we’d be harder to attack.

  So, with security set and sunrise only a couple hours away, we rolled up in our blankets and passed the hell out.

  The sun was well up by the time I woke up. I still felt groggy and sore, though I hadn’t noticed the rocks and tree roots under my back until just then; I’d been that wiped out.

  My rifle was by my side; I’d run my arm through the sling before I’d passed out, though I didn’t remember doing it. It had become one of those things done completely by instinct, after years of living and working in conflict zones, where having a weapon within arm’s reach was a matter of day-to-day survival.

  As I sat up, pulling the weapon onto my lap, my hand brushed a warm, blanket-wrapped body next to me. I looked over to see Mia, leaning against the same tree I’d bedded down under, watching me.

  “I’d say good mo
rning,” she said, “except that it’s almost noon.”

  I grunted as I reached for a canteen. I still felt wrung out, and every move made me want to groan. My head was pounding, every muscle in my neck and upper back tied in iron-hard knots.

  “How long have you been sitting there?” I asked, temporizing. I hadn’t been this close to her since Veracruz, and, my battered and aching body notwithstanding, I was uncomfortably conscious of her nearness.

  “Not long,” she said with a yawn. “I only got off security just after stand-to, about five hours ago. You were already dead to the world.” A smile quirked the corner of her mouth. “I almost got under your blanket, but I didn’t want to wake you. You needed the sleep.”

  My brain and mouth went into lock. It might not have been early, per se, but I was way too sore and groggy to deal with her flirtation. I growled inarticulately, while I reminded myself that the last time she’d tried the flirtation bit, it had been an admitted shortcut to ingratiating herself with me.

  My growl only made her smile wider. “You know, Jeff, sooner or later we’re going to have to do something about all this sexual tension between us.”

  I glared at her, trying to ignore the jolt that her words sent through me. In response, her little smile turned into a dazzling grin. “You know, you really are cute when you’re flabbergasted and annoyed,” she said.

  “Haven’t we already been through this?” I grumbled, as I got up slowly and painfully, and started rolling my blanket up to stuff it in my pack.

  She ignored my question, but her expression got serious, and tinged with concern. “Seriously, though, Jeff, you’re running yourself ragged. The world could have ended an hour ago, and you would have slept through it. And here you are, awake but barely able to move.”

  “And what alternative do you have in mind?” I asked, back on somewhat more solid ground. “It’s not like we’ve got a lot of breathing room right at the moment. The Ranch is occupied and we’ve got more hunters on our trail, more competent ones by the looks of it. Our list of friends is damned short, almost nonexistent. And Little Bob’s life could very well depend on our moving quickly. So, when do you suggest I relax?”