Lex Talionis

by Peter Nealen

  We had to slow down, in part because of the darkness under the trees. NVGs have to have ambient light to amplify, or they don’t work so well. It wasn’t a high-illum night as it was; the moon wasn’t supposed to rise for another hour. Add in a captive who didn’t have NVGs or even boots, and we weren’t going to be setting any ground speed records.

  Behind us, I could hear shouts; the pursuit was getting up to speed. Those shouts were punctuated by the rolling, echoing reports of high-powered rifle shots, followed by calls of alarm and what sounded a lot like panic fire, before somebody bellowing louder than the gunfire got them to cease fire. The boys up on the mountain were doing work.

  As we wove our way through the trees, I tried to construct a picture of what was going on up above. The shouting had died down, and for a while, the shooting did, too. Then more shots rang out from up above, on the mountain, the reports echoing down the valley. I counted five shots; the task force must have tried to make a move, and Larry, Eric, and Bryan were nailing anyone who strayed too far from cover. The shooting wasn’t all that fast; that had the sound of carefully aimed shots.

  We’d first tried out using snipers on an elevated position in place of machine guns for a support by fire position in Mexico. It had worked there, and it was working here. Instead of spraying bullets—and, coincidentally, potentially revealing your position thanks to muzzle flash—we kept the enemy’s heads down by dropping them from distance whenever they tried to move.

  It took another hour before we were able to swing around the shoulder of the mountain and start really heading up. By then, the shooting had died down altogether. Jack kept stopping and turning to check our six, and Nick had slowed down to backwoods hunter speed, stepping carefully and silently, almost as if he could see the rocks and the roots and the brush even in the pitch black under the trees. I was trying to watch every direction at once while still keeping tabs on and control of our captive. To his credit, he was keeping quiet and he wasn’t trying to fight me. He was slowing, though, as the rocks and needles and fallen tree limbs cut his socks to ribbons.

  I stopped, signaling Nick to halt when he looked back. There hadn’t been time to get the prisoner to put his boots on in the house, but he was already limping, and if we kept climbing for long, he was going to be barefoot and going over rocks and brambles on the shredded meat of the soles of his feet. I made him sit down and hissed, “One wrong move and I’ll end you. Nobody’s going to be able to localize the shot up here.” Unslinging my rifle, I leaned it against a tree nearby, out of his reach, and drew my knife. He tensed, but I just used it to cut off his pantlegs below the knees, then tied the sections of cloth around his feet. They wouldn’t last all that long, and he’d still be hurting, but it was better than trying to climb a mountain barefoot.

  Still, it was going to be a long movement.

  Chapter 14

  We didn’t make it back to camp until well after sunrise. As the first faint light of dawn started to turn the sky above the treetops gray, I started to worry. Not so much about the drones; if they hadn’t found us yet, they probably weren’t going to. I suspected that the operators really didn’t know where exactly they should look, and it was a big, jumbled, steep, tree-lined bit of country. No, my concerns were with Baumgartner and his manhunters. I really didn’t want to accidentally stumble on them with only three shooters and a prisoner.

  Granted, they were supposed to be on the other side of the ridge, and the odds were against our routes crossing. We’d planned ahead for that. But if my growing suspicions about just who this Baumgartner was proved to be right, it wouldn’t pay to make any assumptions.

  But we saw nothing on the way up except a couple of small, distant herds of elk, a red-tailed hawk, and too many squirrels and birds to count.

  Nick slowed, then halted and took a knee next to a wind-gnarled tree. The slope below us was steep enough that a slip promised lots and lots of broken bones before stopping, whether against a rock, a tree, or the bottom of the draw. I found myself trying to find a spot on the slope with some little concealment where I could wedge myself and my captive. Jack snugged himself up against a tall spruce and faced back the way we’d come.

  Nick let out a series of low whistles. They were supposed to sound like a bird, but none of us were very good nature mimics. If we’d been doing it since childhood, it might have made a difference, but as it was, to anyone nearby it would still sound like a man whistling.

  Fortunately, it appeared that the only people up on that rocky mountainside were our guys. We got the right pattern of answering whistles in reply, though they were hoarse and labored, as if whoever was on outer security hadn’t grown up learning how to whistle at all. Nick gave the proper acknowledgement, got up slowly, and headed in.

  I followed, every bone aching, feeling once again the vague lightheadedness that I had come to associate with extreme fatigue. I might have gotten some decent rest the day before this little fiasco, but I was long past burning up whatever reserves I’d managed to rebuild.

  My captive wasn’t in any better shape. His feet were bleeding and he was limping and shivering. I almost felt sorry for him. Almost.

  We wove our way past the outer guard, a pair of new guys whose names I couldn’t remember for the life of me at the moment, and onto the slightly more level ground where the main camp was situated. Larry, Eric, and Bryan were sitting against their rucks, waiting. Other than that, the only ones still there were Tom, Mia, Logan, and a couple of the other support folks who’d stayed in the mountains with us, instead of going with The Broker and his people to another refuge, one slightly less austere.

  So, even as slowed as we had been by our prisoner, we’d beaten Eddie back. That might or might not be good news; on reflection, if they’d taken the planned exfil route, we couldn’t have expected them to beat us back. Even so, knowing how our own mission had gone down, the longer they were out of contact, the longer the darker side of my imagination could run wild.

  I found a reasonably flat rock and propelled my captive to it. I didn’t need to make him sit down; he just kind of collapsed. “I’d tell you to keep your mouth shut unless one of us asks you a question,” I told him, somewhat surprised at the hoarseness of my own croak of a voice, “except that I think it should be pretty obvious that there’s nobody up here besides us who can hear you.”

  He didn’t look at me, but just nodded, before slumping down on the rock and curling into a ball. He was in bad shape. It would probably be several hours before we could get anything out of him, which was fine with me. It was going to take at least that long for us to recover from the night’s exertions.

  I found my ruck, sat down against it, and promptly passed the fuck out.

  Eddie’s return woke me up, though I was pretty damned groggy. I sat up slowly and tried to rub the sleepy out of my eyes as I stifled a groan. I hurt.

  The first thing I noticed when my blurry vision cleared was that Eddie and his team did not have Little Bob. They didn’t appear to be missing anyone, so there was that, but it meant that they’d failed as thoroughly as we had.

  “No joy?” I asked.

  “I hope you had a better night than we did,” was Eddie’s reply.

  “I’d be willing to bet we didn’t,” I said, “but you go first.”

  He leaned his Galil ACE against a tree and dropped against his ruck like a sack of rocks. He leaned his head all the way back and stared at the sky for a moment. He was so still that I started to think he’d fallen asleep from sheer exhaustion, and was about to say, “Fuck it,” and lie back down for a few more Z’s, before he lifted his head and looked at me blearily.

  “We were in the LCC,” he said. The Last Covered and Concealed position was the “point of no return” on an op. It was the last spot to take a momentary breather and make any adjustments before going loud. “We had just halted and dropped rucks, getting ready to move. Security was set, and I was about to go forward to take a look at the objective with Lee. Then all hel
l broke loose.

  “Somebody opened fire with an automatic weapon, then a whole lot of others joined in. It sounded like several calibers, and if there were more machine guns, we couldn’t tell. The volume of fire was just too fucking high. Whoever was down there was throwing a lot of lead.

  “I couldn’t just sit there and listen,” he continued tiredly. “If Little Bob was down there, we had to find some way to get him out, if it was at all possible. So, Lee and I moved up to find a vantage point.”

  He ran a hand over his face. Most of his cammie paint had worn off on the movement. It had been a long one, too; I knew the route he’d been planning to take. They’d gone miles out of the way, to try to loop around where the TF might be watching.

  “It took some doing to get eyes on,” he continued. “The compound was definitely under attack; there was a line of muzzle flashes to the north.” If they’d followed the plan, Eddie and his boys would have approached the camp outside of Cody from the mountains to the west. “We had to move north a bit to get a good line of sight.

  “The attackers drove up in a convoy of Jeeps and pickups, got on-line, and opened fire. They did it pretty quick; too quick for the perimeter security to do much to stop them before they started shooting. We couldn’t see a lot of detail, but it sure looked like a peckerwood version of some of the Arab militias I’ve seen. Drive up, unass, and start blasting. They didn’t seem to be hitting all that much; it looked like they were just turning a lot of money into noise.

  “The TF goons might be assholes,” he said, “but they reacted quick. They were already starting to return fire by the time we got into position. In a couple of minutes, we were looking at a full-on firefight.

  “I don’t think the Peckerwood Patrol was quite ready for the volume of fire they got in return. Whoever these TF bastards are, they know how to get fire superiority. They turned a couple of those trucks to scrap in a hurry, and before too long, the fight was over and the mystery shooters were on the run. I don’t think all of them made it off the X, either.”

  He fell silent. “I’m guessing there was no way to get in to look for Little Bob, after that,” I said.

  He shook his head grimly. “No way in hell,” he confirmed. “They were at full stand-to after that. We could have tried, but we’d have been fucked in a hurry. Especially with only six dudes.” He eyed me. “So, he wasn’t at The Ranch, either?”

  I almost said something about stating the obvious, but bit the words back. I shook my head. “We made it farther than you did, but it turned into a shit-show anyway.” I filled him in on our own compromise and subsequent escape. He raised his eyebrows.

  “Damn, you got lucky as shit,” he said. “They must have been in Complacency City if they let you get out of that.”

  “They were,” I answered. “They won’t be next time.”

  “No, I guess they won’t.” He jerked a thumb at the prisoner’s huddled form. “Who’s the guest?”

  “Don’t know yet,” I answered. “We haven’t had time to interrogate him. And it was a bit of a rough haul to get him up here.”

  Eddie squinted up toward the rock where I’d left our captive. “I really want to start raking him over the coals,” he said with a yawn, “but I’m about dead.”

  “Tom’s about to show him some hospitality,” I said, painfully levering myself to my feet. “We’ll fill you in when you wake up.”

  He nodded, lay back against his ruck, pulled his cap over his eyes, and stopped moving. I was pretty sure he was asleep before I straightened to my full height.

  Tom was already stepping up onto the rock as I approached the captive. The guy didn’t move at first when the retired Colonel nudged him in the ribs with a boot. When Tom kicked him a little harder, he groaned and turned over.

  He was slightly shorter than me, fairly stocky, with dark brown hair, a square jaw, and a thick five-o’clock shadow turning to stubble. He’d fit on a SOF recruiting poster, if he weren’t playing jackbooted thug on American soil.

  His feet were a mess; his socks were shredded and his soles were bloody. We’d covered some pretty rough terrain getting up there. But his brown eyes were alert and wary as he looked up at Tom.

  Tom frowned down at him. “I know you,” he said suddenly.

  The man winced a little. “Long time no see, Colonel,” he said.

  Tom crouched down to look him in the face. “Bill Gage?” he asked, a distinct note of incredulity in his voice. That was new. I didn’t think I’d ever seen Tom caught off guard like that. “I thought you were dead.”

  The man chuckled without humor. “I damned near was,” he replied. “I spent a long time in the body and fender shop after that op.”

  I looked at Tom quizzically. He straightened, his eyes still locked on Gage. I guessed that seeing a ghost could even rattle Tom Heinrich.

  “It was my last tour before retirement, in Afghanistan,” he explained, still without looking at me. “Some of my boys got into trouble just outside of Herat. I rolled out with the QRF, and came across some DEVGRU guys along the way, who volunteered to come along.” He jerked a chin at my prisoner. “Gage, here, was one of them.

  “It was a disaster,” he continued. “They’d gotten sucked into one of those little shithole villages and surrounded, and we had to go in after them. There was enough defense in depth in there to make Kuribayashi proud. It was a maze of two-foot thick mud walls with murder holes on every flank.

  “The SEALs took point, and got fucked up. I went in after them with my boys. We were…thorough.” Knowing Tom, that meant they had left a metric fuckton of dead bodies behind them. I imagined that “thorough” involved a high volume of fire and grenades in every opening they came to, without worrying about collateral damage. That was Tom’s way. Protect his own, crush the enemy, and fuck anyone who got in the way. It worked. “The last I saw of Bill Gage, he was over a brother SEAL’s shoulders, covered in his own blood and either unconscious or dead.”

  “I caught about ten bullets and a lot of frag that day,” Gage said hoarsely. “I actually did die, or so they told me. Twice. I had fifteen surgeries before I could start to live normally again, and it was another two years before I was back in any kind of shape. By then, the Teams had essentially moved on without me; I could take a leadership or admin position, but I’d never be the shooter I was anymore.

  “That was when a guy I’d known from BUD/S approached me, said he had a line on a new contract, something for guys like us. Not as many rules, none of the Navy’s administrative bullshit, no annual training wickets, none of that crap. Just ‘getting shit done.’” He looked up at Tom. His expression was unreadable. “How could I resist? A desk job versus getting to run and gun again, without having to put up with the idiocy I was seeing more and more of in the service? Sign me up.”

  “And then?” Tom asked coldly. Tom had never been the sentimental type, and any sense of brotherhood he might have had with Gage from Afghanistan was pretty well DOA thanks to Gage being among those who had attacked us, and on American soil to boot.

  Gage looked at his bloodied feet. “’Once in, never out,’” he quoted. He looked up at Tom, then at me. “Ever hear that one? It can sound good; lots of brotherhood implied in the right context.” He shook his head. “Not in this outfit.

  “It didn’t take long to see that ‘getting shit done’ meant being strongarm guys for a different set of soft-suited assholes in offices who never had to get their hands dirty. Worse; these sons of bitches were accountable to fucking nobody. Oh, sure, they gave us the usual line of bullshit, but the cracks started showing pretty quick. Go support these ‘freedom fighters,’ who are little more than terrorists. Go grab this ‘terrorist,’ who it turns out is a financier for an opposing interest, and never had any contact with jihadis or anybody else.” He slumped. “I kept my mouth shut and did what I was told. Yeah, maybe that makes me a dupe, but by then I was already in too deep. I saw what happened when somebody tried to get out. They threatened him with pr
osecution for an illegal op, one that had actually happened. That was when I decided to keep my head down and my teeth together.” He shook his head. “At least I got out of the Syria-Iraq op.”

  “I think I ran into that one,” I said grimly. “Was there a shithead who called himself ‘Carnivore’ on that op?”

  He looked up at me. “Yeah, there was,” he said. “Maybe still is; it’s not like they give us regular updates on anything we’re not directly involved in. Or anything we are, for that matter.”

  “He’s dead,” I said flatly. “I gutted him like a fish after he tried to send one of you to stab me in the back while we were trying to fight a bunch of ISIS fucks.”

  “No shit?” he replied. “Hell, I’d like to shake your hand. Never did like that bastard.”

  “That’s nice and everything,” I said, “but the fact remains that I just pried you out of my house, which you and your cronies just invaded. Mutual enemies aside, that isn’t going to make matters easier for you.”

  “I get that,” he answered. “You’ve got to understand, though, that I really didn’t have much choice, not if I didn’t want to wind up in the Federal pen or dead.”

  “’Just following orders’ hasn’t been an excuse since Nuremburg,” Tom said flatly. Given his scorched-earth style of leadership, I found that vaguely funny, though I kept my face impassive. “But if you cooperate, we might go easy on you. As in, we might not tie you to a tree and leave you for the wolves.”

  As if sensing just how thin the ice he was on was, Gage took a deep breath. “And I’m willing to cooperate,” he said. “Hell, this is the first time in years I’ve really been beyond my employers’ reach. I don’t know very much; they keep everything pretty compartmentalized, but what I know, I’ll tell you. I was never really comfortable with running operations on American soil, anyway. I thought I’d be going after bad guys in the Middle East, not taking out political and business competition at home.”