Lex Talionis

by Peter Nealen

  “We haven’t got the firepower to do that,” Brett said.

  “Leave that to us,” Eddie told him.

  Having Brett with us made getting into the sheriff’s office that much easier, as we were able to go in the back. The goons hadn’t relieved him of his keys, which had been stupid on their part. The handful of Task Force shooters inside had to have seen us coming on the security cameras, but offered no resistance when we busted in on them. They were fairly relaxed, in fact. And I was pretty sure I knew why.

  A few minutes after we’d secured the sheriff’s department, while Brett was still busy calling the rest of his deputies in, my sat phone rang. When I answered it, Tim only said, “Five vics en route, departed three minutes ago.” Then he hung up.

  I shoved the phone back in its pouch. “Right on time,” I said. I raised my voice. “Praetorians, out front! We’ve got incoming!” I turned to Tom O’Reilly, who had accompanied us with several of his own militia. “Can you guys hold this down while Brett gets his people back up to speed?”

  He nodded. “No problem,” he said. “These guys won’t be giving us much trouble.” Considering that the five Task Force shooters were now sitting on the floor, with their hands zip-tied behind their backs and three big, corn-fed ranch hands with ARs watching them like hawks, I believed him. I clapped him on the shoulder and headed for the door.

  We’d just killed two birds with one stone. We’d busted out the sheriff’s department after these goons had usurped their place by force, and we’d baited the hook in the process. Now to set it.

  We had to move fast, but we didn’t have as far to go as our adversaries did. They had to drive clear down from The Ranch, while we’d already set up just north of Cody. We just had to get back in position and hook up the detonators.

  The thing about prolonged wars is that both sides learn from each other. Sometimes, one side refuses to learn, whether because of inertia or arrogance, but even if institutional learning is stifled, there are always going to be guys in the ranks who take certain lessons away anyway. And we’d seen enough convoys ambushed from one side to have a pretty good idea of how to do it effectively.

  I knew guys who hated the idea of IED ambushes. They equated them with jihadis and cowardice. I could certainly understand why; I’d been on the receiving end of a few IED blasts and coordinated, complex ambushes myself. There’s something about being struck without warning, about the threat of being suddenly blown apart without ever seeing it coming, that is horrifying to the warrior, and ultimately fuels his frustration and hate. That was a large part of why My Lai happened; the pent-up frustration of getting hit over and over and over for days without ever seeing the enemy was let loose by a shitty leader.

  But when it was boiled down and the emotions removed, an IED was only an expedient when you didn’t have LAWs or AT-4s or RPGs. And we didn’t have any better armor crackers on hand.

  Lying flat on the hill overlooking the highway, I watched and waited. The terrain meant we wouldn’t have a lot of warning, especially if they were moving as fast as I suspected they would be.

  The night was deathly quiet out there. The lights of Cody glowed to the south, across the river. The wind whispered faintly through the grass, and, far off to the east, a pack of coyotes started yipping and howling. But everything else was still. It was almost four in the morning, and nobody was likely to be out and about. Some of the farmers and ranchers were probably getting up to feed their animals at that point, but the highway was empty.

  Slowly, past the yipping of the ‘yotes, I started to hear something else, a distant roar. At first it was little more than a murmur, but soon built to the growl of engines. Looking north, I couldn’t see anything, but they were definitely coming.

  They had to be driving blacked out. Even as far as sound carried in the night, I should have been able to see their headlights, or at least the glow from them. But the north was completely black.

  Fortunately, there’s no way to hide an armored vehicle from thermals. They were moving fast enough that I might have missed them in the dark, but my PSQ-20s picked up the brilliant thermal bloom of the lead MATV’s engine from more than half a klick away as the five-vehicle convoy roared down the road toward Cody.

  One MATV was rolling as the point vehicle, with another one taking up the rear and three of the eight-wheelers in between. They had to be doing sixty miles an hour, which is pretty damned speedy for an armored vehicle. I’d have to time this very, very carefully.

  The guardrail on the side of the road that led off the bridge did an excellent job of concealing the shaped charge that we’d set there. As the MATV hit the south end of the bridge, I triggered the IED. The vehicle briefly disappeared in a flash and a cloud of smoke and dust, as a tooth-rattling boom rolled across the hills.

  We’d always been good at using the resources at hand; most of us had been fighting in Third World shitholes and making do with what we could scrounge, buy, or steal for quite some time. Logan’s 20mms were somewhat emblematic of our way of doing things.

  But since getting forced off The Ranch and into the mountains, our resources had been rather sharply limited. So, when the local ranchers had joined the fight, it had been like Christmas.

  Working with ranchers and farmers means access to all sorts of useful chemicals and scrap metal. Some of those chemicals had just ignited and propelled a molten cone of scrap metal at extremely high velocity at the side of the MATV.

  Barely seconds behind my own charge, a second detonation echoed it at the rear of the convoy, hitting the second MATV with another explosively formed projectile.

  The twin clouds of dust, smoke, and flying rocks slowly settled out, revealing the wrecks of the lead and trail vehicles, both slewed across the road and mostly blocking the bridge on either end. The resolution on my PSQ-20s wasn’t great, but I could still see the hole in the lead vehicle’s door, glowing faintly on thermals, where the EFP had punched through the armor. The vehicle was still running, but the cab was smoking, and there was no movement from within. It wasn’t going to be pretty in there.

  The convoy was halted, boxed in by terrain on either side and destroyed vehicles at point and rear. One of the eight-wheelers started to move forward, as if to try to shove the MATV out of the way and get out of the kill zone, even as the CROWS turret on top began to scan the surrounding hills.

  We were under blankets to help shield our thermal signatures, and peering between rocks close enough together that we’d present one hell of a small target. None of us were interested in repeating the mistakes of over-eager jihadis who’d wanted a good view for their YouTube propaganda videos.

  I hunkered down and brought the captured radio we’d taken from the shooters at the sheriff’s office to my lips. There was a better than good chance that they’d changed their crypto after we’d captured their people, but on the off chance that it was still good, I keyed the mic.

  “Attention, you in the eight-wheelers,” I called. I didn’t have callsigns, and frankly I didn’t give a shit what kind of cool-guy douchebag callsigns they’d given themselves anyway. “I wouldn’t try to keep pushing if I were you; you presently have a string of daisy-chained EFPs on either side. We only haven’t set them off because I’m not actually all that interested in killing you all.”

  There was a long pause, while I waited to see if they’d even heard me. Apparently, they hadn’t bothered to change crypto, because I got an answer.

  “Who the hell is this?” a frustrated voice demanded.

  “I’m the guy with his hand on the detonator that is going to turn the rest of you into charred meat if you don’t do exactly what the hell I tell you to,” I replied. “I’m giving you a chance to live. Do I need to just go ahead and say, ‘fuck it’ and get you out of my way permanently?”

  There was another pause. “What do you want?” he asked.

  “I want everyone out of the vehicles with gear off and hands on heads,” I told him. “If I see a weapon, you all die. If
I see one of those turrets move a millimeter, you all die. If you’re not out of the vics and on your knees on the road in five minutes, starting right now, you all die. Am I clear?”

  “How do I know you’re not bluffing?” he asked. He was reaching. I can’t say I blamed him; no shooter ever wants to find himself in that situation. He was utterly helpless and being forced to surrender. “Surrender” had become a curse—even more so than it had been before—after Daniel Pearl had gotten his head sawed off on the Internet, and that had kind of gotten hardwired into every gunfighter who ever set foot in the sandbox since.

  “Well, if the two wrecked vehicles to your twelve and six o’clock aren’t enough,” I said, “by all means, try me. Run the clock out. Which, by the way, is ticking while we’re speaking.”

  He didn’t reply. But after another two minutes and twenty seconds, by my watch, the rear hatch on the lead eight-wheeler opened, and figures started to shuffle out, bent over to get through the hatch, their hands on their heads.

  Slowly, the other two vehicles emptied, as well. I kept one eye on them, and the other eye on my watch, my hand on the detonator.

  I hadn’t been bluffing. The trouble with threats is that you’ve got to mean them. If they dawdled a second past that five-minute mark, I was going to blow them all to hell. It would suck; a lot of guys who had surrendered would get shredded in the process, and I’d have more blood on my hands. But we were in no position to give them an inch. We were being more than magnanimous in trying to take them alive, rather than just blasting them to kingdom come. With the disparity of forces we had, that was as merciful as we could afford to be. Let them think that they could push, and they would. And then we’d be fucked.

  At four minutes and ten seconds, the radio crackled to life again. I could see the figure holding the radio below. He was scanning the hills, looking for likely covered positions, trying to spot us.

  “All right, everybody’s out,” he said. “Now what?”

  “Turn south and start walking,” I told him.

  “Say again?” he asked. I didn’t think he’d been expecting that.

  “I didn’t stutter,” I told him. “Start walking toward Cody. And you might want to step it out. I’m going to blow your vehicles in place in another five minutes.”

  “Wait a minute…” he started to say.

  “You’re not in a position to argue right now,” I told him. “Look down in front of you, at the guardrail.” When he did, I saw him visibly flinch. He was standing only a few feet from another of the IEDs we’d emplaced. “If, by some chance, you kept gunners in the vehicles, hoping that we’d expose ourselves, you might want to get them out, now. Of course, that would mean that I’ll have to kill you all, since you’re past the five-minute mark, and I did say that I’d touch off the daisy chain if you weren’t all out by then.”

  While he was too far away to tell for sure, I had the sudden impression that he swallowed, hard. But when he replied, he only said, “No, everyone’s out. We’ll start moving.”

  “Time’s flying,” was all I said in reply.

  They got the message. In a few moments, the entire line of twenty-four men was moving down the highway at a pretty brisk pace.

  No one had exited either MATV. A few heads turned to look at the smoking lead vehicle as they passed, but none of them stopped to try to get anyone out. I suspected that those guys were dead; it had been a solid hit, and I knew something of what an EFP does to the inside of a vehicle.

  War is hell.

  Right at the five-minute mark, I hit the detonator, as promised. The bridge briefly disappeared in a string of strobing flashes and a billowing black cloud. The overpressure hammered the hills and knocked grit into our faces where we were lying on the hill above, over eight hundred meters away. We’d used “P for Plenty” on those charges; we were not taking chances on the vehicles shrugging them off.

  The idea of capturing them and using them to assault The Ranch had been brought up. It had its appeal, but I’d ultimately rejected it. There were too many ways in which trying to capture them from an ambush could go wrong, including all sorts of nasty surprises left inside that I could think of. I also wasn’t entirely convinced that the CROWS couldn’t still be operated remotely, even from outside the vehicle. I knew a couple guys who were working on such systems, that could control a turret from a smartphone. There was no way in hell I was going to go down there only to have somebody a few klicks away turn one of those turrets around and cut me in half.

  The dust began to clear, though smoke was now billowing up from fiercely burning vehicles. The light of the fires was starting to illuminate the hills to either side of the road.

  Five more of the enemy’s vehicles were now out of the fight.

  We pulled off the ambush site and started hoofing it for the rendezvous. Two long-bed F350 duallies were waiting for us; TJ was driving one of them, and another guy I didn’t recognize had the second. They’d been waiting since they’d dropped us off an hour before.

  “Head back down to the highway,” I told TJ as I got in the passenger seat. He just nodded and started the truck trundling down the dirt track toward the road. His AR was shoved between his right leg and the center console.

  Given his reputation for trouble, I hadn’t known what to make of TJ. But he’d been as professional as any of us so far, and I thought I was starting to get a handle on what made him tick.

  TJ was one of those guys who’d gotten out of the military and felt lost. He might not have ever been the best Marine, especially if he got out after only four years, but those four years can shape a man more than he knows. I suspected that a lot of the trouble TJ had gotten into was because he’d seen combat and never felt as alive after that.

  Now that he was back in the fight, any fight, he was himself again. I saw it in the way he held himself, the way his eyes kept moving, the way he was ready and eager to be a part of it. It was encouraging and a little sad at the same time, that it had taken this kind of shitstorm to break him out of whatever rut he’d gotten himself into.

  We came out onto the side of the highway at the same time that two big panel trucks came up from the south. The line of disarmed Task Force goons was just coming abreast of us; they’d stepped up their pace when those IEDs went off.

  “Hold here,” I told TJ, and piled out, while the rest of the team jumped out of the truck bed. We lifted our rifles to cover the approaching men, and waited for them to come to us.

  While we were better armed, we were still outnumbered, even with the good old boys in the trucks coming up the highway. This would have to be handled carefully.

  “That’s far enough,” I bellowed. They slowed to a stop, the slinky effect making them bunch up a bit on the side of the road. In one way, that was good for us. A smaller cone of fire could take out more of them more quickly. “Get down on the ground with your hands on your heads, fingers interlaced.”

  There was some hesitation and a little milling around. I lifted my rifle and flicked on the tac light. “You’ve got five seconds before we start shooting!” I snarled. That got them moving, and in a few moments, they were all down on the ground as instructed.

  It took a while to get them individually searched, zip-tied, and thrown in the back of the panel trucks, but by the time the eastern sky was starting to lighten, we were heading back into Cody. I’d already called ahead; Brett would have cells for all of them.

  Chapter 18

  We had to move fast. We’d just taken a huge chunk of the Task Force out of action, but there was still a good-sized force sitting on The Ranch, and I was sure they were yelling for help. If we were going to kick those assholes out of our home and be ready for the next counterattack, we couldn’t afford to dawdle.

  “It’s going to be one beast of a hump,” I said, pointing to the map, “but this is going to be the best support-by-fire position. That’s where I want your guys.” Harrick and O’Reilly nodded; we’d already established that the locals were going to s
tay off the X as much as possible. The assault would be entirely Praetorian shooters; I wanted the militia to stay in the wings.

  It didn’t mean they’d be out of harm’s way. Baumgartner was presumably still up in the mountains somewhere.

  Somewhere along the line, we were going to have to deal with him. That was going to be a nightmare; I knew enough about the man to be sure of that.

  I’d grilled the convoy commander, a former FBI HRT shooter named Potter, about what the rest of the Task Force still up north was likely to do. He hadn’t been nearly as forthcoming as Gage, but I had gathered that losing thirty guys and five vehicles would be one hell of a shock. We’d already been a lot harder nut to crack than they’d expected, and now we’d cut their effective strength in half.

  He was worried, too. That much I could see from his answers and his demeanor. There was more going on than I knew about, and while I couldn’t say for sure—and he sure as hell wouldn’t—I got the distinct impression that he was worried that reinforcements might not be coming.

  Even so, I couldn’t afford to assume that. We had to hurry and take the rest of them out of action before they got relieved.

  It could be that the whole thing was futile. I still didn’t know who exactly was behind this bunch, but their resources were considerable. We could win in the next twenty-four hours only to be overwhelmed by tanks and helicopters in a week. But like Old Man Harrick, it wasn’t in me to just lie down and give up.

  “Watch your rear security,” I reiterated. “We know they still have manhunters in the hills, and I don’t want you guys getting hit from behind and wiped out because everyone was focused on the target area.” I was sure I especially didn’t have to tell Dave Harrick that, but some things you say in a brief just to make damned good and sure that they don’t get forgotten.

  “This is going to be a daylight op, which is less than ideal,” I continued, “but under the circumstances I don’t think we can afford to wait until dark. So, we’re going to have to move fast, then get slow and sneaky, then move fast again.” I made eye contact with both Old Man Harrick and O’Reilly. “You guys are going to have the longest and hardest movement, but once you’re in position, make sure you wait for the signal before opening fire. We can’t afford to fuck this up.”