Rose City Kill Zone

by D L Barbur

  “Car just pulled into the lot,” Daniel said from over by the window, where he’d been standing and keeping an eye out. At least one of us hadn’t been hijacked by the situation.

  “Older dude is getting out and walking towards our door.”

  “Hubbard,” I said.

  Dale shucked his worn old Colt Combat Commander out from under his jeans jacket, where it usually rode in a Milt Sparks holster. Alex pulled one pistol out of her belly band and handed it to Casey. Then she pulled the second one out of her boot and aimed it pointedly at Diana.

  There was a knock at the door. I nodded at Daniel and he opened it. Hubbard stood framed in the doorway wearing jeans and a tan windbreaker. He looked like a grandfather on vacation. His hands were pointedly in view.

  “Hello Hubbard,” I said.

  He ignored me and looked at Diana.

  “Let’s go, my dear.”

  I put my hand on Diana’s shoulder.

  “Not so fast. Why don’t you come in and talk Hubbard?”

  He shook his head and gave me a tight grin.

  “I don’t believe I will. I think I’ll collect my employee, and we’ll be on our way.”

  I looked around the room.

  “I think we’re holding all the cards here,” I said.

  “I don’t think you are. It’s true that there’s just me, standing here empty-handed. It’s true that there are six of you holding guns in that tiny little hotel room. But if you use them, what’s left of your flimsy cover will be erased. It would be horrible if someone were to make a scene.”

  With those last few words, he raised his voice to a near shout.

  I took my hand of Diana’s shoulder.

  “Get up and walk out,” I said.

  She stood, and I thought for a second her legs were going to give out from under her, but she got her balance. She glanced at the dart gun on the desk.

  “Touch it and I’ll shoot you in the ass,” Alex said.

  Diana threw her head back and walked out with as much pride as she could muster. Daniel shut the door behind them and I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding.

  “Well,” I said. “That went well.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I walked back next door and Stuckey was signing a statement that Bolle had prepared for him. Whether he understood any of it was an open question, but that was Stuckey’s problem, not mine.

  “How are things next door?” Bolle asked.

  “Not as bad as they could have been,” I said.

  He seemed to accept that, for the moment, although I knew I’d have quite a bit of explaining to do later.

  “Mr. Stuckey is signing an affidavit that he has seen the subject of our investigation on the grounds of Freedom Ranch as recently as this very morning,” Bolle said. He was practically vibrating with suppressed energy. I wouldn’t have been completely surprised if he had jumped up and started capering around the room.

  “Outstanding,” I said. Maybe all this craziness hadn’t been for nothing after all.

  Stuckey was one of those people that poked his tongue out of the corner of his mouth when he wrote. Finally, he was done and set the pen down.

  “Now what?” he asked.

  “Now you go back to your friends with exaggerated tales of your sexual prowess and don’t breathe a word about what really happened to anyone, or I will make your life miserable,” Bolle said with a smile.

  “Uh. Ok. Can I get a ride back to the Oasis? Maybe with Candy?”

  It took me a minute to remember that Candy was the alias Casey had been using.

  “No.” Casey’s voice came through the connecting door.

  I pulled my keys out of my pocket.

  “I’ll give you a ride,” I said. “I’ll drop you off around the corner so nobody will see you’re with me.”

  When I came back from depositing Stuckey, Bolle and Eddie were already gone. He’d apparently been on his phone, talking ninety miles a minute with Burke, arranging the search warrant.

  Casey rode back with Dale, while Alex and I got in the Charger. She asked me to drive, uncharacteristic of her. As we drove down the dark desert highway, she sat silently curled up in her seat.

  “You were pretty convincing back there with Diana,” I said after a while.

  “It wasn’t an act,” she said. “I really was pretty close to killing her. I was so angry.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  We pulled off the pavement and onto the long gravel road that led to Rudder’s ranch. I slowed down, partly to save my kidneys from the rough ride, partly because of the deer and elk that liked to cross here at night, and partly because I wanted to hear what she had to say, and I felt like if we got out of the car she’d clam up and not want to talk.

  “People keep getting taken from me,” she said. “First my mom. Then my dad. Now everything has been taken from me. My job is gone. My house is gone. You’re the only thing I have left, and when I saw that dart gun I just snapped. I keep waiting for you to go too. I feel like one way or another it’s inevitable. In some ways, I wish we could just get it over with so I could stop dreading it.”

  I pulled the car to a stop outside of the bunkhouse and we sat there for a second, listening to the engine tick as it cooled. Later, I’d realize that I should have said something comforting, or maybe just said nothing at all. But because I’m me, of course I said something stupid.

  “That’s kind of messed up, Alex.”

  She opened her door. “Yeah. That’s me. Messed up Alex.”

  She got out of the car and stalked off, her footsteps crunching in the gravel. I almost followed her, almost called out after her, but instead, I just stood there. I think at the time I told myself I was too tired to deal with her moody bullshit, but the truth was I was growing increasingly resentful of how much she controlled our relationship. When she wanted to be close, we were close. When she withdrew, chasing after her made her withdraw more. I didn’t feel like she was being intentionally malicious, but I was getting tired of wondering which Alex I was going to wake up to in the morning.

  We’d staked out a room at the end of one of the bunkhouses, formerly where one of the chief hands would have made his abode, and thrown down an air mattress, but I didn’t want to join her just yet. I felt like there was a pretty good likelihood one or both of us would say something stupid, with the added bonus of everybody else being able to overhear. Besides, I was hungry.

  I could see the flickering of Rudder’s giant TV so I walked on in. Sands of Iwo Jima was just ending. I stood in the doorway to the living room and watched as the members of Sergeant Stryker’s squad read his final letter, and watched the flag raised. When the credits rolled, Rudder turned to me.

  “Sandwich fixins are in the kitchen. Fighting Seebees is up next.”

  By the time I was done making myself a plate, Rudder had the movie cued up. He motioned to the easy chair next to him and I had a seat. I hadn’t seen a John Wayne movie in ages, since before I’d been to war myself, and part of me wanted to laugh at the simplistic plot and wooden characters. But part of me wanted the real world to be like that, instead of the morass I was in right now. I just decided to stop being so damn introspective, turn my brain off, and enjoy the movie.

  Just like in Sands of Iwo Jima, John Wayne’s character died in the end. As the credits rolled, I saw Rudder had fallen asleep. I shut down the home entertainment system and crept out of the house. It was cold outside, and there were a million stars. I stood for a minute to look at them, wishing Alex was out here to enjoy them with me. Over the last couple of months, I’d developed a habit of appreciating small things: sunsets, stars, a good meal. I’d come close to dying so many times lately I didn’t want to take anything for granted.

  One of the surveillance cameras we’d mounted on top of the trailer swiveled in my direction and I gave it a wave. I was tempted to go inside and talk to whoever was on duty, but it was already late, so I headed in the bunkhouse instead. When I climbe
d into bed, Alex scooted over as close to the wall as she could get. The foot of distance between us felt like a mile. I was still trying to think of something to say to her when I fell asleep.

  When I woke up the next morning, she was already gone. I pulled some fresh, but rumpled clothes out of a duffel and followed the smell of coffee into the trailer. Bolle was hanging up a satellite phone when I walked in.

  “Burke’s coming with a search warrant,” he said by way of greeting. “And she’s bringing HRT with her.”

  Alex was seated at the trailer’s little dinette table with a laptop open in front of her. She looked up at me briefly, then looked away. I shoved all that firmly out of my mind. Business first. I reached for a cup of coffee and sent some caffeine towards my brain before I responded to Bolle.

  “How many HRT people are they sending?”

  “Half the team.”

  “Holy shit,” I said. Last time I heard, the FBI’s elite Hostage Rescue unit had just over a hundred operators. Even sending half of them, with all their support staff and equipment, was a major undertaking.

  “There goes the element of surprise,” Dalton said from over by the radio console. “They won’t be here and ready to go for two days at least. Maybe three.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Has anybody left since last night?”

  Dalton pointed at the monitors.

  “No vehicle traffic in or out of the main gate of the ranch since the cowboys went home late last night. We’ve seen the usual vehicle patrols around the ranch, but nothing out of the ordinary. We don’t have complete coverage of the ranch though. There are all sorts of unimproved roads and what not.”

  I took another drink of coffee.

  “They could load Marshall and the money into a pickup and be gone,” I said. “We don’t have enough bodies to prevent it.”

  “I have some ideas,” Dalton said.

  He pulled up a topographical map on the big screen in front of him. He’d marked it up with all sorts of symbols and lines.

  “The ranch essentially runs up this valley,” he said, tracing a line that ran more or less north and south. “We’ve got our observation post on the ridge to the east. There’s a network of roads up here, but they’re rough, and there aren’t THAT many. I’ve identified a half a dozen or so possible routes besides the main road that could be used to sneak out of the ranch in a truck.”

  Now it was Casey’s turn to speak up. “We can’t get live video coverage of all of them. The terrain is too rugged to get a line of sight. But there’s a couple of places where we can set up a live feed.”

  Dale helped himself to another cup of coffee. “And for the rest, we’ve got some of those motion activated cameras we use during elk season. Strap ‘em to a tree near the road and they’ll take a picture of anyone who happens to drive past. We’ll have to go out and check them every now and again, so if somebody sneaks out that way, they’ll have a few hours head start, but it’s better than nothing.”

  “We were hoping you, Dale, and his sons could go place the remote cameras,” Bolle said. “Eddie and I will stay near the ranch entrance to follow any traffic that leaves. We’ll have Jack standing by here to get in the air to follow anyone that gets away.”

  I wasn’t looking forward to another day riding on the back of Dale’s ATV, but at least I wouldn’t have to spend it in awkward silence with Alex.

  “Let’s hit it,” I said.

  It took us an hour to eat, pack our gear, and load the ATVs into the backs of two pickups. Dale and I rode in one truck, Robert and Daniel in the other. We split the sites between us and soon Dale and I were jouncing down a rutted pair of wheel tracks that could only charitably be called a road. Branches scraped either side of the truck. After one particularly bone-jarring thud, Dale saw a spot between two trees and parked the truck.

  “Reckon we better take the four-wheeler from here. Last thing I want to do is blow a ball joint out here in Hell’s half acre.”

  While Dale readied the four-wheeler, I tried my radio. When I keyed the microphone, I was greeted with the harsh buzz that meant I wasn’t connecting to our repeater. I had a satellite phone stashed in my pack, so that was our only form of communication.

  I held on for dear life for a couple of miles on the four-wheeler, then Dale brought us to a stop, cut the engine and removed his helmet.

  “Reckon we’re about a mile from the junction,” he said, pointing to the GPS unit strapped to his wrist.

  After we dismounted, I donned my rucksack full of cameras and grabbed my rifle. I mounted a suppressor on the barrel. It wasn’t as quiet as the movies would have you believe, but it would keep the report of the .308 rounds from echoing through the canyons. I made sure the variable power scope was dialed down to its lowest setting, optimal for close range engagements.

  We kept a slow pace, moving for ten minutes then stopping to listen for five. The woods were mostly lodgepole pine, big tall trees with straight trunks and no branches low to the ground. The undergrowth wasn’t very tall, so we could actually see quite a way through the forest, but there was still a myriad of places behind tree trunks and fallen logs where somebody could be hiding.

  When we came to the road junction, we stopped and observed for several minutes. The road that led into the ranch was recently graded and graveled, and the BLM road that continued past the junction was in much better shape than the stretch we’d been traveling.

  “Looks like we found their escape route,” Dale whispered in my ear.

  I suspected he was right. There was a whole lot of nothing up here. If a person knew what they were doing, they could work their way through the maze of BLM and private ranch roads, and eventually emerge out on one of the sparse two lane highways. It would be a long, slow, journey, hard on vehicles and it would be easy to get lost, but it was almost guaranteed that it would be unobserved.

  “Cover me, and I’ll place the cameras,” Dale said.

  I nodded. He unzipped the bag and pulled out a pair of motion-activated cameras. I tried to look everywhere at once as he walked out into the open.

  Dale slung his rifle and started strapping the camera to a tree when the first shot came. I wasn’t the only one with a suppressor on his rifle. Dale dropped the little memory card for the camera, bent to retrieve it, and there was the hiss-crack of a silenced rifle shot. The report of the rifle was muffled, but the supersonic bullet made a sound like a whip cracking and a sheet ripping at the same time. A big sliver of bark blew off the tree right where Dale’s head had been.

  Dale rolled on the ground, going for a section of downed log not even a foot high.

  “Federal agents! Stop shooting!” I yelled. The only response was a pair of rifle rounds that cracked overhead.

  I looked around, desperate to find the shooter. More shots came. The other guys suppressor didn’t make his shots silent, it just made it hard to track down where they were coming from. Finally, I saw some vegetation waving. I cranked up the magnification on my scope and suddenly the image resolved of a guy in a camo face mask with a rifle. I put the crosshairs between the two eye holes of the mask and stroked the trigger.

  When I came down from recoil, he wasn’t there anymore. I couldn’t even tell how many people were shooting. I’d think the firing was coming from my left, then the next volley of shots would seem to come from my right. I heard a thud from overhead, and splinters of bark hit the back of my neck.

  “Pop smoke Dent,” Dale said. He sounded like he was asking me to pass the creamer for his coffee. He triggered a couple of shots. His rifle wasn’t suppressed and they echoed off the hills.

  I cursed myself for forgetting the smoke grenade hanging off my backpack harness. Another round hit the tree behind me and I dropped, and rolled. Once I was a dozen or so feet away, I snatched the grenade out of its pouch, pulled the pin and flung it into the middle of the crossroads. Purple smoke filled the air.

  “Break contact,” Dale said. “Cover me.”

  I started dumping rou
nds into the trees, shooting blindly through the smoke. Dale stood, ran about fifty yards down the road and then took a knee and started shooting right about the time I ran out of ammo.

  I took a deep breath and ran as fast as I could down the road. I heard a round snap past my ear. I changed magazines as I ran, found a spot, and dropped to one knee. Now it was my turn to dump rounds down range, careful not to hit Dale as he charged down the road.

  We repeated this a couple times, then Dale stopped beside me. The firing behind us had stopped. We could barely see the purple cloud down the road. There was no wind and it was lingering.

  “I think that did it,” Dale said. “I’m fifty percent on ammo.”

  I realized I’d burned through four of the six rifle magazines I’d been carrying. Rounds went quickly at times like these.

  “Less than that,” I said.

  “Ok. I’m going to pop another smoke and then let’s run for it.”

  He dropped another smoke grenade, yellow this time, then we took off at a run. Dale easily kept pace with me and didn’t even seem all that winded as we mounted up. I managed to hang on to the wheeler and keep hold of my rifle as we blasted over the ruts and bumps.

  When we arrived at the truck, there were no signs of pursuit. I covered while he loaded the wheeler. As we drove out in the pickup, I tried the satellite phone, but it wouldn’t lock on while the truck was moving.

  An hour or so later, we stopped on an open ridgeline, miles from the ambush site and in a spot where we could easily see someone in rifle range. The satellite phone locked on. I dialed our operations number and Dalton answered.

  “We got ambushed,” I said. “No casualties.”

  “I know,” Dalton said. “You’re already on YouTube.”

  “What?”

  “It’s complicated. You might want to get back here as fast as you can.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The video had been hastily edited, but they’d managed to make it look like we started shooting first. Henderson Marshall’s voice over lacked audio quality, but he made up for it with hyperbole and inflammatory rhetoric.