by D L Barbur
I started to key my microphone to report into Bolle, when his voice came over the radio.
“We just got word the convoy is moving,” Bolle said.
“Apparently, the folks down there knew it before we did,” I said, but didn’t transmit it over the air.
I put my eye back to the scope just in time to see Webb and Marshall walk out of the hangar. The duffel bags were now quite a bit heavier.
“Looks like those boys are carrying quite a few mortgage payments,” Dale said from behind his rifle scope.
Another SUV drove up to the tarmac. This time two women got out and pulled a couple of suitcases from the back.
“Well I do believe that’s Mrs. Webb, and Mrs. Marshall,” Dale said. “That plane is a six-seater, if I’m not mistaken.”
“Yup,” I said. “Cessna 206.”
“Looks like Marshall and Webb are taking off with their wives, a pilot and a hired gun, and leaving the faithful to deal with the FBI,” Dale said. “Maybe Marshall does really have leadership potential. He’d fit right into congress.”
“That’s a shit load of money in those bags too,” Robert chimed in.
“Yup,” Dale said. “Let’s confirm our range to that airplane.”
While Dale and Robert worked the rangefinder and talked sniper speak to each other, I clicked my microphone.
“You getting this?” I asked. “It looks like Webb and Marshall are fixing to fly away.”
There was silence for a few seconds. Way out by the ranch gates, I saw a sea of blue and red flashing lights.
“Dale, can you confirm that you have a can mounted on the fifty?”
We’d hauled the Barret M82 rifle up here in pieces, and assembled it. The damn thing weighed almost thirty pounds and was four feet long, to which Dale had added another foot of QDL suppressor.
“I can,” he said. “It isn’t exactly silent, but it shouldn't raise too many eyebrows.”
This was horrible timing. The armed protesters were about to come face to face with a gaggle of even more heavily armed Federal agents. With that many itchy trigger fingers, the boom of heavy rifle fire echoing off the mountains might be just enough to ignite the whole powder keg.
“Can you disable that plane without hurting anybody?”
“I can as long as I do it before they all get inside. After that no guarantees. That little tin can won’t even slow these rounds down very much.”
“Do it,” Bolle said. “I’m directing you to disable that aircraft with gunfire, as long as you can do it without seriously injuring anyone.”
To his credit, Bolle was standing up and taking responsibility. We were recording our radio net, and now there was a record of him ordering Dale to shoot the plane.
“My pleasure,” Dale said. “Robert, spot my rounds. Dent, I need you to keep a wide view to make sure nobody wanders into the line of fire.”
I lowered the magnification on my spotting scope. Webb, Marshall, their wives, and the guard were standing by the vehicles, safely out of harm’s way. The pilot was another matter. He had the engine cowling up and his head was stuck underneath. I wasn’t sure how Dale was going to deal with that.
“Gonna send a round over that fellow’s head, see if he takes the hint. On the way.”
He squeezed the trigger. With the suppressor, it didn’t sound like a gunshot, more like some kind of giant piece of machinery. There was a sharp crack and the clank of the action cycling. It took the bullet a few seconds to travel the distance. The sun was just right, and I actually saw the wake of disturbed air in its wake. The shot passed over the head of the pilot and dug up a huge geyser of dirt a hundred yards or so behind him.
The pilot was apparently smart enough to recognize it for what it was. He took off running from the plane and dove into the ditch beside the runway.
“Perfect,” Dale said, and squeezed the trigger again.
I watched that round sail into the engine compartment of the airplane. The giant slug was as long as my thumb and weighed almost an ounce. Metal parts flew a dozen feet in the air.
“I believe you’ve got the range,” Robert said from behind his scope.
“Yup,” Dale said, and squeezed the trigger eight more times. Glass shattered, aluminum flew, and the plane’s front landing gear collapsed, bending the prop. We heard the sounds of the impact a few seconds later. It sounded like somebody banging on a metal drum with a giant hammer.
“Not fixing that with duct tape,” Robert said.
“Nope,” Dale said. “Feed me.”
The ten round magazines for the giant rifle were the size of a book. Robert had hauled a backpack full of them up the mountain. He handed one to his dad while I checked out the crowd. A few heads had turned towards the airstrip, but nobody seemed excited, and most importantly, nobody was shooting.
It was somewhat comical to watch Marshall, Webb, their wives, the pilot and the guard all try to pile into a single SUV at the same time. They took off in a cloud of dust back towards the ranch house.
“Not leaving that way,” Dale said as he slid the new magazine home.
“No sir,” Robert said. “Looks like the cops are at the gate.”
I focused my scope on the front gate. There was a sea of official vehicles out there. There were black unmarked SUVs, Oregon State Police, and Department of Homeland Security vehicles. The local sheriff’s office was conspicuously absent. Leading the way were the two Lenco Bearcat armored cars. They stopped by the roadblock, and a pair of figures dressed in body armor and helmets hopped out, while riflemen in the turrets covered them.
There was a tow strap already coiled on the hoods of Bearcats, and hooked to the front chassis. Each officer grabbed the hook on the end of a tow strap, attached it to one of the trucks blocking the road and ran back to the safety of the armored vehicles. The drivers backed up and jerked the front ends of the heavy trucks around, opening a narrow passage just wide enough for a single vehicle.
The Bearcats led the way through the gap, followed by a van with a dozen tactical officers hanging off of running boards, then a dozen SUVs and cars. They raced down the half mile road towards the ranch house in a single file, bumper to bumper, scattering cows as they went.
People would argue for years about who fired first. Ultimately it was unknowable. I thought for a moment that the direct assault was going to work. Some folks in the crowd had their hands up, others were shifting from foot to foot with rifles slung over their backs. My first clue that something was wrong was when an officer fell off the side of the van, his arms pinwheeling like a rag doll. A couple of seconds later, the flat crack of a shot echoed through the air.
“Oh shit,” Dale said.
The driver of the van slammed on the brakes and was promptly rear-ended by the SUV behind him. The Bearcats kept going, while behind the van, vehicles slid to a halt. Some of them pulled off the road and tried to go around, but the dry ground was deceptively rough, and the sage brush higher than it looked. Several officers jumped off the van and ran for their wounded comrade.
Then everyone started shooting at once. Dozens, then hundreds of gunshots filled the air. It was impossible to follow it all at once, even from our perfect vantage point. Both Bearcats stopped. The rifle men in the armored turrets were shooting in different directions. The crowd scattered. Some people ran. Some dove to the ground. Some started shooting.
The convoy of police vehicles was hard to see through the billowing dust. I realized trying to see everything at once was futile. Instead I focused the scope and started methodically scanning the crowd.
One guy was hiding behind a pickup with his rifle held over his head, firing blindly. Before I could say anything, he stood and scampered into the crowd and I lost him because of the narrow field of view of the scope.
A man on the roof of the ranch house caught my eye. He was balancing a long barreled precision rifle on the peak of the roof and firing slow, measured shots.
“Dale, guy on the roof with a scoped long gun,�
� I said.
“I see him,” Dale said. There was a second or two pause while the fire control computer in Dale’s head calculated range, wind and a million other factors that influenced a shot at this range, then he said: “On the way.”
The big fifty coughed and a second or two later, the guy on the roof vanished in a cloud of pink mist. I saw an arm pinwheel through the air and his rifle slid down the roof.
“Dent, you give me targets west of the ranch road. Robert, you focus to the east,” Dale said.
That made sense. The scene below us was mass chaos. There were police vehicles parked on and around the ranch road with cops hunkered behind them. I saw several bodies in black tactical gear lying in the dirt, being tended to by their teammates. Some of the vehicles were shot full of holes and looked un-drivable. One of the Bearcats was parked straddling the road and had been turned into a de facto bunker, with some officers firing from the inside through the gunports, while others took cover behind the armored car and popped out for the occasional shot.
The other Bearcat was plodding through the sagebrush with officers taking cover beside it. It was headed for a gaggle of cops surrounding the first officer who had been shot off the van.
The advance was stalled out. Some police vehicles were trying to move forward and maneuver around stalled and shot up cars. Others were trying to back down the road. It looked like nobody was in charge. I flipped my radio over to the main tactical channel and was rewarded with a dozen voices all trying to talk at once, and issuing contradictory orders.
On the other side, a bunch of the protesters were on the ground, some of them because they’d been shot, some of them because they clearly wanted no part of the gunfight. A dozen or so were shooting. A few of them looked like they knew what they were doing.
I didn’t designate them as targets. We had one rifle to contribute to this fight, and we needed to maximize our efforts. I had a feeling some of Marshall’s people were seeded into the protesters, and I wanted to pick them out.
I focused on a pickup parked on a slight rise a few hundred yards east of the ranch road. The long bed was covered by a canopy. The tailgate was down and the inside of the bed was hidden in shadow, but as I focused the scope I saw a brief flash from inside, followed a couple of seconds later by another.
“Dale, see that truck on that rise about four hundred meters west of the ranch house? I think there is a guy in the bed shooting.”
Dale was quiet, but out of my peripheral vision, I saw him shift the rifle.
“Yep,” he said finally. “Sneaky fucker. On the way.”
The fifty barked and the truck rocked on its suspension. I saw a plume of dust on the other side where the round hit the ground after passing all the way through the canopy and side of the bed. The truck started to roll forward slowly and Dale triggered another round. That one missed, but Dale saw the bullet hit the ground in his scope and used it to correct his aim. Dinner plate sized dents appeared in the sheet metal, and big splinters of fiberglass flew off the canopy as Dale unloaded the rifle. The truck stopped on a flat tire and didn’t move for several seconds. No more flashes came from the bed.
“Reckon that ought to do it.” I heard the clunk of an empty magazine hitting the ground and the snick of another one being rammed home as I scanned through my scope. I looked away from my scope for a second, both to give my eye a break, and to take in the larger scene.
On the radio, some of the chaos had been tamed. Laughlin sounded pretty calm, considering his career was likely about to end. He was organizing a withdrawal, and it was starting to work. The vehicles closest to the highway were backing down on to the blacktop. Officers with disabled vehicles were dashing to vehicles that were still running and either diving in or jumping on to running boards and bumpers. I saw one limp form being carried by four others stuffed into the back of an SUV and evacuated. The Bearcats were backing down towards the highway.
The pace of firing had slackened, although there were still plenty of bullets flying through the air. I got back on the scope and started looking for targets for Dale to destroy.
“I think I’ve got muzzle flashes coming out of the upstairs of the house,” Robert said. “One side. Third floor. Fourth window.”
The “one” side of the building was the side with the front door. I aimed the scope at the third floor, and counted four windows over from the left. The window was open, but all I saw inside was darkness. If there was a shooter inside, he was well trained enough to stay deep in the room and not stick his barrel out the window like in the movies.
As I focused the scope, I saw a flash from inside. It was hard to pick out the sound of a corresponding shot, especially with the delay. The window was also at a slight angle to us, so we weren’t looking directly in. I watched for a few more seconds and thought I saw a second flash.
“I believe you’re right,” Dale said. “Thing is, there’s no telling who else is in that house. These rounds will go through one side of that house and out the other.”
He had a point. We were reasonably sure there were no children on the ranch, but there were all sorts of ranch hands, cooks, maids and other employees we’d watched come and go through the cameras. They were just innocent bystanders. Even a hit to the extremities from the big fifty was liable to be lethal. Dale could kill a combatant without his heart rate even going up, but he didn’t want to shoot an uninvolved party, and I didn’t blame him.
“Now what?” Dale said.
Over the radio, I heard Laughlin yelling at everyone to hold their fire. I pulled away from the scope and saw something that made me do a double take. A man on a Harley Davidson motorcycle was driving up the ranch road, weaving among the police vehicles that were backing up. I managed to find him in the scope,and saw it was Sheriff Neal, dressed in his uniform and wearing a Stetson.
The firing slackened even more as he stopped the bike halfway between the two parties and hopped off. He pulled a bullhorn out of a saddlebag.
“He’s got balls. I’ll give him that,” Dale said.
We saw him raise the bullhorn to his lips, and a few seconds later the words echoed around us.
“All of you stop shooting! You goddamn federals get out of here. The rest of you at the ranch lower your rifles. We need to talk about this.”
Somehow it worked. There were a few more odd shots, from both sides, but eventually, the silence stretched to a few seconds, then a minute, then longer. The police continued backing down the driveway, while the people around the ranch house started to get off the ground, collect themselves and tend to their wounded.
We kept scanning, looking for threats, but there was no more shooting. Finally, the cops stopped at the main road.
Dale clicked on the Barret’s safety, stood and stretched his back.
“Well, that was a shit sandwich. Now we’ve got ourselves a good old-fashioned siege.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
By the time I made it to the Lehigh Valley Middle School, helicopters were landing in the parking lot every few minutes, carrying wounded to Bend and Boise. Bolle and I pulled into the lot just in time to see Alex and a couple of volunteer firemen pushing a wounded officer on an office chair. He had bandages wrapped around his head and face. They ducked under the blades of the Little Bird, strapped him in, and Jack took off, pushed the nose of the helicopter down and poured on the power.
A stunned-looking guy in an FBI windbreaker was mopping blood off the floor of the school lobby when we walked in. Our ID had been checked three times, but people still looked at us like they expected us to open fire at any minute. I made a mental note for Dale and his boys to stay the hell away from this place. They looked just like the folks who had just shot up the convoy, and that might not end well for anyone.
Everyone had a spooked, haunted look that I knew all too well. When I’d been in the Rangers, we were used to dominating every situation we were involved in. Casualties were always a possibility, but they were rare. We were used to stepping over the
bodies of our enemies, not our friends. That day in Mogadishu, eighteen of us had been killed, and just about everyone else had been wounded to one degree or another. Days like that changed the way you looked at the world.
After showing our credentials a fourth time, we managed to get in the command center. It was bedlam, with phones ringing and people talking. Burke was standing in a corner, her arms folded over her chest and her mouth a flat line. She saw us and cocked her head towards a door. We went through and the noise level dropped when it shut behind us, leaving only the sound of her heels echoing off the rows of lockers as we followed her down an empty hall.
We wound up in a science classroom full of Bunson burners and glassware.
“Four dead and sixteen wounded,” she said by way of greeting. “Most of them are FBI, although I think some State Police guys got hit too.”
“What a mess,” I said.
“Webb and Marshall were supposed to surrender,” she said. “They were supposed to tell their people to comply and not shoot. Rumor has it the guy who feel off the van had a gunshot wound in the foot, delivered from very close range.”
“He shot himself in the foot, and every body started pulling triggers,” Bolle said, shaking his head.
“Webb and Marshall were trying to leave,” I said. “They were loading the plane.”
“Part of the deal was their wives were supposed to fly away, and Marshall and Webb were going to surrender, but somebody shot up their airplane.”
She looked from me to Bolle.
“We didn’t know about the deal,” he said. “Nobody put us in the loop.”
“They could have easily gotten in that plane and flew away,” I said. “And you would have had nothing but a bunch of malcontents in custody.”
“Well, I guess we’ll never know will we?”