by D L Barbur
Rather than dwell on it, I concentrated on my gear. I was carrying too much stuff, but I wasn’t willing to cut anything else. I had my .308 rifle with scope, suppressor, and half a dozen magazines. I was wearing one of the two body armor carriers that hadn’t been seized by the FBI. My pistol was strapped to my thigh, and I had Dale’s wicked Gerber Mk2 knife strapped to the other side of my belt. He’d insisted I take it since my part of tonight’s festivities was likely to be up close and personal. I also had a rucksack with the dart gun we’d seized from Diana and some other party favors.
When I’d been in the Army, we’d jumped with heavier loads than this, but we’d also had the equipment to deal with it. The Army had special bags to carry weapons and other gear that would dangle below us as we descended. Civilian sport parachutists usually just jumped with a Go-Pro and a big goofy grin on their faces.
So we had to improvise. I made sure the chamber of my pistol was empty, and used some cordage to tie it into my holster. Likewise, I made sure the straps on my knife and extra magazines were taped shut, then ran some zip ties through the zipper on my backpack. My rifle went into a simple soft case, one of a bunch we’d picked up at a sporting goods store, and tied the zippers together before attaching it to a line hooked to the front of my armor.
“Five minutes,” Jack said. “Everybody on the plane.”
We all shuffled aboard, poking each other with rifles cases and almost tripping over our own feet. Jack started the engines with the hangar doors still shut, to keep the noise down for as long as possible. It was deafening inside the plane. Finally, after they were warmed up, he gave Dalton a thumbs up and he opened the doors before climbing in the back with us. As the plane lurched forward, he fell into a seat by the door and plugged in a headset.
The inside of the plane was dark, and Jack had the instrument panel lights turned down as low as they would go so they wouldn’t interfere with his night vision goggles. We were taking off without the benefit of runway lights or any of the other niceties of modern aviation. I shoved my fear of dying a fiery death firmly to the back of my mind and told myself this was exactly the sort of thing Jack was good at.
We taxied out to the dark runway, and I debated whether to turn on my own night vision or not. Was it better to see the end coming, or to be blissfully unaware? Finally, my own compulsive need for a feeling of control took over and I slipped the goggles on. In the eerie green, I could see the runway ahead of us as the plane picked up speed. We weaved back and forth, and for one heart-stopping moment I thought one wheel was going to go off the runway, but Jack finally got the plane straightened out and we were airborne.
He didn’t climb very high. A key component to this little scheme was for nobody to know we were coming, so we were staying under a thousand feet above ground level. The problem was ground level varied pretty drastically between us and Freedom Ranch. There were plenty of mountains along the way. I’d looked at Jack’s laptop, where he’d plotted a zig-zagging course that took us around, and occasionally over various terrain features, and promptly looked away.
Dalton plugged in a headset and handed it to me.
“So far so good,” Jack said. “I haven’t heard any chatter that makes me think we’ve been detected yet. Although our first clue might be when an F-15 flies by.”
That was not a comforting thought. They would probably hail us on the radio before they shot us down, I guessed. Dalton had a laptop hooked up to a GPS, and was using it to vector Jack onto our course. He had the screen turned way down, but it was still too bright for my goggles so I shut them off.
After the burst of activity back at the airfield, I suddenly found myself with nothing to do. I was in the back of the plane, near the door. Alex was on the other side, near the front, and still wouldn’t look my way. Dale looked like he was already asleep with the case for his long barreled .300 Winchester Magnum cradled in his arms like a baby. Robert was staring out the window, and Casey was looking at her cell phone, scrolling through what I strongly suspected was an ebook.
I’d been here before, only in the Army I’d been packed into a C-141 with 120 other Rangers. Sometimes we’d sit there, shoulder to shoulder and knee to knee for five or six hours. We’d take pills to keep us from having to defecate and try not to drink too much, but we’d still wind up trying to piss in a bottle with out getting any on our gear or our neighbor. Guys would sleep, or read, with the bible and Playboy equally represented.
When I left the Army, I swore I’d never do anything like this again, but here I was. Only in the Army, I’d had a thousand other guys jumping with me, and little things like air support from fighter planes and gunships. Now there were just the five us and whatever gear we had managed to scavenge.
I leaned my head back against the vibrating skin of the airplane and promptly went to sleep. I had crazy, restless dreams, almost like I had a fever. None of them made sense. I was treated to a long parade of the dead: men I’d shot, victims of homicides I’d investigated. Finally, I found my self sitting in Al Pace’s study, just like the night I’d met Bolle. Al was sitting there behind his desk, wearing his goofy looking sweater with a tumbler full of scotch in front of him, only his head was ruined by the bullet that killed him. He sat there staring mutely out of his one good eye, trying to make his mouth move.
I jerked awake to Dalton’s hand on my shoulder.
“Fifteen minutes,” he said over the intercom.
I nodded. I felt hot and tired, and I had a foul taste in my mouth. I took a drink of water from a bottle I’d shoved in my cargo pocket and swished it around. I set the bottle aside, then did a final check of my gear.
I flipped the goggles over my eyes and turned them on, being careful not to look at the computer screen. Out the front windows of the plane, I saw a mountain pass underneath, heart-stoppingly close. I gulped.
“Ten minutes,” Dalton said. “Hook up and stand in the door.”
We were jumping from a low altitude, thus were using static line parachutes. A wire cable ran lengthwise down the plane, attached to the ceiling. I grabbed my static line, clipped onto the wire, and gave it a tug. Then I unhooked my headset and stood so I could duck waddle over to the door. Behind me everyone else stood and clipped in. I turned my goggles off and checked my gear with a red flashlight, then checked Robert’s. He looked mine over and turned to check the person behind him.
Dalton gave everyone a final once-over, then held up five fingers. Five minutes out. He clipped himself to the plane’s bulkhead and opened the door. A cold wind and the roar of the engines filled the interior of the plane. The night was clear, and the half moon gave plenty of light for my night vision goggles to show the terrain below us. I recognized the highway that ran outside Freedom Ranch.
Suddenly the sky was lit with a brilliant flash. The compensators on my goggles cut in, keeping me from being blinded. That was Rudder and Henry detonating their first gasoline and dynamite bomb, right on time.
Dalton slapped me on the ass, and it was time to go.
Fighting all my better instincts, I hurled myself out the door of the airplane.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
I’d never really liked parachuting, but it had been the price to pay for being a Ranger. Despite the Army’s other faults, I had to give them credit for one thing: they excelled at training people to do things that their rational minds knew were absolutely insane.
One second the plane’s engines roared in my ears, but they faded rapidly and there was just the wind. I let my body assume the right attitude and started counting automatically. Right on schedule, my chute popped and I was treated to a massive jerk that felt like I was being pulled upwards. That was an illusion. I was still falling, just not as fast.
I looked up and saw that my canopy was inflating nicely. At least one thing was going right. I didn’t waste time looking for the others. They were behind me and above me, directions I couldn’t see because of the three hundred square feet of nylon canopy over my head. Of the five o
f us, only Dale and I had night vision goggles. My job was to pick a place to land, in the hopes that everyone else would be able to follow my white canopy in the darkness. Dale was last in line, and in addition to getting himself on the ground safely, he was supposed to keep track of everybody else in our little chain of fools in case anyone wound up off course.
I undid the snap link attached to my gear, and my rifle case and backpack dropped to the end of their line. They would hit the ground first, a second or so before me.
The ground was coming up fast. I risked a look at the GPS strapped to my wrist. It looked like I was going to land right in the middle of the drop zone we’d picked by looking at satellite images. Over to the east, a big column of fire lit up the sky, courtesy of the gasoline bomb Rudder and Henry had detonated with a healthy charge of dynamite. No doubt people on the ground had heard the plane, but since we’d been flying blacked out they’d probably not had time to see it before the bomb went off, and hopefully, nobody would see us falling from the sky, thanks to their night vision being shot from the explosion.
I picked a spot between clumps of sagebrush and made a slight correction. I hit the ground running, hoping to “run out” my landing, but wound up falling anyway. I was ready for it, so I didn’t do too bad, although it hurt worse than I remembered from when I was eighteen. I hit the release and my chute deflated. There was no wind so I wouldn’t have to chase it all over the desert.
Spitting out grit, I rolled to my knees. Robert landed not twenty-five yards behind me and stuck his landing like a pro. Behind him, I could see three more canopies still in the air.
I patted myself down real quick. All my gear was still attached to my body. No mean feat, all things considered. I turned on the little radio mounted on my vest and was greeted with a burst of static in my earpiece.
“Sagebrush,” I whispered into the microphone. That was our brevity code that meant we’d landed safely. Technically some of us hadn’t landed yet, but I figured it was close enough.
There was silence for several long seconds. I watched as the person behind Robert hit the ground and the canopy deflated. That would be Casey. She was too far away to see how her landing went. Alex and then Dale were still in the air, at least for a few more seconds.
Finally, my radio broke the silence.
“Crystal,” Laughlin whispered. That meant the FBI commander hadn’t heard any reports from either the inner or outer perimeter that anyone had sighted our chutes, so hopefully a posse of federal agents wasn’t about to descend on us. I breathed a sigh of relief. We’d all agreed that we weren’t going to resist if the FBI or the State Police showed up. There hadn’t been much discussion really. We all wanted Marshall, but none of us were willing to shoot at the cops to do it.
We were in a little depression that ran east-west, with a line of trees on either side. Nobody could see us from the house, and as long as we didn’t shine any light around, none of the cops on the outer perimeter would see us either. The little zone of dead ground gave us some breathing room to assemble and get our act together before the hard work started.
I pulled my chute in, wadded it up, and set a rock on top of it, then shucked out of the harness. After donning my backpack, I racked a round in my rifle and my pistol, then busied myself peeling off all the tape and string holding my various pouches closed, as I walked over to Robert. He had his chute squared away and was tending to his own gear. I jogged across the desert to Casey, who had a big grin on her face.
“That was fucking awesome!”
I slapped her on the ass, just like I would have one of the guys in my old platoon. I think it surprised both of us, and I wondered if I’d made a mistake. Then she stifled a laugh and went back to pulling in her chute. I decided to just keep jogging, back to where I’d seen Alex land.
She was sitting on her butt, pulling in her chute.
“I don’t ever want to do that again,” she said.
I helped her get her gear squared away. Out of the corner of my eye, I kept watching Dale’s chute. It was still on the desert floor, stark white in the moonlight and I didn’t see any sign that he was reeling it in. I felt a cold feeling in the pit of my stomach.
I decided to wait until Alex had her medical gear strapped on. By then Robert and Casey had joined us and we all ran to Dale together.
He hadn’t landed well. The lanyard attached to his rifle case had wrapped around his leg, tripping him as he landed. We found him on his side, holding his hip and moaning.
Alex knelt down beside him. Without even being asked, Casey and Robert each took a knee and faced in different directions, scanning for threats.
“Landed bad,” Dale said. “I think my hips out.”
“You mean the one you had replaced?” Robert asked.
“Yup. That’s the one.”
“You parachuted with a prosthetic hip?” Alex asked.
“Seemed like a good idea at the time,” Dale said through gritted teeth.
I felt helpless standing there while Alex examined him. One unanswered question in our little plan was how we were going to handle a wounded teammate. I figured the odds of us all making it out unscathed, and one of us getting hurt at the drop zone had been a huge worry. Like many things, we’d just glossed over it in our planning.
“There’s nothing I can do here,” Alex said. “You need surgery.”
“Just haul my ass up to the top of the ridge and leave me my rifle,” Dale said.
“You’ve got a fractured hip!”
“Well, it isn’t my trigger finger. Come on time’s wasting.”
“Dale…” I started to argue.
He cut me off.
“Miller, I’ve let you lead this little shit show until now, but if you don’t get your ass in gear and start hauling my ass up to that ridge, I’m going to pull rank on you. These sons of bitches have injured two of my children, and I intend to blow thirty caliber holes in them until they’re either all dead or I am.”
He rolled over and started pulling himself with his hands. Robert and I looked at each other and we both shrugged. We handed our rifles to Casey and Alex, then picked up Dale.
We didn’t have far to go, but the slope was steep and rocky. We picked our way up as carefully as we could but it had to hurt like hell. Still, he didn’t make a sound. We stopped just before the crest and set him down. Robert and I crept up the rest of the way. He’d liberated Dale’s goggles and we both scanned the area.
We were about three hundred yards from the ranch house to the northeast and the runway and hangar to the northwest. One of the Stryker vehicles was between us and the house. Inside the ranch house, I saw the occasional burst of light. The power had been cut not long after the shootout, and an FBI sniper had put a round through the backup generator.
One of the Strykers was equipped with a loudspeaker. They kept it aimed at the house and blasted noise all night long. Heavy Metal. Gregorian Chants, you name it. We’d climbed the hill to the dulcet tones of AC/DC’s Back In Black. If I’d been in a better mood, it would have struck me as funny. There were a few minutes of silence, then an unearthly wailing sound started coming from the speaker. It made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
“The fuck is that?” I whispered.
“Sounds like a rabbit distress call,” Robert said. “They make a surprising amount of noise.”
All of this was supposed to keep the people inside from sleeping. The rabbit noises were a particularly sadistic touch. After a couple minutes, they were making my teeth hurt.
We hauled Dale the rest of the way up the slope and got him set up in a place where he could see. Alex gave him just enough of a dose of painkillers to take the edge off, but not enough to knock him out. His rifle had a night vision scope attached. I kept one pair of night vision goggles, and Casey took the second.
“Ready?” I asked everyone. They all nodded, so I keyed my radio.
“Ballgame,” I said, our brevity code that meant we were going to start sneaking to
wards the house and hangar.
Laughlin was quicker coming back this time.
“Field goal.” We were clear to start. Not for the first time, I thought about the fact that when you let dudes pick brevity codes, half the time they were sports references.
Robert and I were going to the house. Casey and Alex were going to the hangar. With a whispered “good luck” we started out for our respective destinations. Through the goggles, I saw Alex look back at me like she wanted to say something. I forced myself to shove it out of my mind. If she’d wanted to say something, she’d had plenty of time to say it earlier. Part of me wanted to be angry with her, part of me wanted to beg her to go back into the gully and wait until all this was over. Either way, it was too late now.
We picked our way carefully, trying to avoid noise. Laughlin was supposed to tell his people to “unsee” us. The official explanation was we were the advance recon party for the DHS team that was officially taking over tomorrow. Apparently about half the FBI HRT guys were upset the operation was being taken away from, while the other half, mostly older guys, were glad to let somebody else lead the way on what was sure to be a bloody, near-suicidal assault.
There was a drainage ditch that led to a point only a dozen yards from the house. The area was dry most of the year, but in the late fall and early winter, massive thunderstorms could dump water faster than the parched earth could soak it up. The ditch was only about three feet deep, but when I slid into it, I was effectively invisible to anyone that wasn’t standing right on the edge and looking down.
It was bone dry right now, and full of stones, which didn’t feel too good as I crawled. I hadn’t been looking forward to this. During my Ranger days, a two hundred yard low crawl in a ditch filled with sharp stones would have been a point of pride. Now I was just thinking about how much it hurt.
The ditch ran well past the house, so I kept an eye on the GPS strapped to my wrist. Designed for the military, it had a night vision mode that illuminated it just enough for my goggles to pick it up from a couple feet away. We hadn’t had all this nifty shit when I left the Army. Back then the night vision goggles had weighed three times as much and were like looking through a soda straw.