by JT Sawyer
“Well, it looks like we both get admission to the mutual admiration club—now can we get moving?”
As they continued walking along the rocky terrain, their banter continued with each trying to outdo the other until their mouths grew dry. Mitch shared some of his scant water and then finished off the last mouthful.
“We’ll stick with the Apache method of clinging to the mesa rim in case we need to drop below for concealment. Hopefully we’ll hit a cattle trough or rock-pocket of water somewhere. Otherwise, just put a small pebble under your tongue. It won’t relieve dehydration but it will help with cottonmouth which helps with one’s attitude.”
“My attitude will greatly improve once we get out of this furnace.”
As they walked, Dev thought about how Mitch was another mystery associated with her father’s old life. In the four years she had spent learning Anatoly’s tradecraft and working for his company, she felt like she still knew so little about him. The intermittent family dinners of her youth when Anatoly was home in between missions along with the stories she’d gleaned from her mother made her ache for the lost time when she needed her father the most as an adolescent. Hearing Mitch talk about Anatoly made her realize the impact her father had had upon his life and countless others but it only filled her with envy over the vanished years she could never reclaim. She wasn’t alone in her experience—most of her childhood friends with fathers in the military had the same story but it didn’t make turning the anguish-filled pages of that book any easier. In the ensuing years since she began working for her father, their relationship had transmogrified into a teacher-pupil arrangement under his stern direction. Occasionally, they both let their guards down enough to allow the old familial sentiments to bleed through but only as long as Anatoly allowed it. Dev was constantly torn between wanting to please him and her desire to simply be the best operative in the organization, given her competitive nature. At the end of the work day, all that mattered was that she was in closer proximity to her father than she had been all of her childhood, one more reason she had longed to end her assignment in the crucible of Aeneid and return to Israel.
***
The first six miles were uneventful as they traversed more boulder fields while trying to avoid wrenching an ankle or getting jabbed by the desert flora which all seemed to be designed to poke, pierce, stab, or impale.
With only a few hours of travel under their belts, Mitch was feeling the effects of physical exertion in the ninety-degree heat coupled with lack of fluid intake; his head was pounding and it seemed like every cell in his body was screaming for water. He knew Dev had to be feeling it as well but she never complained nor slowed her pace. She reminded him of some of the female ranch hands he’d grown up around that worked their tails to the bone each day in all manner of weather and got the job done no matter how brutal the field conditions. Though he’d known her less than a day, she had proven to be tough and resourceful. He still wasn’t sure what would happen once they reached civilization but he admired her physical prowess and staunch independence.
As they rounded the bend in the boulder field, Mitch caught the slight glimmer of movement a mile ahead in the faint moonlight. He could make out the metallic surface of a small vehicle weaving its way along a tumbleweed-choked dirt road to the east. He motioned for Dev to stop and they secreted themselves against a vertical slab of sandstone that resembled a whale fin emanating from the desert floor.
They watched the vehicle for a few minutes until it came to a stop near a windmill. They could see two men climbing out of the open-top jeep.
“Those probably aren’t cowboys out inspecting their cattle, eh,” she whispered.
“Driving at midnight without their lights on? Not likely. I’m betting they’re equipped with some nightvision though.”
“Two of them—it’d be an even match.”
He looked at her with his eyebrows raised. “You’re not one to run from a fight, are you?” He glanced back towards the men, watching them as the two strode about the windmill searching for any signs on the ground.
“They know we are going to be drawn to the waterholes in the area so they’re scouring those sites for potential tracks. That’s what I’d do too if I were a searcher.”
He chewed on his lower lip, mulling over their options. “The thing is…if we take them out, that’s going to leave lots of tracks and alert the other Neanderthals that two of their guys are missing when they don’t radio in.”
“Then why not wait until they’re done and check back in then hit them on the road on their way back out?”
He analyzed the ramifications of her plan and studied the terrain ahead of them near the single dirt road that led up the mesa. “Not a bad plan—pretty tactically sound and it puts the element of surprise in our hands. Lord knows we could sure even the odds more with their NVGs.”
“Growing up in Israel, your mindset for attacks and ambushes in daily life is a given, not like over here. Just walking to school when I was a kid was exhausting because you’re scanning everyone around you as a potential terrorist. It’s something you can never turn off.”
Though Mitch had spent his adolescence on his uncle’s working cattle ranch and had a much different childhood than Dev, he knew the debilitating effects of PTSD. The daily hypervigilance that combat provided was one you could never seem to shake once you returned to civilian life. Your trust in your fellow man, outside of one’s tac-team, dwindled until you saw everyone as a suspect in what felt like a conspiracy against your own sanity.
He pointed to a shadowy formation two hundred yards away. “We can use that low outcropping of rocks to spring the ambush.”
She nodded and then followed him out from behind the immense slab. They skulked around the waist-high stands of cactus then darted between the lone mesquite trees until they were beside the overgrown two-track that the jeep had driven in on. Unspooling the barbed wire he had retrieved earlier, he handed her one end as they wound it at chest-level between the tree trunks.
“Won’t they see this? There’s not much to conceal it,” she said.
“Exactly—a good mantrap always operates on two levels, with one serving as a decoy up high to draw visual attention from the main trap on the ground or, in our case, our ambush location to their rear. I want their NVGs to pick up the barbed wire about twenty feet away so they are distracted from the chokepoint we just drew them into—that’s the place where we’ll attack,” he said, pointing to a cluster of mesquite trees along a bend in the road.”
“I’m afraid that I’ve mostly done urban ops over the years and don’t know all this hillbilly survival stuff.”
“You mean redneck—hillbillies are inbred country music-lovers back in the tick-infested mountains of Virginia and other backwards eastern states. We westerners use the term redneck.”
She rolled her eyes. “Whatever.”
Mitch kept an eye on the distant outlines of the shadowy figures near the windmill as he left Dev to finish securing the barbed wire diversion. He moved along the side of the road, being careful to step on rocks to obscure his boot prints. He moved to the curve in the road which would help to block any disturbance once the men made the turn. Instead, they would immediately be drawn to the barbed wire strung up at chest level and provide the critical seconds for Mitch and Dev to strike.
As he finished scrutinizing the ambush location, he gritted his teeth for the attack that was about to come and hoped that Dev was as fierce as she seemed. After she moved up to his location, he heard the faint call of the men radioing in their position followed by the sound of the jeep starting. He could see the vehicle undulating along the bumpy two-track towards their location. Dev and Mitch crept into the shadows by the mesquite grove ten feet from the chokepoint. Each of them readied their firearms, their throats growing further parched, as if they’d just swallowed hot coals.
Chapter 17
They needed to dispatch both guards just after the tight bend in the road where the vehic
le would be moving the slowest. This would afford them a better chance of securing it before a crash occurred.
Dev was kneeling on one leg a few feet from him to the right of the road, her pistol clutched close to her chest. They were hidden behind a twelve-foot-high boulder with a polished surface, as if a giant tawny marble had sprung from the ground. The sound of the jeep’s tires crunched over loose rock and the faint aroma of barrel cactus flowers wafted along the mesa.
Moving along a snaky section of the road, fifty yards away from them, the jeep jumbled along the uneven road, both men inside resembling bobble heads.
“Headshots, if possible. I don’t want the jeep console damaged,” said Mitch, who cast a questioning glance at her. “You sure you can do this?”
“Don’t worry about me.”
At the bend in the road twenty yards distant, as the driver slowed to accommodate the turn and both men noticed the barbed wire stretched between the trees, Mitch swiftly delivered both headshots, spraying the remains of the two men over the windshield. The jeep continued its forward momentum on the road as he ran alongside the open driver’s side and yanked the dead man out. He hopped in, slamming on the brakes while doing a hasty check of the slumped figure next to him, whose NVGs were slightly damaged but still intact.
Dev moved alongside the rig and pulled the man in the passenger’s seat out by his vest, dropping him onto the sand. “What the hell is your problem? I told you I could do it.”
“Yeah, well I couldn’t take the chance that you’d hesitate. You’re the one that told me a while back how you weren’t cut out for killing somebody in cold blood.”
She just ground her teeth and growled out a deep breath. “I will do what needs to be done if the situation calls for it.”
“We’ve got the jeep now, which is what matters, so grab anything of value off that dude and let’s get rolling.”
They quickly removed the body armor, weapons, ammo, and radios then continued driving over the mesa, skirting around the barbed wire. As they drove along the rock-strewn road, bobbing along in the jeep with their knees smacking the bottom of the blood-soaked dashboard, Mitch kept an eye on the massive storm clouds to the north. The spider web bolts of lightning illuminated the vapor leviathan. In between blasts of light, he saw that rain was coming down in sheets a few miles to his right. Even though the countryside around him was parched, he’d witnessed enough flash floods in the desert to know that the raging torrent of waters can come from twenty miles up canyon even if it’s sunny and bone dry where you’re standing.
They sped downhill for a mile past the first ravine, which had only marginal amounts of fresh water in the puddles lining its bottom from rainfall the night before. Mitch stopped and quickly filled up their water bottles with the murky fluid, then continued driving northwest. Skirting up onto a small mesa, he continued gunning the jeep along a narrow stretch of the road that hugged the rim until it went down again. They had already covered six miles since procuring the jeep but as he crested the bend in the road and descended, he could see the moonlight reflecting off a current of coffee-colored water raging through the arroyo below. The thick brown sludge was filled with car-sized boulders and tree branches that churned like a cement mixer.
Mitch brought the jeep to a screeching halt twenty yards away from the torrent and put it in park. He climbed out and scanned the furious waters. Rubbing the back of his neck and exhaling, he punted a small stone into the current then stepped back towards the door.
“No way we can cross this—probably fifteen feet deep at least. We either sit it out here, hoping the water level goes down in the next few hours, or we trek parallel to the canyon until we find a crossing point. That could be a half-mile from here or ten miles.”
Dev was already craning her head out of the window, studying the scene, then she reached into the back seat and withdrew her small pack. “I’m not staying put here. Looks like we’re back to boot power.”
Mitch nodded in agreement, grabbing the rest of his gear and his rifle then motioning to her to head up to the canyon rim forty feet above. “I’ll be right up,” he said, handing his items off to her. “I hate to foul up the desert like this but it’s better to remove any evidence we came this way.” Mitch went back to the jeep, removed the emergency brake and placed the stick in neutral. The vehicle rolled forward into the tumult, turning sideways upon impact with the current and joining the rest of the debris washing downstream.
He rejoined Dev, both of them watching in fascination as their brief reminder of civilization melded into the grip of the hungry waters. “The coming rains will wash away our tire tracks on the road,” he said, looking north at the cumulonimbus cloud that hung upon them like a black veil. “Hopefully we can find a way across the canyon quickly and then hole up somewhere. This storm is going to be savage.”
Shouldering their gear, they hoofed along the rim while scanning each small rock or cow pie to make sure it wasn’t a rattler. The landscape was rife with large juniper trees and clumps of mesquite. Mitch thought for a second about how this would be good terrain for mule deer hunting and then realized how the tables were turned and they had become the prey. With the full moon in the cloudless sky at their backs and the electrical storm filling the horizon to the front, he caught a glimpse of a primitive sheepherder’s bridge atop the canyon a mile up.
He tapped Dev on the shoulder and pointed to it. “Let’s hope those sheepmen have been keeping that crossing point maintained.”
“Why is that even there when the road isn’t that far back?”
“A lot of the cattle and sheep bridges out west were put in fifty years ago or more while some of these roads came into being in the past coupla years. The ranchers prefer staying off the beaten path anyway.”
His voice was drowned out as the wind shifted and began pelting them with rainfall. They picked up their pace, trotting to reach the bridge as the tempo of the storm increased with each step. Mitch could hear the current in the canyon below pulsing as if it was a living creature that would reach an arm up over the edge to claim any terrestrial being that defied it.
The moonlight was fading as the storm overtook them, the inky black clouds occasionally belting out another shockwave of lightning and thunder. Just where I want to be right now—out in the open, near water, with the sky gods pissed off. The last volley of lightning revealed the bridge a hundred yards out. Mitch and Dev began sprinting, crunching over ankle-high cacti in a frenzied dash to the bridge.
Making it to the edge where metal was married to rock, Mitch did a hasty inspection of the rickety contraption in between lightning flashes from above. The canyon below had swollen further and the water level was coursing four feet away from the cable suspensions that spanned the short distance between rims.
“You sure this redneck piece of shit is going to hold us?” yelled Dev.
“If not, I’ll see you in Mexico,” he shouted back, then grabbed the railings of spun cable on either side and began moving across. He steadied himself with the waist-high supports while half trotting, half shuffling across the creaky planks, hoping his trust in cowboy engineering wouldn’t prove him wrong.
Chapter 18
The raging current of mud and churning boulders below resembled a brown python undulating through the bedrock, reshaping the very walls of the canyon with its violent passing. The pounding rain was slapping against his entire body like it was trying to drive him into the hungry mouth of the silty beast below. Mitch wanted to look over his shoulder to check on Dev but needed every ounce of concentration upon his slippery footing and the faint contours of the approaching rim. The lightning had temporarily ceased and he had to use his boots as probes to feel for the end of the bridge. Arriving at the opposite side, he released his comforting grip on the slick cables and took a shuffle of faith into the darkness, his soles making contact with the sandstone.
He turned and stared into the inky abyss, searching for Dev. She should’ve been right on my tail. Shit! His he
art rate sped further as his eyes tore through the darkness, searching for her, the squall of rain allowing only a few feet of visibility when lightning struck. He barely knew her but felt a twang of camaraderie with her given their shared connection to Anatoly and the world they operated in. She was a rare blend of elements and he had to force away the image of intrigue she presented, reminding himself that if she was gone then all of today was for nothing.
Like a specter emerging from the dark grip of the storm itself, Dev appeared in a flash of lightning, startling Mitch, who was about to retrace his precarious route. He reached forward, grabbing her arm, steadying her until they were both off the bridge. She nodded in appreciation, her face ashen as she tried to steady her wobbly legs.
“We walk side by side from here so we don’t lose each other,” he shouted above the roar of the canyon. “I saw some big juniper trees over this way,” he said, pointing over his shoulder. “We’ll head there and hole up for a few minutes.”
They trudged onward, sinking at times into the goopy amalgamation of sand and pebbles that divided the panels of slickrock. Mitch paused a few times to wait for lightning illumination to get his bearings. Making it to the cluster of six massive junipers, they crawled under the thick conifers, getting some respite from the sheets of rain still scouring the land.
Mitch dropped his pack and sat down on the thick layer of duff, emitting a shriek. “Dammit,” he yelled, feeling the piercing sensation of cactus spines in his palm.
“Ooh, that’s not good,” said Dev, inspecting the ground around her. “But better you than me.”
“Very funny. How about you go find another grove of trees.” He searched his palm for the spines. Dev sidled up next to him and grabbed his hand, removing the stickers with a quick tug. “I was kidding, Agent Kearns.”
“Mitch will do.” He winced slightly with each removal. Leaning closer, he noticed the pleasant fragrance of her hair. Since his divorce two years ago, his dating life had been non-existent by choice and he had caught himself staring at her athletic figure on more than one occasion. Now here he was being hunted in the wilds during a raging storm with a woman of considerable character and stunning features, and he was having his hand groomed. He remembered she was the daughter of his old mentor and, out of respect and reminding himself of the uncertainty of her future, he yanked his hand back. “Thanks, that feels better.”