Arriving back at the ranch late in the morning, Mackenzie and Column returned from Glendale with a truckload of gear. The back of Hausmann’s pickup was full of huge rectangular black nylon bags.
“Damn, Column,” Reaper said. “I send you out to do some shopping and you come back with the whole damned store!”
“It’s fun going out with someone else’s credit card,” Column said with a big grin on his face.
Each pair of tactical operations bags held a full operator’s kit. Everything needed to fully outfit one man from the underwear out was in the kits. Boots, body armor, flight suits, gloves, knee and elbow pads, flashlights, spare batteries, a high-quality gas mask, a chemical/biological protection oversuit, individual medical kit, even sunscreen was included in the kits. The only major items missing were communications, weapons, ammunition, and munitions. There was even a SpecOps cold-weather clothing kit that included socks in the package—though the men didn’t think they would be using the rest of the clothing from the cold-weather kits, at least not for this operation.
Everyone lent a hand in carrying the bags in from the truck. The gear was piled up in the poolroom, which was rapidly turning into the staging area for their operations. Diamondback Tactical had placed numbered tags on the cases to match them up with each other, and identify the contents as to size according to the list Column had supplied.
A welcome addition to the gear pile were the Garmin 120 radios and extra batteries that Column had brought. In addition, he had picked up a tactical team rappelling kit to augment the equipment Reaper had used the day before. This kit made sure that both Reaper and Hausmann would have a full rappelling harness, rope, and rope bag for their part of the mission.
The last thing Mackenzie brought out was a large sealed box that had been hand-delivered to him by a courier. The man had been waiting in a rented car at Diamondback Tactical until Mackenzie showed up. Then he personally transferred the box and completed his mission. When Reaper cut the seals with his Emerson knife and opened the box, the contents were sobering.
Admiral Straker had sent them two AN/VDR-2 radiac instruments. These were lightweight survey meters and dosimeters. The pouches the devices came in could fit on a belt or on the back of an assault vest. The probes attached by a coiled wire to the meters would detect very low levels of radiation when properly set. Instructions came with the meters along with spare batteries and six more devices.
Each man in the room received one of the six AN/UDT-13 radiac sets that had been delivered by the courier. The sets were smaller than a paperback book and came adjusted to sound an audible alarm if there was a radiation source nearby. They would also keep a record of the radiation dose the user had received.
The idea of facing hard radiation was a scary one. Each of the men around the room had faced danger at multiple times in their lives. But normally, that danger was a man with a weapon that they could fight back against. Radiation was silent, unseen, and deadly. They were all from the generation that had lived through the nuclear menace of the Cold War. Now, they were very likely going to be facing a new version of that nuclear menace, one designed to poison and spoil, not blast suddenly to eternity.
“This makes it about as real as it gets guys,” Reaper said as he laid the devices out on the kitchen table. “We have enough gear to carry as it stands. Washington wouldn’t have sent this equipment if they didn’t feel we had a real chance of finding something. Warrick, Mackenzie, and I are in this for the long haul, pretty much no matter what. Manors, Column, and Hausmann, you three are strictly volunteers. You can back out now and there won’t be any hard feelings at all. Glowing in the dark is not something you signed on for.”
The banter and joking the guys had been doing among themselves earlier was noticeably absent in the room. All of them had been given military training at one time or another regarding radiation exposure. It was an insidious poison that couldn’t be seen. And it killed slowly and painfully. They looked at one another, no man knowing the others’ thoughts but suspecting that they were all thinking about the same concerns. No one wanted to face the danger, but no one felt they could back away.
The answer Reaper received from everyone in the room was direct and straightforward. It was a quiet group of men who each reached out and picked up one of the devices. After glancing at the boxes, each man put the device into his shirt pocket. It was an eloquent answer to Reaper’s question, in spite of the fact that not a word had been spoken.
The rest of the gear was broken out of the bags and Column and Manors started setting up their pouches and Predator Level 3a armored assault vests according to their own preferences. Hausmann headed back to the vault to finish up there before he began setting up his gear. There were ammunition boxes and magazines he wanted to pull out for the rest of the team to use.
After going over the gear and paperwork for a few minutes, Reaper headed out to the vault to lend Hausmann a hand. He found Hausmann and Warrick deep in conversation about some of the hardware that was in the room. They didn’t even notice Reaper standing in the doorway, or at least Warrick gave no sign of seeing him. With a long rectangular box on the floor in front of him, Hausmann was standing with his back to the door.
“My dad was only seventeen years old when he fought with the Marines against the Japanese on Iwo Jima,” Hausmann was saying. “He carried a hell of a weapon, literally, an M2A1 flamethrower. Said it was the best weapon the Marine foot soldier had to get the Japanese when they were dug into caves and emplacements. Just a couple of years ago, both the Army and the Navy were looking at resurrecting flamethrowers for use in Afghanistan against al-Qaeda and Taliban forces in caves. I think we can put one to good use on this operation.”
“Yeah,” Reaper said, stepping into the vault, “but a flamethrower is a heavy weapon to carry. And a bitch to maneuver with quickly, as well. I’m sure your dad told you that, too.”
“Oh, he did,” Hausmann said, turning to include Reaper in the conversation. “He told me that he hated dragging those twin fuel tanks and gas tank on his back. Made him feel like a big target waiting to go up like a barbecue. Which is why I’m not suggesting I bring one of those along. This is a different animal, though.”
Flipping the latches on the long box on the floor, Hausmann opened the lid. Lying in the box was a strange-looking weapon, if it was a weapon. The device was black and made of some kind of plastic or fiber material. When Reaper crouched down and touched it, it was hard but didn’t really feel solid. More than anything, the device looked like a six-inch-thick black tube folded over on itself in a hairpin bend, half of a gigantic paperclip. There was a cover over the squared-off ends of the tube. A shoulder strap was secured to buckles at both ends of the weapon.
“Okay, I give up,” Reaper said. “What is it?”
“It’s an M8 portable one-shot flamethrower,” Hausmann said. “It’s reloadable or you can throw it away. They were developed from a late–World War II design and were only issued for a short time to the Marine Corps and the Army in the 1950s and early 1960s.
“It doesn’t have a pressure tank, there’s a gas-generating cartridge that fires when you pull the trigger. At the same time an igniter cartridge fires for the load. The whole weapon is only about a yard long and less than a foot wide. Weighs twenty-six pounds loaded with two gallons of thickened gasoline. And it will throw that napalm out to between fifty-five and sixty-five meters range for four seconds.
“I’ve had fresh ignition and gas cartridges specially loaded for it by my friends at the All Custom Firearms shop in Sierra Vista. There’s a can of the powder to make the napalm for it there in the box.”
“And you want to take it along on the operation?” Reaper said.
“Like my dad said, best thing for fighting caves and tunnels,” Hausmann said. “Besides, it doesn’t weigh but a few pounds more than an M60 machine gun, and I carried one of them often enough.”
“Yeah, but I’ll bet your dad wasn’t talking about using it again
st a cave he was standing in,” Reaper said. “Bring it along, if you want. If it slows you down, we can always cache it somewhere.”
“It won’t slow me down,” Hausmann said. “Besides, it doesn’t look like a single-shot weapon, at least not to anyone looking at the working end.”
“So,” Reaper said.
“Even al-Qaeda won’t willingly face a flamethrower,” Hausmann said. “That’s damned near insane. Touch this baby off and after people see it fire, they can’t throw down their weapons and put their hands up fast enough if you point it at them.”
“You can’t argue with that,” Warrick said.
“No,” Reaper said, “and I wouldn’t argue with a torch myself. So get it ready, if you’re going to carry it. We jock-up and load the gear for a noon launch at the latest. The temperature outside is already getting close to the nineties and it’s going to be a hot day. Make sure your hydration containers are full and tell the others the same thing.”
Reaper’s “hot day” prediction was looking to be right on the money. Actually none of the four men were really suffering from the heat, but it was hot in Southern Arizona this year. The dry heat didn’t feel very bad to Mackenzie or Warrick, they had just come down from Northern Michigan where the humidity could be the real killer when it got hot. But everyone had to be protected from the sun and heat. The only really good thing that Reaper could see from the weather was that the cloudless blue sky and scorching sun would keep most people indoors wherever possible. And it would make the normal Mexican siesta time between 1:00 and 4:00 P.M. even more popular. If they were lucky, they could literally catch the people sleeping down at the hacienda.
The gear was reduced to a single tactical accessory bag for each man. That, combined with all of the heavy weapons, ammunition, and the fact that both Prowlers were going, meant that they would have to take both available pickups. Manors’s truck would be able to carry the Prowler that he was going to use. An additional advantage was that Manors had a radio in his truck that picked up the Border Patrol frequencies. That could help them as they approached the border crossing.
Weapons and equipment had been strapped to the front and rear decks of both Prowlers. The weapons carrier with Mackenzie, Warrick, and Column was going to be pretty heavily loaded since it also carried the Mark 19, tripod, mount, and Warrick’s rifles. So all but one of the heavy ammunition cans went on Manors’s vehicle. The last belt of 40mm grenades and its can went with the gun to ensure that there was at least some ammunition always with it on the same vehicle.
The explosives and packs that Reaper and Hausmann would take with them were on the truck with the armed Prowler. Column would ride with them to the dropoff point near the Heart Ranch. For this insertion, Reaper and Hausmann would have to walk the whole way to the Blue Star mine. Remembering the incident in the barn, Reaper was hoping that the heat of the afternoon would keep the reptiles in the sanctuary under their rocks and in their dens.
Everyone had abandoned the flight suits that came with the operators kits and were wearing 5.11 khaki tactical shirts and trousers. If they were stopped by law enforcement, the khakis would look a lot more normal than sage flight suits. That might be enough to get them past a sheriff’s deputy without him asking to look under the tarps covering the beds of the pickups. The Prowlers and all of the gear would be a little difficult to explain.
Finally, every magazine was loaded and slipped in a pouch, every piece of gear checked and rechecked. Warrick had tested the zero on all of his rifles before packing them for the insertion. The TTR-700 was so quiet it was hard to notice when he fired it. The Chandler M40A3 was a loud enough normal rifle. But the muzzle blast from the Barrett .50-caliber rifle was massive.
Warrick only fired three rounds to check the weapon, but the echoes of the shots rang out down the riverbed and across the desert. For each blast, the triangular muzzle break threw part of the propellant gases back and to the side. Anyone standing next to Warrick would have found themselves hit by the wave of sound and gas, as if they were slapped on the whole front of their body by a big wet towel. The noise drowned out the sound of the nearly six-inch-long spent cartridges flying out of the ejection port and bouncing on the gravel. The dogs jumped up and barked their disapproval with each roar of the powerful Barrett.
For his weapons, Reaper was armed with a much smaller and quieter selection than Warrick was using. He had his M4A1 and customized Springfield Armory M1911A1. Inside his shirt he had the suppressed Glock 26 with the Gemtech Aurora suppressor. Over the 5.11 tactical shirt, Reaper had on the Predator tactical-level 3A armored vest. The vest was covered with the ammunition and gear pouches he had attached to the MOLLE (modular lightweight load-carrying equipment) attachment points that lined the outside surface of the Predator.
The vest would stop most submachine gun and handgun projectiles. To increase the armor level to stop rifle-caliber bullets, Reaper inserted the Cercom-enhanced ballistic plate that came with the kit. Now at least his chest was protected from hits by 7.62 and 5.56mm ball rounds.
The four magazine pouches were filled with three thirty-round magazines each for his M4A1. The twenty-eight rounds in each magazine plus the one in the weapon gave him 364 rounds for the carbine. Three magazines for the M1911A1 gave him an additional twenty-four rounds of firepower. The pistol was in a Safariland tactical holster strapped to his thigh. One of the M183 demolition kits along with the AN/VDR-2 radiac instrument went into the three-day assault pack on his back. The additional rappelling gear went in the same bag except for the harness that Reaper strapped around his waist. Other gear was secured in pouches and pockets on his vest and in his pants.
The rest of the men outfitted themselves in much the same way as Reaper had. Hausmann was carrying his MP5A3 with a dozen thirty-round magazines in his pouches and his Gemtech Raptor in a pouch if he needed it later. Manors had laid aside his Benelli shotgun for one of the M4/M203A1 carbines that Mackenzie and Warrick had brought with them. Mackenzie was using the other M4/M203 combination. Column decided against carrying a shoulder weapon. Instead, he would use the M240B 7.62mm machine gun or the Mark 19 grenade launcher as his main weapon.
The last weapon to go in the back of the pickup was Hausmann’s M8 flamethrower. The rest of the guys were impressed when he told them just what it was, and what it could do. None of them could think of a more horrible weapon to face in combat.
With their weapons secured in the backs of the trucks, the men climbed into the cabs. The only special preparation that had been done by any of them for a worst-case scenario was that Hausmann had contacted a friend of his to come and take care of his dogs and livestock if anything happened to him. Reaper and his men had made their final arrangements a long time before. Since Manors was an active law-enforcement officer, he faced the possibility of not going home every day.
For his final instructions, Column’s were the simplest of all. He had no one to leave anything to, so the instructions he had standing in place were to give a hell of a party at the best of his clubs in order to send him on his way.
Chapter Twenty-five
Both trucks left the Dogbone Ranch and headed south together. The drive to the dropoff point was quiet. Each man rode in the crowded cabs of the two trucks keeping council with his own thoughts. The pickup with Mackenzie, Warrick, and Column on board pulled over to the side of the road and parked in a grove of trees. The truck was well concealed from any curious eyes that might pass on the road. With the other pickup safely hidden, Manors drove Reaper and Hausmann to their insertion point.
Instead of going in along the same road they had already used twice, Reaper had chosen a smaller, unpaved road that ran along the eastern border of the reptile sanctuary. The same stream that they had followed before crossed under the road they were on. Pulling off the road, Manors had no trouble driving the four-wheel-drive truck along the almost-dry streambed. Finally, he came to a bend in the stream that Reaper pointed out; he had marked the spot on the overlay he had done for
the satellite map.
“This is the spot,” Reaper said, “drop us off here and turn the truck around. We won’t go on until we’re sure you can head back.”
“Okay,” Manors said. There wasn’t very much more to say at that point.
Taking their packs and tactical bags from the bed of the pickup, Reaper and Hausmann geared up while Manors turned the truck around. It took a little maneuvering, but he soon had the truck pointed back in the direction they had come from. For the trip in, Manors had kept the truck in two-wheel drive. If he got stuck, then he could switch into four-wheel to get himself out.
The truck now had the best chance of getting back to the other men. For Reaper and Hausmann, this meant a great deal as the Prowlers on the truck were there as planned fire support and backup. If things completely went to hell, the Prowlers would be able to carry Reaper and Hausmann back to the border along with everyone else. It would be a rough ride, but a whole lot better than walking.
“Okay,” Reaper said to Manors, “it’s 1315 hours. You’ve got ninety minutes to get into position on the ridge line overlooking the hacienda. We’re going to be in place at the mouth of the Crystal mine by 1445 hours and contact you by radio. If you don’t hear from us by 1530 hours, you’re free to move in on your own.”
“Okay,” Manors said, “good luck to you.”
Snapping his M4A1 to the Chalker attachment point on his Predator vest, Reaper turned to start up the hillside to the fence line. Hausmann slipped the shoulder strap of the flamethrower over his head and across his shoulder. His MP5A3 was already attached to the shackle of his Chalker attachment and hung down from his chest. He moved out after Reaper. Sitting in the truck, Manors watched them climb up the hill and out of sight before he drove off.
Hostile Borders Page 24