Run for Cover

by Michael Ledwidge

  Oh, well. Back to work, he thought as he pulled the silk-smooth trigger and blew the ranger’s beautiful boot to smithereens.

  5

  When the sledgehammer impact of the rifle round struck, Owen Barber had thought his whole right foot had surely been obliterated. But as he looked down at his annihilated boot and counted all five of his wriggling toes, he saw that by some holy miracle, the bullet had only cut a perfect stripe-like groove across the sole of his heel.

  Barber untied what was left of the boot and lay there breathing with a deliberate slowness, trying to calm the mad frantic pumping of his heart. He glanced down at Kit Hagan where she lay with her face pressed into his chest, shivering. He could see that she was still in the black zone, mentally undone with shock.

  Then he glanced over at Sheriff Kirkwood and Agent Braddock where they lay blown to pieces against the rocks.

  No blame there, he thought.

  Barber’s hands squeezed involuntarily, longing for the M4 he had slept with for over a year in the Kush Mountains. What he wouldn’t do for its undermounted M203 grenade launcher right now. Damn had he loved the forty-millimeter grenades, the coppery smell of them, the hollow thunk of loading them, the nothing click of the trigger followed by the distant thunder boom when they landed three hundred meters out.

  If wishes were fragmentary ordnance, he thought, as the woman clutched at him even harder behind their extremely inadequate rock cover.

  Okay, Barber thought, looking up at the still-dark morning sky. You’ve done this before. You’re back on the firebase, and there’s a sniper. What’s the plan?

  First thing was finding where the shots were coming from. Get a grid. Second was getting to his radio. As in Afghanistan, the radio was life.

  That was it. Get a grid. Get to the radio. That was the plan.

  Sit still, you dirty murdering son of a bitch, Barber thought as he wiggled very slowly on his back through the dust toward the sheriff’s body. I’m going to call in an air strike on you.

  “Wait!” Hagen said.

  “It’s okay. Everything’s going to be fine,” Barber said, surprised at the calm in his voice as he reached back as far as he could. He just managed to grab the fallen sheriff’s cell phone with his fingertips.

  He turned it over as he brought it up in front of his face. The video screen was still queued up and the time stamp was still rolling. It had already started recording.

  Good, Barber thought as he tilted just the camera part of it up above the rock and panned it back and forth.

  6

  The shot, when it came a fraction of a second later, shattered a sizeable portion out of the rim of rock just above Barber’s face. It showered the both of them in jagged shards the size of playing cards and covered them in a plume of gray rock dust so fine it was like talc.

  What was this boy shooting? Barber thought coughing. A Howitzer?

  He wiped dust from the screen of the miraculously unharmed phone with a licked thumb and played back the footage.

  “Ah, there you are. Say cheese, jackweed,” he said as he saw the muzzle flash on the screen.

  Barber watched the video again and paused it and zoomed the still. The shooter was behind some rocks up the rim of the hollow to the left of the clearing. He was well back in some good cover with only the barrel showing. It looked like he’d built a little blind or something with the rocks.

  A crazy thought—Barney Rubble goes postal—came into Barber’s head as he unzoomed the still. He gauged the distance. Five hundred yards at least. Plus, you’d have to compensate for the difference in elevation a bit.

  Barney had some skill, Barber thought. Just great.

  Okay, got my grid. Now for the hard part.

  “Okay, Kit. Do you have your service weapon?” Barber said calmly to the agent shivering slightly less now but still attached to him like a tick.

  She immediately handed him something. It was a small backup gun, a Glock 27.

  “How many rounds? Ten?” Barber said.

  “No, eleven. There’s one in the pipe,” the agent said from where her head was pressed against his stomach.

  His Glock 20 had sixteen, and he had another magazine, so they had what? Forty-three?

  Forty-three, he thought biting his lip. That wasn’t a lot.

  What was also not, not, not in their favor was the distance. Five hundred yards plus uphill with a handgun was laughable. Hitting this son of a bitch would be like getting a hole in one with a blindfold on.

  But then again, he just needed to get a few in close to get his jackass head down. Like the agent here was finding out, shooting a gun was one thing. Getting shot at was quite another.

  Besides, what else could they do?

  There was literally no other cover. If he flanked them up along the bowl-like rim of the ridge he was up on, they were toast anyway.

  “Okay, Kit. Take a look at this,” Barber said, showing her the video. “See where this joker is? On our left here? Here’s what we’re doing, Kit. I’m going to shoot at him while you run up the trail back to my truck and call for help. I’m going to shoot four times, spaced out a little. At the fourth shot—or even the third—you run and get to new cover, okay?

  “I’ll wait twenty seconds for you to catch your breath, then shoot four times again. Every time, you have four shots to run. Then you have to put yourself between a rock and this loser on the hill, okay? It sucks, but it’s what we have to do. I’d run myself, but it looks like I’m currently down a boot, and I actually shoot a bit better than I run anyway.”

  “Okay,” Agent Hagen said, forcing a brave smile on her terror-stricken face. She took a deep breath as she moved off him slowly and got up on her knees a little.

  Barber even shocked himself when he reached out and touched her tear-streaked cheek.

  “You got this, Kit,” he said.

  She nodded.

  “Remember, look for cover while you’re running. I’ve got an emergency six-pack in my truck, and in about ten minutes, we’re going to be pouring it over each other’s heads as we mount this son of a bitch to the grille, okay?”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “On three then,” Barber said, slipping his gun out of its holster. “Ready? One...two...”

  7

  Westergaard was still aimed at where the phone had popped up when the gun started going off five feet farther to the right. He ducked down as a bullet strike whined off the rock somewhere not too far below him. When he got back onto the scope again two shots later, he saw the woman twenty feet up the trail, diving behind another rock.

  “Oh, so you guys want to play after all?” the killer said with a smile as he blasted away the top edge of the rock the woman had dived behind.

  He ditched out the first magazine and had just snapped in another when the return pistol fire started again. One of them hit only ten feet down now. There was a blast of four again. The ranger was walking the rounds up the hill. With a handgun no less!

  “Very clever, Ranger Rick,” Westergaard said.

  He waited and when the pistol fire started up the third time, he ignored it and looked up the trail as the female agent ran out from behind cover again. He slid a bead on the woman’s running back and gently squeezed the sleek springy euro trigger.

  The butt of the gun kicked into his shoulder as the round drilled a neat hole through the top part of the yellow F on her FBI raid jacket. She ran on for three more strides and then went down sprawling, arms out and headfirst, like a base runner trying to steal second.

  “You’re out!” the killer said as he shot out the casing.

  When he sighted back on the ranger’s position, he had stopped firing. When the Glock appeared again at the same spot above the rock twenty seconds later, it was right in the center of the reticle.

  He squeezed the trigger. The handgun along with a
spray of blood went airborne.

  There was a long pause before he heard the ranger’s unholy scream.

  “Finally,” Westergaard said, rolling the kinks out of his neck as he stood with the rifle.

  He clambered over some rocks to his right for a hundred yards and lay down and got the attached bipod set and sighted down again.

  He could see the ranger there now completely exposed, clutching at his blown-apart hand.

  He couldn’t get a good head shot because of a pesky jutting rock, but he was able to quickly shoot him once and then twice high in the chest.

  “Game, set, match,” Westergaard mumbled as he watched the ranger’s arms drop.

  As the ranger bled out on the stone, the killer stood and gave him the two-finger-over-the-right-eye Boy Scout salute.

  “Least you tried, brother,” he said.

  Who does that anymore these days?

  It took the killer less than five minutes to scoop his brass and pack his kit and another twenty to clamber down the stones to where the three dead men lay splattered across the clearing.

  He fished the truck keys from the ranger’s bloody khaki pants and found the cell phone and bagged it. He thought about things and took the man’s wallet and badge. Then he went to the others and took their wallets and credentials, as well.

  If this doesn’t blow a lot of minds, he thought to himself with a giddy giggle as he tucked everything away into his knapsack.

  “What in the hell?” he said, halting immediately as he came up level on the part of the trail where the female agent had gone down.

  She wasn’t there.

  He ran over to where there was a huge red ink blot splat on the rocks and quickly tracked the bloody drag trail through the dust to where the trail fell off above the stream.

  No, he thought, looking down at the trees and water far below. The crazy agent had jumped!

  “Damn, damn, damn,” he said as he searched the evergreens and white water with the rifle’s scope.

  He couldn’t see her. He passed a hand through his hair as he lowered the rifle. Now he would have to go down there.

  He checked his watch.

  He didn’t have time for this.

  No, no, he thought after a minute. Calm down. Think, moron. It had to be what? A five-story drop? He had probably heart shot her anyway. Nicked the aorta. Hell, with 250 grain .338 Lapua Magnum boat tail that traveled about a thousand yards a second, nicking a toenail usually did the trick.

  He looked down at the roiling water, then up at the hovering peaks, then down at the water again.

  Get real. She was dead. They were all dead.

  “Get moving,” Westergaard said, finally shouldering the strap of the rifle as he turned.

  PART ONE

  HOME ON THE RANGE

  8

  At seven thirty in the morning, the sun had not yet risen over Carbon County in Eastern Utah. In the distance out the glassless window beside where Gannon sat was a line of the high desert cliffs that were huge and ominous in the predawn dark.

  The fantastic mesa-like vista looked like an advertisement for something, Gannon thought. And then he remembered it.

  It looked like one of the cowboy ads for Marlboro cigarettes they used to have in magazines when he was a kid.

  Welcome to Gannon Country, he thought with a grin.

  He stood and turned from the windowsill and glanced around the second-story room of the abandoned house. The old wood beams above were coated thickly in dust, as were the exposed brick walls.

  The formidable structure had once been the headquarters of a surrounding coal mining operation that had gone bust in the 1950s, he knew. Now its occupants consisted mostly of desert rats and birds.

  And various other strays, he thought as he went over to the cheap leather office chair in the room’s center and sat.

  The old battered green metal office desk in front of it looked army surplus circa WWII. Upon it was a Toshiba laptop that was wired into the old building’s interior and exterior security camera array.

  Gannon clicked at the mouse and brought up the three-by-three rows of screens.

  It was 7:32 a.m. on the button when Gannon detected movement on the uppermost left-hand camera. He put eyes on it just in time to see the tall figure with the rifle emerge from the mountain junipers a hundred fifty yards northwest of the house.

  He made the screen larger. The figure came slowly as he skirted the shadow of the abandoned coal mine’s tall, looming wash plant. But then as he came past the long line of rotting wooden barracks dead west of the house, he sped it up into an almost jog.

  There was a ragged creak in the cheap chair as Gannon leaned forward.

  Beside the computer on the desk was a brown paper bag from which he removed a single banana. He examined it in the computer screen’s bluish glow. Still a tad green but acceptable.

  He broke the stem and peeled some of it back.

  Better early than late when it came to bananas, Gannon thought as he took a bite.

  By the time he had tossed the empty peel into the room’s corner trash can, the figure was less than twenty feet from the house’s north side. He was moving slowly again now, silently heel-to-toe, with his carbine’s buttstock up on his shoulder.

  “Come to papa,” Gannon said with a smile as he drew his sidearm from its thigh holster. Then he lifted a flash-bang grenade out of the milk crate beside the desk and stood.

  Down the stairs, he stood for a moment looking out the old house’s doorless front entry into the cool morning dimness of the outside, listening.

  He couldn’t hear anything, and he had just pulled the grenade’s pin with his teeth and had turned to his right to chuck it into the front room when he heard the footstep behind him.

  That’s when he dropped the flash-bang. It bounced off the hardwood floor and then exploded at his feet at the same exact moment he was shot in the side of his head.

  He staggered around the narrow hall for a second, blinded, his ears ringing despite his earplugs.

  “Dad, Dad, you okay?” Gannon’s son, Declan, said, lowering the rifle as he climbed up the porch.

  Gannon lifted his goggles up onto the skateboard helmet, shaking away the cobwebs. The goggles were critical because the state-of-the art paintball guns they used for the drills were filled with a powerful pellet called Simunition that could take out your eye.

  “No, I’m not all right. Somebody just shot me in the head,” Gannon said, holstering his paintball pistol.

  His son’s face broke into a huge grin.

  “I actually did it!” he said, raising a pumped fist. “I finally did it. I actually got you for once!”

  “Very clever of you running all the way around from the back,” Gannon said. “I thought you were coming in the side window like last time. Nice head fake.”

  “This is unbelievable. Woo-hoo! I just dropped a navy SEAL! I’m invincible!”

  Gannon frowned.

  “Well, sort of,” he said.

  “Sort of?” Declan said, throwing up a frustrated hand. “What? No sort of. I got you for the first time ever. What did I do wrong now? C’mon, this is bull, Dad. I got the drop on you fair and square. You said it yourself. I put one in your head! You’re dead!”

  “But how many times do I have to tell you? It’s twice,” Gannon said.

  “Twice? You can only die once!” Declan cried.

  Gannon walked past him out the door. He took off the helmet and stood in the morning breeze, looking out at the horizon from the old rickety porch. The sky was lighting up now over the still dark endless-seeming desert, and in the far distance the top of the Utah-side Book Cliffs were now glowing with a pale gold light.

  “To the head, son,” Gannon finally said. “To the head.”

  “To the head?”

  Gannon t
urned back as he pointed a finger gun at his temple and double tapped.

  “When you shoot a man, remember, it’s double or nothing. Never pull the trigger once, son. Always twice.”

  9

  When Kit Hagen woke with an electric-like charge of shock, she found herself cold and soaked and tangled up in brush with turbulent water rushing and roaring in her ears.

  She was just about to start roaring herself when the gargantuan tree branch that she was using as a flotation device finally popped free from the rocks it had gotten caught on.

  Then she was free flowing again, spinning sideways back out into the fast-running greenish-brown mountain river.

  Every time she was about to completely fade out of consciousness, the cold metallic smell of the fresh river water in her nostrils would jog her awake again. As she breathed it in and out, a happy childhood memory began to form. They were on vacation somewhere, and she was on an inner tube beside her older brother and sister and daddy when they all suddenly started singing. It was the theme song from that hilariously stupid Saturday morning TV show, Land of the Lost, and they all sang it together with gusto as they went merrily down the stream.

  “Marshall, Will, and Holly,” Kit mumbled facedown as she floated along, “on a routine expedition...”

  Her voice trailed off as her eyes fell closed again. She listened to the soft gurgling sound of the water. So soothing, so tranquilizing, so serene.

  Maybe she should stop fighting it, she thought. Daddy was here. She could sleep. It was okay. Daddy would take care of her. She could go to sleep, go down where it was safe and cool and Daddy and—

  “No!” she suddenly yelled as her eyes shot back open.

  Sharp pain pierced her entire left side as she tried to adjust herself a little on the huge floating branch she’d found after hitting the water. She looked to her left. The high bank she was passing was edged in rough gray rock. Beyond it were more rocks and brush sliding past on a tan-colored endless wilderness shoreline.