Eventually we drove into a small gulch, similar in appearance to where we parked two nights ago. One side of the small, narrow valley was sheer enough to put the Suburban into complete shadow.
"This will be our base of operations for the next couple of days,” Richard said. “Then, we'll move on to another spot."
We got out of the Suburban and dropped the tailgate. We removed our packs and our guns, along with a healthy amount of ammunition. We also changed into sets of lightweight desert camouflage and military-style desert boots. Our gear, a mix of military, paramilitary, and civilian, was intended to give us the look of militiamen or even tactical law enforcement types on a training exercise.
"If we run into any nosy locals or pestering cops, you leave things to me. Do not try anything clever, just follow my lead completely," Richard said.
"Understood."
We climbed out of our little gulch and walked into the rocky, broken ground to the north of where we parked. The terrain was an endless panorama of hardscrabble rocks, ground fissures, hills, buttes, and valleys. As we walked, Richard began to explain to me why were were here.
"You're going to be operating a lot in the city, and when you look at the modern urban landscape from a structural perspective, it has a lot in common with a rocky desert like this. The terrain is broken, the shadows are sharp and deep, and there isn't a lot of soft cover or concealment. Any target in line of sight is probably a clear shot, while if you can't see the target, the obstruction is impenetrable, most likely a building, a solid car body, or some other hard object. In addition, when it comes to sniping, you have to be aware of how cross winds coming out of alleys and intersecting streets are going to affect the bullet's flight path. The best way to simulate this behavior away from the city is out here, where there's plenty of wind moving through these valleys and gulches."
"All right, all of that seems sensible," I replied.
"Because of this, learning how to find cover, lines of sight, and how to maneuver out here among the hills and valleys is as good a simulation of working in the city as you're going to get."
"That also makes sense to me,” I said. “The ridges and buttes are buildings, the valleys and fissures are streets and alleyways. Boulders are like cars, the dips and rises here and there are similar to curbs and other city features."
"Right. You silhouette yourself along the top of a ridge trying to make a shot down into a valley, ain't no different from silhouetting yourself on the rooftop of some apartment building, trying to get a shot down into the street. Instead of seeing the desert here, you need to train your mind to see a city instead."
And so, that's what we did. For the next few days, I trained myself to see not a rocky desert landscape, but an urban cityscape. Richard taught me how to approach a cliff edge in order to peer down below while presenting the smallest possible silhouette. We practiced how to fire and maneuver from one position to the next, picking our shooting locations ahead of time to make best use of the available fields of fire and the cover they provided.
For targets, Richard would bring along a bag of those red apples he bought, and while I looked away, Richard would hurl one down into the valley floor. I would then have to spot the "target" and then "kill" it with a single shot. The hardest part was actually finding the apple. Sometimes, Richard would throw it into a spot where it wasn't visible unless I moved to the other side of the valley, at which point we would work on techniques for rappelling down off the side of a rock face to the ground below and then climbing back up on the other side of the valley.
In order to make sure I didn't grow too familiar with any one location, we would often pack up and hike down a valley or cross-country to another valley entirely. During these transitions, Richard would move ahead of me and I would have to stalk him, staying within a distance of about two hundred meters. Richard would move in an erratic fashion, stopping and starting suddenly, speeding up to a jog or slowing to a crawl. Often, Richard would turn with little or no notice to see if he could spot me, and I had to try and get into cover before I was seen, while still being able to follow after him. Whenever he spotted me, Richard would give a short blast on a plastic whistle he had brought with him to let me know I was seen.
When we would get to our destination, Richard often made me move up onto the valley's ridge to one side or the other, and instruct me to circle around him at a set distance, again without being spotted or heard. Whenever I had to get myself down off the rocky ledges and cross the valley floor, then make my way back up onto the opposite side, Richard would inevitably see me, and give me a blast from his whistle.
That damn whistle would taunt me in my dreams for a long time to come.
By the end of every day, I was completely exhausted. The previous week, while we would run, exercise, and shoot out in the open, we would eat our meals in the shade of the cabin, and breaks were plentiful. While there was a certain level of exertion, especially later in the first week when I would fire while on the move, I didn't go terribly far.
But out in the desert, we were constantly on the move; hiking, climbing, crawling, lying down, getting up, crouching, jumping, rappelling, jogging, sprinting, and hiking some more. We were also carrying our weapons, ammunition, food, water, climbing gear, and other supplies with us all day long, only returning to the Suburban's hiding place as the sun started to go down. Once back at our base camp, Richard and I would make our evening meal using a small gas camping stove rather than a real fire, to prevent the risk of any tell-tale smoke or firelight being noticed by someone from a distance, even down in the gulch where we were largely hidden from view. Furthermore, with the little gas stove, there were no ashes or burnt wood to hide when breaking camp.
"The best operators are like pro-environment hikers,” Richard explained. “You carry out of the field everything you bring in, so there is as little evidence of your presence as possible. The more you leave for the forensics team after an operation, the more information they will gain about you, and the easier it becomes for the authorities to tie you to other operations. It might be bad to get busted for one operation, but you don't want to get linked to them all."
The afternoon of the third day, while moving to a new location, Ricard suddenly stopped ahead of me. Thinking he was going to turn around, I hid myself and waited. After a few moments, poking my head out from behind the rock I was using for cover, I saw that Richard was standing on a small boulder, waving me up. I presumed he wanted to show me something, but as I began to walk ahead, he motioned for me to approach with stealth.
It took me several minutes to make my way to his position. Richard had slipped down off the boulder, and he pointed ahead of us.
"Take a peek around the boulder, get your carbine up, and look for some movement."
The DeLisle at the ready, I eased myself around the boulder and looked down the narrow valley through the scope, breaking the terrain down into segments and scanning each individually for movement or a tell-tale target like Richard had taught me.
After a few moments, I saw what he must have meant. A big, lean desert hare was tucked next to a large slab of rock, perhaps twenty five meters away, nibbling at something.
"It's a big jackrabbit," I said.
"I caught him out of the corner of my eye," Richard said, "and so I tossed him a piece of apple to keep him occupied. Take him."
I looked back at Richard, frowning. "You want me to shoot the rabbit?"
"Yup. Blow his little bunny brains out."
"You're fucking with me."
"I am not, in fact, fucking with you. Waste the damn rabbit."
"I don't want to kill the poor guy, you just fed him an apple. That seems cruel."
Richard pulled me aside behind the boulder and leaned in close. He seemed almost as angry with me now as he did the night we attacked the meth lab.
"Look here, son. That's just a dumb rabbit out there. It is not a struggling single mother raising a family, nor is it going to go on and cure cancer some d
ay. The most important thing that rabbit will ever do it its life is possibly make a few more rabbits, and then eventually fill the belly of some lucky coyote. As sad it it might make you feel because you've been raised in a world where no one kills what they eat anymore, that creature only exists to be killed and eaten so that the lucky predator can go on to live another day. Do you hear what I am saying?"
I nodded.
Richard gently pushed me back towards the edge of the boulder. "You need to get over the hurdle of killing something with that carbine. Take the shot. If that rabbit possessed the power of understanding human speech, and you explained to it why you're out here and what you hope to accomplish, I think the rabbit would understand, even if it didn't like going into tonight's cookpot."
I peeked around the edge of the boulder. The rabbit had finished eating the piece of apple Richard had thrown, and was sitting under the edge of the rock slab, ears up, nose wiggling as it sniffed the air for predators. Leaning into the boulder for support, I settled the crosshairs on the rabbit's center mass, and with all possible care and patience, squeezed the trigger until it gave.
The rabbit tumbled across the ground in a tangle of slack limbs and a puff of dusty gray fur.
Walking over to the rabbit's corpse, I saw it was killed instantly. The bullet had caught it in the torso right behind its foreleg, destroying the rabbit's heart and lungs before blowing out the other side.
Looking at the sky and then checking his watch, Richard jerked his thumb back in the direction we had come from.
"Lets head back to the truck and get this fellow in the pot."
Richard made me carry the carcass by its legs the entire way.
Once back at camp, Richard drew a knife from his belt. "Have you ever skinned an animal before?" he asked.
"Nope."
"Of course you haven’t, how stupid of me. Time for you to learn."
The deed only took a few minutes. The rabbit weighed just a couple of pounds, and Richard walked me through the process of gutting and skinning the rabbit with a few cuts of his knife. The task of pulling away the rabbit’s pelt was something akin to pulling a furry sock off a boiled chicken.
I promptly turned and threw up in the dirt.
"Last week you shot a man in the face and didn't so much as blink," Richard said.
"Yeah, but I didn't skin his corpse afterward."
Nevertheless, the rabbit stew was delicious.
Two days later, we found ourselves on the edge of a ridge, preparing to move to another location. Suddenly, Richard brought up his AR-15 and scanned the next ridge over, some four hundred meters away.
"What is it?" I asked.
"Hiker. Male, looks young, probably around your age. Civilian dress, no weapon visible. Probably just out for a day trip. There's a road a few miles to the west. That might be where he's coming from."
I looked through my carbine's scope, and could make out the tiny figure striding along the next ridge.
Richard put his hand out for the carbine and offered me the AR, with its better scope. "Here, take a better look."
The subject jumped into view. I could see he was a young man, fit, with a backpack and baseball cap. He definitely had the look of a casual hiker enjoying the late spring weather before it got unreasonably hot later in the season.
"Yeah, I see him,” I said. “You're right, probably just a hiker."
"Take him."
I brought down the rifle and looked at Richard. "Now you really have to be fucking kidding me."
Richard shook his head. "You need some experience taking shots from this range. You haven't used the AR yet, but it shoots like a dream. Just adjust the scope and put one in him. The round is still lethal out to that range. If you just clip him, you can finish him off quick with a follow-up."
"Richard, you're insane. I'm not shooting some guy just hiking out in the desert."
Richard slung the DeLisle and crossed his arms over his chest, leaning in close like he always did when trying to prove a point.
"How do you know that's just 'some guy'? What if he beats his girlfriend? What if he molests his baby brother? What if he sells meth out of his dorm room? None of us are as innocent as we'd like to think. I'm willing to bet that dummy's done something in his life that warrants sixty grains of copper-jacketed lead through the ten-ring."
I was disgusted. "I see where you're heading, and that bullshit isn't going to work this time. It shouldn't have worked last time, but I am willing to admit that what we did was, if not necessary...well I can live with it. Those were definitely bad guys. But this is just some stranger out for a hike. Maybe he deserves a bullet and maybe he doesn't, but I have no evidence to support your theory."
I held out the AR to Richard.
"You're so eager to see him drop, you take the shot," I said.
Richard stared daggers at me for a moment, then snatched the AR from my hand in a blur. Bringing the rifle up in one smooth motion, Richard lined up the shot and squeezed the trigger.
The rifle clicked.
Richard looked at me out of the corner of his eye.
"You asshole," I said. “There’s nothing in the chamber.”
Richard brought the rifle down from his shoulder, held it up so I could see the receiver, and drew back the bolt. A gleaming 5.56 NATO cartridge jumped from the chamber and tumbled at me. I caught the cartridge out of the air and looked at it. The primer was dented, and a quick shake let me know there was powder in the case.
"Must have been a dud round," Richard said.
"Dud round my ass. We’ve been shooting for two weeks, and we’ve never once had a dud round. I think you doctored the bullet."
Richard shrugged and snapped the AR-15’s bolt back into place. “That ammo’s been sitting down in my cache a long while. There’s always the first time for a dud.”
I stared incredulously at Richard. “And if it wasn’t? What would you have done if I’d shot that guy? Would it have been another ‘life lesson’ for me to learn? How to deal with killing innocent people?”
Richard gave me one of his hard looks. "The 'life lesson' here is that killing’s a slippery slope. I've seen men, good men, tumble down that slope. First you kill out of self-preservation, then you're killing for God and country, and before you know it, you're killing out of fun and amusement. Maybe you come up with some kind of cockamamie story like I was feeding you just now in order to justify the killing to yourself, at least at first. But as time goes on, even that charade falls away. Eventually, you're just a rabid dog in need of a bullet."
I pointed at the AR-15 in Richard's hands. "And if I’d pulled the trigger? Then what?"
Richard narrowed his eyes and put his hand on the butt of his Delta Elite. "Like I said. A rabid dog in need of a bullet."
“And what about you?” I asked. “You pulled the fucking trigger yourself. What am I supposed to think of you?”
Richard slung the rifle over his shoulder and began walking again.
“I’ve done a lot worse,” he said.
I looked down at the cartridge in my hand, and threw it into the desert.
TWELVE
Before dawn the next morning we policed our campsite one more time, hung Richard's "road rake" from the trailer hitch of the Suburban, and drove out of the desert. I hadn't slept all that well during the night. Several times I had woken up after dreams that ended in either the rabbit or the lone hiker being blown away by yours truly. The dreams ending with the rabbit bothered more because I knew it wasn't a fantasy.
Why did it bother me so much? Mankind had hunted for food since before you could call us "Mankind". We were omnivores, we ate meat. All acknowledgments towards the beneficent path of vegetarianism aside, Man had grown big and strong on a diet high in protein and fat derived from animal meat. Some of our earliest tools doubled as weapons used for hunting, and some of our earliest technological achievements had revolved around how to kill game, be it with spears, clubs, darts, knives, nets, or some other method to
arm our relatively weak primate bodies and give us a predatory edge.
But Richard had been right; those of us living in the 21st century never had a need to kill and eat our own food. How many Americans had seen a dead animal that wasn't a deceased family pet or some anonymous smear of roadkill? How many Americans had seen an animal die in front of their eyes, or done the deed themselves, and then gutted, skinned, butchered, prepared, and eaten that animal mere hours later? I knew hunting was still alive and well, but to the average white-collar urbanite such as myself, the activity bordered on the grotesque. Who needs to do such a thing? If I wanted to eat a wild animal, I could order wild game meat from my local butcher.
I remembered coming across a passage in one of my western civilization textbooks about why certain cultures came more easily to "real" violence, as opposed to the ritualized "show" violence that many primitive cultures practiced. An early theory had been because the diets of the more violent cultures was more heavily supplemented in meat and dairy, that this food and the "animal hormones" it contained made those people bigger and more aggressive.
But another theory refuted this claim, noting that it was not the diet that granted those cultures their advantages, but the actual practice of herding and butchering animals. Herders who worked together to move and control large masses of animals practiced communication, coordination, and tactical control of the land that aided them on the battlefield. Beyond this, a people who were used to the act of killing large mammals, of seeing and smelling large pools of blood, of butchering game and seeing raw meat laid open; these cultures were much more able to handle the visceral shocks to the senses that came from the horrors of close-quarters combat, something that set truly violent cultures apart from their posturing counterparts.
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