there will come a day
When the colt must be taught to feel
The lash that falls,
and the curb that galls,
and the sting of the rowelled heel.”
—Rudyard Kipling
The first eighty miles of the drive to Utah were uneventful. Life in the Clearwater River valley was obviously getting back to normal. There were cultivated fields and signs of regular commerce from Orofino through Kamiah and Kooskia. Grangeville was humming with activity. Large portions of the Camas Prairie were back under the plow. South of Grangeville, just below the White Bird hill, there was a large washout that had taken out all of one lane of the highway, and most of the other. Dan stopped the Bronco, got out, locked in the forward hubs, and shifted into four-wheel drive. It took an extra ten minutes to creep along what was left of the road, with Kevin guiding on foot. Two hours later they came upon three burned-out cars clustered together. This again forced them to slow down. Dan and T.K., who had encountered an ambush under similar circumstances, were both nervous until they were well clear of the cars. As they drove away from the wreck, Dan commented, “Oh maaaan, a little pucker factor there!”
Several of the small towns south of Grangeville were burned to the ground.
Others appeared undamaged but abandoned. There was no rhyme or reason to the destruction. Scenes of total ruin were within line of sight of buildings that looked like they were transacting business as usual.
For their overnight layover, they selected a spot two miles off of Highway 95, just above New Meadows, near the Hell’s Canyon National Recreation Area. They parked the Bronco on a low-tree-shrouded knoll just off one of the gravel access roads to the Hell’s Canyon Park. After parking the truck, they covered its headlights and windows with burlap and erected the camouflage net above it.
They made their camp some two hundred yards away, in a clump of even thicker trees. From this spot they could just barely discern the outline of the truck beneath the camouflage net. They positioned their sleeping bags like spokes of a wheel, with their feet almost touching. Because it was a relatively secure spot, they opted for one man guarding while the other two slept. They traded off this guard duty every three hours. Because of his night vision, Kevin got the midnight-to-3 a.m. shift.
After awakening at 6 a.m. and eating an MRE apiece for breakfast, they cautiously approached the truck, looking for any signs that it had been disturbed. They found none. Taking down and restowing the camouflage net took only a few minutes. Kevin and T.K. worked while Dan provided security.
They were back on the road at 6:40 a.m. Halfway between Wendell and Jerome, Idaho, they encountered a roadblock. It consisted of a pair of pickup trucks parked bumper-to-bumper across a cut through a hill. Six men stood around the roadblock, armed with a variety of rifles and shotguns. They wore an odd mix of civilian clothes, digital ACUs, and BDUs. As soon as he saw the roadblock, Kevin hit the brakes, sending the Bronco skidding to a halt. A hundred yards away at the roadblock, a man with shoulder-length hair and holding an M1 carbine yelled, “You’ll have to pay your toll before you can pass here!”
“This is a public highway, sir!” T.K. shouted in reply.
“Not anymore, it’s not. You owe us half of the gas you are carrying.”
Sounding emphatic, T.K. yelled in reply, “Oh no, we don’t. We’re not paying you any ‘toll.’”
The man at the barricade answered with a quick shot from his carbine. The next few seconds brought a dizzying roar of sensations. Bullets fired by the ambushers whizzed by. A few were heard hitting the Bronco’s roll cage. Dan Fong was struck by a bullet in his left shoulder, but it was stopped successfully by his Kevlar vest. T.K. and Dan fired rapidly in reply. Together, they fired more than forty rounds. They saw two of the bandits go down. Meanwhile, Kevin sent the Bronco roaring backward. The four surviving bandits ran out from behind the barricade, firing their weapons wildly. After he had backed up five hundred yards, Kevin again slammed on the brakes, and turned the Bronco around to continue their escape in a more conventional manner.
More than a half-mile away from the roadblock, the road followed the contour of a hundred-foot-high hill. After topping the hill, T.K. motioned to Kevin to pull over.
The truck came to a stop on the shoulder of the road, halfway down the reverse slope of the hill. After Kevin turned off the engine, T.K. avowed, “I think I can take them.”
Dan asked, “What? From here?”
T.K. replied, “It’s possible. ‘Standoff’ engagements are the best, you know.”
After taking a few deep breaths, he asked, “So Fong man, can I borrow your McMillan?”
“Suuuure,” Dan answered. With that, he hopped out of the Bronco’s backseat and pulled out the McMillan’s waterproof plastic Pelican carrying case.
Opening the case, Fong lifted the rifle with an audible grunt, and inserted a six-round magazine of hand-loaded match ammunition, and handed the twenty-six-pound rifle to T.K.
Kennedy declared, “I like it!” as he chambered a loose round, leaving the magazine full, and clicked on the rifle’s safety.
T.K. walked up the hill until he was near its crest. From there he inched along in high crawl position, with the rifle cradled in his arms. The weight and the bulk of the large rifle made this a slow process. Upon reaching the crest of the hill, he extended the rifle’s bipod legs, flipped open the scope covers, and began to scan the area where they had been ambushed. As this was going on, Dan and Kevin crawled up until they too could just see over the ridge top. They each carried a spare loaded magazine for the McMillan.
Tossing a bit of dry grass in the air as he had done at countless high-power matches, T.K. judged the wind. He complained, “Darn, I wish I had a windage table for .50 Browning. I’ll just have to guesstimate.” Getting ready for his first shot seemed to take forever. First, he made several adjustments to the bipod.
Then he squirmed around trying to get into a comfortable prone position. He tried placing his cheek on the stock several times before he found a position that was both comfortable and provided the full field of view through the rifle’s ten-power Leupold scope. Next, he concentrated on getting himself relaxed and controlling his breathing. Then, and only then, did he pick his primary and secondary targets.
“I’ll spot for you,” Dan said, as he pulled out his binoculars. Dan lay propped up on his elbows, peering through the rubber-armored seven-by-fifty Steiner binoculars. “What do you make their range, about eight hundred?” Fong asked.
“More like nine-fifty,” T.K. remarked coolly.
“Are you going to take out the guy with the scoped rifle first?” Dan asked.
“Yep.” After a long pause, T.K fired.
Because they were traveling faster than the speed of sound, the bullets arrived before the sounds of the shots. The first bullet struck the ground behind the bandit’s feet, kicking up a large puff of dust. “Three feet low, one foot left,” Dan whispered. A few moments later, T.K. fired again. This bullet struck his intended target in the right side of his upper chest. To the other men looking at him, it looked as if he had been struck by some silent, magical force. The loud report of the bullet arrived nearly a second later.
The long-haired man carrying the M1 carbine turned to see where the shot had come from. Just a moment later, he was hit by a second bullet fired by Kennedy. The 750-grain full metal jacket bullet hit near his solar plexus, knocking him to the ground. Finally realizing what was happening, the two other men dropped to the ground.
“You’ve got their range now, dude,” Dan said. T.K. fired twice more before he found his mark. The third man, who had still not yet determined where the shots were coming from, was hit in the head. The bullet entered just above his left eye socket and removed the top and back of his skull. T.K. changed magazines and resettled his cheek.
The last bandit, who was shaking uncontrollably, spotted a puff of dust kicked up by the McMillan’s muzzle blast. He yelled out loud to his now dead c
ompanions, “I don’t frippin’ believe it. He’s a mile away! Nobody can shoot that far!” The man began to crawl through the dust toward the barricade as quickly as possible. T.K. fired again, and missed. On his next shot, he hit the man in the lower abdomen, eviscerating him. “I’m hit! I’m hit!” he yelled, but there was no one alive to hear him. The man thrashed on the ground for twenty seconds, with his life ebbing out of his belly.
T.K. changed magazines again and cycled the bolt. He fired once more at each body to insure that they were dead. Now confident of the wind and range, he hit his targets with each shot. “They’re deader ’n doornails now,” T.K. delivered. He removed the partly empty magazine from the rifle and inserted a full one. Glancing down at the ground, he wondered about the large pieces of shiny brass that were scattered out to the right of the rifle. He abstractly wondered in a more extended tactical shooting situation, what would be more noticeable: the brass itself, or his movement in crawling to pick it up. He shrugged his shoulders and decided that it was by now an academic question.
Dan Fong lowered his Steiner binoculars and reached over to slap T.K. on the shoulder. “That’s the most incredible shooting I’ve seen in my life.”
“I guess those guys didn’t know who they were messing with,” Kevin muttered.
Fong smiled, and putting on an exaggerated accent said, “Old Chinese proverb: You may rob a man by the darkness of the new moon. But in the light of day, the payback is a bitch!”
After he had picked up his fired brass and walked down the hill, T.K. opened an ammunition can and reloaded the two depleted magazines for the McMillan. He warned, “Well, there’s no use in going over there to check the damage. Besides, they might have a backup man hidden behind the barricade or in the rocks that we didn’t see. Something like that could ruin your whole day.”
Kevin stroked the stubble on his chin. “I agree. Let’s get out of here. We’ll let the buzzards handle the funeral, and let God sort ’em out.” They spent a few minutes examining their road map for an alternate route around the ambush site. The detour would cost them nearly an hour and two extra gallons of gasoline.
Before departing, Dan Fong examined his Hardcorps vest and his flesh beneath it. “Stopped it cold. Looks like a little 110-grain soft nose slug from that M1 Carbine. Check out how you can see the weave of the Kevlar imprinted on the mushroomed out bullet. Cooool! I’m going to keep this as a souvenir.”
“How’s your shoulder, Fong man?” Kevin asked.
Holding the palm of his hand to a spot beneath his collarbone, Fong worked his arm in a circular motion. He proclaimed, “It’ll probably be black and blue and sore as heck in the morning.”
Putting on his Monty Python accent, T.K. said, “Classic blunt trauma.”
They all laughed, as Dan put his vest and DPM shirt back on.
As they drove away, Kevin started the three singing repeatedly in chorus, “Reach out, reach out and touch some one. Reach out, reach out and just say… die.”
They traveled without incident for the next five hours. Ten miles northwest of Portage, Utah, the trio encountered another ambush. The ambush was set up in a better location than the one that they had encountered earlier in the day. It was positioned just around a sharp bend in the road, so that Kevin had little time to react before reaching the obstruction. A stout barricade made of a double thickness of railroad ties blocked the entire road. It extended from the nearly vertical cut on the left side of the road to a steep dropoff of more than forty feet down to an old railroad bed to the right. With no other option, Kevin slammed on the brakes. They came to a full stop less than forty feet away from the ambushers.
Behind the barricade, nine men with rifles opened fire without warning. As quickly as possible, Kevin put the Bronco in reverse and hit the gas. Meanwhile, Dan and T.K. were firing rapidly at the bandits manning the ambush. T.K. was shooting his AR-15 in rapid double taps, with his forearms leaning up against the black padded dashboard. Dan was firing his HK91 from the backseat in a low staccato. The rifle’s muzzle was almost directly between the heads of the two in the front seats. The sound of the muzzle blast in their ears was deafening. Dan saw three of the men behind the barricade get hit and go down.
After they had backed up fifty feet, Dan saw T.K.’s head snap backward violently. Soon after, he slumped forward over his rifle, with a tremendous gout of blood pouring from his face and beneath the back of his helmet. Just then, Dan felt a heavy blow to his own chest.
Once the Bronco had backed up behind the bend and out of sight of the ambush, Kevin again hit the brakes, and turned the rig around. He then drove at high speed for three miles before finding a spot on a side road that looked fairly secure where they could stop. By then, Dan had regained his composure.
After feeling around under his fatigue shirt, he found that his vest had stopped a large caliber soft nosed rifle bullet. He leaned forward to check on Kennedy’s condition. Checking for a pulse and finding none, Dan was sure he was dead.
Examining T.K.’s body, they found that a bullet had hit him in the right eye, just below the lip of his helmet. The bullet passed all the way through Tom’s head, exiting through a hole roughly two inches in diameter. They concluded that he had died almost instantly. Both men were still shaking as they checked for other damage. To their surprise, there wasn’t much. The roll cage had been hit in three places and one bullet passed through the upper portion of the radiator. After it went through the radiator, it glanced off the top of the engine block, just to the right of the water pump, and then went almost vertically through the Bronco’s hood, leaving an oblong jagged hole. Luckily, it did not penetrate the block.
With Fong on security, Kevin attempted to repair the pierced radiator. Rummaging through the tool kit, Kevin found a quarter-inch diameter carriage bolt that was four inches long. By cutting some rubber gaskets out of a piece of scrap truck tire inner-tube material, he was able to make a plug that passed completely through the radiator. He then applied a heavy coat of blue RTV silicone sealant to the gaskets and around the bolt. The inner-tube gaskets were positioned on both sides of the radiator, held in place by two large washers and a wing nut. Working rapidly, the repair took less than five minutes.
After waiting half an hour to let the silicone cure, with both men standing guard, Kevin refilled the radiator from one of their tan plastic five-gallon G.I. water containers. Lendel then replaced the radiator cap and started the engine.
Kevin told Dan, “It still leaks about a drop every two or three seconds under full pressure, but that’s negligible, considering the extra water we have on board. We’ll just check every hour of driving. It should get us where we need to go. If the leak gets any worse, we can always loosen the radiator cap and run with the system unpressurized.” Fong grunted in agreement.
After staring at each other for a few moments, Dan pulled out two ponchos from one of the backpacks. “Let’s get his body wrapped up,” he said sharply.
It was then that Dan noticed that Kevin’s helmet had a large gash running along one side. “Dude. I think you’d better look at your helmet.” Kevin took off his “Fritz” helmet to find that it had deflected a bullet that under other circumstances probably would have left him just as dead as T.K.
As he fingered the frayed yellow Kevlar material that blossomed through the helmet’s woodland camouflage cloth cover, he asked, “What should we do, Dan, bypass the roadblock?”
After a moment’s thought, Fong replied, “No way, Kev. Those S.O.B.s drew first blood. No warning or anything. They’re looters, for sure. I say that we take them out.”
Kevin nodded his head and delivered in a quiet, low voice, “Agreed. Let’s go find a place where we can hide the Bronco and lay up until it’s full dark.”
As the sun set, Kevin and Dan applied a fresh coat of camouflage paint to each other’s faces and the backs of their hands. Dan carried his HK-91. As was his habit, Kevin carried his riotgun. They walked slowly in single file for an hour until they got t
o the point where they had planned to separate. There, they once again compared their watches. Dan reached out to Kevin’s hand.
Kevin grasped it firmly in response, but asked, “What’s the handshake for, Fong man?”
“This might be goodbye, my friend.”
Kevin shook his head. “Nonsense. As Jeff would say,we’re going to‘kick tail and take names’ like the Kolodney brothers and the Rugsuckers. Just think positive.”
After a pause, Dan agreed. “Okaaay. Then let’s do this one right the first time.”
By 11 p.m., they were both in position. After approaching from the east, Kevin sat crouched sixty yards away from the bandits’ camp, which lay just across the railroad bed, below the road barricade. Dan Fong was lying prone just back from the edge of the road cut, sixty feet north and twenty feet above the campsite.
Kevin pressed the red “push to talk” button on his TRC-500 twice. He then heard Dan break squelch twice in reply. At the camp, both men could plainly see six sleeping bags clustered around a small fire. A man holding a riot shotgun walked around the perimeter of the camp. The man could see little as he looked out into the darkness, as the light of the fire constantly ruined his night vision.
Both Dan and Kevin waited, watching the half moon’s slow track across the sky and occasionally consulting their watches. Just before midnight, the guard walked up to one of the sleeping men and kicked him in the feet. “Hey, your turn, asshole,” he yelled at the recumbent form. Shortly after, the second man sat up, extracted himself from his sleeping bag, and put on a pair of boots. Just after midnight, he stood up and took the shotgun from the guard he was replacing, who rolled out his own sleeping bag, and was soon asleep.
Shortly after the new guard took over, he began walking almost directly toward Kevin. Kevin held his breath. He could hear blood pounding in his ears. When the guard was thirty feet outside the camp, he stopped, dropped his pants, and squatted to relieve himself. Two minutes later, the guard resumed his normal route around the perimeter of the camp. It took ten minutes for Kevin’s pulse to settle down.
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