by J. L. Bourne
Our team was able to capture Rich —————————————; however, one of our men was killed during the assault. We are confident that we now have key interrogation assets that will enable us to geolocate CONDUCTOR in the coming days.
Director, Little Rock Fusion Center
Notice to All Fusion Centers
The apprehended terrorist, Rich —————————————, will heretofore be referred to as TOURIST. Your compliance with this intelligence directive is mandatory until such time as HAYSTACK is deactivated.
Director sends.
RECOVERY
It’s been a week since I’ve written anything in here, and a damn rough one at that. Three nights ago, I spent hours shivering in my bed, out of split firewood, fever raging and teeth chattering. If not for the water I’d stockpiled in days prior, I’m certain I’d be dead. I pounded water for three straight days, taking care of my necessaries in a bedside orange five-gallon bucket, until my fever broke and I was finally able to stand up without passing out.
I have enough meat left to last me about ten days or so (if I don’t exert myself), but I desperately need something besides a handful of old rice to go along with it; I’m down to the bottom of the bag and it’s full of weevils. The food cooler is stored under the cabin on the north side away from the sun. Heading out in a few to check on it and get water. I’m only one swallow away from dry cabin status.
—————
My trip to the river was arduous and uneventful, but things picked up after I got there. I was still using both crutches, but felt like I could get down to only one crutch if I let myself heal a little longer and was careful. The ice had disappeared down at the river and there was no snow on the ground. A warm front must have been through while I was bedridden, melting everything. Before I got sick I was actually pondering whether or not to butcher the mountain lion instead of just dragging it away but it’s too late now. At least the contents of the cooler are still frozen. I just hope I don’t get any crazy Arkansas weather where it inexplicably rises briefly into the 80s when it should be around 20.
Back to the interesting part of my trip to the river. As I checked the trotline and filled up my water jug, I detected the thumping of helicopter rotors somewhere off in the distance. I hobbled fast over to the riverbank and hid behind a row of sapling pines. The rotors got louder momentarily before fading off to the point where I couldn’t hear them any longer.
Someone’s flying around in this area and there aren’t too many reasons to do that. I doubt the government cares about all the moonshine stills in these parts anymore, but they damn sure care about me.
I’m a wanted man.
I took the rotor noise as a wake-up call. Make preparations to repel boarders.
—————
It’s been three days since I heard the helicopter. Even with the injury, I’ve managed to move my pickup truck farther away from the cabin and cover it up pretty well. The cabin is set back into the woods and shielded by a thick tree canopy, only visible by air from the east. The rotor noise came from the west, Jim and Rich’s direction, but that doesn’t really mean anything.
In other news, I’m down to one crutch. I chucked the other one into the river, grinning as the torturous stick spun in the air and splashed into the icy waters.
Yesterday morning, I dug up a handful of worms and took them down to the river with my pole. I was able to snag two small fish and had them cleaned, cooked, and eaten within thirty minutes. I didn’t even bother to take them back to the cabin; I did it right there on the riverbank over a fire circle.
I’m down to my last bit of venison, as the meat is starting to spoil. I’m cooking the rest of it in a stew right now, which I plan to stretch out over the next several days.
—————
Happy Thanksgiving.
Injury update: only a slight limp remains. This is fortuitous, all things considered.
Two nights ago, I decided to hunt for game down by the river with my NVD attached to the rifle. Once again, the distinctive thumping of approaching rotors could be heard in the distance. I took cover just as the helicopter hovered slowly along the river a couple hundred yards upstream. Through my unassisted eye, there was no indication the helicopter was nearby except for the obvious noise. Only through the assistance of my NVD could I see the flying machine. The pilot’s instruments were set for night vision, so I could easily spot their glow illuminating the cockpit with IR, revealing two pilots. I had previously turned off my own NVD IR illuminator and concealed it with electrical tape, just in case. Sure enough, a giant IR spot beam was slewing along the river as the helicopter slowly hovered in my direction.
I dipped farther back into the tree line, careful to make no sudden movements, as the human eye is a big fan of movement and contrast. My blood was pumping adrenaline and the slight pain in my calf disappeared. Just as soon as I saw two people rappel from the chopper down into the shallow banks of the river, I began to back away and run up the hill to the cabin, hoping my leg would hold out.
Back at the cabin, I shouldered my go bag and ripped the floor rug aside. I was especially interested in the two loose boards there. I wedged them out with my knife and pulled my suppressed LaRue M4 short-barreled rifle (SBR) out from under the cabin. It was still sealed up in its Pelican case, which itself was loaded with full magazines and an extra bolt carrier assembly.
I then filled my thermos with hot stew and tossed everything else I could think of into an empty rice sack. I was out the door in only three minutes.
Outside, I dragged the cooler out from under the cabin and pulled it behind me as more adrenaline pushed my injured body up the mountain. My kit was beating me about the back and chest as I climbed.
I hid the cooler three hundred meters up the mountain. I then moved the NVD from my bolt gun to my M4 behind the red dot in order to provide me night vision combined with 30 rounds of full-auto capability if the need should arise. I also thought now might be the time to put on my load bearing vest full of mags, and after that, slung my SBR across my chest, caching the rest of my kit twenty paces north of the venison cooler inside a hollowed out oak.
As I began to finally calm down, the pang of pain in my calf returned, warning me not to overdo it out here in the darkness.
I began a slow and deliberate arc back down the mountain to set up observation on my cabin. There’s no way those helicopter goons wouldn’t find it, and they more than likely knew where it was already considering where the chopper dropped them.
It was only two guys.
With guns. But I was ready for them.
SPY VS SPY
Morning
I was sore from sitting up in a deer stand all night, one that was overlooking the cabin. Up in the hills with a line of sight down on its west wall, the back. There are no windows on that side, but good concealment, so I took that trade-off. At about 0900, I took my last swallow of warm venison stew from my thermos and continued to glass the hollow.
Glint.
I noticed a brief but distinct flash through my binoculars and saw a masked figure talking on a radio of some sort. He was beyond the cabin, down the hill a ways. No, not a radio; the large antenna boom hanging off the device indicated a satellite phone.
Reaching up with my left hand, I made sure the can on the end of my M4 was hand-tightened. I drew my legs up closer to my chest and sat in the tree, using my knees as support for the rifle. I kept the red dot trained on his center mass and tracked him as he crept. As soon as he was close enough to the cabin’s clearing, he got on his chest and began to low crawl until he reached the very edge of the cabin’s cleared area.
I hoped my binoculars had better magnification than his.
I watched him as he pulled his own binos out and began to reconnoiter the cabin. I should have brought my bolt gun; I could have taken this fucker out without his partner even knowing. The M4 was loud, even with a silencer, but it had a higher rate of fire. I couldn’t ris
k taking out this guy now, as I had no idea where the other one was hiding. If it were me, I’d be right up here somewhere, keeping an eye on my partner.
He could very well be just a few trees over.
—————
Some time passed. The guy watching the cabin never moved from his spot. Just lay there on his chest with the binos glued to his masked face.
The problem was that I needed to get out of the deer stand, and he was waiting for me to appear so he could pop me in the face with the rifle I saw sitting to his right.
By noon, I couldn’t feel my legs, besides the pang in my calf. This sensation was slowly moving up my body. I needed to at least stand up, but couldn’t.
My window of opportunity suddenly came.
Inexplicably, the man began to crawl backwards, retreating into the trees beyond the cabin clearing. I waited a full ten minutes before I carefully started my descent, wincing all the way. I had to watch where my feet landed on the rungs of the ladder; I couldn’t feel them at all. Most of the trip down was upper body. When I made it to the ground, I had to hold the trunk of the tree to keep from falling. I did a few painful squats behind the tree to get the blood flowing again and took a long-awaited head call.
There were two shooters out here, and they weren’t rookies. They were patient, or at least one of them was.
I quietly fell back to my cache location and picked up my bolt gun. Yeah, it was extra weight, but I needed to put those .300 Blackout subsonics to work on this hit squad or they’d be bringing my corpse back to be put on parade.
What kind of motherfuckers lay in ambush for other Americans? I mean, what would the job application questionnaire sound like? “Are you willing to extrajudicially kill people? Yes? You’re hired! Welcome to the goon squad.”
Back on topic.
After gathering my bolt gun as well as some Power Bars and water from my emergency bag, I started back towards the cabin, M4 at the high ready.
Staying slow and low was the key to not being detected by the most advanced sensor every created, the human eye. It was painstaking to move like that, but the alternative to a sore back is getting filled in by shooters you’ve never met.
I rounded the final bend in the trail as the cabin came into view. I set up a shooting point prone, piling leaves underneath me so I didn’t freeze to death waiting on my targets.
I lay in wait for an hour until one of the bastards walked out of the woods ten feet in front of me.
He squinted as his brain told him there was a shape in front of him that was abnormal. Not organic.
I raised the rifle; he was too close for the optic I had set at nine power, so I pointed it in his general direction.
“Listen buddy,” I said in a stern whisper, “unless you want to die right now, you better start fucking talking.”
His response was a little unexpected.
The man pulled a large tiger-striped fixed blade knife from the small of his back and charged. Rage filled his eyes as he sprinted to me.
I pulled the trigger.
The silenced round cracked from the bolt gun barrel like a microwave popcorn kernel and slammed into the man’s ribcage.
What did he do?
Remarkably, he stumbled but kept coming.
I didn’t have time to chamber another round in the bolt gun, so I went for the Glock. As I rose the blaster to fire, the man grabbed my hand, pulling me fast into his blade. I grabbed his wrist and rotated it out and away from his body, causing him to lean back over the alternative of losing his knife.
Somehow, he caused me to drop my pistol in all the commotion.
I reached down into the small of my back and pulled out the knife I’d liberated last year from that psychopathic biker.
Our knives were out in front of us as we rounded the fight circle. Two weapons from more uncivilized times stood between us, his dark and subdued, and mine gleaming, stainless.
One of us wasn’t getting off the mountain alive.
He came at me first in a downward horror-movie-killer thrust. I blocked his initial attack and punched him hard in the ribs where I shot him. He winced in agony and grabbed his wound.
Seeing opportunity, I rammed the Bowie through his mask, up into his chin and through the top of his mouth.
His lights stayed on for a good bit. I stared him down as he died, hoping he remembered my face on the way to hell.
I then searched for my pistol in the bushes, securing it before dragging the corpse off into the woods. Safer behind the cover of the foliage, I wanted to search the body to see if he had anything that would get me out of this shitstorm.
But first things first. Inside the dense brush, I kept an ear open for his partner. The only shot fired was quiet, near impossible to triangulate; I was confident that wouldn’t bring attention, but not too certain, either.
After thirty minutes of hearing only the wind and falling leaves, I figured it was okay to get started.
I ripped the mask from the corpse. No one I knew. Just a face without a name. No ID, big surprise.
I put his carbine aside, an HK416, unsuppressed. He was also carrying an HK USP pistol. Pretty high-quality kit for an innocent helicopter trip and hike through the mountains. This guy was a tier-one goon.
He had a handheld radio tuned to a UHF freq, but I sure as hell wouldn’t be going out on it; I knew how mistakes like that ended up.
No codebook or communications plan on him, either. Again, this guy was a professional. All the frequencies I wanted to see were in the man’s head, contained in the biological zero and one switches that began to decay the moment I rammed the knife into his brain. I tossed everything useful in the goon’s pack, slinging it over my shoulder for later.
—————
Goddamn it. Goddamn it.
I need to gather my thoughts. Why would they do this?
—————
Okay.
I set up observation in a different spot, getting the drop on goon number two, who was looking for goon number one. Except. Well.
I took aim through my bolt gun optics and squeezed the trigger. The target was about two hundred meters from me, so the bullet drop was significant, nearly thirty-five inches. It was also pretty fucking windy. So I missed the head and hit the shoulder, the bullet’s kinetic force violently spinning the body around.
The figure let loose with a woman’s agonized scream, then reached for a blowout kit and began applying pressure to her shoulder with what I thought was most likely a clotting agent.
“Max! Max, you motherfucker, you shot me, you goddamned bastard!” she screamed out.
I knew in my heart who it was the moment I heard her voice.
My head poked up over the foliage like a prairie dog as I watched the woman hurry to save her own life. She still wore the mask.
“You reach for your gun, any gun, and I waste you! Are we clear?!” I shouted back.
She was leaning against a pine tree, one hand applying pressure to her shoulder, and tried to reach up with the other to show that she wasn’t armed. I slung my bolt gun and brought my carbine to the ready in front of me as I approached.
She peeled the ski mask over the top of her head, allowing her ponytail to fall on her right shoulder.
Maggie.
My former black-ops teammate out here trying to waste me along with the other goon I put on ice.
I stared at her for a long moment, unwilling to speak, gun trained on the center mass that was rising and falling rapidly from blood loss and adrenaline.
Her big blue eyes stared back at me.
I spoke first. “Why?”
“Be-because they have my daughter.” She was turning pale at this point from blood loss and shock.
She took a look at the pack I had on my back that formerly belonged to goon number one.
“Oh, no . . . Max? Did you kill him?” she asked, tears streaming down her face. “Now she’s dead. My baby is going to fucking die because of you!”
“S
orry for not being more accommodating,” I said, unsympathetic. “The way I see it, Maggie, this ends three ways. The first is that I kill you right here on this mountain. The second is I let the mountain kill you. The third is that I save your traitorous ass and you answer my questions.”
She just sat there against that pine tree, defeated and out of options. I knew in my heart that if the gun was in the other hand, I’d get no such quarter; my body would be cooling to outside air temperature right about now.
I didn’t speak for a while, letting her chew on what we both knew was inevitable. Without medical attention, in another hour, she’d be gone anyway.
Finally she spoke. “Okay, Max,” she muttered, nearly unconscious.
I cached her weapons behind a nearby tree and frisked her for concealed knives, guns, sharp sticks, or poison lipstick before fireman carrying her murderous ass and her kit up the mountain back to the cabin.
SISTER IN ARMS
I put Maggie on the cabin table and dumped both of the goon backpacks out on my bed. To be clear, Maggie is blood type B+. I know this because I’m also B+ and wouldn’t have even been assigned to Maggie in the first place if I wasn’t compatible. As an added measure of survivability, they wanted people like us to be able to give each other blood if the need should arise, like now.
I quickly pulled the direct transfusion kit out of its sealed pack and began prepping Maggie to receive my blood. The kit was idiotproof and the instructions were printed (with pictures) on the anti-coagulant blood bag. I connected the lines and watched my blood stream into Maggie’s unconscious body. At resting heart rate, it wouldn’t take too long before I’d have to disconnect the line and tape over the holes in our arms. I didn’t want to give her too much. As the blood flowed, I tended to her shoulder. The 208-grain subsonic bullet didn’t tumble, but passed clean through.
Easy day.
I pulled the clotting agent–infused bandages off her wound and cleaned it out with a squeeze bottle of saline from the goon packs. After verifying that the bleeding had stopped, I began to sew her up with her own trauma kit. She moaned and jerked a couple times during the procedure, but didn’t wake up. I wasn’t sure quite how long it had been, but sometime after I finished with her wound, I started getting dizzy, so I disconnected the transfusion line and let the blood bag continue to pump into her arm.