by Peter Nealen
“What?” Curtis asked. “When did we start buying our own rifles?”
“Not just the rifles,” Santelli told him. “I’ve got night vision, ammunition, field gear, the works. And this is an out-of-pocket op, buddy. No magical black ops fund here.” He grunted. “Lamberte might be Hancock’s buddy, but that didn’t mean he was going to give up all this kit for free.”
“Lamberte,” Flanagan said, nodding. “That explains how you were able to get ten OBRs all at once on short notice.”
“Who’s Lamberte?” Curtis asked.
“A friend who has a lot of money and a lot of guns and gear,” Santelli said. “And who doesn’t ask too many questions when friends come calling, looking to equip a team for combat.”
“So, Van Zandt decided that we’re on our own for this one?” Flanagan asked, turning to Brannigan.
“Van Zandt might provide us some legal cover,” Brannigan said from behind them, “but he’s not terribly happy about it. We’re enough of an asset that he’s not going to sell us down the river, and I’m keeping him abreast of what we’re finding out. But he’s going to keep us out of jail, and that’s where his support ends.” He paused in the dark. “Let’s keep him out of it as much as possible, hmm? In other words, ‘Don’t get caught.’”
“Message received, boss,” Flanagan said. “And from what we saw tonight, I think the law is the least of our worries.” He described the incident at the Denny’s, and the subsequent pursuit across the desert. “Don’t get me wrong, I’d be fine with bird-dogging some cartel operation for the Feds, but somehow I’ve got the feeling that this ain’t gonna work out that way.”
“I don’t think it will, either,” Brannigan admitted. “The Feds have generally been treading on eggshells about the border, when they haven’t been straight-up turning a blind eye. And while I know a lot of Border Patrol guys who’d love to intervene, I don’t think they can do much about a dirty sheriff. That’s FBI territory, and the odds that they’re going to put themselves out for a small county sheriff in a county of less than five thousand people? I’d call ‘em slim.”
He rolled his shoulders. “We’re not going full vigilante yet; I want to avoid that, if possible. We’re just gearing up in case it does become necessary.”
Flanagan and Curtis were already rummaging in their respective cases, prepping weapons and magazines. Flanagan had leaned his .45-70 against the wall as he worked.
“Joe,” Brannigan said, “you, Wade, Herc, and Gomez are on ranch recon. Herc’s in back getting all his med gear sorted out. Get prepped for a four-day patrol; it may not take that long, but I want eyes on that place. If there’s cartel activity there, and the sheriff’s not doing anything about it, we need to know. You’re the team lead; I don’t want Wade or Mario getting too eager.”
Flanagan nodded, already starting to plan out what was going to be needed. They were going to have to make a trip into town for some of it; Santelli had been thorough, but there had only been so much he could bring in one trip. Probably going to have to go all the way to Silver City; shopping for tac gear in Lordsburg probably will be about as welcome as it is successful, i.e., not much.
“The rest of us are watching the law,” Brannigan continued. “If they’re in bed with a cartel, I want to know it, and I want concrete evidence to present to the DA and the Feds. It might be a bit sketchy, but it’s better than nothing.
“Vinnie, how are you on the tech side?” he asked.
Even in the dim red light of the headlamps, Bianco looked a little pained. “I’m decent,” he replied hesitantly. “Colonel, I don’t want to be the guy stuck at a computer the whole op.”
“I know you don’t,” Brannigan replied, “but we need information. There’s got to be something out there about what’s going on here. Nothing happens in a vacuum anymore. Find me intel.”
Bianco nodded reluctantly. “I don’t know how much I can do here,” he said. “A good satellite setup’s going to get expensive.”
“Then head to town,” Brannigan said. “If nothing else, can you do it from a hotel?”
“With the right VPN, yeah,” Bianco said. He suddenly raised his eyebrows. “I might even be able to talk Don through some of the sketchier stuff; being halfway across the country should help a little.”
“As long as it doesn’t interfere with taking care of Sam,” Santelli said. The gruff, fireplug of a former Sergeant Major had a bit of a fatherly feeling for Childress, possibly because of how many times he’d busted him down for getting in trouble in the Marine Corps.
“It might be just the thing that both of them need,” Brannigan mused. “Something to do, some way to still be part of the team. This has got to be rough on both of them.”
Gravel crunched outside, and the white glow of headlights filtered through the door to the former dining room. “Gomez isn’t shooting, so I would guess that’s Hancock and Wade,” Jenkins said.
“George, can you head up to take over security so that Gomez can come down and start getting prepped?” Flanagan asked.
Jenkins looked like he was about to protest, but finally sighed, picked up his own OBR, and headed outside.
Wade and Hancock came in. Hancock was still in jeans and a jacket, with his chest rig packed with twenty-round 7.62 magazines over it, his OBR in his hands. Wade was already wearing desert ATACs camouflage. Each had a PVS-14 night vision monocular over one eye, held in place by a “skullcap” mount.
“John, you, Herc, and Mario are with me,” Flanagan said. “We’re on ranch recon.”
Wade just nodded. If he hadn’t known the big man as well as he did, Flanagan might have been concerned that he might get some pushback as the team leader. Wade had retired from the Army after twenty years, and had been a Master Sergeant. Flanagan had gotten out of the Marine Corps after eight, as a Staff Sergeant, two ranks below Wade’s retirement rank.
But Wade had made it clear from Day One that he was there to work. He didn’t give a damn about rank or status games anymore. He’d had a bellyful of that in his last years in the Army. The less of a leadership role he had, the more he could concentrate on just doing the job he loved.
Namely, killing people and breaking their stuff.
Flanagan knew that Wade might be disappointed if this really did turn out to be little more than a recon mission, bird-dogging the bad guys for the Border Patrol and the FBI. He’d do his job, though. Borderline functional sociopath that he might be, Wade was nothing if not a professional.
Still, after what they’d seen coming out of Lordsburg, he really wondered if this was going to end without bullets flying.
***
The recon team left first, just before daylight. They’d managed to snatch a few hours of sleep after doing what prep they could with the gear they had. They wouldn’t be back to the adobe until they rotated off the ranch.
Brannigan was up to see them go, even though he’d been awake long after they’d gone down on rest plan. There was still surveillance of the sheriff’s department, more specifically Sheriff Thomas himself, to plan, and that had been a bit trickier than planning a desert observation post watching the ranch. They had to be much more discrete, in an environment that was much harder to hide in. He’d rather be in an OP in the desert than trying to blend in as a stranger in a small town any day of the week.
A footstep scraped beside him. He turned to see Hancock standing there, a canteen in his hand and his OBR slung at his side. “I owe you a drink,” his second-in-command said.
“What for this time?” Brannigan asked.
Hancock waved his canteen in the direction of the receding taillights of Flanagan’s truck. “Joe and Kevin,” he said. “I was worried that they were on the outs, and you said they’d work it out on their own. You were right. Everything seems to be back to normal.”
“They’re big boys,” Brannigan said. “I wouldn’t have brought them on otherwise. I know why Joe was pissed, and I can’t blame him. But Kev seems to have learned from it, so as lo
ng as they can work, it’s all good.” He glanced at Hancock. “If ever we worked by Big Boy Rules, it’s in this little outfit.”
Hancock just nodded. “So,” he said, changing the subject, “when do you want to head in?”
“As soon as possible,” was the reply. “We had to wait to get some rest, and there’s never a good time to start shadowing cops, but we need to be back in town by sunup or just after.”
“Sounds like a plan. I’ll start kicking the rest of the boys awake.”
Chapter 8
“He’s coming out.”
Brannigan looked up from the newspaper he was making a show of studying against the steering wheel. He knew that it might look a little odd; who read newspapers anymore? But he didn’t own a smartphone and never would. Just the flip phone in his pocket was more than he wanted.
Sure enough, Sheriff Thomas was coming out of the county jail, moving to his truck. He was easy to pick out, even in the dark of early evening; he never wore the dark green uniform that the rest of the sheriff’s department did, and his stature was rather distinctive. It looked like most of his deputies paid far more attention to physical fitness than the sheriff himself did. Furthermore, the pot-bellied figure with the broad-brimmed hat and star winking on his jacket was going straight for Thomas’ truck, which was also impossible to miss. Of course, there weren’t exactly many vehicles in the parking lot in the first place; there was one other SUV at the far end.
Brannigan and Santelli hadn’t made the same mistake that Jenkins had; both of them were parked, several vehicles apart, in the parking lot just across the street, rather than on the street itself. Especially in the early evening, they didn’t appear out of place, both men having leaned back and disappeared into the shadows of their trucks’ interiors until the sun went down. It was getting cold, but Brannigan had kept his engine shut off, so as not to make it immediately obvious that there was someone waiting there.
“I have him,” Brannigan replied. It would have been easy to use phones, but, Brannigan’s antipathy towards them aside, they were using small but encrypted commercial radios that Santelli had picked up. They would be harder to track, in the event that someone was looking. They didn’t have any indicators that the opposition had any such technical capability, but it never paid to make assumptions, and Bianco had pointed out that the cartels were getting more and more sophisticated in their tech and operations.
“You want lead?” Santelli asked, as Thomas climbed into his truck and started the engine, the lights coming to life and splashing white and red illumination across the dirt lot that surrounded the brick sheriff’s office.
“Yeah, I’ll take it,” Brannigan replied. This was going to be tricky. Running mobile surveillance in a rural area was never easy, and even less so at night. There was no way the sheriff was going to miss a vehicle driving behind him, unless they went blacked out, and that presented its own set of problems.
He kept the lights off while he started the truck, waiting until the sheriff was out of the parking lot and well down the road before he pulled out of his spot and followed. For the moment, he kept the lights off. There wasn’t an abundance of street lights in Lordsburg, and he might still be able to bluff that he was just another truck coming out along the road if he waited until they were some distance from the sheriff’s office. Might.
The sheriff’s taillights were dwindling in the distance, heading southwest, when he finally pulled out of the parking lot and followed, his lights still dark until about a quarter mile down the road. Only then did he flip on his headlights, bracing himself for a reaction. This was going to be doubly tricky, given that they were following a law enforcement officer.
Brannigan didn’t like it. There was nothing about this situation to like. Operating on American soil was risky enough; he’d never wanted to do it, in large part because you don’t shit where you eat. If they got themselves wanted in the US, they didn’t have many fallback options. He’d never set much store by the expats living in Costa Rica. He didn’t want to live in Costa Rica.
If it was just about the dead, he’d probably leave it be, whether Gomez was pissed about it or not. The dead were dead; nothing that they did was going to bring his parents or his brother back. Calling in the Feds would just make more sense in that case; somebody would eventually get to the bottom of why the sheriff was sitting on the case, along with who had killed the Gomez family and why.
But it wasn’t just about the dead. Sonya Gomez was missing, and while he’d never had a son or daughter kidnapped, he knew that time was short. Every moment that the sheriff sat on the case was one more moment that Sonya was closer to death.
Or worse than death. He wasn’t under any illusions about why she’d been taken, and he doubted that Gomez was, either.
All of that ran through his head as he drove, waiting for the sheriff to swerve, stop, or worse, flip on his lights and siren and turn around.
But even as his headlights illuminated the sheriff’s license plate, if dimly, there was no response. Thomas was still driving down the highway, away from Lordsburg, giving no indication that he had seen Brannigan behind him at all.
“Goodfella, Kodiak,” Brannigan called, lifting the radio to his lips. “Status?”
“I’m about three-quarters of a mile behind you, boss,” Santelli replied. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing, and that’s what worries me,” Brannigan said. “He didn’t respond at all when I flipped on my lights.”
“Honestly, Kodiak,” Santelli said, “from the way he was acting when he left the office, I don’t think he even knows we’re here.”
Brannigan pondered that. It was true that Thomas hadn’t really looked around except in the most cursory manner as he’d come out and gone to his truck. He’d seemed preoccupied, if that could be determined from a darkened truck across the street.
There could be any number of reasons why. Maybe he thought that he had the county locked down to the point that he no longer had to worry. He had to wonder what would fuel reckless confidence like that. Sure, Hidalgo County was tiny, a barely-inhabited patch of desert in southern New Mexico that most of the country had probably never heard of, but this wasn’t the 1800s. Somebody would hear something and start digging.
Just like he and his Blackhearts had.
The desert night closed in around them, the three vehicles becoming islands of red and white light in the darkness. The night was overcast, making the desert and the sky above equally black.
Brannigan almost killed the lights and reached for the PVS-14 night vision goggles on the seat next to him. But that might still alert his quarry, if the lights suddenly went out behind him. Presuming that he wasn’t already alerted, and leading them into an ambush.
But they went deeper and deeper into the desert, and no ambush materialized.
They’d covered about twenty miles, passing through a tiny assemblage of buildings with a sign that named it “Roadforks,” and into low but rugged desert hills, when Thomas turned off the highway, going down the shoulder and trundling into the sagebrush and creosote bushes along the wash.
Brannigan immediately followed suit, killing his lights as he did so. He knew he might have been too late; if he’d been spotted, it was probably game over, and he was less than half a mile behind the sheriff. But even as he rolled to a stop and killed the engine, grabbing his suppressed OBR while sweeping the NVGs off the seat beside him, and rolling out of the cab, he was greeted by the silence of the desert night, broken only by the pinging of his engine starting to cool.
He waited, motionless, for a long few moments, crouched behind a creosote bush, listening. He pulled the night vision goggles and their skullcap mount over his head, lighting the view in one eye a pale shade of green.
He could just make out movement ahead, near where Thomas had gone off the road, but it was too far away to see much more than that. Slowly, deliberately, he panned his view to right and left, looking for the flankers that would be coming after him
if he’d been spotted. He swore silently. The whole thing could be blown right here, and he’d probably end up an unidentified corpse in the desert if there were enough of them. He wouldn’t go down alone, but he’d go down, eventually.
He knew that even as small a team that Brannigan’s Blackhearts was, he probably shouldn’t have been the one out on recon. He should have been back at the adobe, coordinating and planning. But he had always been a firm believer that the leader had to get his own eyes on the objective, and with two objectives at hand, he’d picked one. Besides, he wanted to know.
No attack was forthcoming. He couldn’t hear anything out in the brush, aside from a coyote howling somewhere far in the distance, and the continuing faint noises of his cooling truck. Confident that he wasn’t going to have to go to ground and fight, at least not for the next few minutes, he started to move, angling away from the highway and into the desert, heading for higher ground and toward the movement he had seen where Thomas had stopped.
He didn’t run. He doubted that the enemy had night vision, but sound carried far in the desert at night, and the sandy ground crunched a little under his boots. Besides, the faster he moved, the less chance he’d have to spot an attacker in time.
The ground was flat enough, and the sagebrush, creosote bushes, and cacti far enough apart, that he was able to make good time, even while moving deliberately and quietly. He quickly found that the hump of ground between him and Thomas’ truck provided excellent screening, allowing him to move even more quickly. That was probably why he hadn’t been spotted and already attacked.
He could hear faint voices, the sound carrying across the desert floor in the dark, coming from the far side of that hump. He was getting far too close for comfort, but given the terrain, that was going to be his best bet for a vantage point. He’d just have to move extra carefully to avoid detection, that close.
He could almost see Flanagan shaking his head in disapproval. The black-bearded backwoodsman was now the premier stalker on the team, with Childress out of the game. And even he would balk at getting that close. If you could hear the enemy talking, the odds were good that they could hear you. Getting spotted and captured or killed was a short jump from there.