The Valley: A Lee Harden Novel, page 37
Lee blinked rapidly as his feet found the dirt road heading into the gate. The ghost of the first explosion that still hung in his vision had thinned, and he could just make out the figure of the man with the machine gun, nearly to the ranch house.
Don’t let him get inside!
Lee brought his sights to his eye, but just as his finger dropped to the trigger, Marie hollered “Crossing!” and slipped in front of him.
“Marie! Down!”
She dropped to a knee instantly, her head ducked low.
But the guy was gone.
Lee swore, but there was nothing to be done for it. Now the ranch house would have a machine gun nest in it. “You’re clear!” he shouted at Marie. “Hit that bunkhouse!”
He knew that’s what she’d already been targeting. She didn’t bother to rise—she had a clear shot straight through the gates and right at the bunkhouse. Simply shouldered her weapon, ranged the target, and let fly with three grenades, as fast as the M32 could cycle.
They didn’t even know if there was anyone in the bunkhouse. But they knew that Sam wasn’t in the bunkhouse, and some pissant with a lever action might be.
The big barn-style bunkhouse erupted like it’d been built on the mouth of a volcano. The sides of it blew out, and Lee could swear he saw the whole roof lift up, then come caving in on itself.
No pissants anymore.
Lee caught up to Marie and grabbed her up by the shoulder to let her know she was clear to rise. As soon as she was on her feet, he moved away from her so as not to make an easy target of the two of them.
“Everyone hold!” he transmitted. “Gimme your positions!”
He was already angling for the cover of the stables, just inside the gates and to the right. Marie followed. The ruckus had stirred up the horses inside and they were screaming and kicking at the walls with massive reverberating thumps.
“Jones here. Got Abe coming up on my ass. We’re on the east end, near the empty grain silo.”
Lee rounded the stables and cut in through the main corridor. Horses to either side, all of them in a panic. He slowed his pace. Couldn’t hear a damn thing, so he started trying to shush the animals. He had no experience with horses, but he knew to sound calm and gentle. Shockingly, it seemed to have an effect. They didn’t immediately go quiet, but their kicking tapered off and their screams turned to indignant huffs and whinnies.
He checked over his shoulder. Saw Marie slinking along the opposite side of the corridor, walking backwards and covering their rear. She’d swapped the M32 for her rifle.
“Hold what you got,” Lee said over the comms. “Try to get eyes on that ranch house but don’t give away your position. And watch your backs in case we missed anyone.”
Did it really need to be said? No, they were probably already doing it out of habit. But long ago they’d all agreed that stating the obvious wasn’t an insult. Reminders never hurt, especially in an environment full of distractions.
“Should have a clear shot at the ranch house through this passage,” Marie noted.
The stables were oriented so that the main, central corridor pointed just to the right of the ranch house. As Lee approached the last third of the corridor, he saw the side of the ranch house come into view.
“Got it,” he murmured, coming to a stop. The horses were getting quieter and quieter as the stillness stretched. He moved very slowly to shave away some angles, more and more of the ranch house coming into view. The porch. A swing hanging listless from two chains. Then the first window.
Light glowed inside, dull and amber. Lanterns or candles.
Lee’s target was the rightmost window at the front of the house, if you were looking directly at it. It was also where they heavily suspected Sam was being held, as it was the only window with the curtains drawn.
Lee’s rapid-fire thoughts were interrupted by the sound of glass shattering. The curtains twitched and jumped and were ripped aside. And then a machine gun barrel protruded, resting on the sill. A man hunkered behind it.
Two other figures were visible, standing behind the machine gun.
One was Sam himself. And holding Sam in a hostage position, only identifiable by the crown of iron-gray hair peeking over Sam’s shoulder, was Colin Horner. Holding a revolver to Sam’s head.
Lee’s heart started hammering so hard, he felt like it might rip itself apart. He held his position, unmoving, except for the one hand that it took to touch off his comms. His voice came out quiet and direct: “Horner’s got a gun to Sam’s head, in the window, right behind the machine gun.”
Behind him, Marie swore.
“I got no visual,” Abe hissed back. “Working on getting a better position. Hang on.”
Though Marie was right next to him, Lee spoke over the comms so he could include Jones. “Marie and Jones, start moving towards the back of the ranch house in case we need to make entry.”
“Jaaaaax!” Horner bellowed into the night. “Give it up, motherfucker!”
Slowly, ever so slowly, Lee lowered himself into a prone position on the hay-strewn floor. If they took out Horner, would the ranch hands continue to fight, or would they give up?
That said, Horner wasn’t an idiot. He was holding Sam good and secure and making effective use of his body as a shield. The tiny dome of gray hair over Sam’s right shoulder was not enough for Lee to make a confident shot. Not at a hundred yards with a red dot on a rifle that could only manage three MOA on a good day. Not when one tiny involuntary muscle spasm could wind up taking the side of Sam’s face off.
Lee’s eye glanced down at the machine gunner. That was another issue. Horner had Sam pressed so close to the guy manning the gun, if they shot the gunner, there was a decent chance the bullet would pass through and hit Sam too.
Shit, shit, shit.
“Jax!” Horner practically shrieked this time. “Come out and face me like a man!” His voice cracked and Lee was surprised at how unstable he sounded. It made a knot cinch just a bit tighter in his chest. Lee had been counting on Horner being cold and practical, as he’d been when they’d met. But this version of the guy sounded unhinged.
Lee didn’t think Sam had much time.
He thought about trying to open a dialogue—shouting back and forth with Horner might buy them some time. But then he thought of how volatile Horner sounded. Like a man that might kill his hostage just because he didn’t like something that was said.
Keeping silent might be less dangerous for Sam.
Instead, Lee keyed his comms. “Marie and Jones, I need you to get to the front corner of the house, right there next to the window with the machine gun.” He could only imagine how much they liked hearing that, but he trusted that they wouldn’t waste time arguing. “Abe, I need you to get a diagonal angle on that gunner.”
“Sounds like you’re working something,” Abe said.
“I’m gonna give the word,” Lee responded. “And when I do, Abe I need you to drop that gunner, and Marie and Jones, I need you take that window.”
“Workin’ on it,” Abe said. “I’ll let you know when I’m in position.”
After a moment of silence on the radio there came two clicks. Marie and Jones must’ve gotten close enough to the ranch house that they needed to maintain radio silence. Two clicks of the PTT counted as an acknowledgement.
Through his optic, Lee watched Horner fidgeting around. His head came up a bit, just one eye peeking furtively out from around Sam’s neck, searching the darkness. Lee’s red dot sat right on that eye, and for just a moment, Lee’s finger came off the magazine well of his rifle, and almost went to the trigger.
No. Not yet. Still a bad shot.
Lee switched his focus to Sam for a brief instant. Hard to tell expressions from this distance, but Lee could read Sam’s body language well enough. And he felt a welling of pride, because Sam was doing exactly what Lee had taught him to do: Waiting. Watching for an opportunity.
Sam wasn’t defeated. He was just being patient.
That feeling of pride devolved into dread.
Don’t screw it up, Lee.
And then Lee had to put that out of his mind along with all his other very rational concerns of failure. Focus on the moment. What needed to be done in this moment?
Just keep Horner from shooting Sam.
Horner snugged in tight behind Sam again and started shouting once more, his voice only slightly more controlled this time. “I know you’re out there! Let’s talk!”
Let’s not.
“Alright,” Abe whispered in his ear. “In position. Got a good bead on the gunner. Low chance of a pass-through hit on Sam.”
Low, not zero. Because you could never perfectly account for what a bullet might do once it hits something. Could punch straight through. Or it could carom around and come out somewhere completely unexpected.
“I copy. Standby for go.”
“Alright, motherfucker!” Horner raged into the darkness. “Let’s do this! You come out in the open where I can see you or—”
Lee saw the ultimatum coming and knew he couldn’t let Horner get it all the way out.
“Why’d you let Kat kill Ted?” Lee bellowed over the last of Horner’s words. No real rhyme or reason why he’d gone with that as his opening sally. It was just the first thing he could think of that didn’t have to do with Sam. He wanted Horner to stop thinking about Sam.
It worked. Kind of. Horner didn’t shoot Sam, and he did pause for a few precious seconds.
“You coulda stopped it,” Lee pressed, not wanting to give Horner time to see that he was being distracted. And praying to God that he wasn’t about to put a spark to Horner’s sudden volatility. “You coulda saved him. He wasn’t a threat to you. He wasn’t even armed.”
A temptation to keep going, but Lee put the reins on. He only needed to keep Horner engaged. If he started monologuing, Horner might realize he was being stalled.
“Ted?” Horner let out a nasty chortle. “You’re worried about Ted? You should be worried about your boy here!”
Well, shit.
Get him off the topic.
“You think Kat’s not gonna come back and get her revenge on you?” Lee called out, thinking, Come on, Marie! Get in position!
“Revenge on me?” Horner sounded insulted. “For what?!”
“For lying to her. For misleading her. For treating her like a dog.”
“What the fuck are we even talking about right now? I’ve got a gun to your boy’s head, and you’re talking about everything but that! Almost seems like you’re trying to stall!”
“I’m trying to figure out a way forward that doesn’t require a mountain of dead bodies. I’m kinda tired of making those. I guess you haven’t got your fill yet.”
“You come out in the open and start talking to me face to face, or I blow your boy’s brains out! How about that?”
And there it was. Nothing to do now but force a stalemate.
“You kill him and the very next second I’m gonna drop six high-explosive forty-millimeter grenades on your head. Do to your nice little home what I already did to your bunkhouse. Kill you and every man you got in there with you.” A moment of inspiration. “Actually, if any of you guys working for Colin Horner want to turn around and blow his head off for me, I’ll let you live.”
There came a moment where Horner was no longer yelling at Lee, but dealing with some internal personnel problems. Several men’s voices were raised, but unclear.
A subtle shift in shadows at the corner of the ranch house, barely two strides from the window.
“Marie and Jones, gimme two clicks if you’re in position and ready.”
The voices from inside the ranch house came to a sudden crescendo and then ceased altogether. Lee braced for the sound of a gunshot, but none came.
What did come was two clicks in his ear.
Then Horner, once more: “Nice try, motherfucker! Looks like we’re at an impasse! So how do you wanna finish this night, huh? With your boy alive or dead?”
“Standby for go,” Lee murmured into his comms, then settled himself nice and flat on the ground, as relaxed as he could be, and then lowered his reticle so that it was hovering over Sam’s chest.
Then Lee shouted, louder than before, each word clearly articulated. “Can you hear me loud and clear? Because I have one word for you.”
His finger moved to the trigger.
Hesitation. Then: “Yeah, I can hear you. Say what you’re gonna say!”
And here’s the one word Lee shouted back: “Artichoke!”
Chapter 37
Staring out into the darkness with a revolver pointed at his head, Sam had a curiously distinct memory.
They were in some dingy basement, Sam recalled, but where that was geographically, he couldn’t remember. Could’ve been any number of dingy, dark places where they’d slept on the road between settlements, or in the settlements themselves. Sam only remembered that it was early on in their “career” together, not long after The Deal.
Exposed floor joists made the ceiling, with ancient insulation falling out and forming fuzzy stalactites. A few pipes and conduits that looked like they’d been put there in the previous century, dusty remnants of cobwebs hanging from them.
“Alright!” Jones announced. “Pop quiz, hotshots!”
To which Abe groaned, and Lee smiled, saying, “Nice Speed reference.”
Marie booed loudly.
Jones looked aghast. “You can’t boo Keanu Reeves! He’s a national treasure!”
“Was a national treasure,” Sam observed.
Jones shook his head. “No. He’s still alive. I can feel it.”
“Whatcha got for us today?” Sam mused. He was tucked into his bivy sack, laying on his side and propped up on one elbow. Jones was sitting cross-legged on his.
Despite the dissenting grumbles from Abe and Marie, these so-called pop quizzes from Jones were a frequent form of entertainment. Abe and Marie were just being killjoys because they’d been winding down to sleep.
It wasn’t just entertainment. Every once in a while, one of Jones’s pop quizzes actually resulted in some good ideas. Mostly, though, they were just crazy fantasies where Jones put the team in extremely compromising hypothetical situations that would never occur in real life, and then demanded they come up with a solution.
Jones spread his hands wide and straightened his back, gazing at everyone with a knowing leer. In the red up-glow of the rechargeable lantern laying in the center of them, he looked kind of like he was about to have a séance.
“It’s the simplest of shitty circumstances. I can’t believe we haven’t already talked about it. Someone’s holding me hostage—you know, using me as a meat shield, and they’ve got a gun to my head. What do you do?”
“Just let him do it,” Abe suggested.
“Maybe we’d get more sleep,” Marie agreed.
“No, you have to save me,” Jones countered. “That’s the point of the exercise. You have to save me, and you have to kill the other guy.”
“Negotiation?” Sam offered.
“I just said you have to kill the other guy.”
“Yeah, I was gonna negotiate you away, and then shoot him.”
Jones blew a raspberry. “Boring. That’s not even fun. ‘Oh, I negotiated Jones away.’ You can’t just say that. I’m talking about an actionable plan here, Sam, not some fuzzy-wuzzy heart-to-heart.”
“Question,” Lee said.
Jones pointed to him.
“Is time travel allowed?”
Jones narrowed his eyes at Lee. “Don’t make this weird.”
Lee held up a placating hand. “It’s not weird. Stick with me. You’ve been taken hostage. That’s the situation in the imaginary present, yes?”
Jones looked exceedingly suspicious. “Go on.”
“Okay, so if that’s the imaginary present, can we imagine that we pre-planned for this event? Effectively, can we imaginarily travel to the imaginary past, and set our imaginary past selves up for success in this scenario?”
“No,” Jones said. “Because if you changed the imaginary past, you would change the imaginary present, and the scenario would be different. It’s called the Butterfly Effect, Lee. Read a fucking book once in a while.”
“But we’re planning it right now,” Lee said with a twinkle in his eye. “Maybe this scenario isn’t the imaginary present, it’s the imaginary future, and we’re currently in the imaginary past.”
“You’re just trying to derail me,” Jones sighed.
“And if that’s the case—”
“It’s not. This is an adulteration of the core concept of the game.”
Lee continued, undeterred. “Then we should come up with a plan now, which is, of course, the imaginary past of your imaginary present scenario that might occur in the future.”
Jones ran his hands over his face. “Fuck. Fine. Alright. You win.”
Lee smiled. “Code word.”
“Code word?”
“Yeah. That’s the plan. Have a code word.”
And that’s when Sam spoke up: “Artichoke. The code word should be ‘artichoke.’”
Jones slumped back against the wall, defeated. “Y’all are just destroying my game. Now it’s just ridiculous.”
“Come on,” Sam argued his point. “Who’s gonna ever say the word ‘artichoke’?”
“Um, an artichoke farmer?” Jones said, as though it were oh-so-obvious.
“Yeah, but we’re not farmers. None of us would ever say ‘artichoke.’”
“Unless we happen upon a stash of canned artichoke hearts,” Jones shot back. “Then one of us says ‘Oh, look, artichoke hearts!’ and then all the sudden everyone’s shooting? Terrible plan.”
“No, I like artichoke,” Lee pitched in. “Simple. Easy to say. Easy to remember. Hard to mistake as another word. Unlikely to just randomly be said on accident. Perfect code word.”
Now, standing in a ranch house with a gun to his head, Sam realized that their imaginary future had become the very real present. And as Horner and Lee began to shout back and forth, Sam felt like he knew where this was going, and his heart started hammering ever faster.
