The Jared Chronicles | Book 4 | The Devil's Bastion, page 10
part #4 of The Jared Chronicles Series
She felt an animal attraction to him right now like she’d never felt for anyone in her life. Conversely, John’s mouth, hands, and thickly muscled arms personified a careful gentleness Stephani hadn’t known he possessed. This only served to intensify the roiling tension she felt in her lower belly, flaring like a volcanic fissure, ready to split open by the sheer force of her mesmerism.
John gently withdrew from the embrace, pushing a still clinging Stephani to half an arm’s length, and studied her with a pleasant, almost sad look on his handsome face.
“What?” Stephani rasped through a throat tightened by the sudden onslaught of ardor.
John blinked several times. “That was very nice, Steph. I’m glad I did it, but now I really want all of us to survive this coming storm so you and I can spend some time with each other.”
They both stood staring into one another’s eyes for a moment before Stephani spoke. “You’re right, Jared won’t leave, and if we did, I would always feel like a heel if anything bad happened to any of the Thackers.”
John gave a knowing half smile. “You get it, then.”
“I do,” Stephani conceded.
Stephani leaned in and gave John a peck on the mouth before stepping back. “So, what now?”
John ran his hands through his hair, then back and down his face. “I’d like there to be an us. Steph, you’re a unique woman, and although I know you think I’m just some military guy good for one thing, you’re wrong.”
Stephani’s face darkened as she stepped back into John, grabbing hold of his shirt with both hands like she was about to rough the Special Missions Unit man up. “If you want to know what I think, ask me; don’t assume you know.” Again, they came together, mouths melting, hands grasping at each other’s bodies like a falling climber would grasp at a ledge.
Stephani was the first to disengage this time, pushing John back. “When this is over, we need more housing, more privacy,” she said from under a raised eyebrow. “Shannon and Jared need the same.”
With that, Stephani patted John’s shoulder and returned to the house, leaving him standing in the driveway feeling very unfinished. Instinctively, the rifle swung around, landing firmly in John’s hands, helping to bring him back to earth. Fucking wow, he thought. That was a hundred times better than I could have ever imagined. John blew a long breath out through his mouth, turned, and headed to the barn to see what Barry was up to.
The sun slipped lower on the horizon, leaving behind a blanket of darkness as John slipped into the already shadowy interior of the barn. Two candles flitted their dismally bleak yellowness about the barn, illuminating Barry’s back hunched over a workbench, giving him a mad-scientist look. A sound overhead caused John to look up as Devon peeked over the edge of the loft. John lifted his thumb, accompanied by a quizzical look, to which Devon returned his own thumbs-up. John marched over to Barry, hovering over the man’s shoulder as Barry’s foot pumped a small bag attached to a tube that ran up to a small brick-type oven.
Every time Barry smashed the bag with his foot, air was fed into the oven, and the already red-hot coals would flash a brighter shade of yellowish red for a moment as Barry dipped the tip of a large nail into the heat. The nail was nearly a foot in length and was wrapped in tape on the end Barry used as a handle. John saw Barry was working on some sort of motherboard, but had not a clue what else was going on in this makeshift workshop.
“Need something, John?” Barry asked without looking up or stopping his work.
John was about to wag his head, but realized Barry had no intention of making eye contact. “Nope.”
“Mind getting off my back, then?” Barry complained, the vague tinge of irritation evident in his tone.
John briefly pondered pulling out his water bottle and extinguishing Barry’s little fire, but instead sighed, backing away and leaving Barry to pump his bag and solder whatever the hell he was tinkering with. John moved across the barn’s floor to the ladder leading to the loft and hefted himself up the rungs.
John heaved himself up onto the loft landing and strode to the back, where Devon was perched atop a stool next to a small opening in the back of the barn facing the north. Devon had a pair of binoculars hanging from his neck he’d been using to scan the pastures to the north, with a clear view all the way to the hills.
“Anything moving?” John queried, already knowing Devon would have alerted someone if there’d been anything to report.
Predictably, Devon shook his head. “Some deer, a coyote, but that’s it.”
John stood, ducking in an effort to see the field of view Devon had through the small opening. It was too dark for him to see much of anything, so he straightened. John gestured to Barry. “What’s he working on?”
“Dunno, he’s been tearing into old radios for a couple of days now. I heard him testing one last night, like, talking into it, but it must not have worked, ’cause he got all pissed.”
John cast a glance back toward Barry, thinking the man appeared to still be pissed, as Devon put it. John shrugged it off, reminding himself to ask Barry what he was working on—tomorrow.
“I’m going to talk to Jared first, but how do you feel about going out and trying to find those soldiers out there?”
Devon answered without hesitation or emotion, “I’ll do it.”
John chuckled softly, remembering his own youthful feeling of invincibility. “This is serious business, Devon. These guys get hold of you and—well, they won’t be nice.”
Devon smiled grimly. “I know, John.”
John contemplated arguing with Devon, telling him he didn’t know what men like Carnegie were capable of doing to other humans, but held his tongue on the matter. “I want you to figure out where they all are. I’ll show you how to draw a little diagram or a picture.” John waved a hand toward the far hills to the north. “Kinda like the map I use, just a rough overhead of the ranch and its relationship to our enemy’s positions.”
Devon glanced out the opening he kept watch from—he yearned to be out there in the hills, alone, matching his wit and deftness of foot against the world. As he stared blankly into the night, he had the feeling this time was going to be different. The feeling caused a clinching in his gut, the same feeling he’d had the last time a bully had trapped him in a gym bathroom and Devon had realized he no longer was afforded the flight part of fight or flight.
“How many do you think will come?” Devon asked softly, his voice wavering only slightly, but enough to tell John Devon did understand the dangers lurking in the hills.
John reached up and across his body, rubbing his right shoulder, lips drawn tight in thought. “I don’t know for sure, but it’s fair to say Carnegie will bring as many as he can get. If I were to guess, I’d say fifty maybe.”
“Soldiers?” Devon gasped.
John sighed. “Men with guns, Devon, men here to do any of us harm, men and women, so don’t get caught up if the time comes and you’re face-to-face with a woman. I am not kidding about this. A woman will kill you as fast or faster than any man will.”
Both fell silent for a spell as John allowed Devon to process this last bit of trivia, the only sound in the barn coming from the occasional rustling of Barry pumping air into his homemade brick oven down below. After a spell, John laid a heavy hand on Devon’s back.
“You’re going to be fine. Just lie low like you always do,” John whispered through a wry smile.
Devon’s lips twitched in what John took as his nervous way of acknowledgment. Having said what he came to say, John wheeled on a heel and started back toward the rungs leading down to the ground level. He lowered himself, glanced at Barry’s back, then struck out to find Jared.
Jared was on the back porch with Essie, watching the child clean her rifle although she hadn’t shot the thing in two days. The weapons cleaning was being done with the aid of a pathetic single candle’s light, in John’s opinion. Jared was on point in the clean-gun department thought John. As John approached, Jared looked up and smiled tiredly; they were all tired. Truth be told, everyone in the community was tired, dirty, and hanging on by a thread these days.
John winked when Essie caught his eye. “Can never be too clean, Ess.”
Essie held up a Q-tip, the end still mostly white, her head tilted slightly to one side. “I’m not cleaning it anymore; I’m wearing it out now.”
John snorted, casting a sideways look at Jared. “How old is she?”
“Eight, going on fifteen,” Jared said without missing a beat.
Essie shot Jared an exaggerated frown, to which he rolled his eyes. “Put it together and go inside, Ess.”
Essie expertly reassembled the little rifle, pointed it down, and walked into the house, leaving the two men alone to talk.
“I think we should send Devon out to scout and get a handle on how many and where Carnegie’s boys and girls are,” John started.
Jared thought about this for a long moment. He wasn’t used to issuing orders that had the potential of getting the person he was ordering killed. Jared tried understanding how John could so cavalierly send a boy out into harm’s way with seemingly no emotion about the act. He stopped himself from judging John only because he knew the man was not someone without a moral compass. Maybe it was that men who ordered others into battle, knowing many would not return, simply held a larger view of what could come if these orders weren’t issued.
Jared, to date, hadn’t participated in anything even remotely resembling a large-scale battle, but he’d seen the smaller skirmishes he’d been in turn quickly when one group was outplayed on the battlefield. A larger version could only be different in that there were more moving parts. The rest of the game was the same, two forces clashing for the purpose of defeating the other by way of reducing the opponent’s numbers to a point they became irrelevant.
This irrelevance was sought for two reasons, the first being to simply irradicate an unwanted foe or to weaken them so they were unable to protect something the opposition wanted for themselves. Devon could be a factor, as would John and Rip, when it came time to fight this colonel who had doggedly pursued John from the moment he’d spotted him at the small ranch they’d been forced to leave behind. Any advantage they could place at their disposal gave everyone at the Thacker ranch a higher probability of surviving what was heading their way.
Jared understood, but still struggled to accept the risks that went along with acting in a manner that furthered one’s chances of survival in this new and at times very cruel world. Jared felt an abrupt pang of guilt at the thought of John carrying the load of telling everyone where to go and what to do and then dealing with the outcome, like in the case of Dwight. John had been the one who’d directed Dwight to accompany Jared, and when Dwight had been shot and killed, John, in Jared’s opinion, had seemed the most affected by the loss.
Everyone else just seemed a mixture of scared and relieved it hadn’t been them, after which they all just moved on. These times didn’t lend themselves to long periods of grief. People experienced loss, blinked, and were off to the next tragedy.
“I will order him into the hills,” Jared blurted out, surprising John with not only the outburst, but the choice of words.
“Well, I don’t think anyone is ordering him,” John started.
“I will. That way if something happens, it’s on me and no one else,” Jared confirmed.
“Jesus, Jared, relax. No one needs to feel responsible for anything that happens other than Carnegie,” John cajoled.
Jared lowered his head and stared at John through steepled fingers. “Is that right? That’s the way it was where you came from? Always the other guy’s fault and no fault of the men and women ordering soldiers into harm’s way?”
John swallowed hard before replying, “No, I mean, guys were held responsible for bad decisions, and we debriefed every KIA and WIA, but I think you’re taking this all the wrong way.”
Jared spread his hands out questioningly. “I’m leading, John, taking responsibility and leading. You’re the one who taught me this. You can’t carry the entire load, brother,” Jared said, using a term John used on him all the time, but one Jared rarely reciprocated with.
John locked his fingers behind his head and smiled. He’d been played by Jared, the younger man using the very moves John had taught him. “Okay, go tell him. He’s in the loft.” John left it at that, knowing Jared wouldn’t make an ass of himself in ordering Devon out into the hills. “Just tell him to see me before he leaves. I have a laundry list for him,” John added.
Jared grunted as he got to his feet and stepped off the porch, heading toward the barn.
Chapter 10
Josh worked tirelessly, coordinating the logistics needed to get men in the field and a base camp set up. The first few days were focused on getting several observation teams into the area. Josh made sure each team understood what had happened to the last team to spy on the ranch. No one knew what had happened to them, which tended to unnerve the men more than if Josh had shown them video of the team being beheaded.
After four days, Josh enjoyed four teams of two who were feeding him real-time information on the activities at the ranch. Josh cursed out loud when the first report came in, telling him the people at the ranch were digging in. Josh shouldn’t have been surprised since John was a seasoned and very intelligent warfighter. Josh had half expected the ranch to be vacant, and when it wasn’t, he had felt a brief sense of satisfaction until the digging in report came to him.
Once Josh’s small network of observers was in place, he began moving additional troops into an area nearly three miles from the ranch. The location Josh chose was a depression atop a hill, giving him the high ground were the need to defend the spot ever to arise. Four hundred yards in the direction of the ranch from the depression that would soon be their base camp was a small hill. Josh intended on placing additional troops on this hill for an added layer of security for the base camp. When it came to John Buckley, Josh wasn’t leaving anything to chance.
Josh detailed ten soldiers to remain in the base camp, ensuring the location wasn’t occupied by their enemy. Josh really wasn’t too concerned with the people from the ranch showing up and setting up camp in his chosen spot, but the security was just the start of a growing presence. Over the following days, supplies were ferried into the base camp. First tents and other items needed for basic living were brought in and set up.
By the end of the first week, Josh quartered twenty-five men at the base camp, performing all manner of duties. One man cooked while two others were in charge of the field latrine, including waste disposal. The waste was not burned as it had been in past wars; instead, Josh ordered all human waste, including their trash, hauled out with every convoy that brought additional supplies.
Slowly the base began taking shape in both form and strength. Josh’s intel informed him there were less than a dozen capable fighting adults in the ranch below them, but again he never let his guard down, running patrols and making sure every soldier knew he would personally shoot them if they were caught sleeping on duty—especially during the night watch.
On day six, Carnegie came to inspect the work done at the base camp. His arrival was predictably disturbing to the troops, but Josh merely found the colonel’s presence a nuisance, a distraction from things he needed to focus on. When Carnegie announced he would be staying, Josh groaned inwardly. His hope had been Carnegie would remain at the Stockton base until much closer to the date they were ready to conduct combat operations against the ranch and its residents.
Josh was growing less and less fond of the colonel as the days passed, wanting to be left to his own devices to run missions, operations, or wars the way he saw fit. Sure, the colonel had combat experience and was a legend of sorts in the special operations community, but the last time he’d slung lead with the enemy, Josh was probably popping wheelies on his bike back home instead of doing his eighth-grade homework. Like the great football coaches of the sixties and seventies who’d reigned supreme, but been out-strategized by the next generation of greats, Josh felt the game had passed Carnegie by to some degree.
As Carnegie settled in, Josh realized he’d made a grave tactical error from day one in dealing with the base personnel. Josh was arrogant and looked down his nose at the soldiers, both men and women, making no effort to hide his disdain for their weakness. His actions did nothing to improve his position within the hierarchy of the base personnel. Carnegie got compliance through fear, while Josh got his through their fear of Carnegie.
Not a single person on the base could be trusted to be loyal to Josh, with or without the colonel around, and Josh knew it. Were he to kill Carnegie, Josh wasn’t so sure the soldiers wouldn’t rise up in retaliation against him, based on the manner in which he’d treated everyone. In hindsight, Josh wished he’d worked to be the guy the soldiers looked to as an ally. Just the thought of being nice to all these people for so many months caused Josh to gather the saliva in his mouth and spit it into the dirt.
Carnegie had his tent moved to a central location within the base camp, where he kept the front side of the tent up like some Civil War general, complete with a table and two chairs where he could hold court for all to see. Carnegie sensed a change in his lead dog, which was the main reason he’d made the trip so early. One thing Carnegie would not be a victim to was his inattention to the inner workings of his command. If he had a cancer growing, he would deal with it before the tumor was inoperable.
The evening of his first day, Carnegie had his aide call for Josh to meet him at the colonel’s tent. When Josh arrived, Carnegie dismissed everyone from the area so the two had privacy. Carnegie was no stranger to dealing with the thoroughbred types like Josh Talley. These guys wouldn’t stand for being fronted off or scolded or even slightly talked down to in front of their peers much less those they viewed as below them.
