The Jared Chronicles | Book 4 | The Devil's Bastion, page 11
part #4 of The Jared Chronicles Series
Carnegie lit a lamp, pulled the front of the tent down, then took a seat at one of the two chairs, motioning Josh to the chair opposite him. “Sit, Josh,” Carnegie suggested gruffly.
Josh glanced around the tent, taking in the sparse furnishings—a small desk, cot and the table with chairs—before leaning his rifle against the table and lowering himself into the chair, hands flat on the tabletop. “Why are you out here so soon? We barely have the placed secured,” Josh asked, not waiting for the colonel to take control of the conversation.
Carnegie studied Josh for a moment, then reached back to his desk and pulled out two glasses and a bottle of bourbon. He set the glasses down on the table, opened the bottle, and poured two generous portions. Carnegie capped the bottle and returned it to the desk drawer he’d gotten it from. Turning back to Josh, Carnegie pushed one of the glasses across the table. The colonel wrapped his large callused hand around his glass, but didn’t lift it.
Carnegie’s eyes focused on the brown liquor, his lips pinched, brow furrowed for a moment as if he had been asked a question he found difficult to answer. Suddenly, his face relaxed, the glass was pulled to his mouth, and he poured half the glass’s contents down his throat.
“I fear a bit of a disconnect; that’s what brings me out here. That and I’m the fucking base commander and can do and go wherever I please,” Carnegie said with a wry smile. He held the glass in hand, straightening his index finger to point at Josh. “You aren’t completely on board, and that worries me, son.”
Carnegie lowered the glass to the table, then removed his cover, scratching at the matted hair atop his head. Josh didn’t respond to the accusation, choosing to abide by some old traditional advice a senior soldier once told him. If you find yourself in trouble, it’s best to be silent. Josh fought to remain passive and not convey an air of disdain toward Carnegie. Josh truly did want to hear what Carnegie had to say if for no other reason than to know where the old bastard stood, or where Josh stood with the colonel.
Carnegie stared hard at Josh, trying to read the man, but failed to assemble anything close to an opinion of what Josh was thinking. Carnegie balled his hands into fists, then straightened them, stretching his hands before resting them flat on the table. “You and I need to be on the same page here, Talley. No discourse here, it won’t work. We are the prison guards here, outnumbered and only able to maintain order through their fear of what we are capable of. If either of us shows the least bit of weakness, there will be a day when one of those soldiers rises to the occasion,” Carnegie warned.
Josh reached out and spun the glass in front of him with a finger. Shaking his downturned head, he grasped the glass and took a sip. The bourbon was hot, maybe a younger batch, definitely not a well-aged small-batch single barrel or anything like that. He swallowed, emancipating his glass and leaning back. “No one out there has the balls to come after either of us.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Josh. Wrong in two ways. When it happens, they will try to divide us. Once that is done, they will come for both of us. Believe me when I say this.”
Josh stared back at the colonel, again wearing the face of a man with nothing on his mind. Conversely, Josh’s was racing, considering everything going on. “I have no problem with anything I’ve done to date, but at some point, they’re going to push back,” Josh countered.
“If you’re suggesting we ramp back the fear factor, forget about it. Once we take this ranch, we throw a party, they eat and drink, and all will be forgiven,” Carnegie fired back.
Josh took another drink, emptying his glass, then slid it into the center of the table. “Maybe, maybe not. Things get easier and people start thinking they could be in charge. Right now, you are lucky ’cause not one of these weak fucks could do what you do, and they all know it.”
Carnegie thought about this for a second. “You think we need to keep the base in a perpetual state of imbalance?”
Josh waved this off. “No, not at all. I’m saying that there is going to come a time, no matter what, when these people will want a say. Jesus, Colonel, they’re all Americans, used to freedoms and rights. It’s coming, and I’m not sure you or I can do a damn thing to stop it.”
“I need you one hundred percent on board, Josh, no matter how you feel this thing is going to play out. For starters, you’re wrong about us falling from power. I have a plan. I’m just not ready to implement it yet.”
Josh’s face showed his impatience now as he bit his lip. “Okay, I’ll bite. What’s the plan?”
“We are going to bring others into the inner circle; we have no choice. We treat the military like Gods, and they’ll be loyal to us. Those who run the military will be royalty while the rest of the people will carry the load. I mean, everyone will be fed and treated fairly well, but the ones with the power, the soldiers and those we choose to help run them, will be second only to you and I.”
Josh snorted a ruthful laugh. “Socialism, that’s what it’s come to?”
“Survival, Josh, unless you want to sleep in the mud and starve to death, you and I must control this situation,” Carnegie urged, leaning forward in his chair.
Josh imagined living in the hills alone, hunting and struggling to live. It wasn’t a life he really wanted to deal with, so Carnegie was probably right, although Josh didn’t care for being anyone’s lacky, including the colonel’s. With a sigh, he relented. “There’s no disconnect on my part, Colonel.”
Carnegie again studied his golden knight, not able to discern anything other than what Josh wore painted across the canvas of his blank face. In the days of old, Carnegie would have shitcanned Josh and brought in the next super killer to replace him. Now he didn’t enjoy such luxuries. Carnegie would have to manage this situation, like a pilot in a sputtering aircraft. He would do what he could, monitor all systems, be twice as vigilant, and try to bring this thing home in one piece.
“Well,” Carnegie said, clasping his hands together, “tell me where we’re at here. What’s your plan, time frame? Read me in, boy,” Carnegie said, shifting the conversational gears.
Josh spent the next hour briefing the colonel on every operational detail along with his plan of attack. Although his scouts were so far unable to locate the herd of cattle, Josh felt certain the animals wouldn’t be too far from the ranch. John had most likely preempted them by moving one of their most valuable assets from the area in an effort to make the ranch appear less valuable to Carnegie. This was a basic rule of war, devaluing yourself so your enemy moves on to greener pastures or underestimates you. When the risk outweighed the reward, intelligent field commanders would steer clear.
Much like common criminals, generals also sought soft targets in their endeavors to avoid the waste of war materials like machines and men’s lives. Josh knew the absence of cattle would not come close to deterring Carnegie from his mission to kill one John Buckley. The base camp would be fully operational in another week, at which time Josh would begin moving additional men into the area.
Josh kept a strict schedule of deliveries coming from the Stockton base on a daily basis, food, water, even toilet paper. There was no room for items not essential to the mission at hand, causing Josh and the soldiers to stockpile things that would quickly disappear during the assault portion of the operation, like bullets, rifle-cleaning gear, and medical equipment. Josh ordered the entire Stockton medical setup moved to his base camp along with nearly their entire inventory of medical supplies.
Josh was not kidding himself here, when the lead took flight, men and women would both die and be wounded. Men were injured in battle in all manner of ways; being shot was just one of those ways. Josh was asking his troops to cover five hundred yards of open area, backed up with only a single up-armored Humvee with a heavy machine gun. There would be the usual sports injuries, like twisted ankles and the like, simply from moving frantically across open and very uneven ground.
Josh would expect men and women with these sports injuries to remain in the fight; only personnel with an injury that threatened their life or immobilized them would be evacuated from the battlefield for treatment. Josh wouldn’t be around to make sure of this, so he would have to threaten the daylights out of his soldiers before the mission. Let them know what would happen if he found anyone in the makeshift medical tent with a sprained ankle. He’d remind them the colonel would be prowling the camp during the battle, and hoped that would at least keep the medical setup from being overrun by soldiers with no stomach for what Josh knew John was going to put them through.
Josh originally thought he would employ snipers from a flanking position, but quickly realized the best soldiers he had at his disposal couldn’t hit the big red barn sitting smack-dab in the middle of the ranch’s front yard. When the reports came in about the trenches, Josh binned this idea altogether. In its place, he assigned ten soldiers to the Ford pickup truck. They would flank the ranch, dismount, and undertake their own assault from the east.
The terrain was so flat and void of substantive vegetation anywhere near the ranch, Josh and the soldiers had no choice but to cover the ground on foot using a leapfrog maneuver. Josh had no time to work through an actual dry run with the soldiers and planned on briefing them the day before on how he would have the heavy gun atop the Humvee rake the trenches, then push men and women forward in short running intervals.
The Humvee would roll slowly along, coordinated by Josh, who would order each squad forward one or two at a time. What Josh didn’t want was all the squads huddled behind the Humvee, where one of the M203 grenades could derail his whole operation in a single shot. When untrained men and women were in danger, they tended to cluster, and clustering often resulted in a much higher number of KIA and WIA. Josh needed the men and women under his control to flow toward the ranch through the hail of bullets they would undoubtedly be welcomed with, and he needed them spread out while doing this.
The more difficult he could make things on John and his people, the better chance of a resounding victory Josh would enjoy. Josh felt he held a categorical advantage, based solely on his number of soldiers versus John’s dismal number at the ranch. Josh’s rough estimate was he outnumbered John’s crew nearly five to one. This was an advantage John would not be able to overcome through tactical maneuvering. There were other ways John could mitigate his disadvantage, but the numbers would remain the same until men and women began to fall in battle.
Josh would have preferred to wait John and his people out by surrounding the property and not allowing them to come and go as they pleased. This would have severely reduced John and his friend’s ability to provide food and water for those at the ranch. Based on Josh’s own dwindling supplies, he needed a more trenchant approach, one that drove a knife straight into the heart of those at the ranch with only a modicum of deviation. Josh’s only divergence from making war on the ranch was the time he needed to spend building up the base camp along with the number of troops he’d need for the final assault.
When Josh finished explaining every minute detail to Carnegie, the colonel pulled the bottle out of his desk and poured another round for the two men. Josh thought about declining, but decided the stress the drink would peel away from him was worth it. He’d take a night off and sleep at least until 0400 hours before creeping out into the dark morning in search of any soldier who dared sleep on watch.
The two men finished their second pour of the night; Josh thanked the colonel and then exited the drafty tent. It was dark, but the sky was as clear as a new sheet of glass, the stars winking down on him as if they were all part of an inside joke Josh was being left out of. He gave a curt snap of his head coupled with a deep breath of fresh air, which helped refocus him after the liquor had dulled his mind slightly. Josh strode off to find his man in charge of the night watches. He found the man, briefed him on Josh’s intentions of getting some sleep, then warned the man.
“I know we got a lot of people here, so it might seem like we own this place. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Two of those guys down there are more than capable of slithering into this camp and slitting more throats than I care to think about. Be on the men on post; let ’em know how dangerous this is.”
The soldier, a man by the name of Cortez, bobbed his head, letting Josh know he would stay on the other soldiers. “Roger that,” Cortez responded.
With that, Josh made his way to the edge of camp and peered out across the expansive land in the direction of the ranch. “What are you planning down there, John?” he whispered under his breath. When John failed to respond, Josh turned slowly, heading toward his own tent. Inside, he lay across the cot as fatigue swept through his body nearly to the point of his sleeping atop the sleeping bag.
Chapter 11
John sat awake, going over his plan to defend the ranch, probing it for weaknesses. Eventually, John lay back, his mind racing, searching for any tactical errors. John’s plan wasn’t one he was fond of by virtue of it being a defensive plan when his personality lent itself to more of an offensive style of warfighting.
The plan was an amalgamation of several tactical movements culminating in a counterattack from the pit outside the basement at the rear of the ranch house. This banded with John’s sniper operation to the west was what he hoped would turn the tide of the battle he knew his side would be outnumbered in. Another thought struck him; they needed intel, good intel, in order to understand Carnegie’s abilities once the fighting began. John needed to go out and locate the colonel’s base camp and determine how many soldiers Carnegie intended on using in the upcoming attack.
If the colonel had ten guys, he would employ them differently than if he had fifty soldiers. John doubted Carnegie would be out here in the hills if all he had were ten soldiers, which didn’t bode well for John and his friends. Now that John was faced with the eventuality of fighting these men and women, he kicked himself for not killing every one of them when he and the SEALs had fought their way out of the Stockton base a few months prior. With no visions of sugarplums dancing in his head, John eventually fell asleep.
The following morning, John was up earlier than anyone at the ranch. He sat in the kitchen, impatiently waiting for Jared and Quinten as he drummed his fingers on the countertop. Quinten was the first up, but by that time, John couldn’t take it any longer and marched back to Jared’s room, shaking him awake. Two minutes later, the three men were seated at the kitchen table.
“I had a thought last night, fellas. We dug the trenches wrong, all wrong.”
Both Jared and Quinten were still rubbing the sleep out of their eyes, not fully awake or able to understand what John was excitedly jabbering about.
“Go on,” Quinten croaked with a flick of his finger.
“We don’t know whether they have any indirect-fire weapons or if all their arsenal is direct-fire weapons. We need to safeguard against it all. The trench is great right now for direct fire, but…”
Jared, head bowed, raised a hand.
“What?” John asked under a creased brow after being interrupted.
“Direct, indirect, what does all this mean?” Jared questioned, looking up through still tired eyes.
After all this time John hadn’t fully become adjusted to speaking civilian. “It’s, ah…” He searched for the words for a second. “Direct-fire weapons.” He held up his rifle. “Line of sight, straight. You duck in the trench, and someone with a direct-fire weapon can’t hit you when they are on the same level.”
“Ever heard of a thing called parabola?” came Barry’s voice from behind the trio.
Before Barry could try to impress them further with large words with grandiose meanings, John continued, “Indirect-fire weapons are things like mortars, Rip’s grenade launcher, anything that goes up and drops down on top of the enemy. We don’t know what Carnegie has, so we need to plan for the worst-case scenario.”
Quinten drew a rattly breath before asking the obvious question. “And how do we do that?”
John outlined his plan on the tabletop, using a finger in lieu of drawing materials. “We should have zigzagged the trenches when we started. Right now, if an explosive detonated inside a trench, everyone along that stretch of trench gets it. We already have the trenches dug, so I propose we dig out fighting squares every ten feet. We can fight from these positions, and if a grenade falls into the trench, you’re good. If one comes into your square, as long as it’s not a mortar, you can duck out into the trench, and again, you’ll probably survive. Geometry, angles, it is all about having a barrier between you and anything bad that happens out there.”
Barry had stood by listening to John, but now scuttled toward the front door.
“Hold up, professor,” John called out.
Barry stopped, and although he didn’t audibly groan, his body language performed the protest for his mouth.
“We are going to start running probing patrols, and you are my partner. We go out tonight. Jared and Stephani will go out tomorrow night, but tonight you and I roll. Just a little sneak and peek,” John finished with a mock jovial smile.
Barry stood frozen like a deer caught in the lights of an approaching vehicle for what seemed like an eternity as everyone waited to see if he would object. “Okay, what time?” Barry finally muttered.
John smiled. “Midnight.”
The front door slammed, and Barry was gone.
“Why do you call him professor?” Jared asked sincerely.
“Ah, I don’t know, Gilligan,” John replied with a shake of his head and a sidelong glance at Quinten, who only smirked.
One by one the members of the ranch woke and ambled out to the kitchen, where Margie had begun preparing a little food for everyone. Theirs wasn’t the traditional American breakfast of old; instead, they ate some radishes plucked from the garden, a flatbread made from acorns, and some dried venison made by Quinten in a makeshift smokehouse he’d erected a month earlier. The only part of the meal better now than before was the real butter. Margie had brought fresh cow’s milk in one day and divided it into two different containers she handed to the children. She’d then instructed them to shake and not stop shaking until she said it was time. The result was wonderful little globs of real butter. After a pinch of salt was added, they all thought they’d died and gone to heaven.
