The Jared Chronicles | Book 4 | The Devil's Bastion, page 3
part #4 of The Jared Chronicles Series
At dinner that evening, Margie suggested someone make a trip into town and raid the Livermore library to collect the book Essie had recommended. Margie added that whoever went should take as many books on gardening or any other survival-type literature as they could find. She emphasized the need for any books with information about indigenous plant life and ways to find and ultimately cook them. Quinten agreed in his usual gruff manner while Calvin nodded his two cents as well. Shannon and Stephani looked to John and Jared quizzically when neither man seemed interested in what Margie was orating about.
It wasn’t like their leaving tonight was some huge secret; John and Jared just didn’t want to alarm anyone before they confirmed there was something to worry about. Finally, after Shannon nearly bored a hole in Jared’s head with her stare, he gave her a flick of his finger toward the back of the house. She didn’t hesitate, leaving the kitchen and heading straight to the back of the house. Jared waited a few seconds and was about to follow when Stephani got up and followed Shannon. John watched the whole episode play out and heaved an exasperated sigh as he also got up and walked to the back of the Thackers’ house.
Jared sat glued to his seat, knowing if he got up, everyone was going to start asking what was going on. Before he could muster the courage to leave, John came back with the two women.
“Hey, everyone, something’s come up,” John announced by way of getting everyone’s attention. The statement had its intended effect. Everyone in the room turned and stared expectantly at John and then at Jared, who appeared to possess some account of what John was about to tell them.
“Well,” John started lamely, “ah, Devon thought he found tracks or signs that someone was walking the fence line to the north. I went out, and to be perfectly honest, I couldn’t tell if it was man or animal or how old the mashed-down grass was. Jared and I are going out tonight to take a good hard look around. Everyone else needs to continue with business as usual until we get back.”
“Should we post a watch?” Barry inserted himself anxiously.
John looked around the room, there were eight able-bodied people who could be counted on to stand watch. This meant no one would lose a tremendous amount of sleep except Jared and himself. “Yeah, probably wouldn’t be a bad idea to keep someone awake inside the house while we’re out there. Try to keep everything as normal as possible. I want whoever may or may not be out there to be relaxed and not on alert when we go snooping around.”
Chapter 2
After dropping the bomb on the group, John let the people not going out into the night set up their own watch schedule. He was getting better at letting people fend for themselves the longer he was with these people. John glanced over at Stephani, who was studying him with a peculiar look on her face. He and the woman had met, clashed, then somehow grown fond of one another. Nothing substantive had happened between the two, with work and living on top of one another making privacy nearly extinct.
John knew Stephani’s fiery temperament and felt sure she was going to give him hell for not telling her about this possibility of danger the moment he’d found out himself. He would explain to her he didn’t want to frighten her; this would make it worse, and then she would calm down. It was their way, he was learning.
“Well, sssh—” Calvin started before catching Shannon’s motherly but stern eye before he could utter the curse in front of Essie and Salvador. “Sssshooot,” Calvin corrected, altering his verbal course. “I was going to suggest a run into town or some light house scavenging ’cause we are plum outta whiskey.”
Jared smiled grimly, he too had come to enjoy a dram every now and again, but with the possibility of being stalked, he couldn’t believe Calvin was even bringing this up. “We got bigger fish to fry, man.”
Calvin motioned a boney old hand in Jared’s direction, a gesture of surrender and not denigration. “I know, I know. It’s just if this nonsense is going to start up again, it sure would be nice to have a little something lying around to take the edge off, that’s all.”
Jared tipped his chin in acknowledgment, knowing Calvin had aged five years since the solar flare less than a year earlier. Jared could see the older man slowing as life became more difficult with each and every passing day. Jared surmised people weren’t much different than machines; they wore out at a rate consistent with their use. Two hundred years ago, people lived hard and died young, whereas recently, people lived easy and died old. Buy a car and park it in your garage for fifty years without driving it, and well, Jared stopped belaboring the thought. Calvin was old and starting to feel the effects of the hard life he was now leading. As a result, he appeared to focus more on things that made him comfortable and less on things that kept their community alive.
Jared made a mental note to remember this when the time came and he started down the same road. He guessed not much had changed from the days of old. The only difference was older people used to talk more about their ailments and less about things common in younger people’s conversations. Now, Calvin could be dying of some disease and wouldn’t know it till the day he dropped dead. The older man’s departure from the younger generation now manifested itself in the form of creature-comfort talk in place of endless conversations about illness and disease.
“We will put together something when John and I get back, find you a little something brown, if you know what I mean,” Jared offered with a chuckle.
Calvin moved, but he didn’t say anything as he sank back into the cushions of the chair. He was feeling less and less capable, and after a lifetime of active ranching, he didn’t like this new and unwanted sensation. Knowing he was an oddity in a world not designed for the elderly gave Calvin a sense of urgency in teaching the community as much about the art of riding and ranching as he could. Sure, Quinten ran his cattle outfit, but after several months of working with the man, Calvin realized Quinten wasn’t much of a horseman, having mostly relied on quads to get around the ranch in place of keeping horses.
Devon sat silently in a corner chair, fidgeting with his fingers, obviously uncomfortable spending so much time confined inside the house with everyone. Jared stared around the room, realizing after John had ordered Devon to stand down on any scouting in order to avoid the potential for a green-on-green shooting out in the darkness of night, the teen was at a loss as to what to do with himself.
“How ’bout we hit the hay, John?” Jared suggested, knowing they would be in for a long night.
John rose, stretched, and exhaled. “Pack for three days.”
Jared was confused. “Three days, why?”
Everyone else in the room was equally surprised by John’s mention of three days.
“We are going out tonight, but we aren’t coming back right away. Might take a few days to scout the entire countryside around this place. I want to make darn sure we aren’t being maneuvered on.”
Alright,” Jared said with a slight rise of his shoulders.
Shannon and Margie helped pack the food needed for a three-day trek while Jared and John filled water bottles and checked their equipment. They would be taking the two sets of night-vision goggles, or NVG, along with the solar-charging unit for the goggles’ batteries. The men would wear body armor and carry a daypack along with a rifle and a pistol, which would mostly round out their operational gear.
Rip, who’d remained mostly silent on the matter of searching for undesirables, saddled up alongside John when he returned from the well, where he and Jared had just finished topping off their water bottles. “Bro, you sure you don’t need a third set of eyes out there?”
John smiled at the younger SEAL. “We need you here in case something kicks off while Jared and I are outside the wire. No one here is really qualified to handle something like that on their own, except you.”
Rip dipped his chin in the way a subordinate does when they concede, but disagree—respectfully. “All good, bro.”
John clapped Rip on the shoulder. “Next time you and Steph can go out,” John said, stone faced.
Rip recoiled slightly. “I don’t think she likes me, man.”
John laughed out loud at hearing this. “She likes you, just has a funny way of showing people.” John stopped laughing as he thought better of what he’d just said. “I mean, don’t go trying to get chummy with her; won’t work out well for you, trust me on that.” John gave another laugh before turning and heading off for a last check of his gear.
John shook Jared from a deep sleep, Jared’s eyes fluttering before bursting wide open in the darkness. “Time to roll, man,” John indicated before silently disappearing from the room.
Jared took a few seconds to get his bearings before rolling over and planting his feet firmly on the floor. His feet were bare; he’d gone to bed this way purposefully, knowing he’d be wearing shoes without reprieve for the next two to three days. He wriggled his toes into the carpeted floor, remembering a popular action movie that had advocated this as a stress releaser. In the absence of a hot cup of coffee, this would have to do. Three minutes later, Jared met John in the kitchen near where the back door was located.
“Jesus, what were you doing back there, makeup and hair?” John chided softly, not wanting to wake anyone.
Jared glanced into the living room, where he knew someone was standing post. “Who’s in there?” he asked, unable to see through the murky darkness.
“Steph, she wanted to come. Between her and Rip, I almost had a mutiny when they realized you and I were going out,” John whispered through hushed laughter.
Jared thought briefly about saying goodbye, but decided against it. “Let’s go,” he whispered back.
Wordlessly, John turned and eased the back door open. He and Jared slipped through the opening, closed the door gently behind them, and moved off into the night. Jared had been in bed not five minutes prior, making the cold darkness of the night feel foreign. He knew this feeling would pass as his heart rate rose after the exertion of moving across the countryside, coupled with his senses slowly coming online and growing accustomed to the sights, sounds, and smells of this new environment.
Jared and John moved steadily for a solid hour, traveling southwest across the landscape until they were both sure no one watching the Thackers’ ranch would have any possibility of seeing them as they changed course and began a slow envelopment maneuver back toward the ranch. John wanted to circle around to a position far enough northwest that he and Jared would be behind anyone watching the ranch.
Jared and John took turns leading, switching every time they stopped for water or a security check. They’d left the ranch just after 0200 hours and found themselves far from being in position once the sun casts its first explorative rays across the land.
“Fucking hoped to be a little farther than this,” John groused quietly as he sipped water from a Nalgene bottle.
Jared finished drinking his own water and brought out his binoculars, scanning the area to the east. Complete with his scan, Jared squinted back at John, his lips pursed, and shook his head. “I don’t see anything moving or out of place.”
“Don’t look for them, look for the place you’d use if you were them,” John recommended. “If we can establish what we feel would be an ideal spot, then we can zero in on it.”
Jared adjusted his mind to search not for that which might be out of place, but a location he’d have chosen to watch the Thackers’ ranch. He would have wanted an elevated spot, so he raised the binoculars and scanned the higher ground in the distance. Jared searched for areas with avenues of escape as well. A rock face seemed like a great spot, but if its occupant were contacted from the rear, they would have nowhere to go. He diverted his gaze to another area, searching, scanning, analyzing.
Jared settled on a terrain feature he knew to be a finger. The finger came off the top of a ridgeline and ran downhill for approximately fifty yards before ending. Most of the top of the finger was covered in brush that grew in the area. The majority of the countryside was covered only in tall grass, with the patches of brush appearing here and there. This patch of brush afforded anyone who occupied it escape routes in all four directions, three of which also would provide cover from weapon’s fire.
John must have seen Jared fixated on a singular spot. “You hawking that finger fifteen hundred yards out, with the patch of bushes along its spine?” John asked.
“I am,” Jared responded without coming out of his optics.
“I wish I had a damn spotting scope,” John grumbled as both men studied the terrain a moment longer before John pointed out ahead of them. “We move to the back of the finger, a little off to the side, and see what we can see.”
The area John wanted to get to was roughly five hundred yards from the finger, a safe distance should they encounter a force with superior numbers. John’s choice of positions wasn’t much different than the spot he planned on scoping out. Its accommodations included several escape routes as well as decent cover. In the case John and Jared were forced to flee, the countryside afforded them a plethora of places to disappear into.
Chapter 3
Much of the fifteen hundred yards needing to be covered by Jared and John in order to reach their chosen spot was done up right and with little worry of being spotted by anyone who might have been in the brush on the finger. The rolling hills blocked them from view for nearly a third of the distance to their position. Still, John took it nice and slow, stopping for his security checks as if he were being watched the entire way. John’s motto—one of his many mottos—was move like you’re being watched. To Jared, it sounded like the old saying, “Act like someone is always watching you.”
The last five hundred yards, John and Jared crawled on their bellies, dragging their rifles along, trying not to make noise. The sun was much higher and hotter during the crawl, ensuring both men were drenched in sweat by the time they reached their position. Like giant slugs, the two men slowly made their way into a spot offering them a clear line of sight to the finger.
Jared slipped out of his pack and situated it for an easy exit. He laid his rifle across the top of the pack to keep it out of the dirt, then pulled his binoculars to his face just as John swore under his breath.
“Motherfucker,” John whispered through lips drawn so tight it was miracle the words even escaped his mouth.
Jared immediately saw the cause of John’s curse. Below them were two men dressed in the uniforms of soldiers, lying on their bellies, facing the Thackers’ ranch. Jared’s eyes narrowed as he struggled to make out the area around the men through the shimmering heat waves distorting the finer details.
“Surveillance team,” John announced, his voice almost emotionless as his brain raced in an effort to formulate a plan of action.
“From that colonel?” Jared asked skeptically.
“Has to be,” John answered before pulling his face out of his own binoculars and staring down into the dirt. “I’m placing everyone in danger. He’s not gonna quit. I knew that.”
“What now?” Jared whispered, not allowing John to beat himself up anymore.
John thought about this for a second, spit into the dirt beside himself, and turned to Jared. “We can sneak in there and kill ’em both, but what does that get us? He will just send more guys, and they will change how they approach us—maybe a sniper next time, I don’t know. We need to follow these guys, figure out for sure who they are and where they’re coming from before we begin actively participating in this game.”
Jared was confused by John’s response. “Follow them and then what?”
John returned his eyes to the optics. “I don’t know, but intel is gold, and without it, we are at a distinct disadvantage on the battlefield.”
Jared returned to his own optics, watching the men below him as they took turns on a large long scope trained toward the Thacker ranch. “Why don’t we grab them and make ’em tell us what’s going on?”
John chuckled quietly as if he’d just heard a great inside joke. “Grabbing folks takes a significant coordinated team effort. A highly trained team.”
“Yeah, you and Rip are highly trained,” Jared pushed.
“A team, bro, like twelve guys in this environment. Maybe six dudes if we were in a city, but out here in the open country, you need a lot of guys, and you need a ton of surveillance beforehand.”
Jared laid his binoculars down and stared at John, a thought suddenly coming to him, causing a chill to pass through him. “Ya think that colonel knows what Stephani and I did to the helicopter?”
John could hear in Jared’s voice that his friend was truly worried. “Naw, man, no way. How the hell would he know that? I didn’t even know until we stumbled on you at the barn.”
Jared’s face was contorted in thought as his mind unwound the last several months, trying to properly place all the puzzle pieces of possibilities; then it hit him. “The family whose house the helicopter crashed into, they never made it to the Thacker place. The colonel could have gotten to them. If that happened, he could know.”
John thought this highly unlikely since the second Black Hawk had been destroyed shortly after, and he was not aware of any other prisoners being brought to the base before his and the SEALs’ violent departure. It wasn’t completely out of the question, just unlikely. “I doubt that happened, man. I mean, it could have, just not a high probability.” John’s serious look softened, then morphed into a shit-eating grin. “If he does know it was you, he’ll hunt your ass until he dies though.”
“Thanks for the pep talk,” Jared said wryly.
John just smiled and went back to watching the watchers. Nothing changed for several hours as both two-man teams watched their assigned targets, one unaware of the other’s presence.
